An Open Table: A Conservative Evangelical View

By Robin G. Jordan

Liberals in the Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church argue that the Holy Communion should be open to all. No one should be refused communion. Everyone should be welcomed to the Lord’s Table. They maintain that the practice of restricting admission to the Holy Communion to baptized Christians is not only exclusionary but also it is inconstant with Jesus’ own practice of seemingly indiscriminant table fellowship. They cite a number of New Testament passages that they claim support their view—Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand (John 6:5-14), his staying with Zacchaeus (Luke 19:10), his eating with all kinds of people--tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 9:10-13), Pharisees (Luke 7:36; Luke 14:1), and a leper (Mark 14:3) and his reputation as a glutton and winebibber (Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:34).

But do these passages support open communion as they claim. John’s account of the feeding of the five thousand is one of those New Testament passages into which all kinds of meanings have been read that cannot be read out of the passage. In the passage Jesus performs a miracle that serves as the introduction to his “I am the Bread of Life” discourse. It is a long stretch of the imagination from Jesus miraculously feeding the multitude on a Gallilean hillside to Jesus miraculously feeding all communicants in the Eucharist. The passage will not bear the weight of that interpretation. Jesus performed a number of miracles. They point to who he is, as does this miracle, as the “I am the Bread of Life” discourse makes clear.

Jesus spent the night in Zacchaeus’ house and presumably ate one or more meals with him. He ate with all kinds of social outcasts. He did not avoid them as the Pharisees expected him to do. He also ate with the Pharisees. His detractors would call him “a glutton and a winebibber.” When the Pharisees questioned his eating with social outcasts, his response was that he had come to seek and save the lost. They needed him, not the righteous.

In the Mid-East in that time eating with a person showed acceptance of the person, as it does to this day. What proponents of open communion do is focus on this fact. They ignore what Jesus says at these meals and elsewhere about repentance and faith and his own death. If any underlying principle may be gleaned from these passages is that we should emulate Jesus and not shun the unchurched and spiritually-disconnected but seek to be the instruments through God leads them to himself and to salvation.

In all these passages Jesus is accepting the hospitality of others, he is not extending hospitality to them. He is eating at their table. He is not inviting them to eat at his table. Indeed the New Testament tells us that Jesus had no place to lay his head (Matthew 8:20; Luke 9:58).

The proponent of open communion fail to give proper attention to the four New Testament accounts of the Jesus’ institution of the Lord’s Supper at the Last Supper—Matthew 26:17-30, Mark 14:12-26, Luke 22:7-39, and 1 Corinthians 11:20-34. In the accounts of the Last Supper in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke Jesus sends his disciples to make preparations for a Passover meal that he wishes to eat with them. Those who are present at the Last Supper are his closest disciples, including Judas who would betray him. They, with the exception of Judas, represent the nucleus of the embryonic Church.

The words that Jesus spoke to them when he instituted what Paul in 1 Corinthians calls “the Lord’s Supper,” he spoke to the Church in every place and in every age. He did not speak them to the multitude but to the twelve. This is how the New Testament church understood them as Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians attests. This is how the Church in the first five centuries of Christianity understood them, as the writings of the early Church Fathers bear witness. This is how the Church has understood them for the past two thousand years.

The Lord’s Supper is the Church’s meal by which the Church remembers and proclaims Christ’s atoning death. While Christians of different ecclesiastical traditions may disagree on what else the Lord’s Supper is and how the Lord is present at his Supper, most agree that the Lord’s Supper is a meal of remembrance and proclamation of Christ’s death upon the cross in atonement for our sins.

What the proponents of open communion are proposing is an innovation, not only in practice but also in doctrine. They seek to transform the Lord’s Supper from a meal of remembrance and proclamation to a meal of welcome. But this is not the purpose for which Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper. He said, “Do this in remembrance of me.” He did not say, “Do this to show people they are welcome.”

