Substitutionary Atonement, the Two Natures of Christ, and the Trinity

I saw someone the other day take a swipe against substitutionary atonement by saying that the cross is not about God pouring out his wrath on an innocent human being. "Cosmic child abuse" someone also has called this theory of atonement. Those who think substitutionary atonement is the best or even the only way to speak about the reconciliation of humanity to God and God to humanity through the cross of Christ have also spoken about the alienation between Jesus and the One who is his Father in such stark terms as to imply if not outright break the union of the Holy Trinity. There is some way in which these thoughts are related, whether they be of a powerless human being who serves as a ransom for humanity before a wrathful God or of an abusive Father who takes out his frustrations against others on his Son, coming from those who find substitutionary atonement disturbing or distasteful, or, from those on the pro-side of substitutionary atonement, thoughts of rage against sin and alienation that divide the Trinity. In some way, they all come from a failure to grasp in fullest terms the unity of essence and intention in the Triune God, and, relatedly, the union of the divine and human natures in Christ.

Let us take this notion of the utter powerlessness of the innocent human being in light of the cross. Humility, being found in the form of a servant, being silent as a lamb before its shearers pictures the weakness in which God is slain of sinful man, but this is a powerful weakness, the weakness of God. No one takes the life of the Son from him. He lays it down of himself and takes it up again. The creature here is one person, the Son, of the very essence of God, the Trinity. This is not a man forced to carry a burden he does not freely choose to carry. He submits in love to the will of the Father to be slain by those he has come to save in propitiating the wrath of the self-same God. God and man are one in this as they are one in Jesus Christ.

Secondly, let us remember that the division of the persons arises out of the One, undivided, and indivisible essence of the Godhead. The Father who wounds is God; the Son who is wounded is God; the Spirit who announces God's revelation that "one hung from a tree is cursed" and then vindicates him before the Father in the resurrection is God.

Thirdly, let us remember that this abandonment of God by God into the hands of sinners for the salvation of humanity is the plan forged before the worlds in the inner council chamber of the Blessed Trinity. In the actual accomplishment of this plan, the Trinity, as God's One indivisible essence, experience as One what it is to be forsaken of God and shatter this horror to pieces. Each person of the Holy Trinity also experiences this tragedy individually. That Jesus is perfectly in submission to the will of his Father and that the Spirit is leading him and vindicates him in the end shows that the transaction of wrath between Father and Son is carried out in perfect concord and peace. In their alienation is perfect unity.

From Geneva to Wittenberg: Christology 1

I am as much an accidental Lutheran as I was an accidental Reformed Christian. When I realized my convictions were no longer Baptist and that I would find myself sooner or later in a liturgical and sacramental church, I did not at all expect I would start that life in a Presbyterian church. This was due to some uncomplimentary and false preconceived notions I had about Calvinism, but I gradually and blessedly overcame those objections by listening to what the tradition actually had to say about them. While it was not due initially to any major change in conviction about Christian faith and practice that led me to consider exploring Lutheranism as had been the case when I stumbled into Presbyterianism, I did have the similar experience of having to reevaluate false preconceived notions about what a group of Christians actually believed and practiced. My understanding of the Lutheran take on Christology and their related teaching on the Lord's Supper required just such a treatment.

My story with Lutheranism began when I returned to my hometown from college and began considering from within which church community I should live out the sacramental and liturgical convictions I had arrived at during college and had begun nourishing there at a confessional Presbyterian church. I did not consider one of the local Lutheran churches for, among other reasons, their teaching of the "ubiquity," or omnipresence, of Christ's body after his ascension into heaven. Well, a few years later and with a trying experience in my hometown Presbyterian congregation behind me, I gave the Lutherans the look they deserved right from the start and discovered very quickly I did not have the whole picture on their Christological teaching. I'll sketch a broader picture of the Lutheran Christological concerns in a minute, but first a word on the "so what?"

Wherever the truth may happen to be on the particulars of this question, is an issue as seemingly speculative and tangential to the Gospel as the properties of Christ's body ascended to the right-hand of the Father important enough for it to be a deciding factor in whether or not to join, much less investigate, a church community or tradition? It would seem in today's context that this would be an example of the worst kind of divisive, doctrinal nitpicking, but there is actually something quite central to the Christian faith at stake here. We are dealing with Our Lord Jesus Christ and his divine and human natures united in his one person–the Incarnation by which God the Son assumed our flesh, suffered, died, rose again, ascended into heaven, reigns at the right hand of the Father, and will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. On the basis of the witness of the Holy Scriptures, the Church throughout history has understood that the work of freeing us from the bonds of sin, death, and Hell required that the Savior be at once both fully and truly God and fully and truly man; therefore, our thinking or speaking about the person of Christ must fall within the boundaries set forth in the Chalcedonian formulation of the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in one person, neither mixing, confusing, nor separating his two natures, if we are to present him as God-in-the-flesh who by his Incarnation, death, and resurrection is our Savior.

Furthermore, the Church has understood that the work of salvation Christ accomplished for us on the cross and in the resurrection is communicated and guaranteed to us in and through the flesh He shares with us to eternity. The salvation Christ provides, of which the Incarnation is both the necessary means and the very reality itself, is not the kind of thing that once he has died as the ransom for our sins and risen again for our justification, he would then relinquish his flesh and consider his work on our behalf over and done with. No, in addition to offering himself as a sacrificial victim for us, Christ continues the work of redemption in his body by the high priestly ministry he carries out on our behalf in the heavenly tabernacle. Our salvation is guaranteed by this work and by the fact that Christ wears our flesh eternally and has seated it forever in heaven.

The issue of the properties of Christ's body now that he has ascended into the glory of his Father relates to these concerns in that it has broader implications for understanding the Incarnation. From passages such as Colossians 2:9, "in Christ all the fullness of deity dwells bodily," the Lutherans understand that the union between Christ's divine nature and human nature is most intimate and exhaustive. As Christ is one person, the natures work inseparably, the divine nature giving itself fully to the human nature, andthe human nature being filled with the divine nature. If this is so, as Scripture indicates it is, then Christ wills to, can, and does utilize all of the properties of his deity in, with, and through his humanity in communicating his salvation to us, especially now that he has been exalted to God's right hand and rules on high. From the Lutheran perspective, however, to deny this consequence of the union of the two natures in one person, is to implicitly separate the natures and thus have a God who has not become fully incarnate in Jesus Christ. If Christ's assumed humanity is not united to the fullness of his deity in his one person, then we have no guarantee that we are in union with the Holy Trinity through his flesh.

For the Reformed, on the other hand, they reason that if in the Incarnation the two natures of Christ retain their natural properties, it is improper to speak of the divine nature communicating properties to the human nature that are beyond or even contrary to its natural properties, for to do so would be to mix the natures and have a God who has not assumed a human nature like ours and who thus has not redeemed us. Calvin, for instance, reasoned that if Christ's body was now omnipresent, it implied a body of infinite substance and thus no body at all. The result of such a teaching would be that Christians would lose the confidence of salvation that comes from having Christ in a body like ours seated at the right hand of the Father, performing his ongoing work of intercession for us and serving as a guarantee that we are at peace with God and will one day be in heaven with him. The Reformed, therefore, take the position that Christ's body, because of the natural limits of his humanity, is unable to be everywhere present and so is physically present only in heaven at the right hand of the Father.

This in short is why Lutherans have accused Calvinists of Nestorianism (i.e., separating the two natures) and Calvinists have accused Lutherans of Monophysitism (i.e., mixing the two natures). As I have indicated, these are serious charges, and, admittedly, one can easily see how each tradition would level the charge at the other. That being said, the charges are most likely due to clumsiness in expressing the actual teachings of each tradition by both its proponents and opponents than it is to true Christological heresy. One also can see the reasonableness of the arguments of either tradition in regard to the question and how they are each concerned to safeguard essential matters of life and salvation by their teachings and to defend these core concerns in relation to the teachings of the other tradition.

So how do we sort this out? Are the Lutherans really flirting with or outright adopting Monophysitism in understanding the person of Christ? I once thought so, but I now see very clearly that the answer is no. How did I change my mind? One of my first discoveries when I turned to the Book of Concord, was that, contrary to what has been understood by the Reformed and other Christians, the Lutherans do not teach that Christ's body is now omnipresent in the sense that it possesses an infinite substance. The Lutherans maintain a distinction between the two natures in the abstract, and the two natures as they are joined together concretely in the hypostatic union as one person. Calvin's characterization of the Jesus of Lutheran Christology as a phantasmal Christ thus has more rhetorical force than it does basis in reality. Lutheran Christologians are far too careful, orthodox, and familiar with the conciliar formulations of the ancient Church to posit a communication of properties by a mixing of the substances. In keeping with the Chalcedonian formula they have always taught that each nature maintains its essential properties.

If Christ's human nature retains its essential properties of being circumscribed in time and space, then how can he present his body everywhere, if not by mixing it with his infinite divine nature? We must look to the kind of union that Christ's two natures have with one another and to the teaching of the communication of properties. Zwingli conceived of biblical statements that attributed human properties to God, such as dying and shedding his blood, to be merely a figure of speech, a verbal alloiosis, because the divine essence cannot by nature die. As a result, he attributed Christ's death only to the human nature. Of course, Zwingli was correct that the divine nature, being impassable, could not suffer death, but his position that the communication of properties was merely verbal implied that the divine nature simply sat idly by while the human nature alone participated in death—something that comes very close to the two boards glued together, human person united to a divine person Christology of the Nestorians. A more orthodox understanding, however, is that the divine person of the Son of God died in his assumed human nature, the divine nature communicating the power of life to death and overcoming sin, death, hell, the devil, and damnation through it.

While the subsequent Reformed tradition has associated the two natures far more closely, for instance, the Westminster Confession attributing death to the divine person, Zwingli's clumsy early formulation perhaps still casts its shadow on Reformed Christology in the tradition’s rejection of the third genus of the ancient Church's teaching on the communication of properties. In the Book of Concord, Luther is quoted as saying that when the distinctions within the communication of properties are neglected and that it is reckoned as being of only one kind, "the doctrine becomes confused and the simple reader is easily led astray" (Solid Declaration VIII.35). The history of the understanding of this doctrine in parts of the Church where the third genus is less well known bears this out.

The first genus of the communication of properties pertains to the predication of the properties of each nature to Christ's one person. This is not merely a verbal predication but expresses a real communion between the natures, the Greek Fathers speaking of it in terms of perichoresis, or interpenetration. This is intended to communicate the idea that the two natures are united as one person and thus that the properties of each nature are predicated of the whole person and thus of each other. The Church has utilized a member of analogies to show how this communication occurs without the mixing or confusion of the natures, including the union of body and soul and the glowing and burning of iron placed in fire with the light and heat of fire. The soul, for instance, communicates its powers of life and activity to the body without the soul becoming the body and the body becoming the soul. In like manner, iron submerged and heated in fire glows with its light and burns with its heat without substantially becoming fire or losing its essential iron-ness.

Building on the first genus, the second genus pertains to the predication of a single work or property to both natures, for instance Christ's offices of Mediator and Redeemer or his work as High Priest, these works being proper to both natures. The third genus, as mentioned above, enters into more controversial waters for the Reformed. It expresses the communication of properties above and beyond the ordinary properties, dimensions, and limits of human nature to Christ's assumed humanity. The Reformed do teach a communication of miraculous finite, created gifts given to Christ according to his humanity, but the Lutherans, following Cyril of Alexandria and the Greek Fathers, go further, predicating the highest prerogatives of deity to the human nature, including omnipotence and omnipresence.

