I was musing on Twitter and Facebook the other day about baptism and why evangelicals are often willing to downplay the differences in their understanding of baptism for the sake of unity. It is a topic that has caused a lot of confusion for me, especially as we see churches divide all the time over issues that seem to be of far less importance than baptism, which is so central to the church's life.
Anyway, I still don't have answers, and I'm not here to talk about my own thoughts on the matter today. But I stumbled across this short video clip yesterday in which Doug Wilson discusses whether or not paedobaptist and credobaptist ministers can work together. Food for thought, at the least. Let me know what you think.
The baptized are brought into relation with God and with each other in the same act, by virtue of sharing in communion with the one Father, mediated by the Son and realized by the Spirit. Those who are in Christ are in the church: brought into relation to God and into community simultaneously.
Pursuit, identification, the offer of life through sacrificial love—this is what God's faithful presence means. It is a quality of commitment that is active, not passive; intentional, not accidental; covenantal, not contractual. In the life of Christ we see how it entailed his complete attention. It was whole-hearted, not half-hearted; focused and purposeful, nothing desultory about it. His very name, Immanuel, signifies all of this—"God with us"—in our presence (Matt. 1:23).
And the point of God's active and committed presence, of course, has always been to restore our relationship with him. This, of course, is the meaning of the Eucharist. God's coming to us, his becoming flesh and blood like us, and his atoning sacrifice for us are manifested in the bread and the wine that is fed to us. His faithful presence is manifested in the body that was broken and the blood that was shed for the remission of sins. In the Eucharist, we not only have a backward-looking remembrance of what God accomplished long ago but we have a celebration of the start of God's restoration in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. In the Eucharist, Christians celebrate the in-breaking of the new creation within the framework of the old; the kingdom that is to come within the present.
I continue to insist that if we truly believed and understood all that is signified in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, our partaking of it would occur with far greater frequency. Bavinck has noted that the Supper is 'not merely a reminiscence of or a reflection on Christ's benefits but a most intimate bonding with Christ himself, just as food and drink are united with the body.' Indeed, to use Hunter's terminology, it is a visible sign and seal of God's faithful presence among us. How is it, then, that we do not run to the Table as often as we can?
Since I was just chipping away at the book one essay at a time, it took me a while to finally finish Knots Untied, the collection of essays by J.C. Ryle that I have been reading and commenting on here in the last several weeks. In an essay on the Lord's Supper, Ryle raises the question of what is to function as the primary element of worship. Some Protestants, particularly evangelicals, have a tendency to elevate the preaching of the Word as the primary element, sandwiched between a few songs. In some cases, the preaching and the music occupy such a place that almost everything else becomes unimportant and worship loses its character altogether.
Anglicanism, the context in which Ryle is writing, tends in two directions (at least among those who hold convictions about such things): Anglo-Catholics tend to view the Eucharist as the pinnacle of worship, while evangelicals align themselves with the Reformed perspective, which takes the preaching of Scripture as primary. Ryle's essay, written from an evangelical perspective, attempts to demonstrate that the Anglo-Catholic position is unwarranted. He comments:
Like the ark of God in the Old Testament, this blessed sacrament has a proper position and rank among Christian ordinances, and, like the ark of God, it may easily be put in the wrong one. The history of that ark will readily recur to our minds. Put in the place of God, and treated like an idol, it did the Israelites no good at all... Treated with reverence and respect, it brought a blessing... It is even so with the Lord's Supper.—Placed in its right position, it is an ordinance full of blessing. The great question to be settled is,—What is that position?
...The Lord's Supper is not in its right place, when it is made the first, foremost, principle, and most important thing in Christian worship. That it is so in many quarters, we all must know... The sermon, the mode of conducting prayer, the reading of 'holy Scripture,' in many churches are made second to this one thing,—the administration of the Lord's Supper.—We may ask, 'What warrant of Scripture is there for this extravagant honour?' but we shall get no answer... To thrust the Lord's Supper forward, till it towers over and overrides everything else in religion, is giving it a position for which there is no authority in God's Word.
If you are looking to Scripture for evidence, as Ryle suggests, it is hard to miss the prominent place that the preaching of the Word holds in the ministry to which Christ calls his people. Ryle notes further on that the New Testament speaks with relative infrequency about the Supper in comparison with how often it speaks of and gives examples of the verbal presentations of the gospel. Looking to Luke and Acts, for example, it is time and time again the proclamation of the gospel that brings people to repentance and faith. Even in Jesus' own ministry, his making known the presence of the Kingdom through miracles and healings was always secondary to his announcements that the Kingdom of God was at hand.
The focus of Ryle's essay, as I mentioned above, is merely to demonstrate that the Lord's Supper should not hold the place it does in high church Anglicanism. However, he does not end up sharing his thoughts on its place and significance. This is unfortunate because the tendency in evangelicalism is to go too far in reacting to the excesses of those they deem to be making an idol of the sacrament, and they in turn undermine its value and partake of it far too infrequently. Would Ryle align himself with John Calvin, who rightly stressed that the Supper should always accompany the preaching of the Word because it is a visible representation of the gospel?
It is important to remember that Jesus' institution of the Supper before his death and resurrection is of enormous significance for the church. Too often evangelicals forget this an adopt a view of the Supper that reduces it to a mere memorial. The invitation to the table is an invitation to enter into intimate communion with Christ. It is an invitation to "taste and see that the Lord is good" (Ps. 34:8). It is an invitation to be united with Christ by physically partaking of the elements. It is an invitation to have a foretaste of the coming marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:6-10). It is an invitation to receive—not just to remember—his grace.
Of course, a further question arises that underlies this whole discussion. While we can go back and forth all day on whether the preaching of the Word or the celebration of the Lord's Supper should be primary in our worship, we need to first ask if it is even warranted to single out one element as the primary act of worship. Are we right to herald one part of our worship as the most important, whatever it may be, or must we understand worship as one unified whole, each part—singing, prayer, preaching, sacrament, offering, doxology—playing an equal part in our communion with God before his throne?
When I was growing up, I remember there being a number of debates about whether we should continue to use wine for the celebration of the Lord's Supper, or switch over to grape juice. All kinds of different reasons abounded for why some thought we should go to grape juice—"Wine tempts those who are recovering alcoholics," "It really doesn't matter what you use since it's just symbolic of Jesus' blood"—and eventually one of the churches I was a part of settled on half-wine and half-grape juice in the tray that was passed around. Most evangelical churches these days, it seems, don't even consider wine an option anymore.
The elements appointed by the Lord Jesus are 'bread and wine' and that the right to determine these rests with him alone, and not with the temperance movement of the nineteenth century. While Jesus changed the water into wine, the temperance movement changed wine into grape juice concentrate [or Ribena]. No one has any right to change the elements of the Lord's Supper, any more than water may be replaced in baptism by orange juice. To do this is to usurp the authority of Christ.
Many would brand this as legalism, of course, but I think that is an unfair accusation. Letham's point is that these are not pragmatic concerns we are dealing with, but a question of the authority of Christ over our worship.
