[Kevin26320]

The sacrifice on the cross was a replacement for former sacrifices that took place in Judaism. Judaism had been moving away from the idea of sacrificing animals in the centuries leading up to Jesus; most sacrificing was limited to rituals for feeding the priest caste, who couldn’t raise their own food. The significance of the rememberance of communion established that Jesus had been sacrificed to God for man, and therefore animals no longer needed to be sacrificed to God at all; Jesus had trumped them. It wasn’t a reinforcement of sacrifice, but a rejection of all other forms of sacrifice but the symbolic sacrifice of communion. Whether the flesh and blood is symbolic or actually BECOMES the flesh and blood of Christ during communion is an important theological question; Roman Catholicism teaches that the bread and wine transmutates and becomes the flesh and blood of Christ. Martin Luther proposed that the bread and wine was bread and wine AND the flesh and blood of Christ at the same time, a concept known by the term consubstantiation. Most other Protestant religions merely see the bread and wine as being symbolic, no change takes place. The rejection of sacrifice also allowed the early Church, which was viewed as a small Jewish splinter group, to distance itself from Orthodox Judaism and establish its own identity as a separate religion.

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Name : Kevin26320, Gender : M, City : Austin, State : TX, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class, 

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