The Lord’s Supper was not originally the way it is practiced today. It evolved.
Here is a brief summary on how this happened.
Theology and Empire
After the church became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the church leaders had time to develop approved theology and doctrine. Among the things that were debated were the ways that the grace of God was distributed to believers. They came up with numerous ways, all of which required the involvement of the priestly class. Very frequently, the priests said special prayers or required people to say special words when undergoing these sacred rituals, so that over time, people began to think that there was actual power in these rituals, so that the way they were done did not matter as much as simply doing them.
This is how, for example, baptism by sprinkling began. It was thought that the significance of baptism was not in the symbol of going under the water and then rising back up as though from the dead, but in the power of the water itself after it had been blessed by a priest. Therefore, if the power was in the sacred water itself, the amount of water used did not matter. Why use a whole container of water when a few drops would suffice? Why require people to get into a river, when the priest could simply sprinkle a few drops of water on someone’s head? So you see, once the ritual was boiled down to the spiritual power within the ritual, the symbolic nature of the ritual disappeared, and the force was in the ritual itself, whether done in large quantities or little.
Changing Communion
The same thing happened with the Lord’s Supper.
Originally, as will be seen in future posts, the Lord’s Supper was an actual meal. It was an actual supper. But as Catholic theology progressed, it was decided that the power of the meal was not in what happened during the meal, or in the gathering of people for the meal, or really in the food itself, but in the bread and the wine after it had been blessed by the priest. Therefore, why require people to eat a whole meal, when any amount would do, no matter how small? The significance of the bread and wine was not in the elements themselves, but in the power of the spiritual presence that came with it. So just as baptism could be done with a few drops of water, so also the Lord’s Supper could be observed with a small bit of bread and a few drops of wine.
During the Protestant Reformation, as certain church leaders began to break away from the Catholic church, some of them dropped the idea about the mystical presence of Jesus within the bread and wine, but kept the practice the same. The Lord’s Supper continued to involve a tiny bit of bread and a few drops of wine. It was in the late 19th century that churches began to switch to grape juice, and this became the standard practice during Prohibition in the early 20th century.
That is pretty much where we are today. The tradition of using a tiny bit of bread and wine (or juice) has continued to be practiced, even though it does not even come close to what was practiced by Jesus and His apostles on the night He was betrayed, and reflects instead some sort of magical ceremony where some people believe that God is giving them special grace and power through the ritual elements of bread and wine. Those who do not believe this, still put great emphasis and significance upon the ritual, because they seem to think that this is what the Scripture teaches (even though it doesn’t), and that this is the way it has always been done (even though it hasn’t).
We will begin to look at some of the key Scriptures on the Lord’s Supper tomorrow.
Since a lot of people like to put an Ichthys, or “Jesus fish” on the back of their cars, T-shirts, or whatever … I am just waiting for a church to start using those goldfish crackers as the wafer during their ceremony.
I am there if they use the pizza ones 🙂
Ha ha!
Actually, I attended a church in Denver once that used doughnuts and coffee. Seriously.
Don’t tell my kids that…
Jeremy,
I just love the Refuge, when I was there, we had grape soda and pretzels for communion. I really love that they have the person who brings the communion elements share why they chose those particular items.
The lady who brought the soda and pretzels grew up catholic and was always taught that the communion elements were sacred and somehow elevated from normal life. But when she became a believer and began to study for herself, she found that this was not the case. Bread and wine were present at every meal that the jews of Jesus’ time ate. He could have chosen bitter herbs or lamb or any of the things that the jews served for passover but no other time of the year, but instead, He chose the things that were most common. It was as if he was saying “In your common every day life, remember Me.” I really appreciated that, and it has given me a different perspective on communion.
FedEx
Set Free Ministries
Colorado
Yes, they are loose and creative on these things as well, but in their community, it works!
I like your point about Jesus saying “In your common, everyday life, remember me.” I think you just nailed it! This is exactly what He was saying. It wasn’t necessarily some special observance once a month, but ways to remember Him in everything we said and did all week long.
Hi guys,
I know you made these comments three years ago, but I had to make a comment anyway. The comments being made here are missing the prophetic nature of what Christ was saying. Jesus was participating in the Passover Feast and the items he chose were important. For thousands of years the Jews had been participating in the Passover, they had used red wine and a broken piece of bread without knowing why these two elements were added. When Jesus picked up the bread that was to be broken he was telling them that in him the prophecy of being wounded would be fulfilled in him. He was what the Passover Feast and Lamb was all about. The meal was a prophecy this entire time and he was just now explaining it. The wine represented his blood being poured out for our sins. Jesus was making the connection between all that the Old Testament had taught them and how it was pointing to him. The idea that you can just have a snack and hang out misses the meaning of this profound point.
