When people ask me what the early Christians believed about a given subject, I often reply, well, read everything the New Testament has to say on the subject and give each verse its literal and natural meaning and see what conclusions you come to from the New Testament. That is, of course, laying aside all of your preconceptions.
And the interesting thing is, if you follow that method, I can almost assure you that whatever conclusion you come to, you will find that that's exactly what the early Christians believed as well. In fact, offhand, I don't even know one exception to that rule, that what they believed is everything the New Testament says on the subject, giving the verses their most natural and literal meaning. OK, so let's just try that method on the subject of communion. What does the New Testament have to say on communion?
Now, unlike a subject such as salvation, there aren't a whole lot of verses dealing with communion, just really just a handful. So let's look at them together. The first one I think we'd actually go to would be Matthew 26 verses 26 through 28, where we read a description of the final night, the final supper Jesus had with his apostles. We're not going to read the parallel accounts in Mark and Luke, but I would encourage you to read them as well.
Here we read," As they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said," Take, eat. This is my body." Then he took the cup and gave thanks and gave it to them saying," Drink from it, all of you. For this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." Now, if we take that passage where the communion, the whole practice of communion was instituted. And I asked, what did Jesus say this meant?
I think the only thing we could say is he said this was his body and this was his blood. But most of us, including myself, are raised to believe that Jesus didn't mean that. I know I was, it was instilled in me from the time I was a little boy, that what Jesus was saying was," Take, eat, this symbolizes my body." Drink from it, all of you, for this figuratively speaking is my blood of the new covenant.
Now, even though the verses don't say that, that's what my mind always put there every time I read those passages up until when I read the early Christian writings. But if we're going to see just what the New Testament teaches, we've got to put away all of these things that our various pastors and our books and commentaries and all of that have put in our minds so that when we read the scriptures, we don't hear the natural literal sense of the Scriptures.
Okay, let's go to another passage, 1 Corinthians 10:16, where Paul writes," The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?" All right, so applying that verse. What does Paul say? Communion is when we drink the cup and eat the bread. He said it's communion of the blood of Christ, or as some translations say, communion with the blood of Christ, communion with the body of Christ. All right.
Another passage, 1 Corinthians 11 verses 23 through 27. We read," The Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed, took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said,' Take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same manner, he also took the cup after supper, saying," This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This do as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.
For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till he comes. Therefore, whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. So again, if we take that verse, look at the natural, literal meaning of it, what would we say that communion means? Think again, we would have to say this is his body. This is his blood. And that if we eat it in an unworthy manner, what are we guilty of?
The body and blood of the Lord. Now there's one other passage that we're not going to read right now, but we're going to come back to it a little bit later. But I think that's pretty well covers what the New Testament has to say on the subject, which isn't just a whole lot, and yet it's very consistent and clear in what it says.
Now, actually, I could stop this message at this point because what we've just read is exactly what the early Christians believe about communion, the literal and natural meaning of those New Testament verses that we just read. But I'm sure you wouldn't be very happy if I stopped the message at this point and said, well, that's it. Now you know it. And no doubt you don't want to hear what David Bercot says the early Christians believe, but to hear it from their own mouth.
So as with the pattern we followed on other subjects, I'm going to go through in approximately chronological order and read to you some of the passages from the early Christians on the subject of communion. Now I say some of them. I'm reading you the representative part. There are no passages that I've left out that would present a different view than what I'm reading here. All right, the first one is from Ignatius.
You may remember he was a personal disciple of the apostle John, and he was ordained as a bishop or overseer in the church in Antioch by one or more apostles. This is what he says, writing about the year 105 on his way to being martyred," I desire the bread of God, the heavenly bread, the bread of life, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And I desire the drink of God, namely His blood, which is incorruptible, love and eternal life." It's in Volume 1, page 77.
Again, volume one, page 81." Take heed then to have only one Eucharist, for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ and one cup to the unity of His blood." And what he means by to have only one Eucharist, he means the congregation shouldn't be meeting in different places. And in particular, meeting in someone's house where you might have a Gnostic teacher, that was a threat he was concerned about. Now, those quotations may have really surprised you. They did me.
