Training for the Christian life

Whenever the body of Christ eats together in Eucharist on Sundays, it does so in the hope that it will have its eyes opened to and participate in what God is up to in the world, not only on Sundays but on Wednesdays too. The claim, made by Stanley Hauerwas and others, that living in a deeper awareness of the story of Jesus and of the Church does, in the freedom and grace of God, ‘do’ something is deserving of a hearing. While there is no magical change of status, and while these graces do not turn the gathered people of God into liturgical automatons nor automatically make them more ethically-consistent or mature, the Church’s gospel-shaped practices are, I suggest, the means by which the Head (i.e., Jesus) immerses his Body (i.e., the Church) in the way of ordinary gospel-posture. Specifically, they are means by which Christ trains us. This is true whether we are talking about something like the Church’s calendar, its fasting, or its weekly praying of the Lord’s Prayer, and it is particularly true when it comes to the Lord’s Supper. Every time we come to the Table, which is where the entire Church’s story is enacted in concentrated form, we are offered training in how to live sacramentally in the world, to unearth its idolatries, and to expose what William Stringfellow calls the ‘transience of death’s power in the world’.

Rowan Williams on the oddness of the open Table

‘[The Church’s] complete sharing of baptismal and eucharistic life does not happen rapidly or easily, and the problem remains of how the Church is to show its openness without simply abandoning its explicit commitment to the one focal interpretative story of Jesus. To share eucharistic communion with someone unbaptized, or committed to another story or system, is odd – not because the sacrament is “profaned”, or because grace cannot be given to those outside the household, but because the symbolic integrity of the Eucharist depends upon its being celebrated by those who both commit themselves to the paradigm of Jesus’ death and resurrection and acknowledge that their violence is violence offered to Jesus. All their betrayals are to be understood as betrayals of him; and through that understanding comes forgiveness and hope. Those who do not so understand themselves and their sin or their loss will not make the same identification of their victims with Jesus, nor will they necessarily understand their hope or their vocation in relation to him and his community. Their participation is thus anomalous: it is hard to see the meaning of what is being done’.

– Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982), 68.

Easter Eucharist, a conversation with a five-year old

Here’s a snippet of a wee conversation that took place this morning between my daughter and myself – in church:

‘So why do we eat bread and drink wine today?’, I asked.

‘The wine is God’s life, and the bread is God’s skin’, she said. ‘We eat and drink so that we won’t die. When we eat and drink, God’s life and our life is joined together’.

Impressed by this young anti-Zwinglian (a description she embraces with some enthusiasm), I enquired: ‘Since when have you been reading Ignatius of Antioch?’ (Ignatius once referred to the Eucharist as ‘the medicine of immortality’).

And she said, ‘Ha? Can we have our chocolates soon?’

An Inaugural Lecture: ‘Learning to See and to Waddle with our Tongues: a view from the Table’

One of the noble traditions around the place where I work is the annual inaugural lecture. It is a public event, and is typically well-supported by Dunedinites, plus a few ring-ins from other places. It was my turn this year to deliver the lecture, and I chose as my subject the Lord’s Supper. The lecture was titled ‘Learning to See and to Waddle with our Tongues: a view from the Table’. A number of folk have asked me for a copy (possibly in the vain hope that it may make more sense the second-time ’round), so here’s what I said:

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Robert Jenson on the Supper

I’ve just completed writing a lecture on the Supper. It was great fun to research, not least because I used it as an excuse to read Robert Jenson’s two-volume systematics. And while I don’t engage with Jenson in the lecture per se, his charateristically-stimulating work charged my thinking in ways that I had not anticipated and which birthed some fruitful avenues of thought. Here’s one passage that I spent some time meditating on:

‘When the Eucharist is celebrated, Christ’s promises of the Kingdom and of his presence in it are in fact fulfilled: even though the Kingdom is still future so long as we are not risen, each celebration is already a wedding feast. Anticipation, we may say, is visible prophecy; so in the Eucharist we come together to live the Kingdom’s fellowship beforehand. But our coming together, however faithful and pious, does not locate us at the gate of heaven, unless God puts us there. That he does is the content of faith that has the Supper itself as the external object to which it clings. That is, it is the content of faith in those other promises: “This bread is my body. This cup is my blood of the new covenant”’. – Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 2: The Works of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 216.

Images of the Eucharist

While writing a lecture on the Lord’s Supper, I’ve been reflecting on some interesting images which, each in different ways, invite us to think again about what the Church might be up to when it engages in this particular proclamatory performance. Here’s a few that struck me:

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Herbert McCabe: ‘Human words become God’s Word’

Back in 2001, for the Feast of Corpus Christi, Herbert McCabe O.P., delivered a fascinating sermon on the Eucharist. It was titled ‘Human words become God’s Word’. It reads:

‘The eucharist is about the way we are with each other, about our unity. This is obvious from its shape, a ritual meal, an eating and drinking together, to say we share one life.

Now it is not just an ordinary ritual meal, but a sacramental ritual meal, because it expresses the mystery of our unity. It is plain that the eucharist is not a meal any more than baptism is taking a shower. It ought not to look like an occasion when hungry people come to eat and drink. It is a token meal, when something is said. The bread and wine are there for symbolism, not nourishment, though of course they wouldn’t have their symbolism if they weren’t food and drink.

A purely ritual meal in which all share a token portion of bread and wine is purely symbolic, a piece of language, a word. It is not because the eucharist is a sacrament that bread and wine become signs: they are already signs in a perfectly ordinary way. To see the eucharist as a sacrament is to see it as symbolic not just of our human friendship or of the human mystery within it, but of the unfathomable mystery within and beyond it, of community in the Spirit of God.

We cannot express this unity in the Spirit in the same signs with which we symbolise human friendship; they have to be transformed into a new language. We can attempt to express the depth of human relationships in human words, but they cannot adequately express our relationship in the Spirit. Only God can speak of God: to express this unity we need not just human speech but God’s speech. That is what it is for the eucharist to be a sacrament: what on the face of it are human words deepen into God’s Word, which speaks the unfathomable mystery of his love in which we share.

The eucharist is also the sacrament of the human body of Christ. The Word by which God’s love is made present amongst us is not in the first place words, but a human being of flesh and blood, not an idea about God, but the enacted life-story of Jesus of Nazareth. When we say God’s Word expresses our unity in the Spirit in the eucharist, we mean that language used for our love for each other is no longer just human words of bread and wine, but the divine Word-made-flesh, the real body and blood of Christ.

This is the difference between Catholic teaching and the idea that bread and wine are human symbols expressing what Christ does for us. Catholics say that this cannot be expressed except in God’s language; it can only be spoken by God’s speaking his Word, the bodily reality of Jesus. It is not just that our language is now used to speak of Christ, but Christ himself, the Word, is now our language: our words, symbolic bread and wine, have become Christ, the flesh and blood of God’s Word.

So while to one without faith we seem to be dealing simply in human symbols, we know that that is only to look at appearances. In reality it is the body and blood of God’s Word, his whole humanity, that is the sign of our unity in the Spirit. When we eat his body and drink his blood, we speak and hear God’s Word telling of our divine friendship, just as when we share human food we speak a human word of human friendship.

Finally, the eucharist is the sacrament of a body broken and blood shed. Jesus’ life-story was completed in his execution. His obedience to his mission to be truly human meant that we, the world, killed him. Because of the disunited world we have made, the Word takes flesh that is tortured and killed. The divine language and sacrament of our unity is Christ’s body broken and blood shed.

This feast of friendship celebrates the cross. This friendship the world will hate and it belongs to those in solidarity with the victims of the world, and expects only suffering and death. The sacrament of love is also sacrament of death – Christ’s death through which we come to a new life in the love which is the Holy Spirit, in which we shall live for eternity’.

To intinct, or not to intinct?

Mike Crowl’s comment on the previous post led me to Richard Giles’ somewhat controversial book Creating Uncommon Worship: Transforming the Liturgy of the Eucharist wherein Giles had this to say:

In every method of sharing communion there lurks a gremlin that needs to be named, and the name of the gremlin is intinction. This is an antisocial habit, which smacks of fear, arrogance and lack of faith, symptomatic of our not thinking what we are doing. It is a problem that needs to be addressed by the community, led by the pastor and his/her leadership team.

