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09/03/2018 Part I: Facing the Early Church Fathers, A Baptist Minister’s Journey to the Holy Eucharist (Part 1)

Kenneth Hensley
https://chnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/1809nwslttr_email.pdf

For years, as a Protestant pastor, I believed that what Catholics refer to as the "Holy Eucharist" was a simple meal of remembrance and recommitment and proclamation . . . and nothing more.

I don’t mean to say that it wasn’t important, or meaningful, because it was. I use the words “nothing more” only to emphasize that as an Evangelical.

I did not believe that a miracle of any sort was taking place in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, where bread and wine were becoming (in any sense) the Body and Blood of Christ.

Jesus had said,
“Do this in remembrance of me”
Luke 22:19

St. Paul had written,
“For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes"
1 Cor 11:26

In the thinking of essentially every Christian I knew, the Lord’s Supper was a time for calling to mind what Our Lord had suffered for us, giving thanks, recommitting our lives to Him and, by the use of bread and wine, proclaiming the Lord's death until He comes again.

Of course we believed Jesus was “with us” in the breaking of the bread . . . but not in any sense substantially different than He is with us all the time.

The bread and wine were mere symbols, the bread “depicting" Christ's broken Body, the cup His shed Blood.

Now, certain implications followed from this view. One of them (obviously) was that I didn’t believe a priest was needed to celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

I didn’t believe any ordained minister was needed.

There was no reason this simple, symbolic meal of remembrance could not be celebrated anytime, anywhere, and by any gathering of believers.

It was fairly common in the evangelical circles I was familiar with for young adults and even teenagers to celebrate the Lord’s Supper at youth camps and retreats, using whatever elements they had available . . . even potato chips and Coca Cola if nothing else could be found.


Calvin’s Conception


At some point along the way, John Calvin tossed a wrench into the machinery of my thinking about this issue.

I became intrigued with the idea that the Lord's Supper might be what Calvin referred to as a "means of grace.”

Calvin believed that in the Lord's Supper, Christ is not merely remembered and proclaimed, but rather is present in a special “spiritual” sense and that He gives Himself to us as "spiritual food" in communion.

He spoke of Christians in communion as “feasting” upon Christ our Passover Lamb, as “partaking” of Him.

Now, Christ is the only food of our soul, and therefore our heavenly Father invites us to Christ, that, refreshed by partaking of him, we may repeatedly gather strength until we shall have reached heavenly immortality
Institutes of the Christian Religion.
Book IV, Chapter XVII.1

Of course he was eager to emphasize that this was a spiritual feasting and not anything like what Catholics believe.

At any rate, I was intrigued by this idea.

I knew there were a number of New Testament passages that could be read as at least hinting at the notion that something more than mere remembering and proclaiming might be going on in the Lord’s Supper (passages we’ll be coming back to later in this short series).

And so I suspected Calvin might be right.

At the same time, I didn't think his view could be established with certainty from the data of the New Testament alone.

Attempting to lead my congregation, but without clear conviction, I began to approach the Lord's Table more seriously . . . just in case Calvin was right! (It sounds lame, I know!)

I taught my people that the Lord's Supper may be more than remembering and proclaiming, that in communion we may be partaking of Christ spiritually, that a miracle of some sort may be taking place.

And that the Lord’s Supper may be a special means of receiving God’s grace.

I advocated making the Lord's Supper a regular part of our Sunday worship rather than celebrating it once a month, as had been our previous practice.

Most everyone seemed to like the change. Reverence for the Lord’s Supper increased as it came to be seen as being equal to the Sunday sermon in importance.


The Early Church Fathers:


And then, another wrench was tossed into the works.

I learned that an old friend from seminary days had gone over to the dark side and become, Catholic.

I listened to his conversion story and still remember wincing when I heard him speak of receiving Christ in the Eucharist, "Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.”

The idea was so entirely foreign to me.

It was foreign to the evangelical world in which I had learned the faith and in which I lived and ministered.

But it was not foreign to nearly a billion Christians from the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions.

In fact, my old friend claimed that this doctrine of the “Real Presence” of Christ in the Eucharist had been the faith of the Church from the beginning.


So, I began for the first time in my Christian life to read the early Church Fathers and really listen to what they had to say.

I had been tossing back and forth the question of whether the Baptist view of the Lord’s Supper or the Calvinist view was correct.

Now I was being told that neither was the historic view of Christians.

I wanted to know if this was true.

What did Christians in the earliest centuries after the Apostles believe about the Lord’s Supper?

Was there a common belief and, if so, what was it?


Atheists, Libertines, and Cannibals


I discovered that in the early centuries of the Church, Christians were accused of many things.

a. They were accused of being “atheists” because they rejected the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheons.

b. Because Christians “loved one another" and were known to “greet one another with a 'holy kiss'” they were accused of engaging in sexual orgies.

c. A third accusation hurled against the early Christians was that they practiced cannibalism.

After all, it was known that in their clandestine meetings the Christians gathered behind closed doors to celebrate a secret meal during which they would actually eat the flesh and drink of the blood of a human being.

(End Part 1)

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09/03/2018 Part I: Facing the Early Church Fathers, A Baptist Minister’s Journey to the Holy Eucharist (Part 2)

Kenneth Hensley
https://chnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/1809nwslttr_email.pdf


In AD 170 the Christian apologist Athenagoras wrote a book titled, "A Plea for the Christians" in which he sought to answer these charges.

