Caravaggio, The Supper at Emmaus
In the article recently published by First Things titled “Open Communion Invites the Devil to the Table,” Hans Boersma argues against a growing trend in eucharistic practices among Protestants churches of what he calls a “pure hospitality mindset.” He identifies an early sign of this trend beginning with the decision made by delegates at the Anglican Communion’s 1968 Lambeth Conference to vote in favor of “’eucharistic hospitality’—the practice of inviting all baptized Christians to partake of the Eucharist, no matter their denominational allegiance.” This, according to Boersma, was the first step onto the slippery slope that would quickly send churches careening helplessly toward that unforgivable habit of eating and drinking with sinners and tax collectors and demons and the like.
Boersma’s concern, to be fair, is a justified one. It’s an issue of boundaries and therefore of identity. In short, if “we change our eucharistic boundaries, we change the church’s identity; and when, in postmodern fashion, we take away eucharistic boundaries, we take away the church.” It is certainly true, as he pointed out, that “attacks on stable identity and boundaries are now commonplace in our culture,” and the church should indeed be most vigilant about such attacks from within. No one can tear down a wall faster than those in the position to defend it.
The Body & Its DNA
Having said that, not all boundaries function in the same way with respect to identities, and contrasting “eucharistic hospitality” with “eucharistic boundaries,” as though mutually exclusive, assumes a specific kind of boundary that may very well be contrary to the way the Eucharist functions to define the Church. A dividing wall in a house, for example, defines “inside” and an “outside” in a different way than a defining wall, a pony wall, a picket fence, a privacy fence. “Eucharist boundaries” at least need to be qualified. Perhaps “boundary” is the wrong metaphor for understanding how the Eucharist forms the identity of the Church.
Identities always require boundaries, but boundaries don’t always specify identities. A body is a boundary, but apart from its DNA it has no specific identity. What exactly is it that makes the Church body the body of Christ? Where are the boundaries drawn and by what means? In the 1968 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion recognized that the communion of all “Christians duly baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity” should not be broken by closing off the Table people from other denominations in the Anglican Communion. “Duly baptized” thus determined the boundaries for them. The Church’s identity is both a bounded set by baptism and centered set at the Table, the “well” within the “walls.” Baptism is the boundary of the Body, Communion its DNA.
Is Christ Divided?
The fact that Boersma takes issue with the Anglican Communion “inviting all baptized Christians to partake of the Eucharist, no matter their denominational allegiance” begs the question not only about his concern about boundaries but perhaps more so his lack of concern about divisions. How are we to understand “the communion of the saints” in his scheme? Is it the communion of the saints with Christ himself, who transcends denominational boundaries, or are we bound within the immanent frame of many bodies, many members, many communions. “Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:13).
At the risk of appearing ignorant to all the nuanced considerations in the labyrinth of historical developments on the matter of the Eucharist, I think I speak on behalf of the other kids in the classroom who may be too embarrassed to raise their hands and ask a rather elementary, if necessary, question: How did we get from the church’s common devotion to koinonia in Acts 2 to the denominational question of Anglican Communion at the Lambeth Conference in 1968? For many of us lowbrow, low-church Protestants, the thought of even having to ask such a question—whether to “invite all baptized Christians to partake of the Eucharist, no matter their denominational allegiance”—is quite puzzling.
Granted, many of the accrued historic traditions of the Church are puzzling to low-church Protestants, but it’s one thing for people “who were baptized into the one body” (1 Cor. 12:13) not to wear the same robes or follow the same liturgies, it’s quite another for them not to share the same Table. To refuse to share the Body of Christ in the bread is to deny any share of the Body of Christ in the Spirit. What else could it possibly mean? There is “one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism” and, on precisely that basis, “one body” (Eph. 4:4-5). The logic of closing communion off to other baptized Christians is inescapable: there are as many bodies as there are baptisms, as many trinities as there are churches.
The Spirit’s Accommodation for the Ritual Symbolic Imperfections of the Body
Herein lies the heart of the issue—and it has everything to do with the sacramental boundary that was normative in the New Testament: baptism. Regarding Boersma’s article, what I found peculiar in such a forceful statement regarding the preservation of the church’s boundaries and identity was that no consideration was given to the complementary, arguably the dominant, role baptism plays to that end. Any statement of this sort about communion is virtually unintelligible without figuring into the argument the corresponding function baptism plays within a given tradition. Open communion will have a different function, for example, in a tradition that holds to infant baptism than in one that holds to believer’s baptism. Obviously, in the case of the latter, “baptismal boundaries” function to delineate the identity of the church in the way Boersma sees the “eucharistic boundaries” of closed communion functioning.
