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.

Truth and Love: The How and Why of Ecumenism

My theological life lately is a precarious balancing act. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to hold contradictory things together and perhaps I often am. The array of Christian thought and life is often confusing, bewildering, and sometimes disheartening, but I also believe that in spite of the negatives like division and error that are inherent in this state of affairs, there is also much that is good and right about theological, ecclesial, and liturgical diversity among Christians. Truth and the Triune life of God are many splendored things. As the clear light of God shines upon us, we behold many colors and shapes as though on the other side of a prism. These, of course, are not separate things. The entire color spectrum, when un-refracted and concentrated as a ray is the unity of pure and clear light. We are taught in the Scriptures to understand the body of Christ in the same manner.

The problem, though, is that because of our creaturely limitations, enlarged and polluted by sin, our thinking and acting is like a corrupt and impure prism, creating falsehoods and distortions within the components of pure light as this shines through the prism. Contradictions, errors, and divisions arise as a result. Until sin is removed in its entirety from us and our world, we should realistically expect this to continue. The question, of course, is, "What does God will for us in our repentance from sin in regard to this reality?" We certainly cannot give up the pursuit of truth or the conviction of conscience, for to do so would be to have the very contradictions, errors, and divisions we deplore as real evils to reign even more than they already do. We would simply be united in a free-for-all if we simply let truth and holiness go for the sake of unity, and that's no unity at all. Yet, because we are aware of our own sin and limits, we cannot be self-assured that we ourselves see all so clearly that we begin to think we are above this state of affairs. As a result, we seek the perspectives of Christian others to gain a broader view of truth and righteousness.

The things I have expressed are all well and good, but more is required of us than this purely intellectual approach. This pursuit of truth necessarily leads us to something else. We must speak of love. Our Savior loved us and died for us and he desires that we love one another as he has loved us. In fact, he tells us that inasmuch as we love one another we love him. This is the number one reason why Christians should be ecumenical, because Jesus commands us to love one another. And out of this love, for Christ and for all his people, we should be acquainted with what his people believe and do for his sake and love that which is from him in all that they believe and do. This is, I believe, a fundamental aspect to loving our fellow believers who differ from us in understanding and practice. Our first response should not be to correct their errors that we see, but to acknowledge Christ in them and direct our attention to loving him in them. From this love, the mutual pursuit of truth should then proceed.

As I noted above, this is tricky business. How do we hold truth and love together when sometimes to our appearance they pull us in opposite directions? Jesus Christ perfectly holds these together in full force. For those who are willing to take the ecumenical challenge, it is only by the perfection of truth and love in Jesus Christ himself that these can be present in us toward all of his followers. It is only in and through him that this is possible. As in all things, if we are to respond obediently to the love of Christ, we must cling tightly to him. Amen.

Justification: Whose Legal Fiction?

A conversation I was having yesterday with a friend has set me to thinking. My completely awesome friend JK converted to Roman Catholicism two weeks ago and he was sharing with me his frustrations with Calvin’s view of the Eucharist and how, but for rejecting transubstantiation and the consequent adoration of the elements, Calvin’s view on virtually all other points is the Roman Catholic view. I mentioned something about a perceived radical nominalism the Reformers might have been reacting against in Catholicism’s making the elements the substantial body and blood of Christ while they retain the properties of bread and wine and in some sense may still be spoken of as symbols. I guess I was driving toward the seeming appearance of an epistemological monstrosity in which God becomes bread and wine when one tries to have it both ways, so I wasn’t quite expressing myself clearly in bringing up radical nominalism. There is a transformation in the Catholic view—not just God making bread and wine Christ’s body and blood by fiat. This was key, though, because it moved us toward discussing justification, about which my buddy said the Reformers were working with a radical nominalism in having the justified imputed righteous while they remain sinners. That Luther philosophically defended simul iustus et peccator by resorting to the nominalism of Ockham and others, I agree, but Protestant justification is not a legal fiction. Not only is justification a declaration about Christ satisfying all of God's requirements of justice for us, but it is also a transformative declaration about sinners becoming the righteousness of God, in the same way that in transubstantiation, the words, “This is my body. This is my blood” are a transformative declaration about bread and wine becoming what they were not previously.

The above is a controversial rumination, but it led to one that might be just as controversial. I’m thinking that in regards to justification and our understandings of grace and what grace does to the rebel children of Adam and Eve, both Protestants and Roman Catholics have difficulty with process. Catholics might would say I have a lot of gall saying that in the way that Protestantism divvies up justification and sanctification and states justification as an instantaneous event that delivers a forensic righteousness (not a real personal righteousness, Catholics would note) decisive for final salvation, which, Catholics would go on to argue, renders the process of sanctification that follows superfluous in the economy of salvation. In some Protestant explanations of justification, I would have to admit this Catholic objection scores a legitimate point, but I would counter by speaking of justification as a delivery in the present of an earnest of the substantial righteousness, secured and vouchsafed for us by the perfect life, death, and resurrection Jesus Christ underwent in our place, that will belong to the Christian when God delivers him or her finally and completely from sin and all its effects at the last day. In other words, justification for Protestants need not be considered so exhaustive of salvation that God's delivering us at the level of our nature from the power and presence of sin between regeneration and glorification is emptied of all significance. Justification is the declaration of a fact that will be; the fact—Christ's perfect obedience imputed to us in the present—declaring what will assuredly be in the future—our glorified nature resulting from justification-grounded sanctification.

