The Eucharist & Ecumenism

The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let us Keep the Feast by George Hunsinger

Hunsinger is amazing. Not only is he a top-knotch theologian who finds significant common ground between the Reformed, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodoxy, but he also manages to argue for women’s and gay ordination in a logical and level-headed way. I disagree stridently with him on women’s and gay ordination, but he is still a model for peaceful discussion. There is a time for calling down the wrath of God, but we must also demonstrate that we aren’t frothing-at-the-mouth fundamentalists.

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Luther on the Fruit of Holy Communion

I love Luther.  He’s so practical and pastoral!  This is from a sermon entitled, “Confession and the Lord’s Supper”:

“But if you feel that you are unfit, weak and lacking in faith, where will you obtain strength but here [the Lord's Supper]?  Do you mean to wait until you have grown pure and strong, then indeed you will never come and you will never obtain benefit from the holy communion” (207).

“It is our duty to let the benefit and fruit of the Lord’s Supper become manifest, and we ought to show that we have received it with profit … Now this is the fruit, that even as we have eaten and drunk the body and blood of Christ the Lord, we in turn permit ourselves to be eaten and drunk, and say the same words to our neighbor, Take, eat and drink; and this by no means in jest, but in all seriousness, meaning to offer yourself with all your life, even as Christ did with all that he had, in the sacramental words” (208).

“Therefore, when we have received the Lord’s Supper we must not allow ourselves to become indolent, but must be diligent and attentive to increase in love, aid our neighbor in distress, and lend him a helping hand when he suffers affliction and requires assitance.  When you fail to do this you are not a Christian, or only a weak Christian, though you boast of having received the Lord and all that he is, in the Lord’s Supper” (210-11).

- all from The Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, vol. 1

Eucharistic Meditation

The Lord’s Supper is a family meal.  What would you think of a family which didn’t allow their adopted children to eat dinner with the family?  I hope we would all condemn them and probably excommunicate them if they did not repent.  But, what if, after they met with the elders, they decided to not serve the adopted children dinner until the adopted children were old enough to decide whether they really wanted to be part of the family?  Or, what if they refused to serve the adopted children dinner until they could discern whether the adopted children were really acting like good members of the family?  I think we all see the folly of this mindset. The family that eats together stays together.  If we want our adopted children to feel like part of the family, we treat them like part of the family.  We don’t wait for them to make a decision to join our family.  They are a part of our family, and they have right to join us at the family table.

God has adopted us into His family.  God feeds us at His table.  This is how he builds up his family.  He invites us to partake of His Son in faith, through the power of the Holy Spirit.  And He invites all of us, including our children.  If they are baptized, then they are also His adopted children.  If you feed your children at home, then you need to feed them here.  But, you can’t feed them here.  You need to bring them to the Lord’s Table, where God feeds all of his adopted children.

Academic Mission Opportunity

I came across an exciting mission opportunity for academics. This organization sends Christian teachers into other countries, finding positions for them in secular universities. A quote on their home-page says it all:

“The university is a clear-cut fulcrum with which to move the world. Change the university and you change the world,” declared Dr. Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council.

Ascension and the Lord’s Supper

The Ascension of Christ is essential to our understanding of the Lord’s Supper.  Of course, most of what happens to us at this Table remains a mystery, but we can say a few things, given what we know about Christ.  We know that Christ is in heaven, seated at the Father’s right hand.  We also know that Jesus Christ still has a resurrection body.  Many Christians have never thought about this, but it is true.  John says that we don’t know what the resurrection will be like, but we know that we will be like Jesus (1 Jn. 3:2).  And we know that Jesus had a real body that Thomas could touch and feel.  Jesus ate and drank after his resurrection.  This table prepares us for heaven.  Revelation tells us that heaven will be the wedding feast of the Lamb.  We will eat and drink with Jesus in heaven.  We are eating and drinking with him now, in the Church.  But, we often assume heaven will be less than what we know now.  We think we’ll float around, playing harps.  But, what if heaven is an eternal banquet with tastes and pleasures that would make your mind explode now?  Perhaps, when Jesus turned the water into wine at the wedding at Cana, he was bringing a little bit of heaven to earth.  Whatever heaven will be, we must guard against the gnostic heresy, which says our bodies are not important to our salvation.  Christ came to save the world, including our bodies.  In the Ascension, Christ took a human body back up to heaven.  Things have changed at the center of the universe.  We can’t go back.  A grand and glorious party is coming.  Don’t be left behind.  If you’ve been baptized, and are not under church discipline, then you are already wearing the wedding garments, and you need to come to this party.

