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.

Learning from the “Sacramentalists”: Weaknesses of the Commemorative Ordinances View

I issue apologies for last time and issue them ahead of time in this post. Labels are tricky. Usually they are misnomers. It is a bit inaccurate to associate the Baptist view of the sacraments with Zwingli, who retained infant baptism (though the Anabaptist movement did begin among Zwingli's followers in Zürich who simply disagreed with the Reformer on the mode and subject of baptism but not on the spiritually "dry" nature of it, and, of course, one can argue that adult baptism is the logical development issuing from Zwingli's understanding of the nature of faith and his radical duality between spirit and matter.)

The "sacramentalist "label I utilize this time is liable to get me in trouble from the Reformed direction because it sounds too Catholic, but thankfully Scott Clark, Michael Horton, and the other radical Puritans do not read my blog even though I read theirs (though, duh, 1) who am I that they would read me, and 2) I read those guys primarily for comedic purposes anyway).

I must also note that it almost feels as if I take everything I offered as potential strengths of the commemorative ordinances view back in critiquing it, but I would offer that those things still are commendable even if emphasizing them too much can lead us into trouble. Such, however, is the nature of the entire theological enterprise, hence the things I'm always muttering about "balance." Now to my list. Please note there will be more personal prognostications and theologizing in this list than in the last one, as I am in apologetic mode for my position. Plus, some of my points require explanation:

1. That Baptist common sense, of which the commemorative ordinances view of baptism and the Lord's Supper is part, is often a good old-fashioned virtue. Sometimes, however, we are called on to repent of our virtues. That Baptist common sense is partially an un-biblical Cartesian brand of common sense that marks a wide gulf between spirit and matter. For instance, I bring forward the short version of the Southern (and I mean Southern) Baptist catechesis about baptism: "Water don't do nothin’ for you. If you ain't already saved, you go down a dry sinner and you come up a wet one." Absolutely, baptism is not effective for salvation if it is unaccompanied by present or future faith in Christ. What this fails to grab hold of, though, is the way signs and symbols, rites and rituals, and group belonging and identity can strengthen, form, and even create faith in individuals. Through baptism and the Lord's Supper, God can plant, water, and nourish seeds of faith and activate them for regeneration. Do we doubt that God's Incarnation as Jesus Christ, Christ's physical death and resurrection, God's Word spoken and read, and human messengers to bring the Gospel are indispensable to bringing us to saving faith and in causing that faith to grow and be nourished through sanctification? Matter matters and God has repeatedly used it throughout salvation history to reveal himself, accomplish his redeeming purposes, and communicate his salvation to his people.

2. The commemorative ordinances view of the sacraments presupposes an understanding of God's workings in the material and temporal spheres of existence that denies the angels' confession that "heaven and earth is filled with his glory." Modern evangelicals, even Calvinist ones, have conceived of God's work in the world and even in the visible church in ways that smack of Gnosticism, Platonism, and/or Deism. Basically, earthly, material existence is governed by the laws of nature and spiritual existence is governed supernaturally by God. This is not a biblical viewpoint. In spite of the Fall, God still actively governs the world. As Calvin has it, we should not think of ourselves as being nourished by food through the self-perpetuating, God-independent natural process of digestion but by the God who miraculously converts dead food into life and energy for our bodies. Of course, I am not denying biology or laws of nature, but nature could not function without the God who sustains all things by his power. The "death of God" theologians of the 60's were foolish to suppose that the universe would not dissolve into nothingness if God were to empty himself of his being.

3. Continuing in this line of thought, the commemorative ordinances view of the sacraments seems to be part and parcel of a truncated understanding of the scope of salvation and the means through which God communicates that salvation to us.

I will preface my explanation of that point by saying that Christians who hold the commemorative ordinances view of the sacraments are very good about getting the absolutely essential, first-order points of the Gospel right. Salvation is for the souls of individual people, and the salvation of the world begins with the spiritual salvation of individual people. Indeed, we are the firstfruits of cosmic salvation, because, as the spiritual condition of humanity goes, so goes the rest of Creation. Also, people are most assuredly added to the Kingdom by ones and by grace alone through faith alone.

However, where modern evangelicals and even classical, sacramental Protestants go wrong is in limiting salvation to human beings and in applying it almost exclusively to the spiritual capacities of human beings. God means to redeem every single inch of us and every single inch of the universe. In redeeming humanity to the uttermost, there is not a single aspect of human existence that is not grasped in some way by God's saving intentions. God means to redeem not just humans souls but human bodies as well and not just individuals but families, societies, and nations as well: "Go into all nations, baptizing them and teaching them everything I have commanded you." If God has targeted human society for redemption, then it follows that redemption is going to be expressed and communicated in and through human social structures, i.e., the family and the visible church. Likewise, if God has targeted the whole Creation for redemption, then it follows that redemption is going to be expressed and communicated in and through the earthly means of words, water, bread, and wine.

4. The commemorative ordinances view of the sacraments is connected to a misleading understanding of what faith is. The commemorative ordinances view seems to equate faith directly with beliefs, feelings, thoughts, and works of the will and works with anything that has a material or physical expression. Put in equation form, it looks this way: faith = spiritual > works = matter. That sounds a lot like the barren faith of James 2 that consists exclusively of propositions. This conceives of faith far too platonically. I think of faith as having an erotic quality. Like erotic love, faith is produced, revved up, and expressed through the senses. The sacraments work for faith like sex does for marriage. Sex produces, deepens, and expresses creaturely dependence on and trust in one's spouse (or so I‘m told) and the sacraments produce, deepen, and express the creaturely dependence on and trust in God that is faith.

An example: I have heard it suggested that the Roman Catholics might have come to a point of agreement with the Calvinists and Lutherans on the issue of justification by faith alone had they not confused or feared the confusion of the Platonist and anti-materialist understanding of faith espoused by the Zwinglians and the Anabaptists with the Calvinist and Lutheran understanding of faith. The Council of Trent condemned justification by faith alone because they feared that the Protestants meant in this doctrine that the sacraments had nothing at all to do with the application of salvation, as Zwingli and the Anabaptists taught. However, Lutherans and Reformed non-Zwinglians have absolutely no problem reconciling justification by faith alone with the sacraments' role in salvation. In fact, you won't find stronger stalwarts for the doctrine of justification by faith alone than the Reformed and Lutherans. Indeed, for us, the sacraments' role in creating and strengthening faith is a great support for justification by faith alone.