Where do I view the Catholic understanding of justification to have trouble with process in regards to how grace works? I mean, over against Protestantism Roman Catholicism does not distinguish between justification and sanctification and thinks of the decisive note of justification as a process, for crying out loud! Well, here goes. In Roman Catholicism, the declaration of righteousness a Christian receives at first justification is the declaration of a fact pure and simple, not qualified in any way. At justification, the Christian is not simultaneously a sinner and just; a Christian is just just. All is right with him or her. I may be misrepresenting from this point forward (I do not know, but I trust my ex-Reformed, out-of-the-closet Catholic friend and his Catholic brothers and mine will let me know if I have unintentionally misrepresented the Church’s teachings), but it seems the conclusion we must draw from this is that all the truly meaningful adverse affects of the Fall are healed when one is regenerated (if only until the first post-baptismal sin). Because the only thing wrong with the fallen human being is the deprivation of grace, it seems that it is only because of continuing sin throughout the remainder of life that the further sanctifying work of God is required for the Christian to arrive at the beatific vision. In other words, after first sanctifying grace there is no more healing of human nature that needs to be done. Everything afterwards is just an elaborate maintenance operation.

From the foregoing, then, sanctification and the entire sacramental system it depends on is just a maintenance operation, so thorough is the healing effected by first sanctifying grace. I might be wrong on this because Catholics recognize that concupiscence still remains in a Christian after baptism, but even if Catholics do not believe this concupiscence to be sin itself, it is still a disorder that was not present in humanity at our first creation. Concupiscence, even if we are not guilty simply by virtue of it, is still the seething cesspool of all unrighteousness. Is this the perfect and complete substantial righteousness, the healed nature, on account of which God calls us righteous? As long as the sin factory remains operational in any capacity, we cannot safely be spoken of as substantially righteous in God’s presence. This is where the Tridentine Roman Catholic formulation of justification is susceptible to the same charge of legal fiction Catholics levy at Protestant views of justification.

It seems, in Roman Catholic soteriology, that God can’t do fatherly business with human beings until they come into his presence with every last vestige of unrighteousness or unsoundness in their nature done away with. This is where I say the Tridentine Roman Catholic view of justification and grace, for all of its reliance on Aristotlean becoming, has trouble with process. If Protestants have a process problem in our understanding of such a front-loaded imputed righteousness that it implicitly makes the subsequent healing of our nature and the obedience that would flow from it superfluous in the economy of salvation, then Catholics have just as big a process problem in their view of a positional justification that requires a pristine essential righteousness moment-to-moment in a human being for saving communion with the Holy Trinity. Being called and really made righteous is a long process because the wreck the Fall has made of us is truly great and terrible. Arriving at the end of the process is not and cannot be a precondition for beginning. God takes care of working it out so he can get us started standing on solid ground. For Protestants, that solid ground is the alien righteousness of Christ imputed to us presently, which by the progressive work of the Holy Spirit will so permeate us by the last day that it will rightly be spoken of at that point as our own personal nature.

I will conclude this haphazard and off-the-cuff reflection on grace by positing that grace neither be considered exclusively in terms of God’s unmerited favor by which he relates to sinners, a la Protestantism, nor that grace be considered exclusively in terms of Divine energy that must infuse people in order to lift them into communion with the Holy Trinity, a la Catholicism and Orthodoxy. I prefer a both/and approach. They are two sides of the same reality. Grace is nothing other than the personal benevolence of God, whether exhibited in forgiving sinners or communing with his creatures whether they be upright or fallen. God forgives us, fills us, heals us, loves us, by the Spirit of his grace. Grace is forgiveness and healing and peaceful harmony with God through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

Overreacting to John Piper's 2 Minutes with the Pope

I saw this video of John Piper’s response to the question of what he would say to the Pope if he had two minutes with him, and I just had to respond. Let me throw out a few caveats before I get to it. First, Piper is responding off the cuff to a question he wasn’t expecting and this is probably in a conference situation where everybody is operating with the same assumptions and views. All in all, the situation is not conducive for a comprehensive and nuanced response to an opposing point of view. Second, I don’t know as much as I probably should about Piper. He is a big name for evangelical Calvinists, and he has had a hugely positive impact in the lives of many of my friends. I can’t argue with this. I have every intention of reading Don’t Waste Your Life, and my personal impression of him the few times I’ve listened to him on the Internet is positive. This man is a passionate, warm, human being fully alive with love for Jesus and people kind of guy. I think he is an overwhelmingly positive force in the Kingdom of God.

