February 16, 2010: No Holy Communion Until You Have Been Baptized!

I believe I shocked an adult Sunday School class last week by mentioning an ancient and standard practice of the Christian church that has been so neglected in North American evangelicalism that its re-introduction prompts bewilderment and protest. I refer to the policy of restricting the Lord's Supper to baptized believers.

The key word is baptized. I'm pretty sure that all Christian traditions agree that only believers should eat the bread and drink the cup. If an atheist or a Muslim came to a Eucharist celebration and said, "I want to participate in this ritual even though I don't accept Christianity," I'd like to think that he would be told - politely but firmly - "No, I'm afraid that would not be appropriate." In the Lord's Supper we "proclaim the Lord's death till he comes" (1 Corinthians 11:26), that is, we confess till the Parousia our faith that Jesus died to save us. For an unbeliever to announce that would be a lie. We also take the elements in order to "remember Christ" (1 Corinthians 11:24), that is, we call to mind and give thanks for his blessed sacrifice on our behalf. No unbeliever can "remember Christ" this way. We also "examine ourselves" before partaking (1 Corinthians 11:28), and any unbeliever's honest self-examination would lead him to acknowledge that, since he disbelieves the Christian faith, it would not be right to make a public proclamation of it.

So why not just leave it at that? Believers and believers only should partake of holy communion, and whether you've been baptized in addition to that - as an external sign of internal belief - shouldn't make any difference. Faith, not the water ritual that expresses faith, should (alone) qualify you for participation in holy communion.

Here's the problem with that.

First of all, the New Testament never views baptism as an option for Christian believers. It is a commandment. Jesus commanded his disciples to baptize (Matthew 28:19), and when Peter first preached the gospel, he commanded the crowd to "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins" (Acts 2:38). Those who believed the gospel obeyed the command, and 3,000 were baptized that day (verse 41).

I have often felt that the distinction between "option" and "commandment" is not adequately appreciated in some Christian circles. An example may help. In Christianity, marriage is an option. Though Jesus extols singlehood in Matthew 19:12, and Paul favors it in 1 Corinthians 7:32-35, we are also taught that a person who marries "has not sinned" (1 Corinthians 7:28,36), and Paul positively excoriates those who forbid marriage (1 Timothy 4:3). So the choice between marriage and singlehood is completely up to you. However, the choice between faithfulness and adultery (or chastity and fornication) is most certainly not up to you. There are commandments about those things (e.g. Exodus 20:14 and Hebrews 13:4). So, while a man does not defy God when he exercises his option to marry, he does defy God when he sleeps around with people he is not married to.

Baptism, for the Christian believer, is not like the option of singlehood or marriage. It is like the commandment of chastity or faithfulness. To be baptized is to obey God, and to refuse to be baptized is to disobey. If a professing believer chooses to remain in a state of unbaptism, he must be made aware that what he is doing is raising a fist of defiance in the face of the Almighty. Someone will say, "Oh, I never viewed my refusal to be baptized as an act of defiance." Well, start viewing it that way. Repent and be baptized. How long will it take for you to submit to this commandment of God?

In the Bible, it never takes believers any time at all to obey the command to be baptized. That is my second point. Baptism is indissolubly and immediately linked to the grace of conversion. Read the book of Acts, and you will see that, without exception, every convert gets baptized on the same day the gospel is explained to him and he responds in faith. People get baptized in a ditch by the side of the road, or in the middle of the night, or before they resume eating after a 3-day fast. There is no such thing in the New Testament as an unbaptized believer!

The saved-but-unbaptized thief on the cross (Luke 23:40-43), frequently invoked as an exception, really isn't one. I am grateful to professor Murray Harris for explaining this in a lecture at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Harris pointed out that the thief next to Jesus could not have undergone Christian baptism even if he had come down from the cross and been dunked in a pool before being re-crucified. That is because, in Christian baptism, we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection (Romans 6:3-4). When Jesus saved the penitent thief, he himself had not yet died and risen again. So Christian baptism didn't exist yet. There was only the baptism of John (see Acts 19:3-5). Therefore the generalization holds without exception: all Christian believers in the Bible undergo baptism immediately upon conversion. The only legitimate reason for not getting baptized, then, is because you are not yet a believer.

This understanding of baptism, which I came to late in life - in my 30s, in seminary - helped me to understand the early church's abhorrence of serving communion to the unbaptized. For example, the Didache (possibly the earliest non-canonical epistle we have, dating to the first century) reads in chapter 9 verse 5: "But let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist, unless they have been baptized into the name of the Lord." The writer(s) of the Didache understood something we have lost: Christian people get baptized - all of them do, right away. To serve holy communion to an unbaptized person is to serve it to someone who, for whatever reason, has not yet acknowledged Christ.

On a personal note, I pulled aside Dr. D. A. Carson in the hall at Trinity one day and asked him if a person must be baptized before being permitted to partake of the Lord's Supper, and he responded with enthusiasm, "Yes! Absolutely!" It was a short conversation, but I took the point. (Please excuse my name-dropping, because, as some of you know, Carson may be the top New Testament scholar in the world, literally, so I guess what I'm saying here is that if you disagree with me you're disagreeing with Carson, and he's so smart it's not even funny.)

On an even more personal note, I myself was a "spiritual fornicator" in this matter for several years because I just didn't know it was wrong to take communion before getting baptized. (I started partaking around 12, I think, and got baptized at 15.) I now call that spiritual fornication because it is so perfectly analogous to the physical kind. Baptism is like exchanging wedding vows, and the Lord's Supper is like sex. In both cases you should do the first thing before you do the second thing. Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli famously compared baptism to a wedding ring: just as a ring identifies you as a spouse, so baptism identifies you as a Christian. We can go further: just as the ring should go on your finger on the day you get married, and be in place before you begin "communing" with your husband or wife, so also the waters of baptism should douse your body on the day you profess faith in Christ, and before you begin to engage in holy communion with him and the people of God.