5. Holders of the commemorative ordinances view of the Lord's Supper, while not subject to the exclusive, myopic focus on the elements, have unduly narrowed the focus of this sacrament to a memorial of Jesus's death. What!? I'm not mad. Christ's death is the central focus, but he did rise again and he is coming again. The Lord's Supper is not a funeral; it is a celebration of the resurrection and the dawning of the New Creation. We remember Christ's death because of the resurrection. And, we are not just "remembering;" we are sharing in the body and blood Christ sacrificed for us once and for all at Calvary. Furthermore, we are not just communing in the body Christ offered for "me" but in the body he offered for the world and the body he has assembled and knit together out of people from every nation under heaven. We are not to simply look upward in worship to God but around us in love for our brothers and sisters. There is a lot to chew on in the Communion rite.

6. If the commemorative ordinances view does not kill the mystery in the sacraments by subjecting them to scholastic theology, it kills the mystery by denying that it exists! Mystery is not a bad word; it is our life. Luther believed that the memorial view was a "rational emptying" of the Lord's Supper. I agree. There is more than meets the eye going on in baptism and the Lord's Supper. We are worried about "magic," but I think we all too serious moderns could use a little more "magic" in our lives. Kids are far more innocent than we are and they like “magic.” They don't deny stuff because they can't explain it like we so often do. Faith is not so much the land of understanding as it is the land of simple belief and childlike awe and wonder. There’s nothing wrong with expecting God's work right where he promises it. This sacraments business may seem a little goofy and "mythological," but I'm fully prepared to be ridiculous. Screw Tillich and Bultmann! A "de-mythologized" Christianity is as good as dead.

Learning from the Zwinglians: Strengths of the Commemorative Ordinances View

A good exercise in intellectual honesty, Christian charity, and theological humility is to discern the points at which theological positions that one finds to miss the mark are helpful or valuable in considering the issue said positions seek to address. In addition to helping us put the best construction on our brothers and sisters and what they believe and so preserving love and unity in the body of Christ, this reminds us that we are not the only ones to come to the Scriptures and that what the Bible actually teaches is sometimes not quite so self-evident as it seems to us or to the theological traditions that guide and inform our thinking. Sometimes this opens the door to a new understanding of the issue at hand, or, sometimes, it reveals hidden points of agreement between positions that can serve as the basis for the resolution of the theological conflict.

The chief issue that has caused me to shift my theological and ecclesiological identity from Baptist to classical Protestantism of the Reformed and Presbyterian strain is the nature of baptism and the Lord's Supper. For me, I have become convinced that we should understand these rituals related to Christ's redeeming death and resurrection primarily in terms of God's work of using tangible signs and symbols to apply his promises of salvation to us. In other words, baptism and the Lord's Supper are sacraments. This is quite different from the Baptist and mainstream evangelical view that they are primarily memorials and human actions of obedience to attest faith in Christ, and thus that God is not at work in them in a particularly special way (at least not in any way that has to do with "things" or an objective Divine action for the church or for the members-God may very well be working subjectively in individuals' hearts or even in a way that engages the community but quite regardless of the "stuff" involved). For simplicity, I will describe this as the commemorative ordinances view.

Keep in mind, this distinction between sacraments and ordinances is a bit simplistic. They aren't polar opposites. We should understand this as more of a continuum than as an either/or proposition. That being said, we can most certainly sketch a theological divide between the view of baptism and the Lord's Supper as sacraments and the view of them as ordinances. I would submit that this issue is more broadly significant than the narrow question of what “happens” in these rites. The distinction reveals in the theologies of which each view is part important differences in hermeneutics and in understandings of the scope and nature of salvation, the ways in which God applies that salvation, the ways in which God is more broadly at work in the world, and somewhat different views of what constitutes faith.

The differences are not irreconcilable and I'm quite confident that most holders of both the sacraments' view and ordinances’ view are solidly orthodox Christians, but the differences of understanding in the bigger issues at play in this question were significant enough to compel me to shift my identity from a Baptist to a protesting catholic of a confessionally Reformed stripe. Furthermore, the issues involved in this question have been significant enough to constitute the biggest fissure dividing Protestants historically. It is this issue and not the sovereignty-free will debate that is the most fundamental divide between Christians this side of the Tiber (though it is quite likely they are connected somehow).

The following are the points at which I believe Christians who think otherwise can learn and benefit from the commemorative ordinances view of the sacraments.

1. This view is part and parcel of that common sense that makes the Baptist form of Christianity that most quintessential American Christianity. The faith that God is not bothered or hindered by nonexistent ecclesiastical structures or Christian social structures in non-Christian lands and on the American frontier—the faith that God can and does save even if there isn't anybody around to baptize you—was a huge factor in the evangelization of the North American continent and the Modern Missionary Movement.

2. This viewpoint is not susceptible to the obsessive, myopic focus on the bread and wine that has characterized Eucharistic theology for 2000 years. Obviously, what's going on with the symbols of Christ's body and blood is vastly important, but there are other considerations in play at the Lord's Table than how exactly Jesus is present in or with the elements.

3. In connection with the above point, the commemorative ordinances view of the sacraments is not susceptible to the blasphemous and objectifying instinct humans have to try to know and explain in precise, scientific detail the mysterious workings of God. If holders of the commemorative ordinances view shortchange themselves by failing to see God's special action through water and bread and wine, they do not shortchange themselves by killing the thing with scientific, metaphysical terminology and scholastic theology! No bothering about with "accidents," "pneumatic presence," "transubstantiation," "sacramental union," or thinking about "grace" as some kind of gas, substance, or goo to be accumulated.

4. Again, in connection with the previous points, if the sacraments are about communing with Jesus and seeing him face to face (in your fellow Christians' faces), trying to figure out how it's all working or thinking in terms of getting ready to receive something, i.e. "grace," rather than Someone seems to get in the way of experiencing Jesus. Holders of the commemorative ordinances view are not thinking about receiving a gift abstracted from the person of Jesus but rather about God's great gift of the Giver Himself, Jesus Christ. There's nothing to distract from Jesus when there's nothing but Jesus, even if it is just "Jesus in the air."

Next time, I will address the big points where the commemorative ordinances view fails to capture adequately the full and glorious biblical teaching about baptism and the Lord's Supper.

Seminary Shenanigans 1

The semester is over, so my really busy days are over for a while. I now have no excuses for not blogging more frequently, so stay tuned for my snarky, irrelevant, and irreverent thoughts throughout the summer. I'll take the opportunity in my next several posts to share my big projects from my seminary courses at Covenant this past semester. I would like your input and constructive criticism on my labors.

I most enjoyed and benefited from my Christian Worship class with the fantastic Dr. Mark Dalbney. I love the guy. He's full of great stories, is youthful and funny, knows more about Reformed worship than all but a half-dozen people on the planet, and has worshiped and led worship in the most widely divergent worship circles you could imagine. He grew up and began ministering in a tradition that only sings the Psalms, and that without musical accompaniment, and has evolved from that point to a contemporary worship guy who also exhibits a deep love for traditional hymnody. You can hear his lectures and access course materials here.

