The Blasphemy of Open Communion

Pontifications ^ | 12-04-05 | Alvin Kimel

[jecIIny]

The Blasphemy of Open Communion by Alvin Kimel

The Episcopal Diocese of Northern California has released its report on what is popularly called “open communion” but perhaps more accurately named “communion without baptism.” Around the country more and more Episcopal priests are now both permitting and inviting the nonbaptized to receive Holy Communion, without fear of Episcopal censure or discipline. This is happening despite clear canonical prohibition of the practice and despite long-standing Anglican and catholic tradition. The very fact that a diocesan committee was formed to study this new development and which in its turn is now encouraging further study and discussion witnesses to the seismic change that is occurring in the Episcopal Church.

[Rubber_Duckie_27]

I agree.

In college I was (technically still am) an ELCA member. The only Lutheran church within walking distance of campus was LCMS. Fortunately since my mother was raised WELS/LCMS she reminded me to not even THINK about taking communion until I'd spoken to the pastor. After I had attended for a few weeks we had a chat and he invited me to join in communion even though I was an ELCA member.

Now that my husband and I are looking for our own church home, we notice how blatant many ELCA congregations are about open communion. Some of them encourage babies and young children to take communion and I was raised in a congregation where that would be unthinkable! The LCMS practice of closed communion seems to be more reasonable IMO given that open communion has gotten so out of hand in places.

[Claud]

I suppose I just don't understand the "level" of literalness that Catholics believe, since no credible person argues that the disciples actually ate of His flesh and drank of His blood.

I think Forest Keeper means (correct if I'm wrong) that no person standing there while Christ spoke at John 6, bit off a bit of His flesh and drank his blood. In which case he'd be correct. :)

[lugsoul]

I should also point out that it is considered a 'mortal sin' to knowingly take the Catholic communion when you are not a part of the Catholic faith.

As one in an interfaith marriage to a Catholic, I will not say I don't have a problem with the determination of the Church that a confirmed and baptized Protestant like myself is not allowed to participate in the sacrament in their Church because I don't share their beliefs about the nature of the host. I know many Catholics who do not literally believe in transsubstantiation, who even state openly that they do not, but the Church does not bar them from the sacrament.

I do respect the wishes of the Church, in that I do not take communion in their Church. But I do not think many in the Church would be pleased to hear the answer I have for my daughter when she, inevitably, asks why I am not taking communion.

[sassbox]

Hi Forest Keeper

The Catholic belief about the Eucharist being the true body and blood of Christ is grounded both in passage from Luke 22 you mentioned, but also from the 6th chapter of John, especially verses 22 through the end of the chapter.

Jesus tells his disciples that "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my fleshy and drink my blood abide in me and I in them." (John 6:53-56).

As is written in John, this teaching caused great consternation among some of Christ's followers: "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" (6:52) "This teaching is difficult, who can accept it?" (6:60) and many disciples were so offended by this that they left Jesus (6:66).

When Christ hears these complaints he does not say anything to the effect of "hey wait, come back, I'm only speaking symbolically." Instead he reiterates that one must eat (the Greek word used here actually means "gnaw") his flesh and drink his blood to be saved.

Now at this point in Christ's ministry it is not yet clear exactly how He will give us His flesh and blood - but at the Last Supper this is made clear and the Eucharist is instituted. Catholics believe the Last Supper was the first Mass, and at Mass the words of Christ from the Last Supper are used for consecrating the Eucharist.

Once consecrated, the Eucharist is no longer bread and wine, but the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Our Lord. Really, truly, literally. Of course this is really hard to wrap one's mind around, but that is where faith comes in. God is God and we are not, and we cannot fully understand His ways, why He does what He does and how He does it. We cannot fully understand just how the Trinity works, how God can be one God yet exist in three distinct persons. We cannot fully understand how Christ could be both truly God and truly human. Yet we believe these things. There are many paradoxes in Christian belief, and the Eucharist is just one of them.

Suffice it to say, all things are possible with God. Like the disciples we are sometimes offended and confused by Christ's words. Yet like the disciples we must say "Lord to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life." (John 6:68)

[sassbox]

I know many Catholics who do not literally believe in transsubstantiation, who even state openly that they do not, but the Church does not bar them from the sacrament.

Actually such "Catholics" are barred from the sacrament. Any Catholic who is in a state of serious sin should not receive the Eucharist until he or she has repented of that sin and been reconciled to God and the Church through confession. It is a serious sin for a self-proclaimed Catholic to openly deny Christ's presence in the Eucharist. Such people should not receive communion.

Obviously such people do receive communion though. Most probably are able to receive because the priest or eucharistic minister does not know that the person is in such a state of sin. Others can receive because sadly there are some priests who don't accept the Church's teachings and give communion to anyone, even people they know are unrepentant of serious sins. John Kerry is able to find some priests like this and receive the Eucharist.