That all being said, I think John Piper might have a too-narrow conception of the Gospel. If his engagement with NT Wright and here, with Roman Catholicism, is any indication, Piper has substituted a comprehensive explanation of the Gospel with a very specific formal statement about how the Gospel works to bring individual sinners into right relationship with God. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the formulation Piper here gives: “we should rely entirely on the righteousness of Christ imputed to us by faith alone as the ground of God being 100 percent for us, after which necessary sanctification comes.” This is how the Gospel works to bring people into the Kingdom of God, but, necessary and central though this affirmation might be, this does not encompass all that the Gospel entails. The Gospel put more comprehensively might go something like this: Jesus has been established as the world’s true Lord through his righteous life, death, and resurrection and that, as a result, God has lifted his curse on the whole created order, brought it into his favor, and set it on a trajectory towards its original intended end of righteousness, which will be fulfilled at Christ’s Second Coming. Take Piper’s formulation with this and we have the who, what, how, what for, and where are we going of the Gospel.

My main issue, however, is that Piper does not seem to have grasped the full nuance of the Roman Catholic position on justification, and from that flattened understanding, has rather obtusely declared Roman Catholic theology heretical.

To the Roman Catholic position on justification: are we talking about first justification as in baptism or are we talking about final justification? If we’re talking about first justification, or, to find the most analogous modern Reformed Protestant term, “regeneration,” I believe some Catholics would posit that this does come by faith alone. At any rate, the sole graciousness of God in first regenerating a sinner is quite profoundly acknowledged by the Roman Catholic Church. On this issue, perhaps, if we cut through the formal systematics each side is using, the differences are not quite as profound as would first appear.

The rub is in reference to final justification. Historically, Protestants have not parsed justification the way Catholics do into initial, positional, and final categories. To be declared righteous at regeneration is one in the same as being declared righteous in the end, and this comes solely on the basis of Christ’s righteousness imputed to the sinner. This is Piper’s position. I will play the game of double justification, though. NT Wright does it far better than Piper thinks he does and even John Calvin can speak of a double justification where in the end believers are judged according to works that have themselves been justified by grace alone through faith alone. Works may enter in to final justification, but they rest entirely on the ground of Christ’s righteousness for their worth.

On the Roman Catholic side, however, we have a final justification that is based on righteousness infused by faith and works. A first declaration of righteousness at regeneration does not guarantee a declaration of righteousness at the final day. Catholics must work with God for a righteous verdict on the final day. Obviously, this is quite different from justification by faith alone. There is no denying there’s quite a gulf between these views, but a look at the qualifications both Protestants and Catholics make on final justification, faith, and, works makes the gap look less imposing.

In Calvin’s case, with God justifying us in the end by works viewed in light of Christ’s imputed righteousness, or, in the case of NT Wright, with God in his covenant faithfulness working righteousness in his people in order to deliver them with the same verdict on the last day that he did when he first declared them righteous on their entry into the covenant, Protestants, with BIG qualifications, can also say we will be judged in some sense by our works. In this light, we must look at the way Protestants define faith. For John Calvin, faith subsumes a disposition of piety, and the Westminster Confession of Faith speaks of justifying faith as never being alone but “ever accompanied with all other saving graces,” being “no dead faith, but work[ing] by love” (XI. 2).

Let us look to the Catholic qualifications of works. For instance, without grace removing sin from believers or without God crowning his own gifts with grace in the works of believers, Catholics teach that works do not of themselves merit favor with God. It seems to me that though works are required for salvation in Roman Catholicism, they don’t amount to a hill of beans unless God determines to look on them in a merciful light. Why is it that the distinction between mortal and venial sins is superfluous prior to baptism, unless God views Christians according to a fatherly standard the unregenerate are not privy to? Catholicism is not Pelagian or even semi-Pelagian. I think semi-Augustinian would be a better designation. If you take Catholic qualifications into account, I think it is no more pertinent to call Roman Catholic theology heretical than it is to call Arminian theology heretical. First justification there does not guarantee final justification either. Unfaithfulness can muck it up. Are the Young, Restless, and Reformed crowd sectarian enough to call John Wesley a heretic?

I must also take exception to the use of the word “heresy.” I wish we Protestants would pronounce a moratorium on this word until we learn to use it correctly. In Protestant terms, it seems to me that heresy means an error so severe that it makes the holder of it almost certainly toast. Every time we Protestants call someone a heretic, this means we believe that they are almost certainly going to Hell if they do not repent. I wish conservative Roman Catholics would likewise refrain from throwing the term about when speaking of Christians who belong to what the Vatican calls, “ecclesial communities,” but even in this case, there are extenuating factors, like “invincible ignorance,” and degrees within the Catholic concept of heresy that are conceptually impossible in conservative Calvinist theology. In our post-Vatican II universe, Protestant “heretics” can still be saved unless they know in their consciences that they are maintaining heretical beliefs. For doctrinaire Protestants, it just doesn’t matter.