Here's the hymn I wrote for this class. You know that old Gospel song, "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood?" Well, I wrote a Communion hymn called "In Breath and Flesh and Power" to the tune of that old song. I might have biffed the assignment a bit by using an unoriginal tune, especially an old one, but I like the lyrics. I took a few risks with them, but feel I have faithfully articulated a well-rounded, Reformed view of the sacred Supper, though it rather provocatively trends Lutheran in verse two. Ecumenist and sacramentalist that I am, that doesn't bother me, so get over it. What I do worry about theologically, however, is whether in the first few lines of the first verse I diminish the glory of the Word of God spoken and written in extolling the value of the Sacrament? Keep in mind, in the full-bodied Reformed sacramental understanding, the Sacraments are nothing more or less than the Holy Spirit's application of the Word of God (in the Jesus sense too) and His promises to us in a bodily, material, communal manner; therefore, the Sacraments’ glory and that of the written Word is one. That being said, I do not wish to undermine that proposition by affirming the value of the Sacraments at the expense of the Bible. You be the judge of whether or not I have done this. Here's my song.

"In Breath and Flesh and Power"

Verse 1
Christ, meet us not in speech alone, but in Breath and flesh and power.
We have heard Your voice in holy Word and sang with You this hour.
By the Spirit's power, lift now our hearts in holy conqu'ring love.
For we long to share the blessed feast—Your once-offered flesh and blood.
Refrain 1
Your once-offered flesh and blood, your once-offered flesh and blood.
For we long to share the blessed feast—Your once-offered flesh and blood.

Verse 2
Jesus, what a joy to feast with You in Your resurrection power.
You have raised us to Your heav'nly throne for this blest, appointed hour.
For here we know You face-to-face as will be when Kingdom comes.
This table then will be faith's stay till the Consummation's done.
Refrain 2
Till the Consummation's done, till the Consummation's done.
This table then will be faith's stay till the Consummation's done.

Verse 3
Christ, as we share love's meat and drink with brother, sister dear,
Make one our hearts in charity, casting out unholy fear.
Unite us as one temple built on You, our cornerstone.
One holy loaf permeated through with You and You alone.
Refrain 3
With You and You alone, with You and You alone.
One holy loaf permeated through with You and You alone.

Verse 4
We have been with You this Easter Day in the new Jerusalem.
You have fed us with the bread of life and filled our hearts with hymns.
Strengthened by Your death and victory, conform our lives to You,
And send us as Your co-laborers in making all things new.
Refrain 4
In making all things new, in making all things new.
And send us as Your co-laborers in making all things new.

We Already Share in Body and Blood

Here's just one gem of many from today's Calvin reading:

But the flesh of Christ does not of itself have a power so great as to quicken us, for in its first condition it was subject to mortality; and now, endowed with immortality, it does not live through itself. Nevertheless, since it is pervaded with fullness of life to be transmitted to us, it is rightly called "life-giving." In this sense I interpret with Cyril that saying of Christ's: "As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself" [John 5:26, cf. Vg.]. For there he is properly speaking not of those gifts which he had in the Father's presence from the beginning, but of those with which he was adorned in that very flesh wherein he appeared. Accordingly, he shows that in his humanity there also dwells fullness of life, so that whoever has partaken of his flesh and blood may at the same time enjoy participation in life.

We can explain the nature of this by a familiar example. Water is sometimes drunk from a spring, sometimes drawn, sometimes led by channels to water the fields, yet it does not flow forth from itself for so many uses, but from the very source, which by unceasing flow supplies and serves it. In like manner, the flesh of Christ is like a rich and inexhaustible fountain that pours into us the life springing forth from the Godhead into itself. Now who does not see that communion of Christ's flesh and blood is necessary for all who aspire to heavenly life?

This is the purport of the apostle's statements: "The church . . . is the body of Christ, and the fullness of him" [Eph. 1:23]; but he is "the head" [Eph. 4:15] "from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by . . . joints . . . makes bodily growth" [Eph. 4:16]; "our bodies are members of Christ" [I Cor. 6:15]. We understand that all these things could not be brought about otherwise than by his cleaving to us wholly in spirit and body. But Paul graced with a still more glorious title that intimate fellowship in which we are joined with his flesh when he said, "We are members of his body, of his bones and of his flesh" [Eph. 5:30]. Finally, to witness to this thing greater than all words, he ends his discourse with an exclamation: "This," he says, "is a great mystery" [Eph. 5:32]. It would be extreme madness to recognize no communion of believers with the flesh and blood of the Lord, which the apostle declares to be so great that he prefers to marvel at it rather than to explain it. Institutes 4.17.9

If we as the Church already share in the Body and Blood of Christ through our union with Him, is it such a stretch to consider that in some mystical way we share truly and really in flesh and blood in the Supper of the Lord and not just in the Spirit? This is precisely the line of reasoning Calvin is following here.

For the Life of the World 2.2

"Lift up Your Hearts!": Eastern Orthodoxy, Reformed Protestantism, and the Eucharist (Part 2)

What is the Lord's Supper?

Westminster Shorter Catechism again, Q 96- The Lord’s Supper is a sacrament, wherein, by giving and receiving bread and wine, according to Christ’s appointment, his death is showed forth; and the worthy receivers are, not after a corporal and carnal manner, but by faith, made partakers of his body and blood, with all his benefits, to their spiritual nourishment, and growth in grace.

What is the role of eating? If we do not commune with Christ after a "corporal and carnal manner" but by "faith only," can we not be "made partakers of his body and blood” without eating? Can't we just watch it and think pious thoughts and get the benefit that way? This question reveals the shortcomings of most Reformed views of the sacraments in general. We haven't done particularly well with our attitude toward human actions and things. If no significance is attached to the eating, we can end up with something like the medieval Roman Catholic view that Luther and Calvin were fighting against. At a certain point in the Middle Ages, it became customary for Christians only to receive the Communion bread once a year. The rest of the time they were told that they could receive the benefit of the sacrament simply by watching the priest break the bread at consecration. I think this represents a devaluing of the material.

There is also another direction we could go if we don't attach any significance to the eating. We could end up with a Baptist view of the Lord's Supper where God doesn't do anything at all in the sacrament. It's all about what we do. We simply obey and remember. We don't receive any direct spiritual benefit from the ritual because eating is natural and material but God is supernatural and spiritual. We don't want to confuse nature and supernature or matter and spirit. Well, this kind of understanding is a serious problem. This is a clear example of the dualism that completely separates the world and nature from God. Sounds an awful lot like that darned noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world Schmemann has been warning us about. This is precisely why I'm not a Baptist anymore.