That was one of the very first works that I read when I started reading the early Christian writings. And I just couldn't believe what I read that he was talking about this in something other than a figurative sense. And yeah, this was right after the apostles. And this was a man who was a personal disciple of theirs and regarded warmly by them. I thought, well, I'm curious what the others will say. Maybe he's an aberration.
So I kept holding that hope out in my mind as I spent that year reading through the Ante-Nicene fathers. Well, another very early work, the Didache, which may actually be earlier than Ignatius, some dated as early as the year 80, some as late as maybe 130. We read, this is addressing God," You gave food and drink to men for enjoyment that they might give thanks to you. But to us, you freely gave spiritual food and drink and life eternal through your servant." And it's on page 380 of, I believe, volume six.
All right, Justin Martyr, volume one, page 185, written about the year 160. He said," We do not receive these as common bread and common drink. Rather, Jesus Christ, our Savior, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation. So likewise, we have been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His Word, and for which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.
So here you have another explanation of communion, which is very similar to what Ignatius expresses. And we're going to get back to the Didache where it calls it spiritual food and drink. And we'll see that the writer there isn't saying anything different than Ignatius and Justin Martyr. Now let's go to Irenaeus. We've moved now from Antioch, the Didache, we don't know where it was written, but it was in the Middle East somewhere.
Justin Martyr was writing in Rome and Irenaeus is was in Gaul, what is modern day France. He was an overseer there, very well respected Christian leader, writing about the year 170 or 180. This is volume one, page 486. And I'm going to read several quotes from him. He says, our opinion is in accordance with the Eucharist. And in turn, the Eucharist establishes our opinion. I should explain at this point the Greek word Eucharist. It simply means Thanksgiving in Greek.
And so maybe the English translation should say our opinion is in accordance with the Thanksgiving, because that's how they would have been reading it. But that's how they referred to communion as the thanksgiving. And we transliterated the Greek word there in English to Eucharist. Irenaeus continues," For we offer to him his own, announcing consistently the fellowship and union of the flesh and spirit.
For the bread which is produced from the earth, when it receives the invocation of God is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly. So also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection to eternity. And again, that was on page 486.
Page 507, Irenaeus says," If the Lord belonged to another father," which is what the Gnostics were saying, how could he, with any justice, have acknowledged the bread to be his body and declared the mixed cup to be his blood while he took it from that creation to which we belong? Let me explain that quote. The Gnostics taught that the earth and humankind and everything material and physical on the earth was created by someone other than the Father of Jesus, by another God, an angry God, an imperfect God.
And as a result, everything is depraved in the material world because it wasn't created by the real genuine God. And so bread, wine, things like that were creations of this inferior God. And so the Gnostics said, well, Jesus would have never said that. Or rather, Irenaeus says, why would he have said that if what you're teaching is true if all of everything in creation came from this other God?
All right, again, from Irenaeus on page 528 of volume one, but if the flesh indeed does not obtain salvation, which the Gnostics said, the flesh isn't saved, then neither did the Lord redeem us with His blood, nor is the cup of the Eucharist the communion of His blood, nor the bread which we break the communion of His body. Again on page 528," The wine and bread, having received the Word of God, become the Eucharist, which is the body and blood of Christ." All right, let me move to another writer.
Now back east to Egypt, Clement of Alexandria, writing about the year 195, he says," To drink the blood of Jesus is to become partaker of the Lord's immortality. As wine is blended with water, so is the Spirit with man, and the mixture of both of the water and of the Word is called the Eucharist, renowned in glorious grace. Those who by faith partake of it are sanctified both in body and soul." Again, that's volume two, page 242.
Right now, we're going to move west again to Carthage, North Africa, where Tertullian was writing. About the year 207, he wrote, he plainly declared enough what he meant by the bread when he called the bread his own body. He likewise, when mentioning the cup and making the New Testament to be sealed in his blood, affirm the reality of his body. It's in volume three, page 418. This next quotation is from Cyprian, who also was in Carthage, but writing around the year 250.
And he's discussing what was happening during persecution that some believers ended up compromising and either offering a sacrifice or doing something else to avoid being tortured and killed. And then they would later repent and would want to be received back into communion or to the Eucharist. And some of the elders or presbyters readmitted them very, very quickly, which Cyprian was unhappy with.
