"Sacred Roots: Q&A on Anabaptists’ Understanding of the Sacraments" by Dean Taylor

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Welcome to Strength to Strength. It's good to have you all here with us today. And our goal in Strength to Strength is to offer resources that will strengthen your obedient, love, faith relationship with our King Jesus, and to give you solid footing in a shaky world.

And I'm really excited about our chat today, our talk today. We have a Q&A session with Brother Dean Taylor on the sacraments, and this is harking back to a talk we had a couple of weeks ago on the sacraments. Yeah, Anabaptist and sacraments coming out of the Radical Reformation. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, Anabaptist and the sacraments. And this is part of our Sacred Roots series.

And so, yeah, we opened it up for questions. We had some time. That was a long talk, really. Dean said he bailed it tight, and he did, but there was a lot to go over.

So we had a lot of questions. We had some questions at the end of that event, and we also opened it up for questions since then. We've had a lot come in, so I'm really excited, and I'm really looking forward to what we have to talk through here today. We're going to be opening it up for live questions. If you're on the call here, you can either submit them through the chat or when we open up, you can give them verbally.

And I think we'll be doing that possibly several points along the way. Just wait for the queue if you're wanting to give a question verbally, and you can do that. But yeah, I think we can—why don't we have a prayer and then dive into this? That was good. Let's pray.

Father in heaven, I thank you for this day. Thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for the way we can connect in this way and be iron that sharpens iron. Thank you, Father, for the communion of the saints in that we can listen to and be shaped by faithful brothers and sisters around the world and throughout history. And I pray, Lord, you'd give us the humility and the grace as we do that, that we can hear what other people are saying, other faithful Christians, and allow that to shape us. Father, thank you for the way you work in our lives through the incarnation. That's a big part of what we're going to talk about here today.

And the way you saw this, the way this world was messed up and not only had a rescue plan, but you yourself came and were the rescue plan, are the rescue plan. And I just pray that you would, yeah, bless Dean with clarity as he addresses these questions. And I pray that we can think about these things well, and that ultimately you'd be glorified. You're the one who's worthy. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Amen.

Amen.

Yeah, so I don't know that we have a lot that we need to introduce Dean if we have an introduction from before. But so Dean's been on here several times and really, like I said before, really it was a blessing to have him on this discussion, the Anabaptists and the sacraments.

Do you have any comment you want to make before we jump in, Dean? Okay.

Yeah, I guess to make sure I'm understood, I think that, again, I don't want to claim that Anabaptism has the only word on discussions of the sacraments or I only read these things. I think that it is a mystery. And so I am very blessed by different writings that surround the sacraments. I cut my teeth on this. When I got out of the army, David Brissot was my mentor. And so my family and I grew up in that environment. And so I found a home within the Anabaptists.

And that was my initial walking through that. In the day, many of you have probably heard our testimony that we went through when I was a young man. You're looking into the ancient churches and diving deep into Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and found that not apostolic, but still very much blessed by that journey to look in deeper and to see some of those nuances that the apostolic fathers would have discussed and that kind of a thing. I also want to bring up that the goal for my, if you want to know my theology in general, is to bring us to the fundamentals that I think are truly from the apostolic faith. And that is a faith in Jesus Christ that's manifested in the teachings of Jesus Christ being put to practice on earth in the kingdom.

And so I enjoyed the discussions on the sacraments and things like the atonement and things like that. However, I think it's good for us, and particularly in a topic like this, that we don't use these doctrines in a factious way.

There are some nuances, and you hear me talking a lot about nuances. Historical theologians typically stand more on nuances than systematic theologians. And so again, I cut my teeth with David Brissot on that same way. But a historical guy looks like, "Yeah, I can see that point, and yeah, I can see that point.

What's the core point?" Instead of a systematic theologian who says there is an exact absolute point that must be kept, I look at it more from a historical theology perspective. So you're going to see that in me. I'm not trying to be wishy-washy. I'm not also trying to be postmodern or anything. I'm trying to bring us to the dogmas that I think are important, and that is Christ. Our salvation is in the person of Jesus Christ and by faith in him manifested in the life of the believer and the church. So I'll throw that out as a disclaimer or, I don't know, a frame, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's great. Thank you, Dean.