According to Schmemann, something else that smacks of dualism is the distinction we make between Word and Sacrament. We are accustomed to thinking of sacraments merely as secondary helps to the Word. We usually think of the Word in terms of God's activity and the sacraments exclusively in terms of our activity. If we think of it that way, from a Calvinistic perspective the sacraments really aren't that important. Well, I don't think Calvin would agree that the sacraments are unimportant but he unintentionally created that impression when he described the sacraments as appendices to the Word.

So, if the distinction between Word and Sacrament is artificial, how do we overcome it? I want to point us to what Schmemann says on page 33 about the Word being as sacramental as the sacrament is "evangelical." What does the statement that the Word is as "sacramental" as the sacrament is "evangelical" mean?

There’s a couple of things. The first thing is that Scripture is the sacrament par excellence of the Church. I don't want to devalue Scripture, but it must be apparent that the words printed on the page or the words spoken by one reading Scripture or preaching from the Word are also things, things as earthly as water, bread, or wine. These are all earthen vessels that only through the power of the Holy Spirit can carry and deliver the weight of Divine reality. Due to the power of the Holy Spirit, who both inspired the writers of Scripture and who enlivens the printed or spoken words of the Bible for us that read them or hear them today, God speaks to us through His Word. Likewise, it is only through the power of the Holy Spirit that a community ritual meal becomes a sharing in the Body and Blood of Christ. Granted, there are some important ways in which the Scriptures are unique from the things we properly call sacraments (Scripture, being God-breathed, is, with or without the Spirit's new activity of enlightening us, already sacramental), but, just as bread and wine, the ritual actions, the Word spoken, the people, the minister, etc., require the action of the Holy Spirit in order for the sacrament of the Lord's Supper to truly take place, so too do we need the Spirit's activity in order for the Bible to make its transformative mark on us.

The second thing is that the sacraments are an essential part of our evangelical mission as the Church. We are commanded to preach the Gospel to every creature, but we are also commanded to baptize and to gather together to share the Eucharistic meal by which we remember Christ and eat Him as our spiritual food. The sacraments themselves, particularly the Eucharist, both enable our ministry to the world and demonstrate the Gospel to an unbelieving world, showing forth Christ's great love for us and our love for one another. Sacraments are also evangelical because, like the Word, they are means by which the seed of faith can be planted in our hearts and by which that seed can be watered so that it bears much fruit.

Is the above description consistent with the significance of the Lord's Supper in traditional Reformed faith and practice? If not, how central should it be?

We have customarily thought of and acted as if the Word has precedence over the sacraments. I don't think this was the intention of the Reformers. For Calvin, for instance, the right administration of the sacraments was every bit as much a mark of the Church as the right preaching of the Word was. Calvin wanted weekly Communion, but the Geneva city council would not let him. It might have gone differently had Calvin been able to have weekly Communion, but the sacraments have always had second billing in our tradition.

I think this is a mistake, especially when we think about both Scripture and the sacraments as means the Word of God uses to communicate with us. Who is the Word of God? Jesus, of course. He promises to make Himself present both in the Scriptures and in the sacraments. In some sense, then, the Bible and the sacraments are both the Word of God, or, more properly, manifestations of Him. They are really two sides of the same coin, and they complement each other really well. The Bible, for instance, appeals to our minds and to our hearing, while the sacraments appeal to our senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste. God seeks to get to our hearts through every aspect of our humanity so I think we should give Him every opportunity to do so. With that in mind, I think that Word and Sacrament should be equally central to our faith and practice.

Let's look at another perspective. I'll read the following statement about the Lord's Supper. Tell me if this is the statement of a Presbyterian or of an Orthodox or a Catholic.

The Eucharist is the world in miniature; it has cosmic significance. Within it we find clues to the meaning of all creation and all history, to the nature of God and the nature of man, to the mystery of the world, which is Christ. It is not confined to the first day, for its power fills seven. Though the altar stands at the center, its effects stretch out to the four corners of the earth.

Is this the statement of a Roman Catholic or an Orthodox? Well, I changed a few words—I turned Lord's Supper into Eucharist and table into altar to make this sound like something an Orthodox or Roman Catholic would say but actually it is from a Presbyterian pastor and professor who is part of a group that has caused a big commotion over in the Presbyterian Church in America and the other conservative Reformed denominations about the importance of the sacraments and the Church in our salvation. In fact, Peter Leithart, whose words I just read has been investigated not less than three times by his presbytery and has endured at least one heresy trial for his positions. Many Reformed evangelicals think all this sounds too much like Catholicism, so some of them are waging a campaign against those who are attempting to recover the full-bodied Reformed sacramental and churchly heritage.

This is an important question. How central is the Lord's Table in our life together as a congregation? This gets into the issue of frequency. How frequently should we take Communion?

Well, I certainly have a position on frequency. I think every Lord's Day celebration should include the Lord's Supper. Not only does it "show forth Christ's death till He comes" but it guards against this whole tendency toward dualism. The Lord's Supper with its emphasis on ritual and the community of faith and material things tells us right away that our spiritual lives are not lived apart from the world or from other people or even from material things. Our spiritual life must embrace the world, people, and things, not just as purely incidental to our lives, but as means of connection with God.

If we move forward on this idea that the Lord's Supper is the world in miniature; that it is central; that its significance fills all seven days of the week and the four corners of the earth; we have a lot of room to fill out our definition of the Lord's Supper. Of course, the Lord's Supper is a sign and remembrance of Christ's death. I think we all understand that. We have talked about the importance of Communion for our mission—how it turns us into the Body of Christ so that we can be His physical presence in the world and tell others about His Kingdom. We've talked about how for the Orthodox this gets into the whole question of the Eschaton—that time when Jesus returns and sets everything right. It gives us a glimpse of that time so we can prepare the world for His Return. I think we have a bit of that in our Reformed understanding of the Eucharist as well.

In talking about all that this sacrament means for us, I think a discussion about the many different terms we use to describe it would be productive. Somebody give me a name for this sacrament.