Although of ancient provenance (first springing out of the woodwork in the seventh century) it has been repeatedly condemned and outlawed by the Church. Fear of spilling the Precious Blood of Christ, or of catching the plague, may have made sense in the Middle Ages, but surely not today. It is a particularly grave misdemeanour for Anglicans and Lutherans, whose spiritual ancestors fought so hard in the Reformation period for the restoration to the people of communion in both kinds. How ironic if today we were to turn up our noses at the chalice!

Intinction poses two problems, theological and practical:

1.     The common cup has always been a potent symbol of the bond between disciple and Lord. The passing of the cup is a dramatic feature of the gospel accounts of the Last Supper, and those who would be close to him are challenged, as were James and John, with the question, ‘Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?’ (Mark 10.38)

2.     It leaves such a mess for those who come after, especially so in the era of real bread, when those who instinct reduce the contents of the chalice to a soup.

The remedy lies in a renewed education of congregations about the history of the sacrament, the privilege of the common cup, and its safety on health grounds. We also need a few more pastors who will slap wrists. (pp. 200–1)

An undercooked theology? An over-reaction? Or both?

Eucharist and the politics of power

‘The church expresses a corporate existence where divine agency interacts with human affairs, and such an interaction nurtures, that is to say gives life and shape to, the ecclesial body … [A] theopolitics of Christ’s Body in the Eucharist is rooted not exclusively in power, but, in a more primary sense, in divine caritas, which is expressed with a radical gesture of kenosis, reciprocity, and concrete communal practices. This is not to say that power is herein dismissed, or that the Eucharist is a sign of disempowerment. There is a politics of power here. Yet it is a power that integrates plenitude of desire; it is the paradoxical force of sacrifice on the cross; it is the humble power of bread broken into pieces for the purpose of sharing; it is the washing of feet that means a life of service to one another; it is the power of giving one’s life for the other. In other words, this is the theopolitical power of caritas, where the extraordinary embraces and transfigures the ordinary: God’s “sovereignty disclosed at the breaking of the bread,” as Samuel Wells remarks’. – Angel F. Méndez Montoya, The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 115–6.

Thinking with Calvin about the relationship between pulpit, font and table

I’ve just finished giving some lectures on Calvin, part of which consisted of some reflections on Calvin’s understanding of the relationship between pulpit, font and table. I recalled how when Calvin returned to Geneva in 1541, he sought to make the Lord’s Supper the defining centre of community life. His Catechism of the Church of Geneva, penned in 1545 (the year before Luther died), outlines Calvin’s notion that the institution of the signs of water, bread and wine was fashioned by God’s desire to communicate to us, and that God does this by ‘making himself ours’. The signs testify to divine accommodation, to God ‘teaching us in a more familiar manner that he is not only food to our souls, but drink also, so that we are not to seek any part of spiritual life anywhere else than in him alone’. But the signs are not only God’s. They are also human actions, faith’s testimony to the Church’s cruciform identity in the world, to its belonging, its ontology. Moreover, font and table remain places of privilege where believers expect to see, taste, hear and touch the Word’s carnality in ways not expected elsewhere. The drama performed around font and table constitutes the activity of the Church which, together with its pulpit, ‘proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes’. The sacraments ‘derive their virtue from the word when it is preached intelligently’. In his Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper, written while in Strasbourg but with an eye on Geneva (where it was printed), Calvin further expanded themes introduced in his Strasbourg liturgy, notably a more christologically-determined epistemology and doctrine of assurance, and the claim that the ‘substance of the sacraments is the Lord Jesus’ himself:

Jesus Christ is the only food by which our souls are nourished; but as it is distributed to us by the word of the Lord, which he has appointed an instrument for that purpose, that word is also called bread and water. Now what is said of the word applies as well to the sacrament of the Supper, by means of which the Lord leads us to communion with Jesus Christ. For seeing we are so weak that we cannot receive him with true heartfelt trust, when he is presented to us by simple doctrine and preaching, the Father of mercy, disdaining not to condescend in this matter to our infirmity, has been pleased to add to his word a visible sign, by which he might represent the substance of his promises, to confirm and fortify us by delivering us from all doubt and uncertainty.

Calvin contended that ‘the singular consolation which we derive from the Supper’ is that it ‘directs and leads us’ to Christ, attesting to the truth that ‘having been made partakers of the death and passion of Jesus Christ, we have everything that is useful and salutary to us’. So in the 1536 edition of the Institutes, Calvin defines sacrament as ‘an outward sign’ which testifies to God’s grace, and which ‘never lacks a preceding promise but is rather joined to it by way of appendix, to confirm and seal the promise itself, and to make it as it were more evident to us’.

Calvin begins his Summary of Doctrine concerning the Ministry of the Word and the Sacraments with the statement that ‘The end of the whole Gospel ministry is that God, the fountain of all felicity, communicate Christ to us who are disunited by sin and hence ruined, that we may from him enjoy eternal life’. And Calvin proceeds to outline that this communication of Christ – which is both ‘incomprehensible to human reason’ and ‘effected by the Holy Spirit’ – is made possible because of God’s desire to ‘communicate himself to us’ through the same Spirit, and involves us being joined to Christ our Head, ‘not in an imaginary way, but most powerfully and truly, so that we become flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone’. This union is effected by the Spirit who, in Calvin’s words, ‘uses a double instrument, the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments’. Moreover, Calvin imagines that the union of believers with Christ involves ‘two ministers, who have distinct offices’. There is (i) the ‘external minister’ who ‘administers the vocal word’ which is ‘received by the ears’ and ‘the sacred signs which are external, earthly and fallible’, and (ii) there is the ‘internal minister’, the Holy Spirit who ‘freely works internally’ to truly communicate ‘the thing proclaimed through the Word, that is Christ’.

Implicit here is the weight which Calvin places on the event of the Supper as a whole, and not just on the sacramental hosts. So Trevor Hart:

It is the ‘ceremony’ as such which constitutes the wider ‘sign’ within which the particular signifying power of bread and wine is located. And the ceremony is, of course, a synthesis in which objects, actions and words are juxtaposed and related to one another. So, while Calvin insists that the material signs are vital, he also refuses to detach their meaning from the accompanying immaterial symbolics of narrative. The bread and wine are ‘seals’ and ‘confirmations’ of a promise already given, and make sense only when faith apprehends them as such. There must therefore always be some preaching or form of words which interprets the ‘bare signs’ and enables us to make sense of them, and the ‘faith’ which apprehends them, while not mere intellectual assent, has nonetheless a vital cognitive dimension (Inst. IV.xvii.39) … This does not, it should be noted, reduce the elements to dispensable visual aids, as if the essential meaning of the Supper could be conveyed equally well in their absence. Calvin’s choice of similes is helpful here. Certain sorts of images (in our day we might cite photographic as well as painted images) may well require some verbal context before we can make appropriate sense of them, yet when viewed in this context they undoubtedly possess a power or force of their own which transcends the limits of meaning to which words alone may take us.

Clearly, for Calvin, the sacraments are essentially another form of the word. They are, after Augustine, the verbum visibile (‘a visible word’), ‘God’s promises as painted in a picture’ and set before our sight. They confer neither more nor less than the Word, and they have the same function as the Word preached and written: to offer and present Christ to us. They are, just as preaching is, the ‘vehicle of Christ’s self-communication … the signs are nothing less than pledges of the real presence [of Christ]; indeed, they are the media through which Christ effects his presence to his people’. And they constitute – no less than preaching – the Church’s ministry of the Word.

The separation of pulpit, font and table, and the prioritising of ‘words’ over the proclamation activities of baptism and eucharist, betray a failure to understand how these three particular activities might inform – and be informed by – theories of semiotics, ritual, dramaturgy and the sociology of knowledge. It is also, and more urgently, a failure to understand the nature and witness of Word in the Church’s ‘two marks’, and of the way the Spirit functions to create faith is us and to make us ‘living members of Christ’. And this has, consequently, sponsored both disproportion between word and sacrament, and a tendency towards binitarianism, both to the detriment of Reformed worship and ecclesiology. Certainly, preaching and the proclamation activities of font and table constitute two parts of the one action. A ‘low’ view of one results in a ‘low’ view of the other. As Joseph Small has noted: ‘If word and sacraments together are the heart of the church’s true and faithful life, neglect of one leads inexorably to deformation of the other, for when either word or sacrament exists alone it soon becomes a parody of itself … Reformed neglect of the sacraments has led to a church of the word alone, a church always in danger of degenerating into a church of mere words’. Why a community claiming to be concerned with the proclamation of God’s good news would neglect to taste the Word in the Supper each time it gathers to hear the Word expounded in human speech truly is an oddity.

