Truth Unites - The Lord's Supper: A Reformed View

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

The Lord's Supper (or the Eucharist) is one of the chief points of division among Christians of different church traditions. Protestants are often seen as having a lower view of the Lord's Supper, in contrast to the non-Protestant traditions. But historical Protestant views are more complicated. Here I offer an overview of a Reformed view of the Lord's Supper, drawing from five observations of Thomas Watson's helpful book on this topic. Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus,  hosted by Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) author and  Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites | One-time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truth... FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

One of the great goals for my YouTube channel is to encourage the retrieval of historic Protestant theology. My feeling is many people don't know much about historic Protestant views. We tend to be more aware of kind of street-level practices, especially among evangelicals. But sometimes those are very different from historic Protestant theology. And I think that's very much the case with the Lord's Supper or what we sometimes call communion or the Eucharist. For example, many times people think of Protestant views of the Eucharist, or I'm just going to call it the Lord's Supper, because I'm going to be talking about this book with that title. Many times people think of Protestant views of the Lord's Supper as low and the non-Protestant traditions as having a high view of the Lord's Supper. But if you look at the history, it's much more complicated than that.

So it's been in my queue for like three months now to make a video on the Lord's Supper. I previously had made one video on the Lord's Supper responding to Francis Chan, but I thought it might be useful to make a more constructive introductory video, just sort of giving an overview of a reformed view, which is the view that I hold. So I read, I was on a flight home from a conference two days ago, and I read this fantastic book by Thomas Watson, who's one of the Puritans in the Puritan paperback series, which is a great series. And it's really useful. So Watson is a good representative of a reformed or Calvinist view of what we'll call spiritual presence. Sometimes there's other labels for it. We'll get into that. And this is broadly the view that I hold, though honestly I think a lot of what I'll say in this video

could be maybe agreed with by people in other traditions or other views as well. It's an amazing book. I would love to encourage people to read this book. It's 85 pages. It is so rich. in 85 short pages. You could probably read it in an hour or so, or less maybe. It's very lowercase Catholic. It's filled with quotations from church fathers. I counted probably like 30 to 35 quotations from church fathers, including, and then others, medieval theologians, several quotes

from Bernard of Clairbeau, including church fathers who are relatively unknown, like Theophilus and other people like this that you don't see as frequently quoted. Comparatively, it's got maybe five to seven quotes from Protestants. So that was very interesting. It's a very lowercasey Catholic case. It's also incredibly devotional as so much of the Puritan writing is. You know, the Puritans were masters at theological precision plus practical devotion and application. So, you know, he'll just comb through a topic and look at it from every angle and draw out as much as possible to stir up love for Christ and to kind of apply what is being said to the heart. It's just, it's absolutely wonderful.

So in this video, I'm just going to give an overview of five of the things that I especially appreciated about Watson's treatment that I think are representative of his overall view and the overall contribution that I think is in a reformed or Calvinist view of spiritual presence. So I'm going to cover the centrality, mysteriousness, realism, conditions, and value of the Lord's Supper in Watson's account. I'll say those again as we go. So if you missed them, that's fine. First, the centrality of the Lord's Supper.

So Watson follows pretty typical reformed language for the sacraments. He calls them a sign and a seal. He calls them visible sermons. This is very, very typical reformed approach where he'll. You know, the idea is these are visible sermons. You've got word and sacrament. The word is for the ear. The sacrament is for the eye. The audible and the visual. And typically people will think of Protestants, especially in the reform stream, as prioritizing word over sacrament, or at least centralizing the word. The preaching of God's word is in the center. Even Francis Chan's video that I responded to, Francis Chan's video, was talking about how he said something to this effect that for 1,500 years at the center of Christian worship was the Lord's Supper, the bread and the wine, and then Protestants came along and replaced that with a pulpit. And I spoke, I said several things about that

in that video. Just the one thing to observe right here is that Protestants maintained the centrality of the Lord's Supper. And Watson, for example, In pages one and two of the book, he's belaboring this point that the sacrament is superior to the word. And he means something very definite by that. Let me just read this quote as an example. He says, a sacrament is a visible sermon. And herein the sacrament excels the word preached.

The word is a trumpet to proclaim Christ. The sacrament is a glass to represent him. And he goes on and on for some time, basically saying, the word brings us to Christ. Christ, but the sacrament builds us up in Christ, and he stacks up all these various metaphors for that. Now, this could be understood. He's not trying to downplay the importance of God's word, but he's basically saying the word goes so far, but there are various senses in which the sacrament goes even farther, because in the sacrament, God condescends to our weakness. It's like he's saying, you know, it brings the gospel from an idea in our ears to this sort of visible enactment.

right in front of our eyes. And he concludes this section on page two of the book saying, so when we see Christ broken in the bread and, as it were, crucified before us, this does more affect our hearts than the bare preaching of the cross. So it's false to think that Protestants elevate the word over the sacrament or something like that. For most of the historic Protestant traditions, the Lord's Supper remained, kind of the central liturgical act of a Christian worship gathering. And if there's an argument for weekly communion, I think this is it, actually, just the centrality of the Lord's Supper for worship.