1. Lord's Supper- it tells us that this is a meal Jesus has with all of his friends. Not only is Jesus our dear friend at this meal but we are all dear friends to one another. This term points us to his death because it was the last meal he shared with the disciples.
2. Communion- I like this one because it tells us something about our relationship to one another as the Body of Christ. We are one. We must truly love one another. That scary passage of Scripture in 1 Corinthians (11:17-32) that talks about profaning the Body and Blood of Christ by unworthily taking the Lord's Supper is most likely about people in the Church failing to love each other—failing to recognize the Body of Christ in the poorer members of the Corinthian congregation. Paul ultimately says that the sacrament will damn us if we fail to love each other.
3. Lord's Table- This is my favorite because it illustrates our relationship to God. That we get to eat at the table with Jesus says that we are the very sons and daughters of God.
4. Eucharist- This is the one that's most important for the Orthodox. I want to spend a little time with this one. The term Eucharist makes us understand that the sacrament is joy, that it’s praise, that it's thanksgiving. We focus a lot of attention on the fact that this sacrament is about Jesus’ death, but it's also about the Resurrection. It's in the context of the Resurrection that this meal is thanksgiving and joy, that it is Eucharist.

This concept of Eucharist is very strong in the Communion liturgy that we use. I just want to emphasize very strongly once again that the Eucharist is a liturgy. We have to include all of it as sacramental. We can't take it apart and focus just on the bread and wine. It's a seamless action and procession of thanksgiving from beginning to end.

With that in mind, I hope you guys noticed in the last part of this chapter how similar our liturgy is to the Eastern Orthodox liturgy Schmemann discusses in our book. They differ from one another in a few places, but, for the most part, each has a very similar structure to the other and very similar content to the other. I want to have us meditate on this idea of thanksgiving, of offering, of sacrifice that is present in both of our liturgies. Schmemann has some very profound and beautiful yet also very difficult things to say about all this in the last 10 or 12 pages of the chapter. There is a lot of giving going on. Let's look at this on page 35:

This offering to God bread and wine, of the food that we must eat in order to live, is our offering to Him of ourselves, of our life, and of the whole world. . . . It is our Eucharist. It is the movement that Adam failed to perform, and that in Christ has become the very life of man: a movement of adoration and praise in which all joy and suffering, all beauty and all frustration, all hunger and all satisfaction are referred to their ultimate End and become finally meaningful.

I think this correlates really well with the statement from Peter Leithart that the Eucharist covers the four corners of the world. We are offering ourselves and the whole world to God when we offer the gifts of bread and wine.

Well, it's after this point that trying to follow Schmemann begins to make my head hurt a little. It gets a little confusing. He begins to talk about how Christ has already offered all that is to be offered to God by giving Himself, so Christ offers Himself as a Eucharist to God. Well, we as the Church have been taken up into Christ's Eucharistic life, so Christ offers us as a Eucharist to God as well. To make it even more confusing, we then offer the self-offering of Christ as a Eucharist to God. In the end, we end up with four offerings that have occurred in the Eucharist. First, we have offered ourselves and the whole world to God. Second, Christ has offered Himself to God. Third, Christ has offered His Body, the Church, to God. Finally, as a response, we offer Christ's self-offering to God.

This kind of talk makes some Protestants very nervous, especially those who are highly suspicious of anything that sounds remotely Catholic. This begins to sound like we are sacrificing Christ all over again or that we are doing some kind of good work here to earn God's grace. I really don't think that's what's going on here. In fact, we get a very strong affirmation of grace in this. All of this is possible only because of what Christ has done in His once-and-for-all death for our sins on the cross and in His Resurrection, and, at the end of the liturgy, God gives the bread and wine that we have offered to Him back to us as the gift of Christ's Body and Blood.

No one has been "worthy" to receive communion, no one has been prepared for it. At this point all merits, all righteousness, all devotions disappear and dissolve. Life comes again to us as Gift, a free and divine gift. . . . Adam [and Eve are] introduced into Paradise, taken out of nothingness, and crowned king [and queen] of creation. Everything is free, nothing is due and yet all is given. And, therefore, the greatest humility and obedience is to accept the gift, to say yes—in joy and gratitude. There is nothing left we can do, yet we become all that God wanted us to be from eternity, when we are eucharistic.

With that in mind, we can conclude our look at the Lord's Supper with Calvin's view of Christ's presence in the sacrament. This is from his "Short Treatise on the Lord's Supper":

We all confess, then, with one mouth, that, in receiving the sacrament in faith, according to the ordinance of the Lord, we are truly made partakers of the real substance of the body and blood of Christ. How this is done, some may deduce more clearly than others. But be this as it may, on the one hand we must, to shut out all carnal fancies, raise our hearts on high to heaven, not thinking that our Lord Jesus Christ is so abased as to be enclosed under any corruptible elements. On the other hand, not to diminish the efficacy of the sacred mystery, we must hold that it is accomplished by the secret and miraculous virtue of God and that the Spirit of God is the bond of participation, for which reason it is called spiritual.

Two things. One, Calvin understands Jesus’ words about his flesh and blood to be a promise. He rejects any idea of the bread and wine being transformed into actual flesh and blood, but he somehow still manages to take what Jesus says quite literally, even if he doesn't understand how exactly it works. And he makes it very clear that he doesn't know how it works. Listen here to Calvin's rather surprising mystical side:

Now if anyone should ask me how this takes place, I shall not be ashamed to confess that it is a secret too lofty for either my mind to comprehend or my words to declare. And, to speak more plainly, I rather experience than understand it. Therefore I here embrace without controversy the truth of God in which I may safely rest. He declares his flesh the food of my soul, his blood its drink. I offer my soul to him to be fed with such food. In his sacred supper he bids me take, eat, and drink his body and blood under the symbols of bread and wine. I do not doubt that he himself truly presents them, and that I receive them. Institutes 4.17.32.

The second thing we must note about Calvin's doctrine of the Lord's Supper is that he bids us to "Raise our hearts on high."

A question: Where is Christ physically at right now? He's in heaven at the right hand of the Father, right? Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, right? Can human beings physically be in more than one place at a time? Well, as much as you might sometimes feel the need to be in two places at once, you that are parents know that this is impossible. Okay, let's try to get this straight; if we encounter Christ in His humanity in the Lord's Supper, explain to me how Jesus can be at a thousand different Communion services all at once. Jesus is human, so He can't do it without destroying His ongoing humanity, can He? What He can do, though, is bring all of us to His place. This is where Calvin looked East toward the Orthodox view of the Eucharist for help.

Leonard Vander Zee explains Calvin's solution:

For Calvin, the sursum corda, "lift up your hearts," was a favorite liturgical phrase, because at the Lord's Table we lift up our hearts to Christ in heaven by the Spirit who has united us with him in his glorified humanity. By the same Spirit and through the sharing of the bread and wine, we now partake in a unique way of that union with Christ.

Calvin's solution for the problem of Christ's physical presence in the sacrament is for the Holy Spirit to lift the Church into Christ's presence in heaven. This is the reason our Eucharistic liturgy is so similar to the Orthodox liturgy Schmemann has shown us. We are basically striving to do the same thing that Schmemann shows the Orthodox to be doing in their celebration of the Eucharist. We are ascending into heaven to offer ourselves and the world to God and to share in a foretaste of the great banquet of the Lord. Let's say a small part of the Great Thanksgiving we share with the Orthodox as we conclude?

