Three issues are relevant to whether a congregant ought to have
the option of eating broken bread and drinking wine at communion:
1. Whether Jesus
intentionally chose broken bread and wine, to the exclusion of other possible
elements, to represent His body and blood.
2. Whether churches
have an obligation to preserve the sacrament of communion as Christ intended it
to be practiced.
3. Whether the
Bible conveys authority to churches to materially and substantially alter a
sacrament instituted by Christ.
I’ll not patronize the reader by writing “The Biblical Case for
Using Broken Bread and Wine at Communion.” The idea that Jesus used anything
other than broken bread and wine at the Last Supper is risible, and no one I
know clings to the notion that Jesus and the apostles ate crackers and consumed
grape juice that evening.
In the law we deal with something called “the burden of proof.”
In lawsuits the party seeking relief has the burden of proof, and he must meet
his burden in order to prevail. One frustrating aspect of debating what elements
to use at communion is that the burden of proof has been shifted,
inappropriately, by a tradition within the Baptist and Methodist denominations.
(Thomas B. Welch of Welch's Grape Juice fame, was an ardent supporter of this,
and his pasteurized grape juice was a hit with tee totaling Methodists.)
If we go back in time to the year 33, or so, when Jesus
instituted the Lord’s Supper, we know that He used wine and bread, as did the
early apostolic church. So it strikes me that if a man, or a church, or a
denomination, desires to practice the Lord’s Supper other than the way in which
Jesus and the apostolic church practiced communion, the burden should be on him.
In other words, the proponents of juice and crackers ought have to “prove,” if
you will, why it is that when Jesus uttered the phrase, “Do this in remembrance
of me,” we may ignore the “this.”
B. General
Premises
The way in which we worship is formative.Each element of worship
conveys truth. Our gathering together on Sunday mornings is, for instance, a
statement to the world that Jesus was resurrected, that He has a people, and
that He has called those people out of the world.Were we to do nothing but
congregate on Sundays we would still proclaim the Resurrection and the future
return of Christ. Our fellowship at the church-house and the friendly greetings
we give to our brothers and sisters in Christ say something about community. Our
singing with one another conveys truth about our awe of God, our love for
Christ, and our unity as a body. Our use of kneelers is formative—we do it to
create in us, as a church, a reverence for God, depicting a future time when we
will fall prostrate at the feet of Jesus. We pray because we believe in a
benevolent God who loves us. We recite creeds from throughout church history,
not because no one in our congregation is capable of crafting a dozen orthodox
lines, but to stand with the historic church in our recitation of truth,
acknowledging that we are connected with the church throughout history. We read
Scripture, typically standing,displaying a reverence for the Word of God, which
is itself a way of worshiping Christ. We listen as the Word of God is proclaimed
through preaching, by which we endorse the gospel, and through which we implore
sinners to repent. We have an invitation where Christians and non-Christians may
come forward and pray. We collect money from the saints to further the gospel
through our pastors, our ministries, and our missions.
And there are certain days when we baptize people. Stirring the
still waters of the font, immersing the penitent convert in a watery grave, and
raising him to newness of life. We, as a denomination, care about this a great
deal. We split, after all, from other Reformed Protestants hundreds of years ago
because we declared that God ordained a very specific way in which man should be
baptized: by immersion in water, after conversion. We would never immerse
someone in mud, tomato juice, or a vat of Ginger Ale. Nor would we wash someone
with water, “covering” him by wiping a wet washrag all over him. Why? Well, not
only because God ordained that we use water and that we immerse, but because
there is a meaning behind the water (it’s cleansing) and there is
a meaning behind the immersion (death to life).
(Consider this hypothetical: A congregant expresses to his
Baptist pastor that he’s considering leaving for a Reformed Presbyterian or
Anglican church. The pastor points out to the congregant the paedobaptist’s
error regarding baptism. He argues that the meaning of the
term baptizo is to immerse in water, that immersion was how Christ
was baptized, that immersion was how the early church practiced baptism (as is
acknowledged by most all credible church historians) and that immersion has a
deep, symbolic meaning. So the pastor points out to the congregant the
language, the history, and the meaning behind baptism. Then our hypothetical
congregant responds: “But they use wine and broken bread at the Lord’s Supper.
What’s your argument for juice and crackers?” The Baptist pastor cannot rely at
that point on language, history, or meaning of the elements. He must move to a
different set of arguments, which stress that the Lord’s Supper is purely a
symbol. I submit that the pastor, in that scenario, has just gutted his
arguments about baptism by implying that what the Bible says about how to
practice the Lord’s Supper is irrelevant.)
When God ordains something, His proffered methodology conveys a
meaning. That is not to say that we will always understand His meaning, but we
can (or we should) agree that God is, if anything, intentional rather than
capricious with His choices.
C. Reasons why taking
communion as Jesus did should be important to you.
So why should we care about whether we have the option of
drinking wine at communion, and why should we care about whether we eat
actual bread that is plainly broken?
The short answer is that such is the “this” which Christ
commanded us to do in remembrance of Him; we should do “this” rather than
“something like this.” (Or at least we should be permitted to.) Jesus broke
bread, poured wine, and the apostles ate the broken bread and drank the poured
wine.