And it's kind of historically ironic that today Protestants are thought of as downplaying the Lord's Supper because one of the aims of the Reformation was to restore the Lord's supper to the laity. And in other videos, I've gone on about that and talked about how the laity were being deprived of the sacrament, both in terms of frequency and in terms of getting both bread and wine. So those were hallmark Protestant emphases. Here's the second thing I learned from Watson that I found so noteworthy and so interesting. And again, kind of representative of a reformed account is the mysteriousness of the Lord's

supper. So in the book, you get this sense of the sort of reverence and solemnity with which Watson thinks about the Lord's Supper. and he has a view of it as kind of this mystical, special arena in which we commune with Jesus Christ in a very special way. He starts off the whole book with a preface to the reader in the first sentence of the whole book and the preface says, when I contemplate the holiness and solemnity of the blessed sacrament, I cannot but have

some ache upon my spirit and think myself bound to hold this mystery in the highest veneration. And he goes on to say that the bread and the wine are ordinary bread and wine, but he says, in them lie hid divine excellencies. It's absolutely fascinating. The only reference in the entire book to Eastern Orthodoxy is a positive, appreciative reference to the Greek word Mysterioan as used for the sacraments, because he agrees the sacraments are mysterious. He's basically saying something mystical is going on here. We do not fully understand how we are engaging with Christ in this blessed event. It's amazing.

And the way he sums it up several times, which I find helpful as a kind of practical, this is how I communicate about it when we're observing the Lord's Supper at our church. I try to use language like this. And this is the way he sums it up. To put it, you know, sometimes people joke around that the Sunday school answer is always Jesus. You know, if we were to say what ultimately is happening on a reformed view or Calvinist view of spiritual presence, which I'll say more about the mechanics of that next. But what ultimately, how do you sum it up?

You know, what's basically going on? The most basic way to put it, and the way he puts it several times throughout the book is, we get Jesus. That's, you know, or to say, we receive Christ in his saving. benefits in the gospel afresh. We spiritually feast upon Christ. We are spiritually nourished by Christ. We feed upon and drink Christ. We appropriate Christ afresh. At one point, he says, in the Blessed Supper, Christ gives himself to believers. What more can he give? The idea is that in the Lord's Supper, we are receiving Jesus Christ in the gospel himself. It's like as personal as you can

imagine. Well, that leads to the third question of real presence. So Watson affirms real presence. In fact, the whole book is cast as a middle alternative between transubstantiation on the one hand and memorialism on the other. And this is helpful because often today we think in terms of just these two views, either a high view or a low view. But he casts it in the middle. So he gives the standard reformed objections to transubstantiation, the Roman Catholic view, he quoting Theodore Beza and Peter Martyr Vermeigley and these other reformed stalwarts who spent so much time addressing this as a philosophical overreach, you know, tightening the screws philosophically too much, as carnal rather than spiritual. He talks about how it produces an idolatry of the bread and other

concerns like that. But then, after opposing transubstantiation, he opposes with equal or close to equal passion a merely memorialist view. Let me read how he puts this. It's a fascinating, a little longer quote, but I think it'll be of interest for me to reproduce here. He says, the doctrine of the sacrament confutes, such as look upon the Lord's Supper only as an empty figure or shadow resembling Christ's death, but having no intrinsic efficacy in it. Surely, this glorious ordinance is more than an effigy or representative of Christ. Why is the Lord's Supper called the communion of the body of Christ, 1st Corinthians 1016, but because, in the right celebration of it, we have sweet communion with Christ.

In this gospel ordinance, Christ not only shows forth his beauty, but sends forth his virtue. The sacrament is not only a picture drawn, but a breast drawn. It gives us a taste of Christ as well as a sight, 1 Peter 2, 3, such as make the sacrament only a representative of Christ fall short of the mystery and come short of the comfort. The language there of its intrinsic efficacy, the idea of Christ not merely showing his beauty but sending his virtue. There's several other little clauses there. I won't try to recall them all, but they all highlight that. this high view of the sacrament as a means of grace, this powerful context in which we truly encounter Jesus Christ in the gospel. And his final sentence there, you know, he's saying

with that language of aiming short of the mystery, what he's saying is there's more going on in the Lord's Supper. And if we only think of it as our subjective act of remembrance, just a representative of Christ, not actually an encounter of feasting on Christ. We fall short of the full comfort that we are designed to receive from it. It's very interesting. So this is, you know, sometimes people call the Reformed View spiritual presence. And sometimes people see this as less rigorous than other forms of real presence, like a Lutheran or Catholic or some of the other Eastern tradition, some of those views. I don't think that's actually fair. I think the difference between a reformed view and these other traditions are the mechanics of how it is happening.

