Becoming Evangelical?

Well, I guess it was probably inevitable but I finally lost all of my “born again” marbles and joined the Lutherans. Short of swimming the Tiber this is probably the thing conservative Evangelicals suspicious of creeds, formal liturgy, and sacraments fear most when one of their own takes a look at Christianity before and beyond the scope of that which considers the individual heart decision to receive Jesus in one particular moment of life the central focus of Christian faith. To compare the issue to something that is easily accessible for American Protestants at the moment, if we think of this in terms of the “Why I hate religion but love Jesus” video that went viral across the Internet recently, I have likely chosen that which the hip young man in the video would claim Jesus came to abolish. If religion means that you believe the central encounter of the Christian faith is that which occurs when Christians gather together on a weekly basis to encounter the risen Christ in Word, Sacrament, and one another, then color me religious and allow me to mention that Jesus had no intention of abolishing such a thing.

I will agree with Jefferson Bethke, however, that Jesus came to abolish a false kind of religion where your faith, public or private, makes no practical difference in the way you treat people for whom you believe Jesus died or live your life before the God you claim to love. That’s the real dichotomy here. It’s not Jesus v. religion but false religion v. living faith that is the all important distinction we must maintain. Likewise, when it comes to my move to Lutheranism from mainstream Evangelicalism, the divide I am crossing is not between heart Christianity and formal Christianity but between what I see as a kind of Christian faith that has unintentionally separated public and private and heart and body with its exclusive focus on individual conversion and that which more successfully integrates our total experience and need as human beings before God.

Even here, however, I am perhaps raising a dichotomy just as unhelpful and insulting as the one Bethke raised in his immensely popular diatribe. As Christians and Protestants both, contemporary Evangelicals and Lutherans, when we look at one another, should see much of ourselves in the other. The reasons are both historical and confessional. The popular and amorphous form of Protestantism we know today as Evangelicalism applies to itself the name Lutherans have applied to themselves since the Reformation. Lutherans are the first group of Christians specifically known as “Evangelicals,” and the central emphasis on the biblical Gospel that Jesus alone saves us by His cross and resurrection through faith today’s Evangelicals inherited historically from these original Evangelicals. The Lutheran spiritual tradition exalts this Gospel in many powerful ways. Gene Veith, in his wonderful book, The Spirituality of the Cross: the Way of the First Evangelicals, lays this out in greater detail, but I will spell out a few of the high points.

Jesus Christ and His cross and resurrection take the central place in every Lutheran service of worship. At the confession and absolution of sin, we ask for forgiveness "for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ and His most holy, bitter, and innocent sufferings and death" for us and the Pastor grants the same to us through the Word of Jesus Christ. The Scripture readings in the service always focus on the person and work of Jesus Christ. In the Old Testament reading we are faced with the Law, which convicts us of sin and points us by types and shadows to Jesus Christ and His cross work. The practice is for two readings from the New Testament to be given, but one of the readings is always from the four Gospels and the sermon most often focuses on the Gospel text. The person, teaching, and saving action of Jesus always come to the fore in this way. Not just in the subject matter, however, but also in the manner of presentation and emphasis, the sermon also centers on Jesus, with its climax being the proclamation that Jesus has secured our salvation through His performance of the Law for us, His bearing the punishment for our sins on the cross, and His justifying us and empowering us for new life through the resurrection. Jesus and His cross and resurrection also come into sharp relief at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, which is Christ’s giving to us of His true Body wounded for us and His true Blood shed for us for the forgiveness of sins. And of course, the service is not seen primarily as an obedience we perform for God (Law), but rather as His offering of forgiveness to us in Jesus Christ (Gospel), to which our hearts respond by worshiping and glorifying God in gratitude for what He has done for us.

Lutheranism and contemporary Evangelicalism also exalt the Gospel by our similar focus on the Holy Scriptures as the absolute foundation for what we believe, confess, and live as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. As I alluded to above, the reading and preaching of the Word of God is central to the Lutheran service as the means of grace by which Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit not only reveals Himself to us but makes Himself present to the gathered body and individual believers for saving, teaching, and guiding us. As is the case with contemporary Evangelicalism, Lutheranism is thus only as Christ-centered as it is Bible-centered.