He writes," Those presbyters, contrary to the gospel law, before penitence was fulfilled, dare to offer on their behalf and to give them, that is the lapsed, the Eucharist. That is, they dare to profane the sacred body of the Lord.
However, it is written," Whoever will eat the bread and drink the cup of the Lord unworthily will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord." In that particular situation, Cyprian and other leaders of the church in North Africa had met and decided that anyone who renounced Christ and offered to a pagan idol would have to be repentant for 10 years. They would have to spend 10 years showing a repentant heart before they would be received back into communion.
But then here were these elders who were doing it apparently just after a few weeks or something like that.
Cyprian, again, that last one was volume five page 291, volume five page 347, he writes," They drink the cup of Christ's blood daily for the reason that they themselves also may be able to shed their blood for Christ." He's talking about the ones in prison who would receive communion daily when possible as a help, as a spiritual help so that they would be able to stand firm and shed their own blood for Christ. All right, now we're moving east again to Alexandria.
And this is Dionysius of Alexandria writing about the year 262. Volume 6, page 103, and says," I did not dare to renew afresh after all, one who had heard the giving of thanks and who had answered amen with others. He has stood at the holy table and had stretched forth his hands to receive the blessed food and had received it. And for a very long time, he had been a partaker of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. All right, Methodius, also from the east, writing about the year 290.
This is in volume 6, page 319.
He says," The Church increases daily in greatness, beauty, and numbers by the union and communion of the Word, who now still comes down to us and falls into a trance, like the first Adam, by the remembrance of his passion." And finally, Peter of Alexandria, writing about the year 310 at the close of the Ante-Nicene period, says this," But to those who have been delivered up and have fallen, and have been tormented and thrown into prison, it is right with joy to communicate to them in all things, both in prayer and
in partaking of the body and blood of Christ." That's in volume 6, page 272.
And you could go through the entire 10 volume set and you will not find anybody in the church who expresses a different view of communion than that. Well, you might be wondering, does this mean that the early Christians believed in transubstantiation? Not necessarily is the answer. You see, it's a common misconception among Bible-believing Christians today that there are basically two choices in theology on the communion.
One, you can believe in transubstantiation that is literally the body and blood of Jesus Christ that you're eating and drinking, or two, that it's symbolic, that it's only figuratively his body and blood. But those aren't the only two choices. An alternative is simply to believe what the New Testament says without trying to add any explanation or trying to harmonize it with human reason or the material world.
Just simply, like the early Christian, believe it's the body and blood of Christ without trying to define in what way it is and how all of this works. I'll present to you an alternative view to transubstantiation, which is equally in harmony with the quotes we just read from the early church. And this would be the view of Martin Luther that's sometimes called consubstantiation. And what he believed was not that the bread and wine are turned into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
He believed that they remain bread and wine. And that would certainly fit what our senses tell us. That's still bread and that's still wine in the cup. This is not a piece of flesh that I'm chewing on, and this is not a glass of blood that I'm drinking. But what he believed in giving full weight to the Scriptures is that Christ is present in the bread and in the wine. So that when we partake of them, we do, in some sort of physical way, receive the body and blood of Christ.
But it's not because the bread and wine cease to be bread and wine. It's because Christ is present in there in the bread and in the wine. And like I say, this is sometimes called the doctrine of consubstantiation or sometimes simply the doctrine of the real presence. Now, if that doesn't make sense to you, let me give an illustration that maybe will help you to visualize what Luther was saying. I used to do a lot of work in oil and gas law.
And one day I was visiting a petroleum engineer's office and he had in there what looked to be a cylinder. When I got closer to it, I saw that it was a hunk of stone. I mean, it was in the shape of a cylinder, but it was solid stone. And I asked him what it was. And this was a core sample taken from the drill bit of a oil well of a drilling rig. And he was examining the sample of rock under an electron 3D microscope, which was very interesting. He let me look at it as well.
Now, looking on the outside, I mean, that looked like a solid hunk of rock of sandstone. I mean, very tightly compacted. I mean, you'd say there was no room in there for anything else. But under the microscope. I could see the actual particles of sand that made up that sandstone that were not visible to my naked eye, but they were visible under the microscope.