While Calvin argued that ‘it would be well to require that the Communion of the Holy Supper of Jesus Christ be held every Sunday at least as a rule’, forlornly, many Reformed churches have propagated a situation wherein the pulpit and its associated wordiness have eclipsed the sacraments, sponsoring an arid intellectualism which has turned the worshipping community into ‘a class of glum schoolchildren’. It is not uncommon to witness Baptism’s reduction to little more than a welcoming ceremony, for the Supper to be celebrated infrequently, and even for fonts and tables to be discarded in favour of a pulpit which stands unbefriended in the centre of the chancel. In more appalling cases, the pulpit has joined font and table as relics on the sidelines, casualties of modernity’s techno gods.

Calvin, conversely, placed sacrament and word together at the heart of the community’s life not because he was a dreary traditionalist or obstructionist but because he ‘regarded as a settled principle that the sacraments have the same office as the Word of God: to offer and set forth Christ to us, and in him the treasures of heavenly grace’. In other words, pulpit, font, scripture and table function alike as witness to the Word who is the life of the world: (i) proclaiming in bold relief the gospel of Christ in whom we have true knowledge of God, and (ii) communicating Christ’s real presence to us, uniting us to Christ in the power of the Spirit ‘who makes us partakers in Christ’. So Calvin: ‘I say that Christ is the matter or (if you prefer) the substance of all the sacraments; for in him they have all their firmness, and they do not promise anything apart from him’.

I could have gone on (and on, and on) about Calvin, and to recall words from others too who further echo Calvin’s heart on these matters, but even lectures on Calvin must come to an end. Anyway, had I gone on, I may have invited reflection on these two passages:

‘[We understand] the sacraments as pieces of earthly stuff that are meeting places with this [triune] God who exists in ecstatic movements of love. They are doors into the dance of perichoresis in God. [They are a means] of God’s gracious coming and dwelling with us. They are signs which enable us to participate in the drama of death and resurrection which is happening in the heart of God. We share in death as we share in the broken body of the bread and the extravagantly poured out wine, and as we are covered with a threat of hostile waters. We share in life as we come out from under the waters … to take our place in the new community of the body of Christ, and to be filled with the new wine of the Spirit. – Paul S. Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2000), 281.

‘Both sacraments [Baptism and the Lord’s Supper] declare the gospel of participation in the perfect worship of the Son, who has accomplished what we could not accomplish. When we receive the bread and wine at the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, we echo the cry of Jesus on the cross: ‘It is finished!’ Christ has done what I could never do … But we do more than engage in a memorial service! The word anamnesis, which translates into remembrance, has rich meaning…[conveying] a sense of re-living the past as if it were real today … Not only do we participate in shared and thankful remembrance of Christ’s perfect self-offering on our behalf, but we also participate in Christ’s continuing self-offering of himself on our behalf. We do not remember just the Christ of history – we remember the living Christ today, and the Christ who carries us into the future … The sacrament powerfully draws past, present, and future together in the life of the faith-community’. – Graham Buxton, Dancing in the Dark: The Privilege of Participating in the Ministry of Christ (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2001), 137–8.

Rob Bell and Don Golden on eucharist and the new humanity

‘In the new humanity, them becomes us, they becomes we, and those become ours. This is why it is very dangerous when a church becomes known for being hip, cool, and trendy. The new humanity is not a trend. Or when a church is known for attracting one particular kind of demographic, like people of this particular age and education level, or that particular social class or personality type. There’s obviously nothing wrong with the powerful bonds that are shared when you meet up with your own tribe, and hear things in a language you understand, and cultural references are made that you are familiar with, but when sameness takes over, when everybody shares the same story, when there is no listening to other perspectives, no stretching and expanding and opening up – that’s when the new humanity is in trouble.

The beautiful thing is to join with a church that has gathered and find yourself looking around thinking, “What could this group of people possibly have in common?” The answer, of course, would be the new humanity. A church is where the two people groups with blue hair – young men and older women – sit together and somehow it all fits together in a Eucharistic sort of way. Try marketing that. Try branding that. The new humanity defies trends and demographics and the latest market research.

In Acts 8 some of Jesus’ first followers are healing people, and a man named Simon sees this and offers them money and says, “Give me also this ability.” Simon is seduced into thinking that the movement of the Spirit of God is a commodity to be bought and sold like any other product. The apostles chastise him for his destructive thinking, because … the Eucharist is not a product.

Glossy brochures have the potential to do great harm to the body and blood. Church is people. The Eucharist is people. People who have committed themselves to being a certain way in the world. To try to brand that is to risk commodifying something intimate, sacred, and holy.

A church is not a center for religious goods and services, where people pay a fee and receive a product in return. A church is not an organization that surveys its demographic to find out what the market is demanding at this particular moment and then adjusts its strategy to meet that consumer niche.

The way of Jesus is the path of descent. It’s about our death. It’s our willingness to join the world in its suffering, it’s our participation in the new humanity, it’s our weakness calling out to others in their weakness. To turn that into a product blasphemes the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is what happens when the question is asked, What does it look like for us to be a Eucharist for these people, here and now? What does it look like for us to break ourselves open and pour ourselves out for the healing of these people in this time in this place? The temptation is simply to duplicate the Eucharist of someone else’.

– Rob Bell and Don Golden, Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), 156–8.

Frederick Buechner on the communion of saints

With the Calvin Conference over, and a few days before I get back into the swing of preparing lectures again, it’s time to share another gem from Buechner (certainly I’m too tired to write anything intelligent myself):

‘At the Altar Table the overweight parson is doing something or other with the bread as his assistant stands by with the wine. In the pews, the congregation sits more or less patiently waiting to get into the act. The church is quiet. Outside, a bird starts singing. It’s nothing special, only a handful of notes angling out in different directions. Then a pause. Then a trill or two. A chirp. It is just warming up for the business of the day, but it is enough.

The parson and his assistant and the usual scattering of senior citizens, parents, teenagers are not alone in whatever they think they’re doing. Maybe that is what the bird is there to remind them. In its own slapdash way the bird has a part in it too. Not to mention “Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven” if the prayer book is to be believed. Maybe we should believe it. Angels and Archangels. Cherubim and seraphim. They are all in the act together. It must look a little like the great jeu de son et lumière at Versailles when all the fountains are turned on at once and the night is ablaze with fireworks. It must sound a little like the last movement of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony or the Atlantic in a gale.

And “all the company of heaven” means everybody we ever loved and lost, including the ones we didn’t know we loved until we lost them or didn’t love at all. It means people we never heard of. It means everybody who ever did – or at some unimaginable time in the future ever will – come together at something like this table in search of something like what is offered at it.

Whatever other reasons we have for coming to such a place, if we come also to give each other our love and to give God our love, then together with Gabriel and Michael, and the fat parson, and Sebastian pierced with arrows, and the old lady whose teeth don’t fit, and Teresa in her ecstasy, we are the communion of saints’. – Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 30–1.

Frederick Buechner on ‘rather splendid’ symbols

I’m still appreciating the offerings from the pen of Frederick Buechner. And I completely dig his take on wine:

‘Unfermented grape juice is a bland and pleasant drink, especially on a warm afternoon mixed half-and-half with ginger ale. It is a ghastly symbol of the life blood of Jesus Christ, especially when served in individual antiseptic, thimble-sized glasses. Wine is booze, which means it is dangerous and drunk-making. It makes the timid brave and the reserved amorous. It loosens the tongue and breaks the ice especially when served in a loving cup. It kills germs. As symbols go, it is a rather splendid one’. – Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking. A Theological ABC (San Francisco: Harper, 1973), 95–6.