I was just thinking about this, the questions coming in and the discussion we're having here on this. Yeah, to those of you who are listening either live or in the recording, it's possible that some of these ideas on the sacraments are new to you. So I get it. I was there once too.

And I just say, just give it a chance if it sounds really weird.

And I think that is the goal and the genius of our Sacred Roots series here is helping us to think in a way Christians have. It can give us new perspective on this because we sometimes tend to approach whatever practical or theological points and feel like, well, the way I've experienced it, the way I live, the way my church sees it, that's the only way of seeing it. That's the only way Christians ever have seen it. It's the only way to see it. And it's just a natural result of that's the environment we grew up in. And so part of growth and maturity just as a human is seeing, "Oh, there's more around me." And so, yeah, like you were saying, Dean, the depth and the breadth of Christianity can help us to think about these things in maybe a fuller way.

So yeah, that's what I would love to see happen through these talks, that we can have a broad and deep view of what is going on and how that relates to our lives.

Yeah. Anyhow, just want to be open and humble to what other faithful Christians throughout the past have thought and practiced in these things, especially as they are important practices of the church. Yeah. Yeah. So hey, we have a question. Well, maybe I'll start out with one question here on sources. I think maybe you actually submitted this one, Dean, that was probably brought to you. It was the question on using Pilgrim Marpeck and Balthazar Hugemeyer.

Oh, okay. I think particularly with Hugemeyer, people question, "Dean, should we be using Hugemeyer?" And it's a fair question. I was going to bring out the Hutter iconicals on this. So Hugemeyer had an interesting life and went back and forth. I mean, he would be arrested with the regular Anabaptist. He'd recant, and he'd recant from his recanting. And then he was very useful when he went up to Nicholsburg and with the Liechtenstein people there in Moravia. And then ended up tempted into going when the Muslims were attacking jihad, coming up there, he said, "Okay, maybe we'll spin this whole sword thing." And he wrote a defense of the sword. And then next thing you know it, two weeks after that was published, he was being arrested and burnt at the stake because of the Catholics' push down from him or two months after, two weeks after, something like that, very soon after.

So the question is, when you read Hugemeyer, the thing is that in the end of his life, and it says this, I was going to bring it out, but in the Hutterian Chronicles, which would have been the very group that was with him that left after the sword part, claims very clearly that he did die as a knight of God, I think is the exact wording he used, repenting and getting his life right and in the faith. So he's an interesting guy. He's an interesting guy because he's very early. He's right there with the original guys in Zurich and everything. He went and got his doctorate degree in theology, so he knows the patristics extremely well.

And I finally started using him more as a student I had when I was up in Boston. I'm Timothy Miller from down in Sarasota. And Timothy said, "You know, Dean," because I was saying a bunch of disclaimers around Hugemeyer, and he said, "You know, Dean, we use Minno pretty freely and are very forgiving of his Christology. But because Hugemeyer dares touch the sword, we throw him out." I said, "Okay."

And that helped me kind of see that, yes, even Hugemeyer repented of, it appears, if we take the Hutterite quote, to recant his recanting of all that and died in the faith. So he had a lot of good to say, and it reflects a lot of good of the early Anabaptists with him. So I think there's a renewal right now. There's an amazing article in a Harvard Theological Review by McGregor. I could give you the links to that on looking at Hugemeyer's real presence theology. And in particular, and this just makes me—I love this idea of he really stresses this concept of the incarnational grace, which I said we were talking about earlier, and that the real presence is manifested in the entire congregation, not merely in the bread.

And he brings this out very nicely in his article. So I think that's something that we can get with Marpeck. I mean, excuse me, with Hugemeyer. With Marpeck, it's interesting. Marpeck was an interesting guy because very much like a modern conservative Anabaptist where he had a personality, yet he worked with—he had an attractive personality, it appears. He was a good leader. He was a leader.

But he also had a brilliance working as an engineer and worked between Strasbourg and Augsburg and different ways the water works and was able to do both a career and was very influential in some of the early Anabaptist discussions. Why it's important with Marpeck is this: most of the arguments are pointed against what Rome was doing. They're burning us at the stake.

