have both the clear meaning and the absolute authority of revelation. To speak of the Bible apart from persons reading it and apart from the specific questions which those persons reading it need to answer is to do violence to the very purpose for which we have been given the Holy Scripture. There is no such thing as an isolated word of the Bible carrying meaning in itself. It has meaning only when it is read by someone, and then only when that reader and the society in which one lives can understand the issue to which it speaks. Thus, the most complete framework in which to affirm the authority of scripture is the context of its being read and applied by a believing congregation using its guidance to respond to concrete issues in the witness and obedience of this congregation. Our attention centers not on what theoretical ideas a theologian separated from the church can dissect out of the body of scripture in order to relate the one to another in a system of thought. It is for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in right behavior that the inspired scripture is useful. Let us, therefore, not be concerned as amateur philosophers to seek for truth in itself as if it were more true by its being more distant from real life. The Bible is the book of the congregation, the source of understanding and insight as the congregation seeks to be the interpreter of the divine purpose for humans in the congregation’s own time and place with the assistance of the same Spirit under whose guidance the apostolic church produced these texts.
A Community of Grace
If we think of church discipline in the puritanical sense, as an expression of the narrowness of the vision of persons without love concerned only for an ideal pattern of life, then we shall stand before this divine promise—“If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” 7—dismayed at its hardness and afraid of its demands. But if we see in this promise of forgiveness the way of making real in the minds of guilty people the fact that God does genuinely forgive, then we may discover again (as has been the case in one revival movement after another through the ages) that it is precisely this opening up of believers one to another through which not only the immediate problems of personal guilt and offense but many of the other difficulties of the church can be solved as well. The only conditional petition in the Lord’s Prayer asks that our debts be forgiven as we forgive the debts (the sins) of our debtors. Our Lord’s only commentary on “Our Father” is to underline this same point: if you forgive others, your heavenly Father will forgive you also. The only topic of the rest of Matthew 18 is a series of parables about forgiveness. Thus, it is far more—immeasurably more than the mere formal restoration of one erring member or the maintenance of the church’s discipline—which is at stake when we choose whether or not to believe that it is within the purpose and power of God working through the church to forgive and reconcile a fellow believer to myself. Might it even be the case that, in the effort to reach out evangelistically beyond the borders of our present membership, the churches have failed to retain within their midst that quality of loving fellowship which would certify that they truly do have a message for the world? In the ages before Constantine, the churches grew not because they were able to preach in public or to argue people into recognition of their guilt; it was the demonstration of the quality of life in the community that made others see their need and the power of God. Might it not be especially the case today, in a civilization deformed by legalistic and sacramental misunderstandings of the nature of forgiveness and absolution, that this restoration of the person-to-person character of forgiveness among believers could again come to be seen as our message to lonely individuals? An invisible God who forgives my past sins but leaves me alone in the present is not what I need; I need visible believers who forgive my daily sins, making it their responsibility to bear with me that burden. Let not the fear of mixing in others’ business, or of legalism, or of Catholicism, hold us back from this most costly and most valuable gift of ourselves to the fellow believer. “Go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.”8
1. See Matt 16:18 and 18:15.
2. John 20:23.
3. Matt 18:19–20.
4. See “Letter from C. G. to Thomas Muntzer,” in Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Protestant Reformation (New York: Harper Collins, 2009) 170.
5. See Balthazar Hubmaier, Balthazar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism, ed. H. Wayne Pipkin and John Howard Yoder (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1989) 350–51.
6. See Gal 6:2.
7. John 20:23.
8. Matt 18:15.
3. The Mandate to Share
In an earlier lecture, we observed that it would be a misunderstanding to speak of baptism as a ritual needing to be administered properly. It is quite possible and desirable, in the right place, to deal with baptism in this way. At the same time, it is also an issue of profound importance for understanding the much larger question of the place of the church as a missionary minority in a hostile world.
In a similar way, we must carefully ask whether it is to be assumed that the sacramental observance of the Lord’s Supper is simply a ritual practice to be observed according to the ordinance of the Lord because he commanded it and only because of the symbolic meaning which he gave it. In the early church, might it be that this practice was also the expression of the character of the Christian community with deeper significance than the symbolic? Again, we can only ask this question if we are willing to come to the New Testament divested not only of Catholic but also of anti-Catholic assumptions and reflexes.
Only one of the New Testament reports of the Last Supper—that recorded by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11—includes the instruction to repeat the meal: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”1 Centuries of debate have swirled around the meaning of the words “Do this . . . in remembrance of me”2 and “This is my body . . .”3 But the logically prior question would rather be what Jesus meant by “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup . . .”4
Since we read these words through the filter of centuries of church practice and debate, we obviously assume that he meant “whenever you observe the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper.” But, this is the one thing that he could not have meant. At the time he spoke, the Christian Lord’s Supper did not exist and, therefore, was not a meaningful concept. Rather, the phrases “this bread” and “this cup” must have had one of two possible very specific meanings. It could have referred specifically to the Passover meal celebrated annually by the Jews, with the tacit assumption that the disciples of Jesus would continue to practice the prescribed ceremonies of Judaism faithfully. This would mean that there should be a Christian Passover service in memory of the suffering of Jesus once a year. The other possible meaning of “this bread” and “this cup” would be a reference to the ordinary daily practice of Jesus and his disciples, the common meal of the body of believers. Although this Last Supper was taken in a Passover context, it was, at the same time, but one more example of the common meal that must have been the usual practice of Jesus and his