Lutheran spirituality and theology also, however, bring the same central Gospel into focus by emphases different from those highlighted by contemporary Evangelicalism. Both traditions will point to the same realities but focus on them in different ways and to different degrees. For instance, when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, we both affirm the Triune God as a priority in our worship and thinking, but it has been my experience that Lutherans and other classical Protestants as well as Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox place more explicit emphasis on the Triune God than most Evangelicals do. This is important because we obscure the Gospel inasmuch as we obscure the reality that God is Triune. The Trinity is the bull’s-eye center of the Christian faith because the doctrine of the Trinity is the expression of everything we know about God because of His revelation of Himself to us as Jesus Christ. The Trinity reveals the Gospel as the greatest demonstration of the love that characterizes the inner life of God, and it is the Gospel that most clearly reveals that God is Trinity, for our redemption is the work of the entire Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The explicit emphasis on the Triune God in the life and worship of Lutheranism also shows how the Gospel is co-extensive with the community and the way of life it produces. Because the Trinity reveals to us how God is, not just in His inner life but also as He is with His creatures, the Trinity also reveals to us how we are to be with one another in our life in God. If God Himself is a community of love, life in God is always life in community, and the life in the Christian community is to be characterized by love.

The emphasis on the Triune God in Lutheranism also keeps us aware of and in continuity with the ancient Christian Church, in which the articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity took place. Not only does the oneness of the Triune God keep us cognizant of our Savior’s prayer that we be one as He and the Father are one, but the Ecumenical Creeds that are our inheritance from the process of the articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity were delivered to today’s divided global Christian Church from the undivided ancient Church.

The invoking of the Trinity with the sign of the cross at the beginning of the service, the offering of the peace of the Lord to one another, the reciting of the Creeds, prayers offered “through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever,” and the conclusion of our services with the threefold Amen both actualize and keep us mindful of our sharing in the Triune life of God and all the implications of this reality.

Lutheranism and contemporary Evangelicalism, however, differ more in regard the diverging emphases we place on spirit and matter and the internal and the external in the way God communicates to us the salvation Christ accomplished for us. For instance, while we both understand and proclaim loudly that God has accomplished salvation for the world and humanity through His Incarnation as Jesus Christ and His death and resurrection in His physical body, Lutherans understand according to the Scriptures that God continues to use material realities to communicate to us the body-and-soul salvation Christ accomplished for us through His human nature. This starts with the way we understand the agency of the Word of God in salvation. Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit working, in, with, and through physical words on a page or spoken audibly by mouth, gives faith and salvation to believers. The efficacy of the sacraments as means of salvation comes through this same operation of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit in the promises of His Word. Baptism saves through the use of water to apply the promises of God's Word to us. Jesus Christ in His Body and Blood comes to be present in, with, and under the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper in a literal and supernatural manner by the power and promise of His Word.

While for contemporary Evangelicals such an earthly and physical understanding of salvation by sacraments would seem to imply salvation by works, Lutherans understand this precisely to be a corollary of salvation by Christ alone through faith alone. Powerless to grasp God's salvation from within ourselves, God, who is far from us because of our sin, comes to us from outside, putting his forgiveness, life, and grace into us through the Word we hear, the Triune Name he puts on us in baptism, and His Body and Blood we receive through eating and drinking the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper. It's by these physical means that we understand that we have not saved ourselves, not even by our emotional or spiritual appropriation of grace, but by God's objective salvation He renders to us as pure gift, which we receive as helpless and needy creatures from the merciful hand of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. In this, we also understand that the forgiveness and grace we have received through Christ and His cross and resurrection, grasp us and have implications for us body and soul, internally and externally, individually and corporately, both now and in eternity.

I will conclude by saying that I do not see my arrival in the Lutheran churches and tradition as a repudiation of my Evangelical heritage. Rather, the buds I still see growing richly in contemporary Evangelicalism have both their roots and fullest flowering blossoms in the faith and practice of the first Evangelicals.

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?