Today’s proponents of open communion are not the first to promote an open table. The liberal wing of the Congregationalist Church opened the Lord’s Supper to those who were not baptized. But this practice differed in two important respects from the practice that the proponents of open communion in the Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church are championing. The Congregationalist Church’s liberal wing did insist that those receiving communion should be followers of Jesus, as they understood him. They simply dispensed with the requirement of baptism as a pre-requisite for admission to the Lord’s Supper. The Congregationalist Church’s liberal wing also did not reinterpret the Lord’s Supper as a meal of welcome. Rather it left to the individual Jesus-follower to interpret the Lord’s Supper for himself.

What today’s proponents of open communion are proposing is a radical change in how the Church understands and celebrates the Lord’s Supper. Gone would be the meal of remembrance and proclamation of his own atoning death that Jesus himself instituted. In its place would be substituted a welcome meal that liberal Anglicans and Episcopalians instituted, a meal that proclaims their own message of radical inclusion, religious pluralism, syncretism, and universalism. They would replace visual proclamation of the New Testament gospel with an experiential proclamation of “a different gospel.”

If the Anglican Church of Canada leads the way in adopting open communion and The Episcopal Church follows suit, the two churches will have taken another major step away from authentic Christianity into what the nineteenth century Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson described as “liberal religion.” Emerson was one of its early pioneers.

One of the arguments that the proponents of open communion make in support of opening the Holy Communion to everybody, the unbaptized and the unbelieving along with the baptized and the believing, is that excluding any group from communion conveys the message to them that they are not welcome. This is basically the same argument that was made to admit young children to the Holy Communion before they evidenced repentance from sin, faith and Jesus Christ, love and charity with their neighbors, and the intention to lead a new life, the essential requirements for admission to the Holy Communion that are set forth the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, in the First Exhortation, the Invitation to Confession, and in the Catechism.

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer forms along with the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 and the Ordinal of 1661 the recognized doctrinal standard of historic Anglicanism. Article XXIX maintains that wicked persons and all in whom a vital faith is absent receive no benefit from receiving communion. Rather they eat and drink to their own condemnation. For these reasons children were not admitted to the Holy Communion until they were confirmed or ready and desirous to be confirmed. It was charitably presupposed at this stage they had come to repentance and faith.

Once young children were admitted to the Holy Communion solely on the basis of their baptism and not on their evidence of repentance and faith and the other requirements of the 1662 Prayer Book, the admission of unbaptized adults was the logical next step. If these requirements were not demanded of children, why should they be demanded of adults? If children in whom a vital faith is absent benefited from receiving the communion, why would unbelieving adults not benefit? Without realizing it, those who championed communion for young children prepared the way for those are championing open communion. The seed was sown. It has now germinated and is growing into a mature plant.

But baptized children are members of the Church, the reader may object. Historic Anglicanism, however, has insisted that only those who receive baptism rightly are grafted into the Church (Article XXVII). To receive baptism rightly they must forsake sin and steadfastly believe the promises made to them in baptism. Until a child has come to repentance and faith, he has not received baptism rightly. He has not performed the promises that his godparents made on his behalf at his baptism.

Historic Anglicanism rejects the notion that the efficacy of the sacraments is automatic—ex opere operato. The external sign by itself is powerless to produce any spiritual effect. A child when he grows to the age of responsibility may repudiate the reality to which it points. Until a child embraces that reality, he is not ready for admission to the Holy Communion.

Proponents of children’s communion misinterpreted the requirements of historic Anglicanism for admission to the Holy Communion to mean that a child must have an intellectual grasp of the meaning of the Holy Communion. The Holy Communion was a mystery, they argued. What adult full grasped its meaning. Small children could come to understand the meaning of the Holy Communion through experiencing it. They should not remember a time when they did not receive communion.

Parents were assured that even though a vital faith was absent in their child, receiving communion would not be to their child’s condemnation. Jesus blessed the little children. Through the process of receiving communion every week a child’s natural trust in his parents would be transformed into faith in Jesus Christ. Their child was a member of God’s family. He was baptized.