Eucharistic Meditation – Rogation Sunday

Gathering around this Table every Lord’s Day reminds us over and over again that we are part of God’s household.  God adopts us as his children.  Though our earthly families may crumble apart and though death may separate us from those we love, we are never separate from God’s love.  Often God takes things away from us so that we learn to appreciate them more.  But, the only thing which can keep us from this Table is our own stubborn refusal to repent of our sin.  Though God may take our husband, wife, or our children, he will not cast us out of his house.  As long as we are his children, we have a place at this Table.  As long as we are his children, he will feed us.  Let’s enjoy the fellowship we have with each other now, while it lasts on this earth.  Our earthly fellowship will be disrupted by death.  We will all die.  But, even that is only temporary.  We will fellowship with each other again in heaven.  We will fellowship with those that God has already taken to himself.  Paul was torn between remaining with the Church in his body or being with the Lord in his spirit.  We may think of old age and of losing our spouse with fear and uncertainty.  How will we make it?  God will give us strength for the day.  And God gives us strength for each day through the ministry of the Church.  God gives us strength for each day through this Table. 

Eucharistic Meditation – 4th Sunday After Easter

Sometimes we make spiritual matters too complicated.  Salvation comes through eating and drinking Christ.  Jesus tells us this in John 6:

53:  Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
54: Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.
55: For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.
56: He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.
57: As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. 

This is nothing new.  God’s first negative command to the human race concerned eating.  Satan tempted Adam and Eve to eat wrongly.  They fell for it, and we all fell through that disobedient eating.  Jesus came to show us how to eat and drink correctly.  Remember that Jesus was accused to partying too much—of eating with wrong crowd, and of drinking too much.  His first miracle, after all, was to turn gallons of water into wine at a marriage feast.  Jesus wasn’t a dour health-food nut.  But, he was a spiritual super-athlete, and he calls us to the same strenuous spiritual race.  We shouldn’t relax in our spiritual quest, but the problem is that we look for Jesus in all the wrong places.  We look for him in quiet times, precious moments, T-Shirts, mega-churches, and bumper-stickers.  Although all of these things might have their proper place, the Lord’s Supper tends to be forgotten in the mad rush after the latest purpose-driven fad.  Jesus didn’t promise to meet us in a quiet time-he did promise that, if we drink his blood and eat his flesh, he would give us his eternal life.

Irenaeus on Sacramental Realism

Irenaeus seems to argue from sacramental realism to Christological realism.  In other words, because the sacraments are real, Christ’s human body was real.  He argues this way against Marcion: “Moreover, how could the Lord, with any justice, if He belonged to another father, have acknowledged the bread to be His body, while He took it from that creation to which we belong, and affirmed the mixed cup to be His blood?” (Against Heresies, IV.23).

Eucharistic Meditation – One Loaf

In the early Christian book of church order, the Didache, we find a beautiful prayer: “As this broken bread was scattered on top of the mountains and gathered together became one, so let your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your Kingdom: for the glory and the power is yours through Jesus Christ for ever.” 

 

The church is made up of all sorts of people, just as all sorts of grains can be made into one bread.  As farmers gather the broken kernels of wheat and fashion them into bread, so God gathers up the broken pieces of humanity and re-makes them into the image of Christ.  This is how God creates the Church.  But, the wheat must be cut down and crushed before it can be turned into bread.  So we must be broken before we are put together again.  God wants to realize we can’t do it by our own strength.  He will raise us up, but only after we stop trying to raise ourselves.  This doesn’t mean we stop trying and give ourselves up to drift with the current.  Rather, we cease from man’s works and turn to God’s works.  The work of God is that we believe on Him and His Son.  The work of God is that He feeds us around this table.  We need to come with hunger.  But we also need to come with the expectation of being filled.

Unity and the Table

When we come to the Lord’s Table, we see the gospel.  We see the Body of Jesus broken for us in the bread.  We see the blood of Jesus poured out for us in the Cup.  But, we also see all sorts of people gathered around this table.  There are no age restrictions or racial barriers to the gospel.  The place to have true unity with fellow Christians is eating around a common table.  All the discussions and dialogue between famous theologians won’t accomplish anything until the Church stops chopping itself into a thousand pieces.  There are hundreds of Protestant denominations, and this is deplorable.  Our prayer should be for unity, a unity based on the Truth.  And Truth is a Person, the Lord Jesus Christ.  In writing to the Corinthians, a church that was deeply divided, Paul repeatedly points them to the Lord’s Table.  Their divisions were seen at the Table, and the healing would begin at the Table.  Gathering around this Table every week reminds us that we are not simply at church to hear a good sermon.  We are not a church to hang out with our friends.  We are at church in order to become the Church, more and more.  God grows and matures his Church by feeding them at His Table.  He is fashioning us into a Perfect Church, without the spots of heresy, or the wrinkles of divisions.  So, come to this Table, putting away any divisive spirit you may have in your heart.  Come, in the Unity of the Spirit.

