Of the Lord's Supper — Section 3

The Confession Read

The Lord Jesus hath, in this ordinance, appointed his ministers to declare his word of institution to the people; to pray, and bless the elements of bread and wine, and thereby to set them apart from a common to an holy use; and to take and break the bread, to take the cup, and (they communicating also themselves) to give both to the communicants; but to none who are not then present in the congregation.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 29, Section 3

Introduction

What is supposed to happen when the church gathers at the Lord's table? Ask the question, and most believers can describe the elements at once: the bread, and the wine. But press a little further. Ask who may serve, and what must be said before the bread is broken, and in what order the several actions must fall, and whether the minister himself is to receive, and the answers grow far more uncertain. Yet our Lord left nothing at his table to chance. He did not hand his church a loaf and a cup and a vague command to remember him as each one saw fit. He gave her a precise order, an appointed way, and that order is the subject of the section before us. We have traveled some distance in this chapter. When last we stood in the upper room, we watched our Lord institute the Supper on the night he was betrayed, and we learned that it is a meal and not a monument. Then we pressed into the deepest ground of all, and saw that the sacrifice of Christ was offered once, and is never repeated, and that the mass which claims to offer it again is injurious to the finished work of the cross. Now we turn from the substance of the Supper to its administration, from what the Supper is to how it is to be performed. And do not suppose that this is a descent from glory into mere ceremony, a falling away from high doctrine into the dull details of church order. That would be to misread it altogether. The order of the Supper is itself a doctrine, and a precious one, for it teaches us with unmistakable plainness that Christ is the Lord of his own table, that he has appointed the way in which he will meet his people there, and that to alter that way is not to improve upon it but to despise it. Observe, first of all, the word with which the section begins: "The Lord Jesus hath appointed." Here is the whole principle in a single clause. The Supper does not belong to the church as a thing she owns and may handle as she pleases; it belongs to Christ, who instituted it, and who has appointed both the officers who shall serve it and the manner in which it shall be served. When a master appoints the order of his own house, no servant is at liberty to rearrange it. And when the Lord of the church appoints the order of his own feast, no officer of the church is at liberty to alter so much as the turning of a sentence. There is a holy givenness about the whole matter, a shape laid down by Christ himself, and the section we are to unfold is nothing other than the record of that shape. Let us attend to it carefully, for in these few clauses the church has preserved, through four centuries of controversy, the very pattern by which her Lord is pleased to be present at his own table.