But for the reformed view, we are truly, albeit spiritually rather than carnally, feasting on Christ. The difference is not the fact of Christ's presence, but the mode of Christ's presence. So the reformed view is going to emphasize the agency of the Holy Spirit in particular, and that Christ's body remains local in heaven. He's not brought down to us, but we are brought up to him by the spirit. And there's other various nuances where a reformed view will be different. The phrase that helps me the most is what I get from Calvin, spiritual feasting. That's what it is. So it's not a, it's not the physical act of eating. It's It's a spiritual feasting.

And maybe I'll say more about that sometime, but let me press on here. The fourth thing I really appreciated and observed and found noteworthy about Watson's treatment is the conditions of receiving the Lord's supper. He really stresses the necessity of self-examination and faith for a worthy reception of the supper. So this means this is not a mechanical transaction. the benefits of the Lord's supper, this spiritual feasting, this sort of covenantal, you know, this encounter with Christ that we put into marital imagery. All of that is entirely dependent upon faith.

So this follows Calvin's claim that unbelievers do not receive Christ in the supper. Faith is a necessary condition for this transaction to occur. Here's how Watson puts it, such as come faithless, go away, fruitless. Nor is it enough to have the habit of faith, but we must exert and put forth the vigorous actings of faith in this ordinance. Set faith to work in the sacrament. It's like the idea is every time you come, you must place faith again upon Christ. He also talks about, it's not just faith, it's also, so self-examination, he's got a lot in here. One of the other emphasis is that the Lord's Supper is a communal activity, so love for other Christians is a necessary ingredient as well. He says at one point,

though we must come with bitter tears, yet not with bitter hearts. He who comes to the Lord's table in hatred is a Judas to Christ and a cane to his brother. What benefit can he receive from the sacrament whose heart is envenomed with malice? So the Lord's Supper has this horizontal dimension to it as well as the vertical. There's so much going on in his, The spiritual dynamics of what is actually transpiring during the Lord's Supper, it's very rich. He talks about it also as a foretaste of heaven, for example. So when Jesus speaks of, I will not eat of it again until I do so in the kingdom of God and drink of the vine, he talks about the Lord's Supper is both backward and forward-looking.

It's remembering what Christ did in his passion, but it's also anticipating our fuller communion with him in heaven. he talks about it as a feast of dedication. He's got a whole section on how we sort of re-consecrate ourselves to God in the Lord's Supper. It's really fascinating. It's very rich. But let me mention the final thing. This is the one I might get emotional talking about because it's so wonderful.

For all of his emphasis upon warning, self-examination, caution, you know, coming with fear and trembling before God when we partake of the sacrament, he also emphasizes that you should come. See, you might get the sense of, wow, he's really, you know, playing up the solemnity of this. Maybe we should stay away. But that is not the upshot. He says, no, we need this. We should come to the sacrament. So he has a whole chapter of facing objections, and he addresses this objection.

And he says, our sins should humble us, but they must not discourage us from Christ. the more diseased we are, the rather we should step into this pool of Siloam. And then he addresses the objection of, but what if I've sinned presumptuously? What if I've committed high-handed sins? And he's saying no. And the reasoning is like, the more sick you are, the more you need the doctor. You know, come to the table. Come with a penitent heart, with a believing heart, but come to the table.

bring all your sins. And you get this sense of just the sheer mercy of Christ that is available to us through this avenue as through so many others. And I just love that. I find that so meaningful. So I'll close with this story that I shared with my congregation a few weeks ago when I preached on the Lord's Supper. I did a two-week series on the sacraments. And it's of a Scottish minister who was administering the Lord's Supper. There's a woman who passes by the cup and does not partake. and he knows that she struggles with a lack of assurance. And he engages her and asks about it. And she says, why are you abstaining?

And she says, I am a great sinner. And he said, take the cup, ma'am. It is for sinners. And I love that. It's such a wonderful kind of encapsulation of this kind of final upshot of the, of Watson's treatment. of, you know, for all the sacredness of this, it's not something to stay away from. Come eagerly to partake.

So let me leave you with this last quote as he's kind of summing that up and talking about the comforts we receive in the Lord's Supper. He says, so when the devil shall accuse us, let us show him the cross of Christ. When he brings his pencil and goes to draw our sins in all their colors, let us bring the sponge of Christ's blood, and that will wipe them out again, All bonds are canceled. Whatsoever the law has charged upon us is discharged. The debt book is crossed with the blood of the lamb.

And I love the note of hope that the book ends on in this way. So I hope you find that useful and sort of nourishing as I did. Whatever perspective you have on the Lord's Supper, hopefully that's good, at least for just educational purposes of understanding what this view of spiritual presence is. and hopefully those of us who are in the Protestant tradition will engage our own tradition more and learn more of what these views that are a part of our heritage are.

And I would encourage you to buy Watson's book. It's cheap, it's a quick read, but it's really worth it. It's a rich read as well. So that's it. Thanks for watching. Let me know what you think in the comments. I'm curious if people would find value in doing further work in this area. I'd be happy to do that.

Thanks again. God bless.