That is not to say anything for or against any combination of these traditions necessarily; it’s simply to point out that saying one thing about “open communion” traditions in general is to say nothing about any tradition in particular. And to say nothing of substance as the basis for claiming such traditions are dining with the devil, is, to say the least, daring. What if he is wrong about the integrity of the body of Christ in such traditions—a terrifying prospect. What if he’s got it backwards or if there’s some unknown both-and, given the many and various ways the traditions are embodied and practiced for good or for ill? What if some traditions invite the devil to the Table, while others invite him into the Bath. Who knows? Paul once claimed requiring “abstinence from foods” followed devotion to the “teachings of demons” (1 Tim. 4:1-3). Damned if we eat, damned if we don’t.
Perhaps such generic statements are not only unhelpful but inherently untrue. All debates about what constitutes Christ’s presence in communion must begin with Christ’s freedom. Given all we know about the character of Christ and the transcultural vision and work of the Holy Spirit throughout Church history, should we not assume a gracious level of the Spirit’s accommodation, condescending to the imperfect forms of clumsy churches at least half-heartedly pure in heart? Anyone who regularly ventures beyond the boundaries of their tradition to work and worship with other members of Christ’s body throughout the world surely finds a common spirit, the same Spirit common to all those baptized into the same Body who worship the same Lord. Finding such communion across denominational boundaries strongly suggests—does it not?—that denominational boundaries do not, and should not, divide us—defining walls, not dividing walls.
The debate is too often framed in the question of whether opening the doors compromises the integrity of the church’s identity, but perhaps the debate should be framed in the opposite question: Does closing the table to baptized members of Christ’s Body compromise the integrity, the witness, of the One true Church? Should the Anglican Communion (and by extension all communions) claim that title—the One true Anglo-catholic Church(?)— exclusively? Should we all formalize our denomination distinctives by making them identical to the edges of the Lord’s Table, and the guest list? In that case, then should we not also, as a matter of evangelistic responsibility, formally and publicly and urgently announce and renounce all other traditions’ baptisms as illegitimate and all such baptized as bastards?
Is the holy catholic Church only as large as whichever tradition or denomination got it right—whether the Romans or the Greeks or the Germans or the Quakers (granted, I think we’d all be pretty surprised if we ended up in hell on account of failing to do communion like the Quakers!)? What about the witness of a new all-tribes, -tongues, -nations Humanity in Christ, the God-Man, who is uniting all things in heaven and on earth in himself, beginning by bringing Jews and Gentiles to the same Table (cf. Eph. 1-2), notwithstanding that longstanding habit, as old as Pope Peter, of dividing the Table of the Lord in order to preserve the integrity of, let’s say, other distinctives, according to which he was swiftly rebuked by the Apostle Paul because his “conduct was not in step with the truth of the Gospel” (Gal. 2:14). Yes, his effort to preserve the integrity of the the community’s identity compromised the integrity of the community’s identity.
Dividing to preserve identity is necessary except where uniting to preserve identity is necessary, obviously. It’s the difference between calling off an engagement on grounds of faith and calling off a marriage on grounds of faith. Light of the world, a city on a hill cannot be hidden, nor its divisions. A continually, and often pettily, dividing Church can offer little, by way of example at least, to a continually dividing world.
I wonder how Paul would speak to the issue. I wonder if he would say about communion what he said about baptism in 1 Corinthians 1, when he condemned (right out of the gate!) the misuse and abuse of sacramental boundaries in the Corinthian Church—when the sacramental boundaries created to welcome people into the Body of Christ as a whole became sacramental divisions in the Body of Christ through the anti-Christian rhetoric of Christian identity by any other name, rhetoric that verbally dismembers the Body of Christ:
For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.”
—1 Corinthians 1:11-12
Boersma’s claim certainly begs Paul’s question: Is Christ divided?
Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
—1 Corinthians 1:11-12
Regardless of where a given tradition stands on the issue, if any are going to understand the integrity of their own sacramental theology and practices, they should begin with the recognition that neither communion nor baptism can be understood without reference to the other, because together they function as the ritual symbolic nucleus and membrane, the DNA and defining wall, that gives the church its reason for being and provide the principle meaning for all its ceremonial and practical ministries. The critical question every denomination must seek to answer faithfully is how to translate these two mutually defining (albeit relatively unstipulated) sacramental forms to best serve their intended ecclesiological functions. Chief among those functions is no doubt to delineate boundaries for the self-understanding of the community and, moreover, to do so in a way that those boundaries properly orient “insiders” to the community’s relation and responsibility with respect to “outsiders.”
