Should our church live stream the Lord's Supper?
Our church has not celebrated the Lord’s Supper since the first week of March.
Theologians and churches have reacted in diverse manners to this online hiatus with regards to the Lord’s Supper. The Gospel Coalition has published a pro/con on the issue from two baptistic perspectives, one encouraging the practice of an online Lord’s Supper and one denying that the Lord’s Supper should be celebrated apart from a gathered assembly. An article in Christianity Today embraces “online Communion” with a cheeky subtitle: “The bread and the cup Zoomed for you”. G.P. Wagenfuhr, ECO’s Theology Coordinator, makes a theologically robust plea against online communion, as does Scott R. Swain, President of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.
First of all, we must place this issue on our theological radar as a “third-tier theological issue”. Non-negotiables of the Christian faith are first-tier theological doctrines like the Trinity and the incarnation. If a person cannot hold an orthodox belief in the Trinity or that Jesus became human (the incarnation), then we can reasonably assume these issues represent a stark dividing line between belief and unbelief. All major branches of Christianity (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, and Pentecostal) affirm these first-tier theological issues of Trinity and incarnation.
Yet, we are not either treading on what we might call “second-tier” theological issues such as our Reformed view of Soteriology (doctrine of salvation). As a Presbyterian church in the Reformed family of churches, our tradition has historic roots in the Protestant Reformation, itself founded on a solid exegetical foundation of sola scriptura (Scripture alone). Thus, Presbyterians have historically embraced the Reformed “doctrines of grace”: election based on the decree of God (Eph. 1:4-5), salvation not by human choice but by the grace of God (Eph. 2:8-9) since we were dead in our trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1) and thus God had to act in Christ to make us alive (Eph. 2:5). Only God’s saving grace can awaken (unto salvation) men and women dead in sin.
The issue of an online Lord’s Supper is a third-tier theological issue where you will find good Christians on both sides of the theological divide (e.g. baptism, eschatology, forms of church government). There are good, faithful churches practicing a lament-like abstinence from the Lord’s Supper during the online hiatus while other good, faithful churches dive into the deep end of virtual church by celebrating the Lord’s Supper online.
Here’s a few reasons (biblically, theologically, and confessionally) why I am hesitant to celebrate the Lord’s Supper online.
(1) Biblical Reason: Instructions in 1 Corinthians 11 emphasize the Lord’s Supper should take place with the gathered church.
1 Corinthians 11:17-33 represent Paul’s most important instructions for celebrating the Lord’s Supper. In this teaching passage of Paul to the Corinthian church, the apostle mentions on five different occasions the importance of coming together as a church to celebrate the sacrament:
1 Cor. 11:17 – …when you come together…
1 Cor. 11:18 – …when you come together as a church…
1 Cor. 11:20 – When you come together…
1 Cor. 11:33 – …when you come together…
1 Cor. 11:34 – …when you come together…
Scott Swain puts it succinctly: “When it comes to the Lord’s Supper, then, no shared meal, no covenant assembly, means no sacrament.” Biblically, the physical gathering of the body of Christ to share the meal together is a fundamental and indispensable part of celebrating the Lord’s Supper.
A sacrament is a means of grace ordained by Christ that bestows the promise of the presence and blessing of God. The nature of baptism connotes initiation while the Lord’s Supper connotes participation and communion. In 1 Cor. 10:16-17, Paul writes:
“The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation 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.”
The mystery of “participation” and “communion” in the Lord’s Supper is not simply vertical in nature (communion with God) but also horizontal (the mystery of spiritual unity in the gathered church). From the one bread, the gathered many are united mysteriously together spiritually as the body of Christ, the church.
As G.P. Wagenfuhr writes, “We cannot be united in the body of Christ if we are not together in the body.”
(2) Theological Reason: Biblical spirituality is incarnational in nature.
Spirituality without incarnation is gnosticism.
Gnosticism was an early ancient heresy that threatened the early church with a belief that emphasized the spirit to the exclusion of the body. An overly simplistic summary of gnosticism is: body = bad; spirit = good. Gnosticism sought to divorce the Christian faith from the earthiness of God’s creation and the fleshly, bodily, incarnation of Christ. Whether or not John was writing specifically against incipient gnostic tendencies of the early church, John 1:14 is a seminal text that celebrates and magnifies the kind of “incarnational spirituality” that becomes central to New Testament faith: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” (John 1:14a). Paul celebrates the bodily resurrection (1 Cor. 15) and portrays the church as a body (Rom. 12:4-5, 1 Cor. 12:27; Eph. 4:4; Col. 1:18, 24).
