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 seek the restoration of that reality of which the breaking of bread in the early church was the integral expression and not an artificially chosen object lesson. Let a cell of that body be recreated in every place, composed of believers whose life together proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes. Let this death be proclaimed, and let the universality of that communion be visible in every place in the reality of persons whose lives are wholly shared with one another and not by a definition in words or in ordination. Let us be freed from our capacity to separate the action and its meaning until our eating together truly means that our life is real communion.
Then forces of social renewal, like those unleashed in the first Christian centuries, may well go out from this table. Like the New Testament, the “Brotherly Union” (from which we quoted before) clarifies the unity of the church by speaking of its separation from the hostile world. Other theologies can define the sacraments without reference to the world, for the emblems and the ritual have their meaning in themselves. That meaning was defined in the age of Christendom. But, if the “one bread” we break truly points to “one body,” that meaning demands an awareness of the church’s mission in the world. The church is not an institution dispensing sacramental benefits to the population at large but a people called together for a mission in and to the world. Its separate identity is not a proud or fearful retreat but the presupposition of mission.
We already observed that it is the free church that alone stands toward the world in a genuinely missionary posture when renouncing a proprietary control even over children of believers in baptism. Only if one recognizes the line between belief and unbelief, between community and alienation, can the message of reconciliation be known. Here we touch on one of the genuinely live issues in contemporary ecumenical thought on the mission of the church in the modern world. Now that the alliance of church and state is ending, those theologies that were molded by the alliance would like to reestablish it by understanding mission only in the sense of a pedagogical service to society as a whole. Reconciliation then means a call to all people to live together in mutual respect and to reorder their society in a more human way.
If anyone questions the needfulness of this message to society, it would be a misunderstanding of what we need to debate. In the past, it has been the believers churches that have had this kind of impact on society and not those official churches to which one belonged by virtue of birth. But we doubt that such a pedagogical proclamation is either possible or desirable if it is not being made by a visible, committed community in which at least something of that reconciliation and social reordering—which the gospel commands and promises—is in process. Missions and nonconformity to the world are not