This second lecture, I want to take up another related major topic. We have started with Warfield, and we've said he had this beautiful balance between orthodoxy, right thinking, and right acting, and he saw that preaching surrounding the Lord's Supper was the way to bring those together. And so we've gone back from Warfield, we went back to take a broad sweep of Reformed history in thinking about Orthodoxy, and now I want to turn our attention to the Covenant. And when we get Orthodoxy in front of us, and thinking about the Covenant in front of us, then I want to bring it back around again to the Lord's Supper. One more major topic must be explored before we can understand the significance of the Lord's Supper, and that's not just the covenant, but covenant conditionality. Without an understanding of the covenantal relationship that God makes with us, it's impossible to appreciate the warmth with which God continually draws us to Himself. without a covenantal understanding of the sacrament. Not only will our observance of the supper be perfunctory, but daily life with Christ will be perfunctory, if not resentful. If we don't know that God loves us, we're not going to live in a very loving and attractive way. I say to my congregation regularly, there is not a problem in my life. Let me say it positively. Every problem in my life would either be solved or put in its proper perspective if I really believe that God loved me. Now I know intellectually He loves me, but if I really believe viscerally that He loved me, there's where the supper touches us. Our church's agonizing struggle over the tension between justification and sanctification, between law and grace, conditionality and unconditionality, is not a new one. I want to review that history with you and then demonstrate how preaching and serving the Lord's Supper consciously, within a covenantal framework, will result in a healthy gospel culture. In the Reformed tradition, the shape of orthodoxy in tendency to subjectivity or objectivity, outwardness or inwardness, has been tied to debates over the conditionality of the covenant. The basic question in these debates is focused on whether recipients of the covenant of grace actually participate in it, that is, whether they only receive it or perform some necessary conditions in it as well. I don't think I said that very well. Let me go back. The basic question in these debates is focused on whether recipients of the covenant of grace actually participate in it. That is, whether they only receive it or whether they perform some necessary conditions in it. One reason this question came to the forefront was the evolving definition of covenant as a contract or compact. This is something the Puritans were guilty of. They had defined, most of them had defined the covenant as a contract. That is an agreement between two parties. And what devolved out of that was, well, if there's an agreement between, we know what a contract is in our human relationships, and that is that one party has responsibilities, the other has responsibilities, and if either one fails, then the deal is off. Early theologians of the Covenant, Bollinger, Ursinus, von Maistrich, and Vitsius used such terminology as their point of departure. The primary focus in the debate was the relationships among faith, repentance, obedience, and perseverance in the Covenant. None of these early Reformed theologians believed that the covenant could benefit man without these graces. But essentially the problem was how to harmonize the fact that the promises of the covenant are described both as unilaterally given by a sovereign God and conditionally granted upon the required responses of faith and obedience. So to put it this way, in the Bible is the covenant, the covenant of grace, is it conditional or unconditional? The answer is yes. It's like so many of our biblical doctrines, they require a biblical mind to believe them. Does God make salvation dependent on evangelism, or does God sovereignly save those whom He will? Yes. Does God provide for your needs before you know them, or does God say you have not because you ask not? Yes. It is to hold true's intention that are not paradoxes but antinomies. They are laws that seem contradictory but they are held together in God's mysterious mind. That's why I said you develop both as far as you can from Scripture and you sing the doxology over where the two interact, intersect. Let's talk for a moment about conditionality, this idea of conditionality between medieval theologians, the magisterial reformers, and the Puritans. The continuity that extended from Calvin to later English Puritans, particularly on the issue of the covenant, also continued through later 18th century theologians and ministers, particularly Gilbert Tennant. In regard to conditionality, Calvin, and later Bullinger, described a unilateral covenant, that is, a beneficent action initiated by God without any constraint by any force outside of His will. At the same time, they described its outworking in history in terms of bilateral language, that is, language which simultaneously upholds God's sovereignty and man's responsibility. That is not to give the impression that Puritans, later on, were uniform in their convictions regarding the conditionality of the covenant. Their perspective moved along a continuum, too, between conditionality and unconditionality. There were the antinomians, like John Saltmarsh and Tobias Crisp, who represented the unconditional end of the continuum. That is, if you say that there is any condition whatsoever to the covenant, then you are being a legalist. Neither of these men would allow that faith or repentance could be considered conditions in any way. On the other end of the continuum, in the Puritans, were those who distinguish between a covenant of redemption, that is a covenant between the Father and the Son before history, and a covenant of grace between God and man. Proponents of that view included Thomas Blake, Daniel Williams, who argued that while the former was unconditional, the covenant of redemption between God and