What do you feel about this? And they're looking at this and going, "Whatever you guys are doing, it's not Christ." Quoting the kind of 1 Corinthians 11, "When you come together, it's not the Lord's Supper." I'm sorry. You can't be burning people at the stake and call this the real presence. Not happening. So most of the early Anabaptists were directed, particularly the early ones, towards that. Marpeck was in big dialogue with the spiritualists. This is kind of like a proto-before Quaker who basically didn't think any ordinances are needed. No baptism, no communion. It's all just spiritual is what later became in the Quakers.

And so now we're arguing the other way, and you're getting to hear for the first time what the early Anabaptists felt, at least in the Marpeck circles, on these things. And you get some of the most rich sacramental language coming out of Marpeck in that. So it's an important source, I think, to read Marpeck in that.

And so, yeah. And then the Dutch is kind of like a world that's kind of ignored. Some very interesting things. And we had the Northern Holland with Minno and those guys up there. But down to the Waterlanders and all that in Amsterdam, we're still very early. And some of their discussions, even with the English Baptists, back and forth discussing the sacramental theologies and that kind of a thing is interesting in and of itself. So then finally, sources. I look at this as a whole. These guys, it's not like they all went to some seminary and all had the same Belgic confession, Augsburg confessions like the reformers did. These were guys who were writing theology many times on and in a lot of different persecution.

But by the time we kind of finish out that whole thing, about a hundred-year period, bringing in, again, end of that hundred years, we bring in the Brethren movement with the German Baptists and the Amish. The Amish don't write a lot of theological treatises on it, but you do have a rich language in the Osbund. And there's a great article by Arnold Schneider talking about this. And you get this just very rich sacramental theology in just a natural way without a bunch of baggage of Thomas Aquinas' baggage onto that. Just, "Hey, the scriptures are powerful. They're meaningful," and it meant a lot to them. And then with the German Baptists, we're very influenced by now a kind of a resurrection of the early church, some of the writings they were starting to get a hold of.

And so you see them bringing back the love feast, the strong on foot washing. And then particularly, you get very strong language on baptism from them, which I think might have polarized the Mennonites and the Amish after them. But that whole family, okay, that whole family, I say this, I make this argument that I think that these views are within our tradition, and they can be within our tradition. And in the way they are in our tradition, in the sense that I think we can walk through them and not look at them as a divisive way or trying to come up with some reason why you should join my church and leave that church.

This would be the worst thing you could do with sacramental theology. I think we can dig into some deep things with it without that kind of thing. So it comes to sources, yeah, I think those are important ones. And I think that Hugemeyer and Marpeck are both excellent sources. And everybody needs to be read with a grain of salt to the scriptures. But I've really appreciated both of them.

Yeah. That's really helpful. Thank you.

I remember your—I think this is—I think I got this from you originally, Dean. But obviously, you're quoting Conrad Grebel's statement on, I believe, the scripture without a complicated interpretation. And now that I speak, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a great, I don't know, a great motto for us all.

I read a book once. It was a Hebrew. A guy was talking about the Hebrew. It was going on the Hebrew language. I don't remember his name right off the top of my head. And it's interesting. He said, "Where the Greeks thought with the eyes, the Hebrew thought with the ears."

And where he was unpacking that was, you kind of—in the Greek, kind of it's kind of in your head. And you kind of go up your way. And we've talked about this. We'll probably get into it today about Neoplatonism and the idea of thinking your way into theology. Where the Hebrew way would be, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one." And the word of God being preached, the teachings of Christ being practiced, and the receiving of a deposit of faith instead of trying to think your way philosophically up a ladder of faith is the Hellenizing that comes later.

You got guys like Justin Martyr who, I think, bridge it perfectly or not perfectly, but very nicely. Later on, it becomes more and more Hellenized, more Greek-thinking philosophically until you've lost just the basic hearing. "Hear, O Israel. Hear the word of God. Hear these scriptures and just receive them by faith." So yeah. Yeah. It's a good passage. Yeah. That's a good point. So you mentioned Neoplatonism just here. And we had a question come in on that.

