All Who Are Bread Should Get Bread

Lane and I have both posted our first response to Venema’s book, and then Lane responded to my post here. There is some good discussion going on in the comments thread over there. Let’s try to do the same here, and maybe we can figure out how a doctrinal disagreement should be handled. Then we can all tell our great-grandchildren that we saw it done once.

I posed the question whether Venema would consider me to be a proponent of the strict paedocommunion position or the soft one (as he defined it). Lane thinks he would take me for a strict proponent, largely because the age of children that we admit to the Table is way earlier than is usually done in Reformed circles. I would take myself as a strict proponent also, but for different reasons.

First, I am very glad that Lane sees the problem with arbitrarily excluding children until the age of 16, for example. And I am grateful to see his willingness to accept a profession of faith from children as young as six. The more of that kind of openness, the better. At the same time, Lane still wants the bar to be set at a credible profession of faith, arising from within the child.

“When they can articulate a clear understanding of the Gospel, and can therefore grasp (and is taught!) what the Supper means, that child may be received into communicant membership.”

This means, if I understand Venema’s layout correctly, that he would take Lane as a soft proponent of paedocommunion. But at the same time, he would hold that Lane is still within the spirit of the traditional Reformed position, because the traffic of what constitutes a credible profession is still coming from the same direction — the child’s cognitive and spiritual maturity, and ability to act on it.

Now the strictest paedocommunionist is happy to wait until an infant is able to “take” the bread and wine physically. When they can chew, they can come — meaning that the only barrier is a practical one, not a spiritual or theological one. The practice we follow is very similar to this, with the additional stipulation that the child should be able to mentally “chew” as well, which we know they can do as soon as they notice they aren’t getting the elements. But we are not waiting on anything to arise from within them in order to determine if they are “worthy.” We have their baptism, and that is enough. We are simply watching them closely to determine when we can start giving their birthright to them. We don’t wait to hear a profession of faith from them. The Lord’s Supper is a profession of faith, and as soon as we can, we start having them make that profession, teaching them to do it with greater and greater maturity over time.

Now Venema’s book will address the issues surrounding 1 Cor. 11, but every discussion of these issues wants to run ahead to that discussion right away — and to a certain extent has to. All this to apologize for saying what I will no doubt say again later.

Granted that communicants ought to examine themselves, and ought to be receiving exhortations to do so from their first admittance to the Supper, what are they to be looking for as they conduct the examination? The entire context of this passage has to do with the quarrelsome factiousness of the Corinthian church, and nothing directly to do with their cognitive understanding of “the Gospel.” This means, in line with the context, that a proper self-examination in coming to the Supper would have more to do with whether a young participant had been pinching and hassling his sister during the service, and not whether he could articulate the differences between the various theologies of the Real Presence. If he had been pinching his sister, he would have been in principle doing the same thing the Corinthians had been doing to raise the apostle’s ire. Paul had quarrels, fights, and divisions in his crosshairs, not inadequate personal testimonies.

This is not to set aside the important of a clear proclamation of the Gospel in all this — the Word should accompany the sacrament with every administration of it. The clear need to stop pinching one’s sister needs to be set in the context of the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, by which means He established His body in us — a body that must be discerned in love as we come together to partake.

So what we are to be looking for in the examination is whether or not we are wrongly dividing the body. And I would argument that a two-year-old who sees that all the rest of his people are partaking of something that he wants to joing them in is a two-year-old who is discerning the body. A minister who shuts him out, despite the fact that the minister himself performed the child’s baptism, is a minister who is not discerning the body rightly, and who ought therefore to examine himself. As I have put it before, all who are bread should get bread.

There are some other comments that could be made here, but I am confident that we will get to them in due course.