Scripture Foundation

The pattern the Confession describes is not invented by the Westminster Divines; it is read straight out of the words of institution themselves, and we may trace it in the very verbs our Lord employed on the night of the Supper. Turn to Mark's account, for he preserves the fourfold movement of the sacrament with particular clarity. In Mark 14:22 we read: "And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body." And in Mark 14:23 : "And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it." Mark the order: he took, he blessed, he brake, he gave. Four actions, each one deliberate, each one later recovered by the church as a part of her own administration, and each one carrying its own weight of meaning. The Greek of this passage is luminous, and it will repay the closest attention. The word rendered "blessed" over the bread is eulogēsas, from eulogeō, to speak well of, to bless, to consecrate by a word of praise. It is the same family of words from which we take our word "eulogy." Christ did not merely take the bread and begin to eat; he spoke over it a word of blessing, setting it apart by a pronouncement of praise to his Father. Then, over the cup, Mark uses a different verb: "when he had given thanks," which in the Greek is eucharistēsas, from eucharisteō, to give thanks. Here is the very root of that ancient and lovely name for the Supper, the Eucharist, the thanksgiving. The two verbs stand side by side in Mark's telling, blessing and thanksgiving, and between them they mark the double note of the consecration: the bread is blessed, the cup is received with gratitude, and in both the element is lifted from common use and devoted to a sacred purpose by a word spoken in faith to God. And then the breaking. "He brake it," says the text, and the verb is eklasen, from klaō, to break. Why should the breaking matter so much that the early church would take its very name from it, speaking not of the "Lord's Supper" so often as of "the breaking of bread"? Because the breaking is the gospel made visible to the eye. Christ's body was broken for us upon the cross; the bread broken in the minister's hands is the picture of that brokenness set before the congregation. A whole loaf speaks of a whole Christ, but a broken loaf speaks of a Christ crucified, of a body given and a life poured out. The minister does not break the bread idly, as one might break a crust at an ordinary meal; he breaks it as a preacher of the cross, and every eye that watches the loaf come apart is watching a sermon preached without a word. The action is not incidental to the sacrament; it is of the essence of it, a visible proclamation of the death of the Lord. From the action itself we turn to the word that must accompany it, and here the Confession's insistence that the minister "declare his word of institution to the people" rests upon a principle the apostle Paul pressed with urgency. In 1 Corinthians 14:19 he writes: "Yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue." The context is the disorder of the Corinthian assemblies, where men spoke in tongues no one could understand and the worship became a chaos of sound without sense. Paul's remedy is the plain declaration of the word in a language the people can hear and understand. And the principle reaches far beyond the gift of tongues, straight into the heart of the Supper. A sacrament is not a magical act that works in silence; it is a word made visible, and the visible word must be joined to the audible word, or it is not understood, and what is not understood cannot feed the faith. This is why the minister must read aloud the words of institution: "This is my body... this cup is the new testament in my blood." Declared to the people, in the common tongue, the words explain the action, and the action seals the words, and the two together become the sacrament. We see the fruit of this principle in the very first days of the church. Luke records of the newborn congregation in Acts 2:42 : "And they continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers." Here is the ordered life of the church in a single verse, and mark how the breaking of bread stands in the company of other ordered things: doctrine, and fellowship, and prayer. The Greek word for "breaking" here is klasis, the same root we met in Mark, and the whole phrase, "the breaking of bread," became the church's regular name for the Lord's Supper. But observe what surrounds it. The breaking of bread is not a thing done in a corner; it belongs to the gathered congregation, to the assembly that continued stedfastly together, and it is inseparable from the apostles' teaching and the prayers of the church. A sacrament torn from the word and from the congregation is a sacrament mutilated, and the early church knew nothing of such a thing. One further text rounds out the biblical pattern, and it speaks directly to the Confession's final clause, that the elements are to be given "to none who are not then present in the congregation." In Acts 20:7 we read: "And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them." Here the Supper is bound to a particular time, the Lord's Day, and to a particular condition, the coming together of the disciples. The disciples came together to break bread; the assembly preceded the sacrament, and the sacrament presupposed the assembly. The Supper is a feast, and a feast implies a company. It is the corporate act of a gathered people, not a private rite to be performed alone or sent out to those who stayed away. These four passages, Mark and Paul and Luke in agreement, give us the whole biblical shape of the administration: the elements taken, blessed, broken, and given; the word of institution declared with understanding; the breaking of bread set in the midst of the assembled, teaching, praying church. What the Confession sets down in ordered clauses is simply the pattern of the New Testament, faithfully read.