Finally, I must end my overreaction to a 2 minute clip by grappling with the most troubling implication of Piper’s designation of those who do not agree with justification by faith alone in the confessional Protestant sense as heretics. The implication is that prior to the rise of the Waldensians in the 12th century, all of three people were saved for about eleven hundred of the first twelve hundred years of Church history. Let me ask, is Ignatius a heretic? Is the martyr bishop Polycarp? Is Irenaeus? Is Chrysostom? Is Athanasius? Is Ambrose? Is Bernard of Clairvaux a heretic? Is predestinarian, incipient quasi-Calvinistic Augustine, our hero, a heretic? For all of his Protestantly-speaking sound teaching on the sole graciousness of God in salvation, he does not even arrive at an incipient Protestant teaching of justification by faith alone. You won’t find a formal affirmation of justification by faith alone anywhere in the first millennium of the Church. Do I believe it’s possible that it wasn’t till the second millennium of the Church that we began to grapple most fully with Paul’s teachings on justification? Yes, I do, but failing to arrive at the formal declaration of justification by faith alone hits not right at the very heart of the Christian Gospel. We must look elsewhere for the doctrine on which the Church stands or falls. We have been promised that “the increase of his government shall know no end.” If the vast majority of Christians who have ever lived have failed to grasp the most central essence of the Christian faith, heaven help us all. That would be a failure of the promise of the perpetual growth of the Kingdom of God in this world. But thanks be to the abundant mercy of our God, salvation has been marching on where it has not been expressed in confessional Protestant terms. Christ saves all those who cling in simple faith to him.

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.

More Thoughts on Rome and Constantinople

3. I do not view the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox positions on apostolic succession and their concomitant views on the Church's infallible teaching authority to be absurdities that can be summarily swept aside by all sensible, clear thinking people, as most Protestants seem to think. Indeed, in light of the fractiousness that has always characterized Sola Scriptura Protestantism, these points of view might just be valid correctives to the subjectivism and individualism that have run amok throughout Protestant history. Perhaps, in this regard, John Henry Newman was right to muse that to study history is to cease to be Protestant.

4. The above being said, I must put forward a few keenly-felt objections to apostolic succession and Orthodox and Catholic views of the authority of the Church:

1) my autonomous Protestant spirit rankles at the thought of all Christian people being obligated to submit their reason to the teaching authority of a Church hierarchy that claims infallibility for itself and really means it.

2) Likewise, my democratic and egalitarian American soul finds it terribly constraining and inconvenient to limit the Body of Christ as it is expressed in its full-flower to communities led by a particular class of men who have been handing on an ecclesiastical baton for 2000 years.

3) Finally, the vestiges of my rationalized, pietistic, common-sense spirituality find very quaint and superstitious the notion that Christ's spiritual Kingdom can be tied so closely to the historical continuity of a flesh and blood community, or, God forbid, an institution.

Well, I can resolve, at least to some degree, the three objections above by highlighting the cultural context in which they occur. I won't reduce them entirely to cultural accident, but I have a feeling non-Western Protestants might object to Orthodox and Catholic views of Church authority on grounds different from the rather WASP-ish ones I just put forward.

On 1), I have a feeling that that autonomous Protestant spirit would rankle under just about any kind of dogmatic authority by any ecclesiastical body. I can't hack the idea of the Church being infallible in its teaching capacity, but we can't expect anything other than absolute doctrinal chaos if each individual Christian's conscience is a law unto itself, standing entirely apart from and unaccountable to the witness of communities of faith to what they believe the Scriptures to teach. That being said, historically, Protestant confessionalism has only seemed to raise the bar of "solo Scriptura" from an "every man for himself" type of anarchy to a scarcely more civilized species of tribalism.

On 2), Americans value nothing more than their sense of equality and their convenience. I don't know if these values of liberal democracy have the greatest relevance to issues of ecclesiastical validity, though. I believe Kingdom authority has definitely spilled over the bounds of the episcopate (otherwise, I should be compelled to become Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox), but I do not think that this is the case simply so that those of us in churches outside of apostolic succession may have our Christianity on our own terms. The Reformers valued legitimately constituted and exercised authority in the Church. I still think their reasons for schism were proper and weighty. Are ours?

On 3), what I referred to as "common-sense spirituality" is actually a denial of the significance of the Incarnation. Matter matters. The Church of Jesus Christ has been a continuously-existing, concrete, flesh and blood reality in the world since 33 A.D. Or has it?

If we evaluate the Church according to the criteria of doctrinaire Protestantism, we are left without a true, "New Testament" Church in the world for the vast majority of history because, for most of the Christian era, the only visible, established church has been distinctively Catholic. This is obviously a problem, if 1) Catholicism and Orthodoxy are apostate forms of Christianity, and 2) we take seriously Christ's promise in Matthew 16:18 that the gates of hell will not prevail against His Church. The standard solution to this problem has been to shift our gaze from the church of history to a more immaterial conception of the Church.

