My hope is that at least some of this debate will take into account the warnings in I Corinthians, about the harm in approaching Communion in an unworthy manner, not "discerning the body of Christ."

Paul uses this idea in two ways: the real presence of Christ in which we "participate," and the presence of Christ in the body of the church (which the Corinthians despised by segregation and factionalism).

I Corinthians is our most detailed Biblical discussion of Holy Communion, and it warns that it "ceases to be the Lord's Supper" when the body of the church is not recognized, and that there is spiritual harm when the presence of the Lord is not recognized by the one receiving.

That doesn't directly say "Baptism must come first," but it certainly gives weight to the identity value in Ms. Evans' article.

Tfountain - please sign your name next time you comment. Thanks~ed.

"This is the table, not of the Church, but of God.
It is to be made ready for those who love God
and who want to love God more.

So, come, you who have much faith and you who have little, you who have been here often and you who have not been for a long time, you who have tried to follow and you who have failed.

Come, not because I invite you: it is God, and it is God’s will that you who want God should meet God here."

The inclusiveness of the invitation to receive the Holy Eucharist seems very clear in its spirit as to reveal its intent, that "all are welcome".

-Rob Smith, III
St. Stephen's
Richmond, Virginia

Thanks for both of your comments. I hope this issue at GC is not a "debate"--rather a heart talk. As I said earlier, my one criticism of the book is that it is framed as if it is a "debate"--with a side that gets to "win" being "right," and a side that has to "lose" being "wrong." The more I hear the stories of the faithful, the more I become aware of the many permutations of how we got from point A to point B in our spiritual lives.

What sometimes seems to be missing from the discussion is the word "hope." We baptize infants in the hope they will grow in faith and remain in our spiritual community. We commune people in the hope that the act of receiving the Sacraments and participating in the Eucharistic mystery transforms them. These do not seem like they always have to be either/or propositions to me. Our prayer book is rich with precedent in terms of having a "preferred" action in the rubrics, yet making room for individual and community differences. My hope is we can find a way to hold both identity and inclusion in the balance.

As one of the contributors to this book, I have to confess that if I am going to err, it will always be on the side of inclusion over identity, hope over despair, grace over law.

Thanks for this essay, Maria, and for ECafe for printing it. My hope is not to convince anyone "yea" or "nay" but to provide an opportunity for people to more deeply reflect on the divine gift and mystery of our Baptism and Bucharist.

Maria, thank you for this inviting piece. As another contributor to the book you read, I'll gladly admit to responding to a debate move - someone writing that anyone inviting all to communion could have no theology of baptism. If what I wrote suggested that I was now offering The Theology of Baptism, I missed the opportunity and continued the debate.

What you've done here (and what I attempted in the piece I wrote for the current Anglican Theological Review) invites us to listen to experience. It does seem clear to me that people are experiencing (and meeting) God in Christ by the Spirit in both practices. Some of us are finding the Eucharist's power as a converting sacrament and have baptized numbers of people who came to church longing for communion. What does that contribute to our theology of baptism and Eucharist? Others have found the received and established order creates another converting and formative dynamic. Those two experiences need to be in conversation not debate. Thank you, Maria.

Thank you both, for contributing to the book! I tend to be a bit of a speed reader and I have to admit I slowed down and read every essay with rapt attention. Hearing our stories seems to be an important aspect of delving deeper into these theologies, I think.

This is definitely a matter for greater discussion rather than absolute mandate to conform. I also pray that we can have conversation rather than debate. I don't see either position denying that the power of the sacraments is the power of God. Even when I disagree with the conclusion of many of the essays, I also find myself agreeing with the arguments that I feel could also support my own position. Thank you for your call for real conversation. This is not a struggle to win or lose. This is yet another example of our wrestling with a lived experiences of worshiping communities. That life of community is also the power of God. May we reverently follow where that power takes us.

John Mark Wiggers
Knoxville, TN

Two issues are implicit in the post. First, a healthy working relationship between a bishop and clergy entails trust. Although examples exist to the contrary, most bishops trust their clergy; sadly, clergy seem warier of their bishops. Rigid enforcement of rules recreates the Pharisaic legalism that Christian theology so often parodies. One of the treasures of the Anglican tradition has been, and hopefully will continue to be, an emphasis on pastoral inclusivity and sensitivity that allows ample space for “bending” rules when they seem to conflict with God's love.

Second, life inherently entails vulnerability. The Church will always have a handful of “bad” bishops and clergy, regardless of who defines “bad.” If nothing else, this vulnerability is a reflection of both human autonomy and brokenness. Attempts to eliminate all vulnerability succeed only in imposing inordinate, destructive legalism. (To read more, cf. http://blog.ethicalmusings.com/2009/09/further-thoughts-on-civility.html.)

