Tag Archives: Communion

Edward Taylor, 28th Meditation.2

30 Wednesday Sep 2020

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Lord clear the cost: and let thy sweet sun-shine

That I may better speed a second time:

Oh! Fill my pipkin with thy bloodred wine:

I’ll drink thy health: to pledge thee is no crime.

Although I but an earthen vessel be 

Convey some of my fullness to thee.

The image of a coast picks up on the “befogged dark fancy, clouded mind.” In days before the Coast Guard and lighthouses and radar and exhaustive maps, a cloudy coast would be an enormous danger. 

Here the coast is not a physical location, but rather the affections and mind “befogged” by the effects of sin and the fall. Without going through the entire doctrine here, which goes under the title “the noetic effects of sin,” it is sufficient to know that the residual effects of sin persist as long we exist in this world. And while there is improvement in this life under the operation of the Spirit and the Word, the effects persist.

Taylor here prays that the effects of sin be lifted: rather than fog, “let thy sweet sun-shine.” The hope of this transformative effect is that he will be able to rework the poem and create something more worthy. The poem is losing glory, because it lost it ways.

Perhaps Taylor is referring to an earlier version of the poem which he destroyed. But based upon this being a persistent claim, in various forms, which is seen throughout his corpus, it could be just his difficulty at the beginning of the poem.

In the remainder of the stanza he brings up the method of this shining light. Since the poems were written in preparation for communion, the reference of “blood red wine” is to the wine of communion. 

The nature of communion as a joy, while often not emphasized, is not absent from the ceremony. First, the Supper takes over for the Feast of Passover, which while in stressful circumstances also celebrates the escape from Egypt. Second, while the ceremony recalls the Lord’s Death, we also call that day “Good Friday.” Third, the ceremony recalls the Lord’s Death until he comes. The ceremony is based upon the Lord’s life and looks forward to the Lord’s return.

But there is another level of this image: He asks to have his “pipkin,” his small cup, is to be filled with wine. But in the last line, the image of “wine” is recounted as “fullness”:

Convey some of thy fullness into me.

“Fullness” is a reference to the fullness of grace in the moto for the poem, “16 And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. 17 For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” Thus, it is the fullness of grace he is praying to receive.

The pipkin is repeated in the fifth line of the stanza as an “earthen vessel”. The move to an earthen vessel may seem disjointed on the face of the stanza, but when we see the nature of the illusion, Taylor’s relationship makes sense. 

Taylor is referring to 2 Corinthians 4:7, where Paul writes that “we have this treasure in jars of clay.”  While the reference to clay has become a bit of a Christian cliché to refer generally to the weakness of human beings, Taylor picks up this image not merely as a form self-abasement, but because the passage relates to his twin themes in this stanza of fullness of Christ’s grace and light to drive away the fog.

The treasure Paul identifies is  the “light of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”  The fuller passage reads as follows:

5 For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake. 6 For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 7 But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 

2 Corinthians 4:5–7.

James Denney: Moral Impossibilities

27 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by in James Denney, Lord's Supper, The Lord's Supper, Uncategorized

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This sermon is based upon 1 Corinthians 10:21, Ye cannot drink the Cup of the Lord and the cup of the devils.

The sermon has two points of particular interest: (1) what is the nature of the elements in the Lord’s Supper: particularly what is work in a symbol. (2) What does it mean for a modern Christian to take the cup of the devils?

As for symbol, Denney makes an important corrective to the concept of symbol: a symbol is not meant to put something at a distance, but rather to bring that thing close:

Perhaps it was under a deep sense of what it signified, perhaps with a sort of perplexity in our minds that in a spiritual religion like ours such a place should have been claimed by a material rite. It is certain that many church members have no clear convictions about the sacraments, and are uncomfortable in the celebration of them. They may think in some indistinct fashion that they are symbolical, but they use even the idea of symbol in a wrong way.

A symbol in their thoughts is something to be distinguished from reality; just because it is a symbol, it keeps them, one might say, at arm’s length from the thing symbolized. But the true use of a symbol is to bring the reality near; it is to give us a grasp of it such as we could not otherwise obtain.