In order to find the persevering Church of Christ's promise somewhere else than directly in the at times rather suspect church of history, most Protestants predicate this perseverance on the mystical "invisible Church," which consists of the whole number of the saved but is spiritual in character and is thus ultimately known only to God. In Matthew 16:18, though, Jesus is clearly referring to the organized, tangible, worldwide assembly of believers that he knew would go on to meet in divers places every Lord's Day for at least the next 2000 years. What good would the promise of Matthew 16:18 be to us if its fulfillment was lodged in a kind of church whose perseverance could not be empirically verified? Resorting to the invisible Church on this account would be an equivocation. If there has been any point in history since the founding of the Church that there has not remained on earth a true Church, we would just have to man up and admit that Jesus was mistaken.

5. The burden is on Catholic and Orthodox apologists to "prove" their particular brands of Church infallibility. I don't think their arguments work, but, when it comes to the way Protestants understand Christ to operate in and through His Church, we must come up with something better than what essentially amounts to "ecclesial deism." Ecclesial deism is basically the implicit idea that God has dealt with the post-apostolic Church in much the same way Deists understand God to have dealt with the world, i.e., created it as if it were a watch, wound it up, and then withdrew from it to let it operate on its own. In ecclesial deism, therefore, Christ founded the Church and then withdrew from it, leaving it to its own devices.

I learned this concept from a thought-provoking, sharply reasoned essay on the subject by Catholic apologist and friend of a friend, Bryan Cross. You can read the essay and engage with it at this link. What follows is just a bit of my own preliminary engagement with said essay.

Ecclesial deism is the necessary inference that issues from the standard Protestant account of Church history. At some point in the first 1500 years of the Christian movement, the pure Church of the apostles degenerated into the apostate Church of the Middle Ages that required the Reformation in order to be restored. In order for the Church to have gotten into this condition, Christ must have chosen not to preserve the Church in her fidelity to the deposit of faith she had received from Himself and the apostles, allowing her to fall into heresy and apostasy. The degree to which she compromised the central doctrines of the faith or the rate at which this compromise occurred may vary depending on who you talk to, but the general consensus among Protestants is that at least by the time leading up to the Reformation, the (by that point distinctively) Roman Catholic Church had so distorted the Christian faith that a break with her was necessary in order to restore the Church on earth.

As I've noted above, and as I agree with Mr. Cross, this is a problematic account of history because, if we buy it, it means we have to either: a) resort to the invisible Church gobbledygook that doesn't work, b) admit that Christ was wrong about the perseverance of His Church, c) hold to a weak and defective ecclesiology in which we have no assurance that Christ is present and working effectively through His earthly Body, or, d) all of the above.

6. This particular point is probably going to tumble out like a train wreck, but it seems like Protestant-Catholic back and forth about Christ's work in and through the Church is painted in entirely too much of a black-and-white kind of discourse. Either we have a Church that speaks infallibly because Christ has promised to lead His Church into all truth, or we have a Church in which Christ is scarcely thought to be present and working effectively because of a fundamental Protestant mistrust of material and social realities and of authority.

Maybe we’re speaking past each other. Maybe not. What I do know is that either-or categories are too simplistic for this discussion but that thinking in shades of gray won't get it done either. Dialectical or analogical thinking might be better suited to the task.

7. Bryan Cross is wise to utilize Christological categories in discussing the nature of the Church. After all, the Church is Christ's Body, "flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones." Cross exposes the weakness of Protestant ecclesiology by defining the oft-used distinction between the "outward" and "inward Church," or, "visible" and "invisible Church," as an "ecclesial Nestorianism." Nestorianism is the ancient heresy that Christ's human nature is a complete created being united extrinsically to the Divine second Person of the Trinity and, thus, that Jesus Christ is not one person but two persons, a human person closely united to a Divine person. For this reason, Nestorius refused to refer to Mary as Mother of God because, in his view, she did not give birth to the Divine person her Son was united to. In critiquing Protestant ecclesiology, then, Mr. Cross likens the outward Church to the human person and the inward Church to the Divine person in the Nestorian Christ.

Cross is right. The doctrine of the "-ible Church" is an ecclesial Nestorianism, and worse yet, implies an "ecclesial Docetism." Let's let Mr. Cross explain:

Ecclesial Nestorianism necessarily collapses into ecclesial Docetism. Here is why: given that Christ is the Head of the Mystical Body, then treating the Mystical Body as something distinct from, even if extrinsically united to, the Catholic Church [he's talking about the earthly Church], reduces the Catholic Church to a merely human institution, just as Nestorianism reduces Jesus to a mere human being. The real Church (i.e., the one that Christ founded), given ecclesial Nestorianism, is the invisible Church that may or may not be in some way related to the Catholic Church. That is ecclesial Docetism. The real Church . . . is the inward or invisible Church; there is no “visible Church” per se, nor do the promises of Christ apply to it. There are many visible churches, but no universal visible Church.

In other words, the visible Church only appears to be the Church Jesus founded. The invisible Church is the real Church. This basically makes Protestant ecclesiology a peripheral theological issue. Protestants have to arrive at something better to describe the reality of Christ present and powerful in the society of the Church that we actually do have access to as flesh and blood human beings or go to Rome or Constantinople where real, tangible, and consequential ecclesiology exists.