Holy Baptism is the rite by which God incorporates people into the Church. God loves, even saves, those outside the Church. But they are not part of the family of God that we call the body of Christ. No organization can exist without boundaries that establish who is and is not a member. Holy Communion is the feast of God's people who are part of the body of Christ. Exceptions, boundary transgressions, and other issues do not herald the end of the world or even a minor catastrophe. But clarity about the sacraments and our identity as the body of Christ is essential for organizational health. Changing the policies that govern the sacraments is no panacea for our fundamental organizational problems of malaise, numerical decline, and loss of mission focus.

Thank you both for your comments--I appreciate what both of you say. One point of clarity: My impression after reading the book "Water, Bread and Wine," was that no one was suggesting anything about communing people prior to baptism as being a possible "panacea for our fundamental organizational problems of malaise, numerical decline, and loss of mission focus." My impression of the book is that all the authors are keeping this strictly at a theological and experiential level.

I think what has struck me about the discussion is that, unlike many of the discussions we hear prior to GC, people seem more comfortable than usual about discussing this as a call to conversion more than a debate to be won or a point to be defended.

I admit that, because of the institutional nature of my job, I tend to think along institutional algorithms, yet in hearing the conversation, I have felt strangely disarmed regarding a need to "defend a viewpoint." It's strangely interesting...and freeing.

George,

To what you offer here as self-evident statement of fact:

"Holy Baptism is the rite by which God incorporates people into the Church. God loves, even saves, those outside the Church. But they are not part of the family of God that we call the body of Christ. No organization can exist without boundaries that establish who is and is not a member. Holy Communion is the feast of God's people who are part of the body of Christ. "

I offer (as I often do) St. Gregory of Nyssa's assertion that the Body of Christ is all humanity. I know you don't agree with that but Gregory's witness as one of the theologians who crafted Trinitarian theology and helped shape the present version of the Nicene Creed makes a more than respectable counter-statement from the heart of our tradition. I hear echoes of Gregory in "the mystical body of Christ which is the blessed company of all faithful people" (old BCP and Rite 1) and in the promise from the baptismal covenant to "seek and serve Christ in persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.".

It is possible to argue that recognizing Christvin the who is moved to accept an open invitation to communion is precisely discerning the body of Christ.

I'll readily admit that my experience growing up pre-Vatican II in a fundamentalist setting where we were taught that our Catholic school friends were not Christian and headed to hell unless they "accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior," a setting where my Catholic friends were told my best hope as a non-Catholic was limbo makes me very wary of even the most genial declaration that we're God's family and others then non-evangelicals or non-RC's, now the unbaptized are NOT God's family troubles me.

All the talk about experience is making me wonder, exactly what kind of experience is the Church supposed to promote?

A lot of what this sounds like is closer to an altar call. All are invited to the altar to confess their sins and receive the holy spirit, which can be a powerful experience. The problem is, as I see it, is that it encourages the idea of salvation as a button that needs to be pressed, then it's all taken care of. But what happens when there is no experience, or when the initial high eventually fades? How does the Church continue to nurture people after they convert?

I kind of see the traditional way as directing the convert into a more gradual, measured process. Strong emotions are one thing, but they aren't necessarily the way to go. Mystics, such as those in the Philokalia, frequently warn their readers to treat physical sensations during prayer with suspicion: it's easy to confuse that with the movement of the Holy Spirit, when really it's something else. It may be important to emphasize that you don't really need to feel anything when you take communion or get baptized. What truly matters is the person's ongoing journey of discipleship, toward union with Christ.

What especially matters is prayer. Sunday worship is a relatively small part of the Christian life, compared to a personal prayer life, bible study, and personal moral transformation. Maybe instead of giving the unbaptized communion, they should be given prayer books, and taught the offices. Anglicanism is built on common prayer; before we talk about communing or baptizing, how about teaching newcomers about our way of common prayer, so they can make a more informed decision about us down the line?

-Alex Scott

Thanks for your comments, Alex. You bring up something important about the word "experience"--that it can be interpreted as a single event rather than a process. The "altar call" in some denominations does hinge largely on a single event as evidence of salvation.

I can only speak for myself here, but when I am using the word "experience" I am talking about a broader story, and really, one that can only be understood by the passage of time and by analogy--and even then, all analogies break down at some point.

I totally agree with you that we should be handing out prayer books and be willing to teach anyone who will listen about our deep roots in common prayer, and I think common prayer is part of the heart and lungs of who we are as Anglicans. That said, if I had a starving person show up at my Thanksgiving dinner table, I certainly wouldn't hand them a book on the history of American Thanksgiving and say, "When you can understand what's in here, I'll feed you."

I think there is room for all of it in a theology as deep and wide as ours.

