Green Baggins and I have agreed to blog through Cornelius Venema’s new book on paedocommunion entitled Children at the Lord’s Table? Lane has already posted his first response, and here is mine.
In the first chapter, Venema begins with the right question. “On what basis should anyone be admitted to the Lord’s Table?” (p. 1). His answer, in line with the traditional Reformed view which he is defending, is that there needs to be a “public profession of faith” prior to an individual’s admission to the Table. This excludes more than infants, but also anyone older who is unable or unwilling to do this. Venema argues that children are not being “targeted” in this requirement, but rather that the nature of the sacrament, and the nature of the case, excludes them from participation — along with numerous adults.
Venema’s intent in his book is to focus on the strict view, considering the soft paedocommunion view to be simply a “modification of the historic view of the Reformed churches” (p. 4). More on this in a moment.
Venema does not want to concede the phrase “covenant communion,” to the paedocommunionists, because he believes that he is fencing the Table only in ways that the terms of the covenant require. He quite reasonably doesn’t want to be saddled with a defense of “non-covenantal communion.” One follows the reasoning of course. Do you like it when people tell you they go to a Spirit-filled church, and then inquire solicitously what kind you go to? “Oh, mine is liturgical and really, really dead.”
Venema then outlines the approach he will take in the book, tackling in turn the practice of the church in history, three basic biblical arguments (covenant, Passover, and 1 Cor. 11), and then the teaching of the Reformed confessions. My interactions on those points can wait until we get there, and so what follows are some preliminary comments of my own.
Although I understand why Venema distinguishes the soft from the strict view (and I believe that distinction helpful), his decision to then focus on the strict view only is not quite so helpful. For example, I am not quite sure if he would consider my view a mere “modification” of the historic Reformed practice, or a rejection of it. At Christ Church, we do not bring newborn infants to the Table, but the usual practice is to bring one-year-olds. Since the kids stay with us through the whole service, when the children start to notice they are being passed by, we begin the process of including them. Now is this strict or soft paedocommunion? We are assuming the children are to be full participants in the sacrament of communion as they are being taught how to partake.
Advocates of the traditional view are likely to be wary of a six-year-old who “loves Jesus,” but will tend to think of toddlers as indistinguishable from newborns. It would be really helpful to know if Venema thinks that the line between soft and strict paedocommunionists is drawn according to the ages of those admitted, or in accordance with the theological explanation of that admittance.
Two stories to illustrate how very young children can interact — they are not inert substances to whom we give bread and wine. When my grandson Rory was brought to the Table, he was one-year-old. He couldn’t really talk yet, and his parents had been teaching him a sign-language catechism. “Who made you?” Point to the sky. “Are you baptized?” Pat your head. I was administering the Supper, and when Rory got his first piece of bread, he held it up high so that I could see it. He then patted his head, his mother’s head, and his grandmother’s head. We are all baptized, the one-year-old was saying. Is this the soft view or the strict view?
The other story is one of my favorites. A friend’s four-year-old was being examined by the elders of what Venema would call a soft paedocommunion church. The elders asked this young boy the definition of sin. The boy replied that sin was the dragon in your heart. This naturally made them want to hear more, and so they asked him what he meant by “dragon in the heart.” “Well,” he said in reply, “have you ever read Beowulf?” If a four-year-old like that is brought to the Table, would Venema say it was a modification of the traditional Reformed practice, or a rejection of it? I understand the distinction he has made (and why he has made it), but it seems to me that he needs to define where the border is more precisely than he has.
Another reason for this is that Venema tells us when young people are usually brought to the Table in Reformed churches that hold to the traditional view — “middle to late adolescence” (pp. 2-3). By distinguishing the soft from the strict view, and by not critiquing the soft view, Venema has taken one of the most troublesome practices of the traditional view right out of the debate. Many thousands of young covenant members, who are fully capable of expressing their faith in Christ, and who express that faith in every other aspect of their lives, are not brought to the Table in these traditional churches. Venema has said that “public profession” is necessary — so what is holding all the eight-year-olds in the OPC back? It is not their inability to make a profession, or (as I know full well in many cases), their lack of desire to make such a profession. The thing that excludes them is the culture of the church they are growing up in because it is that culture which disbelieves and rejects attempted public professions from eight-year-olds. If they were to make a public profession, the one thing needful according to Venema, that profession would not be believed or accepted.
But by allowing for the soft view as a “modification” of the traditional Reformed view, Venema can blunt the force of this criticism — and this was a shrewd move on his part because it is criticism that sorely needs to be blunted. He has in effect said that it is okay to admit children (much) earlier than is usually done. Two cheers for that, at any rate.
One other round of comments, and that should suffice for now.
But for those, like me, who did come from a baptistic and evangelical background, a few words are necessary. When I was baptistic, I saw the connection between paedobaptism and paedocommunion — it was one of my arguments against paedobaptism. I could see no way to bring children to one of the sacraments and not the other. This is one of the reasons (incidentally) why Reformed Baptists often understand the paedocommunion case (and related issues) far more readily than non-paedocommunionist paedobaptists do. We will leave out of this discussion (for the nonce) those representatives of the pacifist anabaptist stream, who tend toward paedocommunism.
But when I finally became a paedobaptist, I still held paedocommunion at arm’s length for several years. I did this because I had just come out of a position that had specialized in saying, “The Reformers were great, and did a lot of great things. But they didn’t succeed in shaking off all the vestiges of Rome, paedobaptism among them.” That is a baptistic argument, and I now found myself among a number of paedocommunionists saying almost exactly the same thing, only now applied to communion. “The Reformers did not go far enough.” The argument appealed to me on one level, but it was also an argument that the Lord had recently torn up in little pieces in order to make me eat it. I didn’t want to move over one square and start in on the same argument, at least not right away. The Lord had humbled me, and I wanted to stay humbled on the point for a bit.
This was not because I believed that the Reformers could not have been mistaken (as I now believe they were on this point), but rather because it was way too easy for me to make that argument. I wanted to make sure that when I advanced the argument (as I am now doing), I was doing so because it was right, and not because it was easy for me (because of my background) to argue. But there will be more on this later in the book.