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A Pentecostal Theology of the Table

Table of Contents

  1. #Why this note exists
  2. #Starting in Luke-Acts
  3. #Every meal an echo
  4. #All things common
  5. #Healing at the table, the claim
  6. #Bavinck's objection
  7. #Where I land on healing
  8. #The question about individual cups
  9. #Sources

Why This Note Exists

Almost everything in the rest of this study was written from inside a Reformation frame, arguing over questions posed by Wittenberg, Zurich, Geneva and Rome. The questions normal church people actually bring to the table are not the ones those four were fighting about.

Nobody in our church has ever asked me whether the accidents remain after the substance changes. They ask whether something happens when they take it. They ask whether they can pray for healing over the cracker. They ask whether they are allowed to take it if their week has been a disaster.

Starting in Luke-Acts

Chris Green argues that "the breaking of bread" in Acts 2:42, 46 and 20:7 refers to the Eucharist, and that when the early communities broke bread they were "purposefully and self-consciously reenacting the Last Supper and the post-Easter, pre-Ascension meals, liturgically and ritually imitating Jesus' (symbolic) words and gestures with them" (Green, 2012).

Acts 2:42, 46 - ESV

42. And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
46. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts.

Green's conclusion is that the Eucharist was "the hub of the community's life together." Which is worth sitting with, given that we regularly cite Acts 2:42 as our template for church life and then treat one of its four items as a five-minute segment we run once a month before the offering.

Every Meal an Echo

In Luke-Acts no clean line separates the sacred meal from the ordinary one.

According to Luke-Acts, then, every meal shared by the primitive Christian community was at least an echo of the Eucharist, eaten in thanksgiving for Christ and in anticipation of the final messianic banquet.
(Green, 2012)

He notes that this "harmonizes nicely with early Pentecostal thinking and acting, which, like Luke's narrative, typically felt no need to separate, in thought or in practice, the Eucharistic rite from other meals."

This is one of the places where our instincts are better than our theology. We have always believed God turns up in a lounge room over a shared dinner, and we have never had a doctrinal account of why. Luke supplies one. The connection to Eating in the Presence of God is direct: eating in God's presence is the oldest pattern in Scripture, and it never stopped being a pattern about actual food.

All Things Common

The descent of the Spirit at Pentecost "induces an economic model of distributive justice as witness of Christ's resurrected life," and the sharing of possessions is "the first sign of this divinely induced reality of healing all creation." Green's conclusion is that the common table requires "some kind of sharing, advocacy, and partisanship in which the poor are privileged, and in which considerations of merit and productivity are subjected to the rule of servanthood" (Green, 2012).

He connects this to the "gladness of heart" of Acts 2:46. The disciples ate with joy because "already they were dining in the kingdom of God," and that eschatological joy "sets the believing community free from the anxieties that dominate the 'world', thus allowing them to live generously."

The joy is not the reward for generosity, it is the cause of it. People who are already eating in the kingdom can afford to be reckless with their possessions, because their security has been relocated.

This lands in the same place Paul does in 1 Corinthians 11v17-34 - Discerning the Body, where the abuse at Corinth was rich believers eating well while poor ones went hungry, at the meal that was supposed to abolish the distinction. Schreiner's line applies to us as much as to them: there is no place for sacramental devotion that coexists with social oppression.

Healing at the Table, the Claim

Many Pentecostal churches pray for healing over the bread. The reasoning runs from Isaiah 53:5 and 1 Peter 2:24 through the claim that if Communion conveys the benefits of the cross, it can convey physical healing.

Green defends a version of this by arguing that healing of the body is "one manifestation of this coming fullness of life," serving "as a proleptic signum of the Christification already at work in the believer and yet to come with the full arrival of the eschatological kingdom." He documents that early Pentecostal periodical literature believed healing came through participation in the Supper, and concludes that "Pentecostal communities can and should anticipate these kinds of healings in and through the Sacrament" (Green, 2012).

His own guardrails are strict:

It almost goes without saying that this does not imply all those who eat in faith will be healed, and obviously Pentecostals should vigilantly guard against formulaic doctrines of the Supper that guarantee healing as a predictable, always-repeatable effect triggered by some mechanistic control. After all, it is Christ the healer, not healing itself, who is present in the Eucharist-event, and he is of course there in the fullness of his freedom, wisdom, and compassion.
(Green, 2012)

Bavinck's Objection

Bavinck disagrees. Some have deduced from the Supper's connection to eternal life that Christ's body "exerts a direct influence on our body, so that it is healed of all sorts of illness and weakness and is in principle re-created into a new resurrection body." Bavinck traces the pressure behind this to Lutheran premises, observing that if literal eating "does not have this advantage, it has no value at all."

Then the flat refusal: "Yet Scripture does not say a word about this."

He addresses the obvious proof text directly, and this is the part that matters most for us. 1 Corinthians 11:30 "clearly refers to a judgment, a punishment that God inflicted on the abuse of the Lord's Supper, and definitely does not prove that the use, or the believing use, of the Lord's Supper also serves to heal the ills of the body" (Bavinck, 2008, vol. 4).

Where I Land on Healing

I think Bavinck wins the exegetical point and Green wins the theological one, and both halves should be held rather than one of them chosen.

Bavinck is right that 1 Corinthians 11:30 cannot be run in reverse. The verse says abuse of the Supper brought sickness. It does not say that proper use of the Supper removes sickness, and the inference from one to the other is invalid. This is a common move in Pentecostal preaching, and it does not work. Anyone building a healing-at-the-table doctrine on that verse is building on a text that says the opposite of what they need it to say.

But Bavinck's own position concedes more than his tone suggests. He grants that "the Spirit of Christ does indeed use the Supper to strengthen believers in the hope of eternal life and of a blessed resurrection on the last day," quotes with approval the line "where the soul is healed, the body is helped as well," and even allows that in this sense the Supper "may be called 'the medicine of immortality'" (Bavinck, 2008, vol. 4). That is not a refusal. It is an argument about what may be expected and on what grounds.

So here is the position I hold and the practice I would defend.

  1. Pray for healing at the table, and mean it. The Christ who is present is the healer, and the Spirit who makes Him present is the Spirit of the age to come. Green's framing puts the confidence in exactly the right place: celebrants "can and should come to the Table confident that the one present to them is the one who comes in the power of the Spirit to heal the sick and to deliver the oppressed."
  2. Do not promise an outcome. The presence of the healer is the ground of the prayer. It is not a guarantee of the result.
  3. Do not build it on 1 Corinthians 11:30. Ever. Use the presence of Christ, which is the actual argument, and which is stronger.
  4. Never, under any circumstances, imply that someone still unwell was short on faith. That is a pastoral atrocity and we have all watched it committed.

The confidence goes in the person, not in the mechanism. That is the same approach that governs the whole doctrine: hold the how loosely, hold the who tightly.

See also: Spiritual Presence | Sacrament or Ordinance | Communion Practice - Frequency, Elements, and Admission

Sources