Communion is about Death and Resurrection

Markus Barth (Rediscovering the Lord's Supper, 45-46) makes a good point that communion celebrates the death and resurrection of Jesus.

"Those celebrating the Lord's Supper know the pain and shame, the horror and scandal, of Christ's death. However, they rejoice in the crucifixion and praise the slaughtered Lamb because God has raised him from the dead the crucified Son and has accepted his intercession by enthroning him at God's right hand. In Paul's theology, as much as in the message of John, Hebrews, First Peter, and Revelation, the Crucified is always the raised and living Christ. The one who rules the church and the world and who will come again is the crucified Christ. Through Christ alone the godless are justified and reconciled, saved and given peace (Rom. 4:5, 25; 5:1; 8:11; 2 Cor. 4:10-14; 5:14-15, 18-20; Eph. 1:19-23; 4:9-10; Rev. 5). We have abundant reason to rejoice in Christ's death and to praise the slaughtered yet living Lamb."

Markus Barth on the Lord's Supper

I'm reading through Rediscovering the Lord's Supper by Markus Barth (thanks to Wipf & Stock for the copy). Here is what Barth concludes about the Jewish background of the Lord's Supper:

1. The abandonment of altar-like structures in favor of real tables.

2. The participation of children because it is not only permissible but necessary.

3. The combination of liturgical act with a real meal, called an agape in the early church.

4. Joyful and jubilant means of celebration including oral, musical or artistic contributions.

5. The elimination of clerical dominion over the meal.

6. The opening of the church and chapel doors with for spontaneous and regular communion.

New Blog: Grace at the Table

Jim Allman a Bible Exposition Professor at DTS has a blog called Grace at the Table and it is about: "Two great passions motivate me in my thinking and teaching: the grace of God and the Lord’s Supper. These will be the themes I’ll most often explore in these sessions online. Grace changed my life 25 years ago, and at about the same time, I began thinking more deeply about the Supper. The two serve one another now in moving me passionately".

Calvin on the Lord's Supper

I'm preparing to preach on 1 Cor 10.14-22 tomorrow so I thought I'd re-read over Calvin's Shorter Treatise on the Lord's Supper. On the bread and the wine Calvin states:

"We begin now to enter on the question so much debated, both anciently and at the present time—how we are to understand the words in which the bread is called the body of Christ, and the wine his blood. This may be disposed of without much difficulty, if we carefully observe the principle which I lately laid down, viz., that all the benefit which we should seek in the Supper is annihilated if Jesus Christ be not there given to us as the substance and foundation of all. That being fixed, we will confess, without doubt, that to deny that a true communication of Jesus Christ is presented to us in the Supper, is to render this holy sacrament frivolous and useless—an execrable blasphemy unfit to be listened to."

In sum, no real presence = no real benefit!

The Lord's Supper

There a couple of good posts on the Lord's Supper around the blogosphere:

First, Michael Jensen sets forth ten propositions (tongue in cheek) why we should not celebrate it at all. (There are actually debates among prominent leaders of the Sydney Anglicans on this topic including should it be celebrated and can lay people preside over it).

Second, Jim Hamilton, has a good post at Moore to the Point on why it should be celebrated weekly.

If you haven't already read it, a good little book that I enjoyed is N.T. Wright's The Meal that Jesus Gave.

I tend to think that a church pot-luck dinner with a few prayers and hymns sung at the same time is far closer to what the early church did re: the Lord's Supper, as opposed to current practices involving a 5 minute guilt-trip sermonette, a crumb of bread, and a drop of sour grape juice. Rob Jewett wrote: "The purely symbolic meal of modern Christianity, restricted to a bit of bread and a sip of wine or juice, is tacitly presupposed for the early church, an assumption so preposterous that it is never articulated or acknowledged."[1] Bo Reicke showed that the early Eucharistic meals took in the context of a common meal shared by a broad stream of early Christianity through the fourth century (see Jude 12, Ign. Smyr. 8.2 on “love feasts”) [2].

I should point to two excellent blog posts by Darrell Pursiful on how and why the eucharist got separated from communal meals (see here and here). Interesting reading.

For those in the memorial/ordinance tradition, I have this question: how and to what extent is the Lord's Supper a means of grace!

[1] Robert Jewett, “Tenement Churches and Pauline Love Feasts,” Quarterly Review 14 (1994): 44.

[2] Bo Reicke, Agapenfeier, 21-149.

Ben Witherington on the Lord's Supper

Ben Witherington introduces his new book Making a Meal of it: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord's Supper. Here's his description:

In this study I argue that the Lord's Supper was originally part of a large meal, not a separate ritual or ceremony, and as such brought into play all the ancient understandings about hospitality, the welcoming of people to the table, and the like. I am also arguing that the early church did not see the Lord's Supper as merely a symbolic memorial ceremony. They actually saw some sort of spiritual transaction happening in the partaking of the Lord's Supper, and believed that partaking in an unworthy manner was spiritually dangerous, as Paul suggests in 1 Cor. 11. But what sort of spiritual transaction is going on in the Lord's Supper? This is discussed in some detail in the book, and I won't spoil it for you by dealing with that here.

Sounds interesting. I think Protestant churches should turf out their morsel of bread and drop of juice and its accompanying three minute guilt-trip sermonette in favour of a communal love feast instead.