Historic evangelicals, at their best, are unaccredited teachers in the schools of the prophets. At their worst, they are sons of Zedekiah, selling little miniature horns of iron on the teevee for $9.95 plus shipping and handling (1 Kings 22:11). Institutional Christians, let us call them, at their best, are like Jehoida (2 Kings 11:17). At their worst, they carry on in such a way as to make even a Bach chorale obnoxious to God (Amos 5:23), processing up the center aisle in such a way as to make every true child of Father want to throw a psalter at their hats.
And so what does this have to do with child communion? Much in every way. If you would like to get up to speed on a recent discusion, you can check here, here, and here.
Let me quickly answer a question raised at the end of the last round, and then move on to what I believe to be the basic issue. Assuming a communicant member of our church was in an accident which rendered him unable to speak or communicate, but he was conscious and able to come to church in a wheelchair, if he could chew and swallow, would we commune him? Well, of course.
On to the root issue then. After baptism has taken place, everything else is part of Christian discipleship — teaching the baptized to obey all that Christ commanded. Discipleship is foundationally, irreducably, a matter of obedience, not theological test-passing. It is an ethical response, not a cognitive one. Now a certain cognitive element is necessarily there, and it obviously grows over time, but the first thing you must be after is a willingness and eagerness in the disciple to be accepted, grown, taught, and disciplined, etc. What is the point of communing a child, if that child is not growing up into righteous, peace and joy (Rom. 14:17)? Why would a minister of Christ want to give children little damnation wafers? The fact that it is the cup of blessing did not keep profane Corinthians from dying as they drank it.
To represent what we are doing with child communion, therefore, as a low-bar cognitive admittance test, is to radically misunderstand it. What we want with children who are taking the Supper is gladness, so that that right kind of understanding will then be able to grow. We are not after understanding first, so that children may be admitted to the company of those who have passed their ecclesiastical prelims.
We are treating little children as disciples, and the first lesson of every disciple is joy. “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD” (Ps. 122:1). If the children are not glad to be there, then everything after that is counterproductive. When we want the children “tracking” as we commune, we are wanting them to participate in the joy — the way my one-year-old granddaughter claps after everybody sings Happy Birthday to one of the cousins. What we want is “Yay, here we are with Jesus again,” not an infant’s contemplation of Turretin’s rejection of consubstantiation on the one hand, and the folly of the Socinians on the other.
Now it is quite true that an Israelite could have been saved from the Passover Angel of the Lord at the first Passover in a condition of unbelief, provided there was some blood on the doorpost. This was because the Lord needed to have some covenantal unbelievers around to slay in the wilderness later so that we might have their objective example before our eyes. Yes, they drank from the Rock that was Christ. Yes, they ate the bread from Heaven, who was Christ. What did that get them? Without true, living, thriving evangelical faith in Jesus, it got them an unmarked tomb in the wilderness that archeologists will never find. But if we could find such a grave, it would be a fitting place for certain sacramentalists to seek out as a place for a pilgrimage, in order to meditate on their ways.
Before I came to accept child communion, one of my stated concerns was that those who commune children might, when a child’s sullenness, bad attitude, resistance to a life of joy, etc. began to be clearly manifest to everybody, that the “objectivists” would rush to his defense anyway. They would separate the privileges of discipleship from the responsibilities of it. That way lies presumption, and it was the sin that the apostle Paul expressly warned us FV types about (Rom. 11:18,20). You don’t support the root, Mr. Sacrament Man, the root supports you. And you maintain your connection to the root, the apostle went on to say, by internalizing in your disposition, in your soul, in your joy, what the Larger Catechism has to say about justifying faith (WLC 72). Look it up.
In short, I am talking about Westminsterian joy in the heart, not Westminsterian theology in the head. If you cultivate the former, you will have the latter, but they must go in that order. If you have the latter only, then you have the Ironic Spectacle of “evangelical” Calvinists making their kids score 90% or above on the grace portion of their theology exams before they give them some grace as a reward. But the solution to that appalling business is not to reject or set aside the authority of grace to shape our lives in joy.
Salvation first, and then the theology of it. Joy at the foundation, and then the building. Jesus first, then the discussions.