It may be, as Boersma argued, that “eucharistic hospitality” is a doorway for the devil and that “taking away eucharistic boundaries” is tantamount to “tak[ing] away the church,” but then again it may be that to speak of “eucharistic boundaries” is oxymoronic, if, say, the Eucharist is intended to communicate the crossing, or even the removal, of a certain kind of boundary, in which case erecting “eucharistic boundaries” may very well serve as the unwitting reconstruction of a dividing wall that God went to great lengths to tear down.
1. Ritual Symbolic Interplay: The Baptismal Boundaries of an All-Nations Body
If the New Testament can still be regarded, at least for Protestants, as the (or at least a) legitimate authority and source material for developing a theology of the sacraments, however passé, a clear picture emerges in the relation between baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the first century church. Whereas baptism functioned to form and preserve the boundaries of the church body, the Eucharist functioned to in-form the life of the community to ensure it was conformed to the image of Christ’s body, in its relation both to insiders and outsiders in distinct ways. If baptism functioned to form the boundaries of the Church, the Eucharist arguably functioned to ensure those boundaries remained open to the world—but open precisely according to the peculiar form of the Gospel. This is no attempt to make a statement against closed communion, per se, but rather to show how open communion, indeed “eucharistic hospitality,” perhaps even a qualified form of “pure hospitality,” can be understood to preserve the integrity of the church’s peculiar identity without compromising its boundaries.
In his book Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of the Christian Sacraments, Robert Jenson writes that “a missionary community will necessarily have a rite of initiation, and that rite, whatever it is, will be at the center of its life and consciousness. Baptism is the Christian initiation” (Jenson, Visible Words). When Jesus commissioned his disciples with a transnational, transcultural mission, he equipped them with a few remarkably simple and unstipulated instructions for how to expand the community of faith without compromising its identity. He drew the boundary line with a baptism. The identity of the Church was henceforth the one community of the saints bathed in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Baptism binds the community together in a circle of Three strands. The commands of Jesus continually form the community within the circle (Mt. 28:16-20).
Either Jesus was naïve about the influence “all nations” would have of the integrity of the church’s identity or he envisaged precisely an “all nations” kind of identity of the church, one that could preserve its own internal integrity without erasing the cultural integrity of the nations. Boersma believes open communion could very well lead to “the erasure of ecclesial boundaries and hence of ecclesial (or confessional) identity.” Perhaps. But then again, perhaps closed communion institutes the erasure of ecclesial identity precisely by erecting ecclesial boundaries that prevent Jesus’ vision of an “all nations” church from being realized. Perhaps it is enough for the Church to subscribe to the bare minimum Scriptural stipulations regarding baptism, so that it can accommodate and even celebrate certain cultural forms (as it always has, admittedly or not) without canonizing artificial ecclesial forms (which it always has, admittedly or not). The key to maintaining integrity in this approach presumably would require giving more attention to the meaning of baptism than the modes of baptism: incorporation into the life of the Triune God, in whose name every Christian is baptized, through the death and resurrection of Christ and the Spirit of adoption by whom all Christians pray to God as “Our Father.”
Baptism is both the boundary of and entryway into Christ’s body, because the unbaptized remain formally outside the church and because an unbaptizing church ceases to be. It is thus the rite whereby the church becomes the initiating community and the initiating community thereby ever and again becomes the initiated church. It is still proper to call the entryway the boundary—a wall with a door—because to enter within the boundary all must pass through the same doorway of death: “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”
The ritual symbolic basis of church membership is thus formally defined by the death and resurrection of Christ (cf. Rom. 6:1-4), so that every new member comes into the community through a dramatic reenactment of, and identification with, the storied identity of the One in whose name the community gathers, thus reinforcing the shared identity of the community—“one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:5). The conditions of baptism, furthermore, defend the boundary of the community, because crossing that boundary to become an “insider” requires an existential transformation of mind (repentance) and identity (baptismal name) by baptismal candidates. Assuming true repentance, the Holy Spirit ontologically incorporates the baptized into Christ’s body, reconciles them to the Father, and those who were once far off as strangers and orphans become fellow citizens and siblings in the household of God (cf. Eph. 2:13-22).
The same logic can be applied for those within infant baptism traditions through Confirmation or some such approach to calling “insiders” to repentance and conformity to the life of Christ. For both infant- and believer’s baptism traditions, the emphasis on the meaning of baptism is the same, and every baptism ceremony for a new member in any tradition should function as a remember-your-baptism ceremony for all members in every tradition, reminding the body “that [we] are not [our] own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to [our] faithful Savior, Jesus Christ,” and if to him, so to one another. This is the common confession of all who have been washed in God’s name, our family name, and our common baptism is the naming ceremony whereby we are given our shared identity: “there is one body and one Spirit…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:4-6).
