Calvin on Communion

I want to wrap up this section on the spiritual discipline of eating together with one more passage from It Takes a Church.  When I was first beginning to talk about the centrality of the sacraments in Christian spirituality, many of my evangelical friends assumed that this was my childhood Catholicism coming out.  (I was raised Roman Catholic and have a deep affinity with Catholic spirituality even today.) But they were wrong, it was none other than the great-granddaddy of Presbyterianism, John Calvin that led me to want to restore the Lord's Supper to a more central place in our Christian tradition. 

At my ordination as a “Minister of Word and Sacrament”, my friend, Mark Roberts reminded the congregation that we are far more a church of WORD and sacrament. 

Indeed, in the evangelical tradition, we are a people of the book.  I too heartily affirm and honor the ministry of Word.  However, historically, the preaching of the word has been the primary practice of the Christian tradition and the sacraments have been relegated to a place of lesser importance.  Calvin helps us restore that balance by describing the church as the Community where the stories that define the Community as Christian are told and the sacraments displayed which confirm and demonstrate the realities of those stories to us in the here and now. (Institutes, 4.1.9) As a Senior Pastor, I am privileged to preach most every week and I believe that preaching is crucial to the spirituality of the church, when it is rightly understood as a communal activity of the people of God, rather than as a solitary experience of hearing a message. 

But… it cannot be emphasized strongly enough that for Calvin, the sacraments are the primary way in which the real presence of the Risen Christ establishes, maintains, nourishes and empowers, through the Holy Spirit, a transforming union with the believer. “Nothing short of true and full communion with the crucified and risen Christ is what is at stake...in the sacrament.”(Institutes, 4.17.12) 

Second, according to Calvin, sacraments are themselves relational events given to us by God to help us overcome our “mistrust” of God.  They are “methods employed by the graciousness of God to express and develop a gracious personal relationship with him.” (Baillie, Theology of the Sacraments, 54) 

Third, the Lord’s Supper especially demonstrates the necessity of Christian fellowship and Christian witness.  An analysis of 1 Corinthians 11:27 ff reveals that Paul’s critique of the Corinthians’ “unworthy eating” is entirely social.  “Paul was not concerned with the intrinsic moral condition of the individuals... but rather with the lack of appreciation for the communal implications of the celebration of the Eucharist.” (Pannenberg, Christian Spirituality, 41. See also, Gordon D. Fee’s commentary on 1 Corinthians, 557)  Wealthier members of the congregation would arrive early and be finished (and sated!) with the meal before the other members arrived.  What was intended to be a celebration of a community sharing and participating in the life of Christ was instead just another supper clique that reflected the divisions of Corinthian society. 

As Paul had written earlier in the letter, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?  Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16-17).  As I often remind my congregation, the celebration of the Lord’s Supper requires other Christians (even for pastors).  You can pray alone, study alone, sing alone or serve alone, but you cannot celebrate sacraments by yourself. 

Further, for Paul, the Lord’s Supper was not strictly speaking a “religious” event.  It was an everyday and public event that through eating and drinking “proclaimed” the Lord’s death and the salvation through it. In other words, the central activity of the Christian tradition given by the Lord as a fitting remembrance of his life and sacrificial death is in itself a relational event meant to reveal, in the everyday world the saving presence of Christ. 

Even more, this encounter happens amongst ordinary people through very common elements.  Scripture urges us to view the Lord’s Supper as the most ordinary of events.  1 Corinthians 11 depicts much more a family meal with the usual “dysfunction” rather than a religious ceremony conducted to the harmonies of Bach, played on an organ, accompanied by a choir and utilizing silver serving pieces. 

The human elements of bread and wine, hands and mouths, gathered together, breaking and pouring, blessing and giving, eating and drinking are from the most common human experience, meals.  Jesus seemed to break all customs about eating, spurning formality and fussiness, caring little about the character of those who ate with him. For him, it was an act of friendship and basic necessity, a most ordinary experience where people came to expect the extraordinary because of his presence and where consequently people were saved and transformed. 

The story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19 is the quintessential example of a person whose life was transformed simply by the invitation from and eating of dinner with Jesus.  No sermon was recorded; no miracle took place, just the salvation of God brought to a man through shared bread and drink--a relationship with Jesus in everyday circumstances transforming a human life.

Comments

[John]

I have really enjoyed these posts and they have given me an insight that I never had before.
God bless you and yours!

[George Ertel]

You wrote: "...it cannot be emphasized strongly enough that for Calvin, the sacraments are the primary way in which the real presence of the Risen Christ establishes, maintains, nourishes and empowers, through the Holy Spirit, a transforming union with the believer. 'Nothing short of true and full communion with the crucified and risen Christ is what is at stake...in the sacrament.' ... Second, according to Calvin, sacraments are themselves relational events given to us by God to help us overcome our 'mistrust' of God. They are 'methods employed by the graciousness of God to express and develop a gracious personal relationship with him.'... Third, the Lord’s Supper especially demonstrates the necessity of Christian fellowship and Christian witness."

Calvin makes a statement that sacrements are the primary way God effects an empowering relationship. Has that been the means for you? Not for me. While I do appreciate the communion sacrement, my relationship has been built by far more than that activity. So Calvin's statement is not universally true.

The "mistrust" with which some people regard God seems to come from events like 9-11 and tsunamis. Have you known anyone whose mistrust was erased by communion?

Your third point, which apparently is not Calvin's, is that communion is intended to be a community of believers activity. You and I agree wholeheartedly on that. When I lived elsewhere, I used to go to a Grace Brethren church where communion was preceded by dinner -- that was good, I thought.

Doing communion in conjunction with a potluck would combine a directed sacrement with the work of building up the body, would it not? And if so, that would seem to me to indicate the synergistic value obtained from doing it that way.

[David L]

First here is a Blog you might be interested in Pastor: http://www.reformedcatholicism.com/

You post was very interesting, one thing that turned me off to contermporay evangelicalism was the nonchalnt attitude toward the Eucharist. While on one hand you have to Latin overcompensation (Adoration, formula's to explain a mystery) you have somewhat of an abandonment of the importance of the sacrament by contemporary evangelicals protestants. I remember attending Mega Church here in Placer County. During Communion you had people swigging down coffee between the body and blood. Whether you believe it is a symbol, or that God the Son is present in some way in the Eucharist it seems like there should be some direction and explanation given before hand. That seems as in appropriate as lying prostrate before the body worshiping it for hours at a time, in some cases continually.

In the Orthodox Parish I attend I have been mortified that it is five minutes before the Eucharist that the church fills up. Most of the people missed the Word altogether, if these people aren't hearing and we know that faith comes by hearing the Word of God is the Eucharist to their benefit or to their damnation?

On the other hand I know people that choose churches based on how talented the preacher is. They identify with the preacher and not the faith, not the sacraments and the word of God. You have Wesleyians attending Baptist churches, Calvanist attending Weslyian churches, Roman Catholics attending non denominational (reformed/baptist/charismatic) churches because they like the programs, preachers, and community even though they don't subscribe and in some cases are in opposition to the faith of the church.

The more I learn about the catholic Calvin the better I understand him.