“His body, that redeemed our sin can also condemn of a sin, and the sin here is precisely the Protestant cornerstone error: “not discerning the body of the Lord” (1 Cor 11:29). So they “walked no more with him” (John 6:67)”
Paul’s record of the institution of the Lord’s Supper is the earliest we have. His distinctive contribution to doctrine lies in his emphasis on the meal as an occasion of communion (koinonia); his interpretation of the bread, “This is my body”, to include Christ’s body corporate; the explicit memorial purpose of the meal; and the forward-looking perspective that harks back to Jesus’ saying in the upper room that the next time he ate the Passover or drank the fruit of the vine would be in the consummated kingdom of God. The Lord’s Supper not only commemorated Jesus’ passion but anticipated his parousia.
Because of the growth of divisions within the Church at Corinth, including rival schools of thought and social cliques, questions were raised in a letter (1 Cor. 7:1 ) concerning the issue of food in two areas: that offered to idols; and the fellowship meal, but both ultimately dealt with fellowship of the body corporate.
The issue of food (1 Cor. 10) that had been sacrificed to idols especially in a pagan city like Corinth was part of the wider problem of idolatrous associations. The more enlightened members of the church maintained that since “there is no God but one”, it followed that “an idol has no real existence” (1 Corinthians 8: 4), and that therefore food was neither better nor worse for coming from an animal which had been sacrificed in a pagan temple. Paul agreed; but he did not want to impose the Jerusalem decree on the church, nor subject his Gentile churches to the authority of Jerusalem. Paul’s way was not to impose a rule but to help his converts to judge such issues for themselves in the light of basic Christian principles.
He warns the Corinthian Christians against participation in idolatrous feasts. He draws an analogy between what happens there and what happens in the communion meal, in order to show the absurdity of thinking they can “drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons” (1 Corinthians 10: 21). “The ‘cup of blessing’ over which we say a blessing, is it not a participation (koinonia) in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread”, he adds, “we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10: 16- ). Communion with Christ, which they enjoyed together at his table, excluded communion with a pagan divinity at his table; and such communion with a pagan divinity excluded communion with Christ.
He therefore pointed out, for many less enlightened Christians an idol had a real existence; it was a demonic power to those who ascribed a measure of reality to it, even if they did not worship it but rather abominated it. In the eyes of such people, the food had been in some sense contaminated by its association with the idol, and if they ate it they might become demon-possessed. Paul shows considerable sympathy with these “weak brethren”: he realized, as many of the men of knowledge did not, that to a person who believes in an idol or similar demonic being, it has real substance and power — not independently but none the less effectively.
The issue of food (1 Cor 11) at the Lord’s Table, which took a particularly unpleasant form made a mockery of their claim to have fellowship there with their Lord and with one another. The memorial bread and wine were taken in the course of a fellowship meal to which each member or family made a contribution, but instead of sharing what had been brought, the rich ate their own food and the poorer members made do with the little they could afford, so that, as Paul said, “one is hungry and another is drunk” (1 Corinthians 11: 21). Such selfish conduct was an outrage on the sacred occasion; those who participated in such an unworthy spirit, far from deriving any grace from their participation, were eating and drinking judgment upon themselves.
But their membership in the body of Christ could be violated at his own table by an unbrotherly attitude or conduct towards fellow-members of his body. When they broke the bread which was the token of the body of Christ they not only recalled his self-sacrifice on the cross but proclaimed their joint participation in his corporate body. If, then, they denied in practice the unity which they professed sacramentally in the communion meal, they ate and drank unworthily and so profaned the body and blood of the Lord; if they ate and drank “without discerning the body” they ate and drank judgment upon themselves). To eat and drink “without discerning the body” meant quite simply to take the bread and cup at the same time as they were treating their fellow-Christians uncharitably in thought or behavior. Participation in the communion meal, like baptismal incorporation into Christ, is no solitary matter: both involve sharing the common life in the body of Christ with all other believers.
The Eucharist certainly has this communal aspect; it is correct to point out that one burdened by a social sin, for example, of uncharity, should confess it before receiving and if he did not, he would be taking the Eucharist in condemnation of himself, unworthily.
But there is no warrant in the context to reduce the warning to mere social sin. The discourse in 1 Cor. 11 specially makes reference not to the mystical body of Christ, that is His Church, but rather to His historical, physical, real body (1 Cor. 11:23-24). That real body is the body that died, and the call to discern it most naturally refers to it, and not to the social body of the Church referred to elsewhere.
So while the essay you posted makes valid points regarding the social aspect of the Holy Communion, it is still overall is an exercise in masking the critical parts of the scripture in order to make it fit the Protestant desacralized theology.