Church: Love It, Don't Leave It

Young pastors Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck writing on Newsweek/Washington Post "On Faith: Guest Voices" blog about the importance of the Church. Though they screwed Calvin and Cyprian's statement up, (which is actually: "Those who wish to have God for their Father must have the Church for their Mother.") they are otherwise spot on.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2009/07/church_love_it_dont_leave_it.html

The Worship Wars 1

The war over worship has opened a new front in my family. I went away to college and fell in love with a history-conscious, liturgical-sacramental, "high" Church style of worship, but, since I've returned home and we have started going to a very formal, liturgical Presbyterian church, it has become apparent that my mom and little sister are not as enamored with this traditional form as I am. They've informed me that they haven't felt "spiritual" since we started attending Broadway Pres. and that they must struggle mightily to remain awake during the services. What his wounded me the most is that my baby sister Samantha thinks that Presbyterians are just plain "weird," that the music is dreadful, and that the liturgy is basically an invention dropped to the earth from an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Mom misses the simplicity of the Baptist service and all the old hymns she grew up with.

It had been expressed over the past few months leading up to my scheduled move to St. Louis that after I left, Mom and Sam would no longer have to suffer through such boring Sunday morning services and that they would start going to the Celebration Center—the south campus of multi-site First Church United Methodist. In other words, they were going to exchange the boring, formal, traditional, liturgical worship I had gotten them into for trendy, contemporary, informal, uplifting worship at a place that has a movie theater, a coffee shop, a bookstore, and whose "sanctuary" is a big auditorium that doesn't even look like a church.

Well, the move fell through, I'm still here, and we've had to reach a compromise. We are doing Saturday night at the Celebration Center and Lord's Day at Broadway Pres. That's fair enough. Even Broadway is trying to do the same thing. They've started a more contemporary, informal service on Saturday night, "Morning Light" at the early service on Sunday, and traditional worship at 10:30. I would like us to try the contemporary service at Broadway, but since Samantha has connected with the youth group at First Methodist, it's best that we worship there with her.

I can tend to be a little dogmatic and pushy; I must admit I've become somewhat of a formal old prude in my insistence on a Christianity that has roots plunged deeply into the past and that is committed to sacramental and liturgical renewal. The mainstream evangelicalism that I grew up with as a Southern Baptist is no longer enough for me. I don't mean to belittle those who are quite content with mainstream evangelicalism and find themselves fulfilled and fruitful there, but, from my experience, that tradition has serious shortcomings in its individualism, subjectivism, and otherworldliness. I can't go back there. This is why I am going to continue to be a voice calling for the reform of mainstream evangelicalism until it develops a robust and thorough communal and covenantal emphasis, until it values the sacraments and the Church in their full biblical and patristic glory, and until it fully rejects Gnosticism and gets serious about reclaiming the world for God's glory and Christ's Kingdom.

Yes, I'm an old codger and, yes, what I'm doing may very well lead us back to being a bunch of stuffy old confessional Protestants or, worse, a godless horde of Papists (sorry, my "Romish" friends, you know I say this jestingly), but I am not opposed to contemporary Christian music on principle or to the "emerging church" or any other trendy new form or exercise of Christian faith that has as its aim the true worship of God and the advance of Christ's Kingdom. I don't think these things are necessarily bad. Like anything, they can be used for God's glory and the benefit of His Church.

In my hurt feelings that my family does not find my traditional Presbyterianism the "bees’ knees," I have used certain disparaging terms, for their benefit, to refer to the kind of worship that goes on at the Celebration Center. For instance, I've hurled the "Gnostic" label, and I've used "Pietist" in an unflattering fashion on numerous occasions. I've also pulled "McChurch" or "fast food Christianity" out of the hat a few times, which to my disappointment are not at all original but are already being used by opponents of multi-site churches.

Okay, for mainstream evangelicalism, we can avoid Gnosticism by building churches that actually look like churches, not big empty spaces filled with nothing but . . . well, nothing. We can refrain from making so many of our songs and so much of our preaching refer to "flying away" or going to heaven, because, remember, Christianity also has a this-worldly element called discipleship and eternal life is not going to occur for us in some disincarnate plane of existence but in material bodies in a material heavenly city. We can also avoid Gnosticism by keeping in touch with history. Say the Apostles’ Creed, at least, for Christ's sake, or do something else to show that you give a hoot about the 2000 years of Church history that have passed. Finally, we need to take the sacraments seriously. God doesn't just want to touch us on the level of our feelings or our minds but to also appeal to us according to the senses and to seal our faith with objective realities like words, people, water, bread, and wine. Also, "seeker churches" like the Celebration Center must not shirk on the Bible reading in their services. Read some Scripture to those heathens you're trying to convert! Our faith is not based on purely subjective feelings and experiences but on the objective witness of Christ, the Word of God in history, and Scripture, the written Word of God.