With all due respect to Gregory of Nyssa, whose early and lonely opposition to the institution of slavery should likely earn him a jewel in his crown, it is important to note that the Fathers have to be read with care -- no less than the Scripture. Gregory tends to some of the Origenist positions, and it seems to me this question of who is part of the Body of Christ is a case in point. The question that has to be asked is, "Is this teaching consistent with the rest of Christian doctrine on the subject." The answer would appear to be negative.

One can find all sorts of "peculiar" notions in the writings of the Fathers, and it is important to compare these singular notions against the deposit of faith. Sometimes the authors are speculating, sometimes erring. Even the best of them can fall into this.

Ultimately this whole discussion devolves to the primary question, "Does Baptism make a difference or not?" In that light, it is not unlike the controversy over baptismal regeneration that split the church in the late 19th century, when the Reformed Episcopal Church was formed in part on the basis of rejecting the objective change in a person as the result of Baptism. So that part of the discussion is not new.

While I see absolutely no reason to "card" people at the altar, I do not at this point see a systematic theological justification for reversing the normative sequence of initiation followed by communion.

Tobias, yes, Gregory was an Origenist as were many of the great teachers of the church in the East (and maybe later Western teachers influenced by them like William of St. Thiery and Lady Julian of Norwich). And yes, we need to read one another, including ancient and esteemed sister and brother Christians, with caution. My concern isn't to argue the Christian West to rehabilitate Origen, but to caution us to be careful about declaring a consensus or settled opinion where historically (affirmed by calendar and ongoing influence as teachers) we have held conflicting beliefs. It matters to me that the theological dilemmas and opportunities of universalism are consistently a part of our tradition, because I genuinely do not want to explore this territory apart from our tradition. Origenists of various kinds have been one faithful voice all along, not The Traditional Answer because I don't think we're in that territory, but a consistent and faithful voice in the Tradition.

It is excellent that these discussions are really ramping up, and they must continue until some sort of consensus emerges. However I feel we are called to move this discussion to the desert, to a Lent-like relinquishing of our accumulated ways in order to discover what in the world we are really talking about, and what it all means.

The Eucharist is an extraordinary Thing that defies our attempts to put It in neat categories for ease of control - which to me is evidence of It's participation in divinity in some way. We have some folks who want a "Everybody is welcome at the banquet, y'all come!" emphasis to be our primary way at looking at the Sacrament, and others for whom It is a way of marking who is a Christian and who is not. I believe that either way we go, we MUST affirm that neither Baptism nor the Eucharist is complete without the other, that neither are to be approached lightly or unadvisedly, or without discerning the Mystery signified.

Concerning the Eucharist, there IS power here, divine and uncontrolled, and reception of the Sacraments WILL forge connections and spiritual influences that cannot be undone. I cannot believe that words of invitation like "If you are hungry, come to this table" are adequate or useful, but rather are misleading and careless with Something far more wonderful and terrible, nothing less than the very Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world, Whose sacrificial efficacy cannot be exhausted, will never run out, and is still partaken of under the appearance of bread and wine for the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation of the world until He comes again, whatever that means! It really is that, nothing less, but many of us don't want to believe it anymore. But this is what our Bibles and Prayer Books and volumes of Church Fathers and all the rest have to say about Something that was around and working in a spiritually powerful way before any of that was ever written. This should be all so clear in all our witness that literally after all is said and done, the Table fences itself, not due to canons or confirmations, but due to the Thing Itself.

Having just taken a look at Gregory of Nyssa's Sermon On the Baptism of Christ and his Catechism, it seems clear to me that he would have found communion apart from baptism problematical. He seems in these documents to be clear that the body of the faithful, the Body of Christ, subsists in those who are baptized. By analogy he references the eucharist, which before it is blessed and sanctified, is "common bread" but once blessed and sanctified by the action of the church becomes the Body of Christ.

I think these teachings, consistent with the normative understanding of the interrelationship of the two great sacraments of the gospel, have to be taken into account.

Clint,

I simply agree with you that baptism and eucharist are grace-filled, transforming encounters with the living God. I take comfort in your saying, "...reception of the Sacraments WILL forge connections and spiritual influences that cannot be undone." Clearly enough we've come to terms with that in baptism. What if an infant baptized grows up and abandons the church community and adamantly rejects everything it stands for, do we say, "the baptism didn't take?" I think instead we trust God that in making these ritual offerings of God's unmediated presence we're engaging God's relentless work of drawing the world to God's self.

From my experience as a missionary priest in Eucharistically-centered congregations at deeply skeptical places like Yale University and urban San Francisco, I have seen the eucharist's remarkable almost magnetic power. Blessed, Jesus said, are those who hunger. The saying says two things to me - one is that any reckoning of God's blessing on an outcome of prosperity reckons on another God besides the God of Jesus and of slaves' deliverance from Egypt. The other is that God blesses our deepest hunger and desire with more than we know to ask for, and that is exactly what happens, baptized or not, to someone receiving communion.

