№ 6: Edible flashcards
Monthly-ish Newsletter: Neglecting communion truly exhibits and confers what it signifies | Covenant and succession | Study update | Behind-the-scenes | Previously, on Psalter the Earth
Hello all,
Neglecting communion truly exhibits and confers what it signifies
Keith Mathison’s Given For You: Reclaiming Calvin’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper sets out John Calvin’s own very careful thought about the Eucharist, followed by a brief history of the subsequent developments of the doctrine in Reformed and Presbyterian thought. Mathison argues persuasively that Calvin’s view has largely become a dead letter amongst his heirs, in some cases even denounced as nonsense. What has replaced it, argues Mathison, is a very emaciated view of the Supper in Reformed evangelicalism.
Calvin’s view was that although Christ’s body is locally present only in heaven (and nowhere else), it is nonetheless by means of eating the bread and drinking the wine that the Holy Spirit communicates the real human nature of Christ to the faithful participants. In this way, Christ the head nourishes and cherishes his body. Calvin’s doctrine of Christ’s spiritual presence has come to be replaced with a doctrine of mere mental presence; Charles Hodge, for example, taught that “The body and blood are present to us when they fill our thoughts, are apprehended by faith as broken and shed for our salvation, and exert upon us their proper effect” (134). This is what Matthew Colvin has called somewhere the “edible flashcards” view of Communion.
Mathison has a chapter of his book dedicated to critique of other Eucharistic doctrines, such as the Roman Catholic transubstantiation view and the Lutheran consubstantiation view. However, he gives considerable attention to the most popular view amongst Reformed-ish evangelicals, which he calls the “symbolic memorialist” view. He notes that this view removes all objective aspects to the efficacy of the sacrament, so that it only has a purely subjective effect within the mind of the believer. Quite naturally, this has meant that the Lord’s Supper has largely been pushed to the margins of evangelical worship:
Symbolic memorialists are at a loss to explain the difference between the mental recollection that occurs in the sacrament from the mental recollection that occurs in prayer or the hearing of the word. They are at a loss to explain why the Lord's Supper is really necessary or even significant. Such difficulty goes a long way toward explaining the neglect of this sacrament in the modern evangelical church. (265)
Most provocatively, Mathison (following Luther) argues that, despite their significant theological differences on the Supper, there has been a basic consensus between the ancient church, medieval Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists: all these traditions have affirmed that, in some way or other, Christ is actually and objectively present in the Supper, not just subjectively in the thoughts of the participants. On this point, symbolic memorialism uniquely is “in complete and total discontinuity with the teaching of the historic Christian church” (266).
There is a kind of irony to this: even while the Supper is denied by the symbolic memorialists to be an objectively effective sign and seal of communion in the body and blood of Christ, the Supper has still managed to have an effect on the Church’s unity in its very absence. Just as keeping the feast effects and nurtures the unity of Christ’s body, so neglecting the feast seems to have exhibited and conferred upon us a growing distance from the holy catholic Church and the communion of saints throughout the ages.
Covenant and succession
Jemimah has had a piece of hers published in American Reformer:
Here is my claim: Insofar as love characterises what a person does in pursuit of success, it is only accidentally characteristic of it; insofar as a person undertakes his works under the frame of succession, he must have love as his essential characteristic.
Death, as we have seen, brings one’s works into judgement. What succession reveals is that one’s works are not merely the things one has made, but include the people one has formed—the people for whom our works are done, and without whom they must otherwise be rendered futile.
She has since followed up with another piece on her blog about whether succession is even possible without stability of place. Both these articles are well worth a slow, careful reading.
The issues surrounding succession have been discussion points within the Wilson household in recent months. Within the legal profession, there seems to be something of a looming succession crisis: For whatever reason, there has been something of a failure of principals of law firms to do the slow and steady work of setting up their successors to inherit these firms and continue them into the next generation. I don’t think these issues are limited to lawyers though. Closer to our hearts, though, is the fairly widespread problem of children growing up within the church, and leaving the Christian faith when they come of age.
Succession is almost universally recognised as a major theme of the Old Testament narrative, with its stories of fathers and sons, the blessings and curses relating to passing on God’s law to the succeeding generations, and the great trouble that Israel has in doing this (especially in Judges and Kings). Less recognised is that in the New Covenant, succession does not fade into the background, but rather, God doubles down on this generational vision. Jemimah gestures at this right at the end of her piece, citing the promise in Malachi that God, though Elijah the prophet, would turn “the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers” (Mal. 4:6).
The New Covenant is often conceived of as concerned with individuals relating to God in a fairly timeless way, and perhaps only incidentally having something to do with generational succession. A lot of the current discussions about singleness in the church make precisely this error, seeing the unmarried person as someone who exists and relates to others entirely from outside the rhythms of generation, transcending our fleshly social relations. I disagree: the New Covenant has a vision for human life that positively engages the fact that we are naturally creatures, and grace restores this aspect of our nature:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise; That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth. And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. [Eph. 6:1-4]
So long as we make no attempt to pass on our good works to our successors, we at the same time deny with our actions that God shows steadfast, covenant love to thousands of generations who fear him. Through Christ, God is restoring and fulfilling the Deuteronomic vision: as the people of God teach their successors the ways of the Lord, God blesses them by giving them long life not just in the land, but in the whole earth, as their inheritance.
Study update
Last term I enjoyed my first respite from my M.Litt degree since I began about a year and a half ago. But we are so back: I am now in my fourth week of biblical Hebrew classes, and I have had two weeks in the Intro to the Gospels class with Joshua Shaw.
Over at my GoFundMe page, I have begun to post brief videos discussing what I’m getting up to in my classes and what I’m learning.
Thank you again to those who have supported my theological studies by making donations. If you’re interesting in supporting me in this way, please visit my GoFundMe page. Your donations not only make my study possible, they also encourage me greatly.
Behind-the-scenes
As you might have noticed in some recent posts, I have moved Psalter the Earth from Ghost to Substack, the happening speakeasy down the way where all the cool content-creating cats are exchanging their takes.
There is a lot to love about Ghost, especially its open-source ethos, but I find myself with neither the finances nor the time to deal with hosting. I really just wish to write and have all the plumbing and air-conditioning taken care of. So, here we are.
One of the nice things about Substack is the network effect, and I’ve already had a dramatic increase in people coming across this publication than ever before. Mrs Wilson, who has recently also moved her blog to Substack, articulated this well a few weeks ago: “It forces you to admit that you care about people reading you.” It is hard to deny the force of this.
Recently on Psalter the Earth
I reflect on a passage from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, in which he argues that the reason God gave us human teachers, rather than teaching each Christian immediately, is so that he could cultivate mutual love within the body of Christ.
I suggest some (uncomfortable) parallels between early gnostic a-sacramental understandings of Christian faith, and what has come to be the dominant view of the sacraments within evangelicalism.
I review some early Christian sources about the Church’s worship, observing the dominant motif of worship as sacrifice, and the Church’s awareness of God as a Trinity of persons.
I engage with a recent piece by Andrew Noble (Learning the Sounds of Love) on how headphones form us, and impede our habits of loving that which is around us; I reflect in turn about what this does to my own preferred way of engaging with Scripture.
Ever fascinated with Scripture’s natural symbolism, I consider how God’s waters of blessings and waters of judgment appear right next to each other in Isaiah 8:5-8:
God bless,
Sean