I would infer from Cross's application of Christological categories to the "-ible Church" that proper thinking about the nature of the Church should correspond with the orthodox, Chalcedonian Christology of the hypostatic union, in which Christ is defined as one person of two perfect and complete natures joined to one another in hypostatic union, without confusion or mixture. This means that Christ's human and Divine natures may be distinguished but they cannot be separated from one another without destroying the Incarnation, hence why the Church of antiquity rightly insisted on referring to Mary as Mother of God rather than simply as mother of Jesus. Basically, Christ's actions or attributes cannot be attributed this to His human nature and that to His Divine nature but both actions and attributes proper to His humanity and proper to His Divinity to the one God-Man.

The distinction between a human visible Church and a Divine invisible Church dissolved, would then the proper view of the Church in Catholic thought be to analogize from the hypostatic union of Divine and human natures in Christ to the relationship between Divine and human agency in the Church? After all, Augustine thought of the Catholic Church as totus Christus—the total Christ of Head and Mystical Body united. Does Cross mean to imply that human and Divine agency in the Church, at least at some level, may not be abstracted one from another on the basis that the Church is the Body of Christ—"the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way" (Ephesians 1:23)?

This is simultaneously profound and dangerous to my yet deeply Protestant sensibilities. What the Catholic Church and the apostolic churches of Orthodoxy want us to see is that through the humanity of the Church, sinful and broken yet as it is, Christ has promised that He will be present and working, speaking faithfully to His people through the ages in the Holy Spirit-guided episcopal successors of the apostles. On the one hand, this is profound because it reflects the covenantal pattern of God coming to dwell among and guide His people that appears throughout Scripture and culminates in God's Incarnation as Jesus Christ. On the other hand, this is dangerous because the temptation exists that in the recognition of God's agency through human figures, God may become displaced, with bare human authority rising to the level of Divine authority and man-made traditions supplanting the original, pure deposit of faith.

My Protestant cautions noted, I think the use of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ is a good point from which to analogize about human and Divine agency in the Church, provided that the understanding is that it is analogical—at least until we arrive at ecclesiastical maturity when the Kingdom arrives in full force—and that we reason forth from it even-handedly. I affirm together with my Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters that Christ is, in a profoundly Incarnational way, present to us through the Holy Spirit in the earthly assembly of the Catholic Church, and that, in spite of sin and human failing within the Church, the Church—in toto—is truly one flesh with Jesus Christ and, as such, will be preserved in faithfulness to Him through the ages. I am skeptical, however, about describing this faithfulness in terms of infallibility.

When it comes to the question, though, of a sphere in which the infallibility of the Divine Person is predicated of His human ministers, it would seem to re-raise the specter of ecclesial Nestorianism to abstract the teaching capacity of the Church from its other functions, ascribing the category of Divine infallibility to the Church in its fundamental teaching capacity, while admitting of human fallibility for the Church in its other capacities. Remember, the hypostatic union does not allow us to divide Christ.

Perhaps, though, I have not fully understood what Catholics and Orthodox affirm respectively about Church infallibility. If Christ's infallibility were predicated of the Church only when she speaks or acts as one (which would be the rare instance, indeed), logical consistency with the hypostatic union would be preserved, but would this still be taking the Incarnational nature of the Church too far?

I certainly share the faith that Jesus Christ has led thus far and will continue to lead His Church into all truth and preserve her in faithfulness to Himself through the ministry of his servants, but my Protestant skepticism remains strong whether "infallible" can be applied to any singular function of Christ's Church or even to Christ's Church in those limited occasions when it speaks or acts as one before the Kingdom comes in full force.

Where I Sit with Churches of Apostolic Succession

As those of you who know me know, I've been expressing a certain affinity with Roman Catholicism for awhile now. Indeed, my encounters with the Church of Rome and to a lesser though still important degree my brushes with Eastern Orthodoxy have resulted in a rather significant shift in my theological outlook. I've gone from being a dogmatic Protestant to a confused one of the kind that should scare the be-Jesus out of all dogmatically convinced anti-Catholics.

I must admit that some of this arises from a felt need to embody the prevailing cultural fascination with novelty and thus one could say that to some degree I question and challenge conventional Protestant convictions simply because that's my background. Thankfully, that rather suspect and dangerous motivation is not my primary one. I may be a rebel, but I'm no rebel without a cause. My peculiar fascination arises from that point in my spiritual development when I began to feel a strong desire to see Jesus Christ in the face of the Christian other but found that my Protestantism was of a far too narrow character to admit that those Christian believers who differed significantly from me in any way could even rightly be called Christians.

In order in my mind to rescue the vast majority of Christian believers who have ever lived from the fires of hell, my theological outlook got "all messed up," as some would undoubtedly describe it. In that messy process, I've spent some time studying Church history—the undivided Church of ancient times, the medieval Church—and the great figures—the Church Fathers, the Protestant Reformers. As I had suspected, historic Christianity, including classic Protestantism, looks and sounds peculiarly Catholic.

