Systematic Theology - Church

Communion

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 19

Dictation Name: 19 Communion

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Let us bow our heads in prayer.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we come to thee again, mindful that thou art the Lord of heaven and earth, and no man moves, and no man acts apart from thy sovereign will. O Lord, our God, thou knowest that the heaven rage against thee and against thy church. This is of thine ordination, and it is thy purpose that thy people from one end of the earth to the other raise up a banner, stand against the enemy, become strong by thy word and by thy Spirit, so that they may be more than conquerors through Jesus Christ. Bless us to this purpose, we beseech thee. Make us ever resolute, strong in thy word, bold by thy Spirit, and confident unto victory. In Jesus name. Amen.

Our scripture this morning is from 1 Corinthians 11:18, following, and our subject is Communion. “For first of all, when ye come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you; and I partly believe it. For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you. When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord's supper. For in eating every one taketh before other his own supper: and one is hungry, and another is drunken. What? have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye the church of God, and shame them that have not? what shall I say to you? shall I praise you in this? I praise you not.

For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, this cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come. Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.

For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep. For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world. Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another. And if any man hunger, let him eat at home; that ye come not together unto condemnation. And the rest will I set in order when I come.”

Besides dealing with the doctrine of the Lord ’s Table, these words of Paul give us a philosophy of history as well. Very briefly, to call attention to it, Paul responds to the word that there are divisions within the church at Corinth, and he says, “I believe it because these things must come, and heresies must come.” It is God’s ordination that in history, every faith and every man be tested, and therefore, problems, testings, oppositions, false doctrines and opinions, come to every man nation, again and again in history, as a means of proving, testing, and refining man and history.

But our concern this morning is with the doctrine of communion. We have seen that baptism is {?} to the covenant of Christ, that like circumcision, it signifies entrance into God’s covenant. The significance of that entrance was very fittingly symbolized by the early church and for centuries with the image of coronation, baptism as the coronation of man. This aspect of baptism was also a part of the Old Testament imagery.

Now, in the modern age, we have forgotten this aspect of victory which marks baptism, and we’ve also forgotten the note of continuity between the Old Testament and the New, which marks both baptism and communion. The communion of the Last Supper was a Passover meal. It was a passover of the Old Testament brought to its logical conclusion. As we approach the doctrine of communion, it is important for us, first of all, to deal with a very serious error that marks the modern age. It think it can best be described by a comment by the history Richard F. Lovelace, in dealing with the Puritan, Cotton Mather. In his book, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather, Origins of American Evangelicalism, Lovelace describes Cotton Mather’s view of the atonement in these words. “There is no mention in any of Mather’s writings on the Supper, of the corporate inclusion of all believers in the body of Christ, symbolized in their joint participation in the sacrament. In his celebration of the sacrament, believers do not so much eat together as a body. Rather, each concentrates his attention wholly toward God, in spiritual self-concern, as if the members were isolated points on a wheel’s hub, connected to the center by spokes.” Now, this is the great problem that has beset the church for some centuries. We view communion as a private experience only. We see it as communion with the Lord, and we forget the dimension of communion together, one with another in the Lord. Communion and community are related concepts.

Self-examination is a necessity, but self-absorption on one’s emotional, aesthetic, or mystical experience during a communion experience misses the whole point of communion. It is a corporate body. It is the family of God, with Christ making us members one of another in himself. We have communion with him, and therefore, with one another, and the two are inseparable.

The personal element, of course, cannot be overlooked and many a confession and catechism, through the centuries, has called attention to that personal element. I think the Heidelberg Catechism speaks of it very tellingly. “Who are to come to the table of the Lord,” the Catechism asked. “Those who are displeased with themselves for their sins, yet trust that these are forgiven them, and that their remaining infirmity is covered by the passion and death of Christ, who also desire more and more to strengthen their faith and to amend their life, but the impenitent and hypocrites eat and drink to their judgment.”

Now, as Paul discusses the Last Supper, the point he makes and his starting point is precisely that, “I hear there are divisions among you, and because of these divisions, you are not partaking of the Lord’s Supper. If when you eat,” he says, “each family or each group of friends goes off together to eat, and there is no sense of the corporate body, and those who have brought food that is better than others want to keep that all to themselves, why share their better meal with a poor brother who has brought much less,” and so Paul says, they are partaking unworthily, because they are not in communion with the Lord. If they were, they would be in communion one with another. They are seeing it simply as a meal, or we could put it in more modern terms, they are seeing it as a personal experience and not as a corporate experience as well.

Hence, he says, “many eat and drink to their own judgment, and for this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many are asleep, or dead.” When we come to communion, we come to the Lord’s Table, the royal table, as people who have been made members of the household of faith, by the adoption of grace. Thus, Paul condemns all unworthy partaking of the elements.