He notes that the pagans were accusing Christians of celebrating "Thyestian feasts."

The term comes from Greek mythology and the story of Atreus, who, motivated by revenge, kills the children of his brother Thyestes and serves them to him for dinner.

I must admit that once I began to read the early Church Fathers and witness the kind of language they regularly used to describe what they referred to as the Eucharist (meaning “thanksgiving”).

I could understand why such mistaken ideas might have arisen in the minds of non-believers at the time.

For instance, I read the letters of St. Ignatius, bishop of the church in Antioch.

Around AD 107-110, Ignatius was condemned to die in the arena in Rome, fed alive to wild beasts.

On his way to Rome, he wrote letters to seven churches scattered throughout modern-day Turkey.

In his letter to the Church in Smyrna (6-7), he mentions certain heretics, who he clearly conceives as being outside the fellowship of the Church.

Here’s how he describes them:

They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which was offered for our sins and which the Father, in His goodness, raised up again.

They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes.

In the same letter, St. Ignatius refers to the Eucharist as "the medicine of immortality."

The “flesh of our Savior"?
The "medicine of immortality”?

This was language I would never have thought to use to describe the Lord’s Supper."

But this was just one of the Fathers.

I read on and came to St. Justin Martyr, the first of the great defenders of the Catholic Faith.

Around ad 150, he also described the Eucharist:

For not as common bread or common drink do we receive these;

But since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food that has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by him,

And by the change of which our blood and flesh is nurtured, is both the flesh and blood of that incarnated Jesus.
First Apology, 66

]
Again, I had to stop and think.

Food that is made into the Eucharist ? What’s that all about ?

Food that is made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nurtured ?

What?
A prayer that “changes” bread and wine and “makes” it into the Eucharist?

Never had I heard an evangelical pastor speak like this of the Lord’s Supper.

This saint and martyr sounded like a Catholic.

I read on and came to St. Irenaeus, bishop of the church in Lyon.

Writing around AD 180, he described the Eucharist in similar terms:

Just as the bread from the earth, receiving the invocation of God, is no longer common bread but the Eucharist consisting of two things, the earthly and the heavenly, so our bodies.

Receiving the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible but have the hope of resurrection to eternal life.
Against Heresies, IV. 18

Okay, I thought, so Irenaeus sounds Catholic, too!

a. St. Ignatius sounds Catholic.
b. St. Justin Martyr sounds Catholic.
c. St. Irenaeus sounds Catholic.

Here are three of the most important Christian leaders and teachers of the second century, and they all sound Catholic !

I read on and came to Tertullian.

Writing around AD 210, he explains even as in Baptism our souls are actually and truly washed clean.

Even as in Confirmation our souls are actually and truly illuminated by the Holy Spirit, so in the Eucharist.

He writes:
“The flesh feeds on the body and blood of Christ that the soul likewise may be filled with God.”
Resurrection of the Flesh, 8

I read on and came to Cyril of Jerusalem.

Around AD 350 he wrote in his Catechetical Lectures:

As the bread and the wine of the Eucharist before the invocation of the Trinity . . . are simply bread and wine, after the invocation the bread becomes the body of Christ, and the wine the blood of Christ.
19:7


Now, I could go on multiplying quotes from a number of other early Church Fathers.

What I found was that it wasn’t just some of them who used this kind of language when speaking of the Eucharist.

All of them did!

They all spoke as though a miracle was taking place in the Eucharist, that when the words of consecration were spoken over the bread and the wine.

These were changed into the Body and Blood of Christ and that this is what Christians receive when they receive Communion.

It seemed that in early centuries of Christian history there was no one who believed what I believed about the Lord’s Supper.


Here are the thoughts that went through my mind:


If the Apostles taught their churches that the Lord’s Supper was nothing more than a simple meal of remembrance and proclamation, how could these early Church Fathers have gotten so far off ?

And so quickly ?

And so universally ?

How?

a. St. Ignatius was a disciple of the beloved Apostle John !
b. St. Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp,
c. St. Polycarp who was himself a direct disciple of John!

How could this happen?


But What Does the Bible Teach?


I was eager to leap back into Scripture and re-read everything the New Testament had to say about the Lord’s Supper in light of what I had discovered in the Early Church Fathers.

Had these great saints and martyrs simply dreamed up the ideas expressed in their writings?

Had they misunderstood the teaching of the Apostles and turned what was meant to be merely symbolic into something Jesus and His disciples would have shuddered to imagine ?

If I could travel back in time to those early centuries of Church history.

Would I insist that the Evangelical Protestant view of the Lord’s Supper was correct.

And that Ignatius and Justin and Cyprian and Ambrose and Augustine and all the rest were, not to put too fine a point on it, out to lunch on the issue ?

My instinct as a Protestant was to respond:


“But all that really matters is what the Bible says about the Lord’s Supper!”

On the other hand, was it possible that there was more support for the teaching of the Fathers in the Bible than I knew ?

How certain was I that the doctrine of the Real Presence was unbiblical ?

This was a puzzle I had to solve.

I was sick of teaching my congregation “maybe this, maybe that !”

I wanted to know what I was to believe and to teach.

(End Part 2)

(Stay tuned for Part II.)