These words reminded me of the first time I ever heard Robert Jenson speak. It was at Ormond College in Melbourne about 7–8 years ago. I recall the conviction with which he spoke of the centrality of the Eucharist in the life and mission of the Church. I also recall the passion with which he condemned the use of individual shot glasses and highlighted the need for congregations to drink from the one cup, and to fill it with the best wine that we can afford. This conviction finds echo in his Conversations with Poppi about God, where he writes: ‘the wine should be the very best’ and dissolvable bread should be banned. The meal should be appetising, and not like those baptisms ‘when they just dribble a couple of drops on the baby’. – Robert W. Jenson and Solveig Lucia Gold, Conversations with Poppi about God: An Eight-Year-Old and Her Theologian Grandfather Trade Questions (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 33, 34. [Reviewed here]

I’m into sharing meals that make ‘the timid brave and the reserved amorous’. I believe that God is as well. Sounds like the kind of meal we ought to be having more often too.

On ‘Communion Sunday’

‘The Lord’s Supper may be on its way to becoming a monthly rite, but an arbitrary designation of the first Sunday of the month as “communion Sunday” indicates its institutional rather than ecclesial function’. So writes Joseph Small (Director of Theology Worship and Education Ministries for the PCUSA) in his delightful essay on the church of word and sacrament.

Small also properly warns against the practice of thinking of the Supper exclusively in terms of the Last Supper, arguing that this both sponsors a gloomy exercise in silent introspection and – more tragically – betrays a failure to understand the Supper in terms of the Emmaus experience wherein the community feasts and drinks with the risen Christ in whose presence we come to know and love him more fully. Small recalls that by celebrating the Supper each Lord’s Day, the early church were ‘not commemorating the tragic death of a hero or mourning the premature death of an inspiring teacher’ but were ‘gathering in the presence of the risen, living Christ to be joined to him in his death and resurrection and to be fed by him’. How can a community engage in something akin to a funeral for one who is more alive that we are, for Christ is life in se?

But here, in bread and wine, in eating and drinking together, the community of Jesus receives nourishment for the way of discipleship in the love of God and neighbour. ‘If congregations experience the Lord’s Supper as a remembrance of Jesus’ death, a re-creation of the Last Supper, it is little wonder that they do it infrequently and that when they do they are vaguely puzzled or dissatisfied by it all’. – Joseph D. Small, ‘A Church of the Word and Sacrament’ in Christian Worship in Reformed Churches Past and Present (ed. Lukas Vischer; Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 320, 321.

Things to read while eating your Saturday toast …

• Jim Gordon posts on John Denver CDs!
• Joseph Tkach offers a tribute to Ray Anderson.
• Paul Fromont has been thinking about Gospel and culture with Stanley Hauerwas and Miroslav Volf (Parts I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IV)
• Kyle Strobel has been blogging (Parts I, II, III) George Hunsinger’s The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let us Keep the Feast.
• Halden Doerge posts a cracker from McCabe on God’s Self-Understanding.

Holy Communion: An Invitation To Life

Here is a list of posts from my series, Holy Communion: An Invitation To Life:

Holy Communion – 1

Holy Communion – 2

Holy Communion – 3

Holy Communion – 4

Holy Communion – 5

Holy Communion – 6

Holy Communion – 7

Holy Communion – 8

Holy Communion – 9

Holy Communion – 10

Holy Communion – 11

Redeeming Bitterness – An Interview with Miroslav Volf

Miroslav Volf, director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, recently published The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. As Volf calls Christians to remember with redemptive purpose, he recounts his personal struggle to cope with memories of interrogations by Communist officials in his native Croatia, then part of Yugoslavia.

What makes memory an especially urgent theological topic?

Part of the interest in memory is because we live in such a fast-paced culture, in which we have a hard time remembering what’s transpired only a few days or a month ago. We’re glued to this ever-shifting and changing present, so we feel that memory is slipping away from us. We want to hold onto memories, because we rightly believe that part of our identity is what we remember about ourselves and our interactions with others. Part of our identity as a nation depends on what has happened to us in the past.

Why is this topic especially important to you?
Much of the conflict in the world, whether between individuals or between communities, is fueled by memory of what has happened in the past. So on the one hand, we have to remember to preserve our identity. We have to remember in order not to allow similar violations in the future.

Yet when we remember, our memory is not innocent in our hands. I use the term “shield of memory.” But so quickly, the shield mutates into a sword. Memory played a significant role in the recent conflict in my native Croatia. My interest was to find ways in which we can prevent memory from mutating from a shield into a sword—indeed, finding ways in which memory can become a means of reconciliation. That’s why I’m interested not just in memory, but in remembering rightly.

The book is both theological and personal—why?
The narrative backbone of the book is my interrogations by the secret service of Yugoslavia and the Communist army. Immense suspicion arose from the sheer facts that I was a theologian, I studied abroad, and I was married to an American. They had to find out whether I was a subversive element. I narrate the story of my interrogations and my relationships with my interrogators in order to illustrate what memory does to us, how we can deal with memory, and what the light of Christ’s truth and Christ’s person can do to help us remember and reconcile in healing ways.

What is the biblical purpose of remembering?
God’s purpose with humanity as a whole is reconciliation with God and reconciliation with one another in a new heaven and new earth. Given that we have sinned, reconciliation is what needs to happen to get us there. That’s also the goal of remembering rightly. Memory ought to serve that grand vision of reconciliation God is working to create—as Jonathan Edwards has said, the “world of perfect love,” love of God and love of neighbor.

What is Christianity’s unique contribution to remembering rightly?
To remember rightly we need to put on certain glasses. We put on glasses of the memory of the Exodus of the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt. Christians in particular remember the death and the resurrection of Christ. The apostle Paul says one has died for all. Now what does that mean for the wrong that a person has done to me?

Well, I have to remember it as a wrong of a person for whom Christ has died, even if that person isn’t receiving that redemption personally. Then I look at myself. Christ died for my sins, too. I can’t remember transgression against me as one who is purely innocent. It’s not as if I stand in the light and the other person [stands] in the darkness, and he or she has to do all the changing, while I bask in my self-righteousness.

So Christ’s death frames my remembering and reminds me of my own sinfulness and of the love of God toward a person who has injured me.

How do we remember without getting bitter?
In the present discussion about memory, we tend to emphasize remembering what has happened to us, what others have done to us, or if we are more virtuous, what we have done to others. But it’s not about our actions and our sufferings. Now, I don’t want to disregard our deeds and our sufferings, but in Exodus, the Israelites didn’t just remember what they had suffered at the hands of the Egyptians. That was the backdrop to remember what God did for them. It’s a hopeful memory of liberation, a memory of salvation. If you emulate that, then you can remember rightly.

How might right remembering affect church practice?
We have a ritual of remembrance, the Lord’s Supper. We break bread and remember Christ’s broken body. We drink from the cup and remember Christ’s suffering and his spilled blood. If we remember Christ’s suffering rightly, that liturgical act also can serve as a means of fostering reconciliation. I will celebrate the Lord’s Supper by remembering myself as a sinner and not as a saint. I will celebrate the Lord’s Supper by remembering my enemy not as this despicable person who has to be thrown into the pit of darkness, but as one for whom Christ has shed his blood. Therefore, I will be taken up into this action of Christ and hopefully emulate Christ in how I remember and treat the other person.

When can we forget the wrongs committed against us?
In a sense, forgetting is given to us as the gift of a healed relationship. It’s a gift of the new world, which God gives us. Then we can not remember. And then our experience is like a person who is sitting in a concert hall and listening to a wonderful piece of music. Even though just two hours ago she was experiencing hell at her job, she’s taken up into that music. It’s not that she tried to forget so that she could be in the music; it’s that the music took her out of the remembrance of the past. God gives us the gift of a healed self, healed relationships, and a reconstituted world, and then we can not remember.

This is taken from an interview by Christianity Today associate editor Collin Hansen posted here.

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The Apostle Paul had a very functional view of the Lord’s Supper. Linked, as it was at that time, with ‘the love feast’, he demanded that they ‘discern the Lord’s body’. That is, that (i) they saw what Christ’s body was given for, namely forgiveness related to love, and (ii) that they saw the body of Christ, its members and their needs, and shared mutually in meeting those needs. All partook of one food and drink – the body and blood of Christ which was ‘the one bread’, ‘the one cup’. That made them the one cup and the one bread. It was significant for their unity as the people of God, the body of Christ.