Mainstream evangelicals can avoid the worst abuses of Pietism by replacing some of our "I's," "me's," and "my's" in our trendy praise and worship anthems with "us's," "we's," and "ours's." Our public worship isn't just about how Jesus saved me and you and you but about how Jesus has saved us and made us corporately His Bride and Body. Certainly let's sing about "our" salvation, and occasionally about "my" salvation, but let's also sing about Creation, the Church, and God's might displayed in both acts of power and in the humility of the Incarnation and the cross. After all, doesn't salvation encompass all of this and show us how wonderful it all truly is?

Finally, let's not do the "fast food Christianity" thing where we run a bunch of people through our churches like it's the drive-through window at the local Wendy's. Worship isn't about our convenience but is about offering something to bless the heart of God. We can go longer than an hour. We can trade a few worship songs for a time of communal confession in the service, we can put Bible readings in, we can do the Lord's Supper in such a way that it isn't just a tack on at the end of the service, and we can say the Apostle’s Creed and observe the liturgical seasons in a meaningful way. I don't think this is inconsistent with the contemporary style of worship, unless the whole goal of contemporary worship is just to please ourselves.

Next time, I'm going to recap my little sister's complaints about the traditional liturgical style of worship and discuss how more formal worship can avoid the pitfalls of the excesses it is itself prone to.

American Religious Identification Survey: What It Means for Evangelicalism?

The latest American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College of Hartford, Connecticut should be no cause for alarm to American Christians, but, neither can we regard its results as a cause for celebration. The most notable features of the 2008 survey are:

• The percentage of Americans claiming no religion has jumped from 8.2 in 1990 and 14.2 in 2001 to the current figure of 15 percent.
• The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christian has fallen from 86 in 1990 to the current figure of 76 percent.
• The percentage of Catholics in the United States has remained steady at one in four since 1990, but the percentage of non-Catholic Christians has fallen from 60 to 50 percent over the past two decades.
• Ninety percent of the decline in non-Catholic Christianity over this period has come from mainline Protestant denominations, which have seen their numbers drop from 18.7 percent of Americans in 1990 and 17.2 percent in 2001 to just 12.9 percent of today's population.
• The percentage of evangelicals in the United States continues on the rise, with one-third of the population identifying themselves as such, including 38.6 percent of those in mainline Protestant traditions.
• The largest percentage of increase in the evangelical camp has come from those attached to mega-churches, a number that has skyrocketed from less than 200,000 Americans in 1990 and 2.5 million in 2001 to the current figure of 8 million.

Well, the sky most certainly isn't falling, but, in my opinion, several of the trends noted above bode ill for the future of the Body of Christ in our country. It is no surprise that secularity continues to grow. That's a bummer for sure. Religion is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the lives of most Americans. Also, the decline within mainline Protestantism is surely distressing for a segment of American Christianity that has deep historic roots but which has in too many cases drifted from those roots in order to accommodate the culture.

For most theologically-conservative Christians, however, the numbers do not look that bad. Evangelicalism continues to grow, liberal Christianity is continuing to decline, and the Catholic Church has largely retained its numbers. Evangelicals must feel some sense of vindication in the continued growth in their camp and the continued collapse of mainline Protestantism because it represents to many of them an indictment of lukewarm, compromising Christian faith and a strong affirmation of that which sticks to its guns in spite of the culture.

Appearances can be deceiving. For instance, Mark Silk of Trinity College told CNN.com that the rise in evangelicalism is contributing to the rejection of religion altogether by some Americans. He points to the prominence of the "religious right" in politics as having turned many people the other way. That is undoubtedly true, but I think the connection relates more to the very issues many evangelicals see as problematic with mainline Protestantism, namely, that of compromising too much to the culture.

Though the areas where the influential liberal camp in mainline Protestantism has led the mainline denominations to compromise are different from the areas where particularly evangelism-driven evangelicals have led their fellow theologically-conservative Protestants to compromise, I think the results are ultimately going to be similar.

