The Sealing of the Covenant
Tags: the lord's supper
The Sealing of the Covenant: The Reformed Administration of the Lord’s Supper
Quarterly communion was the practice of the church in which I was reared. Like most low-church American Protestants we assumed a memorialist view of the Lord’s Supper. We suspected something significant was happening at communion, but that sense only slightly outweighed our annoyance at the extra 20-30 minutes required for its administration. It was for us an add-on, something extra in the life of the church but in no way occupying space in the center of our congregational life.
The 1980’s brought some changes in sacramental practices to the evangelical world. The burgeoning mega-churches adopted the strategy of moving communion to a weeknight. The rationale, not surprisingly, was the alleged irrelevance of the Lord’s Supper to seekers who would find its administration off-putting and confusing. This pushing of the Lord’s Supper even further to the periphery of the life of the church led to a counter-reaction. There was some experimentation with private communion, served in homes without ecclesiastical sanction among prayer and Bible study groups. Perhaps more widespread were the widely publicized moves to Rome, Canterbury, and Antioch by high-profile evangelicals who sensed that they were being deprived of something profound by the diminished role the eucharist was being given in their churches. They left in search for a more hospitable environment for a sacramental piety.
It is a shame that the status of the Lord’s Supper should ever have been reduced in the churches of the Reformed tradition. The pendulum need not swing to the extreme of high-church sacramentalism to see a true sacramentalism in the historic Reformed practice. The Reformers, no less than the Patristic and medieval theologians, held the Lord’s Supper in the highest regard. Indeed the Reformers through to the Puritans attempted to stake out their position on the sacraments between the corrupting errors of the Anabaptists to the left, and the Roman Catholics to the right. With apologies to Queen Elizabeth and the Anglican settlement the Reformed saw themselves as the true via media between the denegration of the sacraments among the Anabaptists and the idolatry of the Roman Catholics.
There is a proper Reformed sacramental piety which places the sacraments at the center of the Christian life and the life of the church without supplanting the ministry of the word. That is, the sacraments are central but subordinate; they are a means of grace but always and only if accompanied by faith, and never ex opere operato. They came to their conclusions through theological reflection and a historical-grammatical reading of the eucharistic texts (Mt 26:26-29; Mk 14:22-25; Lk 22:17-20; 1 Cor 11:23-25), which, they found, could not sustain the medieval consensus. Both the theology and the administration of the eucharist, they believed, on the basis of their biblical studies, were in desperate need of reform. The central insight to which they came was that the Lord’s Supper is a covenantal meal. As such, it seals or confirms the mutual obligations of the covenant. Moreover, they concluded its administration should retain its integrity as a meal.
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