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines wrote this section with two very different adversaries in view, and a single positive purpose. The positive purpose was to restore the biblical order of the Supper after centuries in which it had been buried beneath error; the two adversaries were the errors that had buried it, one on the right and one on the left, the mass of Rome and the disorder of enthusiasm. Understanding the section requires that we see all three. The first adversary was the Church of Rome, whose mass had inverted nearly every element of the apostolic order. In the medieval mass, the words of institution were not declared to the people at all; they were whispered in Latin by a priest whose back was turned to the congregation, spoken in a tongue the people could not understand, and spoken in a low voice precisely so that no one might hear. The bread was not given to the people in both kinds; the cup was denied them entirely. The priest communicated alone, while the faithful looked on as spectators at a sacrifice offered on their behalf. And the consecrated bread was reserved, carried in procession, and adored as though it had been changed into something it was not. Against all this the Confession raises a quiet, devastating protest: Christ appointed his ministers "to declare his word of institution to the people," to bless the elements, and to "give both to the communicants; but to none who are not then present in the congregation." Every clause is a wound to the mass. The word is declared, not whispered; it is declared to the people, not muttered away from them; both elements are given, not one withheld; they are given to the communicants, not received by the priest alone; and they are given only to those present, not reserved for adoration or sent to the absent. The whole section, read against Rome, is a restoration of what the mass had overthrown. The second adversary was the opposite error, the enthusiasm of the radical Reformers and the Independents, who believed that the Spirit so filled the believer that no outward order was needed at all. If the Spirit was present, why should it matter who presided at the table, or whether the words of institution were read, or in what order the actions fell? Against this the Confession insists that Christ has "appointed his ministers," men called and set apart for this work, and that the sacrament is not a free improvisation but an ordered ordinance. The Divines were not enemies of the Spirit; they were the truest friends of the Spirit, for they knew that the Spirit works through the appointed means and not around them, that a God of order works in an ordered way, and that to abandon the outward order is not to honor the Spirit but to grieve him. Between the rigid ceremony of Rome and the wild disorder of enthusiasm, the Confession walks the middle path of Scripture, where the outward order is neither worshipped as though it saved, nor despised as though it were nothing. Within this double polemic lies the section's most important positive teaching, and it is concentrated in the phrase "to set them apart from a common to an holy use." Here the Divines are teaching the doctrine of consecration, and it must be understood with precision, for upon it hangs the difference between the Reformed Supper and the Roman mass. When the minister prays over the bread and wine, blessing them and giving thanks, he does not change their substance; he changes their use. They remain bread and wine, as truly as they were before, but they are no longer common bread and wine; they are bread and wine set apart, devoted, consecrated to a sacred purpose. The Confession will say this explicitly in a later section, when it teaches that the elements "still remain truly and only bread and wine, as they were before." But the seed of that teaching is planted here, in the word "set apart." Consecration is by appointment, not by transformation. It is the word of God and the prayer of the church that make the elements holy to their use, just as it is the word of God that makes any thing holy. The Divines recovered this truth from Scripture, and in doing so they recovered the Supper itself, for a church that believes the bread has been changed into God will adore it, but a church that believes the bread has been set apart to a holy use will receive it, feed upon it, and give thanks. One further point deserves notice, and it is the parenthesis that many readers pass over: "they communicating also themselves." The minister is to give the elements to the people, and he is himself to receive. This is a deliberate blow against the Roman practice, in which the priest alone consumed the consecrated elements while the people watched. But it carries a deeper lesson as well. The minister at the table is not a sacrificing priest standing between the people and God; he is a fellow-communicant, a sinner saved by grace, who needs the body and blood of Christ as much as the least of those he serves. He gives, but he also receives, and his receiving is the visible confession that the Supper is a feast in which all are guests and Christ alone is host. This is what the Divines meant: an ordered Supper, served by appointed ministers, explained by the declared word, consecrated by prayer and blessing, received by the whole assembled congregation, and presided over by no man as priest but by Christ alone as Lord.

