Please bear in mind that my aim here was as much to reassure as to convince - in particular, please bear this in mind when reading my presentation of our (Lutheran) pastor's comments on the subject. If you have any issues with what our pastor had to say on this subject, please work on the assumption that I have misunderstood or misrepresented him. While I do not believe I have misrepresented what our pastor said, in the circumstances I have preferred to emphasise the differences between him and Dr Feuerhahn rather than the points of agreement. I'm really not interested in getting into a controversy on this whole issue, though any feedback is welcome.
Hi M______,
[...]
I did promise you I'd get back to you about close(d) communion. We raised this with our pastor at our membership class on Wednesday, and ended up spending most of the session discussing this and related issues.
We found the discussion reassuring. [Our pastor] said that he takes a different approach from Dr Feuerhahn on this issue. He explained that a range of views is found within Lutheranism on this issue, and Dr Feuerhahn is very much at one end of the scale on this. [Our pastor] described his own position as "close communion" rather than "closed communion" (OK, only one letter different - but I suppose one letter was enough to make the difference between Arianism and orthodox Christianity...).
In a nutshell, [our pastor] sees his job as not to peer into people's hearts to see what they really believe on every issue (like you said, the onus is ultimately on the participant to "examine themselves", per 1 Cor 11:28). Rather, he sees his task as simply to set out what Lutherans believe concerning the Lord's Supper: namely, that it is "the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine, instituted by Christ Himself for us Christians to eat and drink" (as the Small Catechism puts it). If people profess their agreement to this teaching, then he is happy for them to come to the Lord's Table.
Of course, if someone does not agree with that teaching, then it is probably neither appropriate nor desirable (from their own point of view) for them to be taking part. It's not a case of saying, "Go away, you are a second-class Christian unworthy of the Lord's Table", but rather, "This is what we believe, teach and confess is going on at the Lord's Table - on that basis, do you actually want to take part in this?"
When people line up at the communion rail to receive the bread and wine, the words used in the distribution are "Take, eat; this is the true body of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, given into death for your sins" and "Take, drink; this is the true blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, shed for the forgiveness of your sins." I'm guessing you personally would not feel comfortable saying "Amen" to either of those statements. But then the issue isn't whether you are being unjustifiably "excluded"; the issue is whether the Lutheran understanding of the Lord's Supper is correct.
To go back to your comments about Christopher Idle and Dick Lucas [Anglican Evangelicals who had preached and taken the Lord's Supper at M's Baptist church recently] - while the three of you may not agree 100% on all points of doctrine, you are all pretty much agreed on what the Lord's Supper is about - that "is" means "represents", that the body and blood of Jesus are as far away from us as the heavens are from the earth, that what counts is our metaphorical "feeding" by remembrance and faith. In those circumstances it would indeed be wrong to exclude them from the Table.
As for my own views on this - well, I've never been a Zwinglian, have never held to a "mere memorial" view. Previously I've held to the classic Reformed view in which we do indeed receive and feed on the Lord's body as we eat the bread, and receive and drink the Lord's blood as we drink the wine, but that this feeding and drinking occurs only by faith - that it is not that Christ comes down to the Supper, but that we ascend by faith to Him in heaven (as taught by Calvin, the Heidelberg Catechism, the 39 Articles etc - Calvin himself regarded his teaching as being closer to Luther than to Zwingli).
The Lutheran teaching on the Lord's Supper, on the other hand, reflects the general Lutheran emphasis on the objective validity and efficacy of the Word of God - that God's promises remain true even if no-one believes them and (crucially) even if we have difficulty reconciling them with human reason or with the evidence presented to us by our human senses. So the Words of Institution ("this is my body ... this cup is the new testament in my blood") remain regardless of whether or not we believe them, and regardless of whether we can make sense of them with human reason.
I attach a PDF document which sets out the Lutheran teachings in more detail [note: this was qq.285ff. of the Explanation of the Small Catechism], but the ELCE's website summarises it well when it says:
LORD'S SUPPERNote the emphatic rejection of "consubstantiation" - the whole point of the Lutheran position is that it does not seek to impose a philosophical explanation (such as Rome's "substance/accidents" distinction, or Calvin's "finitum non capax infiniti") on the "plain Word" of the Lord. It goes without saying that Roman teachings concerning transubstantiation, "the sacrifice of the Mass", adoration of the physical elements, the "priestly" function of the minister presiding, the need for priestly confession & absolution before partaking, etc, are all emphatically rejected.
Lutherans believe and teach that in the other Sacrament, Holy Communion, the Lord Jesus Christ, according to His own plain Word, gives us His body and blood for the remission of sins; that the Lutheran belief, called the 'Real Presence', does not imply, either by transubstantiation or consubstantiation, any kind of change in the visible elements, that the bread remains bread and the wine remains wine, but by virtue of Jesus' word of institution, this bread is His body and this wine is His blood; that all who eat and drink at the Lord's Table receive His body and blood in and with the bread and wine, those who believe to the strengthening of their faith, those who reject to their condemnation; and that this Sacrament ought therefore to be withheld from those who are unable to examine themselves in the Christian faith.
References: Matthew 26: 26-28; Mark 14: 24; 1 Corinthians 11: 24-25, 26-28; Matthew 7: 6; 1 Corinthians 11: 29.
While I do not expect to persuade you of the Lutheran position, I hope this helps alleviate your concerns about perceived "legalism" and "sectarianism". Also, that moving from the Reformed to the Lutheran position involves much less of a shift for me than it perhaps would for you. I hope we can agree to differ on the actual teachings about Lord's Supper as we already have done for some time on Baptism.
There are in fact a number of parallels with Baptism here: after all, there are literally thousands of churches in this country - and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Christians - who would deny that I (and many other Christians) have been baptised, and a good number of those churches would exclude me from membership on this account. Some might even exclude me from the Lord's Table over it (which is at least consistent - it's difficult to see what meaning Baptism has if people can even participate in the Lord's Supper without being validly baptised).
However hurt or offended people may be at being "excluded" from the Lord's Table in a Lutheran Church, it is no less hurtful to be told that one's baptism is invalid, to be excluded from membership in a church over the issue, and to sit through testimonies at "re-baptisms" in which people repudiate and denigrate their earlier baptism (and, by implication, one's own), all of which I have had to endure on numerous occasions in the last ten years.
Given what the NT says about baptism, to deny that someone is baptised is virtually to deny that they are Christians. I know that you have never sought to say this - quite the opposite - and I remain grateful for this, particularly thinking back to when we had to "seek refuge" at C________ [M's, and our, previous church]. But I think the Baptism issue remains a good illustration of churches saying, quite legitimately, "This is what we believe. We don't deny that you are a true Christian, but we do believe you are wrong about this, and please understand that we need to behave in a manner which is consistent with what we believe. Please don't ask us to change our beliefs just so we can avoid awkwardness or discomfort."
As always, I look forward to your response on any of this.
All the best,
John