Well, here's the question. Your message, you place some emphasis on understanding that in the Reformation era, their arguments were in the environment of Neoplatonism. It's important for us to understand that. It's huge. And let me unpack that just a little bit because I do think it's huge, not just in this doctrine, but in our doctrine of salvation, grace, faith, all that. First of all is this. We have to understand when we discuss salvation, when we discuss the sacraments, we are saved by grace through faith. And that not of ourselves, it is a gift of God. When you remove that element, you destroy everything in the early church and everything else with these sacraments and every—but why that becomes loaded later and before?

So the environment that your first three philosophers, Socrates, Plato, or not first three, but the big three, I'll call them. You got your Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They were coming into an environment that was over-empirical, where everybody thinks was being broken down to just kind of like what we do today with the gods of science, where there's no spiritual. It's atoms.

They were coming against the gods and trying to come up with a philosophy. And so Socrates and Plato started going, "No, I don't know. There's more to life than a cup. There's got to be more." And so they started to theorize that the reality—this is the big point—the ultimate reality of everything, so including this cup, is not this cup itself, but it's in heaven. It's in the heavenlies. So the ultimate reality is in heaven, not here on earth.

So start unpacking that in your works, in your faith, that ultimate faith is up there, not here. Okay? And so that starts playing out in some of these things. Now, Aristotle and the famous painting I showed you, it's one of my favorite places on earth, is in the Vatican Museum in the Raphael Room where they painted. And you're in there. And I showed the 360 of that. You can go online and actually scan through the 360 of this room from the Vatican Museum. And to the right, you've got the School of Athens. To the left, on the mural, you've got the Eucharist from the Roman Catholics there. And then all the other things from the divine canon law behind you and poetry in front of you.

And this is all in a Neoplatonic world. So you see Plato pointing up and Aristotle going down like this. So it's an important point that they thought that they were correcting the Roman Catholics. So Aristotle said, "Okay, Plato, yes, reality is up there. Okay? But it also exists in the cup. The forms are in the cup." So Plato would say, "True beauty, true cupness, true cupness is in heaven." And Aristotle would go, "Yeah, okay, but it's also here." So when you look in that room, you see Aristotle going like this at the same level. If you could 360 over, they've got this big monstrance of the communion saying, "See, Christ is not just in heaven in its reality, but it's also present right here."

And so to them, that manifested their real present concept. It then took, we'll say, "Okay, so if it's right here, where is he?" So then they went through a medieval time of trying to how to explain that he's not walking around when you see the bread.

And it took Thomas Aquinas to say, "Well, even though it changes to the actual reality of Christ, a miracle happens that keeps it from turning into Christ himself." So it's in essence, it's true Christ, but through a miracle, it's not.

And so this was loaded. So when you start seeing the debates on Constant's constantiation through Luther, through Zwingli, the things that were thrown against the Anabaptists, they were all arguing how this miracle occurs. How can you have real presence and it not switch into an actual bloody teeth? And then you get, of course, medieval stories of people's bloody this and all that. You still, to this day, have that.

And all that debate was around this Neoplatonism and Aristotle kind of philosophy. The early Anabaptists kept coming up and going, "Guys," and this is where Marpeck literally says, "Stop the semantics. I don't care what you're doing. What you guys are doing, it's not the Lord's Supper." In other words, you can't have all your apostolic succession and all your apostolic churches and dogmas and everything if you don't have Christ. Read the scriptures. Corinth had everything you would want in all your apostolic things. And Paul says, "Because of their morality, it doesn't count. It doesn't count." And this is where—and this is one of the primary things that I think the Anabaptist view of sacraments needs to bring into the whole ecumenical discussion on sacraments—is that our life matters.

And there needs to be an incarnational grace in the life of the believers, or it doesn't count no matter what you say. But in that world, that kind of—so then when it comes to faith and works, when you see them, you see Marpeck—excuse me—you see Michael Sattler in trial, in a Catholic trial. He's being burned at the stake or tried and about to be burned at the stake. You see Michael Sattler saying, "We're saved by faith alone."

You see him in the Brothers of Strasburg, the Reformed Brothers in Strasburg, and them saying, "Yeah, we agree a lot in these types of things." If you remember reading in the—as far as our salvation, when you read in Harold S. Binder's Anabaptist vision, there's a couple of letters there very early on. And they said, "Yeah, when we were reading Luther and Zwingli and all this about faith, we loved it. But nothing ever changed.