Dealing with the erroneous idea that the Lutherans teach an infinite substance for the ascended body of Christ is the most important place to start for Reformed seeking to understand Lutheran Christology. The ancient teaching of the communication of properties also shows that the omnipresent humanity of Jesus is not an innovation of the 16th century. It is not the idiosyncratic doctrine of dubious orthodoxy and dangerous tendency I had thought it was but it faithfully buttresses the Incarnation. As one divine person, Christ exercises in perfect unity the prerogatives of immeasurable divinity and the tangible humility of human flesh, without either mixing or confusing the two natures. I've sought to clear up misunderstandings about Lutheran ubiquity in this first post, to express the importance of the issue for understanding the person and work of Jesus, to make a rudimentary comparison between Calvinist and Lutheran Christological discussions, and to establish the building blocks for a fuller explication of the doctrine. I will dive deeper into the doctrine and deal with further Reformed critiques in my next post.

From Geneva to Wittenberg: Introduction and Overview

In my spiritual journey to date, I have lived, believed, and worshiped within three major traditions of the Christian faith. I was reared and formed initially as a Christian in the Baptist tradition, but, as I read, studied, and lived more in the faith I had been given, I came to conclusions about the sacraments and Church history that brought my viewpoint in line with the right wing of the Protestant Reformation, that which in its reform of medieval Roman Catholicism sought to maintain the greatest continuity in doctrine and worship with the Church as it had existed prior to the Reformation. This right wing of the Reformation in history has been represented principally by the Reformed churches and system of doctrine and the Lutheran churches and system of doctrine. By a blessed accident (what we would theologically call a Providence), I lived into the conservative Reformation first in the Reformed churches, and now, by a similar but also blessed accident, God has placed me in Christ's body as it finds its expression within the Lutheran churches. Though I am now living, worshiping, and believing as a Lutheran Christian, the blessings of my Reformed heritage (and also of my Baptist heritage prior to that) continue to live with me.

With that in mind, I will take opportunity briefly to sing the praises of what I view to be the chief blessings of the Reformed churches to global Christianity before moving on to the main project I have in view here of comparing the two traditions’ views on controverted matters between themselves and explaining my insights from navigating these issues and embracing the Lutheran take as the one more faithful and true to the Scriptures. I alluded to the word Providence above, and it is in the Calvinist emphasis on God's exhaustively sovereign and providential reign over his entire creation that I find the greatest comfort and benefit of this tradition. God is in control, and he is in control for us, lovingly governing his world and embracing it in the redemption he has accomplished for it through Jesus Christ. I believe this understanding helps us to better praise God and see his glory in all things. Where things are marred due to sin and death in this world, we can see in this understanding of Providence, that our fulfillment and hope in life and death, in good and bad, is the transcendent God who humbled himself, took on our flesh, suffered for us, died for us, rose for us, sits at the right hand of God as Lord of heaven and earth and Redeemer for us, and will come again for us to abolish sin and death from the good creation he loves and is so exhaustively engaged with. The Reformed teach this and find life in it better than most, and we can learn from them here.

I must also praise the way in light of the above, the Reformed tradition has historically preached the whole Scriptures and especially the Old Testament. I would not now trade the blessings of the sermons on a cyclical lectionary of Scripture passages in the Lutheran Divine Service, because these passages center us on Christ, who is taught all throughout Scripture as its central message, and they do this particularly well. It is not for nothing that these texts have been preached more extensively and exhaustively throughout the history of the church than any other passages in the Bible! Nevertheless, redemptive-historical preaching consecutively through whole books of the Bible and through the Old Testament helps to flesh the centrality of Christ out even in those passages that have not been preached as frequently in church history. I would heed the Lutheran caution of not conflating Law and Gospel or flattening the differences between the Testaments, but would that we all preached the whole Scriptures with the rigor and exhaustiveness the Reformed so often have!

I will conclude this brief litany of praises by connecting the exhaustive Providence of Calvinism with the exhaustive focus on Christ throughout all of Scripture that we see in Calvinism by praising the tradition for its commitment to seeing the Lordship of Christ exalted in every area of life. Lutherans, what with Luther's robust teaching on Creation, our Two Kingdoms theology of Christ's Lordship over heaven and earth, and our teaching on vocation as divine calling, do not have cause to hang our heads on these matters quite as much as is popularly thought, but I must give Calvinism props for showing me the way the Christian hope affects all of life and transforms people and societies for the glory of Christ.

Having now praised the aspects of my Reformed heritage that have most blessed me and that I believe to be genuine blessings to the entire Church catholic, I will now put forward some very general comparisons and contrasts and to state in as factual manner I can the controverted issues between the Lutheran and Reformed churches and confessions.

The branch of the Reformation later designated by the term Reformed or Calvinist began under the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland. It began independently from the Reformation in Germany under Luther, but it held several things in common with it. Just as was the case with the Reformation in Germany, its principle for reforming the Roman Catholic Church in doctrine and worship was Scripture alone as the final authority in the Church. Similarly, just as was the case with the Reformation in Germany under Luther, the theological principle for reforming doctrine which Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation took from the Scriptures was justification by grace alone through faith alone. When it came to worship, however, the Reformation movements followed different principles. The Reformed followed what is termed the regulative principle, which states that only those practices explicitly commanded or prescribed in Scripture were to be permitted in the worship of God, while the Lutherans followed what can be called the normative principle, which states that the Church in its worship is forbidden from only those practices that are forbidden in or contrary to Scripture. As a result, the Reformed followed a more rigorous and radical plan for reforming worship, which included exclusive psalmody, the exclusion of musical instruments from worship, the removal of images and crucifixes from the churches, and a more simplified liturgy, while the Lutherans retained practices and traditions from the Church as it had existed prior to the Reformation, such as the singing of hymns, instrumental music, and much of the liturgical form and content of the medieval Mass. Some of the austerity of Reformed worship lessened under the leadership of John Calvin, but vast differences continued in the liturgical principles of the traditions, including down to the present.

The differences in approach to worship express some of the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in doctrinal and theological emphases of the two traditions. The heartbeat and very center of the Lutheran Reformation has always been justification by grace alone through faith alone. For Lutherans this doctrine has always been the rock on which the Church stands or falls, while in Calvinism the concern for the Gospel has often been expressed more in terms of God's immutable predestination than in terms of justification by faith, and obedience to the Law in Christian worship and liturgy have often been placed on equal footing with the preaching of the Gospel as the essence of the Church.

Their differing emphases in preaching the Gospel, the relative weight each puts on the doctrine of justification in their overall system, and their juncture with the differing emphases and principles of worship each tradition follows point us to the first issue between the Reformed churches and Lutheranism that truly is and has been church-dividing from the time of the Reformation. This is the issue of the sacraments in general, and of the Lord's Supper in particular. The Lutherans teach a straightforward doctrine of baptismal regeneration and the sacramental union of Jesus Christ's body and blood with the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper, while the Reformed have a more indirect understanding of the way in which the sacraments work for our salvation. This more indirect view of the sacraments stems from the greater emphasis the Reformed place on God's transcendence and secret predestination in our salvation. The sacraments testify indirectly to election and are means of salvation only to those who will ultimately persevere to the end and be finally saved. For the Lutherans, however, the Word of God, and its objective promises delivered to sinners directly in the sacraments are sure testimonies of God's saving intent. They tangibly present the realities they signify to all those who receive them. The Lord's Supper saves because it is Jesus Christ, his body and blood being immediately present in, with, and under the bread and wine. The Reformed, due to the normative status in their system of doctrine of Calvin's marked improvement over Zwingli on the sacraments, affirm a feeding on the body and blood of Jesus in the Supper indirectly through faith and the Holy Spirit, but for the Lutherans, it is the body and blood of Jesus Christ, through whom we receive the Holy Spirit, that guarantees our salvation and strengthens our faith. We know we are Christians because we have received these gifts to eat and drink to everlasting life.

This, of course, explains the juncture between worship and justification I obliquely mentioned above and failed to describe until now. The primary purpose of worship in the Lutheran view is to receive the forgiveness of sins. For the Reformed, the note of forgiveness in the worship service is still certainly there but the primary emphasis is on the duty to obey God and render him service. This is not to say, conversely, that Lutherans do not understand the Divine Service as moving us to gratefully serve God and our neighbor in response to his glorious gifts, but the primary form of worship God receives from us when we go to church is "the divine service of the Gospel" where "we receive from him gifts" (Defense of the Augsburg Confession, IV II.189).

As the controversy on the Lord's Supper indicates, the issues of grace and election are also controverted and church-dividing between the Lutherans and Reformed. Differences on predestination, the extent of the atonement, the question of the resistibility of grace, and perseverance in grace are the most salient points in the disagreement.

Finally, while both Lutherans and Reformed fall safely within the bounds of Christological orthodoxy established in the Nicene Creed and the Formula of Chalcedon, each has steadily leveled at the other the charge of transgressing those boundaries. The Christological issue that has been in debate, i.e., the degree to which Christ's divine nature communicates its properties to the human nature, is significant for our understanding of the Incarnation itself. Of course, the occasion for the eruption of the controversy was differing teachings on the presence of the body and blood of Jesus in the Lord's Supper and the implications of Christ's Ascension to the right-hand of the Father to this question. The Christological issues, thus, are significant for their role in the sacramental teachings of each tradition.

I want to examine these controverted issues each a little more closely in their turn. I will start with the Christological controversy, advance to the Lord's Supper, and conclude my study with grace and election.

The Hidden Power of God at Christmas

Christmas is about the humility of God coming into human flesh, entering the world born in a stable. This is lowly and rustic and familiar, but lest we think God reducing Himself to our span is a lowering of standards, a making of Himself comfortable with the way things simply are with us and our world, we need to be reminded that this is a paradox, a mystery of mysteries. The Incarnation is humility, but it is a great and glorious humility because here is also the presence full-strength of the Power and Majesty and Holiness who framed the worlds in glory and perfection, who rules on high and commands the innumerable angelic host, who demands justice and righteousness from His creatures and will judge them accordingly, who is infinite and incomparable in every way. Indeed, the Incarnation does not gainsay God's almighty power but rather underscores it and shows that it is of one substance with His love and compassion, which He extends even and especially to this race that has fallen from Him and brought the whole Creation into ruin. This is a God beyond all limits. This is a God who is big enough to become small for the sake of love.

The fullness of this Deity came to dwell bodily in the Child Jesus. This means that though this Child was small, though He was born in the meanest of circumstances, poor, of a people oppressed, He was able to faithfully carry out the plan for which His Father had placed His hand to the plow, and He did it not in spite of this smallness but precisely through it. Of Him, St. Paul hymns:

6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross! 9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:6-11)

And, of course, Jesus through His death and resurrection has raised fallen humanity so that those who believe in Him may sit with Him in the glory mentioned above both now in the Church and forever in the New Jerusalem. Great is the promise of Christmas. Christ and we His brothers and sisters are the firstfruits of the New Creation, with which all of heaven and nature are destined to be crowned.