Theological Depth

The principle that governs this whole section, the necessity of the word in the administration of the sacrament, was given its classic statement long before the Reformation, by a bishop of North Africa whose phrase has guided the church for more than fifteen centuries. Augustine taught that when the word is joined to the element, then the sacrament is made: "Accedit verbum ad elementum, et fit sacramentum." The water, the bread, the wine remain what they are; but when the word of God is added to them, when the promise is spoken over the creature, the creature becomes a sign of grace, a visible word. Augustine's formula is the seed of everything this section teaches, for it binds the word and the element together inseparably. A sacrament without the word is a dumb ceremony, a mere piece of bread; the word without the element is a bare promise, a doctrine never made visible. But the word joined to the element makes a sacrament, and this is why the minister must declare the word of institution: without it there is no Supper, only bread and wine and silence. Calvin took up Augustine's formula and pressed it into the very structure of his teaching on the sacraments. A sacrament, he insisted, is a "visible word," a promise of God made visible to the eye as the preaching of the gospel makes it audible to the ear. The word and the sacrament do not stand side by side as two separate things; they are one promise spoken twice, once to the ear and once to the eye, and the sacrament without the word is a sign from which the meaning has fled. This is why Calvin was so severe upon the wordless masses of his day, in which the priest whispered in an unknown tongue and the people understood nothing. A sacrament in which the word is not declared is not a sacrament at all, but a piece of magical theatre, and Calvin would have none of it. The word must be preached, or read, or at the very least declared, in a language the people understand, or the Supper degenerates into an empty show. In this Calvin was simply being a faithful reader of Paul, who would rather speak five words with understanding than ten thousand without it, and the whole Reformed order of worship, with its reading of Scripture and its declaration of the institution, flows from this single conviction. Turretin brought the same conviction to bear with characteristic rigor upon the question of the administration. In his treatment of the Supper, he was careful to distinguish between the substance of the sacrament and the order of its administration, and to insist that both are of divine appointment. The elements must be the ones Christ appointed, bread and wine; the words must be the ones Christ appointed, the words of institution; the officers must be the ones Christ appointed, ministers of the word and sacrament; and the receivers must be the ones Christ appointed, the gathered communicants. Nothing in the whole ordinance, from the taking of the bread to the giving of the cup, is left to human invention. Turretin's point is not that the order is a matter of indifference which may be arranged as the church pleases, but the exact opposite: because Christ appointed the order, the order is binding, and the church has no more liberty to alter the administration of the Supper than she has to alter the Supper itself. The Lord of the feast has set the table, and the servants serve at his direction or not at all. Robert Shaw, whose exposition of the Confession has served the church for generations, unpacks this very section clause by clause, and his comments are a model of pastoral clarity. He notes that the minister's duties in the administration are fourfold: to declare the word of institution, to pray, to bless the elements, and to give them to the communicants. He is careful to insist that the blessing of the elements is not a consecration in the Roman sense, as though the minister by his words changed the bread into Christ; it is a setting apart of the elements to their holy use, a prayer of thanksgiving that the Lord would be pleased to make them effectual to the ends for which he appointed them. And Shaw gives particular attention to the final clause, that the elements are to be given to none who are not present, explaining that this is directed against the Roman practice of reserving the host and carrying it to the sick and the dying, a practice which Scripture nowhere authorizes and which turns the Supper from a feast of the assembled church into a portable relic. On every point Shaw's reading is simply the Confession's own meaning, stated plainly for the ordinary believer. To these A. A. Hodge adds the distinction that guards the whole section from misunderstanding, the distinction between consecration and transubstantiation. The elements, he explains, are set apart from a common to a holy use, and this setting apart is real; the bread and wine are no longer common, but sacred, devoted to a sacred purpose. But their sacredness lies in their use and their appointment, not in any change of their substance. They are holy bread and holy wine, but they are bread and wine still. To say more is to fall into the error the Confession will later condemn; to say less is to fall into the opposite error of treating the sacrament as a bare memorial with nothing sacred about it at all. The Reformed doctrine holds the middle ground with both hands: the elements are truly set apart, truly consecrated, truly holy to their use, and yet they remain what they were, bread and wine, signs and seals of a grace that comes not from the elements themselves but from the Spirit of the living Christ. This is the careful, balanced, biblical teaching of the section, and it is worth more than gold to any church that would administer the Supper aright.

