Of Book News, Sacraments, and Apologetics
On Friday I got an email from the publisher of my latest book to tell me that it's been chosen as a finalist for this year's Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (EPCA) Christian Book Awards. The Christian Book Awards have been running since 1978 and each year they honour the best books of the year in twelve categories, with one of the finalists also being selected as overall Christian Book of the Year. My book, 40 Questions About Pentecostalism is one of the five finalists in the “Bible Reference Category” (which covers all theology, doctrine, church history and biblical studies books, including reference works, and commentaries — so it's quite a vast category with some amazing finalists).
To be a finalist for the Christian Book Awards, alongside such authors as Don Carson, Kevin Vanhoozer, Jon Mark Comer, Max Lucado, N.T. Wright and Michael Bird, is way beyond what I would ever have imagined, so it's quite exciting and a lovely blessing from the Lord. I know there were delays in it arriving in the UK (and problems with preorders from a certain large international online bookseller), but I hope this is an encouragement that the book is indeed worthwhile — both for Pentecostals, to better understand what we believe, and for non-Pentecostals to clear up some misconceptions and get an accurate idea of what Pentecostalism is, what we share in common with other evangelicals, and what our distinctively Pentecostal beliefs really are.
(By the way, my current writing project is a commentary on Ephesians, so if anyone would like to pray for me as I work on that, I would be very thankful. Also, you might have noticed the last few weeks that I've been publishing a blog post each Monday – and that's a discipline I'm going to try to stick to, so if you want to know when to come back to the blog to find something new, there should be something here each week.)
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On Twitter this weekend, it was the Lord's Supper that was the trending topic. Two different things combined to draw Twitter's attention to the Supper. The first was a video of an interaction between a seemingly well-known American Evangelical apologist and an Ethiopian Orthodox deacon. The debate is painful to watch (and for that reason and others, I won't link to it — I want to engage with some ideas and culture here, not draw further critique to an individual). But it highlights a few things we need to be much better at in the Evangelical world. (In fact, it's what makes it most painful to watch which highlights our weaknesses.)
The debate started when the Orthodox deacon asked the apologist about what he'd said about the Eucharist being symbolic rather than efficacious. (In other words, that the Supper was just a symbol and that the Supper itself doesn't actually accomplish anything.) The deacon pointed back to Christian writings from the 1st-3rd centuries which don’t view the Supper as symbolic, but do see it as efficacious. His question was, ‘How can you say you're just following what the Bible says if your interpretation of the Bible is not lining up with the people who directly received the Bible?’
Now, this is a fair, and actually very important question. And it's not a question of which Protestants should be scared! (It is, however, also a slightly more complicated question, as the writings we have from the 1st-3rd centuries don't directly correspond to ‘the people who directly received the Bible’ — in most cases there was at least one generation in between — but they were at least people who used the same language and lived in a very similar culture and some even knew some of the people who had first received the Bible. Polycarp and Ignatius may well have been disciples of the apostle John, and Ignatius may also have known Peter.) If our interpretation of the Bible doesn't line up with how anyone in the early church understood it — if our interpretation is something that no one ever dreamt of for at least the first millennium and a half of the history of the church — then we should be asking a lot more questions before jumping to a conclusion.
But that doesn't mean abandoning the evangelical Protestant faith for Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. In fact, returning to the understanding of the earliest Christians is exactly what the first Protestants saw themselves as doing during the Reformation. Their supreme authority was Scripture, but they took a lot of time to demonstrate how they were reading Scripture in line with the early Church Fathers and getting rid of Rome's later alterations. As John Calvin wrote to Cardinal Sadoleto: ‘Our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours. All we have attempted has been to renew that ancient form of the church, which was at first besmirched and distorted by uneducated men of undistinguished character, and afterwards disgracefully mangled and almost destroyed by the Roman pope and his faction.’
The apologist responded by asking the deacon to name the Church Fathers ‘on both sides of the fence’, which is where everything started to go downhill. For, as the deacon knew, but the apologist didn't, there were no ‘both sides of the fence’ on this question in the early church. ‘Not even Luther?’ asked the apologist. Leaving aside the fact that Luther lived 1,500 years later than the early church, this highlighted one of our big problems in the Evangelical Protestant world — we don’t know our own history (and theology) well enough. As the Orthodox deacon knew (but the Protestant apologist did not), Luther emphatically rejected any notion that the Supper is merely symbolic and declared that he would rather drink blood with the Pope than mere wine with the fanatics.