Even if conservative evangelicals are correct that liberal compromises in doctrine, worship, mission, and Christian morality within mainline Protestantism are related to matters of central concern to the Christian faith (in many cases they are), it is a mistake to assume that the compromises evangelicals have made in the name of winning and keeping converts are not also matters of fundamental integrity to the Christian faith. Just because evangelicals have doggedly retained essential points of Christian doctrine, stayed true to the mission of winning souls for Christ, and insisted on biblical standards of morality, that is no assurance that all remains well within the Church.

What happens if evangelicals continue to insist on individual head and heart matters but continue to neglect the love for one another that characterizes real Christian community, refrain from making disciples, and refuse to carry out the mission of establishing Christ's Kingdom in the Church and in the world? How does 12.9 percent of the American population sound? That's where we're headed if the "Let's have a religious entertainment service instead of public worship, and let's build mega-churches so nobody gets to know one another" movement continues. Private Christianity will inevitably dry the well up! Individualistic American Christians need real community and love, not Sunday rock concerts and a purely private relationship with Jesus.

The Sacraments Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting the Scandal Back in the Gospel

The Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Reclaiming the Sacramental (Part 2)

The God we as Christians serve is a Living Mystery who surprises us more and more the longer we follow him. The strangest thing about God is that as we come to know him in deeper and ever more profound ways, the more we grow in the realization of how very little we actually know about him. The distinction I want to highlight here is between that of the relational knowledge of God and the intellectual knowledge of him. One would naturally think that these two things exist in a direct relationship—that as one grows the other does as well—but this is precisely the opposite of the way things work. The more we know God, the less we realize that we "know" about him. Believers in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the Father of Jesus Christ have long testified to the ways in which God transcends our understanding and is thus in a very real sense unknowable to our very limited and finite human minds. This sense of mystery stands out particularly strong in the writings of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah: "'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares Yahweh. 9'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (55:8-9).

In the Christian faith tradition, most notably in its Orthodox and Catholic varieties, one way of sounding Isaiah's theme has been through the negation of positive properties of God. This is called the apophatic way. The apophatic way is designed to bust our idols by clearly defining what God is not. It guards against the danger inherent in all speech about God, which is that of literally conceiving of God in creaturely terms. For instance, while speaking of God as Father is authorized by Christ's use of the term, calling God "Father" can become idolatrous if we conceive of God as a literal father. In order to keep us from doing so, the apophatic way would be to detail how God is not at all like a father. The purpose of this initial negation of the concept of God as Heavenly Father would be to arrive at an understanding of God as Heavenly Father that does not in any way diminish his glory or ascribe to him any similarity to created things. The apophatic way, then, shows us that God is Father in a way that nothing else in the universe can possibly be. Perhaps no group of Christian thinkers excelled in the expression of the apophatic way as did the great 14th-century Rhineland mystics, Meister Eckhart and his brilliant students Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso. The most shocking apophatic statement comes from Eckhart, who provocatively declares, "God is neither good nor better nor best of all. Whoever would say that God is good would be treating him as unjustly as he were calling the sun black." Of course, Eckhart is not denying the goodness of God here but showing how God transcends all of our conceptions of what goodness is. God is good in a way that we never can be and in a way that we never could have been, even if we had never fallen into sin.