Eucharist Meditation – 2 Sunday Before Lent

Peter tells us to practice hospitality to each other “without grudging.”  We need to open our houses and our hearts to each other in the same way that God brings us to His table.  We have all sinned against the Most High.  We have wallowed in our sins like a pig rolling in the mud.  We have returned to our sins like a dog returns to its vomit.  That’s what a Christian sinning is: returning to your vomit and eating it up again.  The thought should turn our stomachs.  Sin should turn our stomachs.  We need to throw it up, and throw it out.  Then, God brings us to this table.  God offers us warm bread and sparkling wine instead of vomit.  Without grudging the horrific things we have done to insult His Majesty, our Lord forgives us and brings us to a feast of fat things.  We must do the same.  No matter what your fellow church-members may have done to you (or what you think they have done to you), open your home to them without grudging.  Perhaps this doesn’t apply to any of you.  But it will.  We will step on each other’s toes.  We will offend each other.  We need to decide, beforehand, to practice hospitality.  We need to be practiced in hospitality so that when there really is a need, we can effortlessly invite the broken and suffering to feast with us.  God has prepared a feast for us and he wants us to call the world to come eat with Him.

2nd Sunday After Epiphany

Eucharistic Meditation 

 

One benefit of weekly communion is that we have a weekly attitude check.  Some of our Reformed brethren believe we should have communion less frequently so that we have more time to prepare for it.  By this, they don’t mean more time to buy the most expensive wine or set the table with the best arrangment of flowers.  What they seem to mean is that we need more time to meditate on our sins and to examine ourselves to see if we are worthy to partake of the Supper.  Weekly communion, on the other hand, forces you to deal with sin much more quickly.  If you are walking in the Spirit, this meal should convict you of your sins.  No one can approach this table without clean hands.  But if you have a month, or several months to confront your sins, I, for one, would be much less likely to actually confront them.  We all know how lazy we become when we have a deadline far in the future.  When I have a few weeks to write a sermon, I don’t.  When I have to write one for every Sunday, I’m kicked into high gear!  Communing with the Lord Jesus every Sunday should make us confront our sins more and more.  And when we confront our sins, confess them, and turn away from them, we will walk in the joy of the Spirit.  Reformed folks have a reputation for being dour, gloomy, and just focusing on total depravity.  But we do not come to a funeral, we come to a wedding feast.

Eucharist Meditation

There is widespread confusion among modern Americans about what a sacrament is.  Even among Reformed churches, serious disagreements divide us at this table, which is the one place where we should be united.  Our word “sacrament” comes from the Latin sacramentum.   Jesus and his disciples never used the word sacramentum.  They spoke in Aramaic, and the Apostles wrote their books and letters in Greek.  However, when the gospel of Christ conquered the Roman Empire, the mightiest empire of man, the church fathers who spoke Latin chose sacramentum to translate the Greek.  Some have argued that this was a mistake and that we should avoid all references to sacraments because it’s Roman Catholic.  Our Baptist brothers choose to refer to the Supper as an Ordinance.  But when we understand what sacramentum meant in the ancient world, we gain a better understanding of what we are doing around this Table.

Thawing the Frozen Chosen

At the risk of sounding too Emergent, I found this observation from Rice and Hufstuttler challenging:

“If Eucharist as giving thanks were central in our celebration of the Lord’s Supper, we might find ourselves dancing in the aisles, clapping our hands, and becoming carried away in the exuberance of the moment.  Perhaps one of the reasons Reformed Protestants are often characterized as ‘God’s frozen chosen’ is that we do not celebrate Eucharist frequently enough to be formed as a grateful people.  Without Eucharist, we put too much emphasis on what we accomplish, upon our duty and responsibility. 

Baptismal Regeneration?

This answer to a question quickly graduated beyond the comments section, so I’ll post it here to clarify why we are making so much of our boys’ baptism …

Jazzycat asked: “At this infant baptism of your son, do you consider him as being redeemed and regenerate or a member of the covenant with expectations of regeneration and redemption at a later date?”