Nothing ever changed." And so this is where the pushback from the Anabaptists to grace. In that Neoplatonic world, Luther could stop, and people could stop, that the reality is in heaven. Your righteousness is only in heaven. And Aristotle would bring it a little further down and said, "No, it may be in heaven, but it also has to be in you. And it's an incarnational grace." So even in this faith, the doctrines of grace and faith, I don't see them talking a lot that we're saved by faith and works. I don't see that in the early Anabaptists.

But I do very clearly see you have to have works following your faith. And that comes everywhere. But all that is in that idea that you could actually have a reality of a spiritual life or a communion or a faith, but it all exists in your head in some sort of theology, some sort of a cerebral heaven thing, and not incarnational, not real in the people of God. And that's the big pushback I see from the Anabaptists, which is needed today too. Right. For sure. Because when we talk about what Neoplatonism is, I'm like, "Well, that sounds pretty familiar to me." Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. The reality is in your head. What you think is what is real. I mean, we have everything from all the way down to gender confusion in our day-to-day that's exactly based on that, in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

To me, when I think about this, one thing that I'm not even sure who I'm quoting here, but someone says, "What our hands do, our heart eventually believes." There's a real link between actually our bodies and who we are inside as well. And sometimes we think that we're disembodied minds or we act like we are.

You're nailing it, Wendell. And this is so important, I think, because if we can stop with just a head knowledge in our theology, whether that's in our salvation or whether that's in the communion, it's still kind of gnostic. I'm sorry. The whole claim against the Gnosticism is that it's not manifest in the incarnation. Now, so if your sacramental theology can stop that the ultimate reality is just up there by a miracle even, you're not quite incarnated. And this is where you get the beautiful thing of Hub Meyer and all that. It's there. It's in the gathered community. We become the body of Christ, not just in the bread, but it's manifested in the gathered community in its incarnational way, which is just amazingly beautiful.

Yeah. Right. Amen. Thank you.

This is Bryant. Any questions or any comments you have? I haven't heard a peep out of you yet.

Wendell, you just keep right at it. I think it's been most efficient if you work through this. I'm here supporting you. Okay. Well, I got something that's coming up that you might have a thought on. But so, okay, this has been fairly—let's make this more practical now. Okay. Okay. So, like I said, it's important.

It is. It has to reach our bodies. Yeah. So someone brought in the question about the practice of the Lord's Supper and frequency. Okay. It's a very good question. Your church only has it once a year in accordance with the Easter Lamb, who is Christ, which the Jews only also kept only yearly at Passover. And my people have adopted this Jewish idea of only doing it yearly. And he asks, "Is that okay? Or will we be condemned for doing it only for not doing it weekly?" It's a good question. Comments, Dean. It's a very good question. I pondered it a lot.

And the thing that I think we have to look at carefully with this question, and when we read Acts and the Epistles, as we read it, we also have to consider things that are a command and a thing that are a testimony of an evidence of how they practiced.

And there is a difference. For instance, let's go to the command. What I see very clearly written in particularly Luke and also in Corinthians, "Do this." Okay. And particularly when you have the Jesus command to do this, we have that as a command.

Well, what's the this? And so my feeling is that at the very minimum, the very minimum, the communion surrounds some sort of a Passover meal that's been brought into the New Covenant.

You'll find some liturgical scholars that push back on that, and they have some decent points. But I think just the natural reading, it's a Passover meal that's now been brought into the New Covenant, and he commands us, "Do this. And when you do, do this in remembrance of me." And so that, I think, is the—so I think that we should—I think it's a command that some sort of around a Passover. I don't think we have to call it Easter.

But somewhere, either by Friday or Sunday, there should be some sort of a meal that obeys that command. Now we go into some of the different examples. So we see in Acts some strange passages. Daily, they shared bread from house to house. Okay? Was that just meals? It could be.

We see different scriptures of how—when I go like this, when I flip over here, does that make my face go away? No. You're still in the screen. Okay. Okay. Good. I have some of these passages I brought up.