The Office of Readings on Christmas Day bears beautiful witness to the glory the Kingdom that has arrived in the humble birth of Christ will bring to the whole Creation. But while I was feasting on these wonderful readings this Christmas, I was also mourning the deaths of the worshipers in Nigeria who had been killed earlier that morning in church bombings as they were glorying in the same Christmas mystery. It is confusing, senseless, and tragic that on the morning when they were celebrating peace on earth that at least two dozen of Christ's redeemed should die in such wanton acts of hatred and violence. The promise of Christmas is not yet fully realized. It is perhaps in recognition of such realities that many parts of the Church commemorate the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr the day after Christmas and the Feast of the Martyrdom of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem on December 28. It is one thing that during the Christmas season violence should come upon the Church unexpectedly, but in light of all that the Incarnation means for humanity and the world, why do we intentionally turn our gaze back to the predations the enemy has made against God, His Christ, and His redeemed children as we do in these commemorations?

Well, until God's Kingdom arrives in all its fullness at Christ's Second Coming, His reign will often be manifested among us in a hidden manner, as it was in the First Coming. God came to us in the fullness of His glory, hidden in the weakness of the Child born in Bethlehem. We remember the martyrs in the midst of the Christmas celebration because in their deaths they bear witness to this Child, who grew up to become the servant of all, pouring out His blood and giving His life for a world determined to reject Him. Resurrection, glory, and the New Creation came through the cross. He descended into the earth that he might rise to the heights of heaven and fill the whole universe, and He made himself the bondsman of His enemies, receiving death at their hands, that he might be the captain of their salvation. This is how Christ has triumphed, won brothers and sisters for himself from among His enemies, and how He is transforming the world that yet lies in wickedness.

In like manner, as the martyrs echo the sufferings of the Lord who bought them, laying hold of Him who unto the death laid hold of them, they plant their blood as the seed of the Church. People see the power that is in their testimony to the Lord Jesus and come to recognize something they cannot account for in the unbreakable hope these have in Him. This is Christ at work, hiding His glory in the suffering of the saints, overcoming His enemies and theirs, converting foes of the Gospel to children of God, and all of it through the death He shares with His martyrs.

In a less dramatic though still paradoxical manner, this is also the way it is with all Christians in the lesser martyrdoms we experience in our lives. Life in a fallen world is filled with small vexations that build up and gradually steal away our strength. Life doesn't quite go the way we plan, and we don't seem as victorious as we think we ought to be. Our jobs are unsatisfying, or we fail in our relationships. We spin our wheels. We seem to accomplish little of lasting worth. Whether they be these kinds of trials or the catastrophies that leave our lives in utter ruin, Jesus Christ is with us, hidden in our hearts with power and grace for us and for our world. What we shall be in Him we do not yet see, but the fullness of God hidden in the helpless Child and the unveiling of the glory residing there that came through His humble obedience to the Father bear the ultimate witness to what is ours even now and what shall be fully realized in us and in our world from our communion with Him. Keep the faith, humble Christian; Christ hidden in us is the power that overcomes the world.

Filling the Universe with the Fullness of God

Ephesians 3:17-19
And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 4:8-10
“When he ascended on high,
he led captives in his train
and gave gifts to men.”

What does “he ascended” mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe

Our life in this world is a constant search for wholeness, for fullness. For those of us who have been grasped by the love of God in Christ, we have found wholeness; we have found all the fullness. He is truly all we need. Christ alone is the fullness of God, and He has come in human flesh. Because of God’s coming into human flesh, when we are united to Christ through the Holy Spirit, this fullness comes closer to us than to our own hearts.

Why then are we believers so often cast down? The simple answer is that we have allowed Satan to take from us the awareness of just how full and wonderful this fullness is. We have allowed him to steal our joy and purpose because we have drawn the loop too tightly on what this salvation God has given us consists of. We have lost the full-orbed Christian hope. Let me explain what I mean. I believe we have robbed God of His good world and failed to see that “heaven and earth are filled with His glory.” Over the last 1000 years the Christian Church has increasingly bought into a dualism that strictly opposes nature to grace, heaven to earth, and matter to spirit. What may come as a great surprise to most is that the Bible simply does not teach this. The faith of Israel embodied in the Old Testament and the faith of the Church embodied in the New Testament teaches us that not only did God establish a good and perfect universe once in the distant past but that He has continuously from the foundation of the world upheld, governed, ruled, and manifested Himself in every inch of the universe. In spite of the entry of decay, corruption, and death into his creation through the Fall, God is still governing and guiding everything toward the glorious fulfillment of His will. The Good News for us as Christians is that God has fulfilled in our flesh at just the right time in history all his promises for the consummation of the universe. The Word became flesh and dwelt, “tabernacled” among us. In the Incarnation, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and heavenly rule of His Son Jesus Christ, God has given us in the present time the fulfillment of all His future promises. This is the Gospel. God is recovering all that was lost in the Fall through the person and work of His Son Jesus. This Gospel is as big and broad and wide and long and high and deep as the universe and it expands to cover everything, visible and invisible, that God has made. It is not plan B. God has not abandoned the project He began in the beginning but is renewing it and bringing it to its final glory in His Son. This is what I mean by the full Christian hope. Christ is filling the universe with Himself and all the trappings of His glory.

Christ and Country Music

As I sit here 15 minutes prior to midnight listening to some classics from the deeply R&B-influenced country great, Ronnie Milsap, I am reminded that one of my desires has been to develop a theology that is conversant with that paradoxically humble yet profound, down-home, All-American, everyday-life-glorifying genre that is country music. Correct me if I'm wrong, but country music is essentially the music of the common people, the regular Joes, the great blue-collared multitude of unsung heroes who keep our country running with the work they do in the factories, the fields, and over the roads, not to mention the white-collar folks who are not ashamed to admit that they're just a little bit redneck, the professors, journalists, pastors, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, professionals, and otherwise "enlightened" folks who don't think they're too refined to take pleasure in the ever-ubiquitous "done me wrong" song, hard-core honky-tonk tune, simple, wholesome song extolling traditional values like love between a man and a woman, family life, and faith in God, or tear-jerking, mournful ballad about anything from lighthearted misfortunes like "my truck broke down," or "my dog died," or "Mama just got out of prison and got hit by a damned ol' train" to the more profound and life-altering tragedies of death, divorce, terror attacks, and war.

Call me a hick, cornpone, hayseed, conservative, traditionalist, Republican, Philistine, simple-minded, s***kicker, or whatever epithet you wish, but, deep down, I really just want to be someone who wasn't afraid to admit where he came from, a simple man who admitted his brokenness and was always quick to give praise and worship and gratitude to the God who deigned to leave his place on a high to become a country boy from the backwoods backwater of the Roman empire that was Galilee, to be a simple man who took up all the minutia, earthiness, and quotidian trivialities of everyday life and transfigured them, returning them to us as the very means of contemplating and communing with the God of infinite majesty and glory, to be the "man of constant sorrow" who took upon himself all the pain and disappointment and suffering and injustices of life in this world and endured it, dying and rising again to gain victory over the evil one and set us free from death and sin so that we may have true communion with God and one another.

Jesus Christ is Lord of the commonplace; the one who has been given the name that is above every name because he humbled himself as a peasant though he is the King of Glory. Likewise, may our glory be, not so much in the things that are esteemed as high and lofty in this world but in the humble things like country music and the carpenter's son from Galilee.

Empathy

Is God the distant Prince of the Stars?
Is God the Indifferent One who cares not for His children?
Is God the Cold Controller—the Perfecter of Power?
Does He care how we feel?

Is God beyond pain, suffering, and weakness?
Is He the Cosmic Sadist who wounds us for kicks?

Are You the God of the philosophers?
Are You the bare, cold Reason above emotion and heat?
Or if passionate, do You burn with wrath and self-interested love?
Is justice Your concern or Your shifting whims?

O God, O God, do You really love me?
Do I really matter to You or am I just a toy—
a subject to Your infininence and uncompromising will?
I know You created me, that You gave me breath.
You know my every thought; my very hairs are numbered.
My lying down and rising up are ever in Your eyes.

But the Christ, the Christ!
If You were in Him, it could be that You have some empathy
for us creatures here below.
If You came to us in Jesus, it means you truly became one of us,
that you lived in our skin and walked in our shoes.

No, you never failed like me, but maybe it makes a difference
that you could have.
No, you never did the things I have, but you don't judge me for that.
You don't throw stones at sinners like me,
only at the pretenders who beat us down,
who want to make us pay and keep paying.

Holy and blameless were you, but you didn't flaunt it.
You were humble and forgiving, gathering to you the weak and flawed,
the hos and Joes, the cheaters and thieves, the terrorists and schemers.

Your life showed you were the friend of mortals and sinners,
but your death says even more.
You never sinned, but you identified yourself with the worst of the worst.
You died the death reserved for murderers and thieves,
beaten like a slave, tortured, slaughtered like a lamb.

But what of the wrathful Father who required the sins of the guilty
from the innocent Son?
Is this the unfeeling Patriarch of the Skies again playing vicious games
with his powerless creatures.

If the theologians are right about Father, Spirit, Son,
then the exacting Father and self-emptying Son are one.

Oh most gracious Lord! What a strange Man you are,
never requiring more of us than that which You Yourself have supplied.
Deign, if You will, to save me by Your own hand.
Condemn me only if You know how it feels.
Aye, but I pray for the first.
Through the stripes of the Son, please dear Lord,
rescue me from the curse.

The Sacraments Revisited

I have not written exclusively or specifically on the sacraments for a little while now, but I'm not done treating the subject in depth. So far, I have written three installments about reclaiming the sacraments for evangelicals. In the process, I have challenged philosophical and theological assumptions that undermine right views of the sacraments, described in brief the sacraments' relation to ecclesiology, exposited Scriptures related to baptism, surveyed various orthodox views of baptism, and given the question of the Lord's Supper a biblical and scholarly treatment from a classically Reformed point of view. I have yet to survey the various orthodox views of the Supper, or, to discuss the broad implications of recovering a sacramental theology.

Before taking up these tasks, I think a little revision is in order when it comes to what I have already written on this subject. The things I had written before are by no means mature thoughts on the sacraments and their implications for the Church and the entire Christian life. They represent my earliest wranglings with these kinds of ideas. I've read and thought more extensively since then. Also, I've learned that doing theology is a constant balancing act. Here are some needed counterweights to my earlier thoughts.

First corrective: In a way that smacks of both medieval scholasticism and the more recent Enlightenment and Age of Reason-inspired evangelical Protestant scholasticism, I described salvation or grace (justification, sanctification, etc.) as a sort of commodity that is distributed by the Church. When we conceive of salvation in this sense, I think we are missing the point. Salvation is relational; it is none other than Christ we seek.

Second corrective: Also in reference to my previous point, commodifying salvation and thinking of the Church as some sort of salvation-dispensing machine diminish the overarching significance of the person of Jesus Christ. We should think of salvation, not as something that is abstracted from Christ and then applied to us, but as nothing more or less than the abiding personal presence of Jesus Christ in and with the believer. Similarly, we should not think of the Church as something antecedent to or separable from the person of Jesus Christ. We should think of the Church in terms of the Augustinian concept of totus Christus and the Eastern Orthodox idea of perichoresis.

The reality of totus Christus is the reality of Christ as the Head in heaven at the right hand of the Father united to the Church—His very own Body—on earth (see Ephesians 5). In other words, Christ is composed of both Christ our Head and we His Body. Therefore, we can say that whenever the Body acts in obedience to its Head, its actions are none other than the actions of Jesus Himself.

