All right, we are back, our second installment
in our four week series called Mystery and Mercy.
And we're focusing in this series, not just on history,
but the history of the doctrine of the Eucharist,
the doctrine and the practice of the Lord's table.
Now, last week, no pun intended, we set the table
as we looked at the narrative of the upper room
in Matthew chapter 26, that amazing moment
when the Son of God sat down for a final Passover meal
with his closest friends and established communion
as a perpetual sacrament for the church.
Amazing moment in time, all four gospel writers
speak of the story, John gives a little bit different
spin on that day, but all four of them speak
of this important moment in the history of the church.
Let me just say for those of you who missed week one,
let me start by clarifying the meaning
of some difficult words that you might hear today
that might be a little bit unfamiliar to you.
Words like sacrament, I just used that word.
Also the word Eucharist, those were words
that were very familiar and used consistently
by both the early church fathers and the reformers.
So we're gonna talk about them in this series.
I hope you won't be triggered by them.
And if you need to know more about what those words
actually mean, go back and listen to last week's message.
That will help.
This morning, we're gonna dive into a whole bunch
of historical doctrine, which is appropriate
considering what today is.
This is the first time, and I don't know how long,
that we're actually celebrating Reformation Sunday
on the actual date that it belongs on, right?
So October 31st, 1517.
Not Halloween, Reformation Sunday, October 31st, 1517
was the date that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses
onto the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany.
Historians who have looked at this call this event,
this one day, and it's hard to even imagine
that a simple monk was doing something
that he would normally do to put some type
of academic discussion on the door of a church
that that one day would be called later on
the match that was struck that lit the whole world on fire.
And that's true.
Nobody but God could have foreseen what would happen
over the next 15 to 20 years after that historic day.
It quite literally transformed Europe and Christendom,
and 500 years later we are still feeling its effects.
Now obviously it wasn't just Luther, right?
It was God's sovereign hand behind all of it,
and actually as you guys know,
Luther wasn't the first one to really begin
to publicly call for reform in the church.
Over the years here at Oak Hill we have documented
the contributions of men who predated Luther,
who had so much courage in calling for reform of the church.
Men like Wycliffe and Huss, for example.
But we mark this particular date every year
for a very important reason because these reformers,
even the ones who predated Luther,
these reformers represent our spiritual heritage.
They're our spiritual heritage as modern day Protestants.
These were the guys who risked everything,
including their very lives,
to battle for the doctrines that we hold
as infinitely precious.
Doctrines that our faith is rooted in,
things like the authority of scripture,
and the justification by faith alone.
Biblical ecclesiology, proper worship in the church,
and our subject matter for this year's celebration
in 2021, the Eucharist.
The Eucharist was a central issue
for those who desired to see reform
come to the Catholic mass.
So, Reformation season is a time to look back
to see how God has been faithful,
how he has accomplished his will through these men,
these reformers, but listen, it's also a time for us
to take stock of where we are today as a church.
To put into practice one of the cries of the Reformation,
which was semper reformanda, which means always reforming.
We should be always reforming because we as Christians,
and we as the church are constantly prone to wander, aren't we?
To wander away from truth.
So it's good for us to slow down
and do some self-examination
and to ask really important questions.
What do we believe about communion?
What's going on there?
How does our view line up with the historic Christian faith?
Have we thought this over carefully
or have we found ourselves over the years
just going through the motions?
These are important questions to ask.
Now, as I did last week, I wanna challenge you guys
with some really tough issues today.
And by the way, even more are coming next Sunday.
This whole series is gonna be about challenging
your presuppositions and what you were taught
about communion or what you think you know about communion,
but to actually look at the biblical evidence
and the historical record.
So, here's the first thing I wanna challenge you
with this morning.
I wanna challenge your sense of mystery
in the Christian faith.
Does your faith allow for mystery?
Or will you only believe things
that you can thoroughly work out,
systematize in your head, in your intellect?
Is there room for mystery?
Second thing I wanna challenge you with
is your understanding of the physical
and the spiritual realms that the Bible describes for us
and over which God rules.
Are your beliefs and convictions driven
only by your five earthly senses?
Is that it?
Or do you take into consideration the spiritual world
that is just beyond you?
Now, as I shared last week, the word sacrament
is derived from the Greek word musterion,
which you'll find throughout the New Testament.
It's translated mystery, right?
In fact, 27 times you'll see the New Testament writers
use this word mystery.
I'll give you a couple of examples.
The mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.
The mystery of ages past.
The mystery of the gospel.
The mystery of Christ.
The mystery of the faith and so on.
This word is all over the place.
The fact is, there is so much about the Christian faith
that is just plain difficult to pin down
only using your intellectual senses.
There are what we might call metaphysical truths
found in the pages of the Bible
that sometimes make us step back
and sort of scratch our heads and wonder,
like, what exactly does that mean?
I'm having a hard time with just my brain
processing what that means.
And many of them have to do with this thin wall
that exists between the physical realm that we live in
and the spiritual realm beyond.
Keep in mind, you and I as beings created
in the image of God,
we are both physical and spiritual, aren't we?
We're made up of two parts, both body and soul,
united in a single person.
And our relationship to God is experienced
in both parts of that person.
Think about this, we love and we worship God
in our inner man, and at the same time,
we offer God our bodies as living sacrifices to him,
both physical and spiritual.