Okay. So Acts 27, chapter 20, verse 7 is a good one. "Now on the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul, ready to depart the next day, spoke to them and continued his message unto midnight." So here we have a very clear—it seems like they were on Sunday. They gathered, it says here, to break bread. Now, is it a command that we do that? I don't see that it is. And we have other things in the book of Acts that are like that. It's very clear, at least very early on in the book of Acts, chapter 2 and chapter 4, a community of goods.

And even when I was in all my Hutterite years, I'd always say, "There's not a command for us to live like this." But there is certainly a testimony of living radical economic lives like this is okay. It's not the only way. We see in scripture people say to those who are wealthy, they have to be ready to distribute. You have different ways to express radical economics in the New Testament. But one of them is very clearly community of goods.

And just to explain it away because of this crisis or that crisis, I don't think is being fair to the text. But it's not a command either. And even when I was a Hutter, I never called it a command. So I think that that's important for us to see.

All that being said, I think there's a strong argument to be made from weekly communion. Beltzar Hub Meyer had it in the evening. We see in our earliest Anabaptist documents, the particular one is the Congregational Order, which was probably written up there in Zolichen, which is just right up the road from Zurich. It's the first community. And it says this.

First, it says that they should meet together three or four times a week. And then it says this in Article 7. This is the oldest confession in the Anabaptists. And it says, "The Lord's Supper shall be held as often as the brothers are together, thereby proclaiming the death of the Lord and thereby warning each one to commemorate how Christ gave his life for us and shed his blood for us, that we might also be willing to give our body and life for Christ's sake, which means for the sake of all our brothers."

And when you put that in the theology of martyrdom, that unpacks in a very profound way that we don't quite catch the meaning of his last words there. But the point is, it was more than just on Sunday.

And there's different expressions. So the question asked is, are we going to be condemned by it? For me, I see that the command is, at the very least, that Passover meal. However, I do think a good argument would be a weekly practice. And then when you go into the DDK and Justin Martyr, I think that becomes even more clear. But I don't see it as a breaking of the command any more than some other practices that we get. Another one is—oh, here's one.

On 1 Corinthians 16, "On the first day of the week, each of you lay something aside, storing up as you may prosper, that there be no collections when I come." So to this day, a lot of churches make it—it's part of the service that you pass the basket. So some churches don't do this. But this would be, again, kind of unpacking that Acts model of a testimony of a practice that's not necessarily a command, but it's a testimony. And certainly, we have good historical standing to stand on it. I know that some churches do it in the evening. Some people do it at different times. Some people do it morning. I think Dave Ressaux's church does it before their regular church service.

But I personally see the ultimate command is that we do it. Interesting. Corinthians puts it, "As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me." So it just says. It didn't say—it says, "As often as you do it, do it for this reason."

And so I don't particularly, for me personally, see a command, but I do see a practice that's testimony to it, if that helps. So I don't see somebody being condemned for not having that. But I would encourage as frequently as we can.

So would you say, I mean, from my observation, a memorialist-only perspective on communion tends to lend itself to less frequency?

It depends. Actually, when you look at what—because of their emphasis. So when you start looking at the discussions between the early Amish and the Mennonites. So in their day, by the time you get to 1690, 1700, Jacob Ammon was coming through and encouraging them to do it more frequently than just once a year.

And the emphasis came on how serious it was. And so just the opposite. It was actually not that they were just taking it trivially. "Let's just go ahead and get this done because it's a command and let's schedule this in." It was, "Wow, we are manifesting the presence of Christ. We're going to look at our lives." And they would be looking at that 1 Corinthians 11, perhaps to—I don't know, people can come under condemnation. But I think that they were taking it incredibly serious. And we look at their—I don't think that they were—you don't see them, again, especially with the early Amish, trying to make a memorialist claim. The emphasis was more on that Christ is going to be manifested.

And if we do this wrong, we're hurting ourselves. So I think that's where the debate was.

Yeah. That's—good question. It's a good question. Yeah. And I just say that we have freedom in that. In my opinion, where we have practices, we have freedoms. Like I said, our command is to have—for instance, for economics, our command is to be radical with our money. Radical. And even the quote that I just gave, some people were supposed to have a collection. Okay? So obviously, people weren't living in community of goods wherever Paul hit there in that passage. But we also have some radical examples of community of goods. And so this manifests in practices. And I think if we take those testimonies and use them as blueprints to live it out, there's some beautiful, rich life in that.