His Son, the latter was conditional upon faith and repentance and perseverance. They were concerned that one who espoused the doctrine of unconditional covenant would neglect repentance and inadvertently promote licentiousness. How much of our preaching in theology is developed like that? If we tell people this, this is what they will do. Whereas Paul in Romans 6 says, what shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace might increase? God forbid. He goes all the way up to antinomianism. and stops, of course, with the gospel. Thus their concern for the objective preservation of orthodoxy and orthopraxy of the church. I'm not going to talk about... I'm going to skip that same part that I skipped last time, if you don't mind. I thought, if it doesn't interest me, it won't interest you. We'll say something about Jonathan. Jonathan Edwards wished to arouse his people from their spiritual torpor. However, he did not succumb to the temptation to preach the law as an end in itself. Rather, he insisted that union with Christ was the foundation of a covenantally faithful relationship with God. Therefore, that condition is one by which God binds himself to the redeemed. Faith, then, for Edwards is the instrument through which one lives in union with Christ. And that union involves continuous dependence upon God for all things through the means of grace, including obedience. It is by God that we have these means of grace, and it is He who makes them effectual. Now, I want to back up and say a few things just because I don't want to forget them. I don't know if they particularly fit here, but I just don't want to forget them. Francis Turretin, who was the theologian that all of these men would have cut their teeth on, very helpfully developed a concept of conditionality that these men that we're following, this string that we're pulling down through Warfield, in which he made a distinction between meritorious conditionality and instrumental conditionality. So follow me here. Meritorious conditionality is, okay, I obey and then I merit grace. Instrumental conditionality is God saying, without holiness no one will see the Lord. But I'm going to provide the holiness. Instrumental conditionality is He is predestined you to walk, and He has prepared you to walk in works that He has prepared in advance for you to do. He is the One. You work out your salvation with fear and trembling, but you're also walking in works that He has prepared in advance for you to do. So yes, obedience is conditional to salvation. The question is, who provides the obedience? And Christ is the one. The Turretin said we do not believe in, we do believe in a conditional covenant. You cannot be saved without obedience. But we do not believe that obedience is that which merits grace. Obedience is one of those means of grace by which God draws us to himself. I'll say this as well, some of the parts that I skipped over were American Puritanism. Not because I'm really not interested in it, but because we've talked about Puritans and I want to get on to the Lord's Supper. But you know what's interesting is studying some of these Puritans like Cotton Mather and John Cotton. These were men at times, and this same thing happened in the awakening. These were men who preached grace. Their own souls were awakened to preach justification by faith, through grace, through faith by grace alone. And then the people started pushing back on them and wanting more law. And so they, at times, would go back to that. There was one man named Jonathan Parsons, I think, who started preaching grace. People were getting saved. But the people who were, you know, all kinds of people were coming into his church, but the core members of his church didn't like it. They called him censorious, and they didn't like he was disrupting everything. So he said he went back to preaching the law, and they all felt better. But then eventually, he couldn't do it anymore. He went back to preaching grace. Let me talk about conditionality among Tenet and his contemporaries, and then we'll move on into the supper. In the face of apparent moral decline in the godly commonwealth of colonial America, the conditionality of the covenant took on renewed interest for Tenet and his contemporaries. Tenet and his fellow churchmen sought to apply the gospel to a society which was increasingly lax in its morals, indifferent in worship, excessive in its use of alcohol, individualistic, unmerciful, and suffering from an increasing crime rate. All the while, those who were in the churches were disinterested toward the doctrines of grace and proud of their moralism. Don't wish for the old days, the good old days. No matter how many social restrictions were introduced or threatened, they did not improve the situation. No matter how much they preached the law, it didn't work. One of the striking results of the Great Awakening was the improvement in the moral tone of colonial America. There's a whole body of literature, even among evangelicals, who say the Great Awakening is not something that really happened. It was just the dramatic gestures of Whitefield. It was the skillful PR job that he did and so forth. But what you cannot deny is the social change that came in America as a result of people embracing the gospel. Even skeptical observers, such as Benjamin Franklin, hail the awakening the great awakening for the public effects it brought in its wake, not to mention that it made him a rich man as he preached those, as he printed those sermons. The greatest social problem to the revivalists was selfish covetousness. Preachers like Edwards' tenant, David Bostrick, decried selfishness as the root cause of all evils. Bostrick called it the original sin. Edwards also related that the revival reversed the systemic selfishness of New England. In a similar fashion in letters during the time of the 1734-35 Northampton Awakening, Jonathan Edwards mentioned not only the improvements in public worship, but also in public and private behavior. He also noted a dramatic resolve among the citizens of Northampton by means of a