When I speak of perichoresis, I am speaking of the sense in which the Persons of the Trinity mutually indwell and interpenetrate one another. Through the Holy Spirit, we as the Body of Christ are taken up into this union the Persons of the Trinity share with one another. As a result, Christ is in us and we are in Christ. Christ is in us individually because we are in Him corporately as the Church.

The point is that neither the Church nor salvation can be theologically separated from Christ. Salvation is right relationship with Christ, embodied in the Church. The Church is salvation. The sacraments are instrumental in our salvation in that baptism incorporates us into Christ's Body and the Lord's Supper continuously renews our union with Christ and His Body.

Third corrective: The sacraments are not means of grace. Again, we are dealing with the problem of thinking of salvation as some sort of commodity. Grace is not some kind of ether that is abstracted from God and distributed. Grace is Christ Himself and the abundant mercy He shows to sinners. A better way to speak of the sacraments is as means of union with Christ.

Fourth corrective: The sacraments are not primarily visible words. This raises the specter of Zwinglian or Baptist memorialism and the worst abuses of medieval sacramental practice. The sacraments do not find their primary use or efficacy in visible demonstration. We certainly cannot neglect the symbolic significance of the sacraments, but we must understand that they are first and foremost performative actions. They are rituals. Preaching Christ's death, burial, and resurrection is more instructive than demonstrating the Gospel through baptism or the Eucharist, hence the reason why those who hold to memorialist views of the sacraments are often prone to neglect their practice.

Baptism is participation in the Gospel through repentance and the objective application of Christ's death and resurrection to us. The Lord's Supper is a participation in the Body and Blood of Christ through eating. It is a meal that embodies the humility and service to one another that are central to the ethic of Christ's Body and it anticipates the full realization of the Kingdom of God at Christ's return.

Certainly, God appeals to our senses in the sacraments but not just to our sense of sight. He appeals to our sense of hearing in that we hear the Word of God in baptismal and Eucharistic liturgies, the shuffling of feet in Communion lines, the sloshing of water, the clinking of cups and plates. God appeals to our sense of smell with the aroma of bread and wine. He appeals to our sense of touch with water, the passing of plates, the handling of pieces of bread and the cup. God appeals to our sense of taste with the Bread of Life and the fruit of the vine through which we truly taste and see that the Lord is good. And he appeals to our corporate human existence and experience by baptizing us into Himself before a great cloud of witnesses, by coming to be present with His Church at His Table, and by feeding us with His flesh and blood.

Fifth corrective: I followed the time honored practice of using a "zoom lens" to think about the sacraments. Discussions of baptism are almost always about what the water does or does not do to the baptizand, while discussions of the Lord's Supper are almost always about what does or does not happen to the bread and the wine. Also, we notice that the focus in discussions of the sacraments is often exclusively on their effects on individuals. Rarely do we consider how the sacraments work to establish and maintain the society of the Church.

As an alternative, Peter Leithart proposes a "wide-angle lens" view in discussing the significance of the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. Here is what a wide-angle lens view of the Eucharist offers as opposed to the traditional zoom lens view:

Instead of attending only to bread and wine on a table, we see people and they are doing things. They are not simply observing the elements but passing them from hand-to-hand, sharing them, eating and drinking them. Words are being spoken. In most churches, one or a few members of the congregation stand nearer the "elements," while the rest sit, stand, or kneel at a greater distance, revealing a hierarchy of some kind. Through the zoom lens, the Eucharist is presented as a miraculous puzzle of physics or metaphysics; through a wide-angle lens, the Eucharist becomes a focal point for more theologically central issues: the relationships of the church’s members to one another, creation, and God. (Leithart, Blessed Are the Hungry, 156)

This kind of discussion provides a good segue into considering the broad reaching implications of reclaiming a sacramental theology. This preceded by a survey of the various orthodox views of the Supper is the next task in my project of reclaiming the sacraments.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

*For directing me to the concept of totus Christus, I owe Peter Leithart and his wonderful scholarship a debt of gratitude. Discussions with Dustin Lyons, former classmate at Mizzou and current graduate student at St. Vladimir's Seminary in New York City, have been important in directing me toward the theological treasures of Eastern Orthodoxy. Interestingly, Reformed scholars like Leithart have also come to look toward the wisdom of the Eastern Church for guidance in ecclesiological and Christological matters. May the dialogue continue between East and West, Protestant and Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox, Catholic and Orthodox. We have much wisdom to offer one another.*

Controversial Ecclesiology

I admit it. I got into my Christmas gifts a little bit early this year. I found the prospect of reading this book so exciting that I just couldn't wait the last three weeks before the big day. I haven't been disappointed so far. Peter Leithart is becoming my best friend already. He challenges presuppositions and questions foregone conclusions. He is therefore controversial, even heretical to some in the Presbyterian Church in America.

I give you a brief sample from Against Christianity. Is he here challenging the fundamental nature of "Christianity" or simply our Western conception that individuals constitute societies? If we instead conceive that this is backwards—that societies in fact constitute individuals—are Leithart's words still so shocking?

Ask the average Christian about the relationship between "church" and "salvation," and you are likely to get one of two answers: either (if the Christian is a rather old-fashioned Roman Catholic) that the Church is the reservoir of salvation, to which one must repair to receive grace; or (if the Christian is a rather common sort of evangelical) that salvation occurs apart from the Church, though it is a help along the way.

Despite the apparent differences between these two views they are fundamentally similar. Both conceive of "salvation" as a something (almost a substance) that can be stored in a reservoir or infused into sinners directly by God. Both believe that the whole point is the salvation of individuals: for the Catholic, the Church is an essential conduit of grace: but salvation is what happens to the individual; for the evangelical, the Church is a nonessential aid to individual salvation. In both cases, Christianity is looming in the background.

Biblically, however, salvation is not a stuff that one can get, whether through the Church, or through some other means. It is not an ether floating in the air, nor a "thing," nor some kind of "substance." "Salvation" describes fallen creation reconciled to God, restored to its created purpose, and set on a trajectory leading to its eschatological fulfillment. Ultimately, "salvation" will describe the creation as a whole, once it is restored to God and glorified. Grammatically, "salvation" is a noun; theologically, it is always adjectival.

Nor is salvation adjectival merely of individuals. If salvation is the re-creation of man through Christ and the Spirit, then salvation must be restored relationships and communities as much as individuals. If Christ has not restored human community, if society is not "saved" as much as the individual, then Christ has not restored man as he really is. Salvation must take a social form, and the Church is that social form of salvation, the community that already (though imperfectly) has become the human race as God created it to be, the human race that is becoming what God intends it to be.

The Church is neither a reservoir of grace nor an external support for the Christian life. The Church is salvation.

One Flesh with Christ

I must admit I have run with this "high church" ecclesiology stuff with a bit less exegesis from Scripture than I should have. Granted, I have spent a good bit of time in Scripture and a high ecclesiology seems to have answered logically those passages about the Church that typically stymie evangelicals. Not to mention, it effectively shows the unity of the covenants in a way that a totally spiritualized "low church" ecclesiology never can. In other words, from my past knowledge of Scripture, it makes sense in a broad, systemic sense.

This is interesting since the basic argument I have used with evangelical friends who reject a "high" view of the Church and the sacraments is that they are relying far too much on systematic theology and not allowing the specifics of Scripture to speak for themselves. It's funny that we sometimes think as if (unconsciously, I hope) the arguments we apply to other people do not apply to us. I have to go back and let the Scriptures speak for themselves.

I've been carefully studying Ephesians to flesh out its understanding of what the Church is and how Christ is related to it. I'm running across a couple lines of tension that are featured prominently in this Pauline letter. As far as Christ's relation to the Church, I have noted a basic tension between the idea of Christ as Head of the Church and the idea of the Church as Christ's own Body. Talking about the fact that God has raised Christ from the dead and placed him over all things in heaven and on earth, Paul writes in 1:22-23, "God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way" (NIV). Christ is "head over everything for the church," but the Church is also his Body, "the fullness of him who fills everything in every way." It seems as if Paul is simultaneously maintaining a hierarchical distinction between Christ and his Church and a sort of identity between Christ and his Body. Christ is over the Church but the Church is also part of him. And it is just not any part; it is "the fullness of him who fills everything in every way."

We see this paradox again in chapter 4. Paul is exhorting the Ephesians to set aside their divisions, to stop being "tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching" (v. 14). Instead, they should speak the truth to one another in love, so that together with all Christians they will "grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up and love, as each part does its work" (v. 15, 16). Christ is not only at the top of the pyramid in the Church, he is also the principle of unity from the bottom up and in all of its parts, even the most elementary and minute. The Church, from its foundation to its peak, is permeated through and through with Christ. We could then say that the Church has a fundamental "Christ-ness" about it.

Later in this epistle, in chapter 5, Paul analogizes from Christ's relationship to his Church about the proper relation between husbands and wives, bringing into sharp focus ideas he has only hinted at thus far. Clearly, in this section Paul establishes the headship of the husband over the wife based on the headship of Christ over the Church. Of course, the husband is not to abuse his position of authority but to love his wife "just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (v. 25).

Paul solidifies his argument that the husband is to love his wife and give himself up to her on the basis of their marital union. He writes, "In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body" (v. 28-30). Paul then makes recourse to the institution of marriage in the Genesis account (2:24): "' For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'" (v. 32). Paul is speaking first and foremost about the marriage relationship in this passage but he also means to teach us something about the mystery of Christ in his union with his Church, as he tells us in verse 33: "This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church."

I don't think Paul could put forth what he is trying to teach us about Christ and the Church in clearer or more eloquent terms. Just as the husband is to regard himself as one flesh with his wife, so too does Christ regard the Church as one flesh with himself. Certainly Christ is our Head, Lord, and Leader just as the patriarch in Greco-Roman society was head of his household, but, like the wife and children of the head of the household in ancient times, who exercised authority in the household in the name and authority of the patriarch, the Church exercises authority in the lives of believers in Christ's name and in his authority.

The Christian Church is one flesh with Jesus Christ. We are his body and he feeds and cares for us because we are found in him and he is found in us. When we encounter his assembled Body in public worship, we are encountering Christ himself through his glorious bride. She is "the fullness of him who fills everything in every way."

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Putting the Scandal Back in the Gospel

The Problem

The Gospel is a scandal. It has been since the very beginning of its unfolding in history. The world finds the notion offensive that God called one particular man, Abraham, to be the father of one particular nation, Israel, through whom He intended to bless the whole world. And what a people to choose! An obscure, desert-dwelling, nomadic, tribal people who should have been forgotten in the annals of history.

Yet, even God's own people, Israel, found its particular God to be a scandal. “Why not be like all the other peoples who have many gods? The Divine cannot be exhausted by such a particular One. And what is this that God has a specific name? The gods of the other peoples are known by many names. And this God is such a particular fellow. Why does he demand of us such strict behaviors and mark out such a specific path that we are to follow in order to approach him? Our neighbors have many gods and many ways to get to those gods.”

It was that God should come to them in one specific Man, however, that most scandalized Israel. And such a man! A poor, stinking peasant carpenter of humble parentage from Galilee. "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" Perhaps it would have been easier if Jesus had come in glory as a rich, privileged potentate bearing all the symbols of earthly grandeur, but he didn't. In the words of the popular song from the 90’s, he was "just a slob like one of us. Just a stranger on a bus, trying to make his way home.” And those people he hangs out with! Peasants and prostitutes and tax collectors and the poor and even Gentiles—the riffraff of society.