And that's a truth that allows us to better understand
and believe that God the Son,
the second person of the triune Godhead,
was actually truly made flesh.
He was actually incarnated, right?
Fully man with a true human nature.
Amazing truth, and that is a fundamental truth, right?
That really sets Christianity apart from every other
world religion, every other faith system,
is that we have an incarnated God.
Both the physical and the spiritual are essential
to our being and to our faith.
In fact, you could say that there is a physical side
to being spiritual.
We really can't bifurcate those two things.
We ought to be able to say that when we're found
to be in fellowship with God, our experience of him
is both spiritual and physical and real.
You can't really know God simply by reading a book
about him.
He wants to be encountered through the ways
that he has revealed himself to us.
It's not just intellect.
So, here's just a short list of things
that we read in scripture that I sort of want you
to just think about in wonder,
to sort of step back and be awed by this,
to see the wonder of your faith and to say,
wow, how have I understood those concepts before?
Just a short list.
First of all, as believers, we're not going to be
in a spiritual union with Christ.
Have you ever dwelt on that?
Just dwelt on it, like a spiritual union with Christ.
We speak of being found in Christ.
What does that actually mean, to be in him?
We're baptized into his death.
In fact, it says we're buried with him.
What does that mean?
Now we've been raised up with him to eternal life.
How are we supposed to grasp those types of truths,
metaphysically?
What does that mean?
Then there's this one, and Grant read it this morning
from our call to worship, Ephesians 2, 6.
God has raised us up with Christ
and seated us with him in heaven.
Now some of you may know this, those verbs,
raised up and seated us, are written
in what we call the heiress active form.
That means it's something that was completed in the past.
It's already done.
Can you explain that to me?
That in the past, we've been raised up with Christ
that in the past, it's already been done.
We have been raised up with Christ.
We are right now seated in the heavenly realms
along with our savior.
Who can understand that?
How do you understand life in the spirit?
How do you understand that?
Or even more challenging, how do we explain
the indwelling of the Holy Spirit?
I mean, do we look like indwelling in us?
Like is that a spatial thing?
He's somehow entered into what our mouths
and he's in there.
What does that exactly mean,
the indwelling of the spirit, right?
God in me?
It's not something we can see or hear or smell or touch.
He is with us spiritually.
We know that.
He's guiding our thoughts and transforming our affections.
But at the very same time, our bodies,
the physical part of us, are called temples
of the Holy Spirit.
And in fact, why we're told not to pollute our bodies
with sin because get this now,
we, our bodies, are members of Christ.
Members of Christ.
And a home for the Holy Spirit.
Think about all that.
What does that actually mean?
Both in the physical and the spiritual realm.
Theologians speak of something called co-inherence.
Jesus says this, the Father is in me
and I am in the Father.
And in fact, we know there are three individual,
what we call subsistences, who co-inhere with each other.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
all existing as one essence or substance.
Anybody get that figured out?
And what about this?
You and I are called to co-inhere with Jesus,
to abide in him.
In fact, he tells us this is truly possible.
He says, I'm the vine and you're the branches.
Abide in me and I in you.
When you step back and think about it,
this is wild stuff, isn't it?
And sometimes we read right past it.
And just nod, like okay.
But we really stop to think about
what are the practical implications
of these types of statements?
If you really wanna get big, I mean really big,
consider this passage in Hebrews 12,
which describes our physical and spiritual experience
under the new covenant.
Look at this passage.
You have come, perfect tense, past event.
You, believers, have come to Mount Zion
and to the city of the living God,
the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels,
to the general assembly and church of the firstborn
who were enrolled in heaven, and to God,
the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous
made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant,
and to the sprinkled blood.
That's pretty dramatic.
Are you aware that that's happened to you, believer?
Christian, are you aware that that's happened to you?
What if I told you the believers in the early church
saw this wall between the physical
and the spiritual realms as much thinner
than we do today?
Much thinner.
You and I struggle with this
because we are products of Western thought,
products of the enlightenment, right?
All of us.
We trust our senses, we trust our intellects,
so we tend to not even read our Bible
supernaturally sometimes.
Like I said, we'll read right over
some of this amazing language.
We don't walk through life with a sense of mystery
and wonder, and consequently, I am convinced
that we don't see God moving as much as we should
because our spiritual eyes aren't on.
The earliest Christians didn't suffer from this.
They believed, for example,
that when they stepped into the church,
and I'm not talking about a building
because the early Christians didn't have a lot of buildings.
When they stepped into the fellowship
among the people of God, they believed they were stepping
outside of earthly time and into what they called
the eternal present of the kingdom of heaven.
That's how much they prized the gathering of the saints.
They felt like they were walking into this eternal present.
They understood, as that passage in Hebrews 12 says,
that they were in some sense worshiping
on God's holy mountain together in the presence of angels.
They saw life as supernatural.
They read their Bibles supernaturally.
More importantly, they believed that they had entered
the very throne room of God as a body,
and they were ready to encounter him
in very powerful ways, both in prayer and in worship.
But not us, not necessarily us, as Westerners.
We drag ourselves into church whenever we can.
For the most part, we walk in without real reverence
or any mystical awe of what's happening around us.
That's just going back to this subject of evangelicalism.
We have made church so casual, everything is so casual,
that we don't have that reverence.
We don't have that sense of awe when we come together
as the body of Christ.