Lift up your hearts!
We lift them up to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give our thanks and praise.

I think we're ready to head into worship now. We will be gathering around the Lord's Table today, so let's go together and ascend with Christ into heaven to share in a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

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

For the Life of the World 2.1

“Lift up Your Hearts": Eastern Orthodoxy, Reformed Protestantism, and the Eucharist (Part 1)

Before we progress forward with our study, I think we need to backtrack a little bit to last time. What, according to Schmemann, is the purpose for the world that God has created? Blessing, communion with God, food that fulfills the hunger of our bodies and inclines our hearts to the One all of our hunger is pointing to.

What does our author believe to be our purpose as human beings? We are to bless God for His gifts. Schmemann even calls us priests. What he's trying to get across in that description is that we are to thankfully receive God's gifts and, as a response, give ourselves and those gifts right back to God. It's in this that we find our purpose and that the world finds its purpose.

But something went wrong. What does our author see as the thing that went wrong? Sin entered the picture. What is the original sin? It was failing to give God praise and thanks for His gifts. Basically, we tried to steal the world from God and we found that without God, the world had no life in it. That's how death entered the picture.

So, what is Jesus's mission? What did the Incarnation, the cross, the grave, and the Resurrection accomplish? He gave all of life back to us; He gave us what we were hungry for all along but didn't realize it. Jesus uses the language of food to tell us this; that's what he means when he calls Himself the Bread of Life. Our hunger for food is a reflection of our hunger for God. Jesus is the Bread that fulfills this hunger.

We are talking today about what the Eastern Orthodox understand to happen when they gather together to receive Communion. We will also be talking about what we as Reformed Christians believe regarding the sacrament, and we are going to compare and contrast that to what Schmemann has to say about the Orthodox view. We can't really say that Presbyterians have just one opinion about what happens when we take Communion, so that part, at least, should give us opportunity for a lively discussion.

Last time, we spoke at length about secularism and dualism. I got myself into some trouble when we started talking about "traditional" American Christianity. I guess we disagreed a little bit about "traditional" American Christianity or whether it even exists, but I referred to what I see as the unbalanced otherworldliness of our brand of Christian faith. Well, of course, the hope of heaven is absolutely a valid aspect of our faith; in fact, it is the hope that all other hopes rest on, and that is exactly where we are headed today as we ascend into heaven with the Orthodox in their celebration of the Eucharist.

Before we do that, though, we need to keep our eyes focused on earth for just a moment. As Chris (a fellow seminarian in the congregation) reminded us last time, not everyone in our world experiences the world as a blessing from God. For some people, the world is an awful place filled with hunger, violence, suffering, and death. For people who don't have enough to eat, they do not experience their food or their lack of it as communion with God.

These kinds of things remind us that all is not right just yet in the world. In spite of what Schmemann said in chapter 1 about Jesus returning the world to us as communion with God, as sacrament, as Eucharist, we recognize that everything isn't fixed just yet back here on earth. That is why the Eastern Orthodox believe they must ascend into heaven where Christ is, because it is only there that Christ's reign is already fully realized and everything is set to rights.

I want to point us to this; when the Eastern Orthodox celebrate the Eucharist and go into heaven, where they are going is the "world to come," and, by "world to come," they do not mean some other world someplace else. What they mean is this world that we live in right now, but in the future after Jesus has returned and set everything to rights. It's not so much that the Orthodox are going somewhere "up there" but that they are moving forward in time to that point in history when heaven comes to earth. That's the heaven to which the Orthodox ascend in the Eucharist.

I might add that this is my own personal understanding of heaven. The New Heaven and New Earth, symbolized in the city of New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation, is the Father's house that Jesus told His disciples that He was going away to so that He could prepare it for us. When we die in the Lord, we are ultimately coming back here to reign with Jesus from the New Jerusalem.

Now we get to talk about mission. The reason the Orthodox ascend into heaven to eat the Body and Blood of the Lord is so that they can see, reflected in the light of the Savior's face, that God's good world is filled with His glory and that it is the means of communion with God.

Perhaps for the Orthodox the appropriate way to sing that classic hymn we all know would be:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus.
Look full in His wonderful face.
And the things of earth will shine clear and true
in the light of his glory and grace.

It would be more accurate to sing this instead of the traditional "the things of earth will grow strangely dim" because in Christ's presence, the things of earth will not "grow strangely dim" but will shine ever brighter, reflecting His glory all the more!

And not only do they see the heaven and earth are filled with God's glory during their ascension but they also touch it and eat it. The idea that the world is given as communion with God is so strong for the Orthodox here that they say that their offering of bread and wine becomes Christ's literal Body and Blood. We'll return to this question of Christ's presence in the bread and wine at some point.

Mission. That's where I was going. The Orthodox ascend into heaven so that they can experience the world as it is meant to be and as it will be when Christ returns and so that they can then come back into the world in their time and place and tell about what they "have heard and seen with their own eyes and handled with their own hands concerning the Word of Life" (1 John 1:1). And this is that Jesus Christ is Lord of heaven and earth and that the world is filled with His glory and is thus a means of communion with Him. I think Schmemann describes this beautifully on 28. This is an important passage. It brings up a couple of important ideas:

The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ has ascended. They realized also that this ascension was a very condition of their mission in the world, of their ministry to the world. For there—in heaven—they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when after this "liturgy of ascension," they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light, the "joy and peace" of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses. They brought no programs or theories; but wherever they went, the seeds of the Kingdom sprouted, faith was kindled, life was transfigured, things impossible were made possible.

The first thing we see, and this is mentioned several other places in this chapter, is that the liturgy of ascension is required so that the Church can become the Church. In the Eucharist, then not only is the bread believed to become the Body of Christ but the group of people who share in the sacrament is believed to become the Body of Christ also.

This points to an important term from chapter 1:

leitourgia- n.: 1) an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals—a whole greater than the sum of its parts; 2) function or ministry of a person or of a group on behalf of or in the interest of the whole community.

Okay. For the Orthodox, the Eucharist is the leitourgia of the Church—it is the set of actions by which individuals who believe in Jesus become the Church.

The second part of the definition for leitourgia brings up the other point that I wanted to lift out of the passage on page 28.

The Church does not exist for our benefit but for the benefit of the world. The Church is Christ's own presence in the world. We act in the world in Christ's stead, bearing witness to His Kingdom and preparing the way for His Second Coming. That's what I've got to say to briefly sum up the distinctively Orthodox understanding of the Eucharist.