Now, Growshide{?} has commented in his exposition of the Greek text, that to partake in an unworthy manner means, “Not in accordance with their value.” That is, their objective value, their objective meaning, not our own subjective experience. We can have a marvelous experience at a communion service. It can be aesthetic and it can be moral, but it must be objective. One of the more common names for the Lord’s Table, or the Communion service, is Eucharist, which comes from a Greek word, a combination of two words, meaning “rejoice well.” It means that we come rejoicing that the Lord has saved us and made us members, one of another. Communion is thus a joyful fact, a Eucharist, but only because of the objective work of Christ. Hence, the necessity for self-examination. Self-examination is in terms of Christ and his word and work, is our reliance upon the atoning work of our Lord, or on our abilities, with some help from the Lord. Do we trust in our self-atonement, our righteousness, our law, our justice? None of these things will save us. Self-examination thus, as Paul requires it, is towards conforming ourselves to Christ’s atonement, work, and law-word. If not, we are breaking the body of Christ and shedding his blood. To despise Christ’s sacrifice is to assume a part in Christ’s crucifixion. To despise Christ’s body is a like offense.

The Lord’s Table is the Christian Passover. The Passover in the Bible is a family rite. The smallest boy able to understand what was going on asks the question, “Father, what is the meaning of this?” and the father explained the meaning of salvation and their deliverance. It is no less a family celebration now because we are members of Christ’s family. It is significant that, in the early church, and beyond the time of Charlemagne, any child able to understand who was baptized could partake of communion. This ended sometime in the generations that followed, and it is interesting to see why this kind of change has come in.

A contributing factor was the rise of philosophy and an attendant rationalism. When rationalism comes in, it downgrades the child. The child becomes less a whole person. The child is not capable ostensibly of understanding and knowing the meaning of salvation, and of right and wrong. In fact, there are those now who propound the theory that no child should go to school before seven to nine years of age, because they’re not capable of any intelligence prior to that time. Rationalism did much to downgrade the role of the child. It is interesting to note that subsequently, by the end of the 17th century and in the 18th century, rationalism also downgraded women, because it said women are like children, they are emotional, and therefore, they are less capable of understanding anything, and what happened with the rise of 18th century rationalism was that women were stripped of many legal rights. In this respect, without agreeing with anything else that the feminists have to say, the last couple of centuries have seen, as a result of rationalism, a very significant erosion in some areas of a woman’s legal immunities.

At the same time as these rationalists progressively stripped the church of any status for children, began to leave the church themselves and said, “Religion is a matter of emotionalism, and therefore, the church belongs to women and children, not to mature men,” and we’ve seen the consequences of that in the feminization of the church, but the Bible presents the faith to us and communion, and the covenant, as a family fact. Christ makes clear the church is one family. The family is a blood tie, and the service of communion celebrates the blood which makes us one. Paul, in giving the words of institution, rebukes those who divide themselves from their fellow members, because, as he says elsewhere in Ephesians 4:25, “We are to be members one of another.”

Calvin, by the way, stressed this aspect of communion, that it is a family fact, and he wrote, “After God has once received us into his family, he also undertakes to sustain and nourish as long as we live. For this purpose, he has favored his church with another sacrament, a spiritual banquet, in which Christ testifies himself to be the bread of life, to feed our souls for a true and blessed immortality. In the first place, the signs are bread and wine which represent us, the invisible nourishment which we receive from the body and blood of Christ. For as in baptism, God regenerates us, incorporates us into the society of his church, and makes us children by adoption, so we have said that he acts toward us the part of a provident father of a family, in constantly supplying us with food to sustain and preserve us in that life to which he has begotten us by his word. Now, the only food of our souls is Christ, refreshed by a participation of him, we may gain fresh vigor from day to day till we arrive at the heavenly immortality.”

Calvin said that communion sets forth the reality that we are incorporated into one body with Christ. Theologians of all faiths have said the same thing. However, we miss the meaning if we see ourselves in union with Christ, but not with one another. Hence, Paul, as I said earlier, says that sins against the Lord’s Table are sins of division, failing to see that we are members one of another, and so, as men come to the Lord’s Table, and as they think concerning it, they are to say, “Are we members one of another? Is there community in our communion? Do we discern the Lord’s body in one another?”

Turning again to Calvin, we read, “Of all these things, we have such a complete attestation in this sacrament, that we may confidently consider them as truly exhibited to us, as if Christ himself were presented to our eyes and touched by our hands, for there can be no falsehood or illusion in this word. ‘Take, eat, drink, this is my body which is given for you. This is my blood which is sin for the remission of sins.’”

Now, these words may come as a surprise to many people, because what Calvin is talking about, very plainly, is the doctrine of the real presence. Now, this doctrine has greatly divided churches, because the usual approach to the doctrine is from the perspective of philosophy rather than scripture, and from the perspective of philosophy, some churches have used ideas of being substance, accident, and form, to assert a philosophical doctrine of the real presence. This does not concern us, nor is this the perspective that Paul is presenting. Rather, we will disregard all these philosophical doctrines for the biblical fact of Christ’s real presence.