2. Ritual Symbolic Interplay: The Table at the Center of an All-Flesh Koinonia
Communion, by contrast, is not a one-off, boundary-preserving initiation rite for new members, but rather is the repeated, embodied ritual designed to ensure the life of the community conforms to the life of Christ, to ensure that the Church body remains Christ’s body. Table fellowship remains open to outsiders, just as the table ministry of Jesus always remained open to outsiders, while the Table elements are extended as an invitation into the life of Christ. This is not to say that outsiders are invited to partake of the elements of communion prior to faith, but rather to say that they are invited to so receive the elements as their first concrete act of faith. Does table fellowship have no evangelistic function? The Apostle Paul said, “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). The bread and the wine are a form of Gospel proclamation. Who is unqualified, who must be excluded, from the Gospel? Does closing the Table to outsiders gesture a closed-off Gospel as well?
Indeed, apart from the accompanying words of the Gospel as the institution of the New Covenant, the bread and the wine become self-referential and in no sense become or create (or whatever) the Body of Christ. Bread offered as “Joseph Smith’s body” is as godless as “blood of Christ” offered in wine purported only to be available in the Anglican (or whichever) Communion. The Table comes with its own seating arrangements, and it is open to all who respond to the invitation from Christ himself, whose living Body is responsible for cooperating by setting the Table accordingly:
Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?
—Isaiah 55:1
Without thinking in such broad categories of traditions’ and denominations’ positions or stances on Communion, consider the event itself. Based on Paul’s words to the Corinthian church, that “when you come together it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat,” perhaps the legitimacy of Communion should be taken also or instead on a case by case basis. Perhaps the body and blood of Christ are present in some Anglican communions, while others are left to commune only in the presence of a bunch of other Anglicans. Perhaps the body and blood of Christ even end up in the rolls and juice at the occasional Quaker potluck (since the body and blood of Christ is occasionally still proclaimed in some Quaker “meetings”—P.S. I am not a Quaker, but I was raised a Quaker, so I’m allowed to make fun of them but also to testify that I’m pretty sure I first tasted the body and blood of Christ in the rolls and juice sweet tea of that little anti-sacramental Sacrament called Thomasville Friends Church, where I regularly encountered the Word and the Spirit).
Indeed, what is required for the elements to be transformed before they are received? The same that is required to transform those who receive it: the Word of God (cf. 1 Tim. 4:4). “The Word comes to the element,” said Saint Augustine, “and so there is a sacrament, that is, a sort of visible Word.” The Eucharist is Word made flesh, the visible proclamation of the Gospel served to all who would receive it as such in the way the Gospel is always received: by faith. As such, what sense does it make to proclaim the Gospel without offering it, to demonstrate the Gospel while withholding it?
The Eucharist meal should not be understood apart from the proclamation of the Gospel. Whereas an outsider moves toward and identifies with Christ symbolically through baptism to become an insider, Christ moves toward and identifies with outsiders symbolically through the Eucharist. His body must be given and blood shed before it can be received, so the sacramental form of the Eucharist makes no sense apart from that self-giving, outsider-embracing aesthetic. If it is indeed Christ’s body and blood that is offered, the church would do well not to become a stumbling block in the way of the world to which Christ is ever offering himself.
One could hardly imagine a more appropriate context than table fellowship for communicating the Gospel in its proper New (decentralized) Covenantal context, for Christian evangelism? The missiological significance of the church’s communion (koinonia) in the Spirit, after all, is that it is the embodied manifestation of the central claim of Pentecost: that God’s presence has broken out of the strictures and structures of the religious sphere and he has poured out his “Spirit on all flesh” (Acts 2:17), thereby making himself accessible to everyone (pagan Gentiles and nondenominational Protestants alike) in the realm of the so-called secular, so that “whosoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Acts 2:21).
This new and unprecedented reality in salvation history meant and means that those “who were once far off,” “having no hope and without God in the world,” “have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:12-13), who “has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” (Eph. 2:13-14). The curtain that tore in the temple took with it the division between sacred and secular, the holy land and the nations, henceforth launching an ever-expanding network of decentralized loci for global access to God’s presence: wherever “two or three are gathered in [Christ’s] name” (Mt. 18:20), that is, “the body of Christ,” which is ever being “built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Eph. 2:22) as the new itinerant “temple” in whom “the Spirit of God dwells” (1 Cor. 3:16-17; 6:19), the ever-fruitful and -multiplying people ‘where’ God is most “at home” (Jn. 14:23). God has always preferred a “mobile home” (cf. 2 Sam. 7:4-6).