Communion doesn’t have any mystical powers but it does have meaning when performed using the exact items Jesus used. It’s the Gospel Message in a meal and it provides opportunity each time it’s given to share the Gospel. And it is the Gospel that has the power to save. That’s the big deal with communion and the items Jesus chose. Jesus didn’t do things arbitrarily. He was the Almighty God who in His wisdom chose every step, breath and action with great intention. The meaning of communion is much deeper than we will ever comprehend.
Anyway, that’s my two cents.
God bless,
Greg T.
So maybe the church my friend attended in the 60’s that had vending machines in the lobby, where one could buy sodas and crackers or cookies, which were used for “Communion”, wasn’t any more “incorrect” in the way they did “Communion” than is the more accepted modern practice!
I still get mighty uncomfortable with this, but maybe I shouldn’t be. If I am willing to trade the symbolism of baptism for something else, maybe I should be willing to trade the symbolism of the Lord’s Supper as well????
Of course, what do people do in countries that really don’t have bread and wine? I hear that some Asian cultures use rice, since bread is much harder to come by.
1 Corinthians ch11 v 17 to the end. Unless you eat my body and drink my blood you can not have eternal life in you.
Is this the transubstantiation the RC believe, but how can that be as God prohibited cannibalism.
Jesus was not saying eat me in any sense as we eat food, but eat me in the way we allow Jesus to live in us, we take Him into ourselves so we no longer belong to ourselves but to Him.
To think and believe otherwise is silly and a horrible deception of the truth.
We who believe in the Christ remember his life and sacrifice just as the Hebrews did at passover time when life was taken so that others may live.
To eat the flesh of a human being would defile the Jews as would the eating of a vulture. So lets not kid ourselves that Jesus wants us to believe that when the bread and wine are blessed by the human priest it is changed literally into Jesus body and blood. Does it not also say do not eat the meat of an animal with the blood still in it.
Next thing the Church will be trying to convince us of is that it’s OK for same sex couples to have the same marriage as a man and a woman. God created a woman as a wife for Adam, not a man for a mate.
Oh dear now I’m being controversial. The Archbishop of Canterbury retires at the end of the year, I wonder what the new one will do about the Church of England.
Clive
Clive
Clive,
You are going to get kicked out!
Ha! Just kidding.
Yes, I have many reservations about transubstantiation. …and consubstantiation as well.
But again, I am not too concerned with debating such things here and now.
Clive,
First off, I’d like to ask you to keep charity in mind when addressing other Christians and disagreements. Not in that you are saying that any doctrine about a real presence of Jesus in Communion is wrong, but in the line “To think and believe otherwise is silly and a horrible deception of the truth.”
If you believe something isn’t true, go ahead and say so, but to start calling those who believe it ‘silly’ is to treat them like children who aren’t capable of taking the idea seriously, and to call it a ‘deception’ isn’t just to say that it’s not true, but that those who propagate it are deliberately trying to convince people to believe something that is known to be a lie.
Now I think the common ‘post-modern’, “everyone’s has their own truth” just doesn’t make sense. When we’re talking about matters of opinion people can have their own preferences, but when we’re talking about whether something is true or not: it either is or it isn’t. So, go ahead and say something is or isn’t true and discuss why you believe that to be the case, I’ll do the same. We’re all human and hence all fallible, so we’re all going to be incorrect at assessing the truth sometimes. What I’m asking you not to do is to insult other for being incorrect by assuming that holding that position is a result of being unable to comprehend a serious thought or deliberately trying to lead others astray for a malicious purpose.
Of course, I’ll note that I don’t believe that you deliberately thought “I’ll accuse anyone who believes this of these things,” but be aware that when you use loaded words like “silly” and “deception,” the meaning is inherently part of the message.
As far as the specific issue goes, of whether this is an actual presence of God in Communion, or whether it is ‘just a symbol’ goes, I spent enough space already discussing loaded language to spend more time on how “We who believe in the Christ…” treats those who don’t believe the details as you do don’t actually believe in Christ, so as far as this issue is actually concerned:
On a technical aspect, you are incorrect about God prohibiting cannibalism. The Bible doesn’t ever specifically prohibit it. At most, you can find Genesis 9:1-6 as allowing eating of meat and not explicitly stating that it is OK to eat human flesh (as long as you don’t consider humans as ‘moving’ creatures), but as far as looking at the law in detail goes; search the Law in detail and you will find many explicitly laid out things that you ‘shall not eat’ listing many different types of animals and circumstances but you will not find humans listed among them.