In all then, we see the grace of the sacraments was simply the grace of forgiveness, God’s love. The sacraments demonstrate the corporate nature of the people of God, initiated by grace into grace, and daily living in the grace of the Cross and the Resurrection. Baptism and the Supper unite to bring this grace (i) by the enactment of each sacrament, and (ii) by that dynamic remembrance which stimulates the people of God. Another way of saying this is that the grace of God is powerfully set forth and emphasised by the sacraments because every day the community needs the love of God in forgiveness, justification and sanctification, all of which flow from the atonement, i.e. from the one act of Christ’s Cross and Resurrection.

The sacraments are a participation, a communion of persons, a partaking in the transfigured humanity of the incarnate Son of God (Gal 3:27; Matt 28:19; Rom 6:3; 1 Cor 10:2; Eph 4:24; 1 Cor 10:16ff.; 11:24, 27ff.). What this portrays to us is that the life of the people of God must not be reduced to spiritualism or mysticism. If the sacraments were merely spiritual mysticism then they would be simply another aspect of worship. To partake of the sacraments is not to watch a religious drama, or to meditate upon emblems as one would a picture. Water washes those baptised, food is consumed at the table of the Lord.

The whole life of faith is a life lived in Christ (e.g. Gal 2:20; Col 3:3; John 14:23). Christ’s is a vicarious humanity so that ‘for us’ and ‘on our behalf’ are key emphases of the New Testament. Christ, in solidarity with us, is circumcised and baptised as our representative. In our place Jesus obeys, and as our Head Jesus dies for our sins and is raised. It is not that we merely share in Christ’s personality. Christ came to redeem – for this purpose he was incarnate. The energetic, crucial and tragic action is found in Christ’s work, drawing all sinners into the judgement of his cross where both the holiness of God and the conscience of humankind is satisfied. Justification is realised in the risen Lord Jesus – but we have this work, this personhood, this power, and this grace bestowed – re-presented – upon us in the sacraments. In this action, Christ is the Chief Actor.

With the coming of the Word in the presence of the Holy Spirit, in the solemn moment of truth the Gospel is crystallised, and we are clinched in our relationship with Christ in his action conveyed in baptism (1 Cor 12:12-13; Acts 22:16; 1 Cor 6:11). It is the continuity of our life in Christ which is reinforced, and highlighted to us in Holy Communion. For here, in a sacramental way, the life of Christ is conveyed into the life of the worshipper and the worshipping community through the bread and wine.

… the bread and the wine of the Eucharist are not merely emblems of the sacrifice that was once offered for the sins of the world; they are the vehicle by means of which the virtue of that sacrifice is appropriated by the participant.[1]

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[1] Peter T. Forsyth, The Church and the Sacraments (London: Independent Press, 1947), 162.

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2. Freedom

In the Supper, there is an ‘uplifting’ of our own humanity, a freely given participation in the life of God.

This in turn transforms the whole conception of the analogical relation in the sacramental participation. Not only is it one which has Christological content, but it is an active analogy, the kind by which we are conducted upward to spiritual things, and are more and more raised up to share in the life of God. This is an elevation or exaltation into fellowship with the divine life through the amazing condescension of the Son who has been pleased to unite Himself with us in our poverty and unrighteousness, that through redemption, justification, sanctification, eternal life, and all the other benefits that reside in Christ we may be endowed with divine riches, even with the life and love that overflow in Christ from God Himself.[1]

The reality is that in Jesus Christ, God shares his own freedom with us, creating a human community called the Church whose spirit is none other than the same Holy Spirit of the Triune God. As God ceaselessly pours himself out on his people, freedom happens. This freedom is enacted in Baptism and celebrated at the Supper. In the words of Robert Jensen, ‘The practice of my freedom is that I am opened to the possibility by utterly various and unpredictable gifts which the Spirit gives other members of the church. Freedom is being able to drink from one cup with the rich and the poor, the healthy and the alarmingly diseased. Freedom is having to forgive and be forgiven.’[2]

In the Supper we ‘celebrate’ this freedom through divine service as an act of thanksgiving for God’s rendering of free service to us through Christ.[3] This eucharist is properly that of the Son to the Father into which we are uplifted as we fellowship with Christ in the Spirit through the communion (koinonia) of the meal. cf. John 16:32‑33; 17:24.
Thus the Sacrament is an action in which we receive Christ and feed upon His Body and Blood by faith, giving thanks for what He has done in the whole course of His obedience, but it is also an action in which we set forth the bread and wine and plead the merits of Christ, taking shelter in His sole and sufficient Mediation and advocacy on our behalf, and lift up our hearts in praise and thanksgiving for His triumphant resurrection and for His ascension, in which we cling to the royal intercessions of the ascended Lord who is set down on the throne of God Almighty … It is our entering within the veil through Christ, who ever lives to make intercession for us and our consecration before the face of the Father.[4]
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[1] Torrance, Conflict, 145.
[2] Robert W. Jenson, On Thinking the Human: Resolutions of Difficult Notions (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 44.
[3] Barth, CD IV/2, 702.
[4] Torrance, Conflict , 147f.

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3.4 The Lord’s Supper as faithfulness and freedom; as upholding and uplifting[1]

1. Faithfulness: ‘where two or three are gathered in my name, there I will be with them.’ (Matt 18:20)

There is an ‘upholding’ of those who bear the name of Christ, a faithful act on the part of Christ, binding himself to our time and place. We are affirmed and ‘named’ even in our inability to believe. Christ comes to us through the act of receiving the elements, we do not ‘ascend’ to Christ through the elements. Thus, to ‘discern the body’ (1 Cor 11), is to perceive the presence of Christ in each other. The issue of the presence of an ‘unbeliever’ at the Lord’s table is not dealt with by Paul in 1 Cor 11. His emphasis is on the ‘unworthy’ partaking, not an ‘unworthy person.’

John Wesley considered the Supper to be a ‘converting ordinance,’ where non-Christians would come to know Christ.

One of the salient features of the Methodist Revival was the fact that the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper came to be regarded not simply as a confirming, but as a converting ordinance … the Lord’s Supper can mark the beginning of the Christian life. It would be possible to give a lengthy list of early Methodists who were, like Susannah Wesley, the mother of John and Charles, converted at the Lord’s Supper. It was the actual experience of the Lord’s Supper as a converting ordinance that led the Wesley’s so insistently to contend for its use by men and women before conversion. They took this stand against the Moravians who would have denied the Sacrament to all except those who had received full assurance of faith.[2]

Others argue that the Supper should not be viewed in this ‘evangelistic’ way. So Otto Weber writes:

The Meal is not a means of mission; it has never been that. The totality within which and in which Christ through the Holy Spirit gives himself to us is a mystery. But in this it is important that the proprium of the Supper in comparison with baptism, which is also physical, is that it deals with us in our supra‑individual (and not just trans‑subjective) existence as the Community.[3]

It reminds/speaks the Gospel to the Christian community. At the same time, Weber says further:
The New Testament has no trace of the idea of ‘partaking on the part of unworthy people.’ There is also no reason to interrogate the participants at the Supper about their ‘worthiness’ or ‘unworthiness’ or to investigate it. This is all the more remarkable since otherwise there is definitely the practice of ‘ecclesiastical discipline.’ What we do find in Scripture is the term ‘unworthy’ (anexios) in 1 Corinthians 11:27. There is the ‘partaking’ which is itself ‘unworthy’ (manducatio indigna), but there is no trace of the idea of ‘partaking by those who are unworthy’ (manducatio indigna) … The question of the ‘partaking by the unbeliever,’ or as it is put in the Wittenberg Concord, the ‘partaking by the unworthy’ (manducatio indignorum), is not raised by the New Testament. It is a question which arises in the practice and teaching of the Church.[4]
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[1] See Barth, CD IV/2, 702ff.
[2] John C. Bowmer, The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in Early Methodism (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1951), 106‑7; Also John R. Parris, John Wesley’s Doctrine of the Sacraments (London: Epworth Press, 1963), 68ff.
[3] Weber, Foundations, 636.
[4] Weber, Foundations, 645.

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3.3 Jesus Christ as the objective reality of the Lord’s Supper.