public covenant to become more charitable to the poor, to practice equity in commercial dealings, and to resolve all past and present grievances. But how did the preaching of free grace result in such a dramatic change in behavior? It was not the fostering of legalism. That was the enemy against which they fought. Revival preachers strained to warn against confidence in good works. Good works, they argued, could not justify nor give lasting assurance of salvation, only with union with Christ could. And carrying forward their biblical insights of Calvin, as well as English and American Puritans, Tennant and his Presbyterian colleagues, preached that union with Christ necessarily produced good works, and urge gratitude for grace received as the enduring motivation for obedience. Tenet said this, sanctification is the evidence of our justification and indispensably necessary to eternal salvation and that assurance is not essential to faith but only a separate fruit of it. The emphasis upon which union with Christ and the proper relationship between sanctification and justification continued after the Revival. As Presbyterians reunited in 1758, and can be observed in David Bostwick's famous sermon, Self-Disclaimed and Christ Exalted, that message together with an introduction by Gilbert Tenet as a good example of the new side Presbyterian insistence that obedience is a necessary grace in the Christian's life. Tenet admired these emphases in his contemporaries because they characterized his own preaching. Over the course of his preaching, Tenet wove together several classically reformed themes regarding the conditionality of covenant living. Number one, he was clear that all good works are impossible outside of union with Christ. They're wholly by grace and merit nothing from God. They are only good because of the perfection granted to them by God. Secondly, in language similar to Calvin's, he insisted that because good works are always tainted by sin, they must always be justified by grace. Third, he explained the symbiotic, the mutually relating relationship between promise and command. Listen to this, every command contains a promise of ability. Every command of scripture contains the promise of ability as a kernel in the husk. That is to a believer. God's promise of enablement in any command is experienced only upon embracing the command so that there is no sharp division between God's supply and his duties. In fact, just as one will never do the duty without the promise, neither will he ever experience the grace of the promise without endeavoring to do the duty. You'll never experience the grace of loving your enemy until you keep the command, love your enemy, before you feel like loving your enemy. This is essentially how Tenet understood the law's function in the Old Testament. Beneath the skin of the moral law was contained all the fruit of the promise of the gospel. Fourth, he related justification and faith. Faith is the inward means by which people appropriate the righteousness of Christ. But faith itself is a gift of grace. While faith is not a meritorious human action, it does produce good works and thus proves justification. Fifth, Tenet explained that conditionality is ultimately explained by a love relationship with God. Salvation is the gift of the free and rich love of God, which in turn excites His people to love Him. So Tenet maintained the faithful tradition of upholding Calvin's and others tradition that Orthodox Christian living requires on the one hand a confident in God's absolute faithfulness to his covenant and on the other hand a loving humility to maintain one's obligations in that same covenant. Now the word supper. Tenet found the solution to the problem of relating the unconditional and the conditional aspects of the covenant, and so the preservation of orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the Reformed understanding of the Lord's Supper. As a result, he took advantage of sacramental occasions to preach these heartwarming and motivating truths. Especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, Presbyterians used their communion sermons as an avenue of expressing this Christ-centered, grace-motivated piety. There's no legalism in those sermons. There's no recollection of past sins and morbidity. It is come, Christ is stretching out His arms welcoming you back. How can you reject Him? Tenet's ministry shows that gospel preaching in faithful sacramental context advances orthodoxy. The church has suffered where either preaching or the sacraments have been absolutized to the exclusion of the other. In a tradition where you're only focused on sacraments or where you're only focused on preaching, either one leads to demise. The strength of Tenet's convictions came from the consistency of his forebears, Calvin and others, who emphasized union with Christ as a means to living faithfully in the covenant. If the Bible was not the fountain of this theology, the channel by which it came was John Calvin. Calvin provided the categories to support Tenet's homiletical approach to the supper and its relationship to an orthodox life. Calvin, as Tenet would later say, saw the supper as an objective instrument in which the subjective benefits of one's union with Christ flow by faith into the believer. Five key ideas that come from Calvin through all of the Reformed heritage into Gilbert Tenet and down into B.B. Warfield and down into people like Derek Thomas and Scotty Old and these other great ones you have around you. Number one, purpose. John Calvin saw three purposes for the supper, all under the broad umbrella of assurance. First, the supper is a sign and seal of gospel promises to the conscience of a believer, which in turn produces assurance. Secondly, the supper produces heightened worship in response to God's grace, because you're assured. Thirdly, and a distinctive instance for Calvin and his later follower Tenet, the Supper depicts Christ's sacrifice in the Supper as an exhortation to holiness of life, especially brotherly unity and love. When you're assured that God loves you, you're