Recently, I (and my peers) have experienced a number of parishioners converting to Catholicism. As I’ve talked to these converts, they’ve consistently brought up the Lord’s Table. They find encouragement in identifying the bread and wine with Jesus’s body and blood. I’ve heard statements such as this:
Pastor George, I like the idea that Jesus was talking about the Lord’s supper when he said, “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (John 6:56). My faith just feels more real if I’m literally bringing Jesus into my body on a daily basis.
While this phenomenon seems to be happening with greater frequency, it’s not totally new. Years ago, I served alongside a man at an ordination service for another pastor in our city. I hadn’t met this man before; I only knew he had until recently been a professor at a Reformed and evangelical seminary. This man preached a solid message on Jesus’s call for ministers of the gospel, and I thanked him for it. Then, the next day, I saw him being interviewed on TV. I tuned in just as he explained,
I needed more realism than my tradition provided, so during lunch I would walk down to the local Roman Catholic parish and take the Eucharist. To unite literally with Jesus’s body and blood was more deeply satisfying to me than the “mystery of union with Christ” my church taught. So, I resigned my post at the seminary and went home to Rome.
I could relate other conversations with those who have left the Reformed faith and joined the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Anglo-Catholic traditions. A similar theme runs through them all: the desire for a more transformational, sensory reality than what the Reformed view of the Lord’s supper provides.
Is this critique valid? How would John Calvin respond to the critique that if you follow the Reformed view of the supper, you’re missing out on its power?
Transformed at the Table
Sometimes, in an effort to have biblically faithful theology, Reformed Christians speak only of what the communion elements are not. I’m painfully aware of my of shortcomings in this regard. This can inadvertently drive some believers to seek out a more “real” experience in other traditions. We can get caught up in debating the exact nature of the bread and wine and forget to ask the more pressing question: How should this meal change me today?
Let’s look back at Calvin’s teachings on communion. When we do, we’ll recover a renewed vision for the table, one that sees it as a divine encounter that motivates a transformed life of profound gratitude and obedience. In short, Calvin shows us that the Lord’s supper is fuel for spiritual growth, so we should come to the table expectantly every time.
In Calvin’s “Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper,” he writes that the supper fuels the believer’s spiritual growth in at least three ways.
1. The supper assures us of our inheritance in Christ.
Calvin teaches that Jesus uses his table to assure us of our inheritance. He doesn’t merely mean that the supper gives us a psychological boost. He means that assurance comes by means of a real union between Christ and the believer, and he means that our experience of this union is expedited by faithfully partaking in the covenant meal.
Calvin shows us that the Lord’s supper is fuel for spiritual growth, so we should come to the table expectantly every time.
In his commentary on Ephesians, Calvin writes, “Paul says that we are members of his [Christ’s] flesh and of his bones. Do we wonder then, that in the Lord’s Supper he holds out his body to be enjoyed by us, and to nourish us unto eternal life?” Calvin insists that by faith, Christians are made members of Jesus’s fleshly human body, so at communion, we experience all the benefits of spiritual union with him.
Christ took on flesh so that in his ascended state, he might be a channel of righteousness to the believer, pouring into him all that Christ’s human life accomplished. As a result of Jesus’s incarnation and death, God the Father established what Calvin calls a “holy brotherhood” between his Son and those united to his human flesh in salvation. What assurance!
2. The supper confirms and increases faith.
Calvin sees the supper as a public and dramatic statement that God has atoned for the sins of the elect. God gives us this dramatic reenactment because he loves us. He knows “our faith is slight and feeble” and “unless it be propped up on all sides and sustained by every means, it trembles, wavers, totters, and at last gives way.” The Lord’s supper is a God-ordained means of “propping up” our faith, not because the supper is necessary to confirm God’s Word but because it improves our faith.
In the supper, we experience a dramatic reenactment in which the ascended Christ, through his Holy Spirit, lifts our hearts to heaven. Christ does this for us, Calvin says, because regular communion with him strengthens us for the spiritual discouragements that inevitably come through besetting sin, temptation, and trials. Calvin views the sacraments as a means that cause Christ to “grow in us” so that our faith is fed more and more with Christ himself.
Christians may experience any number of trials throughout their weeks that cause Christ’s spiritual, unseen realities to feel less plausible and real. Yes, our weak faith “trembles, wavers, and totters.” But when we come to the table, Christ gives us a public, dramatic reenactment that confirms his reality to our consciences and increases our faith.
3. The supper motivates and enables obedient Christian living.
Calvin says, “There cannot be a spur which can pierce us more to the quick than when He makes us, so to speak, see with the eye, touch with the hand, and distinctly perceive the inestimable blessing of feeding on His own substance.” Thus, at the table, says Calvin, we’re compelled to a new obedience rooted in a grateful response to the blessings we receive there in Christ.
Calvin’s conviction that the Lord’s supper provides occasion for this grateful celebration and response led him to structure worship services with this emphasis. In Calvin’s order of worship, the whole service is one long expression of gratitude in which the worshiper brings every aspect of his sin-sickness to the Savior. It concludes at the table where believers gratefully witness the Lord’s healing of all diseases dramatized.
Calvin wouldn’t allow worshipers to enjoy this gratitude in private, because it’s a gift to share and a motivation that fuels outward and practical acts of “faith and charity” to others. This aspect of the supper that drives the worshiper closer to his brothers and sisters in Christ is the final distinctive of Calvin’s sacramental theology.
Living Out Our Union with Christ
As Christ, from love, pours out his life for the believer, the believer also pours out his life for others. So, each time you take the Lord’s supper by faith, you live out of your union with Christ, and he lives in and through you, making you new.
Each time you take the Lord’s supper by faith, you live out of your union with Christ, and he lives in and through you, making you new.
So, the next time you come to the Lord’s table, come expectantly. The living, risen Christ will use communion as fuel for your spiritual growth.
The Gospel Coalition