And of course, he had the same aggravating sense of particularity about himself as the Father he claimed to represent, claiming to be the "I Am," the "Son of God," and "the way and the truth and the life, the only way to the Father.” The worst thing, though, is that he went and got himself killed. “Surely, if he were the Son of God, he would not have been condemned as a criminal, to be put to open shame by such a brutal and humiliating death on a cross of wood.”

Even death, however, could not put to rest the scandal of particularity surrounding Jesus. The rumor began circulating that he rose bodily from the grave and ascended into heaven. His followers began to preach a message that was "a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks" (1 Corinthians 1:23). To Jews, it was a stumbling block because the Apostles asserted that "In him the fullness of the Deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9). The Gentile criticism was twofold. The Gnostics rejected the Apostles’ and Church Fathers' assertions that the God of the Bible, whom they viewed as carnal and bloodthirsty, was the God they approached in their philosophy, that he had created the "evil” material world, that he works in history, and that he had taken on flesh and blood in Jesus of Nazareth. The pagans were offended by the notion that God had acted decisively for the whole world in the singular path of salvation through Jesus.

The objections to the Gospel put forward in Jesus’ and the early Church's day have not changed much. The world still finds the message repugnant that God has acted to bring salvation to sinners through the singular path of Christ's death for our sins and his resurrection for our justification. The objections are basically the following: “It's just too exclusive. There are many paths to God. God cannot possibly be such a particular and choosy God. It's just not fair. God cannot possibly have become one particular man. God could not possibly be angry at me for my sins or condemn me for them. God could not possibly allow an innocent man to die for my sins. They cannot possibly be so bad that he should require such an awful satisfaction for them.”

I do not find the world's objections to be that unreasonable. Should we not expect for the world to object? What I do find strange, however, is that the people today who most visibly and ardently preach the message of salvation in Christ have also fallen prey to the scandal of particularity surrounding the Gospel. The people I am speaking of are ourselves—American Protestant evangelicals. We find the idea blasphemous and offensive that God should continue to use communal, earthly, and particular means to save us. In this we have divorced ourselves from historic Christianity and the faith of the God of the Bible. In our efforts to market the Gospel in an individualistic society and make it palatable and readily available to all, we have conceptually and in far too many cases practically eliminated the earthly, communal, and particular elements that have been so central to historic Judeo-Christian faith and witness.

I am speaking of our rejection of any great theological significance attached to the earthly Church, the social aspect of the Gospel, and the Sacraments. In this rejection, we have made the uniquely historical and communal faith of Christianity an almost entirely ahistorical, individualistic, otherworldly faith that seems to only promise real blessings away from Earth and thus has no bearing on life in the real world. Perhaps this would explain the fact that America is one of the most religious nations on Earth but one of the nations in which religion appears all but irrelevant to the ways people live their lives.

The reality of this can be deceiving. As evangelical Protestants, most of us do not miss historic Christian orthodoxy by much, but the ways in which we subtly and not so subtly miss the mark are important. Of course, we teach that Christians must go to church, that we must meet the needs of "the least of these," that we should be baptized and look forward to Communion as a special time of worship, and that we should have objective certainty of our salvation, but, by our individualistic and radically anti-materialistic theological assumptions and religious practice, we do not allow these things the possibility of being sufficiently realized in the real world. The result is that a wide gulf separates the contemporary American evangelical Church from the historic Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Church.

For instance, let's consider our understanding of the Church. We accept all the orthodox imagery—the Church as the Body of Christ and the Bride of Christ—but we take it in a direction that is unthinkable in historic Christian orthodoxy. Rather than the Church as a whole being the Body of Christ (Romans 12: 4-5; 1 Corinthians 12:12-27) and the Bride of Christ (Ephesians 5:22-32; Revelation 21:2, 9), we have the individual united directly to Christ as his Bride, not the individual united to the other members of the Body and thereby to the Head and Husband, Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:22-23; 5:23, 29-30; Colossians 1:18).

These are corporate images. There is no connection to the Head of the Body unless one is united with the other members. We are not brides of Christ individually but one Bride of Christ corporately. This, of course, does not exclude the necessity of having a personal relationship with Jesus, but, it does mean that this relationship must be understood in light of the Christian community. It is only by our incorporation into his Body (his Temple) that each of us is animated by the Holy Spirit and enabled together to be his ongoing physical presence in the world (Ephesians 2:17-22). If we separate ourselves from the Body, we shrivel up and decay just as amputated limbs do when separated from physical bodies.

Theology has practical consequences. A deviation from orthodoxy always results in a deviation from orthopraxy. The loss of a communal emphasis in our theology has meant a loss of community in our churches. Whereas Christ tells us, "By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:35), our churches all too often seem to be run-of-the-mill voluntary associations of like-minded individuals, like, for instance, the Elks Club or the Moose Lodge. Instead of a family, “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (1 Peter 2:9), members of the same congregation frequently exhibit only the loosest of connections to one another, particularly if they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Due to the alliance that has historically existed between individualized evangelical Calvinism and capitalism, the evangelical church today consists primarily of upwardly mobile middle-class whites and represents their particular interests. With the loss of a theology that emphasizes communal rather than individual election and the real spiritual need that Christians have for one another, private Christians feel no responsibility for the salvation of their brothers and sisters, much less their physical and social needs. Christian charity and love are replaced with Christian civility, or worse, Christian snobbery. The transformative power of the Gospel no longer has the force to break down the barriers that exist between middle-class and working-class Christians, much less between rich and poor, white and black, respectable and not-so respectable, important and not-so important. In our churches today, the Pharisees are warmly embraced, but the kinds of people that Jesus hung out with are far too often only coolly tolerated or outright rejected.

As Philip J. Lee notes in Against the Protestant Gnostics, "What is undeniable is that American Protestantism still accepts and practices a social exclusivism on behalf of the privileged and that the lower strata of society have been psychologically, intellectually, and ethically excluded from the fellowship." So much for "as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40) and "Whoever causes one of my little ones to stumble, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6; Mark 9:42; Luke 17:2).

For "the least of these," it appears that the opinion of Henry Ward Beecher and his ilk that "churches are largely for the mutual insurance of prosperous families, and not for the upbuilding of the great underclass of humanity” is the norm for evangelical churches. The observation of fellow Boston clergyman Rev. Charles Wood that "the poor are not provided for, nor are they wanted as a part of the congregations which worship in the majority of our city churches" is as relevant today as it was in 1874. When sincere Christians from economically or socially disadvantaged backgrounds are rejected by more affluent church members, the result is invariably that they become discouraged in their faith and disillusioned by the hypocrisy of their congregations. Despairing of finding the warm Christian community that is essential for genuine discipleship, many leave the Church altogether, taking their much-needed presence and perspectives with them. When the poor are out of sight in the Church, they all too frequently are out of mind as well.

Nevertheless, evangelical churches do work for the poor. That is undeniable. But the truth is that we do not do enough, and rarely do we welcome with open arms into our churches the individuals we help. Evangelical churches may meet the physical needs of disadvantaged persons on an individual basis and get them to make professions of faith, but, beyond this, only the most superficial attention is paid to their spiritual and social needs.

We see this in evangelical politics as well. Conservative evangelical political action focuses almost exclusively on the improvement of individual morality as the sole source of social change, ignoring the social structures and realities that perpetuate poverty, crime, and addiction. Disadvantaged individuals are entirely responsible for overcoming their difficult circumstances; it is not society or government's place to help facilitate change.

Additionally, the unbalanced otherworldliness that characterizes American evangelical faith means that the physical circumstances of life are devalued. Changing the world for the benefit of embodied human existence is far less important than saving souls. Social justice, the environment, and the building of meaningful and universally satisfying Christian community therefore all take a back seat to evangelism.

Evangelical rejection of the communal, the earthly, and the particular and its deleterious consequences for orthopraxy is also evident in the evangelical rejection of the Sacraments. Baptism and the Lord's Supper have been supremely devalued as means of grace in the name of universalizing and individualizing the offer of salvation in Christ. Subjective experience has become the sole marker of authentic Christian faith, whereas historically the marks of a Christian have been doctrine, discipline, and incorporation into and participation in the Church through the Sacraments. Being a follower of Jesus Christ and having present faith in Jesus for salvation as well as having the objective, communal testimonies to salvation of Church, Bible, baptism, and Eucharist once blunted the existential force of the doctrine of election. Now, however, that the emphasis in evangelicalism has shifted from communal election to individual election and the objective testimonies have been completely replaced by the subjective conversion experience, those unfortunate individuals who do not have the hubristic confidence in their own sincerity at the moment of conversion or in their memories of that experience to dispel all the clouds of doubt bear the full force of the question of their eternal destiny all alone.

Describing the experience of the late Puritans, the first group in North America to take grace out of the Church, Lee writes, "Left with no definite means of grace, no certitude or even comfort, the Protestant individual found the Calvinistic doctrine of election to be a monstrous threat. The sinner was left to the caprice of the infinite God who despises finite means." God had become "a God who refuses to put His heart into His creation and who leaves His creatures alone and without access to Himself." This remains as relevant for today's American evangelical Protestants as it was for our Puritan forebears. Those not given to great emotionality find themselves without God in the world and the Church. They also find themselves without their brothers and sisters in Christ in a loosely associated, purely voluntaristic Church.

The Solution

We must reject the new particularities of the individual, the middle-class, and subjective experience that American evangelical Protestantism has chosen in favor of the particularities of the Church, the poor, and the Sacraments—the particularities that the Bible and the historic witness of the Christian Church call us to embrace. When it comes to re-sanctifying the particularity of the Church, our preaching must move from a pep talk addressed to private Christians who stand alone before God to an edifying message addressed to the members of the Body, who stand shoulder to shoulder before God, encouraging, disciplining, and urging one another on in the Faith. It must not focus on the works of God done purely in individual lives but on the great historic works of God done in plain sight for the Church and the world to behold. Through this type of message, individuals find encouragement not just in what God is doing in their own lives but in what God is doing in the lives of others, in the life of the Church, and in the life of the world. The individual has the sense of belonging to something that is bigger than just his or her own life and relationship with God. Not only do we have our Lord Christ to live for but we have our brothers and sisters in Him and the world that needs his message to live for.

Our preaching and teaching must also emphasize the fact that the flesh and blood gathering together of believers has great theological significance. We must speak more about how Christ is among us in the Church, working through us to do his work in the world. Going to church and taking the sacraments brings us into communion with Christ and one another in ways that are distinct from the spiritual union believers always have with Christ. In Christ's physical absence, we only meet the Word as he was made flesh in the Church.

In light of the reality of Christ fully formed in his Body, then, individualistic metaphors for the Church must be exchanged for communal metaphors. The Church must no longer be thought of as a mere collection of individuals but as a loving and cohesive family, a tribe, a nation. It must therefore have a patriotism of its own based on its mission. Out of many, the Church is one for the sake of Christ crucified and the sake of seeing his Kingdom reign and rule on Earth as it is in Heaven.

In the Church, the barriers that separate people in the world must be dismantled. The Christian Church is the new humanity, in which "there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). God-given differences in the Church must then be viewed not as a reason for our separation but as the basis for our union, for "if the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?" (1 Corinthians 12:17).