A Christian spirit does not play off the reality in the sacrament, and the symbol, against each other; it grasps the reality through the symbol; it does not answer to its experience to say that in the communion it partakes of the symbols of Christ’s body and blood; it has Jesus Christ Himself in all the reality of his incarnation and passion as its meat and drink. It is nothing less than the cup of the Lord which we drink, nothing less than the table of the Lord of which we partake.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 230–231. The “symbols” of the supper are not to create a distance, but rather to bring about a relationship which could not obtain otherwise. The best of symbols make us understand better; help us relate better.

As for the second issue: what now is the cup of the devils? Denney says, Well, we don’t see idol worship or overt devilry nowadays. On this first point, things have changed greatly. There are a substantial number of people who self-identify as Wiccan, “In 2014 Pew Research Center estimated that 0.4 percent of Americans, about 1 to 1.5 million people, identify as Wiccan or Pagan.” There are any number of things quite common today which would have been unthinkable in such numbers in the late 19th century (although since the First World War, such things have certainly grown).

But even without overt paganism, Denney speaks of a certainly “liberty” which has one taking in ideas and culture which are contrary to Christ. The cup of devils is far more dangerous to us than we understand. Paul is warning them of a very real danger:

No matter how sure a man’s hold may be of the Christian principle that an idol is nothing in the world and therefore can do nothing to harm any enlightened person; if he takes part in such a transaction as I have described, then its atmosphere, its circumstances, its spirit, will prevail against him; he will be brought in spite of himself into the great communion of heathen life again. Let him say what he will, it is another world than that in which we live at the Lord’s table; it is spiritual influence of another quality which tells there upon the soul: and the two are irreconcilable. “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons”.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 235–236.

Here is how Denney describes the effect of such liberty:

Probably the cup of devils is drunk most frequently still under the sign of liberty. Even a Christian man says to himself that everything in human life ought to be of interest to him. It belongs to his intelligence to concern itself with all the experiences of his kind, and the most attractive way to look at these experiences is in literature. This is the mirror in which life is reflected, and it cannot be wrong to gaze into it. It is indeed the mark of a large and liberal intelligence to have the amplest toleration here; to allow the mind to familiarize itself with all that has been said and thought by human beings; to cultivate breadth, appreciation, geniality; to avoid a censorious and puritanic temper. The world that is good enough for God should be good enough for us, and we should not be too good to take it as it is.

It is by pleas like these, or in a mood like this, that men and women who have drunk the cup of the Lord allow themselves to drink the cup of devils. They deliberately breathe a poisoned spiritual air as if it could do them no harm. But it does do harm. I do not believe there is anything in which people are so ready to take liberties which does so much harm. There are bad books in the world, just as there are bad men, and a Christian cannot afford to take either the one or the other into his bosom. There are books, and books of genius too, which should not be read, because they should never have been written. The first imagination and conception of them was sin, and the sin is revived when they are conceived again in the mind even of a Christian reader. It is revived with all the deadly power that belongs to sin. We cannot give our minds over to it with impunity. It confuses, it stains, it debilitates, it kills. It is the cup of devils, and we cannot drink it and drink the cup of the Lord.

 James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 237–238.

And, “All things are not lawful for us if we wish to remain in the Lord’s company and to share in His life.”

Orthodox Paradoxes, Concerning Ordinances

08 Tuesday Mar 2016

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XIV Concerning the Lord’s Supper and Baptism

97. He believes that they who are baptized may be not be members of Christ, and yet he believes that they who are baptized may be members of the church.
98. He finds no express warrant or the baptizing of any infants, and yet he finds it warrantable that some should be baptized.
99. He believes that believers are much better for baptism, and yet he believes that the washing of what does them no good.
100. He eats Christ’s flesh and drinks the blood of Christ, and lives by it; and yet he never takes the flesh and blood of Christ into his mouth.
101. He believes that the bread and wine are not the body and blood of Christ, nor that Christ in them nor under them; and yet when he takes them he partakes of Christ.

Preparing for the Lord’s Supper

16 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by in Jeremiah Burroughs, Meditation, Worship

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Jeremiah Burroughs, in the collection of sermons published as Gospel Worship http://www.ligonier.org/store/gospel-worship-hardcover/), sets out ten meditations for one who prepares to receive the Lord’s Supper:

Meditation 1. The way of salvation is by a Mediator. It is not only God’s mercy, God saying that He is offended by sin but he will be content to pass it by; no, but it is through a Mediator….there is a great work required of God to make an atonement between sinners and Himself.