Also, the way in which we conduct communion has a formative
effect on the congregation, just as baptism does. The shout of “Sola scriptura!”
in a sermon on grace, followed by men passing out grape juice and crackers,
because that’s our tradition, unwittingly communicates something very wrong. Without
saying a word, we tacitly undermine the footings of our theology. The congregant
sits, taking elements foreign to the actual Last Supper. While he may not be
conscious that he is doing something materially different than what Christ
commanded, it has a formative effect, the same way a woman preacher delivering a
perfectly orthodox sermon has a formative effect on her audience,or watching a
convert being baptized by sprinkling has a formative effect. For some, that
effect will be a feeling that the church believes all drinking is wrong, or
taboo. For others, it will serve as a prime example of how the church makes
pragmatic decisions in spite of Scripture.
Using wine and broken bread would reconnect us to the historic
church (including ancient Israel) in a way that grape juice and crackers do not,
and cannot.
But the most important reason is the aforementioned idea that
there must be an intentional reason for Christ choosing broken bread and wine to
represent his body and blood, and that we should follow Christ in the Supper as
we follow Him in baptism. In thinking about the bread, I can’t imagine a clearer
metaphor. Jesus invoked this idea, preaching that He is the bread of life. The
fact that the bread is broken is a beautiful symbol of the death of our Lord. Uniformly
shaped crackers do not convey the broken body of Jesus like bread, broken, and
distributed.
Wine was specifically chosen by God to represent the blood of
Christ. Wine was used by Moses to recall the Passover,and to portend the cross.
The combination of wine with bread at Passover was over a millennium and a half
old by the time of Christ, and was more than another millennium and a half old
before a well-intentioned Baptist thought to use grape juice. (I say "well-intentioned," but I do so half-heartedly. Is one well-intentioned if his intent is to have the church observe communion in a way Christ didn't intend?)
Wine’s potency is meaningful. Its imperishability compared to
juice is meaningful. The Psalmist’s paeans of new wine in heaven are meaningful.
Paul never suggesting to a drunken Corinthian church to switch to grape juice
(or water) is meaningful. Wine is a gift from God to bring joy to man; grape
juice isn’t. In the new heavens and new earth we will have new wine, not new
juice. No man has a glass of grape juice overhigh-conversation. Wine nicely
warms men’s hearts as they speak until the wee hours. No man woos his bride with
grape juice. Grape juice doesn’t come close to pointing to the blood of Christ,
any more than sugar-water does. Its sweetness belies the aura of that bitter
night. Wine is celebratory and solemn all at once, capable of simultaneously
directing our attention back to the cross and ahead to the wedding feast. Grape
juice is what you serve to toddlers at a birthday party.
In fact, that we ought to drink wine is silently, though clearly,
conveyed in our drinking juice. For the opponent of wine at communion, passing
out grape juice is wielding the axe that cuts off his own legs. By drinking
grape juice we at once say that the substance in the cup is irrelevant, and also
that it matters immensely. When we eschew wine, we say, “It matters not what
Jesus drank, or what God had Moses use, or what the apostolic church poured. We
just need some liquid in the cup.” But when, of all the liquid drinks in the
world, we choose dark red grape juice, we admit that the substance matters very
much, indeed. But once we reject wine, our effort to replicate the essence
of wine through grape juice rings hollow. (The oddity of this cannot be
overstated, especially in light of the most common reasons for rejecting wine—a
belief that alcohol is bad, or simply too dangerous to have in church. Choosing
grape juice in this milieu is a bit like a vegan ordering chicken-flavored
tofu: it satisfies the moral conscience, but mimics what he finds
offensive.) If we really don’t think it matters what substance we put in
the cup or on the plate, why do we go to such trouble to approximate broken bread and
wine without actually serving it? Why not go with buttery croissants
and grape-soda? Or cheese and Coca-Cola?
Wine is to grape juice as unleavened bread is to leavened bread.
It’s wholly different. Imagine passing out a slice of Mrs. Baird’s to each congregant
observing the Lord’s Supper. Most churches would be embarrassed, and no one
would say, “Well, so long as it’s like unleavened bread, in that it’s still
bread.”
There’s something to the notion that one has to wait a good while
for wine to ferment. There’s a reason we don’t eat wheat and drink
fresh-squeezed grape juice.
While some may say I'm being a wooden literalist, I would
suggest that while I am no such thing, there is no question but that Christ
literally chose specific elements to metaphorically represent His body and
blood. To purposefully alter the physical metaphors He chose is akin to reading
a verbal metaphor chosen by Christ in Scripture and altering it: “I am the moon,
and you are the beams. When the beams are close to the moon they are bright
and beautiful. When the beams reach away from the moon, they fade into the
night.” We’d think any preacher was struck with lunacy (
har har) for
reading the parable of the vine that way. But when we intentionally and
materially alter a physical metaphor, well, that is deemed a reasonable display
of sensitivity to those who may be offended. What is not considered is whether
God may be the least bit perturbed at the hubris of an almost four thousand year
old way of doing things being switched up because of the Temperance Movement,
particularly in light of the imperative: Do this.
D. Conclusion
When Jesus said, "Do this," what did He mean?
When Jesus said, "Do this," what did He mean?
Comments
Excellent post!