Now for a general discussion about the sacrament from our perspective, both what each of us understands personally and the Reformed view that is reflected in the Communion liturgy we use in the Presbyterian Church USA. In the process, let's compare and contrast this with what Schmemann has told us about the Orthodox perspective in chapter 2 of For the Life of the World.

First off, I think it would be instructive for us to define just what we mean by the term sacrament. We know that baptism and the Lord's Supper are sacraments, and, from what Schmemann says, the Church is in some sense, a sacrament also. What is a sacrament?

Westminster Shorter Catechism Q 92: A sacrament is a holy ordinance instituted by Christ; wherein, by sensible signs, Christ, and the benefits of the new covenant, are represented, sealed, and applied to believers.

Sacraments are also elsewhere described in the Reformed tradition as "visible words." This raises the question: What is required for a sacrament? The Word and something that is a sign of Christ. Is that all? Are not the people, the officiant(s), ritual actions also required? A sacrament is a ritual. The ritual, not just the signs given but the whole action is sacramental; it is liturgy, leitourgia.

Are sacraments just signs? In other words, are sacraments purely human efforts? Is God active in the sacraments? Does God do something to us corporately and individually in the sacraments?

Westminster Shorter Catechism says that Christ, and the benefits of the new covenant, are represented, sealed, and applied to believers. We have this idea of a sacramental union between the sign and the reality it points to. For believers, both the sign and the reality are presented to them in the sacrament. Yet, even though sign and reality are both present, we still maintain that they are somehow distinct.

We will continue our discussion of the Eucharist next time.

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

Fast and Feast, Flesh and Spirit

For someone who just joined a congregation in a mainline denomination three weeks ago, I was awfully hard on that segment of American Protestant Christianity in my last post. All criticisms aside, the orthodox majority of mainline Protestants have done some things better over the last century than most evangelicals have. They have done particularly well with two areas I am keenly interested in—the Sacraments and the social aspect of the Gospel, both emphases that have prevented them from falling into the Gnostic scheme of spiritualizing all the trappings of religion away, at least not to the extent that most evangelicals have.

When it comes to its official statements in its Book of Common Worship, the Presbyterian Church USA is one of the most solid of the mainline churches when it comes to its sacramental theology and its sacramental liturgies. Its baptismal liturgies incorporate the beauty of the best Reformed language about the Sacrament and handle with nuance and subtlety the dialectic theological concerns in play in Reformed thought on the Sacrament. Its Eucharistic liturgies incorporate elements of patristic liturgies, giving them an awesome sense of history and mystery and a catholicity that resonates with believers from the Christian traditions of Wittenberg, Geneva, Rome, and of Constantinople and points north and east. The PCUSA has also done a fantastic job in its work with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America in bridging the centuries-old rift that developed between the Reformed and the Lutherans due to their differences on the Sacraments. Needless to say, I am thrilled to officially be a member of this denomination.

In her sermon last Lord's Day, our pastor, Reverend Nancy Carle, did not address the Sacraments but did deal nicely with the issue of fasting as a discipline we are called to practice especially during the season of Lent but also as an ordinary practice of our spirituality. She took the anti-Gnostic track of defending the practice by discussing the importance God places on the actions we perform in and with our bodies. We are not to think of ourselves as having competing and dichotomous fragments of ourselves labeled spirit and matter, with spirit being good and mighty and flesh being somehow lesser or weaker. She pointed to the fact that God called materiality and flesh good and very good when he created it in the beginning and that God assumed flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ, who physically died and bodily rose from the grave. Likewise, she noted the Christian belief in the general resurrection of the dead as stated in the Apostles' Creed. It is in the context of such an embodied spirituality that fasting is an appropriate and necessary activity for Christians. In the season of Christ's suffering and death, we are to show our thanksgiving and joy by bringing our bodies into subjection and offering them as a sacrifice to he who was and is our all-sufficient sacrifice.

With the embodied nature of our spirituality under discussion last Lord's Day, it was appropriate that the contrasting theme of feast also appeared in the service. The idea of fasting as a means of feasting on Jesus Christ came up during the sermon, and, during the children's feature, Nancy discussed with the youngsters the ample material for feasting our worship together provides. She pulled out a hymnal and intimated to the children that a great feast for our ears was set in the music of the church. She pulled out a Bible and pointed to the great feast for our hearts that God's Word is. She also pointed to the congregation and the choir assembled behind her and noted what a feast of wisdom is set before inquiring minds in all the lessons God's people can teach us.

Most naturally, then, my mind made the progression to something else that is as central to our life and worship together as the spoken and written Word of God. Also, with the matters of the mental, emotional, and spiritual feasts set before God's people in worship being dealt with, it was only natural that I should think of the physical feast of the Church. My eyes went from the pastor and the children gathered on the other side of the sanctuary back to the centrally-located altar, hoping against hope that I was mistaken that no feast of Christ's body and blood lay there ready and waiting for us to consume, but, alas, I was not mistaken. No bread. No wine. No literal feast was to be had this day. In good Presbyterian fashion, our fare today was destined only to be words.

Well, my time for complaining is over. Presbyterians have not historically celebrated the Lord's Supper often. Many are now doing so weekly, but many more still are not. The fact is that Presbyterianism is centered on the Word. Well, the entire Church is centered on the Word of God—both the testimony about him and his Father we call Scripture and the God-Man himself, Jesus Christ. The Word of God is speech by and about God as well as the flesh and blood human being that was and is God. Just as Jesus did not come in words alone but also in the flesh when he walked the earth, so too does he not, or, at least should not have to, come by words alone today. In this sense, it is perfectly Presbyterian to make the Sacraments as central to our worship as the Bible is. Since Christ has gone to be present in heaven at the right hand of the Father, through the power the Holy Spirit the Sacraments are the means, in addition to the speech of Holy Writ, by which we continue to commune with him in a fleshly way.

Do I overstate the need for God to engage us at every level of our being, or, conversely that we need to engage God at every level of our being? Doesn't Scripture say, "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all" (John 6:63). This is the verse that the Swiss Reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, used to support his position on the Lord's Supper at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529.

At this fateful meeting, the Protestant princes and theologians of Germany and their counterparts from Switzerland were assembled to bolster the Protestant movement and unify it in the face of the threat from the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Zwingli and the Swiss Reformed camp agreed on virtually all major points of doctrine with Luther and his followers. However, Luther and Zwingli quarreled bitterly on the question of the Lord's Supper.

Luther took quite literally Christ's words at the Last Supper, "This is my body. This is my blood." He was quite unwilling to budge on this point. He felt that the statement was just too strongly put in Scripture to spiritualize it away. He did not quite accept the Roman Catholic view either, but this was primarily because it was expressed in terms more associated with Aristotelian philosophy than the Bible.