Mediation 2. This Mediator who stands between God and us is verily and truly man. He has taken our nature upon Him. The bread puts us in mind of the body of Christ, and the wine of his blood; and therefore we are to mediate on the human nature of Jesus Christ.

Meditation 3. Here is presented what this Mediator has done to reconcile us to God. His body was broken…Oh that we should be willing to suffer for Jesus Christ in our bodies, even to resist unto blood, seeing that Christ has been content to have His precious body broken and His blood shed for us!

Meditation 4. Here we have occasion to mediate on what the Scripture says, that we are saved by the blood of God.

Meditation 5. Of the infinite dreadfulness of the justice of God. How dreadful is the justice of God that, coming upon His own Son and requiring satisfaction from Him, should thus bruise and break Him, that should have His blood, that should require such sufferings even from His Son!

Meditation 6. Here I see presented to me what every soul that shall be saved cost.

Meditation 7. Hence we see the evil of sin. How great is that which has made such a breach between God and my soul that only such a way and such a means could take away my sin.

Meditation 8. Behold the infinitive love of God to mankind and the love of Jesus Christ, that rather than God see the children of men to perish eternally, He would send His Son to take our nature upon Him and thus suffer such dreadful things.

Meditation 9 Though a believer is never so weak, yet seeing that God has appointed the body and blood of His Son for him to feed upon and to drink in a spiritual way, then surely the weakest in all the world will be strengthened to go through all the hazards and dangers that there are in the world….This is meat indeed and drink indeed that will nourish to eternal life.

Meditation 10. When you come to see the bread broken and the wine poured out, you have an occasion to meditation upon the whole New Covenant, the covenant of grace that God has made with sinners.

Surely it must be a great ordinance

16 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by in Jeremiah Burroughs, The Lord's Supper, Worship

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Though Christ was to die the next day, and to encounter the wrath of God (yes, that very night He was to be in agony and to sweat great drops of blood, and the next day to die and have these trials of wrath poured upon Him so as to put Him to cry out, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”), yet He busied himself that very night to institute this supper. Surely it must be a great ordinance, and there is a great deal of the love of Christ in it.

Jeremiah Burroughs, “Receiving the Sacrament”

The Chief Culprit (When Pastors Became “Priests”)

14 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by in Ante-Nicene, Eucharist, P. T. Forsyth, Worship

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It seems that the concept of the Christian minister being a “priest” took place in the thought of Cyprian as mentioned in a letter (63) written approximately 253 A.D:

This letter is also noteworthy for it contains, in the estimation of the incisive Congregationalist theologian P. T. Forsyth (1848–1921), “an absolutely unscriptural change.” After linking the biblical affirmation about the offering of Christ, the high priest of God, “as a sacrifice to the Father” with His command to His disciples to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in His remembrance, Cyprian concludes that Jesus is asking His disciples to do exactly as He did. This means that the one presiding at the Eucharist “imitates that which Christ did,” when he “offers a true and full sacrifice in the Church to God the Father.” In making this exegetical move, Cyprian became, according to Forsyth, “the chief culprit in effecting the change from a sacrificium laudis by the Church to a sacrificium propitiatorium by the priest.”

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Intinction

04 Saturday Apr 2015

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Intinction is the practice of dipping the bread into the wine.  The history of the practice in the Christian Church and theological reception of that practice within the Protestant Church is fully discussed here:

 http://theaquilareport.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/IntinctionPaper.pdf

Smith, in Desiring the Kingdom explains that the practice of the Eucharist forms the shape of the human being who partakes:

This intensity is suggested in the very words of institution of the Eucharist: “This is my body.”

Jesus didn’t look around the room or out the window and abstractly announce, “Behold, the goodness of all creation. Look, remember, believe. These are the gifts of God for the people of God.” Such a statement would be perfectly true; creation is just such a mediation of God’s presence. But in addition to that truth, we also need to note that Jesus takes up particular things from creation and endues them with a sense of special presence, an especially intense presence. In this way Jesus seems to establish particular hot spots of sacramentality within a good creation, while also ordaining particularly packed practices. This selective intensity suggests that the affirmation that all the world is a sacrament is not meant to thereby level “the sacraments.”