Nevertheless, while some hypocritical Catholics can fool their priests, they can't fool God. Sin is still sin even if one "gets away with it" in this life.

[Mr. Lucky]

Orthodox Luteran churches have continued to believe in the real presence of Christ in the communion host.

[Dionysiusdecordealcis]

I'm not sure this is the best way to approach the Catholic position. Orthodox certainly do believe exactly the same thing Catholics do about the Eucharist yet there is no Eucharistic communion between them except in very limited situations. If you follow the reasoning you outline here, then if a Lutheran or Anglo-Catholic did believe the same as Catholics, you would really have no reason to deny them intercommunion

Instead, the reason Catholics do not extend Communion to non-Catholics is the existence of historic schism. We are in schism vis-a-vis the Protestants and, sadly, the Orthodox (and the latter say the same thing to us; Protestants used to say it but their view of the Church isn now so confused that they no longer say it or if they do, it's lost most of its meaning--the denominational theory says that all denominations are partially right and partially wrong). Until the schism is healed, exchanging the sign of unity (Communion) would be a lie and lies are always bad.

Other forms of fellowship with fellow Christians (= the baptized) are possible, just not this one because it, more than any other sign, signifies unity, unity that does not now exist.

Those Protestants who devalue historical unity/disunity and place their hope in "spiritual unity" see no reason not to share the Eucharist among all who are baptized. So it comes down to the question of how important historic unity and schism are.

[lugsoul]

So, to believe his 'presence' in the Eucharist is spiritual, rather than physical, is a 'sin.' That kind of belief is exactly why I would never consider 'conversion.'

[Nihil Obstat]

Well said. Did you know about the miracle of Lanciano?

http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/lanciano.html

Good luck to the Irish.

[Dionysiusdecordealcis]

Not really. Merely symbolic presence and "real absence" was advocated by Zwingli in the early 1520s. Calvin taught a "spiritual presence" and claimed that it was not a form of real absence. In the late Middle Ages, groups were championing merely symbolic presence. They were called "Sacramentarians" and were strong in the NEtherlands and up and down the Rhine River. Berengar of Tours in the 1000s taught merely symbolic presence (although a few scholars say he did not) and was disciplined for it.

Luther did indeed teach real presence and quarreled with Zwingli over it in bitter terms; a parting of the ways came in 1527? at the Marburg Colloquy. Luther also believed in real presence of Breadness alongside real presence of Christ, so he did not believe the same as Catholics and Orthodox but compared to Zwingli he was very close to the Catholic position. Some later Lutheran pietist and revivalist groups, however, did move in a more "mere symbol" direction.

[Dionysiusdecordealcis]

Closed communion was true of all Protestant groups at one time. Again, the idea was that historic schism, even splinterings among Protestants, mattered. But after the splintering reached a certain point, to continue to insist that my sect and my sect alone is the true Church and all the others are wrong, became hard to maintain.

So practically, various groups opened their communion to this or that "cousin" group; eventually most Protestants opened it to all baptized Christians. The LC-MS were holdouts long after others changed. But so too were the Mennonites and others, until the last few decades. The most sectarian of these groups still do--you would not be welcome to receive communion in an Old Order Amish or Old Order Mennonite group but you would be in most mainstream Mennonite groups today. That was not true 40 or 50 years ago.

[Dionysiusdecordealcis]

Catholic teaching is that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is real, entire, substantial, even corporeal but not corporeal in a sense-perceptible or local way. So it is not a normal kind of physical or corporeal presence. We do not physically chew Christ's body with our teeth because he is not present sense-perceptbly or in a space-occupying way. Simply to say his presence is "physical" without qualifying it as a unique kind of non-sense-perceptible physicality is misleading. It is a sacramental physical presence, a real presence but not a normal corporeal real presence. If you placed the Consecrated Host under a microscope, the molecular structure would be that of bread but it would not be real bread. It really would be Christ but you can't see, measure, taste, feel Christ in any way, not with your eyes or hands not under a microscope. The DNA would be the DNA of bread. We assume that DNA is the reality of a thing, and in most cases it is. But this is a unique case. We think that by discovering DNA we've probed (measured) to the really real reality of things, but in fact, we've only begun to explore these matters.

In the case of the Eucharistic miracle, the molecules remain bread molecules; anything measurable about it remains measurably bread but not really bread. The reality has become Christ while the appearance remains bread appearance, not bread reality. (Here's where Luther differed--he thought we had to realities at once--another kind of miracle.)

[sassbox]

It's a sin if one calls him or herself a Catholic, knows what the Church teaches about the Eucharist, denies it anyways, but still receives communion - saying "Amen" (I believe) to something that they don't believe in. I'm only talking about hypocritical Catholics here. Non-Catholics, like yourself, who do not believe what Catholics do about communion and who do not receive communion, are a completely different story.