As we preach and teach the ideal of the Church as a community formed counter to the principles of the world—a community formed of people the world separates according to race, ethnicity, nationality, language, class, and wealth—we would hope that this ideal would become a reality. However, without diligence and courage this vision will not be realized, for "faith without works is dead" (James 2:17). We must reclaim the Christian Church as a movement of ordinary people—the foolish, the weak, the "low and the despised in the world" (1 Corinthians 1:27-28). Congregations must take special care to welcome the poor, the homeless, the working-class, minorities, the disabled, those who have been in prison, and those struggling with addiction. Churches must follow-up with visitors not in spite of the fact but especially if they come from socioeconomic backgrounds different from the majority of the members in the congregation.

This must be an ongoing ministry. Pastors, elders, deacons, and the laity must be especially diligent in helping to keep members from segments of society especially prone to isolation within congregations connected to the life of the community. Compassionate and caring lay persons must take the initiative to come alongside of individuals who often fall by the wayside, inviting them into their homes and lives and likewise accepting these individuals' invitations into their homes and lives. Establishing fellowship groups of church members from a variety of backgrounds is one practical step that could lead to greater cohesiveness between poor and rich, black, white, Hispanic, and Asian, working-class and middle-class within congregations. These fellowship groups must occur in homes, not in church buildings or at the places of elite society.

The pressure to conform churches to the biblical model of community must continue to be applied from the pulpit, both in a general sense and in response to particular instances of individuals and congregations failing to exemplify real Christian hospitality. Pastors must fearlessly and courageously hold their congregations to task, preaching often, if need be, from hard portions of Scripture, from James' fearless denunciation of favoritism to Jesus' sobering parable of the sheep and goats. Of course, these messages must not be framed in terms of individuals' discipleship but in terms of the spiritual damage done to brothers and sisters in Christ and of bringing reproach upon the name of Christ for all the world to see.

The particularity of the poor must also be focused on by the American evangelical Church in its social action. No longer must evangelical Christian political discourse be framed exclusively in terms of private morality and the protection of the single-family home. The truly pro-life and pro-family agenda is one that not only protects the unborn but is fully committed to seeing life flourish in abundance from womb to tomb. Politically-minded and active evangelicals must take up the fight against poverty in terms of society's responsibility and not exclusively in terms of the individual's. Tax cuts and increased defense spending must be denounced when it means cuts to health care and welfare benefits to children, the elderly, the disabled, and the working poor. Evangelicals must take to task those in Washington and in state capitals who claim to represent their interests but fail to exemplify Christ's Gospel ministry to "the least of these."

American evangelicals must also reclaim the American Protestant tradition of social reform. The work of the abolitionists, the Social Gospellers, the Civil Rights Movement, the Sojourners network, and the emerging church must be brought to fruition. White middle-class evangelical Protestants must give up a good deal of the privilege they have traditionally held in education and employment for the sake of their African-American and Hispanic compatriots and brothers and sisters by supporting affirmative action programs and urban renewal projects. American evangelicals should be at the forefront of efforts to establish a fair policy on immigration, embracing all people in Christian love who have come to our country for the sake of liberty and economic opportunity. Furthermore, evangelicals must be more charitable and gracious to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community, promoting their full civil rights while yet striving to maintain biblical morality and the traditional definition of marriage.

In regard to the social mission of the American evangelical Church, the particularity of America and the American way of life must be moderated by genuine concern for the rest of the world. America is not the world's last best hope but the Kingdom of God as it is already being expressed in the Church of Jesus Christ. No longer must particularly American economic interests be advanced to the detriment of the economic interests of the Third World. The only good trade is fair trade. America must quit playing the hypocrite when it comes to international debt. In light of our own fiscal crisis, we must forgive Third World debt. We must also step up our global efforts to fight AIDS, poverty, and hunger. Considering that the U.S. is responsible for producing the greatest amount of greenhouse gases and carbon emissions, the United States must take the lead in combating global warming. We must not sacrifice the ecological future of the world to our appetite for oil and money. Finally, America must seek an increasingly demilitarized foreign-policy, seeking diplomatic solutions to international issues and abandoning policies of preemptive strike. We must also eschew the use of torture in interrogating terror suspects. The American evangelical Church has been silent long enough on these issues. We must step to the forefront in helping to steer our nation in the right direction when it comes to our relations with the rest of the world.

Finally, we must grapple with the consequences of the Incarnation, embracing the logical conclusion of Jesus Christ taking on flesh, his ongoing redemption of the whole of creation and human life, and of his working out of that redemption through the Holy Spirit-empowered flesh of the Church. That conclusion is that God continues to use finite means to communicate his infinite love and grace to us. If this sounds strange, we must consider that the words and speech that we use to convey the propositional truths of the Gospel and Holy Scripture are things as well. In some sense, even the unfailing message of the Bible and the Gospel is a humiliation of infinite, spiritual truth because it is communicated through the limited “earthen vessels" of language—both the written word and speech—and of thought. We must therefore put aside our superstitious Protestant fear of things and embrace the Sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper as finite means of grace. We should listen to the good British common sense of C. S. Lewis on this matter:

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine [and water] to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

The first thing we must do to reclaim the Sacraments is to get our teaching on them right. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are a sharing in the cross of Christ, in his body and blood. They work and we need them. We need baptism once and only once and Christ's Supper often.

Early in the book of Acts, the Jerusalem church is shown taking Communion daily (Acts 2:42, 46). According to the normative instructions Paul gives us in 1 Corinthians, the Supper is a weekly celebration. In that light, all of us must begin to celebrate it more often. Four times a year is simply not consistent with Christ's command that we continually "feed” on his flesh and blood (John 6:53-56) or with the Reformers' efforts to reclaim the cup for the laity. (It is ironic that Luther and Calvin's spiritual children have now taken both cup and bread from the laity by having Communion so infrequently.) If we wish to see the full effectiveness and value of this sacrament restored in our contemporary thought and practice, nothing less than a weekly celebration will do.

And in this weekly celebration, we must do away with unbreadly bread and unwinely wine. How can this sacrament help us make Christ more relevant to our everyday lives if it is nothing like the food and drink we share at our own tables? On this note, we should also bring back the love feasts of the ancient Church. Taking the Supper in the context of a real meal shared by everyone in church communities would do a great deal to strengthen the communal bond in churches and emphasize the necessity of fellowship in the Body of Christ. Furthermore, in accordance with the Protestant understanding of the priesthood of the believer, I see no reason why families cannot share the Supper in their own homes, especially if their churches will not give it to them but on rare occasions. Furthermore, we must pay great attention to the ministry of the Supper to the elderly and the sick. We must share Christ with those whom it would be easy for us to forget.

I do not wish to wade into the controversies surrounding baptism, but our contemporary practice of this sacrament must change as well. Baptisms must begin to be viewed as crowning moments in the lives of local churches—events that are not merely symbolic but that have real spiritual significance for their participants. We should also use lots of water, and, with rare exceptions, baptism must occur in communal contexts before a "great cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1). Re-baptisms must be neglected altogether because baptism is a gift from Christ and not a work we must do to please God.

Let us reclaim the scandal of the Gospel. Our Lord deigned to become one of us, thereby sanctifying human life and all of creation. Jesus continues to make his incarnational presence known to us through his Body—the Church, through the poor and downtrodden he bids us care for, and through the Sacraments. A Christianity that once again values the particularities of life as God's people, God's works in history, of embodied existence, and of the humble things in the world cannot help but put us right where we need to be—a place where our feet are planted firmly on the ground and our eyes are fixed heavenward.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

A Jelly Sandwich Jesus

Today was my first Communion Sunday in quite some time. When I was still in school at Mizzou, I was going to a Presbyterian church where the Supper was served weekly. Since school has been out, however, my family and I have been attending a United Methodist church where Communion is celebrated monthly. For whatever reason, for the past three months or so, we had missed each Communion Sunday. I hadn't been sacramentally fed Jesus in awhile, and I didn't eat breakfast this morning, so I was hungry in both a spiritual and a physical sense today. I could not help but smile in amusement as the hunger pangs first started kicking in as the people in the sanctuary begin processing forward to receive the Lord. This seems to me one of those delightful little coincidences in life that can't just be mere coincidence. I know. I didn't eat breakfast is what you're thinking, but God actually told me not to.

No, I'm joking. I rarely eat breakfast as it is. But that's beside the point. I find it amazing that God uses the particular circumstances of our lives to bless us in ways that uniquely make sense to us. I’m a details person, so these types of things really fascinate me. It also fascinates me the way that particular communities of faith and particular Christian traditions do the Jesus thing. Of course, all of us do the Jesus thing, but God has blessed the Christian faith with a great deal of diversity and beauty of detail in the ways we come together to worship our Lord. We each have something that is unique and special that God has put upon our hearts to uniquely express to the world in our worship. I had never taken the Supper in a Methodist church, so I was anxious to see how these brothers and sisters express Christ in the sacrament. Of course, I also recognized that each congregation has its own flavor, so there is really no such thing as a particularly Baptist way of having the Supper, or a Presbyterian way, or a Methodist way.

This service was unique to me in just about every way. In the Baptist, Restorationist, and Presbyterian congregations I've received Communion in, the elements are brought to the worshipers and passed down the aisles and across the rows by the deacons. Today, however, I had the privilege of going forward to the altar in a procession line to receive Christ. As my little sister and I waited for it to be our turn for our row to get into the line, I looked at all the people as they filtered across the rows and up the aisle, infants in the arms of their parents, little children, old men and women, teens, married couples with children and without children, singles, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, wide-awake, half-asleep, intent, zealous, and bored. Each of these wonderful manifestations of the image of God with their own stories and experiences and lives, each of them loved by God, each of them sinners whom Christ gave his body and blood for, all processing forward in unity one with another and with the Christ present in us and among us and in the bread and wine. There was no blessing, no words, no liturgy that I have come to love, but, in spite of my willingness to find shortcomings and things averse to my preferences in the Church, in spite of my smallness of person, I was able to appreciate the fact that no words of blessing were needed. The rite stood for itself, blessing the participants with its simplicity and grace, bringing us together to be one all together with our Lord.

At the front of each line going up the middle of the sanctuary stood two servers, one holding a bowl of what had to be little pieces of Wonder bread and the other holding a chalice filled with grape juice. Each Christian reached into the bowl and selected a piece of manna and then dipped it into the fruit of the vine. Jesus like a grape jelly sandwich, I thought. Then it was our turn, Samantha and I. Instead of one little piece of bread, she grabbed two. Instead of one dip, she dipped twice. Instead of just feeding herself with the body and blood of the Lord, she fed me as well. I thought of how our weaknesses, when put in proper perspective, simply mean that we have opportunity to serve one another and to show gratitude to one another. I smiled at my baby sister and thought of how Jesus took on the weakness and smallness of human flesh and offered it up in death so that he could serve us with eternal life. What a picture of the Kingdom of God and its priorities. A faith community in a little town in the Midwest, coming together to share a simple little meal in celebration of Jesus Christ becoming small for us and the Church's response of likewise becoming small to serve Christ and one another.

Reclaiming the Sacramental (Part 3)

Having laid scriptural, ecclesiastical, and philosophical foundations for the sacraments and having discussed baptism, I now turn to a discussion of the Bible's teaching on the other Gospel sacrament whereby we commemorate and participate in the atoning death, burial, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ—the sacrament known variously as the Lord's Supper, Holy Communion, and the Eucharist.