In the same way, the affirmation that all of life is worship— that all things can be done to the glory of God— should not level the particular intensity of worship as the “work of the people” that especially praises God and forms us in unique, particularly intense ways. If one temptation is to level the sacraments in the name of the sacramentality of the world, a second is the temptation to naturalize the liturgy as just an embodied practice like any other (another kind of leveling). [38]

Sometimes our emphasis on liturgy as a formative, embodied practice that shapes us runs the risk of construing this as a wholly natural or immanent process— as if the formation of disciples in Christian worship operates in much the same way as the formation of Manny Ramirez as an excellent hitter through bodily rituals of batting practice. While worship is entirely embodied, it is not only material; and though worship is wholly natural, it is never only natural. Christian worship is nothing less than an invitation to participate in the life of the triune God. In short, the centrality of embodiment should not be understood as a “naturalizing” of worship that would deny the dynamic presence of the Spirit; to the contrary, the Spirit meets, nourishes, transforms, and empowers us just through and in such material practices.

The church’s worship is a uniquely intense site of the Spirit’s transformative presence. We must never lose sight of the charged nature of these practices. [39] These are not just rituals that are unique because they are aimed at a different telos; they are also unique because they are practices that bring us face-to-face with the living God.

Smith, James K. A. (2009-08-01). Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (pp. 149-150). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

As we change the practice, we change its meaning — we change what happens in the heart. When we both remove the cup as a separate element, remove the words of institution, or partake on our own schedule, we fundamentally transform our goal and its effects. Is that wise?

Pilgrim’s Progress Study Guide 5

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Biblical Counseling, Discipleship, Humility, John Bunyan

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The prior study guide may be found here: https://memoirandremains.wordpress.com/2015/02/27/pilgrims-progress-study-guide-4/

Pilgrim’s Progress, Study Guide 5:

Christian and the Valley of Humiliation

In this section of the trip, Christian descends first in the Valley of Humiliation

Background: Christian has been refreshed and encouraged in Palace Beautiful. He has eaten of the Lord’s Supper. He has known fellowship with the Church, spoken of the wonders of Christ and God’s work with his people. Then before he leaves, Christian is brought to the armoury where he is outfitted for battle, “lest perhaps he should meet with assaults in the way.”

Christian’s Departure.

  1. Notice that Palace Beautiful is at the top of a hill. One must go up the Hill of Difficulty and go down into the Valley of Humiliation. Why is that?

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1857

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Church History, Lord's Supper, Union With Christ

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How we think about the past often tells us more about present that it does about history. For example, Greek mythology spoke of a past “golden age”:

(ll. 109-120) First of all the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Cronos when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.


Hesiod Works and Days. Yet we wiser moderns know that history goes in one direction; that the past was primitive, but due to the power of progress, things have constantly become better.  We are wiser, better, stronger than our ancestors. Such thinking owes more to people like Herbert Spencer. The Wikipedia summarizes Spencer as follows:

Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. He was “an enthusiastic exponent of evolution” and even “wrote about evolution before Darwin did.”[1] As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. “The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century.”[2] Spencer was “the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century”[3][4]

Yet, a Stanford professor of genetics recently held that our Greek ancestors (or any of our ancestors from the time of Hesiod) would be more intellectually powerful than Spencer (who thought himself at the top of the progressive heap):

Our Fragile Intellect

Gerald R. Crabtree

David Korn Professor of Pathology and Developmental Biology

Beckman Center, B211

279 Campus Drive, Stanford University crabtree@stanford.edu

 

I would be willing to wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions. We would be surprised by our time-visitor’s memory, broad range of ideas and clear-sighted view of important issues. I would also guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues. I do not mean to imply something special about this time in history or the location, but would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas of perhaps 2,000 to 6,000 years ago. I mean to say simply that we Homo sapiens may have changed as a species in the past several thousand years and will use 3000 years to emphasize the potential rapidity of change and to provide a basis for calculations, although dates between 2,000 and 6,000 years ago might suffice equally well. The argument that I will make is that new developments in genetics, anthropology and neurobiology make a clear prediction about our historical past as a species and our possible intellectual fate. The message is simple: our intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprising fragile.