The New Testament’s view of Christ, of the church, and of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper are inter-connected and deeply incarnational in nature. The central NT metaphor for the church as “the body of Christ” and the Lord’s Supper which remembers the body and blood of Jesus in gathered worship point decidedly away from “excarnation” (out of the flesh) and unequivocally towards “incarnation” (in the flesh). (For more, see Wagerfuhr.) An online Lord’s Supper, which primarily promotes the spirituality of the sacrament in a disembodied fashion from the gathered body of Christ, is gnostic in its orientation.
While some might argue for online Communion because Reformed Christians historically believe that Christ is “spiritually present” when we celebrate the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the context of Christ’s spiritual presence thru the sacrament is embedded in an embodied, corporeal, and incarnational gathering of the body of Christ.
True spirituality is incarnational: Jesus Christ came and dwelt among us (John 1:14). In all its divine mystery, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper communicates to us this massive and essential truth that the presence and blessing of God is embodied (not disembodied) and corporeal (not ethereal).
(3) Confessional Reason: Online Communion essentially promotes the practice of a Private Communion, which is antithetical to the nature of the sacrament.
Historical creeds have shaped the praxis and theology of Reformed churches as reliable and historic expositions of the Word of God. The Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 27, Paragraphs 3-4 reads:
iii. The Lord Jesus hath, in his ordinance, appointed His ministers to declare His word of institution to the people; to pray, and bless the elements of bread and wine, and thereby to set them apart from a common to an holy use; and to take and break bread, to take the cup and (they communicating also themselves) to give both to the communicants; but to none who are not then present in the congregation.
iv. Private masses, or receiving this sacrament by a priest, or any other, alone, as likewise, the denial of the cup to the people, worshipping the elements, the lifting them up, or carrying them about, for adoration, and the reserving them for any pretended religious use; are all contrary to the nature of this sacrament, and to the institution of Christ.
Commenting on the Westminster Assembly, Reformed Theological Seminary professor Chad B. Van Dixhoorn writes:
The last line of the third paragraph specifies that the Lord's supper is not to be received privately. One reason why the Westminster assembly frowned on bringing the bread and wine to persons not present in the worship service, was presented in paragraph one: this meal is intended to celebrate communion with Christ, but also with fellow Christians.
A second related reason why the Westminster assembly disapproved of private communion is found in the Bible itself: not only did the individualistic approach of the Corinthians earn an apostolic rebuke (1 Cor. 11:20; c.f., 17-22), it seems to have been the settled pattern of the first Christians to 'gather together to break bread' rather than to eat in isolation (e.g., Acts 20:7).
If my wife asks me to celebrate the Lord’s Supper with our boys on a special Christian holiday, my answer would be the same: the sacrament is meant be celebrated in the church. The sacrament is not to be privatized. The sacrament is not meant to be individualized. Representatives of the church may go to hospitals or nursing homes only as an extension of the church for those incapable of physically participating in the sacrament. When the entire gathered church is in exile, the sacrament is not rightly celebrated.
Yet someone might say: “Does not Jesus say, ‘For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them’? (Mt. 18:20) Therefore, two or three is the church! So let’s celebrate online communion in homes during the pandemic.”
The succinct reply is that Mt. 18:20 is one of the most misinterpreted and misapplied verses in the entire New Testament. Jesus is referring to admonishing or rebuking a brother caught in sin:
If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. (Mt. 20:15-16)
The context is not a private prayer meeting. Nor is Jesus giving the definitive criteria for what constitutes the ekklesia (church). Modern evangelicals, in misapplying Mt. 18:20, often ask the verse to carry an outlandish amount of ecclesiological freight it was never intended to support.
What is our Response?
In the life of the church, there are seasons of feasting and seasons of fasting. In the Psalter, there are praise psalms and lament psalms. “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens...A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” (Ecc. 3:1,3)
As exiles from the gathered church, congregations are learning to fast, to lament, and to mourn.
G.P. Wagenfuhr expresses our contemporary situation well: “Scripture is full of examples of people who were forcibly separated from the presence of God and other believers:
Paul longed for churches while he was imprisoned.
The Israelites lost the Ark of the Covenant when Saul misused it, thus losing the symbol of the presence of God.
The Israelites lost the temple, and the presence of God in their midst when they went into Babylonian Exile.
In each of these situations the people lamented. They did not try to cope by simulating what was lost.”
Lamenting, fasting, and mourning can be soul-food, too.
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See also: The Dark Side for the Church during its Online Hiatus.