1. The mode of sacramental relation reflects the mode of hypostatic union between humanity and deity in Christ

Christ as the objective union of human and divine in his own person is also the objective presence of God to humans and humans to God. All forms and theories with regard to this ‘presence’ are relative to this objective ‘presence’ of God in Christ. Again, we must say that the mysterion is located in the Incarnate One, not in the mechanical or supernatural relation between physical element and spiritual grace.

2. Transubstantiation?

The medieval doctrine of transubstantiation was confirmed in 1215 as official dogma. This formulation of the relation of Christ to the elements takes the is, ‘this is my body’, with the strictest literalism. Philosophically, this miracle was explained by Thomas Aquinas on the basis of the Aristotelian distinction between the accidents of a thing (its perceptible characteristics, such as taste, texture), and the essence or substance of a thing (the true reality of a thing). Thus, in the miracle of transubstantiation, when the prayer of the Priest invokes the presence of Christ into the elements, the substance of bread is transformed into the substance of flesh, while the accidental qualities of bread remain. Thus Christ is assumed to be actually present as real substance in the bread and wine, leading to the adoration of the elements as well as a propitiatory immolation of Christ in a ‘sacrifice’.[1]

The Reformers agreed on the rejection of this notion of ‘real presence’ and sacrifice based on the doctrine of transubstantiation, with Luther holding that Christ is truly present ‘under and with the elements,’ in such a way that the humanity of Christ becomes capable of omnipresence wherever the Lord’s Supper is held due to the doctrine of the ubiquity (i.e. omnipresence) of the human nature of Jesus. This is explained in Lutheran theology by the concept of communicatio idiomatum – where the properties belonging to one of the natures of Christ is fully incorporated into the other. Some have termed this Lutheran view, ‘consubstantiation.’ Luther wrote, ‘What is the sacrament of the Altar? It is the true Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, under the bread and wine, given unto us Christians to eat and to drink, as it was instituted by Christ Himself.’[2]

Calvin, on the other hand, while denying ‘real presence’ in terms of substance, spoke in terms of a ‘spiritual’ presence of Christ in the form of the assembled company of believers who receive the elements:

… he has, through the hand of his only-begotten Son, given to his church another sacrament, that is, a spiritual banquet, wherein Christ attests himself to be the life-giving bread, upon which our souls feed unto true and blessed immortality … (B)read and wine … represent for us the invisible food that we receive from the flesh and blood of Christ. For as in baptism, God, regenerating us, engrafts us into the society of his church and makes us his own by adoption, so we have said, that he discharges the function of a provident householder in continually supplying to us the food to sustain and preserve us in that life into which he has begotten us by his Word. Now Christ is the only food of our soul, and therefore our Heavenly Father invites us to Christ, that, refreshed by partaking of him, we may repeatedly gather strength until we shall have reached heavenly immortality.[3]

The view of Zwingli tended to be more of a memorial supper focussing on the historical event of Christ’s death and resurrection, with his presence ‘in the Spirit,’ so that the sacramental elements themselves were totally symbolic, possessing no qualities of ‘presence.’ So, ‘The presence of Christ’ in the Lord’s Supper is understood by Zwingli in an ‘idealistic’ fashion, so to speak, by Luther in a tangible‑‘objective’ fashion, by Melanchton in an actual fashion, and by Calvin in a ‘spiritual fashion.’[4]

Karl Barth adds an important warning: ‘From the standpoint of the community itself, of the company assembled round the table of the Lord, what takes place will always be highly problematical. Yet’, he goes on, ‘in spite of this it is a fellowship of the Lord’s Supper, united by Him both with Him and also, because with Him, in itself; communio sanctorum as a fellowship of the sure and certain hope of eternal life.’[5]

3. The eschatological union between creature and Creator grounds the Church both in a history as well as in a future

The Lord’s Supper reaches back into the event of Christ’s death – ‘On the night on which he was betrayed.’ It also reaches forward into the future – ‘Until he comes’ (1 Cor 11:23, 26). ‘Through the Eucharist the Church becomes, so to speak, the great arch that spans history, supported by only two pillars, the Cross which stands on this side of time, and the coming of Christ in power which stands at the end of history.’[6]

David Watson suggests that the Lord’s Supper causes the Christian to look in four directions:

i. to look back by remembering God’s mercy when he delivered his people from bondage; and to the Cross, the great event of deliverance from sin;
ii. to look in by purifying oneself from everything evil;
iii. to look around by including one’s entire household as well as the stranger;iv. to look forward by anticipating the coming of Christ and the completion of the Messianic age.[7]

[1] Cf. G. Bromiley, ‘Transubstantiation’, in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (ed. W. A. Elwell; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 1108. Also Berkouwer, Sacraments, 219ff.
[2] Martin Luther, ‘Small Catechism, Book of Concord’, in Joseph Stump, An Explanation of Luther’s Small Catechism (Whitefish: Kessinger, 2004), 21.
[3] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.17.1. (ed. J. T. McNeill; trans. F. L. Battles; Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977), 2:1360f.
[4] Weber, Foundations, 632.
[5] Barth, CD IV/2, 704.
[6] Torrance, Conflict, 171.
[7] David Watson, I Believe in the Church (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), 237‑241.

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3.2 The apostolic recognition of this event as foundational for their new life in the mystery of the Kingdom.

After the resurrection and ascension the disciples understood why, again and again, Jesus had gathered the lost sheep of the House of Israel, the cultically unclean and those debarred from the temple liturgy of sacrifice, and although it scandalized the priests He deliberately broke down the barriers erected by the cultus, and enacted in their midst a sign of the Messianic Meal, when many would come from the east and the west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven. That eschatological meal was not an eating and drinking between holy priests and people, but the marriage-supper of the Lamb, who because he had come to bear their sin, gathered the poor and the outcast, the weary and the heavy laden, the publicans and sinners, and fed them with the bread of life and gave them living water to drink. The disciples remembered also the parables of the prodigal son and his feasting in the father’s house, of the bridegroom and the wedding feast, and the final judgment which would discover those who had given or not given food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, and they understood their bearing upon the Lord’s Supper as the great eschatological meal of the Kingdom of God through which that very Kingdom is realized here and now, as far as may be in the conditions of this passing world. The disciples recalled, too, those Galilean meals of fellowship with Jesus, the miraculous feeding of the multitudes by the Great Shepherd of the sheep, and the equally wonderful words He spoke about manna and water, about His flesh and blood, and the life-giving Spirit, and they knew that what had been parable and sign and miracle then had at last materialized in the Easter breaking of bread.[1]

The resurrection qualifies the Last Supper, and transforms it into an eschatological representation of Christ; his presence continues to be with them, yet it is a ‘presence in absence.’ Thus, we have to distinguish, in a doctrine of the ‘real presence’ of Christ in the elements of the Lord’s Supper, between the eschatological parousia and the final parousia in judgement and new creation. It is the same Jesus who is present through re‑presentation, and yet this presence is veiled so as to create a space between the Word of forgiveness and the final power of healing for the Church to reach out and bind the lost into this fellowship.

Certainly bread and wine are signs, in contrast to some kind of self-effectual power inherently present in them They refer to ‘something’ else. They remain what they are – it is senseless to speculate about whether their ‘substance’ is transformed. But, on the other hand, they are certainly not random ‘signs,’ ‘deposits,’ and ‘gifts (or ‘elements’), but derive their intention from the event of the history of Jesus with his disciples, from the breaking of bread and the Last Supper. They are elect signs, destined for their meaning. What gives them their validity is neither our faith, nor their symbolic power, nor any salvific effectuality which inheres in them intrinsically, but solely the intended historical act of Jesus. There is no ‘something’ which could be found which would guarantee their ‘efficaciousness’. But he is present in them. He has determined that they will be the ‘elements’ of the Supper which he conducts with his disciples, ‘until he comes’ … He has determined himself to give his own a share in himself in that they receive these ‘elements’ within the context of the Meal. In the Meal, that is, in the giving and taking of bread and wine, he desires to be present among his own – and ‘to take them into the victory of his lordship by the power of the Holy Spirit.’[2]

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[1] Torrance, Conflict, 169.

[2] Otto Weber, Foundations of Dogmatics, Volume Two (trans. D. L. Guder; Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983), 627, italics mine.

