to break the one bread in remembrance of the broken body of Christ and all those who wish to drink of one drink in remembrance of the shed blood of Christ . . . must beforehand be united in the one body of Christ, that is the congregation of God, whose head is Christ, and that by baptism. For as Paul indicates, we cannot be partakers at the same time of the table of the Lord and the table of devils. Nor can we at the same time partake and drink of the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils. That is: all those who have fellowship with the dead works of darkness have no part in the light. Thus, all who follow the devil and the world have no part with those who have been called out of the world unto God. All those who lie in evil have no part in the good.
So it shall and must be, that whoever does not share the calling of the one God to one faith, to one baptism, to one spirit, to one body together with all the children of God, may not be made one loaf together with them, as must be true if one wishes truly to break bread according to the command of Christ.9
One of the most general topics of ecumenical debate is the question of intercommunion. A review of the several available attitudes on this question may help to clarify the originality of the free church position.
The text just quoted, Article 3 of the “Brotherly Union of Schleitheim” (1527), is probably the earliest confessional statement of a believers church.10 In the statement of the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, its concern is not with the significance of the sacramental emblems nor with the authority of the church organization or the officiant but rather with the right by which each individual may properly be considered as a member of the communion. It is appropriate that communion be thought of, primarily, as the name for the group and not merely the sacrament.
Therefore, unity can only be celebrated when it exists. The unity of the congregation and the proper belonging of each member within it are prerequisites for and not results of the celebration. Thus, not only the conditions of the individual membership are related to the communion celebration but the disciplined life of the congregation has as its goal this genuine unity that can permit the common breaking of bread to be genuine. The same “Brotherly Union” also says that the restoration of estranged brethren and the exclusion of the unrepentant also should take place “according to the ordering of the Spirit of God before the breaking of bread so that we may all in one spirit and in one love break and eat from one bread and drink from one cup.”11
Much of the ecumenical scene is dominated by the Catholicized understanding of the Lord’s Supper according to which the meaning and the validity of the celebration are dependent upon the sacramental authorization of the officiant and the technical correctness of the words that are used. Therefore, the problem of intercommunion is one of determining how different organizations using different forms of words or having different succession of authority can recognize one another. The numeric and emotional prestige of the churches with this kind of understanding, and their insistence upon institutional form, has led even some of the free churches to begin to speak of orders and of necessary episcopal succession.
The whole concept of sacramental validity, either for the priest or for the ceremony, depends upon a certain kind of philosophy. A particular conception of the nature of reality is necessary before one can believe that prescribed verbal formulae or manual gestures could—simply because this was thus prescribed—take on a specific metaphysical meaning. Such conceptions of the nature of reality are foreign to the mind of the individual in this scientific age. The individual will ask of a form of words: to what visible event do they point? The individual will ask of a gesture: how could it ever manipulate invisible spiritual reality?
But, it would be improper to challenge this concept of communion only because of the currency of certain philosophical ideas. The really significant reason for doubting the correctness of such a statement of the nature of communion is that it is very difficult to support it from a biblical perspective. The bearer of the meaning of the communion in the New Testament church was the body and not the bread. The failure to “discern the body,” which the apostle Paul rendered accountable for spiritual sleepiness and death, was not an insufficient conception of transubstantiation but the failure to share the table with all of the brethren in the same church at Corinth. Considerations of episcopal succession and other criteria of sacramental validity, bound as they must be to particular times and places, are major sources of division among the churches. The cure is not to find an ingenious formula of compromise or a liturgy of reunification whereby the descendants of all can somehow enter into each other’s organizational history. Rather, the need is to overcome the separation of the sacrament from the daily life of the body that was at the very root of the development of sacramentalism.
The alternative solution in the West tends to be the protestantization of the sacrament. In the heritage of the Zwinglian Reformation, modern Western Christians have sought to reduce the sacramental practice into what it means. For modern humanity, meaning can be reduced to clear ideas that are most correctly stated in words: the sacraments are parables or pictures which are useful to give dramatic completeness or artistic depth to the ideas they express, but the mature modern individual could best concentrate on the verbal meanings and would even, as in Quakerism, drop the forms completely. Words are, after all, more spiritual than bread and wine.
It is because of this conception of the sacrament as communication of the gospel that Protestantism has strongly moved in the direction of open communion. If the message of God’s love is being proclaimed in these emblems, then it is the sinner, the person aware of one’s unworthiness, who is most in need of this reassurance. The authority of the church to proclaim this message is universally given and needs only a minimum of external order which, in the origins of Protestantism, was provided by the government. Any church can be accepted which “rightly preaches and dispenses the Word and the sacraments.” Mutual recognition between churches is no problem because both the church and its sacraments have been reduced to a message.
Again, we would not do well to argue, against this modern flattening of the concept of the church, that there is a religious or metaphysical dimension that it forgets. For instance, the traditional argument between the Zwinglians and the Lutherans about what kind of reality a symbol does have, after all, is not the point. What is missing in this conception of the Lord’s Supper as a message, as an acted sermon, is the congregation.
Somewhere between these two competing conceptions is a third that many would feel combines the shortcomings of both. The Puritan conception, coming from an age when Protestant churches were a power in society, tended to make access to communion a reward for virtue. One asked the question of worthiness, thereby differing from the tolerant and modern Protestant pattern. But, this was tested morally or perhaps by agreement with a correct doctrinal statement. Like the New Testament church and unlike modern Protestantism, the Puritan communion is only for members; the members are measured by the characteristics of their own mind or morality and not by their participation in the life of the body.
We in the Anglo-Saxon world are experiencing yet another transformation of the thought of the Eucharist. In much of Protestantism, boredom with a word-centered service has given way to the thought that worship can find more meaning by turning not to the ideas but to their artistic clothing. More music, more careful choice of words, more repetition to accustom the mind to the world of religious concepts, deeper respect for the history of ritual and its solidity may restore the dimension of depth which modern scientific humanity has so nearly lost. Yet, the capacity to sense such a cultural lack and the capacity to try to fill it with artistic means already marks the class and culture, the needs and the capacities of a leisure class society for whom bread is no longer the normal food. In this society, one must give symbolic meanings to table fellowship because it does not occur to one to share at table with the congregation or with the poor.
Thus, we have every reason to return—from the preoccupation with succession or communion, with artistic depth or moral worthiness—to
