Winner take all... Even for churches

Ok, not always because many Protestant faiths do not have communion every week / every service. But whenever they do, the communion will sit on the altar, at least at every church I’ve ever attended, which is a bunch.

It also gets used for other purposes such as holding a Bible and/or candles.

But it’s an altar because of the flesh and blood thing.

Although… People took the flesh of the sacrifice home and ate it off ordinary tables.

I suppose you might think it odd that we have an ark in most synagogues. It’s the ornate box we use to store the scrolls of the law. Like the original ark of the covenant, only not radioactive. :wink:

I’m not sure what the Christian view on that would be theologically, or the extent to which it would differ by denomination.

But from a practical standpoint, there’s very little there. We don’t have a whole animal to eat up before it goes bad. There wouldn’t be much point to taking a single wafer or morsel of bread home with you. There’s not much nourishment there.

Roman Catholics do have a thing where the priest must finish the wine so that none is left over. I don’t think he has to finish the wafers though. Which, if they’re the same ones that the Lutherans use, are pretty nasty and would be a most unpleasant task compared to drinking the wine. I’m not clear on why it’s ok to leave the wafers, but not the wine.

We Presbyterians just dump it down the drain. :woman_shrugging: Although now with the pre-filled cup/bread packaged combo my church uses, they probably just save it for next time.

Not at all, actually. Most religions have items of significance.

FTFY.

The apostles, as observant Jews (cf Acts 10), would have been horrified to be fed literal human flesh & blood, especially during Passover.

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I can speak to Lutherans, as that’s the tradition in which I was raised, but I think it’s similar for Anglicans & Episcopalians. Lutherans believe in something like consubstantiation, which basically holds that the bread & wine aren’t so much transformed into as “infused with” the body & blood of Christ (this is very much a tl;dr description - see more precise language at the link).

Other Protestant denominations view the Eucharist as a purely symbolic remembrance ritual.

Fair enough on the scriptural basis for transubstantiation, but I think every practicing Christian understands there’s an element of mystery involved. Christ was still physically alive, his earthly flesh still in tact, earthly blood not yet spilled, when he told the disciples “this is my body” and “this is my blood” and the disciples were confused by his words.

So I think that even the folks who believe in transubstantiation don’t think they’re consuming meat when they eat the wafer. Like I think you could be simultaneously devoutly vegan and devoutly Catholic and not feel that the Eucharist was violating your veganism.

That said, I know that a challenge in spreading Christianity through Africa (or at least parts of it) was explaining that we don’t truly practice cannibalism. The idea that we do took hold from people who misunderstood communion and spread.

I said that about Presbyterians once and was corrected by another Presbyterian who pointed out that our liturgy says that Christ is present in the elements.

My current understanding is that Lutherans believe that Christ is physically present whereas Presbyterians believe Christ is spiritually present in the elements.

That was also one of the reasons the early Christians were persecuted. It was widely believed that they killed and ate babies. I took a college class about early Christianity, and read a lot of contemporary texts written by non-Christians about the Christians, and they related some pretty nasty practices that seem to have been exaggerations of misunderstandings about the eucharist, and also the Christian practice of referring to fellow congregants as “brother” and “sister”. (That is to say, the early Christians were also believed to engage in widescale incest.)

Eh, the torah scrolls are significant items, and there are all sorts of rules about how to treat them. The ark is just a pretty box to keep the scrolls safe. I was thinking more about the practice of referring to what’s essentially an armoire as an “ark”.

Well I don’t think anyone familiar with Indiana Jones would find that odd. :wink:

(More specifically, the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark made that particular usage of the word “ark” into … if not common parlance, at least common understanding. Sort of like how everyone could recite the seven deadly sins after the movie Seven came out.)

In regards to the leftover wine and hosts from a Catholic mass, the wine is disposed of by drinking it because Catholics believe that it is literally the blood of Christ and to just dump it out would be sacrilegious. Instead it is consumed rather than stored, I’m guessing because poured wine would be difficult to store. It doesn’t have to be the priest that drinks the wine. The consecrated hosts that weren’t distributed are taken to the tabernacle in the church and then distributed at later masses, taken to distribute to people who couldn’t attend mass, and taken by the priest to perform the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1383), "The altar, around which the Church is gathered in the celebration of the Eucharist, represents the two aspects of the same mystery: the altar of the sacrifice and the table of the Lord. This is all the more so since the Christian altar is the symbol of Christ himself, present in the midst of the assembly of his faithful, both as the victim offered for our reconciliation and as food from heaven who is giving himself to us. ‘For what is the altar of Christ if not the image of the Body of Christ?’ asks St. Ambrose. He says elsewhere, ‘The altar represents the body [of Christ] and the Body of Christ is on the altar.’ "

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