Several days ago, I saw a post on The Gospel Coalition website concerning paedocommunion and the arguments against it from a paedobaptist perspective. I read that article and had a particular thought about it, but decided to resist the urge sharing it. But I saw Tim Challies linked to the same article yesterday. Having seen it again, and had the same thought again, I decided I could resist the urge to say what I thought a bit less. You can read the article in full here before reading this.

Now, before I go on, let me admit an assumption here that I held before I read that article and why I was interested to read a refutation of the position from a paedobaptist. My view is that the covenant signs scripturally hang together. I believe that baptism and communion are both covenant signs that belong to covenant members. If you baptise someone because they’re in the covenant (as you judge it) then you should give them communion, the other covenant sign, too. One is either in the covenant or they are not and therefore should be in receipt of the covenant signs or not. On this, Credobaptists and Paedocommunionists agree (is that the correct term? We’ll run with it. Paedocommunicants can’t be right because that would be the infants admitted to the table, right? Alas, I digress). It is the paedobaptist-sans-communion view that therefore needs to do a bit of explaining on my view. So, I read the article with interest.

The article lands hard on the interpretation that ‘discerning the body’ necessarily means the human body of the Lord Jesus. I disagree with that view and agree with the reasons ascribed to the paedocommunion position, along with some others not mentioned, concerning the body being the corporate body of God’s people. Context, as they say, is always king and context is pretty clear both in the immediate passage and the rest of the letter that ‘the body’ is the people and the lack of unity among them is the specific concern Paul is repeatedly addressing, particularly here concerning the supper. The individualist interpretation of the post is contextually unconvincing.

However, the post says this:

Proponents of paedocommunion often interpret 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 to say that the Lord’s Supper is a family meal, and that Paul’s main point is to rebuke disunity that prevents people from coming to the table. “Body,” they argue, refers throughout this passage to the church as Christ’s body. So long as covenant children can recognize and promote the church’s unity, they should share in this meal.

The problem with this argument is not that Scripture never speaks of the Lord’s Supper as giving expression to the fellowship of the church—it does (see 1 Cor 10:17). The problem with this argument is that it makes fellowship the exclusive (or primary) purpose of the Supper. In doing so it effectively eliminates the Supper as a memorial of Christ’s death for sin and as a believing participation in the crucified Christ. Paedocommunion requires a radical overhaul of the nature and meaning of the Lord’s Supper.

And here is where my particular thought kicked in.

The argument the post makes against ‘body’ being the church – which is not well made contextually in the first instance – is to argue that this understanding makes fellowship the exclusive (or, at least, primary) purpose of the supper. But that is not a contextually compelling argument, nor a textually compelling one, against the understanding of the term ‘body’. It is simply to argue that this cannot mean the body of believers a priori because other things are going on in the supper as well. But that argument only works if there is no way for the church to affirm communion as a corporate meal of fellowship and for it to function as having other purposes too.

Of course, the article is writing against paedocommunion. The argument is compelling if you accept that there will be people who cannot discern anything or examine themselves adequately. But the problem is that is fails contextually. The fact that throughout 1 Corinthians the issue of the body of believers is in view repeatedly, the issue in the supper is that the members are not having any concern or thought for the other believers they are eating with and, indeed, humiliating other believers. Even just one chapter earlier, Paul has repeatedly talked about communion functioning as a making the many one and in Chapter 11 itself falls over himself to repeated ‘when you come together’. But it seems no matter how clear and contextually evident ‘body’ means the church communally here, this reading must be rejected because it doesn’t fit other assumptions about the text.

The question is, can one uphold the contextual reading of ‘body’ here as meaning the church communally – which paedocommunion advocates clearly recognise – whilst still maintaining that the supper is also a memorial of Christ’s death and a believing participation in the crucified Christ? Can anybody think of a possible way to make sure that those who partake of communion are remembering Christ’s death for them, participating in a believing way in the death of Christ and ensuring that all members of the church can rightly join in? Is there a way to do all that and still not drive a wedge between the covenant signs and those who belong to the covenant? If anyone can think of one, perhaps you can let me know…