But not coming under condemnation or trying to do this in a way that creates more commands that are not actually commands for us. And I guess that's where I would put it. So that brings me to another question that mentions early Christians' Hippolytus and Justin Martyr talking about the kiss of peace as part of the weekly Eucharist. Yes. Thoughts on that?

Yes. Yes. It's funny. Different places that I've lived have had this. It's interesting. So the Hutterites and the Swiss Brethren were weak on foot washing and the kiss of peace. And so as you travel that up, actually, this was something that the German Baptists and the Amish brought much more dear to us. But, oh man, yes, I think it's important. I have the scriptures written down here. I think it's five times.

Romans 16:16, "Greet one another with a holy kiss." 1 Corinthians 16:20, "Greet one another with a holy kiss." 2 Corinthians 13:12, "Greet one another with a holy kiss," etc. It's given as a command.

And unlike he would have mentioned in my other analogy with the frequency, it wasn't like, "And when I was there, they greeted me with a holy kiss." That would be a testimony, a description, not a command. Right? In a way, unless he's just being cheery, "Hey, make sure you give Brother John a hug," unless that's how he means it, which is possible. Let's be fair. It's possible. But it's pretty strong language. And I've had a funny life with that.

I remember because the Hutterites didn't practice that at all. It's totally not been in their culture. But charity and all the early church groups that I've been a part of, it was something very dear to us. We did it.

I remember back in the early days when I was just out of the army, all of us young guys studying with Dave Ressaux, and we were all going to college. And I remember this guy, his Jerry, and we were going to college together, and we'd ride. And I mean, he would be kissing me all the time. I mean, we'd get out of the car, and he'd kiss your—and he'd be kissing, "Okay, Jerry, thanks."

And we were all trying to be very scrupulous with this. And I remember one time we met each other in the college library, and he came over and gave me a kiss. And I was like, "Jerry, I don't know if this is exactly, but hey, we were very zealous for this." And it's something I think in Lancaster County, you see this a lot more. I remember one time—and the Hutterite colonies that I was with were kind of like charity eyes, I use this expression.

They had a lot of influence from the John D. Martin groups, the charity groups, the different Delhaizie groups, and all these people were very influential. So they were around this very much at Elmendorf and Altona, and still to this day are. You wouldn't surprise them to greet them with a kiss. But we drove up to Canada, and I remember when I was up there and visiting these guys who had not been around this at all. And it was one of the converted colonies. And I got out of the car, and I remember we went to the house, and I was greeting these brothers, kind of like we would do in Lancaster County and everything. And I remember this guy was like, "Did you just kiss me?"

I was like, "Yeah, sorry." And he's like, "It totally freaked him out." But yeah, it's a great doctrine. I think it's there in scriptures. We can do it dry. I remember there was a guy in Lancaster County, and this guy, I mean, you need a beach towel after he's done with you. But I think it's a good doctrine, and I think we should—it's there in scriptures. It's there in the early church. And I think we should bring it back.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Hey, Bryant, I would like you to talk—I would like you to say if you have a couple of thoughts on this.

Yeah. Well, this book right here, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church by Alan Crider, which is actually kind of one of our source materials for this series, the Sacred Roots series, talks about the kiss of peace there quite a bit.

And I do really believe that's such a beautiful example of brotherhood. I see the kiss happening in sewers among my Arab friends. A new Saudi friend walks in, and sometimes it's twice. Boom, boom. It's this idea that you're one of us.

That's awesome. And so once you kind of start moving east, the idea of a man kissing a man isn't as rare as here in the west. And so we need to remember that. But yeah, Alan Crider really draws on the early church and some of the purpose of that. And so yeah, with our weekly communion, we do that here, that kiss of peace, and during the course of that communion time. And I found it to be a real blessing and a chance to make things right. It kind of draws everything together, this idea of brotherhood. And if there is something between you, it's—Oh, now you're talking. It's really—it's pretty engaging.

You just hit a very important point there. And this brings it why this is in the sacramental discussions.