And what was equally visible is that there was space between those grains of sand that they didn't fill in the total area there of the stone, but rather as they were compacted together, there was airspace between the grains of sand, none of which is visible to the naked eye. And of course, what he was interested in was whether there was, in this case, natural gas there in the sandstone, which you couldn't see with the microscope, of course.
But the fact that there was porosity there, which would be that there were gaps in the grains of sand that allowed room for the gas to migrate there and be retained there. And, you know, before I got into oil and gas law, I had, I remember as a child looking at museums and they would maybe have an exhibit on petroleum technology or that.
And they would show I remember this one diagram, they showed a picture of the underground strata and at the top of the picture was like an oil well, a drilling rig or something and a shaft going down through the different layers of rock. And it showed, you know, the different, the shale and the sand and all these different layers. And then towards the bottom of the picture, it showed this this big void and it was Phil painted black. And the oil well was drawing water out of there.
I mean, water drawing, drawing oil in there. Now, the way that looked to me, and I think to anybody who looked at it, I just assumed there was a big cavern or cavity there underneath the earth that was filled up with oil. And basically the drilling rig went down in there and then they sucked that oil out. But that's not the case at all. There's not some great big cavity down. They're not in any normal situation that what is down there is solid rock, but we will we call it in petroleum. We call it a pool of oil.
But to anyone's eyes who was looking at that, you wouldn't call it a pool. You'd say it's solid rock down there. But the molecules of oil and the molecules of gas are there in among the grains of sand. And so there's one reality that that's just a hunk of sandstone, but there's another reality that that's a pool of oil because they're both there together. Now, this is a lot clearer when I can show you an actual drill bit, an actual core taken by a drill bit. And you can see for yourself what I'm talking about.
If you're listening to this message as a recording, then you're going to have to just visualize a piece of rock in your mind. But see to Luther, this is the way the bread and wine were that. Yeah, it's still bread. There is that one reality. It's bread. Nothing changes. It's still bread. But there's a second reality there that Jesus, I mean, he's not a flesh and blood man now. I mean, he has a supernatural body, a resurrected body that can go through material things.
I mean, he's part of the spirit world now and that he is able to be physically present there alongside the molecules of bread. If oil can do that alongside the molecules of sand in sandstone, well, certainly Jesus Christ is able to do that as well. So that when we partake of the blood of the bread, I mean, we are partaking of the body of Christ. When we partake of the cup, we're partaking of the blood of Christ. How Luther was understanding this. Well, let me give you another alternative view.
Now, another view would be that of John Calvin, which is very similar to Luther's view, but where he would say something different, Luther would say Jesus was corporeally present, physically present in the bread and wine. Calvin would say, no, he is spiritually present in the bread and the wine, but he is present in a real sense, but it's spiritual. Now, I'm not sure how to divide either one of those because Jesus is not a flesh and blood man.
As I said, he's a spirit being right now, although he has a real body, but it's no longer just an earthly body. So I could say, yes, I agree with Luther that he's physically present there. I can agree with Calvin that he's spiritually present in a real way because he is a spirit being at this at this point. He has left the earth. So I'm not sure there's a difference between the two, but I'm not sure that it's a difference that has any real meaning.
And I think either one of those views of either Calvin or Luther are certainly in harmony with what the early Christians believe. This is my body. This is my blood. And no doubt some of the early Christians may have believed as the Roman Catholic view that this has changed into his body and his blood. They don't try to explain it. So it's pretty hard to say, well, what were they meaning in their mind? They were certainly meaning that in some real sense, this is the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
They certainly didn't just take it as a symbol. They viewed it as spiritual food and drink. And spiritual doesn't mean figurative. We read from the Didache where it says this is true spiritual food and drink. They meant this is something a channel of grace, something supernatural that works to our spiritual and everlasting well-being. All right, now let's talk about, well, how did this teaching disappear then? If this is what the church universally believed, and it certainly was what they all believed.
Well, just as we had said with baptism that that disappeared because of the Roman Catholic abuse of it, the exact same thing is true of communion, that certainly the Roman Catholic Church on paper could say, yes, we believe just like the early Christians. On the other hand, they took matters to an extreme. One was this whole teaching of transubstantiation, which certainly would be, I would say, one possible, maybe plausible viewpoint of it, but it's certainly not the only way to take those verses literally.