I have also spent some time studying the character of Christianity as it currently exists throughout the world. To view the contemporary global Church through my former narrow separatist Protestant lenses would be to cast off the greatest part of Christ's body as chaff, whereas to view it through the more charitable eyes I believe God has given me is to see a miraculous God-wrought diversity in Christ's Kingdom as it advances ever gloriously on to the ends of the earth.

What exactly is my theological and ecclesiological identity at this point, then? As I said, I'm a confused Protestant; I have a strong dose of Reformed but I find myself even more captivated by forms of Christianity that value the sacraments and the mystical side of faith and hold the Church and its continuity of life and thought in highest regard.

Yes, I recognize that for many this place where I am at is the beginning of the road that leads to Rome or to Constantinople. Even as I write this, I am thinking of a friend who is well down that road and wrestles with whether to continue on to Rome or to remain a Protestant. I am praying for him that God grants him peace as he wrestles with this question that I myself have spent some time considering. I take this opportunity to take stock of my own thoughts as to where I sit in regard to those venerable churches that claim apostolic succession as a mark of the true Church.

1. The strongest and most compelling link in the apologetic chain for either Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy is that the line of succession of bishops down to the time of the apostles has been regarded since the beginning of the Christian movement as a mark of the true Church. Indeed, the first time in Church history that we see significant numbers of Christian people not under the authority of bishops within lines of succession from the apostles being regarded as genuine Christians is at the Reformation, and even then, it is only the Protestants who regard themselves as genuine Christians.

So what? It's no matter of small consequence that the apostolic succession of bishops in the period of the early Church was vital to the Church's preservation of theological orthodoxy against the claims of the heretics.

So much, in fact, did the Reformers value apostolic succession that they were initially very reluctant to break with it but later rejected the doctrine in no uncertain terms. Was this because they could not substantiate it based on Scripture or because apostolic succession became an impediment to the Reformation when few bishops sided with the Protestants?

That we call ourselves Protestants seems to imply to me that, at some level, reunion with Rome was the stated objective of the Protestant movement. Considering that the division of churches is a scandal to the Gospel and that unity between Christians is a command of the Savior, if all the doctrinal issues that separate Protestants and Catholics were to be resolved tomorrow, even if the Catholic Church still maintained its administrative structure intact, I would say that individual Protestants and all Protestant communities would be obligated to at least give the possibility of reunion with Rome serious consideration. For me, even if we were to pare that down to most or even half of the doctrinal issues that separate us, I think it would still be "Rome sweet home" for me!

2. Like the apostolic succession claim, the inability of Sola Scriptura to produce a consistent, principled hermeneutic for interpreting Scripture hits right at the heart of the conversions from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. It's high time that we Protestants admit that the Scriptures are not nearly as perspicuous in a broad systemic sense as we have been saying they are.

Due to the privileging of private interpretation over any kind of tradition (except for that of one's own Protestant tradition), not to mention the limits of human perspective in regard to any text, using Sola Scriptura as a biblical hermeneutic always results in interpretations of Scripture that are ultimately unfalsifiable. When a private interpretation or the interpretation of a group of Protestants has been opposed (even with other Scripture verses), the invariable response has always been, "You are stiff-necked and wicked people! If you would just listen to the Holy Spirit and approach the Scriptures objectively, you too would see what we see. You obviously do not listen to the Spirit or to reason because you do not see what we see; therefore, we are going to separate from you!" Thus goes the standard justification for our countless schisms.

Even when we push past the pop Protestant, "solo Scriptura," just me and my Bible distortion for the true, historic Sola Scriptura of classic Protestantism, i.e. Scripture as the final and sufficient doctrinal authority when interpreted in light of the historic Rule of Faith, we are still operating with a degree of subjectivity sufficient to shipwreck the prospects for doctrinal unity, since 1) Anglicans, Lutherans, and Reformed did not arrive at confessional consensus, and 2) the Rule of Faith Tradition 1 Protestants appeal to includes a great many items, like apostolic succession and Marian devotion, for instance, we would eschew out of hand.

The problem, however, for the Roman Catholic position on final doctrinal authority, is that appeals to an infallible teaching Magisterium and infallible Pope, even when limited to those circumstances in which papal and magisterial infallibility are said to apply, also result in pronouncements of Christian truth that are ultimately unfalsifiable. Indeed, for Catholics there is the conviction that when the Pope has ruled ex cathedra or when an ecumenical council or the Sacred Magisterium has ruled infallibly on a matter pertaining to faith or morals that Jesus Christ has spoken with His own authority. That being said, one still cannot help but fear that the line between "The Church has so ruled because it is true" and "It is true because the Church has so ruled " can easily disappear if the inability of the Church to be wrong is a given right from the get-go.