[lugsoul]

That kind of double-talk crafted by supposed theologians who need rigid interpretation of less-than-rigid language in order to control the 'meaning' of the Word of God - lest the peasants actually think, and worship, and commune with the divine themselves - is the problem, not the answer.

I say that with all due respect to the Church. But nothing you just wrote has any justification in Biblical text. To the contrary, it is merely a justification of an interpretation of Biblical text that is not mandated by the words themselves.

That's an old argument that doesn't need rehashing, again, here. But my point is that a Church that condemns others - believing, baptised Christians - to hellfire for failing to embrace such arcana is losing its grip on the very basis for its existence.

[lugsoul]

And that kind of fine cutting to justify condemning those who believe and love the Lord to hellfire for not having precisely the same beliefs as a bunch of medieval venal officeholders is the problem I was referencing.

[Forest Keeper]

I think Forest Keeper means (correct if I'm wrong) that no person standing there while Christ spoke at John 6, bit off a bit of His flesh and drank his blood. In which case he'd be correct. :)

Thank you Claud, that is exactly what I meant. I thought I'd remembered some teaching that either the Romans or the Pharisees (or both) used the cannibalism argument to discredit the disciples. So, I didn't see how Christians could use it positively.

[sassbox]

Get a grip - I never said you or anyone else was condemned to hellfire.

[Dionysiusdecordealcis]

Sir, just because you can't understand why it matters and have not even bothered to try to understand it, only shows how ignorant you are. Luther thought it mattered deeply, which is why he argued with Zwingli. Calvin thought it mattered deeply.

And, dear sir, it has ample Bibical justification. Jn 6, the Last Supper accounts and 1 Cor 10-11 all are adressing precisely these issues. You, of course, read these passages differently. You are entitled to your interpretation. But please don't be so arrogant as to claim that only your interpretation is possible. We can dispute which interpretations are true but if you insist that what I have just outlined is not an interpretation (false in your view) of the Bible, conversation stops dead in its tracks. But that may be what you prefer--since instead of explaining why the interpretation I outlined is not as good as yours, you wave it away with the back of your hand. Where I come from, that's called disrespect. I pay you the respect of asking you to reconsider and engaging the actual explanatory model (interpretation) of Scripture that the Catholic Church offers. You'll find the detailed argumentation in Aquinas's Summa Theologia and a straightforward exposition in Paul VI, Mysterium Fidei, citing Ambrose, Chrysostom, Augustine and others as they interpreted the Scriptures they loved dearly.

And just in case these figures are too late in history, too far after the New Testament for you, try looking at what Justin Martyr said in about 150: we have been taught that the bread, once it has been prayed over, is no longer bread but the very Christ himself (I am quoting from memory here). He was claiming that he got this from those who got it from Jesus's own apostles. But that's not good enough fo you, probably.

And if that's not good enough, Ignatius of Antioch, who was a contemporary of John the Apostle's later years said the same.

Just to be clear: all that I said above about real but not-sense-perceptible presence is based on a combination of faith in the teachings of Scripture (that Christ really is present--Jn 6, 1 Cor 10-11 etc.) and on empirical observation: it doesn't taste or feel or look like Christ's sense-perceptible body. Measurably, locally, perceptibly, it looks like bread. But we can't possibly say's nothing but bread because Jesus himself said it was not: This is my body, Paul said it was not, Justin Martyr, Ambrose, Chrysostom all said it was not.

We aren't going to be so absurd as to deny what it looks, tastes, feels, measures like. Nor are we going to be so unfaithful to our Lord as to deny that it is what he said it is. So we affirm both, even if people like you laugh at us, even if your Protestant forbears castrated us, ripped out our intestines and hearts and cut our bodies into four pieces for insisting on it. And Ignatius of Antioch, ca. 110 AD, so much believed it that he looked foward to being ground between the teeth of wild beasts in the Colosseum rather than deny that this truly was Christ.

[Dionysiusdecordealcis]

Sir, I do not condemn to hell those who do not agree with the Catholic faith in Christ's real but not local presence in the Blessed Sacrament. I hope and pray that all will be saved. I hope that very thing for you.

I hope also that you will retract the calumny against me that you made when you claimed that I condemn to hellfire those who do not believe in Real Presence. If you would actually read the Catechism of the Catholic Church you would discover that we do not condemn non-Catholics to hellfire. And, while I am at it, many Catholics who believe this teaching may find themselves in hell if they do not act upon the knowledge they have and live a life faithful to Christ. Being a Catholic and believing this doctrine, which the Church has always believed does not guarantee heaven.

[Forest Keeper]

It's interesting to me that Jesus seemingly made no effort to exclude Judas from the communion table.

That's very interesting to me, too. Then I thought that maybe the answer is in the very chapter you cited. 1 Cor. 11:28-30:

"28 A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. 29 For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself. 30 That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep."

So, Judas partook and was unworthy. Soon thereafter, he was dead. Maybe it's the perfect example.