That kiss, I can't remember which one of the early Christian writers talk about that if it's not pure, then it's a Judas kiss. And so it's a test of your heart that you're getting right before you partake in communion in a holy way. And that's why we actually—the German Baptist tradition, and the way I pierced when I put the synoptic gospels with the gospel of John and forced those together, that every scene happened, every word of God is true, every scene happened, I put the foot washing and then the communion. Okay? So why that becomes kind of a neat thing, the German Baptists do it this way.

And I don't think there's enough clarity in the scriptures to be dogmatic about it. So let me make that clear. But we did this at Living Hope in Lancaster County. The faith washing becomes a way to kind of make sure you're right. And you're in these circles, and are you right with your brethren? And should you go get right with someone else? And then you greet with one another. And then you then peek out that with the communion. It's beautiful. And you're right, Bryant. The kiss makes a beautiful part in all that that I think is powerful. Yeah.

Yeah. That's really good. Yeah. I would love to see us as kingdom churches pressing into that because it can get lost so quickly. I mean, so quickly. The next generation has to be taught it. It's very difficult. And could we at least, within our communions, do that kiss of peace? It's very much of a familial we be a brotherhood.

That's beautiful. I think you're right. If we would guard it at least at communion, that would be a great way than getting out of the car to go to college. But yeah.

Yeah. But some people think it's so odd for a man to kiss the—and I say, "Wait a minute. Come to sewers and spend a couple of days here with me. You'll see." Yeah. That's a beautiful idea. Yeah. My wife's dad came from Hungary as a refugee, and we would go over there. You're right. Everyone's kissing everybody. And my work on Lesvos Island, the Greeks do that. And yeah. And it's—yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

To you, Wendell. Okay. Yeah. Hey, that's really great. I appreciate those thoughts on the holy kiss. And also your comment about feet washing timing. That's really interesting. I never heard that before, but that's a good thought.

So we had several questions come in from one person. And I'm just going to—he says the most important one is the last one. And I think he's right. And they kind of all wrapped up in that. So it's a question around—he wonders about, okay, if getting baptized, or you could also say practicing the communion, the Lord's Supper, with a sacramental view produces a better Christian experience than someone who was baptized or practices communion with a memorialist view, a memorialist-only view. And he also asked the question, is it—he says he's in a place where he's sympathetic to the sacramental view, but he feels like it's difficult and maybe divisive to try to change other people's minds on this.

And is it important enough that, i.e., people will have a better Christian experience or God will get more glory, that we should still, in spite of the risks, try to lead our people to a better understanding and change their minds about baptism, or you could also say the Lord's Supper? Those are all great questions. I got a call after the last message too, bringing up—I think John D. Martin gave the comment, "Does it matter?"

It happens one way or the other. And so the word "does it matter" can be loaded. I think if we unpack that, does it matter, yes. Is it effectual? Is the bigger question. In other words, if you don't have the right theology in your head when you're partaking of one of these sacraments, does it count? And I would say emphatically, yes.

When I look at the early church, okay, so let's take—I don't see—okay, let me—I don't see a bunch of dogmatic explanations required of the believers to make these things effectual. Let's take, for instance, the DDK. Okay. If you were to look into an Orthodox or a Catholic seminary or books or apologetics or anything, there would be some very specific things that they would want to see required in a theological understanding for it to be effectual.

One in particular would be, well, the words of institution, "This is my body." So if you're not ever even saying, "This is my body," is it? The Greek Orthodox would push more what they call an epiclesis, where there's an actual prayer saying, "Lord, please fill this bread with your Holy Spirit."

And if it doesn't happen, does it count? Is some of the discussions that they geek out into their worlds? Okay. None of those are present in the DDK. And so you have no words of institution. You have no epiclesis.

And you have very powerful, still rich communion prayers without those theological explanations being held there. So I see the emphasis in 1 Corinthians chapter 10 on a communion with the body of Christ. And that's how the real presence is manifested.

And we see—and I brought this up just kind of on the end of the last message, and this comes out beautifully in that McGregor article, the Harvard Theological Review, McGregor on Hubmeyer, is when you ponder that John 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 is the lost Jesus sermon on the real presence, it blows your mind for a moment because you realize, okay, this was the communion sermon from Christ. So we have the sermon on the Mount Sermon, and we have the communion sermon.