When the book of Acts depicts the Church born of the Spirit at Pentecost in obviously idealistic, if not archetypal, terms, we are told “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the koinonia, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). It then describes how such devotion was embodied by their “hav[ing] all things in common (koina)…and day by day, attending temple together and breaking bread in their homes” (Acts 2:44-46). This is a picture of the Spirit made flesh, embodied in the community of the baptized as the communion of the saints. The Spirit moved this koinonia seamlessly from worship in the temple to fellowship in homes, and Christ was just as present to them in the latter as he was in the former.
And make no mistake, this is ultimately a question about koinonia, since koinonia is both etymologically and pneumatologically the essence and actuality of “communion,” and thus our Scriptural anchor for detecting all its equivocated and bastardized uses. Indeed, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a koinonia in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a koinonia in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16).
The koinonia of the all-flesh church means the world does not have to go to a temple, to a priest, on a pilgrimage or otherwise to find access to the otherwise inaccessible God. Rather, the church has been sent across all otherwise world-dividing boundaries in the presence of the Spirit with name of Jesus, trusting that “the Spirit of truth” is already at work “convict[ing] the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (Jn. 16:8), knowing therefore “the word is near [them], in [their] mouth and in [their heart]…the word of faith that we proclaim…[so that] everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom. 10:8-13). The church thus bears witness to the reality of the outpouring of God’s Spirit precisely by proclaiming and demonstrating accessibility to his personal presence anywhere through the name of Jesus Christ, which is interpersonally enjoyed in the koinonia of Christ’s body, everywhere from temples to tables, whether bowed in worship or breaking bread in the dining room.
Accordingly, the Spirit has long been leading the Church to continue the table ministry of Jesus, who ate and drank with sinners and tax collectors, despite the disapproval of the Scribes and Pharisees, who held to a strict closed Table policy. Jesus spent relatively very little time in religious spaces during his ministry, and much of his time was spent around tables. Table fellowship was not just an evangelism strategy Jesus used to gain a captive audience so he could share the Gospel with them. It was an embodied foretaste of the Gospel’s promised future. Jesus promised eternal fellowship with God and God’s people, and it was temporarily realized whenever and wherever he shared his presence while sharing a meal with others. “You are those who have stayed with me in my trials, and I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, that you may eat and drink at my table…” (Lk. 22:30).
It is no surprise, therefore, that Jesus first revealed the meaning of his death at a table, during the Last Supper, where the meaning of table fellowship was transformed into the covenantal meal and medium whereby that fellowship would continue “as often as” the church ate and drank in remembrance of Jesus’ death “until he comes” back (1 Cor. 11:26). The Holy Spirit makes that table fellowship—that communion, koinonia— with Christ real, actual, the very substance that makes the Christian community the community it is. This is how Paul can say that the bread and the cup are a genuine “participation (koinonia) in the blood…and body of Christ” (1 Cor. 10:16).
The Case of Compromised Koinonia at the Table of the Corinthian Church
Given its importance to the discussion of the New Testament’s teaching on the Lord’s Supper, it will be helpful to consider Paul’s rationale in diagnosing the nature of the compromise in the Corinthian church’s “table etiquette” and thus the integrity of their koinonia. Two distinct issues are addressed, one religious, the other social. First, Paul exhorts those who “participate (koinonia) in the body and blood of Christ” to “flee from idolatry,” which involved eating “food offered to idols in sacrifice” (1 Cor. 10:14, 19). He explains that to do so was to be “participants (koinonous) of demons” (1 Cor. 10:20). Notice the severity of the compromise—a true instance of inviting the devil to the table—yet it was corrected not by closing the Table of the Lord to the compromisers but by exhorting them to flee from the tables of idols, so that their koinonia could continue unmingled with demons. Suffice it here simply to point out that this represents the only explicit instructions and occasion for a “closed communion.” However, it was not for insiders to close off outsiders (however understood) from participating (koinonia) in the body and blood of Christ, but for insiders to stop participating (koinonia) in the demons that in some sense inspired idolatrous forms of table fellowship.
