Tag Archives: Tradition

The Table of the Lord: When tradition gets in the way

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In looking at our views and teachings on the Lord’s Supper, we need to recognize another outside influence. Besides our U.S. culture, we are also affected by religious culture. The American Restoration movement was not born in a vacuum. It came out of Protestantism which in turn came from Catholicism. Ideally, all of our views came from the Bible and the Bible alone, but that’s just not the case. The fish doesn’t know that he’s wet. It’s hard to see the impact that our environment has on us.

Our assemblies betray us. So much of what we do reflects centuries of church traditions. This in and of itself is not wrong, yet its dangerous to fail to recognize the influence those traditions have had on us. The format of our assemblies, the songs that we sing, the furniture we use, the standardized communion trays… all of these things show an outside influence. Have our views toward the Lord’s Supper remained unaffected? Personally, I think not.

That influence can come from acceptance of what others have done or can come as a reaction to what they’ve done. I think that the Catholic view of the Supper as a reenactment of Christ’s sacrifice has had a strong influence on our making a funeral atmosphere the standard ambience for taking the supper. The view of the Supper as a sacrament has led many to place an emphasis on the act of taking the Supper each week, to the point that many come, take the Supper and leave; we offer Sunday night “make up” communion for those that missed Sunday morning. As for reactions, we can see that the controversies over the elements (are they literally the body and blood of Christ?) have led us to emphasize the symbolic nature of the elements.

Again, I turn to you for help on this point. How do you see us as having been influenced by the beliefs and practices of others concerning the table of the Lord?

Signs that your congregation is part of a bigger history

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You’ve probably heard it too. Some Christians claim that their congregation doesn’t have a past, that it is only connected to the church of the New Testament and not to any other. If one suggests that the church of Christ stems from the so-called “Restoration Movement,” they resist the idea violently. “Everything we do comes from the Bible and only from the Bible. We are free from human influences.” Don’t talk to them about church history, don’t talk to them about being influenced by culture, don’t suggest that they are doing anything different than what was done in the first century.

For most of us, to not say all, for most of us, it’s just not true. There are clear and obvious signs that what we do stems at least in part from what we’ve learned from others. If your congregation does any of these things, it can’t claim to be free from human influence:

  • If you sing songs that are sung in other congregations, you didn’t get those from the Bible.

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  • In the same vein, if you have a song book, you must have gotten it from someone.

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  • If you have a song leader, that’s an “innovation”; the New Testament says nothing about that.

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  • Does your church meet in a room with seats basically facing forward, looking toward a place where “the speaker” stands?

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  • If you’ve got pews, well, that’s a sure sign of outside influence.

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  • Do you pass the Lord’s Supper around in trays?

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  • How about an invitation song? There’s definitely not one of those in the Bible. Nor is there a “closing prayer.”

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  • Dare I point out that having a bound Bible isn’t biblical? Using a Bible in book form, with chapters and verses, is a sure sign of having been influenced by people outside of the biblical writers.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. None of us is free from the past. None of us is free from the influence of our culture.

George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” [Yeah, I know… that appears in lots of different forms] Until we admit that we have a past, admit that we’ve been influenced by others, we’re locked into an endless cycle of influence. After a time, we fail to recognize which influences are human and which are divine.

Let’s embrace our past, deal with it, learn from it, and use it to help us recognize what’s Bible and what’s tradition in what we do.

Collecting money in 1 Corinthians 16

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“Now concerning the collection for the saints: as I directed the churches of Galatia, so you also are to do. On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper, so that there will be no collecting when I come. And when I arrive, I will send those whom you accredit by letter to carry your gift to Jerusalem. If it seems advisable that I should go also, they will accompany me.”