We're more like that cynical wilderness generation
when Moses came to them and said, by the way,
God says he is going to supernaturally feed you
with quail and with manna.
And they said, oh really?
They doubted and they grumbled, yeah,
like God's gonna come spread a banquet out here
in the middle of the wilderness.
I hope that's not us, that we would doubt
that supernatural power that God has to do
whatever he pleases.
Every ministry of the Word and sacrament
in the life of our church should be a time of wonder.
Let me say that again.
Every ministry of the Word and sacrament
in the life of Oak Hill Bible Church
should be a time of wonder.
We need to start thinking rightly about the fact
that Christ really is alive.
We say that, but he really is,
and he really is working all the time through his spirit
in supernatural ways to conform us to his image.
Again, we give lip service to that,
but do we live as if that's truly happening around us?
We should be anticipating even this morning
that he is going to faithfully feed his people,
that he's gonna faithfully strengthen our faith,
that he's gonna illuminate our minds
and transform our hearts as we sing to him,
as we worship with our body and our soul,
as we hear the word preached.
And when we as members come to his table,
to his supper, we should anticipate
that he is going to nourish us
through the body and blood of his son.
He will be nourished by it.
And that brings me back full circle,
back to this subject matter of the Eucharist.
What do you believe about the bread and the cup?
What do you believe about the mystery
of how the physical meets the spiritual
when we come to the table in communion?
It's called communion, right?
Communion with who?
With God, the physical meets the spiritual,
and we come and we meet him there, right?
As a body together as one family, we meet God there.
Do we anticipate that he is gonna do something,
or is it just check a box?
Here's some more metaphysical language about communion
that comes from Paul in 1 Corinthians 10.
He says that when we drink from the cup,
we are sharing in the blood of Christ.
We're participating.
We have koinonia, fellowship with the blood of Christ,
he says, and the bread too.
When we partake of the bread,
we share in the body of Christ.
So the physical eating and drinking
comes into contact with the spiritual partaking,
the spiritual sharing or fellowship.
What does all that mean?
How does that affect the way you see the Lord's table?
And of course, that language takes us back
to where we've just been recently in John chapter six.
Remember Jesus used this really hard language
that drove most of his followers away?
He said, the bread that I give
for the life of the world is my what?
It's my flesh, to have eternal life,
you must eat my flesh and drink my blood, he said.
For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.
Jesus' followers are like,
bro, do you have to talk like that?
I mean, do you have to keep talking like that
because you're driving everybody away?
We don't like that type of language, right?
Again, it's too hard to process
what's really happening when we hear that language.
Six months after he says that,
now he is up in that upper room
on the night that he's betrayed,
he looks at his friends and he says very clearly,
take and eat this, this bread is my body.
What does it mean?
Drink all of you for this, this wine in this cup
is my blood of the covenant.
What does it mean?
We're just gonna scratch the surface today.
Next week really is I think gonna be
really eye-opening for all of us.
What we wanna talk about today
as we sort of come out of what I just shared with you
is this idea of what theologians call
the presence of Christ in the elements.
How and to what extent is Jesus present
in the bread and the cup when we partake of communion
and when we share in his body and share in his blood?
How and to what extent is he present in that?
Now the average person, this is like who cares?
The average person is like this seems so insignificant.
Can I tell you for the church,
this is one of the most monumental things
that the church has dealt with over 2,000 years.
It has been an argument for 2,000 years now
and it's been raging even more since 500 years ago
when Luther pounded the 95 theses on the door.
So what I wanna talk about today
is the church's belief in the presence of Christ
in the Eucharist over time.
Now what I wanna do today is I'm gonna talk about
what the church has taught about the presence of Christ
in the Eucharist over time.
How has that doctrine evolved and changed
over the centuries?
And we're gonna look at the early church,
we'll look at Rome, and we'll just touch on the Reformers
at the end and we'll tee it up for next week, sound good?
Okay, quick caveat whenever we do,
look you guys know I'm about to nerd out.
You know me so well.
Whenever we do a historical survey,
I've gotta give this caveat.
It is helpful to study what men have said over the years.
But ultimately what is our authority for truth?
Only scripture.
So Rome has its tradition, Rome lifts up tradition
with scripture side by side.
We have our tradition as well.
Every time I quote Spurgeon, it's a form of tradition,
but it is not authoritative.
So just let's make sure we understand that.
Are you with me?
Good, all right, let's go back to our timeline
from next week, or from last week.
Next week, that's funny.
I will do it next week as well.
Again, this is super, super thin,
but just so you know the period that we're talking about,
that black section there, what we call the Dark Ages,
a thousand years of Roman Catholic domination,
we'll get to that period, but first we're gonna talk about
those first 400 years of what we call
the early church fathers.
Again, you can subdivide those 400 years into subcategories,
but we're gonna speak generally in terms
of the early church fathers.
These are the men who, why they're important
is they took the baton from the apostles, didn't they?
If you picture the development of doctrine as a race,
the apostles, the one who walked with Jesus,
saw him, talked to him, all that stuff,
they handed a baton to a generation of men
who were faithful with that, and they handed it off.
Eventually, that game of telephone,
it broke down, didn't it?
But these guys are really important for that reason.
One of the most fascinating witnesses to the early church
comes from the catacombs of Rome.
How many of you guys have been to Rome?
Have you seen the catacombs?
I hope so.