What does the Lord say about his presence? Well, let us look first at Matthew 18:19-20. “Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Now here our Lord asserts a doctrine of his real presence. “Where two or three are gathered together in his name,” where believers are in agreement in their lives and in their requests, our Father, he says, hears us, because he is present, Christ is present. These words from Matthew 18:19-20 tell us first, that there must be a unity of people, in physical presence and in a common faith and life. Second, there must be a unity in what they are praying for, a unity in terms of the faith, asking in terms of the Lord’s work, and the life of the people in the faith. Third, they are in unity with each other because they are in unity with Jesus Christ. They gather in his name, and by his Spirit. Human unity, in other words, here presupposes unity with Christ and in Christ, and fourth, this means that Christ is in their midst, central to their being, truly present in power and in Spirit. In other words, where two or three are gathered together in Christ’s name, we have a natural gathering with a supernatural presence. This is the doctrine of the real presence in these verses. It appears in many aspects of our lives and of scripture.

But, for another example, in Matthew 25:34-40, we read, again, these are our Lord’s words. “Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Our Lord’s words are emphatic. “Ye have done it unto me,” and his declaration is that it is he that is hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick, and in prison, whenever and wherever his people are, and this is a most emphatic assertion of his real presence in and with his people.

The doctrine of the real presence is a very important part of scripture. We cannot narrow it merely to the elements of the Last Supper.

If, given our own sins and shortcomings, Christ can assert his real presence with us and in us, how can we dare deny it to the Lord’s Table? On the other hand, we cannot limit it to the elements, but must see it in the head of the church and in his family, gathered at the table, in their membership one with another, and in all their activities, and all their days and throughout their lives.

Thus, we must recognize that the Lord’s Table tells us that we are members of Christ, that we stand in his righteousness, his justice, his atonement, his work, his law, and we are to show the Lord’s death till he come, turning again to Growshide’s comment, he says, “He that comes to the Lord’s table declares that he not only believes that Christ died to pay for the sins of his people, but that he also believes that Christ lives and that his death has significance for all times.” Let us add that Christ’s life, death, and atonement, his word, his law, and his government rule us for all time. He is the living word, our very and ever present help in time of need. So, in the Lord’s Table, in the Eucharist, we affirm our unity with him, and with one another in him. To discern the Lord’s body is to be members of him and of one another in him.

Thus, the doctrine of communion is a basic doctrine of scripture which is tied in very closely to the whole life of the believer, the life of faith, and to our covenant with the Lord. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee for thy so-great salvation, for the atonement wrought for us upon the cross by Jesus Christ, and for the fact of his real presence in our lives, in the sacrament, in one another, so that all the days of our life the real presence of our Lord is ever with us, for he hath said, “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee,” so that we may boldly say, “The Lord is my helper, I shall not fear what man may do unto me.” Our God, how great thou art, and we praise thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

We have a very brief time for questions today. Are there any questions?

[Audience] Is the Lord’s Supper, do you take the bread and wine and there is a separate meal also?

[Rushdoony] No. Originally, because of the Lord’s Day, there was no recognition of it as being a holy day, separated from work, the people in the early church had to work. It was a work day. Their services were at night. It was not a simple matter to have a service, because the working day was long, and so men went from their work straight to the place of meeting, usually in one of the larger homes of their fellowship. The women came there with a meal prepared, and they would partake of the meal together, and it would be celebrated as communion. Subsequently, as church buildings were developed, the meal and communion were separated, and the elements used, not a full meal. We know, of course, in the Book of Acts, of one incident where one man, apparently tired after a hard day’s work and sitting in an open window ledge, fell asleep and fell out. It was easy to do when men had been working all day.

The meal form was separated and came to be known as the agape, or love, feast, and it became a common means of sharing with the less needy members, a form of a thanksgiving as well as a sharing, until after a few centuries, the agape feasts were eliminated entirely from the life of the church, partly, it is claimed because of abuses and partly because of an aesthetic temperament, and partly because other means were found of ministering to the needs that the love feast took care of. Yes?

[Audience] How do you feel about closed communion?

[Rushdoony] Closed communion and open communion are two very controversial subjects that have often divided the church. Now, the question that governs closed communion is the need for examination, and the doctrine held by the closed communion churches is that only those who are under the jurisdiction of the local church can know whether a person is worthy or unworthy of partaking. As a result, there has to be an examination beforehand. This can be in the form of a general oversight, sometimes relaxed, sometimes very close. It can be in the form of a required confession as a preparation for communion, and it takes a number of other forms. Now, I believe the concern that is expressed in closed communion is a valid one, and to some extent, there must be some kind of oversight over the church and over the congregation. However, the emphasis that Paul makes is that let a man examine himself, so that we must say that the scripture requires self-examination. Now, this is an important fact, and we cannot get around it. The answer at times, in the history of the church has been, and I think it is a valid answer, a pre-communion service, the point of which is self-examination, guided by the pastor. So that there is not only a general confession of sins, but an order of service that brings home to the person his responsibilities, that charges him with his responsibilities, and with a systematic self-examination. So, there’s no question. The table has to be fenced, to use the traditional word, but whether it is the work of the church exclusively, or whether self-examination must be the primary aspect with some oversight by the church, is the big question, and I tend to favor that latter form.

Any other questions? Well, if not, we shall continue our studies in the doctrine of the church next week.

End of tape