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§ 3 The Lord’s Supper as an Event within Covenant/Salvation History

3.1 The inauguration of the new ‘covenant’ in the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

The antecedents of the Lord’s Supper can be located in the history of redemption as portrayed through Israel:

i. the Passover meal (Passover Haggadah) with its commemoration of the exodus from Egypt, with its meal of unleavened bread;

ii. the assimilation of the covenant meal (Kiddush) at Mt. Sinai which took account of the mighty events of Israel’s redemption to the Passover, with the addition of the rite of sanctification using a cup of wine (Exod 24:11);

iii. the rite of thanksgiving (Chaburah meal), or blessing, along with the breaking of bread at the start of the meal along with the cup of wine at the end.[1]

Jesus seems self‑consciously to draw these elements together in his own identification with the messianic implications of these rites.

Jesus must have followed the Jewish custom of passing round a cup of wine in token of thanksgiving to God; but before that was done, a piece of bread and a cup of wine were set aside for the Messiah in case He should suddenly come to His own in the midst of the feast. Then at the end of the meal, fully charged with pascal and covenantal significance, Jesus took the bread and wine set aside for the Messiah, and said, ‘This is my body broken for you. This is my blood which is shed for you.’ By breaking the bread and giving it to the disciples, by passing round the cup, He associated them with His sacrifice, giving their existence in relation to Himself a new form in the Kingdom of God, indeed constituting them as the Church concorporate with Himself.[2]

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[1] Cf. Torrance, Conflict, 134‑5.

[2] Torrance, Conflict, 170.

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2.2 The Eschatological aspect of Sacrament

1. Jesus, is the eschatos – the one who is the ‘end of the age,’ the final Word of God to humans, who has already come, is present, and yet to come

In Christ, the eschaton broke into the present and yet the final Word of judgement and present redemptive action of the Word are ‘held apart’ to leave room for repentance and faith. So Mark 2:1-12, where an interval of time occurs between the word of forgiveness and the healing of the body. This is what Torrance calls an ‘eschatological reserve’ between the Word of the Kingdom and its power.[1]

The Church is redeemed, not in Word only, but in power, and yet it waits for the redemption of the body. The sacrament functions to preserve this unity between Word and power while maintaining the eschatological tension. The word of forgiveness is proclaimed, yet the healing of the body (resurrection) is delayed. As we shall see, this means that all healing is provisional, and a miraculous healing may be understood itself as a kind of sacrament of the resurrection.

2. There is a ‘presence in absence,’ associated with the sacrament

Paul says, ‘from now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way’ (2 Cor 5:16). In the words of the institution that Paul received for the Lord’s Supper he says, ‘Do this in remembrance of me … For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Cor 11:24, 26). The ‘until he comes’ portrays for us the provisional nature of the sacramental life of the Church. With the ascension, Christ withdraws from one form of presence to enter into a new form of presence, attested in the sacraments of Baptism and the Supper, among other forms.

The sacraments point to their own disappearance as interim events sustaining the life of the Church between Pentecost and resurrection. ‘The really significant event in Baptism is a hidden event; it recedes from sight in the ascension of Christ and waits to be revealed full at the last day.’[2]

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[1] See Torrance, Conflict, 159.

[2] See Torrance, Conflict, 167.

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§2 Sacrament as the Re‑Presentation of Christ

2.1 The sacrament gives to the church a ‘communion in the mystery of Christ,’ and thus the sacrament is a true sign of this mystery.

Matthew 18:20: ‘for where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ John 14:21, 23: ‘They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them … Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.’

According to T. F. Torrance, Calvin meant by the term ‘signify’ as used of a sacrament, or the term ‘present,’ not merely that which recalls to memory, or that which symbolises a thing, but that which designates the thing itself, that which re‑presents a thing; thus the sacrament is an act of re‑presenting the same Word which is given in the Incarnation.[1] ‘Kerygm is in the fullest sense the sacramental action of the Church through which the mystery of the Kingdom concerning Christ and His Church, hid from the foundation of the world, is now being revealed in history … in kerygma the same word continues to be ‘made flesh’ in the life of the Church.’[2]

The very withdrawal of Jesus from visible and direct relation to the world casts the Church into an eschatological relation with Christ the head of the Church. The Church lives between the cross and the parousia and thus the original sacramental relation of the creature to the Creator in the hypostatic union (Incarnation) is now re‑presented through the enactment of the life of the Church itself. But in this re‑presentation the full presence of the parousia is screened, permitting the Church to have a genuine history in relation to the world. In God’s revealing to and through the Church in Jesus Christ, God also is concealed in order to be present, not merely as another ‘presence’ alongside the existence of others, but in and through their existence.[3]

Here is the danger of idolatry in the sacrament – ‘The call to worship can be the temptation to idolatry’, said Barth, but this is a call which cannot be avoided.[4] The work and sign of Christ’s presence is not frustrated by unbelief, however, precisely because the re‑presentation is governed from the side of divine action, ‘offence can be taken’ through the substitution of the sign for that which is not signified.[5] This danger of ‘offence’ seems to be greater for one who stands within the church than the one who comes in from without, and may actually be an ‘unbeliever’ in the church’s eyes (cf. 1 Cor 14).

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[1] Cf. Thomas F. Torrance, Conflict and Agreement. Vol. 2 (London: Lutterworth Press, 1960), 140‑1.

[2] Torrance, Conflict, 158‑9.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 (eds. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; trans. G. W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1969), 55.

[4] Barth, CD II/1, 55.

[5] Barth, CD II/1, 55‑6.

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1.2 Revelation as Sacrament

‘Revelation means sacrament’.[1] For God to reveal himself, this revelation must be disclosed in creaturely objectivity, adapted to our creaturely existence and knowledge. The theological concept of sacrament is thus bound up in the structure and nature of God’s revelation. Thus, there is ambiguity from the perspective of the human person – the objectification of divine revelation is not a predication of the creaturely mind – and a provisional aspect to revelation – the final Word of revelation encompasses the ‘end of history’ as well as its significance. This means that there is an eschatological tension between the revelation of God in its historical form and its ultimate reality. This is true both of revelation and sacrament as a sign of revelation.

1. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the primary sacrament

Jesus Christ is the mysterion through which all sacramental ‘mystery’ is mediated and objectively confirmed (1 Tim 3:16).

In the New Testament mysterion denotes an event in the world of time and space which is directly initiated and brought to pass by God alone, so that in distinction from all other events it is basically a mystery to human cognition in respect of its origin and possibility. If it discloses itself to man, this will not be from without, but only from within, through itself and therefore once again only through God’s revelation … Faith as a human action is nowhere called (in Scripture) a mystery, nor is Christian obedience, nor love, nor hope, nor the existence and function of the ecclesia, nor its proclamation of the Gospel, nor its tradition as such, nor baptism, nor the Lord’s Supper.[2]

The human nature of Jesus is the sacramental reality of revelation on the ground of the hypostatic union between the divine and human in the one person. There is attestation, or witness of God to humans and humans to God, in this primary event which is determinative of all secondary occurrences of the Christ event.

For, in the light of the attestation which occurred through the man Jesus, we find the attestation of God wherever it is the attestation of that occurrence. That the eternal Word as such became flesh is a unique occurrence. It happened only once. It is not therefore the starting point for a general concept of Incarnation. But its attestation through the existence of the man Jesus is a beginning of which there are continuations; a sacramental continuity stretches backwards into the existence of the people of Israel, whose Messiah He is, and forwards into the existence of the apostolate and the Church founded on the apostolate. The humanity of Jesus Christ as such is the first sacrament, the foundation of everything that God instituted and used in His revelation … And, as this first sacrament, the humanity of Jesus Christ is at the same time the basic reality and substance of the highest possibility of the creature as such.[3]

2. The true mysterion is located in the single event of the incarnate presence of God in Jesus Christ

Baptism and the Supper are regarded in the New Testament as two aspects of the one event. There is, therefore, properly speaking, one sacrament, of which Baptism and the Supper are correlated expressions.

The language that the New Testament uses about Baptism is interchangeable with that it uses concerning the Supper (Cf. Mark 10:38f.; 1 Cor 10:1ff.; 12:12‑13). Thus, the relation between Baptism and the Supper is bound up in the Word of God as Incarnate, inscripturated, and proclaimed. This locates the objective reality of the sacraments in the presence of Christ both as an event within salvation history and as the Lord of the Church. There is a primary objectivity through Christ to which both the objective (physical) and subjective (personal) nature of the sacraments are bound.