 

http://bmi205.stanford.edu/_media/crabtree-2.pdf

One way in which consider ourselves to be advanced is in matters of “race”. Now “race” is a nonsense concept. There is only one “race”, the human race. Of course human beings have organized ourselves into various groups which use common language and culture; but that is a cultural club, not a “race”. Anyway, we pride ourselves in outgrowing notions of race – which make us much better people than our forbearers.

Yet, racism is far more “modern” than we might admit. An incident in 1857 at least points in the opposite direction:

A watershed point in this history occurred in 1857 when the General Assembly of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) received from some white members a request for permission to celebrate the Lord’s Supper separated from black members of the church. The request was clearly against the Reformed polity of the DRC ….(Indeed, an earlier request for separate communion had been rejected by the Dutch Reformed Church, for the Lord’s Supper was to be administered “without distinction of colour”). Moreover, the 1857 Synod found no biblical grouns for the separation of communion based upon race. However, the assembly, wanting to avoid being conservative, doctrinaire, and rigid gave pastoral accommodation that “due to the weakness of some,” communion and worship could be organized into separate celebrations  based on race. (The “weaker” one referred to were the white members who made the request for separate communion.)

J. Todd Billings, Union With Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church, 98-99.

Fortunately, in many places – particularly within the Christian church – such modern racism has been rejected: but, not on the basis of “progress” but rather to conform to what the church already believed and held and practiced. If nothing else, this story cautions us to be more careful of what we “know to be true.”

If we go on at all

25 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Biblical Counseling, Discipleship, Faith, Galatians, John, Philippians, Union With Christ, William Romaine

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It is easy to forget that all the Christian life must and can be only in Christ — in union and comunion with him. We forget this because we easily fall to the idea that our life is a doing of some-thing or other as a bare act, which, if performed, satisfies God. Such thoughts dishonor our Lord and suffocate our faith.

Sin suffuses through the entire human life, because sin — in one aspect — is the absence of the life of God. The human being without God is twisted, unnatural, sullen, without true hope or love. Redemption is to be in Christ.

Consider Paul’s words here; note the language to “be found in him”:

7 But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.
8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ
9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith-
10 that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,
11 that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Phil. 3:7-11. Or in Colossians 3, our life is with Christ in God: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). Our Paul writes elsewhere: our life is now the life of Christ in us: I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:20.

The Christian life can never be a life without Christ, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4).

Sin is death necessarily. The death does not lie in the bare action — it lies in the Godlessness of sin. The Sahara desert has many attributes – especially that it contains no water. One dies of thirst in the desert, not because one does not move hand to mouth, open in the mouth and swallow. One dies because there is no water. Without water, the action is lifeless; it is a charade, a parody of drinking. Without God, even our best acts can never be more than parodies of life.

Yes it is worse to not do “good works” — and yet such good works will fall short of the beauty they were meant to convey:

VII. Works done by unregenerate men, although for the matter of them they may be things which God commands, and of good use both to themselves and others; yet, because they proceed not from a heart purified by faith; nor are done in a right manner, according to the Word; nor to a right end, the glory of God; they are therefore sinful and can not please God, or make a man meet to receive grace from God. And yet their neglect of them is more sinful, and displeasing unto God.

Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 16.

In short, our life must be in and through Christ. Our life must be in love and fellowship of union and communion — and that union and communion can be only be conveyed and received by means of a lively faith. As Romaine writes

“If we go on at all, it is by communion with him. We can receive only out of his fulness, grace for grace, to make us willing and able to go forward. Our fellowship with him is in every part and in every moment of our walk, and this is as necessary as our fellowship with the air and elements of this world is to every thing that concerns our natural walk. Our wisdom to guide our steps, our progress in the way, our courage and strength, our warfare and victory, every grace and every blessing is received by faith, and is the effect of our communion with Jehovah Jesus. We trust in his word, we rely on his arm, we wait on his faithfulness, and so go forward; for he makes good what he had promised to give us in our walk, which confirms the peace of God, establishes our hearts in his love, increases our faith, and thereby makes our daily walk more comfortable to us, and more glorious to him.”

William Romaine “Treatises on the life, walk, and triumph of faith.”