Zwingli found Luther's view to be outright idolatry. He found repugnant the idea that God is present "in, with, and under" the physical elements of bread and wine. On this point, John Calvin would later agree with Zwingli, but his reason for rejecting the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist was thoroughly biblical. As for Zwingli, the basis of his reasoning was philosophical.

Calvin could not reconcile the idea of Jesus Christ the human being sitting at the right hand of the Father in heaven while simultaneously being present on a thousand altars. He was worried about inadvertently endorsing the "Monophysite" heresy (which is the elimination of the distinction between Christ's humanity and divinity, namely that "the humanity of Christ is absorbed into his divinity just as a drop of rain is into the sea"), but he nevertheless still affirmed that Christ is spiritually present in the Sacrament and that it contains a divine blessing for believers and a curse for unbelievers.

Zwingli, on the other hand, could not reconcile Christ's physical presence in Communion with his Platonic understanding of the relationship between spirit and matter. For Zwingli, matter was inherently inferior to spirit and could not carry the weight of spiritual reality. As a result, Zwingli's interpretation of that great Eucharistic chapter, John 6, hinged upon verse 63: "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all." (I find it remarkable that a theologian who was as otherwise skilled as Zwingli was could fail to recognize that following his exegetical reasoning on the Lord's Supper to its most obvious conclusion would be to empty the Incarnation of any significance as well!)

At any rate, Luther thought Zwingli had performed a rational emptying of the Lord's Supper and thus uttered, "We are not of the same spirit." (Yay Luther! Even though these words were disastrous for Protestant prospects for church unity and I have some points of departure from Lutheran views of the Lord's Supper, I still have to admire Luther's stand for historic Christianity here.) It was at this point in history that we can mark the definitive split between the Reformed and the Lutherans. Though Calvin took a view of the Sacrament somewhat closer to Luther's view, he helped deepen the split between his followers and Luther's by signing a statement of agreement with Zwingli's followers in the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549. The Reformed have been trying to figure out whether they follow Calvin or Zwingli on the Lord's Supper ever since. (Can you guess which I follow on this doctrine?)

But what do we make of the essential biblical distinction between Spirit and flesh? Paul, for example, uses the dichotomy between Spirit and flesh repeatedly in his letters to mark a sharp distinction between the life of regenerate and unregenerate humanity. Those of the Spirit are rescued from sin and death, given everlasting life, and set on a trajectory toward glory, but those of the flesh are altogether ruined, wrecked, and doomed.

The Gnostics read their anti-materialist prejudices onto Paul's letters, inferring that spirit is inherently good and that matter is inherently evil. I do not mean to question Paul or the Holy Spirit for their mutual decision to use these terms, but it seems as if the distinction inherently smacks of Gnosticism or some species of Platonism.

Well, I think we can defend Paul's and also John's use of this dichotomy while affirming that there is nothing intrinsic to mere spirit or to mere flesh that makes one superior to the other. I want to note a couple of things.

1. "Spirit" in the Pauline Epistles and in John 6:63 is, of course, the Holy Spirit.
2. "Flesh," as used in the New Testament, often means sinful human nature. That is what is in play in most Pauline usage of the word. Neither does it refer exclusively to our bodies and their sinful nature but it includes our sinful minds, sinful hearts, and sinful spirits as well. This is all "flesh" for Paul.
3. "Flesh" in John 6:63 is not synonymous with "sinful human nature" or bare materiality but with pure natural reason. The flesh here that is of no help is that of the human mind unenlightened by faith, not the flesh and blood that Christ bids us to eat and drink as our regular "spiritual" food earlier in the chapter. Christ's literal flesh and blood offered up for us at Calvary, and consequently signified for and delivered tangibly to us in the Eucharist (not by transformation but by the presence of the Holy Spirit in and with the bread and wine, according to my Reformed perspective), is everything in John 6. The flesh and blood Christ offered up for us at Calvary is the root of our Life as regenerated persons.
   
   (The best Protestant commentary I could find on John 6:63 is solid but contains a heresy. The Geneva Study Bible notes of this verse: "The flesh of Christ therefore quickens us, because he that is man is God: and this mystery is only comprehended by faith, which is the gift of God, found only in the elect."
   
   Good so far and still good on its lexical note on Spirit, except for the heresy it contains: "Spirit, that is, that power which flows from the Godhead causes the flesh of Christ (which is otherwise nothing but flesh) both to live in itself and to give life to us."
   
   That which is in parentheses is technically heretical because there is no humanity of Christ without the divine nature joined to it in hypostatic union. The ancient ecumenical Council of Chalcedon describes Christ as being "in two natures, inconfusedly,unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.")
   
   I digress; the point is that Christ's discourse on his flesh and blood in John 6 must be apprehended by faith, not according to human reason. Human reason finds it preposterous that Jesus can be both fully God and fully human and consequently a human sacrifice for us, but faith recognizes that these are the central realities of the Christian faith.
4. The Spirit is eternal, but the flesh is temporary. This doesn't necessarily imply hierarchy of mere spirit over mere matter. The Spirit/flesh dichotomy is most appropriate for its inference about duration and influence. Flesh (matter) as we currently know it is perishable. Sinful flesh in particular is dying a slow death in the Church and in the individual Christian, but it will inevitably and completely die, though bare matter will not disappear because we will have perfect and incorruptible physical bodies in the Kingdom.
   
   The Spirit, on the other hand, which is God's agent (not to mention very God of very God) of cosmic and individual regeneration, is already powerful in the Church, the world, and in individual believers. The Spirit's influence is eternal and is only getting stronger in the Church, the world, and in individual believers. It will triumph over all when the Kingdom arrives in all its fullness.

Okay, here's how I'm going to bring this sprawling train wreck to an end. We fast during Lent, not because matter is bad, but because matter is good, inasmuch as it is a means of communion with God. We fast so we can bring our bodies and souls into subjection to the will of God and thus offer our whole selves as sacrifices to the one who sacrificed his whole self for us.

When we feast as the Church on the Lord's Supper, we are anticipating that time when matter is returned to the purpose for which it was created—to be a means of union between God and his creatures. The purpose of the Eucharist is thus, according to my friend Dustin Lyon, "the fundamental proclamation of the gospel where all creation is redeemed and the world becomes what it was meant to be: a means of communion with God and transparent to Him." That's why the Word of God, as embodied in Jesus himself, Scripture, and Sacrament, are central to Christian worship. Let us not feast on words alone but on the Word, flesh and Spirit, in all of his fullness.

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.*

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.