Paul thus identifies the principle issue of compromise in this first case as a demonically-mingled koinonia, corrected simply through abstinence from food sacrificed to idols. That correction, however, may seem like underkill, considering it is immediately followed with instructions encouraging the Corinthians to continue mingling with unbelievers in table fellowship: “If one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience. But if someone says to you, ‘This has been offered in sacrifice,’ then do not eat it, for the sake of the one who informed you” (1 Cor. 10:27-28). In other words, it appears, contrary to Boersma’s claim, that the only way you can invite the devil to the table is quite to literally invite the devil to the table.
Indeed, Paul seems to treat table fellowship less as the boundary-forming context exclusively for sharing the Lord’s Supper and more as the evangelistic context to mingle with outsiders while drawing the line at the demonic (which is not short for “denomination”), a perfect opportunity to faithfully contextualize the Gospel: “You offer food in sacrifice to your gods, but we receive food from the one true God who offers himself to us in the sacrifice of his Son: the body of Christ broken for you, the blood of Christ shed for you. This would certainly be consistent with Paul’s principle approach to engaging outsiders spelled out for the Corinthians in the previous chapter: “To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win the Jews…to those outside the law I became as one outside the law…that I might win those outside the law…I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it for the sake of the Gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings” (1 Cor. 9:20-23).
Second, the integrity koinonia was compromised socially by the kind of “table etiquette” you might find in a high school cafeteria: “When you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat. For in eating, one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What!” (1 Cor. 11:20-22). They failed to “discern the body” as they partook of the body (1 Cor. 11:29), eating every man for himself, and some not eating at all. In other words, their failure to “discern the body,” following the logic of Paul’s indictment in context, was clearly a reference to the body of Christ-in-community, which he had already declared them to be (1 Cor. 6:15) and would expand on in detail in the following chapter (cf. 1 Cor. 12). In that case, perhaps the threat that follows is less about the unworthiness of individuals for whom the Table should be closed but rather the unworthiness of those who close the Table to those for whom it should remain open.
Whatever the case, Paul does not order the Corinthian church to close the Table off to the disorderly. He simply informs them that to the degree their table fellowship contradicts the koinonia of the Lord’s Table, to the degree they are excluding members of the body of Christ from receiving the body of Christ, they have excluded Christ himself—or Christ has excused himself—from their table: “It is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat” (1 Cor. 11:20)!
In both cases of compromise, the logic of Paul’s diagnoses and instructions suggest the relation between the Eucharist and the identity of the body of Christ was less like the formal boundary of the body and more like the body’s Spiritual DNA—the living in-formation that constitutes the organizing principle and power that makes the church body indeed the body of Christ. Baptism forms the boundary of the body, communion forms the personality of the body. Baptism confers Christ’s identity on members of the body, communion conforms the members of the body according to Christ’s identity, the body’s living and active “genetic code.”
When the community’s “Table etiquette” fails to conform to the koinonia proper to Christ’s identity, his way of opening the Table to sinners and tax collectors, rich and poor—to any and all who come to the Table to come to Him—such as in the case of 1 Corinthians 11, Paul claims in no uncertain terms that Christ is absent from the elements—nilsubstantiation—which have been reduced to the utility of a pagan potluck (“Do you not have houses to eat and drink in?” 1 Cor. 11:22a) in which those who have nothing to share are given nothing to eat (Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?” 1 Cor. 11:22b). Having no bread in common is a far cry from having “all things in common (koina)…selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44-45). What is telling in this case is that Paul identifies the principle issue when he introduces the problem as division: “In the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you” (1 Cor. 11:18). This, of course, reinforces the original (rhetorical) question in his opening of the letter and the occasion for it: “Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:13).
Naturally, division is the greatest compromise to koinonia in the body of Christ because it is the antithesis to it. Koinonia is not unity for unity’s sake. There’s nothing inherently good about unity—Nazi Germany was unified. Koinonia is Christ-centered, Spirit-energized unity, which is why the Church’s devotion to “the apostle’s teaching” is prerequisite for devotion to “the koinonia” (Acts 2:42), why the “unity of the faith” is based on “the knowledge of the Son of God” (Eph. 4:13), why “koinonia in the Spirit” is only a reality for those who are “in Christ” (Phil. 2:1). Accordingly, however, for those who are in Christ, nothing compromises our koinonia in the Spirit than all our creative ways of and reasons for dividing. If we could consult him on the matter, it is hard to imagine Paul not regarding closed communion as an example of the kind of institutionalized division that stands in permanent violation of the Lord’s Table etiquette.