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Jazzycat,

Great question! You’ve obviously done study on this issue, and I hope this isn’t too much of a cop-out, but I don’t know when my three boys have been/will be regenerated. All we can do, as parents trying to keep the covenant faithfully, is baptize them in accordance with God’s promises to us and to our children (Acts 2:39).

In some sense, it seems your question might be a false dichotomy: we baptize our children because they are already holy (1 Cor. 7:14) and Jesus tells us the operation of the Holy Ghost (who regenerates us) is like the wind: we can’t see it, but we see the effects (Jn. 3:8). So, we pray that our boys will manifest the fruits of the Spirit, but we don’t treat them like unbelievers in the meantime.

The confession both our churches subscribe to seems to gives a both/and answer: “The efficacy of baptism is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered; yet, notwithstanding, by the right use of this ordinance the grace promised is not only offered, but really exhibited and conferred by the Holy Ghost, to such (whether of age or infants) as that grace belongeth to, according to the counsel of God’s own will, in his appointed time” (WCF, 38.6).

I’ve highlighted the phrases which state that infants can be regenerated at the moment of baptism. In fact, it seems that the Divines thought this was the “right use” of the ordinance. In other words, we should expect God to work in this way. But, contrary to a strict view of baptismal regeneration, God is free to regenerate his elect at some future time. And, of course, it’s all a work of the Holy Ghost, and of sovereign grace.

Thanks for asking this tough question. I’m preaching through 1 Peter, and am starting to get nervous about 3:21! This has helped me to clarify my thoughts.

Federal Vision Practicum

Call me Luther, a boar in the vineyard of vacuous American traditions … My wife and I believe our high-Church Calvinism should affect every part of our lives, and so it was inevitable that we do something different for the birthdays of our three boys. After all, we’ll have three opportunities each year to do something informed by theology, rather than what the magisterium of American materialism has handed down to us. Here’s my exhortation for the service I’m leading Sunday at Providence Church in Greenville, NC.

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This week, we celebrated Athanasius’s 3rd birthday. But he didn’t get any presents. Or cake, or ice cream. Not that we are health nut freaks, or that we are opposed to presents. If anyone deserves presents for his birth, it would be my wife! The birth of a child is indeed a miracle, and a central metaphor for our salvation (Jn. 3:5-6; 1 Pt. 1:23). We should celebrate birthdays, especially when so many in our culture of death never make it out of the womb.

So, Athanasius got to pick out a special birthday dinner and help prepare it. But … this Sabbath is a special day, too: this is his Baptism Day! Today, he gets cake and presents! Today, we celebrate his entrance into the Church. Wednesday, we celebrated his entrance into the world; today we will celebrate his entrance into the Kingdom. On his birthday, he came into our family, but in his baptism, he entered the Family of God. He became, officially, a living stone in the New Temple. This, indeed, is a cause for celebration.

Now, I don’t bring up what our family is doing to make the rest of you feel like you must do it our way. In God’s providence, we were able to baptize all three of our boys the within a week of their birth, and so the timing works out perfectly. But, however you do it, we should constantly remind our children of their baptism. We should constantly remind ourselves of our baptism. Baptism is our badge of membership in the Church; baptism into Christ is our identity. We are all part of Christ’s family. “Christ” is our last name; we are all Christians. Eph. 4:4-6 reads, “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” As we celebrate birthdays, let us also celebrate our new birth, our adoption into the Family of God.

Federal Vision Musings

Although my sympathies lie with the FV folks (mostly because I don’t actually know the guys on the other side of the debate), I can’t claim to be an expert in the controversy. I’m still learning too much! However, one book I’ve found quite helpful in working through these issues is Leonard J. Vander Zee’s Christ, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper.

I was struck at how FV he sounded, even though Wilson, Wilkins, and Lusk don’t show up anywhere in the footnotes. The only suspect listed is Leithart, but the rest of the sources are top-notch scholars.

Vander Zee writes: “If we don’t really know what baptism is we don’t really know what the church is either. It seems to me that we will not recover a solid ecclesiology until we recover a solid biblical understanding of baptism, which is our incorporation into the body of Christ,” (112). Although the FV debate is stirring up a lot of dust (maybe too much dust), it’s an important debate to have. Justification is central to biblical Christianity, but so is baptism.

Vander Zee also stresses the visibility of the Church, and cautions us against making too much of the visible/invisible Church distinction (112).

I found this a powerful statement of what baptism does: “Baptism unites us, by water and Spirit, into the body of Christ that is both visible and invisible, local and universal, at the same time. We presume that all who are baptized are spiritually united with Christ unless and until they, by their unbelief and unrepentant sinfulness, show themselves otherwise to the very end of their lives. Finally, this is judgment only God can make,” (113).