Until relatively recently in the history of the church, no one, apart from a few heretical groups, has thought that the Supper is purely symbolic. (Even Zwingli didn't believe that, even though his name is so often associated with the idea!) It was the Socinians — a heretical group which denied the deity of Christ — who really introduced a purely symbolic view of the Supper. (Even until the 1990s, Apostolic Church writers continued to describe any notion of a purely symbolic view of the Supper as Socinianism. Ian Macpherson, the former Principal of the Apostolic Church Bible College, and revered Pentecostal preacher, rejected any view of ‘the Lord’s Supper [as] nothing more than a memorial rite [and that] the elements throughout the ceremony are and remain “bare signs and nude emblems’’ . . [and] only a commemorative ordinance’ as Socinian.)
The apologist’s next strategy was to speak louder and more confidently to ridicule the real presence of Christ in the Supper — yet in doing so, he showed that he didn't understand the doctrine of the real presence at all. He immediately jumped from ‘real presence‘ to transubstantiation — even thought those two things aren’t at all the same. And in doing that, he was reflecting what we Evangelical Protestants too often do: assuming that there are two and only two alternatives when it comes to understanding the Supper: mere symbolism or transubstantiation.
The problem is, historically Protestants have not believed in either of these. So in reducing the options to these two (essentially the Socianian position or the Roman Catholic position) we cut ourselves off from our own history and theology as Protestants.
The apologist ridiculed the idea of the real presence by describing the scene at the Last Supper: ‘When [Jesus] stretched out his hand to grab the bread ... he was taking a piece of his kneecap, dipping it in some of the blood that was pouring out of his arms and then eating himself ... It’s just completely contradictory.’
Now, that is completely contradictory — completely contradictory to the actual doctrine of the real presence. We don't feed on Christ in a carnal way in the Supper — we don't each receive as piece of His flesh. Instead, Christ feeds us with His body and blood in a heavenly and supernatural way. As the Lutherans put it in the Epitome of the Formula of Concord: ‘We believe, teach, and confess that the body and blood of Christ are received with the bread and wine ... not in a Capernaitic [i.e. the way the apologist characterises it], but in a supernatural, heavenly mode.’ Johann Gerhard, one of the greatest of Lutheran theologians, explained that ‘the body of Christ is not eaten naturally ... the mode of eating, like the presence itself, is neither natural, carnal, physical nor local, but supernatural, divine, mystical, heavenly, and spiritual.’ The Reformed, in the Westminster Larger Catechism (Q.170), say that those who worthily partake of the Supper ‘feed upon the body and blood of Christ, not after a corporal or carnal, but in a spiritual manner; yet truly and really.’ All Christians who believe in the real presence — not only classical Protestants, but also Roman Catholics and Eastern and Oriental Orthodox — reject what the apologist describes.
Transubstantiation is one attempted explanation of ‘how’ Christ is present in the Supper. But it's not the only explanation. And attempted explanations of how Christ is present are a different matter altogether from the fact that Christ is present. Classical Protestants, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox all believe the fact that Christ is present; but they don't all agree as to how.
So, as a good Protestant, I reject transubstantiation (on biblical grounds) as the explanation for how Christ is present. But, still as a good Protestant, I insist that we must recognise that Christ is present — we must ‘discern the Lord's body’ (1 Cor. 11:29). Believing in the real presence does not mean believing in transubstantiation. Nor does it mean adopting a Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Oriental Orthodox theology. Rather, to believe in the real presence is to stand in the long line of Protestants stretching from Martin Luther and John Calvin, to John Wesley, George Whitefield, Charles Spurgeon, Andrew Murray, William Seymour, D.P. Williams and Andrew Turnbull.
And so, while many Catholics and Orthodox have been pointing to the debate between the apologist and the deacon as a demonstration of the weakness of Protestant theology, the reality is that many Protestants watching saw it not as a weakness of our theology at all — but a weakness in our culture. Somehow we've developed a culture where we can be blissfully unaware of our own theology and history — and a culture which is much too confident about things we don't understand.