In our ways of thinking about God, we must constantly guard against the impulse to reduce God from the Living Presence he is to a rigidly and easily defined set of propositions. The Angelic Doctor Thomas Aquinas famously said, "If anyone claims to have understood God, then what one has understood is not God." I think these ancient words of St. Thomas have a prophetic significance for contemporary American evangelicals when it comes to our understanding of the way God works in the world, particularly in regard to the rites of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Most evangelicals, to use the words of Leonard Vander Zee, deny the ability of material objects, including and especially the sacraments, "to carry the freight of spiritual reality." Though the Reformation is 500 years in the past, to many Protestants the idea of sacraments raises the full specter of the abusive medieval Roman Catholic sacerdotalism against which Luther and Calvin railed as if it were a present reality threatening the integrity of the Christian faith. "Protestant horror" is an appropriate term for this reaction. This Protestant suspicion of all things that sound remotely Catholic arises, I believe, not from a sola scriptura reliance on the explicit teachings of the Bible or from a religious climate like that of the 16th century but a spirit-matter dualism that is more characteristic of Enlightenment rationalism than the Spirit-led theological premises that informed the Apostles' writing of the New Testament. It is more characteristic of the modern mindset to systematize knowledge and reduce it to its lowest common denominator, such as the philosophically simple distinction between spirit and matter, than it was in the first-century Judeo-Christian mind. Whereas we as early 21st-century American evangelicals view the mystery associated with a messy theology that does not radically separate spirit from matter as a problem that must be solved, the Jewish writers of the New Testament embraced a spiritual God who repeatedly humbled himself and used visible, tangible signs, symbols, and personal invasions into history in order to relate to human beings. The God of Israel repeatedly revealed himself in the natural world, speaking to Moses through the flames of the burning bush, guiding the children of Israel in the Exodus in the form of the pillar of smoke in the daytime and the pillar of fire at night, and, most dramatically, becoming one of us in his Incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth. When we deny the possibility that God continues to relate to his people through the elements of this world, we are thus taking a departure from the view of God presented in the Bible.

While our philosophical inheritance from the Age of Reason and modern life may be fundamental to mainstream evangelicalism's rejection of the sacraments, we cannot just dismiss the theological objections and questions that the sacraments raise for evangelicals. In my last posting, some of the ideas I put forward were undoubtedly shocking to many of you. In fact, some of you have expressed alarm at the dangerous ideas I put forward, particularly my foray into ecclesiology, with the direct correlation I made between salvation and the Church and between Christ and the Church. Also, I made some remarks that appeared to denigrate the reality that we are saved by faith alone and that, at face value, seem to make salvation primarily a sacramental affair. I will take this opportunity to moderate some of those remarks, which, upon further reflection, I must admit were put forward with somewhat less nuance than they should have been. Let me first take up the question of the Church's role in salvation.

The most shocking statement I made was that "the Church opens the gates to heaven in some sense through the sacraments of salvation it administers." This statement seems to imply that the Church and the sacraments by themselves can save us, or, inversely, that without the Church and the sacraments we cannot be saved. I too reject the idea that the Church and the sacraments by themselves can save us or that we cannot be saved without them, as would, incidentally, most Catholics. If we personally reject Jesus Christ, the Church and the sacraments can do nothing for us. If, by faith, however, we are in Christ, no power of the Church can separate us from him. Though the Catholic Church would explain this in different terms than I would, consistent with the Reformed tradition, I would say that the Church and the sacraments contribute to our salvation in the sense that they augment and strengthen the faith through which Jesus saves us. In other words, the sacraments strengthen the influence of the Christ event in our lives. They sign and seal our salvation by powerfully and experientially conferring God's promises on us. In the unusual situation in which the sacraments are not available, however, the promises of God's Word remain true, albeit without the additional assurances that the sacraments alone can provide.

I also mentioned how I do not find the teachings of the Catholic Church about its role in salvation to be substantially wrong but object only to the degree to which it understands this role. I stand by that statement. We must realize that this is not the 16th century and that the Roman Catholic Church has done much to address the abuses that led to the Reformation. While many of the popes and spiritual leaders of the Middle Ages were corrupt and abused their spiritual authority for political and material gain, it is undeniable that recent popes, notably John Paul II, and the current Pope, Benedict XVI, are holy men who deeply love Jesus Christ and are earnest and sincere in shepherding the flock. No longer are indulgences and promises of salvation aggressively marketed to poor peasants for the purposes of filling the Vatican's coffers and no longer does the hierarchy of the Church use the threat of excommunication as a political weapon. Furthermore, in spite of the sex abuse scandal, for which the Vatican is truly beginning to express godly repentance, the vast majority of priests are holy and faithful men who love the Lord deeply. That being said, however, I cannot affirm the Catholic teaching that the Church directly and exclusively administers salvation to the faithful through the priesthood. For me, this places too much stress on the Church's role in salvation and makes God's grace too dependent on human mediators. I do not deny that the Church has some bearing on our salvation but only object to the extent to which this is expressed in Roman Catholicism.