Here it is important to see that the true mysterion is located in the primary objectivity – the Incarnation – and not in the secondary objectivity, the physical aspects of the sacrament. In the sacrament, undergirded by the Word of God and attended by the Spirit of Christ, the sacramental action of the Church itself takes place, through which the mysteries of the Kingdom concerning Jesus Christ are made known. The original presentation of God to humans and humans to God becomes a re‑presentation in the sacramental life of the church.

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[1] Barth, CD II/1, 52.

[2] Barth, CD IV/4, 108‑9.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Il/2, (eds G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; trans. G. W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 54.

Holy Communion – 2

The Sacramental Life of the Church

While some groups and denominations within the Church believe the sacraments to be critical for the life and ministry of the Church (Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and some Anglicans), others see them as either unimportant or irrelevant (eg. Quakers, Salvation Army). This study considers the notion that Jesus Christ is Himself the Primary Sacrament, and that the function of the sacraments for and in the Church is to re‑present Christ to us.

§1 Jesus Christ as the Primary Sacrament

1.1 The Concept of Sacrament

1. Sacrament as mysterion

The Greek word mysterion, as found in the New Testament, was translated by Jerome into Latin as sacramentum. In Ephesians 5:32, for example, where Paul speaks of marriage and the ‘one flesh’ relationship as a great mysterion, Jerome used the word sacramentum, thereby creating the theological concept of marriage as a sacrament.

The word ‘sacrament’ originally meant a ‘thing set apart as sacred,’ and ‘a military oath of obedience,’ where a citizen of Rome was inducted into the army and loyalty to Caesar, who was considered to have divine status.[1]

Augustine later defined sacrament as a ‘visible word’,[2] or an ‘outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’.[3] The similarity between the outward form and the hidden grace tended to be stressed. As a result, the ritual of a sacrament came to be regarded as ‘conveying grace,’ rather than relating human persons to God through participation in Christ through faith.

The technical term for this direct mediation of grace through the elements and ritual of a sacrament was described as ex opere operato (on the basis of the work wrought). In other words, the grace of God conveyed in the sacrament was not dependent upon the recipient, nor the officiant, but the act itself.[4]

2. Sacrament and the Word of God

Both Luther and Calvin rejected the doctrine of ex opere operato and agreed upon the effective relation of Word to Sacrament and the importance of faith. However, they also wanted to protect the sacraments against an undue subjectivising, a charge which Rome made against the Reformers in the their rejection of ex opere operato. Berkouwer points out that the Roman Catholic doctrine contains within it a subjectivising factor itself – there is the necessity of a certain disposition, or rather, the absence of a ‘negative disposition’ which constitutes the effectiveness of the sacrament. Supernatural grace is prevented from entering the soul if an obstacle is in the way.[5]

Reformed theology, particularly as found in Calvin, reached beyond the synthesis of objectivity/subjectivity in the Roman doctrine of ex opere operato and posited a third possibility. The objectivity in the sacrament is not in the elements or the act but in the ‘object of faith,’ Jesus Christ, the true mysterion.[6] Thus Calvin took the outward form of the sacrament with full objective seriousness, but did not locate the mysterion in the relation between physical sign and grace, but in the person and work of Christ himself. Thus, the grace of the sacrament is the same grace as in justification. For Calvin, the sacrament is directed toward faith in order to nourish and strengthen it. This is what Karl Barth described as Calvin’s ‘cognitive sacramentalism’.[7]

3. Sacraments as signs

By the 12th Century, the Medieval Church had concluded that there were 7 sacraments, and the Council of Trent made this a dogma of the Church. In addition to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, they added Confirmation, Holy Orders, Marriage, Confession, and Extreme Unction. The Reformers rejected the additional five as having no Biblical basis. A sacrament is a sign, but not all signs are sacraments.[8] Therefore, the doctrine of the sacraments cannot be based on a phenomenological basis, but must be a recognition of those signs through which God has determined to act.

Here we must heed Berkouwer’s warning against developing a general concept of sacrament, and then applying it to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The Bible does not speak of sacrament, but only of those concrete actions directed by Christ.[9]

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[1] Cf. R. S. Wallace, ‘Sacrament’, in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (ed. W. A. Elwell; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 965.

[2] Cited in Carol Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 245.

[3] Augustine, Augustine: Confessions Books I-IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 163.

[4] Cf. Gerrit C. Berkouwer, The Sacraments (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1975), 62.

[5] Cf. Berkouwer, Sacraments, 68.

[6] Cf. Berkouwer, Sacraments, 72ff.

[7] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/4 (eds. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; trans. G. W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1969), 130.

[8] Berkouwer, Sacraments, 24.

[9] Berkouwer, Sacraments, 9.

Holy Communion – 1

Over the next few weeks, I will be posting some thoughts from a recent paper that I gave on Holy Communion. Much of this material will be based on some very helpful lecture notes by Ray Anderson.

The Gospel declares that we are saved by God’s grace alone. Jesus Christ is the grace and truth of God incarnate. Christians have traditionally held that God has also given us means of grace whereby we receive the grace of God in Christ. They are means of grace only in so far as they literally ‘speak’ the word of Christ to us.

Traditionally, these means of grace have included various spiritual disciplines, especially Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, Holy Scripture, prayer, fasting, meeting with God’s people, worship and confession. In more recent times, Christians have also spoken of other things, like silence, suffering, candles, even coffee, as a means of grace.

John Wesley believed that Jesus is God’s means of grace. For him, the ‘means of grace’ were also ‘works of piety’ (spiritual disciplines) and ‘works of mercy’ (doing good to others). He said that means of grace are ‘outward signs, words, or actions, ordained of God, and appointed for this end, to be the ordinary channels whereby he might convey to [people], preventing, justifying, or sanctifying grace’.[1]

Wesley talked about a variety of works of piety:

The chief of these means are prayer, whether in secret or with the great congregation; searching the Scriptures; (which implies reading, hearing, and meditating thereon;) and receiving the Lord’s Supper, eating bread and drinking wine in remembrance of Him: And these we believe to be ordained of God, as the ordinary channels of conveying His grace to the souls of men.[2]

In this paper, we will be looking at Holy Communion as God’s gift to us.

The two gospel sacraments (Baptism and Holy Communion) are pledges and pictures of God’s grace and of the redeeming love of Jesus Christ. In this sense, they are proclamation activities, i.e. they proclaim the gospel visibly in the same way that preaching proclaims the gospel verbally. In this it is important to remember that while the Word can and does exist and function apart from the sacraments, the sacraments have no function apart from the Word of God.

The sacraments are rightly viewed as means of grace, for God makes them means to faith, using them to strengthen faith’s confidence in his promises and to call forth acts of faith for receiving the good gifts signified. The efficacy of the sacraments to this end resides not in the faith or virtue of the minister or believer but in the faithfulness of God, who, having given the signs, is now pleased to use them. Knowing this, Christ and the Apostles not only speak of the sign as if it were the thing signified but speak too as if receiving the former is the same as receiving the latter (e.g., Matt 26:26-28; 1 Cor 10:15-21; 1 Pet 3:21-22). As the preaching of the Word makes the gospel audible, so the sacraments make it visible, and God stirs up faith by both means. In other words, sacraments function as means of grace on the principle that, literally, seeing is (i.e., leads to) believing.

Being linked with the Passover, the Supper points back to the old exodus (Israel being released from slavery in Egypt), and forward to the ‘new’ exodus (Luke 9:28) – Jesus’ death which would secure our release from sin and the devil. It also has in view the second parousia of Jesus Christ. In Luke 22:18 we see this fact. It is also given voice in 1 Corinthians 11:26, where Paul says that we are to share in this meal ‘until he comes’. This simple meal points to the ultimate purpose of God when all the redeemed people of God shall be gathered together in glory to celebrate the full salvation and liberty of the children of God.

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[1] Cited in Christopher J. Cocksworth, Evangelical Eucharistic Thought in the Church of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 64.

[2] John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions (New York: G. Lane and C. B. Tippett, 1845), 137.

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