Sara Miles, whom I had the privilege to baptize some months after her first communion writes eloquently of what many others experience:

"I came late to Christianity, knocked upside down by a midlife conversion centered around a literal chunk of bread. The immediacy of my conversion experience left me perhaps freakily convinced of the presence of Jesus around me. I hadn’t figured out a neat set of “beliefs,” but discovered a force blowing uncontrollably through the world.

Eating Jesus cracked my world open and made me hunger to keep sharing food with other people. That desire took me to an altar, at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, where I helped break the bread for Holy Communion, then to a food pantry that I set up around the same altar, where we gave away free groceries to anyone who showed up. From all over the city, poor people started to come every Friday to the church–100, 200, 450, 800–and like me, some of them stayed. Soon they began to feed and take care of each other, then run things, then start other pantries. It was my first experience of discovering that regular people could do Jesus’ work.
–Sara Miles, from the introduction to her book, Jesus Freak.

My experience is that few people take an invitation to communion lightly. We did our best to make it clear that we were offering invitation in God's name, not compulsion. People made their choices, regularly came back for more, chose to be baptized, and continued to grow in faith, commitment, and practice. Sara's story of the food pantry continues to the present, a dozen or so years later. Now, each week, 500 hungry people lining up to receive seven tons of free groceries in the most beautiful, joyful free grocery, gathered around the altar at St. Gregory's. Sara has also become a remarkable preacher and teacher, anchors (with a couple of other lay people) the daily morning prayer at St. Gregory's, and manages the whole church's (clergy and laity's) active engagement in day to day pastoral care.

Along with the book Maria's reflecting on here, the current Anglican Theological Review has three articles (Ruth Meyers', Bishop Tom Breidenthal's and mine) share your perspective of sacramental realism while engaging the question of the missionary relationship between baptism and eucharist from differing perspectives. My article is substantially telling a story - how a priest and congregation in missionary circumstances came early (1982) to the decision to invite all to communion. I think that 'how' matters because it is the argument of the Book of Acts. As Acts offers a story of lowering the threshold to the community and inviting unexpected people in, our work in mission at Episcopal Church at Yale and at St. Gregory's, San Francisco pushed us to a conclusion and practice that we were not seeking but in which, consistently we seemed to find the Spirit at work.

Tobias,

Your addition is useful. I wasn't meaning to claim that Gregory of Nyssa taught or practiced the Eucharist as a converting sacrament, only that the core of his theological framework, an early and mature Trinitarian theology that's not interpreting our condition or experience in the terms of original sin, gives us a voice within the tradition for interpreting 'discerning the body' or 'seeing Christ' or 'serving Christ' in every person in a wholly coherent way. St. Paul, after all, gives us an eschatological hope and vision of Christ all in all and Episcopalians of many different persuasions are familiar with describing the Eucharist as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. The question our secular and multi-religious setting is posting freshly for us is just how fully realized our eucharistic eschatology is. Clearly there's a breadth of response in the tradition. And on this important question, I know I'm NOT in territory where I can or even want to say, "I know I/we are right about this." Clearest I can get to is something more like,

"It feels clear to me and many others working in missionary settings that the Spirit may be asking us to risk explicitly and openly inviting all to the Table. There seem to be strands of scripture and tradition that point to this possibility. We're glad for that continuity because we also know a break like this is risky. And here in the voices of people finding the sacrament DOES effect conversion and who DO seek baptism, and here in the voice of communities practicing an eschatologically-realized Eucharist as Jesus' beginning the feast in Isiah 25, here's what we're learning from the practice."

Can we look at the practical as well as the theological argument on a baptism requirement? Practically speaking-how would you enforce this rule?

Would you have bouncers waiting to trunce you back to the pew if you came forward un-baptised?

Will we tattoo a mark on you indicating baptism?

Will we start issuing cards you will be required to show as you approach the rail?

Will our priests and deacons start asking "Are you baptized" just before your receive the Body of Christ or the Blood of Christ?

All this theological discussion is valid, please do not misunderstand, but the practical application of theological discussion should be included in any discussion.

Troy,

As I understand it, the question is whether to alter the rubrics so that all persons are invited (as some parishes already practice) or whether to leave things as they are. I have never heard anyone suggest a bouncer, a checkpoint, or a tattoo. I've never even heard a genuine express concern that unbaptized people might receive Eucharist if they come to the rail. I presume this happens. I think it's just fine. The question is whether we invite all people regardless of baptism as a general practice--and the issue is the implications of that particular practice for our theology.

I think what most people who oppose CWOB want to see is the continued practice of inviting all baptized Christians to communion, communicating anybody who comes to the rail, and conscientious discipleship that would encourage a deepening spirituality--beginning with baptism for the unbaptized.

To be frank, the idea that anybody in this discussion wants to put a bouncer at the door is a caricature.

Annie Bullock.