This brings us to another question. I mentioned the connection between the Church and Christ. How is Christ present in the Church? Is he first and foremost present through a professional priesthood that can be identified directly with him, or, do we envision Christ's presence in the Church in a more organic sense? As a Protestant, I must choose the latter and affirm the priesthood of all believers. Though my ecclesiology is quite high for an evangelical (high Church evangelical is an oxymoron if ever there was one!), I cannot identify Christ's presence in the Church with a professional clergy. However, I enthusiastically affirm that Christ is present in his assembled body in a more excellent way than he is in each Spirit-filled Christian individually. Jesus affirms this, when he promises in Matthew 18:18-20:

Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. 19Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.

Though we cannot say that the Church is Christ and that Christ is the Church (Jesus is locally present only at the right hand of the Father in heaven), we clearly see that the Church has great spiritual power and authority because Christ is among his people when his body is assembled. When we encounter the Church, we are encountering the living Christ powerfully present. Conversely, then, when we reject the Church and the sacraments, we are rejecting the Head of the body, Christ. As a result, we can say that in a real sense we are incorporated into Christ through our incorporation into his body by the sacraments and that we are cut off from him through our dismemberment from his body. That is why the author of Hebrews is so insistent that Christians do not forsake the regular gathering together of believers. It is hazardous to our spiritual health to do so.

Finally, how can we reconcile the saving significance of the sacraments with the Protestant tenant of salvation by grace alone through faith alone when the sacraments involve physical things and actions? This was a difficult question for Luther and Calvin to answer, but our importation of a modernist dualism that radically separates spirit from matter complexifies this question to an even further degree. How we read this into the Christian life of faith is most evident in our interpretation of Jesus' words in John 4:24: "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." Protestants, particularly evangelicals, have long used this verse as a proof text to argue against all forms of ritualized worship. True worship is that which occurs in the heart and the head; therefore, ritual actions and ritual objects cannot carry the weight of spiritual reality and are thus unnecessary, if not harmful, to true worship. A look at the context of the passage in which Jesus speaks these words and a discussion of the historical context of the Reformation will introduce needed balance to our understanding of these words.

The biblical context of this verse is Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. We must note that this interaction is unusual because of the animosity between Jews and Samaritans that existed at this time. The Samaritans were the descendents of those Hebrews in the northern kingdom of Israel who were not deported by the Assyrians when Israel fell in the eighth century B.C. Recall that when Judah and Israel divided after the reign of Solomon, Israel set up a temple in Bethel to rival Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem in order to sever the religious connection between the northern tribes and their kinsman in the South. The religion of Israel centered in the temple at Bethel combined elements of monotheistic Judaism with the pantheism of the local Canaanite peoples. The Hebrews who remained in northern Palestine after the Assyrian deportation intermarried with these Canaanite peoples and, in time, became indistinguishable from them, resulting in the rise of a distinct ethnic group called the Samaritans. The animosity that existed between first-century Jews and their Samaritan cousins was thus based not just on race or ethnic identity but also on religious grounds. In the course of Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman, she brings up the differences between Samaritan religious practice and that of the Jews. She says, "Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where we ought to worship" (v. 20). When Jesus responds that the day is coming when God's worshipers will worship neither in Bethel nor in Jerusalem but rather in spirit and truth, on the one hand, he is speaking to the pantheistic impulse to identify God directly with a physical location that the woman's words indicate, while, on the other hand, he is also speaking to the Jewish understanding of God's exclusive relationship with the physical descendents of Abraham (v. 21-24). By reaching out to a pagan half-breed Gentile woman, Jesus is showing us that the new covenant is not limited to one specific ethnic group or to a particular region of holy geography. The Messiah has come to claim for the Father worshipers from all peoples, nations, and places who will worship him in spirit and truth. This does not mean, however, that this worship is only expressed in an internal and subjective experience. After all, the greatest commandment is to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength." This is worship in spirit and truth—a passionate, engaged, embodied (erotic even) spirituality that ardently worships God with all of one's faculties.