But insisting on it caused a later reaction against it. But much more important than that, the mass then, well, communion began being called the Mass. And the Mass became the center of a lot of superstitious and idolatrous practices. The communion would be put in a special container often made of gold with jewels called the monstrance. And it was believed that if you wave this over somebody, then they get some kind of spiritual benefit from it.
There were all kinds of stories going about of this miracle or that miracle connected with mass. One story was after mass that morning, a person had something stuck in their tooth and they finally worked it loose and spit it out, landed on a leaf, and it was part of the bread from communion. And the bees saw it and they made a kind of a palace made out of beeswax around it. Other ones was that they put this under a microscope and there was a beating heart there, you know, in what looked like bread.
And a jillion stories that offended the sensibilities of a lot of people because they knew they were just silly superstition. And then the other thing, the Roman Catholic Church, one of the other things that they added so much to it was that it was not just a sacrifice of thanksgiving, but that the priest was offering Jesus as a sacrifice to his father. He was redoing the crucifixion that he was offering to God the Father the body and blood of Jesus Christ a new again.
Every time Mass was celebrated, Jesus is being sacrificed again. I don't know if that's still how the Roman Catholic Church would explain that today, but that was what was being taught in the Middle Ages. And like I say, the idolatry of people bowing down and kneeling before the communion as it passed down the aisle and things like that. I'm not objecting to simple reverence to communion and taking it in a reverence, reverent manner.
But there is a distinction between reverence and where something becomes idolatrous. In fact, it became so much so that the Roman Catholic Church refused to let the people drink from the cup out of fear. Someone might grab the cup and some of the wine would be dropped onto the ground would be spilled. And this would be such a sacrilege. So they quit letting the laity drink from the cup, and that wasn't restored until Vatican II in the 1960s. I mean, that's how far they had gone with this.
And when you look back and read those New Testament accounts, you can see how extremely far the Roman Catholic Church had drifted in this regard. When you read the account in 1 Corinthians, there was a problem there that it was being treated too lightly. people were getting drunk and gorging themselves with food and all that. It was being taken as part of the love feast. I mean, very far from the idea of people kneeling on the ground in front of it or having it waved over them for a blessing.
It was just part of a meal the exact same way Jesus instituted it at the close of a meal. It began being taught that you should not eat anything before receiving communion. That that was unholy to have any food in your stomach when you ate it. Well, the earth of the church never said that. Number one, number two, the scriptures, more importantly, never say anything about that. In fact, they directly contradict it because when was communion instituted at the Last Supper. And it wasn't before they ate.
It was after they ate, according to the accounts that are there in the Scriptures, after they ate. Then he gave them the cup and the bread. So it obviously isn't true that it's wrong to eat it without having fasted ahead of time. But see, all these practices began to be built up. And the result was with the Reformation, many people just overreacted to Rome and went 180 degrees the opposite direction. Now, Luther didn't. He pretty well stayed with what the early church had taught on it.
And Calvin would certainly not be out of line in the early church, but he probably is a little bit too dogmatic in his view of it. But now Zwingli, so he went to the other extreme. It's all symbolic.
In fact, the Lutheran Reformation and the Zwinglian Reformation were unable to unite, which perhaps in the Reformation, there could have been one church, or at least I don't guess that would be possible, thinking of various groups that came out of who would not be willing to work with them with state churches and the different sins that they had held onto.
But at least the Lutherans and the reform could have ended up maybe being one body, except for the issue of communion, that Luther was not going to compromise on the view he held to. And certainly he would have both scripture and historic reference on his side. Zwingli, on the other hand, had seen enough of the idolatry of the mass, and he didn't want any part of that. And so as I said, he taught it was all symbolic. When Jesus said, this is my body. He meant figuratively speaking, this is my body.
And I would guess that is the predominant view among Bible believing Christians today. And by that term, I mean evangelicals, anyone else who believes the Bible is inerrant and who base their faith on it, that the majority probably hold to the Zwinglian view that this is nothing but a symbol. And it's often treated very haphazardly in a lot of churches. Now, again, the setting in the New Testament is not anything like a Roman Catholic mass. It is a pretty informal way that it is done.
