INTRO
Why Water, Bread, and Wine?
When baptism and Communion are talked about, we’re more often told what they do not mean than what they do mean.
Why is this? Let me suggest a couple of possible reasons.
Yesterday’s Battles
First, we are still fighting the debates of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Reformation in the sixteenth century was a great return to the biblical gospel. To the fore were two big issues.
First, there was a rediscovery of justification by faith alone—we are saved entirely by trusting in Christ’s finished work rather than through a process of moral transformation.
Second, there was a reaffirmation that our faith is built on the authority of Scripture alone—the Bible and not church tradition is our supreme authority.
But the sacraments were a close third. The Reformers rejected the idea that the sacraments are effective irrespective of the faith of those involved, and therefore they rejected the idea that babies are born again simply by being baptized. They also rejected the idea that Christ is offered as a sacrifice to God afresh in the “mass,” along with the claim that the bread and wine become the physical body and blood of Christ.
These issues resurfaced in the nineteenth century with the emergence of the Oxford Movement, a movement that sought to bring about a renewal of Catholic ideas in the Church of England. The Oxford Movement gained a lot of traction at the time, and evangelicals felt embattled. As a result, the sacraments can feel like dangerous ground. Like a field full of land mines, they become surrounded by warnings signs. “Don’t go there” is the message.
Today’s Mindset
Second, we are children of modernity. Our modern world is the product of the Enlightenment, the intellectual movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that placed human reason front and center.
The starting gun of the Enlightenment is usually recognized to be René Descartes’s claim “I think, therefore I am.” What is significant for our purpose is not what Descartes concluded (we’ll take for granted that Descartes existed), but the manner in which he arrived at that conclusion.
Descartes deliberately excluded any input from the world around him. His experience of the world could, he feared, be an illusion. He needed a basis for truth that transcended what he saw and heard and touched (or what he feared he might only be imagining he saw and heard and touched). So he made human reason the ultimate basis for knowledge.
Ever since Descartes, modern people have assumed truth operates in the realm of the mind. Our essential selves reside in our thoughts, memories, and hopes. The world around us—including our own bodies—is separate from our real selves.
This worldview both collides with and, in part, fits with evangelical religion.
The collision is obvious. In the modern worldview, human reason trumps divine revelation. And so the Enlightenment has seen a series of hotly contested debates and supposed contradictions between reason and revelation—debates about the historicity of the resurrection and the virgin birth, evolution and creation, the meaning of the incarnation, the authority of Scripture, the nature of miracles, the reality of prayer, and so on.
What is less often recognized is that in some key ways modernity has proved a good fit for evangelical religion, in particular its emphasis on truth residing in the mind. For evangelicalism is a religion of the Word. We preach the truth of God’s Word to convert people by persuading them to accept the claims of the gospel and put their trust in Christ. The action, as it were, takes place in people’s minds. All well and good.
But this leaves us uncertain about the sacraments. We’re not sure what they’re for or what we’re supposed to do with them. In the sacraments, truth is embodied in water, bread, and wine— in physical substances. And in the sacraments this truth is appropriated by our bodies—we get wet, we eat bread, we drink wine.
So one of the issues I want to explore in this book is the physicality of the sacraments. Why all this water? Why bread and wine?
Sometime it feels like we would have been happier if Jesus had said, “Say this in remembrance of me,” or “Think this in remembrance of me.” That would have fit so much better into our Western, modernistic worldview—it would have made Descartes happy. But, no, Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24 ESV). And then he handed us bread and wine and water.
There can sometimes be a sense that the sacraments are something of an embarrassment to modern evangelicals. We’re not sure what to make of them and what to do with them.
To be sure, in Baptist churches baptism is often relished as a great celebration of the triumph of conversion. I hope it is God’s regenerating power that is being lauded, though sometimes I fear the focus is on the church’s evangelistic success. But it remains unclear whether baptism serves any further purpose in a person’s life.
Rediscovering the Sacraments
I have sometimes wondered if I was moving away from my heritage in the Reformers and Puritans. Perhaps I was becoming (whisper it quietly) “a bit sacramental.” But what I have found as I’ve studied the theology of the Reformation and its successors is a much richer, fuller understanding of the sacraments.
Far from drifting away from my Reformed roots, I was actually returning to them. Robert Letham writes, “Nothing presents a starker contrast between our own day and the Reformation than the current neglect of the Lord’s Supper. . . . Today, the communion hardly features as a matter of significance. It is seen as an optional extra.”
But I’ve also noticed, particularly as my interest in the sacraments has attuned me to the issue over the past ten years or so, that on the ground, as it were, many, many Christians value the sacraments highly. They find them to be a great source of comfort. It’s this instinct I want to articulate and encourage.
One issue I’m ignoring is whether infants should be baptized (the paedobaptist position) or just those professing faith (the credobaptist or Baptist position). It’s clearly an important issue. But it’s not the focus of my concern in this book.
Indeed, I fear it often distracts us from a serious consideration of the wider significance of the sacraments to our daily lives as Christians and congregations. I realize that this may frustrate some people, but there are plenty of other books to which you can turn to explore those debates.
There is, however, one aspect of the debate that we cannot completely ignore, and that is the question of what baptism signifies. Paedobaptists emphasize the way baptism signifies the work or promises of God. But evangelical and Reformed paedobaptists also emphasis the need to respond to these promises with faith.
Meanwhile many credobaptists emphasize the way baptism signifies our response of faith. But Reformed credobaptists also emphasize God’s initiative in salvation so that baptism is much more than simply a sign of an individual’s decision to follow Christ. So all evangelicals agree that faith is vital—even when they disagree about the sequence of baptism and faith.
Yet I want to argue that our primary focus when we think about baptism should not be on our faith, but on the object of our faith—Jesus Christ. I think this is consistent with both an evangelical paedobaptist position and a Reformed credobaptist position.
If you’ve grown up in the kind of Baptist circles where the focus is all on the commitment we make in baptism, then this emphasis may initially appear unfamiliar. But I hope you will see that, while it is true that baptism is in part a sign of faith, first and foremost it points us away from ourselves to the promises of God and the work of Christ. As we recognize this, we will discover how God uses baptism and Communion to strengthen our faith and reassure our hearts.