On the night he was betrayed, Christ broke bread and blessed the cup, instituting this meal as a memorial of his death until he returns and as a sharing in his once and for all atoning sacrifice. The Lord's Supper is the glorious reenactment of the Gospel message that first became our own story in the waters of baptism. It serves to bring Spirit and water-born believers back to the cross where we first met and united with Christ, prompting and empowering us to persevere in faith until Jesus returns by providing us with yet another precious glance at Calvary and by making the flesh and blood that Christ offered up there for our forgiveness available for us to eat and drink. The one loaf and one cup of this sacrament also serve to commemorate our union one to another as the body of Christ and to reconstitute and strengthen that precious and unbreakable bond. It is thus Holy Communion, both with Christ and our blood-bought brothers and sisters in Him. It is Eucharist (Greek, eucharistia, meaning thanksgiving) because in it we offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving to God for our redemption in his Son and we offer ourselves once again to him as living sacrifices. It is Eucharist most of all, however, because in it Christ graciously offers us his broken flesh and shed blood as our true food and true drink, which we thankfully receive.

It is for these reasons that the Lord's Supper may properly be spoken of as the crown jewel of the Christian faith. It is, in my experience, one of the chief joys of the Christian life—an opinion I share with many of my brothers and sisters in Christ, both among those living today and down through the ages. For as much refreshment as the Lord's Supper has provided for Christians, however, it has also been a source of much bitterness. For as much brotherly love and union as Holy Communion has symbolized and made in the body of Christ, it has also been a shamefully visible witness of the body of Christ's discord and brokenness. For as much joy as the Eucharist has imparted to the chosen priesthood of which we are all part, it has also brought much sorrow to God's children.

Jesus taught us in John 13:35, "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Why, then, is it that the meal that should most powerfully demonstrate this to the world instead demonstrates our extreme disunity and, sadly, even our contempt for one another? My brothers and sisters, this should not be. We have profaned the body and blood of Christ by failing to discern his body. We have eaten and drank judgment on ourselves. How shall we save this sacrament? My friends, with people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible. As we consider the sacramental nature of the Lord's Supper, let us pray that God will bring us together somehow as one at the Table of the Lord before his Kingdom comes. We will all come together at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, but can we not at least come together for the dress rehearsal first?

It is in response to a climate of disunity and disorder such as we noted above that St. Paul instructs the Corinthians in the teaching on the Lord's Supper he has received from Jesus himself and offers startling words of rebuke to those among them who have been abusing the sacrament. Apparently, the Corinthians have been abusing the Communion meal in two particularly disastrous ways. First, they have been sharing in the "cup of the Lord" and the "cup of demons." To set the scene, some of the Corinthians have been partaking in sacrifices to idols to the spiritual detriment of their "weaker” brothers and sisters in Christ. These "weak" Christians have stumbled in their faith and been "destroyed" after seeing Christians whom they thought to be mature followers of Jesus eating meat sacrificed to idols. Paul advises Christians with the knowledge that idols are nothing in and of themselves to forsake their freedom to eat the sacrifices for the sake of the "weaker" brother who has not fully come to the realization that idols are merely carved pieces of stone (1 Corinthians 8:7-13).

But, as we all remember from Sunday School, those Corinthians were always getting into trouble with mean old Uncle Paul. Paul, knowing better than anybody how slow the Corinthians were to get a clue, after discussing how he gives up his own Christian freedom for the sake of others, tackles the question from another angle. In 1 Corinthians 10:14-21, he compares and contrasts pagan sacrificial cults to the Christian ritual meal of the Lord's Supper:

Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. 15I speak to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. 16The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? 17Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. 18Consider the people of Israel: are not those who eat the sacrifices participants in the altar? 19What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything. 20No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. 21You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

I believe that Paul is talking about something far more complex and powerful than a purely commemorative meal. Just as those who sacrifice to idols participate with demons and come into communion with them, so do Christians participate in the blood and body of Christ in the Lord's Supper and thus come into a real and powerful communion with Jesus. In regard to the Lord's Supper, we notice that he describes the sharing of the cup and the sharing of the bread as a participation in Christ's sacrifice, not just a commemoration of it. This is an interesting idea to say the least for those of us who were raised in traditions that deny that anything miraculous or supernatural occurs in the Lord's Supper.

However, because Paul is not teaching directly on the Lord's Supper here but simply using it as a point of comparison against which to speak about sacrifices to idols, we cannot build a solid sacramental theology about Communion from this passage alone. Nevertheless, in light of the other explicit passages concerning the Eucharist in the New Testament, this passage clearly shows forth a sacramental understanding of the Lord's Supper.

The second way in which the Corinthians have abused the sacrament is the practice the affluent in the congregation have adopted of making the Eucharist an opportunity to flaunt their status superiority over the poorer members of the community. For instance, when the Corinthians gather together as a church, they separate into divisions, to which Paul sarcastically remarks, "I believe it in part, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized" (1 Corinthians 11:18). As a result, the church does not eat and drink in unity and brotherhood but rather in disunity and strife.

In order to understand this, we must note that the early Christians did not commemorate the Lord's Supper in as formal a fashion as we do today. We must envision their celebration of Communion not as taking place in a church service per se but rather as taking place in the context of a potluck dinner of sorts. People brought their own food out of their own abundance to share with one another. It was only in the course of this "love feast," or agape, as this meal came to be known, that the Eucharistic bread would be blessed, broken, and shared and that the Eucharistic wine would be blessed and passed about to be shared. Christians were to share in the body and blood of Christ and the larger meal surrounding it as equals.

Among the Corinthians, however, the sharing of this sacred meal is being done on anything but equal terms. As Paul notes, "When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper you eat. 21For in eating, each one goes ahead in his own meal. One goes hungry and one gets drunk" (11:20-21). Sharply rebuking them, he goes on to thunder, "What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not" (11:22). Instead of a common meal that affirms the unity, equality, and genuine love that believers in Christ have amongst themselves in the Church, in the Corinthian congregation the Lord's Supper has become a shameful, divisive, self-indulgent party in which the affluent gorge themselves and get drunk, refusing to share their food or commune with the poorer members of the congregation. It has become a time for wounding and tearing down rather than the time of healing and edification Paul understands it to be.

After giving the words of institution, Paul renders a judgment on the Corinthians' practice of Communion that cannot easily be theologized away to conclude that participation in the rite has no direct spiritual consequences. No, what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11:27-30 goes directly against this conclusion:

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. 28Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. 29For anyone who eats without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. 30That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.

Is this mere bread and mere wine? I do not think one would be a fool to say that this is not typical food and typical drink. Something powerful and mysterious is happening here behind the scenes that we cannot easily grasp with our demythologized modern way of thinking. Notice how Paul directly connects the judgment unworthy participants bring upon themselves not just to whether or not they discern the body but also to their eating and drinking in light of this failure. They eat and drink judgment on themselves, and this judgment is manifested in physical consequences, such as weakness, illness, and, shockingly, death.

We must also note the role of discernment here. What exactly is the body that is not being properly discerned by the Corinthians? This is a bit ambiguous. It could either mean the fleshly body of the sacrificed Jesus or the church community, often likened in the New Testament to the body of Christ. Considering the depth and richness of the term in the New Testament and the context of this particular passage, it would be highly reasonable to conclude that Paul is using body in both senses here. In their abuse of this sacred meal, the Corinthians have "counted the blood of the covenant a common thing," (Hebrews 10:29) forgetting that Christ gave his own flesh and blood on the cross for their salvation. Furthermore, they have failed to recognize that, as a church community, they are all knit together into one body of Christ, with all parts existing in equal worth and dignity. Instead, they have divided and dismembered the body. The Corinthians have thus transgressed against both the body Christ offered up as an atonement for sin and the Church that is now his earthly body.

What about the elements of bread and wine? Is it possible that Paul is speaking to the Corinthians’ failure to recognize the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist? We will fully address this controversial question in my next post, but, at the very least, the Corinthians have forgotten that the Lord's Supper is a participation or sharing in the body and blood of Christ. Whether this is a participation in the sacrifice in the direct sense that the bread and wine themselves become the literal body and blood of Christ or whether the bread and wine spiritually communicate the body and blood of Christ to the participants cannot be determined on the basis of this passage alone (or, on the basis of any other passages; the way one views this question may depend entirely on the interpretive lens through which he or she views the Bible's instruction on the Eucharist), but, it is quite clear that the Lord's Supper, with all of its parts—the community, the one administering the sacrament (Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and some very high Church Protestant traditions require a priest to consecrate the elements), the elements, the Word spoken, and the eating and drinking—is a matter of great consequence that cannot be taken lightly. For Paul, in fact, it is a matter of great spiritual benefit or harm to those who receive it.

In addition to their appearance in 1 Corinthians 11, Christ's words of institution of the Lord's Supper are found in all three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 26:26-29, Mark 14:22-25, Luke 22:15-20), and, though they do not appear in John's Gospel, this Gospel has perhaps the most profound Eucharistic theology of the four, as we shall see when we look at John 6. Since Paul's version of the words of institution is virtually a composite of what appears in the Gospels, we will focus most closely on 1 Corinthians 11:23-26:

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, 24and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." 25In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." 26For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

The institution of the Lord's Supper in each of the Synoptic Gospels differs only slightly from the above. Matthew and Mark, for instance, speak of the blood as being "poured out for many." Paul concurs with Luke in describing the cup as "the new covenant in my blood" but Matthew and Mark render it as "my blood of the new covenant." Matthew emphasizes the eating and drinking in Communion ("Take, eat" and "Drink of it, all of you"); Paul and Luke emphasize the remembrance of Christ's death ("Do this in remembrance of me."). All four instances of the institution of the Supper involve some sort of expression of the tension between Christ's death and the expectation of his return (1 Corinthians 11:26, Matthew 26:29, Mark 14:25, Luke 22:15-18).

In discussing the particulars of what the words of institution mean, I will be turning to a brilliant evangelical attempt at retrieving the sacraments. In his book, Christ, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper, Christian Reformed Church pastor Leonard Vander Zee beautifully articulates a Reformed view of the sacraments, drawing from biblical scholars and theologians across a number of Christian traditions and from John Calvin's profound but regrettably largely abandoned teachings on the sacraments (see chapters 9-12).

The first thing Vander Zee points out about Communion as it appears in Scripture is that it is a Jewish meal. As a Jewish meal, the Lord's Supper begins with a typical Jewish table blessing, called in Hebrew the berakah. When Jesus broke the bread, he would have spoken these words that are familiar to Jews (and, coincidently, to some Baptists, who use these words as a blessing for the Lord's Supper), "Blessed art thou, Lord God of the universe, who bringeth forth bread from the earth." After supper, Jesus would have blessed the cup, saying, "Blessed art thou, Lord God of the universe, who createth the fruit of the vine."

The significance of the berakah is that it carries the idea that the bread is God's gift and that the blessing of the bread at the beginning of the meal covers the entire meal. The bread is offered to God in thanksgiving and, then, God returns the whole meal, represented by the bread, as a gift to his people for their use. Those who eat of this blessed bread become sharers in the blessing and the whole meal is sanctified to them. Likewise, the blessing of the cup at the end of the meal makes those who drink of the blessed wine sharers in the blessing and sanctifies to them all that they have drank in the course of the meal.

Something similar happens in the course of the Eucharist. It involves the thanksgiving for and offering up in sacrifice to God of bread and wine, which represents all that he has given us for our bodily nourishment. Just as in the course of the Jewish berakah God returns to his people as a gift for their physical nourishment the bread and wine they have offered to him, so in the Eucharist does God offer back to us as a gift for our spiritual nourishment bread and wine that, at the very least, carry with them the whole person of Christ—his body, blood, soul, humanity, and Divinity, as well as his life of obedience and redeeming death and resurrection (see Vander Zee, 140-143).