And it’s not hard to imagine the same rationale informing the reason Paul “opposed [Peter] to his face, because he stood condemned” Gal. 2:11) for refusing to continue sharing table fellowship with Gentiles when the “circumcision party” came to town. It wasn’t simply that Peter was guilty of being too strict about preserving proto-denominational boundaries (surely “the Gentiles” and “the circumcision party” constitute what we would describe as, at the very least, two different denominations, and just as surely they had far less in common in their liturgies and table manners than Anglicans and Lutherans or even Baptists and Anabaptists!). Rather, it was that erecting such boundaries in table fellowship (whether it involved the Lord’s Supper or not, although it’s hard to imagine it did not) compromised the very essence of the true fellowship (koinonia) of the Church. For precisely that reason, according to Paul, it was not simply an ecclesial issue—it was a Gospel issue: his “conduct was not in step with the truth of Gospel” (Gal. 2:14). At what point do those who insist on dividing from the rest of the body cut themselves off from the Head?
The Whole World A Sacrament: Secularizing the Sacred or Sacralizing the Secular?
We would do well to remember the decidedly secular aesthetic of Gospel forms—from mangers to meals to a cross outside the city gates—lest we fail to be conformed by the Spirit to continue the ministry of Christ in everyday life. That is not to say anything against high church forms of worship, just to say that our worship forms inform our vision of the world, perhaps also to offer a reminder that the God our transcendent spires point to is the same who came down and found his first demon possessed earthling at a worship service in synagogue, the same who found great love from a prostitute at the table of a Pharisee, a Pharisee who found nothing in Jesus but a man unworthy to even be called a prophet (Lk. 7:39).
There are valid reasons to be concerned about the identity crisis of the Church in our increasingly secular age. Having said that, we must not become reactive, thereby allowing the spirit of the age to serve as the basis of our mission in the world and responsibility with respect to outsiders. The Church does not respond to the secular malaise by resurrecting the division that was torn down at Pentecost, building more than mere pony walls and drawing holy curtains and around our sacred spaces in a retreat from the world. Such boundaries between the sacred and secular serve merely to maintain the illusion of an essential difference. The only essential difference between the church and the world is the koinonia of the Spirit, and the Spirit is always reaching out to the world with an invitation to repent and receive the life of God, to enter the household of God, indeed the communion of the saints. However this reality is communicated in our various traditions, it remains the responsibility of the saints to ensure the integrity of our communion among insiders without closing the door to outsiders.
Jesus offers himself to the world in the form fitted to the most universal human desire: food and drink. He has come to find us in our ordinary appetites to satisfy a hunger and a thirst we often are unaware of until long after the meal is over. The veil between secular and sacred has been torn asunder, the Spirit has been poured out on all flesh, and the new all-flesh communion it birthed continues to grow and spread by extending the hospitality of God to all tribes, tongues, and nations, offering the presence of Christ to outsiders who remain only ever a meal and a bath away from taking up permanent residence inside the household of God, inside the communion of the saints, which is continually “being joined together, growing into a holy temple in the Lord…being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Eph. 2:21-22).
The Church is itself the sacrament at the heart of the world. We have been empowered by the Spirit not to retreat from the secular into a sacred enclave, but to transform it—all of it—by claiming it for the God who created it. We do this by rejecting false religious teaching and embracing the sacred gift of God’s good world, following Paul’s warning and exhortation: “Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:1-5).
How do we battle the secularization of the world? By making it holy—by rejecting the claim of the secular recognizing that the world, as God’s good creation, is inherently sacred, and it is only profane to the degree we profane it, whether by failing to “honor God and give him thanks,” recognizing the whole of creation as God’s ever-outpouring gift, or by dividing it up and locating God’s presence in this or that place or people or object, “exchanging the glory of the immortal God for images resembling” mortal men who resemble broods of vipers and other such creeping things (Rom. 1:20-22)—and by receiving it (drawing lines at the idols of our age, of course) “with glad and generous hearts, praising God” (Acts 2:46-47). This is our priestly duty as God’s living temple, and so we do it boundlessly, from sanctuaries to dining rooms, from fellowship feasts to fire pits, through the doxology in our worship gatherings to the doxology with our kids at bedtime, from sunup until sundown, until the world itself becomes the Holy of Holies, until the whole world becomes the sacrament God made it to be.
Conclusion: The Table is Open
If this vision of communion is reasonable, then surely an open Table is reasonable. Indeed, an open Table functions as the ritual symbol of God’s regular and radical hospitality, but also the very means whereby the Church extends the invitation to the world into the living presence of God in our midst. People come to encounter the fellowship of the Spirit through the communion of the saints and are drawn into the life of God himself. “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have communion (koinonia) with us; and indeed our communion (koinonia) is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 Jn. 1:3). They are welcomed to the Table and led down to the River.