So I don't know that we have to have the exalted reverence that you see in some of the high churches. But on the other hand, we should at least be aware that this is something very sacred that we're dealing with and not something you take lightly.
I guess the question I always come back to in my mind is if this was just supposed to be meant figuratively, why is it that all of the Christians after the period of the apostles, they all believed that there was a reality to this is my body, this is my blood that none of them said this is simply figurative. It seems hard for me. It's hard for me to believe that a teaching of that magnitude could be lost so quickly and you didn't have any controversy or anything like that with regard to it.
I think you know the truth is their view is scriptural, it's reasonable. The problem is how it was perverted by the Roman Catholic Church and then the overreaction to that as a result. Now, I mentioned earlier when we read to the Scriptures that there was one New Testament passage that we handled. And I want to read that right now. It's from John chapter 6 verses 51 through 55. And here Jesus is speaking. He says," This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die.
I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.
He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him. Again, that's John 6:51 through 55. Now I was taught growing up that all of that, that's not even referring to communion. Jesus was talking about something else entirely different. He's just talking about that we have to feed on Him in faith. And we do that when we read the Scriptures, when we meditate upon His words, that sort of thing. That's what he means by eating his flesh and drinking his blood.
He's not even talking about anything to do with communion. Well, and I accepted that without question. But after I saw how the early Christians viewed communion and when I went back and read the New Testament and came across this passage, I saw that that was sort of a strange interpretation that I grew up with. I think anyone reading that without any preconceptions and knowing about the Last Supper that you would logically put these two things together, that he says this about eating my flesh and drinking my blood.
And then when you get to the Last Supper, he hands them the bread and says, this is my body and hands them the cup. This is my blood in the New Covenant. So I think it would be a logical sequence. That's what Jesus was talking about here in John 6:51 through 55. And that's how the early Christians understood it. Now, some of them, like Clement of Alexandria, who certainly believed in the real presence, we read a quotation or two from him. He also understood this passage.
He understood that it had a figurative meaning as well that we can feed on Jesus when we drink in his words from Scripture and that sort of thing. But Clement didn't deny the literal application of it as well. He just felt it had two different meanings. Ignatius, who we read at the beginning, I'll read again chapter one, chapter one, volume one, page 58 of the Ante-Nicene fathers.
He says," Breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality and the antidote to prevent us from dying so that we should live forever in Jesus Christ." Well, that was strange to my ears when I first read that.
And yet when I went back to the New Testament, what Ignatius says fits so much a belief in the reality of what Jesus said, that in the communion, we, through some supernatural manner, not through some magic or something like that, but I mean, to some spiritual reality, something beyond flesh and blood that we commune with, we partake of the body and blood of Jesus Christ in some manner that is beyond our human senses.
And by feeding on His divine body and blood, and I think that's the key that we quit thinking about a human and think about the divinity of Christ, and we are partaking of His divinity in some real way when we partake of communion, it's no wonder that Ignatius would call it the medicine of immortality. Those are Jesus' words. Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you. There is no way you're going to live eternally except by drinking my blood and eating my flesh.
And this explains why Paul says some of you are dying, are sick and are dying because you don't perceive the body. It was that serious of a thing. Cyprian wrote, volume 5, page 452, he says that whoever will eat of his bread will live forever. So it is clear that those who partake of his body and receive the Eucharist by the right of communion are living. On the other hand, we must fear and pray lest anyone who is separate from Christ's body, being barred from communion, should remain at a distance from salvation.
For he himself warns and says, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. You may be wondering, well, wasn't there somebody in the early church who are in that time period didn't believe that this was really the body and blood of Christ. They didn't believe in the real presence. They thought it was all symbolic.
As I said, I don't know of anybody in the church who expresses that view, but there was a group outside the church who did believe that that this could not possibly be in any kind of literal or real sense the body and blood of Christ. This group were the Gnostics. And I commented earlier when I was reading to you from Ignatius or rather Irenaeus that he talks about the problem they have with the Eucharist because they believe that everything in the material world was created by this inferior god.
