Any Roman Catholic would always be welcome to partake of the Lord's Supper in any Bible-believing church. We only ask that any partaker honestly consider himself a believer.
It really comes down to if you believe the sacrifice at the cross was sufficient. The Lord's Supper and Baptism are great illustrations of this fundamental difference and evidence that our respective churches do teach a different Gospel, something to consider on Resurrection Sunday.
Well the way I'm following the argument these days leads me to ask "Sufficient for what?" or "What does being saved on earth 'look' like?"
Clearly in some, in the most important sense, it is all-sufficient. But still ...
I'll argue it offers the privilege of working with God, of taking up our (adopted) sonship by doing (poorly) what we see the Father doing. If what you see as the burden of works is instead the gift, privilege, and honor of works, we have another way of looking at the problem.
I say again, Paul rejoices at his sufferings and that in his flesh he completes "what is lacking in Christ's afflictions ...". This is the same Paul who, more clearly than anyone else in the NT proclaims the completeness and sufficiency of Christ's suffering, and who also urges the Philippians to work out their own salvation (!) in fear and trembling (! again!), for God works in them both to will and to do.
So the language here is, at the simplest level contradictory, I think. I mean either Christ worked out our predestined salvation or not, huh?
But if doing good works is not something with which we are burdened but the work of God in us, then ONE solution is to view, as I've said, works and their "merit" as further gifts, as the working out in our lives of God's plan for us. Or, to say it another way, we are saved from futility into meaningful works, while we live, and (intercession of the saints anyone?) after we die.
This is why, in a round about way, I don't get into the donnybrooks over predestination and irresistible grace and the rest turning us into automata. The interaction between our willing and God's willing in us is just mysterious to me.
To oppose too simply God's action as simply external to us and our action as isolated from God seems to me to fail to be in line with the fullness of the Pauline message or of our experience.
And again, when you do something right, are you proud or grateful? Isn't it precisely then that you see that God was at work in you both to will and to do and that it was all gift?
Yes, I think that's huge. I think both sides would say Christ accomplished everything He intended, but we disagree with them on what that was. I happen to think the Apostolic view is that Christ accomplished very little on the cross in objective reality. Especially during this Easter season, whenever I even TRY to contemplate what He went through for us, it does not OCCUR to me that it would mean so little as our friends portray it. We all agree that God did what He did for a reason. We are left to figure out if He was trying to do a big thing or a little thing. Since it involved His very DEATH, I am inclined to think it was a big thing. But most Apostolics disagree, implicitly (or comparatively).