For that was perhaps the biggest take-away from the debate. The reason it was so difficult to watch was not so much the confusion and lack of understanding about Protestant theologies of the Supper, but rather the over-confidence and the combative mode of engagement on the part of the Evangelical apologist. Talking over his opponent, imputing ideas to him that he didn't actually advocate or believe (like transubstantiation), speaking with unfounded confidence about things he didn't really know or understand (like assuming that when an Orthodox Christian speaks about the early church councils that that means the First and Second Vatican Councils — the most recent councils of the Roman Catholic Church — or speaking about the non-existent Vatican III). Speaking confidently might give the appearance of ‘winning’ a debate, but that doesn't really mean anything at all. We are called to be people of the truth (for Christ is the truth, and we want to be more and more like Him) and to speak the truth in love. Our call isn't to ‘win’ debates — it's to hold out the word of truth in a dark and dying world. (And to be fair, this isn't only a problem in evangelical culture; many of those on the other side who were reposting the debate were talking about how the apologist got ‘destroyed’ or ‘bulldozed’ or other equally triumphalist language. Let this attitude be far from us all!)
Theology isn't for winning debates, it's for helping us grow in the knowledge of our God and in the life of prayer. Theology isn't for ‘destroying’ opponents, it’s for serving others with the truth of God's Word in humility and love.
But this debate wasn't the only reason the Supper was getting attention on Twitter this weekend. One of the dangers of our general disconnect from our own historical Protestant positions on the Supper is that people in our churches replace healthy Eucharistic Theology with superstition. That was the other reason the Supper was coming up this weekend.
Some videos were going round of people doing odd things with grape juice. In a few, people were pouring it round the boundary of their property or all over their gardens to protect them from spiritual attack. Now, there are some parallels to this in some abuses of the sacrament in mediaeval folk-religion (like the woman who put a consecrated host in her beehive to increase her honey yield, or the farmer who buried a host in his field to multiply his harvest). And I don't think we should be so surprised by people doing such things today. Where we don't teach well, superstitious folk-religion practices based on a poor understanding combined with belief in God's power will flourish. (Isn't that exactly what we see with the prosperity gospel and exaggerated teachings about divine healing?)
It didn't take me long to find multiple ‘ministries’ on the internet providing instructions for how to anoint your home with grape juice and specific prayers to use for it. And, although it's not identical, it ties in with some of the bizarre quasi-magical (and fetishistic) teachings about Communion found in books on the extreme fringes of the charismatic world (like those of Beni Johnson and Joseph Prince), but which are read much more widely.
Now, pouring grape juice round the garden might be quite extreme, but once you start taking to people in churches about the Supper, it won't be long before you find other superstitious practices like people taking Communion by themselves daily (or thrice daily) like vitamins to protect from sickness. (Joseph Prince even has an article on his website connecting taking Communion three times a day with success in dieting and losing weight!) Where we create a vacuum by not teaching about the Supper, all sorts of superstitions and magic-like beliefs flow in to fill it up. People seem to instinctively grasp that there's something special going on in the Supper, and in the absence of some good sacramental theology, many grasp hold of ideas which aren't only superstitious, but can ultimately end up becoming quite dangerous indeed — ideas where the power or the blessing ends up being rooted in the ritual or in a bottle of grape juice, rather than in the Lord Jesus who has promised to meet with us in His body and blood in the sacrament of the Supper.
So what's the solution? We need to teach! The debate highlighted the general paucity of our knowledge and understanding about the Supper across much of the evangelical world. The grape juice-pouring videos highlight what fills up the vacuum when we don't teach about the Supper (or when we speak about the Supper in purely symbolic terms, as if the Lord is absent and not at work in it!).
That's part of the reason why I wrote The Lord's Supper: Our Promised Place of Intimacy and Transformation with Jesus. There are a lot of unhelpful (and wacky) books out there being read by Charismatics and Pentecostals, full of these quasi-magical ideas. So I wanted to give some sound teaching, from a Pentecostal perspective that's rooted in Scripture and enriched by the thought of those who have gone before us. If you've got your ideas about Communion from Beni Johnson or Joseph Prince, or if you think it's a mere symbol like the apologist, then I hope my book will help you.
The sacraments weren't given to us to be talked about, but for us to make use of them in faith. Yet, faith comes by hearing God's Word, so if we're really to make use of the sacraments in faith, we need to hear what God's Word teaches about them. Our faith and expectation at the Lord's Table will grow as we teach more about the precious sacrament of Holy Communion, where the Lord Jesus promises to meet with us in His great grace and power in His body and blood.