Having beaten the topic of breaking bread into the ground, I want to look at a text that is somehow strangely related. In countless tracts, we find 1 Corinthians 16:2 paired with Acts 20:7 to prove unequivocally that Christians met for a worship assembly on Sunday and only on Sunday. And that one of the authorized acts of worship is giving. (For those who may be unfamiliar, the teaching goes that the authorized acts are not only allowed, but must be present in the main assembly each week)

Interesting passage this one. If I were to read all of 1 Corinthians, I would have to conclude that Paul is instructing the Corinthians about something new. Note that he doesn’t say “as I instructed you before.” No, this is something that he has shared with the Galatians. He doesn’t say “here’s what I want you to do with the collection that you take each week.” No, he tells them when to take a collection. It’s a new instruction, not something that had been taught to them as a normal requirement.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that this passage is legislative, that Paul is laying down rules for all places and all times. Using the laws of approved example and silence, let’s make a brief list of what those rules would be:

  1. This collection was “for the saints.” Any use for non-saints is prohibited by silence.
  2. We also see that this collection was for the saints in Jerusalem. Any use for non-Jerusalem saints is prohibited.
  3. This collection was for saints in another geographical area (as are all collections mentioned in the New Testament). Collecting money to be used locally is prohibited.
  4. These collections were to end before Paul went to Corinth. Any continuation of collections by Christians are thereby prohibited.
  5. Monies collected are to be held until Paul’s arrival. Any prior disbursement is unauthorized and thereby prohibited.

It’s interesting to me that we can take a brief mention of a short-term, special collection and somehow extract “laws” for the modern church. It’s a wonderful example of Christian generosity, of how the church should come together to meet a specific need such as the famine in Judea. The procedure used is no more normative than the practice seen several times in Acts of selling goods to raise funds for the local church. One could easily argue that a garage sale is as scriptural as the Sunday collection and even moreso when applied to funds destined to be used locally.

But that wouldn’t suit our purposes, so it’s much easier to mold 1 Corinthians 16 into something that it never was.

I sometimes wish I’d taken the blue pill

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If you haven’t seen the movie The Matrix, you won’t recognize the reference. At one point in the movie, Keanu Reeves is offered a choice: take a red pill and come to see the reality of life in the Matrix or take a blue pill and go back to peaceful ignorance. Reeves takes the red pill, of course, or there wouldn’t have been much of a movie. One of the other characters later says to him: “I know what you’re thinking, ’cause right now I’m thinking the same thing. Actually, I’ve been thinking it ever since I got here: Why oh why didn’t I take the BLUE pill?”

As I look at my life, I sometimes wish that I could have taken the blue pill. There was a time when I knew everything, especially when it came to religion. The main thing that I knew was who to get the answers from. If there was something that I was unsure about, I could find someone at church to tell me what to believe. We had an exclusive lock on the truth, an exclusive lock on salvation. People that didn’t agree with us were either ignorant or rebellious. Anyone who honestly studied the Bible would come to exactly the same conclusions we had arrived at.

Somewhere along the way, I swallowed the red pill. I learned that there was a difference between studying the Bible and studying what someone said about the Bible. I learned that many of the views that I saw so clearly in the Bible could only be seen there if you started out with those views. I also learned that the Bible is living and active and refuses to be dominated by man; the Word of God must master us; we will never master it.

I sometimes look longingly at life under the effects of the blue pill. A friend encountered a preacher, a 35-year-old scholar, who had written a book on biblical interpretation. My friend asked the man if there was any chance that he was wrong about anything in that book. The confident author replied: “No.” He had come to an understanding on everything, and his mission in life was to help other people come to that understanding. Part of me envies that. Part of me thinks that evangelism would be easier under those circumstances. It’s cut and dried, black and white. You’re in my circle or you’re out. You agree with me or you’re wrong. Unfortunately, I no longer see the world that way.

The whole premise of the Kitchen of Half-Baked Thoughts is that I don’t have all the answers. The more I study, the more questions I get, so I share them with my intelligent friends, hoping for insights. I don’t really want to go back to a blue pill life, but I sometimes long for its simplicity. Yet I know that I’m better off digging and searching, looking for God’s truth, listening for God’s voice, being willing to put aside previous beliefs in favor of eternal truths. It’s definitely the harder life, but there’s no going back.