And so everything is naturally corrupt. That's part of the material universe. So material things cannot in any way, in their theology, be used by God to affect man's salvation. And it's an interesting thing to keep in mind because I'd have to say some Protestants, and I'm using that term very generally, I should say maybe some non-Catholics go almost to that same extreme as the Gnostics.
They've reacted and overreacted so much to the errors of Rome, which made almost everything work through physical stuff and almost created a type of white magic that through this, you know, holy water and this thing and that thing and images and all of that that they brought God too much, maybe in the physical world, destroyed His majesty.
And some of Zwingli and others have gone, I think, too far the other way, where they don't want to believe that God can work through His own creation to bring about salvation to mankind. Everything has to be on a spiritual plane. And this is the way the Gnostics believed. Everything was on a spiritual plane. Everything dealing with salvation. Even Jesus had not ever actually become a human because if he had taken on real flesh and blood, that would be assimilating the wicked creation of this other god.
And so he only appeared to be man. He wasn't really man. Ignatius wrote about them, and this is, you know, right at the end of the period of the apostles. He says," They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not believe the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior, Jesus Christ." I think we want to be careful that we don't fall in the same situation as the Gnostics. All right, let's move now from the theology of what the communion meant to how they celebrated communion.
Well, the first thing to take note of is that the early Christians celebrated communion every Sunday. And in some instances, they may have done it even oftener than that. In the book of Acts, we read how they broke bread from house to house every day. And probably the expression breaking bread refers to communion as well as a love feast that at the beginning, Christian worship centered around a meal, the love feast and community.
Justin Martyr, when he describes what they do every Sunday when they meet together, he gives us this description. This is in volume one, page 185. He says," Having ended the prayers, we greet one another with a kiss." Then there is brought to the president of the brethren, that is whoever was presiding, the leader, bread and a cup of wine mixed with water. He takes them and gives praise and glory to the father of the universe.
And when the president has given thanks and all the people have expressed their assent, those who we have deacons give to each of those present the bread and wine mixed with water over which the Thanksgiving was pronounced to partake of. And they carry away a portion to those who are absent.
And this food is called among us the Eucharist or Thanksgiving, and no one is allowed to partake of it, but the one who believes that the things which we teach are true and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins and unto regeneration and who is living as Christ has commanded. So as Tertullian explained, they had a closely guarded communion.
It wasn't closed in the sense that only someone from that congregation could partake of it, but they were not indiscriminate on who they would let partake because they realized what a serious thing it was to partake unworthily and they wanted to guard that that wouldn't happen accidentally from someone wandering in. So it was only open to baptized believers who were in good standing in the congregation.
And if you visited another congregation, which was very common there, there were travelers, just as we have travelers today. The normal practice is that you would take with you letters of communion, a letter from the overseer or elders in your church stating that you were in good standing and were admitted to communion. And with those letters, you could go then to any other church and receive communion there. There was, to a large degree, autonomy of each congregation, and yet it was all one church.
It wasn't divided like it is today among believers, that there's all these different churches teaching so many different things. In the early church, they were able to stay one and communion was was worldwide. Now, something I want to clear up that you might come across and you have probably heard it in some of the quotes I've read to you. And that is that the early Christians sometimes refer to the Eucharist as a sacrifice. Well, what did they mean by this?
Well, we often have the misconception today that the word sacrifice means that something is being killed. That it's become, I think, the normal meaning of the word. If you hear something, a sacrifice, you assume someone or something is being killed. But that's not what the word meant in Greek or in Latin. Our English word, or even originally in English, our English word sacrifice comes from two Latin root words, which means to make, and sacer, which means holy. So sacrifice meant to make holy.
It was something that would bring grace, that had a spiritual benefit to the person participating in it. The root meaning of the word doesn't have anything akin to killing. That's only one type of sacrifice, a blood sacrifice where someone was put to death. Now, the early Christians did not think they were re-sacrificing Jesus Christ. I mean, that thought never comes into their mind. They call it, as we saw, thanksgiving, the Eucharist. It was a time of thanksgiving.