A great deal of misrepresentation has settled in with regard to the self-purported infallibility of the Pope and the Roman Magisterium—no, papal infallibility does not mean the Pope is incapable of personal sin or that all his public statements are to be viewed as infallible, nor does the infallibility of the Sacred Magisterium mean that everything the Church teaches or has ever taught is to be regarded by Catholics as infallible. I do not wish to add to the misinformation, but I can sincerely say that the degree of un-falsifiability insulating Roman Catholic dogma from critique is as great a logical shortcoming for Roman hermeneutics as the subjectivity and un-falsifiability inherent in Sola Scriptura is for Protestant hermeneutics. However, in light of the sheer weight of 2000 years of official Roman Catholic teaching that the Magisterium and the papacy must avoid running afoul of, there is little room left in their procedure, at least at this point in history, for the subjectivity and innovation that has so often plagued Protestant teaching.

The Eastern Orthodox position on Church infallibility appears somewhat more tenable to me than the Roman Catholic position, as it centers on the authority of the entire Church represented in the gathered bishops of an ecumenical council. In effect, then, the Eastern Orthodox Church speaks infallibly only when it speaks with the voice of the entire Church. This is not all that different from the way confessional Protestantism has strived to work, but it has not worked to preserve Christian unity the way it has in Eastern Orthodoxy. Stay tuned for more to come.

Evangelicalism and the Problem of Subjectivity

Scott Clark is once again smoking crack over on the Heidelblog, but he has characteristically captured a small slice of truth in the midst of an otherwise delusional, drug-induced haze. He's way off base and downright mean in comparing Tim Keller to Neville Chamberlain and mainstream evangelicalism to Hitler in his title to this post, even if he's right to warn us against a postmodern reductionism that would deny the existence of propositional truth because of the recognition of the problem of perspective.

Yeah, triperspectivalism may be "responsible for undermining a good bit of Reformed theology, piety, and practice," but from whence comes Dr. Clark's absolute dogmatic certainty that the Reformed confessions and his particularly narrow interpretation of them are an immaculate and timelessly normative exposition of the objective truths of Scripture? One cannot escape the problem of perspective even if he or she is elect!

I know exactly where he's heading when he asks, "Why are evangelicals, who have no sympathy for the confessional doctrines of church and sacraments, enamored of TPism?" I absolutely agree that rampant subjectivism is destructive, but, seriously, who made Scott Clark, Westminster Seminary California, and the brass in NAPARC the infallible guardians of all Christian truth and the entire Church catholic? Have you truly divested yourselves so completely of your context and humanity, not to mention depravity, that you have risen transcendent to speak heavenly truths without the means of earth? How about a little humility in conducting the theological enterprise? The Scriptures are absolutely true, but don't "we all make many mistakes" in teaching and interpreting them?

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.*

Our Mother, the Church?

John Calvin echoes Saints Cyprian and Augustine in proclaiming, "He who would have God for his Father must have the Church for his Mother." How curious that one of the Reformers would heartily endorse such a Catholic-sounding view of the Church. Is this an unnecessary holdover from the Catholic Church that Calvin’s spiritual children did well to do away with, or, is it in fact representative of biblical language about the Church?

Actually, the Westminster Confession, which has historically served as the boundary marker for Anglo-American Calvinism, does not jettison this kind of talk altogether, describing the earthly Church as that "out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation" (25. 2). But perhaps the Westminster Confession of Faith misses what Calvin had to say about the Church? After all, it connects personal union with Christ exclusively to the invisible Church while asserting a merely political union with Christ in the visible Church (compare 25.1 to 25.2). Calvin, on the other hand, while it can be debated that he embraced a completely spiritualized concept of Christ's Body, seems to indicate more of what Augustine and Cyprian had in mind. It seems he would agree with these important ancient Christian thinkers that God has designed the earthly Church as the ark or womb into which sinful human beings are gathered for rescue from death and birth into the Kingdom of God. She is the Mother to whom we must turn for shelter from the forces of evil.

"Behold, your Mother," says Jesus to the disciple he loved as he was hanging on the cross (John 19:27). Is Christ entrusting us to His Mother and His Mother to us for the sake of Mary alone? He is certainly exalting her but only as the symbol of the Church He bids us embrace as the means of our union with Him. Just as Christ was conceived in Mary's womb by the Holy Spirit, so is Christ conceived in our hearts through the work of the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mother Church. Likewise, just as Christ was born whole from Mary after developing in her womb, He will be born fully formed in us when He returns because of the gestation of His Body in the womb of Mother Church. In this sense, Mother Church can be thought of as Christ Conceiver, Christ Nurturer, and Christ Bearer. The Christ life enters us through Her and will be brought to its maturity and full life in us through Her.

We can utilize the imagery of the Church's Motherhood to point us to the more classically biblical image of the Church's bridal union with Christ. Just as divinity finds its union with humanity in the Child in Mary's womb, so too do God's people find bridal union with Jesus in the womb of Mother Church.

Therefore, let it be known that whenever "high church” folks make such high-sounding statements about the Church, we are not elevating the bare humanity of the Church to the level of divine authority but simply recognizing the authority of Christ in His union with His Church. It is Christ we praise when we say such things. And let it never be thought that we conceive of the Church as standing between humanity and Christ. The great salvation we find in the Church is Christ's own communication to us of the salvation He purchased for us on the cross!

A Jelly Sandwich Jesus

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

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

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

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

Reclaiming the Sacramental (Part 3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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