Understanding Four Views on the Lord's Supper

Zondervan, John H. Armstrong, Paul E. Engle

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780310542759
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Canon & Ecclesiastical Law

The Lord's Supper has been the central and characteristic action of the church at worship. But there are still many ways of understanding it and many questions surrounding this meal...

Who should participate in the Lord’s Supper? How frequently should we observe it? What does this meal mean? What happens when we eat the bread and drink from the cup? What do Christians disagree about and what do they hold in common?

These and other questions are explored in this volume of the fair-minded, informative Counterpoints series. Contributors make a case for one of the following views:

• Baptist view (memorialism)
• Reformed view (spiritual presence)
• Lutheran view (consubstantiation)
• Roman Catholic view (transubstantiation)

All contributors use Scripture to present their views, and each responds to the others' essays. Included are resources for understanding the topic further, such as:

• A listing of statements on the Lord's Supper from creeds and confessions
• Quotations from noted Christians
• A resource listing of books on the Lord's Supper
• Discussion questions for each chapter to facilitate small group and classroom use

The Counterpoints series presents a comparison and critique of scholarly views on topics important to Christians that are both fair-minded and respectful of the biblical text. Each volume is a one-stop reference that allows readers to evaluate the different positions on a specific issue and form their own, educated opinion.

Chapter One

BAPTIST VIEW

Christ’s Presence as Memorial

BAPTIST VIEW: Christ’s Presence as Memorial

Russell D. Moore

Novelist Flannery O’Connor was at a dinner party when “the conversation turned on the Eucharist.” In response to a comment from the ex-Catholic intellectual Mary McCarthy in which she said she thought of the bread of Communion as a pretty good symbol, O’Connor said, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”¹ Many Christians can sympathize with O’Connor’s reflexively Catholic dismissal of a “symbolic” view of the Lord’s Supper. And, in one sense, she is exactly right. If the bread and the wine are simply “symbols” — along the lines of a contemporary corporate logo — whose point is to remind us of a significant historical event, then the Lord’s Table really isn’t all that defining for Christian identity. But this, of course, is not at all what Baptists and others in the broad Zwinglian tradition have meant when we have affirmed that the Lord’s Supper is a “memorial meal,” or an ordinance of Christ. In order to understand the Baptist view, we must take into account the biblical pattern of signs, and how it relates to the role of proclamation for the creation and sustenance of faith. But in order to recapture the meaning of the so-called “memorial” view, more than just understanding is in order. Churches must consciously reclaim the Lord’s Supper as a central aspect of the church’s identity in Christ.

THE LORD’S SUPPER AS SIGN

Biblical Foundations

The very term memorial can be misleading. Many contemporary Christians have thus chafed at the idea of the Supper as a bare means to remembrance — prompting even some Baptists to embrace a more sacramental understanding of the Supper.² But the historic Baptist concept of the Lord’s Supper serves less as a “memorial” than as a sign — a sign pointing both backward and forward. In the Old Testament, this function of the sign serves as a “reminder” and a proclamation to both covenant parties —Yahweh and his people — of the promises of God. The rainbow sign of the Noahic covenant, for instance, served to remind the entire surviving creation that they had been spared from the wrath of God in the deluge, and to remind them that God promised never to destroy his creation by water again. But the most significant aspect of the bow was the “reminder” to God himself: “Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth” (Gen. 9:16). As theologian Michael Williams points out, the bow in the sky is “a sign of God’s grace in the midst of judgment,” a treaty of peace between the Creator and his human image bearers along with the creation they are called to govern under his lordship.³

The sign nature of the Supper is in continuity then with the rest of God’s redemptive purposes in the canon, purposes that often are linked with the concept of eating and feeding. In the primeval garden of Eden, the man and the woman were sustained by the fruit of the trees, especially by that of the Tree of Life. One of the earliest and most specific acts of God’s lordship over humanity entailed what they were to eat and what they were to avoid eating.⁴ After their rebellion, they were cut off from the garden sanctuary, but most specifically from the life-giving tree.

In the redemption of Israel from among the nations, God gave various signs that he was for them, centering on the act of eating and feeding. The Passover meal indicated God’s presence on behalf of the Israelites. Manna in the wilderness, along with the provision of water and of quail, demonstrated that God cared for his covenant people. Moreover, God promised a future restoration that included eating and drinking of bread and of wine. In his prophecy of God’s overturning of the reign of death, Isaiah mentions that God will lay out a banquet for all peoples on the holy mountain, a feast that includes “the finest of wines” (Isa. 25:6). The messianic feast points even beyond the bounty of Canaan, “a land of grain and new wine, where the heavens drop dew” (Deut. 33:28). Speaking of the glorious future that awaits God’s people, Zechariah writes, “The seed will grow well, the vine will yield its fruit, the ground will produce its crops, and the heavens will drop their dew. I will give all these things as an inheritance to the remnant of this people” (Zech. 8:12). With Israel restored, “Grain will make the young men thrive, and new wine the young women” (9:17). When the Davidic kingdom is exalted in the last days, Amos announces, “New wine will drip from the mountains and flow from all the hills” (Amos 9:13), and the restored nation of Israel “will plant vineyards and drink their wine” (v. 14).