When you do look at references to cannibalism in the Old Testament, you can infer from the context of Deuteronomy 28:53-57, Leviticus 26:29, 2 Kings 6:26-29 and Jeremiah 19:9, Ezekiel 5:10, and Lamentations 4:10 that just as much as now people at time understood it to be an act of desperation, but it is never explicitly forbidden by God.
Of course, if we don’t stop at an explicit list of ‘rules from the Bible’ but using our God given reason to discern truth (as I believe we were meant to do), we can look at the issue of blood as you mention it. God’s Law isn’t a list of arbitrary rules, but help guide us to understanding and conforming to His nature, which is the only real source of Goodness. So we can look at passages like those mentioned in Genesis, ect. but notice that in Leviticus 17:14 we are provided with an explicit explanation of what the Hebrew nation was discussing when blood came into the discussion: In plenty of ancient rituals it was clear that blood was a physical manifestation of life-force and consuming blood of another was an attempt to steal the life that God had given that individual being.
Looking at the understanding that we are told not to be engaging in rituals to steal life-force from others, as the Hebrews saw in their text as opposed to other contemporary religions of their days, we can see how the text of John that you quote involves an explicit appeal: We aren’t supposed to be filling ourselves with other things of this world because God wants us to be ready to fill ourselves with Him. As you quote: “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood you can not have eternal life in you. In America many Christians who insist on a literal interpretation of anything in the Bible are often ready to say “but, in this case, Jesus didn’t really mean…” when both Jesus and the author of this Gospel labor to convey “You aren’t supposed to try to take the live of other things on Earth… that’s the whole point, I want you to take on life that only I can offer!”
(Please re-read John 6 at this point for the passage that Clive brings up, upon which this issue turns in the New Testament)
There is two words used in the New Testament to describe eating, fago and trogo (OK, it’s a little more complicated than that, look up esthio as far as the verb action of ‘eating’ in the ‘fago’ sense goes).
It boils down to fago means ‘eat’ mostly the same way that we mean when we say ‘eat’, usually it is literally, but it can be conceived of as figuratively: when it speaks of Israel eating manna, we understand it to mean literally, but we can conceive of it meaning something figurative. When aunt Sally says that the children are so cute she ‘could just eat them up’ we know that usually ‘eat’ means a literal consuming but in this sense just points out the figurative attractiveness of adorable children.
On the other hand, trogo is as literal as it gets, it’s the word you use for pigs digging their snouts into slop and gnawing on it to ingest it. If aunt Sally says that the children are so cute she “could just gnaw on their bones and slurp up their blood” you would no longer think of her as a slightly eccentric aunt but someone who literally wants to eat your children.
When we look at the bread of life discourse presented in chapter 6 of John’s gospel, we see that it starts off using ‘fago’ as Jesus proclaims himself to be the bread of life. When they ask among themselves ‘can he really mean this?’ he repeats it with fago, which can be figurative, but then switches to trogo to confirm his point; in essence the dialog goes:
Jesus: It wasn’t Moses but God who gave bread from Heaven for you to eat.
Followers: Give us this bread always.
Jesus: I am this bread.
Followers (amongst themselves): How can he give us bread to eat from himself?
Jesus (reaching verse 53): so it is; I say to you: unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. (verse 54) Whoever gnaws on my flesh and slurps up my blood I will raise him on the last day.
Clive, you point out how others often don’t understand what Jesus was saying; but while Jesus often labors to try and make things clear to the unbeliever (“Oh, you of little faith) or at the very least the author tries to make it clear for us in retrospect (At the time they didn’t understand that he spoke of this…), in this case Jesus switches from something that might be figurative to essentially say ‘no, I seriously mean this’ and it concludes not with Jesus saying “don’t go away, this is what I actually mean” but confirming that people would refuse to accept that God intended for them to actually fill themselves with the life that He offered so they stopped following him.
I’m sorry if I went on at quite a length at this, but I hope I impressed that this is a serious and deep issue in the understanding of the nature of God, some might not be in any position to accept it as true, but it is not to be rejected out of hand as a silly or tricky little thing that people are foolish for falling into believing.
Jeremy, that was a good read. Never before have I heard that teaching about sprinkling or the lord’s supper. I’m curious where you came up with that? Any sources you can share?
Colin,
Yes, I do have some sources…. I cannot remember off the top of my head right now. Let me get back to you.
Thanks, Just curious. They didn’t teach that at Bible College or seminary. It sounds logical, its just new to me and I was wondering where it came from.
Colin
Great thought!
On a side note, there’s a typ in the first sentence of the last paragraph.