In other words, a sacrament automatically and unfailingly effects what it signifies. It works ex opere operato. The child had been automatically grafted into the Church. Jesus would be automatically present to the child under the forms of bread and wine. Jesus welcomes children and does not turn them away.

Let me repeat what I just wrote. Jesus welcomes children and does not turn them away. It is a hop, a skip, and a jump of small child from Jesus welcomes children and does not turn them away to Jesus welcomes all people and does not turn them away.

The notion that the sacrament of baptism works ex opere operato is behind the liberal notion that baptism qualifies the baptized to receive all the sacraments of the church, including matrimony and ordination. Historic Anglicanism does not view matrimony and ordination as sacraments but Anglo-Catholicism and Roman Catholicism do. Just as repentance and faith were dropped from the equation for children’s communion, repentance and faith is dropped from the equation in case of matrimony and ordination.

A couple need not even be a man and woman to marry and a candidate for ordination may, from the perspective of the 1662 Prayer Book, be “an open and notorious evil liver.” They are baptized. They are members of God’s family. They are entitled to receive all the sacraments.

Liberalism has become joined to unreformed Catholicism and then radicalized. What we are seeing are the consequences of this development working themselves out.

If the problem were simply one of making unbaptized people feel welcome, the solution would be to offer more non-Eucharistic services such as the Service of the Word that the Church of England and the Church of Ireland have developed for use when the congregation included large numbers of unbaptized people. The Anglican Church of Canada’s services of Morning and Evening Prayer in the 1985 Book of Alternative Services can much more easily adapted to this use than those in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

However, the proponents of open communion do not want to dispense with the Eucharist as the central act of worship on Sunday morning. It lends itself to a High Church style of worship that provides a spiritual experience that is missing from liberal religion. This is one of the reasons that liberals are attracted to the religious and spiritual practices of other faiths. They provide spiritual experiences in which liberal religion is lacking. Non-Eucharistic services focus on the Word of God and liberals have for a large part written off the Bible.

When we compare liberal ideas about open communion with liberal thinking on baptism, marriage, and ordination, the guiding principle is clearly evident—radical inclusion. The problem is not that Canadian Anglican churches are not welcoming but they are not welcoming as seen through the eyes of the proponents of radical inclusion. Radical inclusion’s proponents would not only open marriage and ordination to everybody but also the Holy Communion. It is the logical outworking of their guiding principle, the principle that they have made an idol in place of God and that they worship in his stead.

In the early Church inquirers preparing to receive the sacrament of baptism were dismissed before the Holy Communion. In the post-Reformation Church of England until the nineteenth century the sacrament of the Holy Communion was not administered in parish churches every Sunday. On Communion Sundays non-communicating parishioners departed from the parish church after the Prayer for the whole state of Christ’s Church militant here in earth.

The pastor of church with which I am presently sojourning explains to those present at worship gatherings on Communion Sundays that the Lord’s Supper is for those who have accepted Jesus as their Savior and Lord. The first service has an average Sunday attendance of 60+ and the second service an ASA of 200+. To my knowledge no one has felt unwelcome because of this requirement.

The area in which I am living has a number of growing churches that admit only believers to the Holy Communion. This practice is not affecting their average Sunday attendance. On the contrary, they are growing in part because they do maintain New Testament standards.

Declining church attendance provides a convenient problem onto which the proponents of radical inclusion can latch to further promote their agenda. It is one that they have been using in both Canada and the United States, maintaining a more inclusive church was the best response to poor church attendance. However, the improvement of church attendance is not their goal. A radically inclusive church is their objective.

The main reason that Canadians are not attending Anglican churches is that they have no use for organized religion in their lives. What passes for the Christian faith in most Anglican churches is so diluted and insipid, Canadians see more benefit in going to a restaurant and having a good meal or going to a club and having a few rounds of drinks. Open communion is not going to arrest the decline of the Anglican Church of Canada. In all likelihood an open table will hasten its demise.