We most certainly do need to preserve the boundaries of our identity, but we just as certainly need to extend the invitation for all the world to join the feast, indeed to “compel people to come in, that [the Master’s] house may be filled” (Lk. 14:23). Open communion invites the world to the Table, to Christ himself through the Table, and such is the responsibility of the church. Closed communion not only excludes the world but even fellow members of Christ’s body from the Table, and if Christ’s body, so Christ himself. Christ asked Paul, “Why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4), perhaps he would ask Dr. Boersma, “Why are you excluding me?” Perhaps.
Every church in every tradition has the responsibility to examine itself for that leaven Jesus warned about that leads to the kind of communities that shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces, as well as those practices that divide the body of Christ. We are all called to be conformed to the image of Christ, being moved by the Spirit we came to know when we first received the invitation to the Table from Christ himself. Whatever our traditions maintain, our task is to do whatever we can to extend that invitation to come to the Table, to do whatever it takes to be able to say to a starving world: Come—the Table is open.
Come, sinners, to the gospel feast, let every soul be Jesus’ guest.
CHARLES WESLEY, THE UNITED METHODIST HYMNAL NUMBER 616
Ye need not one be left behind, for God hath bid all humankind…
Come and partake the gospel feast, be saved from sin, in Jesus rest;
O taste the goodness of our God, and eat his flesh and drink his blood…
See him set forth before your eyes; behold the bleeding sacrifice;
His offered love make haste to embrace, and freely now be saved by grace.
Further Reflections Articulated from a Different Angle
Communion is both a ritual meal and a family meal, a way of worship and a way of life. It is the body of Christ named at the Table in our worship—the body of Christ given for you—that forms the basis for understanding ourselves as the body of Christ in community around tables in everyday life, where God is and wants to be found. What began at the Table in worship continued seamlessly around tables in homes. This was the kind, the quality, of community the Spirit forms in Christ’s Name as Christ’s Body.
“And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:46-47).
The meaning of the Lord’s Supper is only half understood, and therefore wholly misunderstood(!), if it is only seen to refer to ‘Christ’s body given for us’ and not also the fellowship of “body of Christ” formed as a result of his self-giving and our shared partaking:
“The bread that we break, is it not a fellowship (koinonia) 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).
Paul goes so far to suggest in the next chapter that if a church shares the ritual meal of Communion and disregards the fellowship it symbolized, then the symbol is emptied and the ritual is invalidated—the bread remains bread alone:
“When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not” (1 Cor. 11:20-22).
Communion, then, is both identity and culture. It is the life named and given in the breaking of the bread and the life poured out in the Spirit and through the community—through an outpouring of love and generosity and forgiveness and reconciliation and hope. That’s is the reality of Communion. It is a holy sacrament and a way of life, the life of Christ’s body in community. If baptism provides the boundary of the Church’s identity, and so the threshold for all new members, the Lord’s Supper provides the DNA of the Church’s identity, and so the kind of community new members should expect to find once they cross over the threshold. It’s a kind of community where every worship gathering is, and feels like, an invitation from the same Father to return to the same Table, the kind of community that feels like Home—because that’s what family feels like, and that is who we are.
The hesitation to make the change has to do with the difference in the way the early church shared and understood the Lord’s Supper and the way churches tend to share and so misunderstand the Lord’s Supper today, 2,000 years later in 21st century America. In short, the Lord’s Supper has become detached from the fellowship feast in which it was originally shared. As pointed out above, the Lord’s Supper was central to Christian worship gatherings, but so was ordinary supper—an actual meal, a fellowship (koinonia) feast! It wasn’t so much that they worshiped and then broke bread together; rather, they worshiped by the way they broke bread together. What was so radical and new about this way of worship is that it did not require people to gather at a temple—it just required people to gather at a Table where Christ was named, so that his Christ’s was proclaimed (1 Cor. 11:26).
This represented a new reality brought about through the outpouring of God’s Spirit on “all flesh” (Acts 2:17), so that God is accessible to all flesh: “whosoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Acts 2:21). This all-flesh ingathering of the “saved” was made evident by a new kind of community (in Christ’s name!) united in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The Lord’s Supper is a symbol intended to provide the meaning and basis both for our worship and our fellowship, but in contemporary contexts our fellowship has largely been separated from our worship. That is perhaps why some people regard the Lord’s Supper an empty ritual (like I was taught, having been raised a Quaker!), because it’s significance for illuminating the meaning of our fellowship has become partially eclipsed by the relative lack of organized fellowship in our increasingly fragmented and individualistic culture.
Dim Reflections For Now 