The Scottish Reformation Just Called: It Wants Its Ascetical View of the Sacraments Back

However, as central as Bible reading and prayer are to the cultivation of one's relationship to Christ, neither of these practices fits the images Jesus uses in John 6-7 as well as another common Christian practice, the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist. Jesus is speaking here of eating and drinking, and while it is true that Bible reading, prayer and other Christian disciplines are ways of eating and drinking from Christ, the one rite of the church that involves literal eating and drinking is the Lord's Supper.

Donald Fairbairn, Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Fathers

What's amazing about this passage is that Fairbairn wrote this text as a professor at a Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church seminary: a denomination that maintains the spirit of the Covenanters in 21st century America. The spiritual ancestors of Fairbairn threw stools at Hooker's and Laud's disciples.

And yet in this passage, he essentially recapitulates what Martin Thornton calls "the Rule of the Church." Fairbairn is clearly nervous doing so, because he realizes he is proposing something innovative to his "evangelical" audience. And yet he does it.

It may help to reflect upon history to see that the view Fairbairn takes is a classical Presbyterian view. John Knox considered the Mass superstitious. He was particularly explicit about denying the Mass was a sacrifice. (I feel more sympathetic to Knox than I once did about the position he took in the debate discussed here on 28 September 1562 . But Knox (nor Calvin for that matter) were memorialists. The Lord's Supper was not performed solely as a memorial or in mere obedience to the Lord's command. Instead, Knox saw its ascetical purpose:

First, we confess that it is a holy action, ordained of God, in the which the Lord Jesus, by earthly and visible things set before us, lifts us up unto heavenly and invisible things. And that when he had prepared his spiritual banquet, he witnessed that he himself was the lively bread wherewith our souls are fed unto everlasting life.

And therefore, in setting forth bread and wine to eat and drink, he confirms and seals up to us his promise and communion (that is, that we shall be partakers with him in his kingdom); and he represents unto us, and makes plain to our senses, his heavenly gifts; and also gives unto us himself, to be received with faith, and not with mouth, nor yet by transfusion of substance; but so, through the virtue [power] of the Holy Ghost, that we, being fed with his flesh, and refreshed with his blood, may be renewed both unto true godliness and to immortality.

And also [we confess] that herewith the Lord Jesus gathered us unto one visible body, so that we are members one of another, and make altogether one body, whereof Jesus Christ is the only Head; and, finally, that by the same sacrament, the Lord calls us to remembrance of his death and passion, to stir up our hearts to praise his most holy name.

John Knox, 1550, Summary of the Lord's Supper

In fact, in terms of ascesis , Knox might have had a higher view than his Roman Catholic opponents. Most Roman Catholics prior to the Reformation were taking communion twice a year (correct me if I'm wrong). They were going to Mass regularly sure, but their ascetical practices saw the core of their participation not in eating and drinking but "gazing" and "carrying about" (paraphrasing Articles XXV and XXVIII, 1979 Book of Common Prayer, pp. 872-873). Communion every month to three months would have been an improvement.

Roman Catholic encouragement of the practice of daily communion was a genuine response to the ascetical concerns of the Reformers but not the theological ones, of course.

I therefore find Fairbairn's insistence on evangelicals recovering the idea of the Lord's Supper as an ascetical practice of literal regular eating and drinking to the Body's renewal to be encouraging. I'm far more interested in holding the outline of ascetical discipline in common with the evangelical church than detailed theological positions. The first points us all to organic unity with Christ. The second only points us to a tenuous and perhaps impossible intellectual unity with one another.