Archaeologists have discovered a number of murals,
or what they call frescoes, on the ceilings and walls
of these burial chambers underneath the city of Rome.
Burial chambers of many ancient Christians,
and they tell us something about how ancient Christians
lived and worshiped.
Here's an image of probably the most famous one
that has been discovered.
It had to be basically revealed by scraping off
layers of limestone and layers of historical dust
to get this beautiful fresco there,
and it depicts what we call an agape feast.
I talked about that last week, right?
This is an early sign.
This is dated to the early 100s.
Think about that.
This is right around the time of the death
of the apostle John.
So this doctrine about communion is being handed off here.
That's what we're seeing.
You've got this table, right?
Seven people at the table.
It appears there are six men and one woman,
and on the table you see a cup,
and you see two large plates.
One plate has five loaves of bread on it.
The other plate has two fish, right?
And that seems to be an obvious connection
to the multiplication miracles
that we see in the gospels there.
You see the one man, probably a church leader
on the far left.
He's got like a small loaf of bread in his hands.
Most people think he's breaking the loaf,
as Jesus did at the Lord's Supper,
and his arms are stretched out in front of him
to show that he's doing that,
and then near him you see a two-handled cup.
Like a sippy cup, right?
When I see it, the first thing I notice
is it looks like a sippy cup.
It's a two-handled cup.
Am I wrong?
Where's the lie, right?
But you also see there are these wicker baskets
on both sides of the table, right?
Showing the abundant resources of God.
This idea that even after Jesus multiplied the bread
and the fish, there was much left over, right?
So there's all kinds of imagery in this picture,
but you see people as early as 100, right there,
living out the doctrine of communion.
Now, let's talk about writings.
What are some of the earliest writings we have
that describe communion?
Well, we go back to a writing that's very early,
somewhere between the year 70 and 110.
That's incredibly early, right?
Because we're talking about just after the destruction
of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans,
up until, again, the period where John the Apostle
probably dies, and some of you guys are familiar
with this work.
It's known as the Didache, right?
Very early work.
Didache just means the teaching,
and what makes it special is it's basically a church manual.
I mean, how cool would it be,
I know that everybody who's an elder,
been a pastor, or been involved in church ministry,
to say, boy, if I could just have a church manual,
you know, from the period of the Apostles.
That would be amazing, tell us what to do.
That's sort of what the Didache is, okay?
It's a church manual.
Number two, it's referred to by a bunch
of really prominent early church fathers,
including Athanasius, my great hero of the early church.
Okay, so they talked about it, they all referenced it,
said that this writing existed,
that it was helpful and instructional for the early church.
The problem was, scholars had never been able
to find a copy of it.
Until 1873, when some monk in a monastery in Istanbul,
stumbled upon a copy of the Didache,
and we have a copy of it now.
Going back to that early period.
Now, internally, it claims to be a summary
of the teaching of the 12 Apostles.
That's what it says in the very first line of the document.
So once it got published, again, right around 1875,
the Didache was immediately recognized
as one of the most important manuscripts
of the early church, why?
Because it's so close to the apostolic period,
and secondly, because it was written at a time
before any vast Roman hierarchical structure
could be developed.
So it's very primitive in that sense.
So, for our purposes, what's cool about the Didache
is that it lays out instructions on how to observe communion.
I'll give you a few highlights.
Number one, it refers to it as the Thanksgiving meal.
So that is Eucharist, right?
That's exactly what the word means in Greek, Thanksgiving.
Second, the Didache lays out word for word
what the prayer should be over both the bread and the cup.
And those are words we plan to use
at our very next communion service,
just so that we can experience what they did back in that day.
Third, it also includes some warnings, including this.
Quote, let no one eat or drink
unless they've been baptized in the name of the Lord,
for the Lord has said about this,
do not give what is holy to the dogs.
Interesting.
Now, another early witness to the Eucharist was a bishop
by the name of Ignatius of Antioch.
He was also a contemporary of some of the apostles,
probably passed away somewhere around the year 110.
What is Ignatius most concerned about
when it comes to communion?
The very same thing that Paul is most concerned about
in 1 Corinthians 11.
Ignatius wants to talk about unity,
unity of the body.
In fact, here's a quote from one of his works.
He says, give heed to keep one Eucharist,
for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ
and one cup unto union with his blood.
There is one altar, as there is one bishop,
together with the elders and deacons, my fellow servants,
that whatsoever you do, you may do according to God.
He goes on, assemble yourselves together in common,
every one of you together, man by man, in grace,
in one faith and one Jesus Christ,
who after the flesh was of David's race,
who is son of man and son of God.
So tons of cool Christology in there,
but over and over again, one, one, one, one.
That's what the early church was most concerned about.
Then there was this godly man named Cyril
who became the bishop of Jerusalem in the year 350.
He leaves us with some really interesting details.
He speaks of exactly how a person
should come to receive the elements.
He literally describes how a person should clasp
his or her hands together so as to not let any part
of the bread slip from their hands.
He refers to every single crumb that he receives
as more precious than gold.
And then describes coming up to get the cup
and how he would bend low, quote,
in the way of worship and reverence
in order to receive the cup.
So here's the thing, when you read the early church
fathers on this stuff, what you see is that
they viewed communion with the highest level
of respect and awe you can imagine.
Very different from the way we tend to see it today.
Especially in the evangelical world,
where we have this open communion, very casual.