With the curse on the ground (Gen. 3:17 – 18) now lifted, the people will feast, because their covenant God feeds them —and does so without stinginess. Whereas in the old age, people labored against the ground for bread and for wine (“through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life” [Gen. 3:17]), at the messianic banquet the earth itself will joyfully give forth the provision of the covenant God.

The coming of Jesus promises the onset of this new reality. Jesus changes water to wine at a wedding feast, pointing to a greater feast to come (John 2:1 – 11). He feeds thousands by multiplying food with a word (John 6:1 – 13). He identifies himself and his people with the vine of God (John 15:1 – 8), an image previously given to the nation of Israel (Isa. 5:1 – 7; Jer. 2:21), identifying himself as the fulfillment of the promise that the vine would one day yield fruit (Isa. 27:6; Gal. 5:22 – 23). In Christ, this new age is a reality, although a veiled reality seen only to those who have the eyes of faith. The meal Jesus feeds us then is a sign of an eschatological banquet, with the church acknowledging the “already” and pining for the “not yet.”

All of this is set in the context of a cosmic warfare schema of Scripture. The story line is a battle between the Serpent and the dragon-slayer son of Eve (Gen. 3:15; Rev. 12), a war that rages from the very earliest pages of the biblical story. Even in the tracks just outside of Eden, the murderous Serpent leads a fallen humanity to the shedding of blood, a killing that, ironically, finds its root in two views on ritual sacrifice. Cain brings to Yahweh the vegetation and grain of the earth, as though he does not recognize that he now lives in a cursed era. Abel the righteous, however, recognizing that something is awry, brings before his God a bloody sacrifice (Gen. 4:3 - 5). In the Lord’s Supper, both the restoration of Eden and the recognition of human sin coincide in a ritual meal that is indeed the produce of the earth, perhaps pointing backward to our pre-carnivorous past and to our post-carnivorous future (Isa. 11:7), and yet symbolizing spilled blood and a mangled body, pointing to the fact that we are forever approaching our God through a Mediator (Rev. 5:9 - 10).

The banquet of the Lord’s Supper signals that, for the church, the warfare is over, and yet it still rages on. While not all things in the outside world have yet been placed under the feet of our King, we have come into his rest. And as we gather around his table, he announces to us his victory, pointing us to the day when we will eat at a table spread for us in the presence of our enemies (Ps. 23:5). In this sense, the Lord’s Supper is the antithesis of an ongoing sacrifice of Christ. It is instead the sign that the sacrifice has been accepted once for all and that we now share in the spoils of a crucifixion that crushed the Serpent’s head. This warfare motif is why Jesus assigns the Supper with such kingdom significance, even in the midst of an ongoing tumult against the principalities and powers. After he celebrates the Supper, Jesus announces to his disciples, “You are those who have stood by me in my trials. And I confer on you a kingdom, just as my Father conferred one on me, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke 22:28 - 30). Immediately after this declaration, Jesus promises Peter that he will stand against a Satan who desires to destroy him (v. 31), assuring him and us that through Jesus the kingdom will prevail. Through the eating of a messianic banquet meal, the church announces — not just to itself but to the principalities and powers (Eph. 3:10) — that the kingdom has invaded, the new order is dawning, and the rulers of this age are being cast out. That is more than a symbol; it is a sign.

Contemporary Implications

The sign aspect of the Lord’s Supper is often obscured in contemporary churches — and not only in those who hold to the Zwinglian/Baptist view of the Supper as a memorial meal. Often this has as much to do with the ethos of the Supper as with any teaching regarding it. Often Lord’s Supper services are characterized by a funereal atmosphere, complete with somber, droning organ music as the ministers or deacons distribute the elements to the congregation. The congregation is sometimes led to believe (if for no other reason than the omission of pastoral teaching) that the point of the meal is to screw up one’s face and try to feel sorry for Jesus. This is often accompanied by a psychological attempt to meditate on the physical pain of Jesus’ sufferings — an emphasis that is markedly understated in the biblical text itself.

In order to recover a biblical model of the Lord’s Supper, churches need not tacitly accept a sacramental understanding of the “real presence of Christ” in the elements of bread and wine. Instead, they must recapture the vision of the eschatological messianic banquet — and seek to recover the joyfulness and triumph of this event within their own churches. This would mean that the Lord’s Supper would be characterized by even more celebrative singing, and even laughter, than the rest of the service. The congregation would be taught to understand that the Supper is a victory lap — announcing the triumph of Christ over the powers of sin, death, and Satan. At the same time, the Supper would maintain the gravity of the moment, as the congregation recognizes that it is performing a sign of God’s freeing us from slavery through Christ — a sign of a new covenant that addresses not only other believers but God himself, the unseen demonic rulers, and even unbelievers who might marvel from outside at the meaning we find in this ancient rite.