The sacrifice they talk of and they look to the prophecy in Malachi, how the people of the nations would bring a pure sacrifice in his house. And they apply that to the Eucharist. This is the sacrifice that we bring to the Lord. It's a sacrifice of praise. It's a sacrifice of thanksgiving. I mean, the people brought the bread and the wine that was used for a communion. And so in that sense, it was an offering. But in return, they received something much more wonderful from God.
They received true spiritual food and drink in the Eucharist. So that is what they mean by sacrifice. They don't mean we are killing Jesus all over again. But because the Roman Catholic Church adopted that theology in the Middle Ages that most of us are now real gun shy, we hear the word sacrifice. We think, uh oh, this is something terrible. And that's not what they're meaning. And there's no reason we have to be afraid of that word just because somebody else has misused the word.
Tertullian wrote," Concerning the days of stations, which were the fast days, most think that they must not be present at the sacrificial prayers on the ground that this station would be dissolved by reception of the Lord's body. Does then the Eucharist cancel a service devoted to God, or does it bind it more to God? Will not your station be more solemn if you have stood at God's altar?
When the Lord's body has been received and reserved, each point is secure, both the participation of the sacrifice and the discharge of duty. So I was reading that as an example. It's in volume three, I believe, page 687. Again, he talks about sacrificial prayers, the sacrifice, the altar. Again, it's not talking about sacrificing Jesus Christ. It's talking about offering up the bread and wine as a sacrifice.
Origen, we also eat the bread presented to us, and this bread becomes by prayer a sacred body, which sanctifies those who sincerely partake of it. Again, back to the real meaning of the word sacrifice and Cyprian, but may fortify them with the protection of Christ's body and blood, for the Eucharist is appointed for this very purpose. So it wasn't magical. If you weren't partaking of it worthily, it was something that would bring detriment to you.
But to partake of it in good standing with Christ, it did, they believe, have a spiritual benefit that it was a channel of grace. Well, before leading this subject, I want to comment on two objections that are often brought up to me. One is back there in John, where Jesus said, unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you have no life in you. Many have said to me, well, but later he said, my words are spirit and life. So, you know, he was speaking in a spiritual and a figurative sense. Well, what did Jesus say?
He said, my words are spirit and life. He didn't say my words are symbolic and figurative. He said they're spirit and life. In other words, don't look at this in a carnal sense that you're going to grab Jesus arm and start gnawing on it or something like that. The carnal sense isn't going to get you anywhere, but his words are spirit. They're truth. There is a spiritual reality in what he said.
And the second one is, he said," Do this in remembrance of me." And I've heard it said it was taught to me growing up that, see, he was saying, do this in remembrance. It's simply a memorial, an event by which we remember that Jesus died for us. Well, the Greek word there that is translated in our Bible's remembrance is anamnesis. I'll read to you what Vine's dictionary, which is certainly not a Roman Catholic work, what it says about this word, a remembrance.
In Christ's command in the institution of the Lord's Supper, it means not in memory of, but in an affectionate calling of the person himself to mind. What is indicated in regard to the sacrifices under the law is not simply an external bringing to remembrance, but an awakening of mind. It's been explained to me that the Greek word there has a sense of reparticipating in, that when we receive communion, we participate in the sacrifice made for us by him. We don't reoffer him. He was offered once for all.
That's done and accomplished. But we participate in his death, that that is the great sense of the word anamnesis that we don't have an exact equivalent in English. Remembrance doesn't quite get it because when we think of remembering someone, we do think of it in an external sense. We don't have that sense of actually mentally, spiritually participating in something that has already happened. OK, in conclusion, let's sum up what we see.
We've seen that the Scriptures never refer to communion as something symbolic or figurative. Rather, Scripture expressly says that communion is with the body and blood of Christ. Jesus said," This is my body. This is my blood of the new covenant." We've seen that the early Christians believe that very literally and exactly without trying to explain it by complex discussions on transubstantiation and things like that.
We also have seen that the early Christians understood Jesus' words in John 6 about eating my body, drinking my blood to be referring to communion. And I think the majority of the Reformers understood it that way too. And finally, we've talked about how consistent with Scripture, the early Christians believe that communion is a channel of grace. It's a wonderful, glorious provision that Christ has made for us. No wonder the early Christians called it Eucharist. Thanksgiving.