Hey, we'll just put the things out there,
do what you want, it's up to you,
it's your walk with Jesus, right?
No oversight, that is so common today.
But that is nothing, nothing like the way
the early church viewed communion.
Justin Martyr, one of the church's earliest evangelists,
the founder of a Christian school in Rome.
In the year 150 he wrote about both the liturgy
of the church and the Eucharist.
Here's what he says, Grant, this is for you.
The order of service in the year 150,
like what did his service look like?
Well, he lists it out, he says first of all,
they start with a prayer of intercession,
then scripture readings, then more prayer,
then the sermon, followed by what he calls a kiss of peace.
We're not doing that, right?
He's only laughing.
The kiss of peace, right?
Don't know what it means.
Then a Eucharistic prayer and a congregational amen.
Guess what, that's not only biblical,
but it's also from the early church, to shout amen, right?
A congregational amen, and then the distribution
of the elements by way of the deacons of the church,
and then after observing the Lord's Supper,
the church would take up an offering,
and that offering was taken up so that they could go
into the streets of Rome, where Justin was,
and be able to give money to the poor and evangelize.
That's a basic order of service in 150.
Now, particularly interesting,
look what he says about the Eucharist.
He says, and this food or this meal is called,
among us, Eucharistia, of which no one is allowed
to partake, but the man who believes
that the things that we teach are true,
and who has been washed with the washing,
that is for the remission of sins and unto regeneration,
and who is so living as Christ has enjoined,
for not as common bread and common drink
do we receive these.
So you see already by 150, we have restrictions here, right?
You've gotta be a believer, you've gotta be one
who understands the truth, who is living out that truth,
who's been baptized, and who is living a godly life.
Restrictions.
And then just after the time of Justin,
we see even more restrictions being laid out
on who could receive communion.
Never in any writings do we see that unbelievers
are ever, ever, ever invited to the Lord's table, ever.
And by the early 200s, you see the church requiring
a very rigorous process of learning for new converts
before they're allowed to come into the Lord's table.
So the elders of the church would guard the table.
They would say when you were ready,
when you have a full understanding of what's going on,
then you can come to the table.
So at a typical service, the catechumens, or the students,
and any visitors who were there that day
would be dismissed from the worship service,
and then the church family would huddle up together
as one body to observe the table.
That's typical in the early church's writings.
And also, once you became an affirmed member of the church
and approved for coming to the supper,
you had to remain a member in good standing
according to the elders, according to the bishops,
in order to continue to participate in the sacrament.
All this stuff dates back to the early church, folks.
Now, what do the early church fathers believe
about the presence of Christ in the elements?
That's the key question for this morning.
What did they teach about the presence
of Jesus in the bread and the cup?
Guess what?
The answer to that question has plagued the church
for thousands of years.
Here's the amazing thing.
Both Rome and the Protestants claim
the early church fathers support their position.
I mean, you can Google this Catholic quotes
of the early church fathers, and there they are.
And you can also go after Lutheran or Reformed
and say, what are the quotes of the early church fathers?
And there they are.
It's a mixed bag.
So you're gonna read, if you look this up,
some of these statements made by the early church fathers.
Listen, the Eucharist is the flesh
of our Savior Jesus Christ.
He has declared the cup a part of creation
to be his own blood.
These are individual quotes.
The flesh feeds on the body and blood of Christ
that the soul likewise may be filled with God.
Formerly there was manner for food.
Now, in full view, there is the true food,
the flesh of the word of God.
You know Rome loves those statements, right?
But the same guys also make these statements.
Here we go.
Having taken the bread and given it to his disciples,
Jesus made it his own body by saying, this is my body,
that is the symbol of my body.
The bread which Christ gave us to offer
in remembrance of the body which he assumed.
What he says is not fleshly but spiritual.
Heavenly eating from above and spiritual food given by him.
It is needful that this be visibly celebrated
yet it must be spiritually understood.
So here's the thing, in terms of development
of Eucharist doctrine in the first 400 years of the church,
two things stand out simultaneously.
Two things at the very same time.
First, there's always language consistent
with what Jesus actually said in the gospels.
He reminded his disciples that he took on real flesh
and real blood in the incarnation and that in some way,
in some way, he is present in the elements.
But we cannot ignore the fact that Jesus said,
this is my body, this is my blood.
In some form he is present.
What form?
That's what we gotta figure out.
But that is clear in all the early church writings.
At the same time, the early church fathers are clear
that partaking of the elements was a spiritual practice
done in remembrance of the passion of Christ.
What those two things meant when they get put together,
gets fleshed out over 2,000 years,
we're still arguing about it.
Still.
Now, let's look briefly at how Rome
perverted this whole mess, okay?
The development of the Roman Catholic hierarchy
in the medieval period altered the church's view
of communion in terrible, terrible ways.
Again, we're talking about developments that take place
about a thousand year period between 500 and 1500.
The church began to use a common liturgy
for what became known as the Catholic Mass
with very specific readings
and a much, much more formal structure.
And they began to define what a sacrament is,
according to their own system.
In the 11th century, there's a Catholic theologian
by the name of Peter Lombard,
and here's how he defined a sacrament.
He said, a sacrament is a sign of anything sacred.
Now, that's a super broad definition, right?
Like, almost anything can fit into that,
and so there's a time earlier in the medieval period
where the Roman Catholic Church identified
nearly 30 different sacraments.