Although I’ve quoted only a few tidbits from two pages, Vander Zee is a wise voice from outside the Reformed ghetto (a pastor in the CRC), and reading his irenic study might help some folks to calm down and work through these issues carefully.

Healthy Eucharist = Healthy Church

Interestingly, even though he supported communion in only one species (bread) Nicholas de Cusa linked Eucharistic practice with the health of the church. As summarized by Pelikan, de Cusa argued: “When the love of the church was at its peak, believers communicated often and under both species; when it was only warm, they received more rarely and by means of intinction; and now that it was merely tepid, they received even less often and under one species. Thus, ‘the usage was commensurate with the love of the church,’” (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 4, 124).

It is no coincidence that Paul comes back repeatedly to the Supper as he deals with the Corinthians and their train-wreck of a church. We either feast on Christ, or we feast on each other!

Communion and Censure

We went over chap. 30 of the Westminster Confession (“Of Church Censures”) in our weekly men’s study group at church. One aspect of censures the Divines outline is “suspension from the Supper” (30.4). However, if the Church does not teach a high view of the Supper, who cares? If nothing happens during the Supper, then suspension from the Supper is meaningless. What child would give a rip if he was barred from a play-dough dinner? We can’t have effective church censures if we don’t have an efficacious Supper. We can’t have a high view of church discipline unless we have a high view of the Supper. We can’t have covenantal curses unless we have covenantal blessings. Of course, we don’t “have” any of this; we are merely the stewards of God’s mysteries. As good stewards, we must teach people that these mysteries are powerful to save and to condemn (1 Cor. 5).

Are Baptist Children Heathen?

I’m doing some copying work for the Westminster Assembly Project. The goal is to get all the documents relevant to the history and work of Westminster up on the web, accessible to all. The gentleman in charge, Dr. Chad van Dixhoorn, found some lost minutes of the Assembly lying around(!!!), and so there is much to learn, or re-learn. My efforts are not nearly so grand. I’m typing out a sermon by Stephen Marshall, a central divine, called the “best preacher in England” by Robert Baille, one of the Scottish comissioners to the Assembly. Anyway, the following caught my eye. If you read slowly, the basic point is that (Ana)Baptists basically believe their children are going to hell; whatever way they find to get around that can also be used by paedobaptists to justify baptizing infants.

I thought something inflammatory might attract more readers. There’s so much muck-raking elsewhere on the web, it’s hard to stay relevant and provocative!

[Note: all the weird spellings and italics are in the original, unless I made a blooper. I've modified it to make it easier for the modern reader, so just imagine the original!]

“But it is expressly said, That hee that beleeves and is baptized, shall bee saved; Faith in Christ is the Condition, upon which men may be baptized: and this is the most common objection among the Anabaptists: Unbeleevers may not bee baptized, children are unbeleevers, therefore they may not bee baptized.

Theological Balance

Philip Schaff on walking the theological tight-rope (perhaps insight into why we have so many controversies in the Church with both sides appealing to the “Reformed Tradition”):

“Calvin thus combined his high predestinarianism with a high view of the Church and the Sacraments. Augustine and Luther did the same to a still greater extent, with more prominence given to the sacramental idea. It is the prerogative of great minds to maintain apparently opposite truths and principles which hold each other in check; while with minds less strong and comprehensive, the one principle is apt to rule out the other. In the Catholic and Lutheran Churches the sacramental principle gradually overruled the doctrine of absolute predestination; in the more rigid Calvinistic school, the sacramental principle yielded to the doctrine of predestination. But the authoritative standards are committed to both,” (Creeds of Christendom, vol. I, 457).

Nevin’s Federal Vision

Reading D.G. Hart’s excellent biography of John Williamson Nevin (the Mercersburg theologian who, along with Philip Schaff, insightfully critiqued American Protestantism) is one Deja vou after another. The Auburn Avenue Gang is not the first group in church history to say what they are saying. Hart quotes Nevin on the Supper: “‘Low views of the sacrament,’ Nevin deduced, ‘betray invariably a low view of the mystery of the incarnation itself, and a low view of the Church also, as that new and higher order of life, in which the power of this mystery continues to reveal itself through all ages,’” (Hart, John Williamson Nevin: High-Church Calvinist, 126).

Eucharist & the Word

Just as God, through the Word, spoke matter into existence and then shaped it into the created theater of His Glory, so His word makes dead bread life-giving grace.