Puritan Application

Let the order of the Supper teach you, first, to be content with the appointed way, and to find in it a strange and holy liberty. There is a kind of modern restlessness that chafes at any fixed form, as though an order handed down were a cage and not a gift. But consider how the appointment of Christ sets you free. When the order is fixed, you need not wonder whether the church has done it rightly, whether some human invention has crept into the feast. You know what will happen at the table, because Christ has appointed it, and you may come to it with a quiet heart, as a child comes to a meal whose table his father has set. Do not despise the givenness of the Supper; it is the mark of a house that belongs to a master, and the freedom it brings is the freedom of a guest who knows his place at the table is his, not by his own arranging but by his Lord's appointing. The church that keeps the appointed order is not the church in bondage; she is the church at rest in the will of her Lord. Let it teach you also to receive from Christ, and not from the minister. The man who stands at the table to break the bread is appointed by Christ, and for that reason you are to honor the office; but the bread he gives you is not his bread, and the grace it seals is not his grace. He is a servant at a feast he did not prepare, a waiter carrying food he did not cook, and when he sets the bread before you it is Christ who feeds you, Christ who is present by his Spirit, Christ who gives himself to your faith. The minister adds nothing to the meal; he only serves what Christ has already provided. Receive, then, with an eye fixed past the servant to the Master, and do not fall into either of the two errors that beset men here: neither to despise the minister because he is but a man, nor to adore the minister as though he were a priest. Honor the office Christ appointed, and look for Christ, and you will neither starve through contempt nor stumble through superstition. Let the necessity of the word teach you never to settle for a wordless sacrament. The Supper is a feast spread for faith, and faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. If the word of institution is not declared, if the gospel is not preached, if the death of Christ is not set before you in speech as well as in sign, then you are asked to eat without understanding, and to feed upon you know not what. Prize the word that accompanies the table as much as the table itself. Listen to the reading of the institution as you would listen to the host of a feast announcing, before the bread is passed, what the meal is and what it means; let the spoken promise of Christ make sense of the bread in your hand and the cup at your lips. And in your own private devotions, never let the sacrament become a mere ceremony to be performed, but let the word and the sign go together, that your receiving may be intelligent, believing, and full of thanksgiving, a eucharist indeed. Let the setting apart of the elements teach you the true meaning of consecration, and then turn it upon your own life. The bread is not changed; it is set apart. It remains bread, and yet it is holy, because it has been given to a holy use. Is this not a picture of what you are called to be? You are not changed into something other than a man; you remain a man, weak and earthly, and yet you are set apart, consecrated to a holy use by the word and calling of God. The apostle besought the Romans to present their bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, and this is your consecration: not a change of substance, but a change of use, a life taken from the common commerce of the world and devoted to the service of the Lord. As you watch the ordinary bread taken up and set apart at the table, remember that the same Lord has taken you up, and set you apart, and that your holiness is not a new nature manufactured by your own effort but an old nature devoted, by grace, to a new and heavenly end. Live as one set apart, and the Supper will preach to you every time you receive it. Finally, let the company of the table teach you that you cannot be a Christian alone. The Supper is given "to none who are not then present in the congregation," and the form of the sacrament itself declares that the grace it seals is a grace for a people, not for an isolated soul. You are one loaf with all who eat of the one bread; you are a member of a body, and the feast you share is a feast of fellowship, the communion of saints made visible in bread and wine. If you have been slack in gathering with the saints, let the Supper call you back. If you have carried a grudge against a brother, let the table break it, for you cannot eat at the Lord's table and despise the Lord's people. Come to the table as one of a company, glad for the brothers and sisters beside you, and there learn the sweet lesson that Christ has not saved you to be a solitary pilgrim but to be a member of his body, feasting with his family until he comes. The table is set for the congregation, and it is only as part of the congregation that you will ever truly taste its joy.

Prayer

O Lord Jesus Christ, who hast appointed the order of thy own table and called thy ministers to serve it, we bless thee that thou hast left nothing in thy worship to our invention, but hast given us a pattern after which to come. We praise thee for the word of institution, declared to thy people in a tongue they understand, and for the bread and wine, set apart from a common to a holy use, signs and seals of thy broken body and thy shed blood. Grant that we may never despise the order thou hast appointed, nor turn it into a superstition, but may receive all things as thou hast commanded, with understanding, with faith, and with thanksgiving. We thank thee that in this ordinance thou thyself art the host, and that the minister who serves us is but a servant carrying what thou hast provided. Keep us from trusting in any man, and keep us from despising the office thou hast set, that our eyes may be fixed upon thee alone, who alone canst feed our souls. Give us a love for thy word that we may never settle for a dumb ceremony, but may ever hunger for the promise spoken over the sign. Consecrate us, we beseech thee, as the elements are consecrated, that our whole life may be set apart to thy service, no longer common, but holy unto thee. And because thy table is spread for a company, bind us in love to all thy people, that we may not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, nor come to thy feast with a heart divided from any of thy children. Draw us together as one loaf, one body, one family, feasting in thy presence, and keep us looking and longing for the day when the shadow of the Supper shall give way to the substance, and we shall see thy face and be satisfied. We ask it for thy name's sake, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Elements of the Supper: Bread and Wine