Then it got cut down to 12,
and then finally to its current form of just seven
at the fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215.
Here are the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church.
Baptism, the Eucharist, confirmation, penance,
holy orders, which is for the clergy,
anointing of the sick, and marriage.
Marriage, yeah.
You wanted to say it, didn't you?
You wanted to say it, so I said it for you.
Marriage.
Okay, so today, today the definition of a sacrament
reads like this, according to Rome.
A sign given to us by Jesus Christ
through which we share in God's life,
here's the key part, and the effective channel
by which the Holy Spirit spreads the grace of Christ
to those with the proper disposition.
Read those last two words.
That is really important to see.
Proper disposition.
In the Roman system, you cannot have assurance of salvation
because you never know if your disposition
was good enough, holy enough,
in order to merit God's favor.
So you just have to keep trying.
Over and over again, keep trying, harder and harder,
and at the end of your life, hope for the best,
that you've done enough, that you've been godly enough,
that your disposition has been enough to please God.
The official catechism of the church states this,
the sacraments are necessary for salvation.
They don't hide that.
Now it does go on to say, although not all sacraments
are necessary for all individuals,
and that's because some people are never gonna take
holy orders, some people are not gonna take
holy orders, some people are not gonna get married,
but the fact is, some combination of those seven things
are necessary, are essential for anyone to be saved.
It is literally a list of things that you have to do
to be saved.
Don't let anybody try to tell you that Roman
and Protestants are just really close,
it's just minor differences.
No, it's massive.
There is a chasm between the two.
That is a list of things you have to do to be saved.
And listen, the necessity of the sacraments for salvation
makes perfect sense in the Catholic system.
In their version of soteriology, God's grace is earned
through participation in the church-sanctioned works.
That's important.
Remember, in the Catholic system, salvation is not
by God's sovereign choice, it is by works sanctioned
by the church and mediated by the church.
There is no salvation, according to them,
apart from their Roman Catholic system.
They will try to fudge on that if they talk to you,
but that is in their councils, that is in their catechism.
There is no salvation outside of Rome.
That's important to understand.
At its core, Roman Catholicism is a man-centered system
designed by men who are tied way more to power
and control and tradition than they are to Scripture.
That's just a plain fact.
And yes, by the way, cases struck your mind,
and think about it, the whole idea of earned grace
is an oxymoron, is it not?
It just, that is, it can't be.
They nullify grace every time they talk about that.
I once wrote a very simple illustration
about how Rome uses the sacraments
in terms of dispensing grace.
Picture in your mind a great bathtub.
Like every one of us has a big old bathtub.
And in their understanding, what baptism does,
especially for a child, right, is it wipes away
the stain of original sin.
And so in that, the bathtub is filled up
with an abundance of grace.
So every child gets sprinkled,
and they've got this bathtub full of all of this grace.
And the whole goal is you've gotta die
with some of that, enough grace left in that bathtub
so that you get to heaven.
But every time a Roman Catholic sins,
a venial sin, they call them, right, a little sin,
as if you can judge those things.
A venial sin, a little bit of that grace
leaks out of the tub.
And if they create, if they do a mortal sin,
a big sin, that entire tub might be emptied.
And so that's where participation in the sacraments
like the Eucharist come in.
You gotta keep refilling your tub.
You gotta keep filling it up with grace.
So you can understand, if you have Catholic friends,
sometimes they're the most devoted people, aren't they?
They're sweet people, they're devoted, they're religious.
They, you really, I mean, we have to be careful
not to just hate on people, right?
Some of these, some of our Catholic friends
are really sweet people.
And they believe it with all their hearts.
But you can understand why they wanna be in mass
all the time, right?
Because they're building up credits.
They're refilling their tub.
See, Rome was always confused and jumbled up
good works and divine grace.
It is true, guys, that things like confession
and repentance and service in the church,
those are good things.
In fact, I would say that they're duties
of the Christian life.
But here's the thing, they are always a response
to God's grace.
Not things that help you acquire God's grace.
Does that make sense?
We respond with good works because of the grace
that's been lavished upon us, which was a gift.
We don't do things in order to fill up a tub.
Now, most importantly for our purposes today,
listen to what came out in the year 1079.
So think about those dates, 500 to 1500.
1079, the Sixth Council of Rome declared this
about the presence of Christ in the elements.
The bread and wine which are placed on the altar
are substantially changed, they declared,
into the true and proper and living flesh
and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord.
That is the first official change
into what we call transubstantiation.
It's not fully developed yet, but it's right there.
It's the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215
that really adds to that.
Here's what it says.
Jesus Christ whose body and blood are truly contained
in the sacrament of the altar under the species
of bread and wine, the bread changed into his body
by the divine power of, there it is, transubstantiation
and the wine into blood.
1215 is when this was officially laid down.
And then that statement was approved by a man
named Pope Innocent III by any stretch of the imagination.
He is the most powerful and influential pope
of the entire medieval period.
Once Innocent said it was true, there was no going back.
It was in the record.
Now, later on, we're gonna see what the Council of Trent
said, but just to be clear so that we know
what we're talking about, transubstantiation,
hard word, say it with me.
Transubstantiation.
Thank you.
Refers to the idea that in the Eucharist,
the bread and the cup are transformed
into the literal body and blood of Christ.
And I know we misuse the word literal all the time, right?
Literally, no, I'm talking, right?
It's everywhere, isn't it?
It drives me nuts.
Do you know what that word means?
No, this is literally the body and blood of Christ.
That's what it means.
So, the word literal is literally
the body and blood of Christ.
That's what it means.
So, the appearance of the elements, they say,
doesn't change.
So, the Roman Catholic goes up, takes the wafer,
drinks out of the cup, and from their eyes,
what they see is it looks like a wafer and a cup.
So, they affirm that.
They're not like, well, there's some magical incantation
and poof, there's an actual body and blood there, right?
So, the actual substance of the elements,
you're lying eyes, okay, the actual substance
of the elements does in fact change, they say,
into the literal flesh and blood of Christ.
And so, in 1551, they laid down the gauntlet
over this issue, Council of Trent,
the most famous council in all the history
of Roman Catholicism, and this is what they affirm.
They laid out what we call an anathema,
meaning if you don't believe this, you're to be cursed.
You ready?
So, the body and blood of the most holy Eucharist
are contained truly, really, and substantially,
the body and blood together with the soul and divinity
of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently,
the whole Christ, but says that He is only therein
as in a sign or in a figure or power, let Him be accursed.
That's us.
Okay, again, there's a chasm between Rome
and the Protestant world.
In this doctrine, Rome has also done something else.
They have taken the Lord's Supper and turned it
into a re-sacrificing of the body of Christ.
A re-sacrificing, every time they claim,
they gather in the mass, and the priest says
the prayer over the elements, they believe
that Jesus' body is broken again and His blood shed again.
All over the world, all the time,
constantly re-sacrificing, and they claim this
in spite of the very clear teaching
in at least three separate places I can think of
in the book of Hebrews, where, again, literally says,
I'm gonna do it, literally says that Jesus died once for all.
So, there's a great example of how they have raised up
tradition and the teaching of the papacy above Scripture.
Okay, deep breath.
I'm gonna wrap up here with the Reformers.
How are we doing on time, Grant?
Oh, okay.
How much time you guys got?
I'm gonna do this quick, but again, this is mainly
to tee us up for next week.
Okay, during the Reformation, 1517 passed,
the church began to recognize that it needed
to recover the true Gospel, which had gone dark
for a thousand years.
Yes, there was little lights here and there,
but it's basically gone dark.
There was only one system to participate in.
A message that was God-centered needed to be returned,
rooted in the right understanding of biblical grace,
not the church's version of grace,
and forensic justification, justification by faith alone.
And this wasn't just a matter of doctrine, I understand.
This was not just in the mind, not just doctrine,
but also practice.
So, they had to reform the liturgy,
had to be totally redone, especially the Mass,
the definition of sacrament as well.
There had to be returned to the truth that grace
was a sovereign gift from God, not something
that could be earned, that had no ties
to the moral disposition or the worthiness
of the person that receives it.
These things had to be straightened out.
Here's how Calvin puts it.
Gotta get a Calvin quote in, right?
He says this, man's unworthiness does not rob
the sacraments of their significance.
Baptism remains the bath of regeneration,
even if the whole world is faithless.
And the Lord's Supper remains the distribution
of Christ's body and blood, even if there is not
the slightest sparkle of belief left.
Because it's from God.
It's not about us, right?
It's not about our worthiness or our disposition.
It comes from God, so it's never changed.
Like the preach word, the sacraments are given to us.
Cannot, I said this so many times last week,
downward direction, from God to us.
We don't come to the sacrament offering something to God.
It comes from Him, the sacraments are given to us.
Again, not because of our moral strength.
Quite the opposite.
They're given to us because of our weakness.
Because we need to come to the table
to be strengthened in our faith.
That's why Calvin said that the sacraments were instituted
so that, get this, quote, believers,
poor and deprived of all good,
should bring nothing to it but begging.
That's it.
That's how we come humbly to the table.
Begging.
So I'm just gonna close out now with the three major views
of the presence of Christ in the elements
as espoused by the reformers.
And again, this is gonna be food for next week.
No pun intended.
I'm full of them today, man.
I didn't even write them down, they're just coming.
Okay, all right, you see the faces,
you see the names there.
Real presence, reformed and memorialized.
Each doctrine proposed and supported by a great reformer.
All of them great men.
I believe only one of them is right, but all great men.
Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, right?
Now, I'm not gonna say a whole lot today
about what's right and what's wrong.
That's for next Sunday.
I'm just gonna throw out there what the actual tenets are.
Let's start with real presence.
Luther insisted that the body and blood of Christ are,
now get this, quote, in, with, and under.
The bread and the cup.
Say it again.
The body and blood of Christ are in, with, and under.
The bread and the cup.
What does that mean?
I still don't know.
I mean, frankly, it's pretty murky.
It's pretty abstract, okay?
Luther would say that the substance of the bread
and the wine remain, but in some mystical way,
that can't really be explained by the human mind,
they are joined with the literal body and blood of Christ.
So, Lutherans agree with Rome that Christ is physically
present in the sacrament, but they deny that the Roman
Catholic idea that there's a change in the substance
of the elements.
They also disagree with Rome that Christ is being
re-sacrificed.
They would not affirm that either.
Now, let me hop over past Calvin for a second
and go to Zwingli.
The reason I wanna do that is because Luther and Zwingli
are the two extremes on the spectrum of the body
and the body of Christ.
Calvin is in the middle, and it just so happens
that Luther and Zwingli historically actually did meet
to debate this.
We know because we have a record of it in the year 1529.
So, 12 years after Luther nailed that 95 theses
to the church, Luther and Zwingli were invited to come
to a city called Marburg in Germany with all
of their colleagues, big entourage, like 40 dudes
just with their Bibles to try to figure out
what was going on.
The occasion behind this meeting of the minds
was very simple.
You had a reformation happening in Germany
and one in Switzerland, and if we could combine
the power of those two movements and agree on everything,
then perhaps the reformers could resist the great power
that Rome wielded.
So, they pounded out, there's a famous painting of it,
15 points of doctrine to be discussed.
15.
And at first it looked like it was gonna be a great success.
The first 14, bada bing bada boom.
We agree, these are foundational things.
But it was that 15th one that threw everything off.
What was it?
The presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
It's the one thing they could not agree on.
A prickly issue, and it kept coming back over
and over again.
Zwingli would say this and Luther would say,
but it says this is my body.
So much so that Luther carved that in German
into a table at Marburg that they still have.
He carved it in there, this is my body.
He would not budge.
And he and Zwingli broke fellowship.
14 out of 15 they broke fellowship
because this was such a big deal.
Now, Zwingli and his colleagues argued that the bread
and the wine only signify Christ's body.
They represent Christ's body.
In other words, they were symbols only.
That's what he hung his hat on.
That's why we call it the memorialist view.
The Eucharist is understood to be a symbolic
or a memorial representation of the body and blood of Christ.
And their primary argument against Luther,
which is a good one, is that Jesus' body,
which is a localized body, right?
Jesus has a one physical localized body.
That it couldn't possibly be at the right hand
of the Father in heaven and on the altar
all at the same time.
That defies reason, is what Zwingli said.
So they also claimed that the purpose of the sacrament
was not to do anything metaphysical at all,
but simply to cause the sinner to recall
the passion of the Lord.
And they focused on this idea of remembrance.
Remember how Jesus says that in the upper room?
Do this in remembrance of me.
That this idea of coming to the table in remembrance
would cause the sinner to have great gratitude
for the passion of Christ, to be thankful
for his sacrifice on the cross.
In response, Luther and his colleagues argued
that the words of Jesus clearly teach
that the bread is the body.
It doesn't signify, the word signify is not there,
the word represent is not there.
His body is, the bread is the body of Christ.
And so for Luther, who wanted to stand on scripture,
that's what he was all about, said, look,
you can't twist the meaning of the word is
to mean anything other than what it means.
So he had two guys, very strong, very smart,
very esteemed leaders, butting heads over this.
By the way, Zwingli was really unhappy with Luther
because he felt like the real presence position
was too close to Rome.
He's like, you're not really reforming the mass.
You're basically agreeing with Rome here in many ways.
So they left very frustrated with each other.
All right, back to Calvin now.
Truly a middle position of compromise.
Now we have to remember that Calvin was what we call
a second generation reformer, okay?
At the time that Luther and Zwingli were meeting at Marburg,
Calvin's only 20 years old.
He's not even really involved in any career as a reformer.
So Calvin has the benefit of time
and the benefit of reflection to work off the brilliance
of these other two guys.
He eventually comes to the conclusion,
and I only got a few minutes left, so hang with me,
comes to the conclusion that Christ is truly communicated
through the Eucharist and that we really do participate
in his body and blood.
So he disagreed with Zwingli that it was just memorial,
but he also disagreed with Luther
concerning the physical presence of Christ in the elements.
The reformed position is that Christ is spiritually
communicated in the sacrament, not physically.
Meaning that the way we receive Christ in the elements
is by the Holy Spirit uniting us to Christ in heaven
by faith.
It's seen as an invitation that we would be lifted up
mysteriously into the presence of our great high priest
where in the language of Calvin we would feed upon him.
Spiritually, not physically, spiritually.
And I'll give you a really good summary of this.
This is a guy named Herman Baving,
who's a Dutch Calvinist from the 19th century.
Here's how he argues this.
He says, the Lord's Supper is a communion
with the person of Christ that does not consist
in a physical descent of Christ from heaven,
nor in a mixture or transfusion of the flesh of Christ
with our souls, but in the elevation of our hearts,
heavenward, in a union with Christ by the Holy Spirit.
These guys thought deeply about this stuff, didn't they?
Not us, not us today.
We're like, yeah, juice is in the back.
Enjoy.
These guys thought deeply about this stuff,
and they battled over it.
So Calvin and the Reform believe that the purpose
of communion is found in the fact that like the word,
the sacrament is a gift from God to his children,
wherein God reinforces all the promises
that he's given to us.
Our spiritual union with him, the forgiveness of sins,
the certain hope that we have of eternal life,
and that through this communion with Christ
in the heavenly realms, we are strengthened in our faith
in our walk with him.
That is the Reform position.
Now, teed it up, here's the questions for next week,
and you can consider these.
Number one, which Reformation stream does Oak Hill come from?
Like where do we, in the river of the Reformation,
which breaks off in all these tributaries,
where do we sit?
What do we believe about the presence of Christ
in the elements?
Do we line up with one of those three guys?
And what should a communion service at Oak Hill
look like today?
So tune in next Sunday.
In the meantime, happy Reformation Day.
Amen?
This is Bauer Heads.