In discussing the Jewishness of the Lord's Supper, we must also note how it draws isolated individuals into a single community. As Vander Zee quotes biblical scholar Alasdair Heron:

For the Jews, as for other ancient peoples, the shared meal had a profound religious and human significance of which we in our largely secularized and functional outlook have almost wholly lost sight. Those who ate together were bound together by that simple sharing. . . . the meal itself established a bond between those who shared in it: it did not merely symbolize the bond, but actually constituted it. (qtd. in 143)

The Lord's Supper is the table meal of the Christian Church, and as such, it establishes our union with one another and with Christ. When Jesus took the bread and said, "This is my body," he attached his presence among us directly to the loaf from which we all eat. Whenever we eat this bread, we can be sure that we are united in fellowship with him and with one another.

In this same vein, Vander Zee also points us to the fact that the Lord's Supper is a Passover feast. The Last Supper, as presented in the Synoptic Gospels, was a Passover feast, and, though John's Gospel does not provide an account of the Last Supper, in keeping with the Evangelist's strong Eucharistic theology, it clearly sets Jesus' death in the context of the Passover. That Christ instituted the sacrament at the Passover says a great deal about how we are to interpret the meaning of the Lord's Supper. This connection was so clear to the earliest Christians that Paul boldly declares in 1 Corinthians 5:7-8, "For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival . . . . "

The most important things Vander Zee notes about the Passover and its connection to the Lord's Supper are the particular points in the Passover meal where Jesus offers the words of institution, the conspicuous absence of any mention of the Passover lamb in the biblical accounts of the Last Supper, the role and understanding of remembrance in the Passover meal, and the apocalyptic significance of the Passover.

According to biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias, the Passover meal consists of four parts. For our immediate purposes the middle two parts are what we need to look at. The second part of the Passover includes the Haggadah—the recounting of God's deliverance of the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt. The third part involves the main meal, which begins with the blessing and breaking of the bread. This third part of the ritual concludes with the blessing of the third cup, called the "cup of blessing," after the meal is eaten (noted in Vander Zee, 144-145).

In light of the structure of the Passover, then, Jesus' blessing, breaking, and sharing of the bread must have occurred at the beginning of the main meal, and, considering that Paul and Luke indicate that Christ blessed and offered the cup "after supper" and that Paul calls it the "cup of blessing," the cup must have been the third cup of the meal. What is important about this is that Jesus would have said the Haggadah prior to his words over the bread and cup. Thus, as Jeremias argues, it is very likely that in the course of the Haggadah Jesus taught the disciples the special meaning of the Passover as it related to his impending death (noted in Vander Zee, 145). Therefore, it would have been unmistakably clear what Jesus meant when he blessed the bread and wine, saying, "This is my body. This is my blood." They would have understood that a sharing in the bread and wine was a sharing in the flesh and blood Christ would offer up for them on the cross.

Another very important biblical clue to the connection between the Passover and the Lord's Supper is the conspicuous absence of any mention of the Passover lamb in the biblical accounts. Vander Zee captures well the nature of this paradox:

When Jesus and his disciples met that night for the Passover meal, the roasted lamb lay prominently at the center of the table. Yet the Gospels never mention the lamb except in the disciples' preparation for the supper. Jesus' words over the bread and cup seem to have nothing to do with the lamb that was so central to the Passover meal. Is the lamb forgotten, or do we have to somehow reckon with its unspoken presence? (145-146)

The simple answer is that the true Passover lamb is not lying on the table but that he is presiding at this very special Passover. When Jesus blesses the bread and wine, saying, "This is my body. This is my blood," he is identifying himself as the sacrificial lamb. The body and blood point to the two parts of the sacrifice that are separated in the ritual slaying (noted in Vander Zee, 146). As Jeremias also argues, Matthew and Mark's words of institution describe the blood being "poured out for many," a clear reference to the willing lamb in Isaiah 53:12, who "poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many."

John's Gospel identifies Christ as the Passover lamb in perhaps the clearest and most eloquent ways. For instance, early in the Gospel, John the Baptist calls Jesus the "Lamb of God." Additionally, Jesus' "bread of life" discourse in John 6, easily the strongest teaching on the sacrificial nature of Jesus' death in the New Testament, takes place at the Passover (John 6:4). John's most brilliant way of identifying Jesus as the Passover lamb, however, is his decision to place Jesus' crucifixion not on Friday, as the other three Gospels writers do, but on Thursday, the "day of Preparation for the Passover," (John 19:14) on which the Passover lambs were ritually slaughtered in the temple. Vander Zee writes:

Of course, this causes some chronological problems between this and the Synoptic accounts . . . , but our focus should be on John's purpose in setting Jesus' crucifixion on the day of preparation. John clearly wants his readers to see Jesus' death on the cross as the true sacrificial lamb occurring while the Passover animals are slaughtered in the temple. (148).

The results of Christ's Passover sacrifice of himself mirror those of the original Passover sacrifice. Just as God passed over the dwelling places of the firstborn of Israel because their doorposts were covered with the blood of the spotless Passover lamb, so does God's wrath pass over us because Jesus has covered the doorposts of our hearts with his blood. And just as the Passover marks the liberation of the children of Israel from their bondage in Egypt, so does the Lord's Supper mark our liberation from the chains of sin and death and into the "glorious liberty of the children of God" (Romans 8:21).

However, as a Jewish understanding of the commemorative nature of the Passover shows, the Lord's Supper is much more than just a remembrance of an event in the long-distant past. Both the Passover and the Eucharist are God's bringing to bear on the present and future his great historic works of emancipation. For instance, Vander Zee points us to what the Jewish Mishnah says in regard to the Passover: "In every generation a man must so regard himself as if he came forth himself out of Egypt. . . . He brought us out from bondage to freedom, from sorrow to gladness, and from mourning to a Festival-day" (qtd. in 149). The Passover is thus not just a recollection or historical reconstruction of the Exodus but "is a way of making the past present and of making each participant in the meal a slave freed by God's mighty hand" (Vander Zee, 149).

The connection between this aspect of the Passover and the Lord's Supper is explicit in that the Septuagint account of the original Passover translates the Hebrew "remembrance" as the Greek word anamnesis, which is the same word Jesus uses in the Gospels when commanding the disciples to partake of the Lord's Supper as a memorial of his death. As indicated in the Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, anamnesis connotes the idea of re-presentation, the idea of "making present the past which can never remain merely past but becomes effective in the present" (qtd. in Vander Zee, 149). Like the Passover, the Eucharist is a remembrance of God's great works not just by recollection but by participation.

The apocalyptic implications of the Passover show that the Lord's Supper is an anticipation and proclamation of Christ's coming Kingdom. By Jesus' day, the Passover had become a feast of longing for the Messiah, especially in light of the Roman occupation of Palestine. The Hallel, the recitation of psalms beginning in the second part of the Passover Seder and concluding in the fourth and final part of the feast, culminates with Psalm 118, which points forward to the day when Messiah will come and make all things new.

The crowds greeted Jesus with the words "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!" (Psalm 118:26) when he arrived in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Now, on the evening on which he will be betrayed, Jesus and his disciples sing this psalm as they leave the Upper Room and head for the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus, well aware that he is "the stone that the builders rejected," sorrows over his coming sufferings but also looks forward to his exaltation as "the chief cornerstone" (Psalm 118:22).

Likewise, whenever we gather around the Lord's Table, we find ourselves between sorrow and hope. In somber reflection, we commemorate the Lord's Supper as Christ's last supper with his disciples and as a participation in his death. On the other hand, we celebrate the Eucharist in faith, joy, and hope as a looking forward to the time when Christ will return and gather us all together at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb to eat the Passover (Luke 22:16) and "drink the fruit of the vine" (Matthew 26:29, Mark 14:25, Luke 22:18) again.

We cannot conclude our discussion about the Lord's Supper as it appears in Scripture without dealing in some depth with those great and mysterious words Jesus spoke over the bread and wine at the Last Supper: "This is my body. This is my blood." It goes without saying that these words have a long history of dispute and controversy attached to them, but, what light does the Bible shed on the meaning of these words?

No biblical text develops the idea of eating Jesus' flesh and drinking his blood as extensively as Christ's "bread of life" discourse in the sixth chapter of John's Gospel. After having met the physical needs of the crowds following him by miraculously feeding them all from just five loaves and two fishes (v. 1-14), Jesus appropriately teaches the crowd about how he can fulfill their spiritual hunger using the language of food. He begins to build-up to a controversial crescendo by saying, "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst" (v. 35).

Confused about his meaning and offended by the assertion, that he, the mere son of the humble carpenter Joseph, is "the bread come down from heaven," the religious leaders enter the discussion. Responding to their grumbling, the strength of Jesus' words build. Even more boldly, he declares:

I am the bread of life. 49Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of this world is my flesh. (v. 48-51)

At this point, Jesus goes beyond the pale for many of those who had been following him. His discourse concludes with these shocking words:

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. (v. 53-56)

Without question, Christ is teaching that he will be sacrificed for the life of the world, that the breaking of his body and the shedding of his blood will purchase salvation for those who put their faith in him. In the centuries of debate and controversy over this passage, it has not been the fact that Jesus is teaching about his sacrificial death that has been in dispute. In fact, as the passage shows, this was clear to those who heard Jesus deliver this teaching and stopped following him as a result (v. 66).

The dispute about this passage has been whether or not Jesus is making in it a direct reference to the Lord's Supper. As Vander Zee notes, there are two very important things we must keep in mind when addressing this particular question. The first is that it is stretches credulity to believe that John's late first-century readers would not have made the connection between this passage and the sacramental meal they celebrated each Sunday (or more often than that). Secondly, we cannot escape our theological and sacramental prejudices when reading this passage. A majority of biblical scholars conclude that in this passage Jesus makes, at the very least, a veiled reference to the sacramental eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood in the Lord's Supper (see Vander Zee, 152 for a list of relevant commentaries on John).

Accepting the conclusion that Jesus is speaking in some way about the Lord's Supper in John 6, this discourse is highly valuable for discerning how Christ would have us view the Communion meal. In some mystical and miraculous sense, in the Eucharist Jesus gives us his flesh and blood as nourishment for our souls to eternal life. When we come to the Lord's Table, we are receiving as spiritual food, through the work of the Holy Spirit (6:63), Christ's death and resurrection for us and a powerful, personal confirmation that he is with us and in us always, even to the end of the age.

According to the specific verb usage in this passage, we note that this is a habitual feast. We do not simply "eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood" once or every great once in awhile. We are to "feed"—literally munch, knaw, chew in the Greek—on the body and blood of Jesus.

Undoubtedly, through belief and prayer, we can chew on Christ continually, but the wonder of the Eucharist is that we can receive the sanctifying benefits of the cross, participate in his sacrifice, and unite ourselves to him by the physical, earthly, very human actions of eating and drinking—actions that are fundamental to the maintenance of life. And what do we eat and drink as the body and blood of Christ but the most elemental and universal of all food substances—bread and wine. Just as eating and drinking, bread and wine nourish and energize our bodies, so too does the body and blood of Jesus, given to us in a uniquely powerful and effective way in the Lord's Supper, nourish and energize the life of our souls and help preserve us to everlasting life.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.