THE LORD’S SUPPER AS PROCLAMATION

Biblical Foundations

The function of the Supper as proclamation is particularly acute in the old covenant precursor to the Lord’s Supper — the Passover meal. Yahweh delivers the people of Israel from the curse on the firstborn through a substitutionary sacrifice, the death of a lamb. He then commands them to continue the meal as a statute — a memorial to the deliverance from the curse on Egypt (Exod. 12:43 - 50). The point of the meal was explicitly commemorative. The Israelites are told how to respond when future generations ask what the meal means: “Then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians’ ” (12:27). But the meal did not simply point backward. Yahweh reminds the people that they will continue to celebrate the Passover when their children are in the land of promise. In so doing, Israel’s God signifies that he will keep his covenant to multiply the nation and to deliver them into a land flowing with milk and honey. Moreover, the meal was to prompt the Israelite community to worship in light of Yahweh’s redemptive act (v. 27, “the people bowed down and worshiped”). As one commentator observes, “The annual Passover celebrations, then, were a constant summons to Israel to look back and were never meant to be anything other than a ‘Getting out of Egypt’ feast, a commemoration of their deliverance and redemption.”⁵The feast was to continue even after the conquest of the Promised Land, to remind the people of Israel in perpetuity that they were a redeemed people.

It is no accident that the first Lord’s Supper was a Passover meal. Luke specifically tells us that it was “the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed” (Luke 22:7). It is not incidental that the institution of the meal coincided with Passover since Jesus explicitly called it the Passover meal, an identification Matthew repeated in retrospect (Matt. 26:18 - 19). Again, just as with the Passover meal, Jesus ties the significance of the meal with its function as proclamation. If Jesus intends to suggest that the elements of bread and wine are literally his body and his blood, he certainly avoids the obvious question as to how then the disciples see his body still before them, at that point neither broken nor poured out. But he does suggest that the bread and the wine function as covenant markers (Luke 22:20), that the disciples should “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Moreover, Jesus points forward to the messianic banquet to come by noting that he will not eat or drink with his disciples “until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God” (Luke 22:16).

It seems, then, that for Jesus the institution of the Lord’s Supper functioned for the new covenant Israelite community precisely as it had for the old covenant Israelite community. Yes, the meal strengthened faith, but it did so through a visible sign of an invisible covenant promise — the promise of the kingdom of Christ. The question, then, is not whether the Lord’s Supper is a means of grace but how it functions as a means of grace. The Supper does indeed ground, buttress, and establish Christian faith — but it does so through the proclamation of the finished redemption of Christ and the promise of the kingdom to come. In this sense, the eating and drinking of the Lord’s Supper create faith within the body, and this is analogous to the verbal proclamation of the word of truth. The church’s faith is established through the preaching of the gospel — a proclamation that includes the eating of the bread and the drinking of the wine.

This gets at the very definition of faith itself. In a passage identified by various Christian groups as eucharistic, Jesus contends that his disciples must “eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood” (John 6:53 - 55). To equate this feeding on Christ with the physical act of consuming the elements of the Lord’s Supper confuses the context of the event and obscures the force of Jesus’ teaching. Immediately after feeding the crowd of five thousand, Jesus identifies himself as the true bread from heaven, as distinct from the manna in the wilderness. He then points the crowd to the issue of belief, a belief that includes looking to and trusting in Jesus as Messiah and Lord (John 6:40). In the act of feeding, Jesus illuminates the very meaning of faith itself and therefore of gospel proclamation.

From Eden onward, a fatal flaw of humanity remained the appetites, specifically the refusal to trust God for the provision of food and drink. Noah, the founder of a new humanity after the deluge, becomes drunk with wine (Gen. 9:21). Esau throws aside his birthright for the sake of a hunger for stew (Gen. 25:33 - 34), a pattern that the New Testament warns believers not to emulate (Heb. 12:16 - 17). Indeed, the apostle Paul indicts unbelievers, specifically false teachers within the church, because they are governed by the appetites, persons whose “god is their stomach” (Phil. 3:19). The Israelites grumbled in the wilderness that God was not for them, specifically because they did not believe he would feed them (Num. 11:4 - 5). In the temptation (Matt. 4:2 - 4), Jesus demonstrates trust in his Father, where Israel demonstrated distrust, by refusing to eat the food of demons, trusting instead that by living by every word that comes from the mouth of the Father he would gain “a good land — . . . a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing” (Deut. 8:7 - 9).⁶ When the church feeds on the bread and the wine given by Christ, we are confessing to one another, calling forth faith within the church, that the God who brought us out of slavery now says to us: “Open wide your mouth and I will fill it” (Ps. 81:10).

Contemporary Implications

The first way the church can incorporate a more biblical understanding of the Lord’s Supper as an event of proclamation is...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION: DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• CONCLUSION: THE TWO MOST THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS
• APPENDIX 1: STATEMENTS ON THE LORD’S SUPPER IN CREEDS, CONFESSIONS, AND CATECHISMS
• APPENDIX 2: QUOTATIONS ON THE LORD’S SUPPER
• RESOURCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION QUESTIONS
• ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
• SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS