From the Lord's Supper to Amyraut

Earlier today I promised a blog entry for tomorrow. Well, you're getting it today instead. How's that for making up for lost time?

Anyways, what follows are my musings on a couple of random subjects which have captivated my attention recently.

1. The Lord's Supper.

Christ ordained the ministry of word and sacrament for his visible church. These, along with prayer, are the God-ordained means of grace (at least for those of us in the British Reformed tradition; see the Shorter Catechism Q.88-89). Reformed Christianity has a long history of trumpeting the centrality of the Word read and preached; and this is only right. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the other elements of public worship are relegated to a secondary status. While baptism and the supper, for instance, cannot be properly administered apart from the word (i.e., preceded by it), they are not something less than the word. Yet, as I survey the phenomenon that is American Reformed Christianity, the only conclusion I can reach is that for generations now we've largely ignored (or worse, forgotten) the significance of the Supper in the life and worship of the church. [To be fair, there has been a revival of interest in the Supper in recent years; yet, this can only be considered the beginning, not the end.]

The Supper is a sign and a seal of Christ's person and work, and specifically of the redemptive benefits of his substitutionary death. Through the Spirit, Christ presides at his table and feeds his sheep, on his broken body and on his blood, and yet we seem content not to eat of and receive the benefits of this spiritual feast. We come once a month or once a quarter or, in some cases, whenever the elders determine it is time again. If the nature and the benefits of the Supper are what they are, then what prevents us from observing the supper with greater frequency? Why should we not conclude, as Calvin did, that we ought to come to the Table of our Lord "at least weekly"? This conclusion seems harder to avoid especially when we consider in at least two instances the apostolic church appears to have adopted this very practice (see Acts 2:42; 20:7, 11). The only valid reasoning for less frequent observance of the Supper is, as T. David Gordon has concluded, is that we do not perceive the Supper to be of significant spiritual value, as was the case with Zwingli.

So, my question is this: If the Supper is one of the divinely appointed means whereby Christ communicates the benefits of his mediation, and if it was observed regularly, frequently, if not weekly by the early church under apostolic oversight, why, then, do we, as Reformed churches, not practice frequent or weekly communion?



2. Calvin vs. the Calvinists (especially with regard to the doctrine of limited or definite atonement).

To be honest, I have very little by way of expertise in this subject. Yes, I've read a number of the primary sources and a handful of secondary sources, both of which lead me to conclude that the Muller thesis (i.e., substantial continuity) is basically correct. Calvin's successors did not fundamentally depart from the basic contours of his theology; they did not corrupt a supposedly more biblical theology by the use of scholastic structures of teaching and thought.

My biggest difficulty in taking seriously the Kendall-Armstrong-et al thesis (that is, the discontinuity thesis) is that it always seems as though it has an theological ax to grind. This is no more apparent than with the doctrine of limited or definite atonement, which argues that Christ's death was efficient for the elect only. The saving efficacy of Christ's death takes into account only those for whom Christ was given to die (i.e., the elect, and not all men indefinitely). Though Calvin's view is admittedly difficult to understand (probably because of the context of the Reformation when compared to the context of the post-Reformation era), the views of historical and confessional Calvinism are not hard to understand. Both Dordt and Westminster (and with them Savoy and 2nd London) clearly confess that while Christ's death lacks nothing in terms of its sufficiency, his death is efficient for the elect only. Nevertheless, the discontinuity thesis wants to say that Calvin and his successors are so different at this point, that true Calvinism does not believe in limited atonement. They will jump on any and every instance of an isolated theologian making statements regarding the universal sufficiency of Christ's death and turn those theologians into proto Amyraldians (e.g., Ursinus).

My question to such a reading of historic Calvinism is this: why, then, has confessional Calvinism in every single instance affirmed the doctrine of definite atonement, and repudiated the teachings of Amyraut and those of his ilk. If the discontinuity thesis is correct on this point, why do the confessional documents of the entire Reformed tradition argue the very opposite? Why can't such fellows simply admit that they find the arguments of Dordt and Westminster unconvincing rather than attempting to turn nearly every Reformed theologian of the 16th and 17th centuries into a mouth-piece to voice their own theological agenda?

I know what the response from the discontinuity folks will be: "you've misunderstood, read this sound bite from the past". That won't do. It is insufficient. Read the historical confessions of the Reformed church and be honest. What do these documents (unanimously and unequivocally) teach?

Integrity, it seems to me, is still something worth maintaining, even whilst engaged in historical theology.

Peace...