"God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth" was an important statement for the Protestant Reformation, not in the sense that the Reformers were rejecting any and all ritualized expressions of worship but in the sense that ritual worship is not to be the sum total of authentic Christian spirituality. The 16th century was a time of ecclesiastical abuse and neglect by the Roman Church. Secular priests were often poorly trained, bishops were often absent from their dioceses, sermons, when provided, were most often in Latin, as was the liturgy of the Word, and promises of the forgiveness of sins and even salvation were exchanged for money through the purchase of indulgences. What the Reformers were reacting to was a spirituality that was mediated exclusively through the Church and that demanded nothing of Christians but loyalty to the Church, yearly confession, and participation in the Mass, which the vast majority of the laity could not understand and in which they were only occasionally given the Eucharistic bread and never the cup. None of the Reformers rejected liturgical worship and, with the exception of Zwingli, all retained a sacramental understanding of baptism and the Eucharist. Furthermore, while Calvin completely rejected transubstantiation, Luther maintained the physical presence of Christ in the bread and wine and did not forbid Christians from accepting transubstantiation as an explanation of how the Lord's Supper works. For the Reformers, ritual and sacramental worship thus remained an important part of authentic Christian spirituality.

The significance of this for our understanding of how the Reformers affirmed the saving significance of baptism and the Lord's Supper while affirming salvation by grace alone through faith alone is that God uses the material substances of water, bread, and wine to confer his promises on us. The Reformers' focus in the sacraments was not on what people do but rather on what God does in the sacraments. God freely offers his grace through baptism and the Eucharist. It is Jesus who baptizes us with the Holy Spirit in baptismal waters. It is Jesus who feeds us with his flesh and his blood when we come to the Lord's Table. Even the verbs we use in talking about baptism and the Lord's Supper testify to this. For instance, we do not baptize ourselves but we are baptized, and though we do eat the bread and do drink the wine, are they not first given to us?

Yet, this is just the problem, that things somehow bring the grace of God to us? Is this not a works salvation because sacraments are bodily received? It is no more a works salvation than the mistaken belief that sincerely praying to receive Christ in and of itself causes us to be saved. Notice something very important about Protestant ideas regarding salvation. We are saved by grace alone through faith alone. It is not faith that is causal of our salvation but grace. Grace is the cause of our salvation, and faith is simply the vehicle through which God confers this grace on us. Faith cannot appropriate salvation from God or it too becomes a meritorious work that we must do to please God—a "spiritual" work but a work nonetheless. In other words, faith does not work upward from us to God. Faith comes down from God to us. It merely enlightens us to the salvation that is already freely given in Christ. Let's look at Ephesians 2:8-9: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." What is the gift here? Is it salvation or is it faith? It is both. Salvation is freely available to us in Christ; faith opens our eyes to this reality.

We still have not answered the question of how we understand faith, though. What does faith mean? I think the modernist spirit-matter dualism we have imported into our understanding of Christianity has dramatically warped what we mean by the word “faith.” Is it a platonic acceptance of the objective truth of certain propositions, or is it a passionate grasping on to and trust in the promises of God that transforms our lives? The witness of Scripture would clearly direct us to the latter. Faith is not an airy, ethereal, abstract belief in objective facts that have little bearing on our lives. No; faith is a passionate, engaged, embodied subjective experience of the objective reality of God's redemption of us in Christ that makes each of us a new creation.

Faith, however, sometimes seems the farthest thing from this experience. Sometimes it is very faint. Sometimes it is all we can do to hang on to it. That is why Christ instituted the physical signs of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Until Christ returns, they remind us that the Christian faith is based on the historical events of the God-man's life, death, and resurrection. In Christ's physical absence, they testify to the fact that he was here, that he was and is one of us, that he loved us and gave himself for us, that he died, that he defeated death and rose again, that he ascended on high and is at the right hand of the Father, and that he will come again to make all things new.

Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the sacraments are the visible words by which we know our Savior. In them, God promises us the realities to which they point. Whenever our faith is weak, whenever the clouds come to make us doubt whether or not we have indeed experienced the saving grace of Christ, each of us can point to our baptism and claim the promises God made to us in those waters. This does not mean that baptism in and of itself is a guarantee of salvation or that it mechanically accomplishes our salvation, but for those who live by faith in the Son of God, we can count God's testimony in baptism that "This is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased" to be true. And if we doubt Christ, that he was crucified and rose again, that he was our Passover lamb, that his sacrifice counts for us, we can come to His Table and receive his body and blood anew. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? When we sit at the Lord's Table, we can emphatically say, "Yes! I was there. It counts for me."

To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, God only wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.