going to obey. And when you're assured that God loves you, you're going to love your neighbor. Puritan's great contribution to this idea of the purpose of the supper leading to assurance was a practical theology of preparation for the supper. You know, most of the books, I don't remember the statistics, but most of the books printed in the colonial period were manuals on how to keep the Lord's Supper, how to prepare for the Lord's Supper, written by pastors for their congregation. While this preparation was carried out to a precision as extremes by some, on the whole it was an effective pedagogical strategy for helping worshippers develop as individual priests. After their liberation from an oppressive ecclesiastical government in the British Isles, the Puritans not only gave instructions for coming to and participating in the supper, they also taught their people what new dispositions of heart they should have upon leaving the table. One test for whether one had properly communed with the Lord was for the communicant to examine himself and ask if his heart had been refreshed, enlarged, inspired to virtue. If so, he must remember to give thanks and take care to maintain that same zeal for obedience until the next celebration. Other 17th century Puritan theologians such as John Owen carried forward the Puritan emphasis on preparation for the table as a means of participating properly in covenant renewal. He articulated a mutual sealing of God and his people. Not only does God seal his word to his people, they seal themselves to him. Second emphasis. Purpose is number one. Second emphasis is union with Christ. Another theme in the Reformed understanding of the Supper that made its way into Tenets preaching was the importance of union with Christ as a reality enhanced by the Supper. Some might say the doctrine of spiritual presence was the essential distinction of Calvin's view. However, nobody believed, Reformed or Lutheran, nobody believed that Christ was absent during the Lord's Supper. The issue was how the believer benefited from the presence of Christ in the supper. Did the communicant receive benefits from Christ through the reception of the physical elements of the supper or through rational contemplation? Calvin's answer, which became the answer the spiritual brothers, the group I didn't talk about earlier, intended himself, was that neither the physical reception of the elements nor rational contemplation was sufficient for the communication of Christ's presence. Rather, the believer's Christian life benefits from Christ's accomplishments in the body by means of spiritual union with Christ through faith. In other words, it's not the focus on how well you think about it or on the magical elements. It's rather on Christ, united to you, feeds your conscience and makes you more faithful. He fills... He gives you concentrated doses of grace. He gives you spiritual vitamins that move you on to obedience. Calvin connected the covenantal meal and union with Christ this way. This mystery of Christ's secret union with the devout is by nature incomprehensible. However, by giving guarantees and tokens, he makes it as certain for us as if we had seen it with our own eyes. Elsewhere, although he doesn't connect it to the Lord's Supper, he describes the literal transformative effect of our union with Christ this way, from this too we infer that we are one with Christ, not because he transfuses his substance into us, but because by the power of his Spirit he communicates to us his life and all the blessings he has received from the Father. Calvin reminds elsewhere, that Christ is still a human being at the right hand of the Father. He ascended to heaven as a human being. And that human being who added incarnation to his person as the second person of the Godhead communicates the physical accomplishments he made in his life to us. And in few places does he communicate that to us more powerfully than through the Lord's Supper. You come to be fed by the physical accomplishments of Christ at the Lord's Supper which follows on the heels of the preaching of the gospel. Mystical union with Christ is created by God's covenant with us. Therefore Calvin preferred to speak in familial, relational terms rather than abstract theological ones. So he warmly sets the table for a covenantal discussion of the Lord's Supper this way. It needs to be pointed out that it has pleased the good Lord to receive us by baptism into his church as into his own house. And there He wishes to train and direct us. He has therefore received us, not that we be His servants, but rather that we be His children. God wishes to be our devoted Father, nourishing us with spiritual food, supplying us with everything that we need in life. Well, that Third, the third theme is we've had purpose and union. The third theme is this. These are themes that were articulated especially by Calvin, have been carried through the Reformed tradition, find their way into Tenet and into our practice today. The third is drama. A third key theme on the supper running from Calvin to the Puritans was the concept of the supper as a dramatic event. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must acknowledge that the great Hughes Oliphant Old, Scotty Old, he was a beloved professor here at Erskine. He graced the halls of this church and was another of my prime professors and encouragers in my degrees. He said the following about this point in his recent book on the Lord's Supper. He said the following on this point I'm about to make. George Robertson claims that another function Reformed theologians attributed to the sacraments was as a dramatization of the gospel. When I first read this I was more than put off by it. But then, as this term dramatization appeared chapter after chapter in Robertson's work, I began to see his point. Though what Robertson says here can easily be misunderstood. The sacrament is an event that shows forth the Lord's death until He comes. What I think Robertson means by this is that in the sacrament we act out the gospel. We receive the blessings of the gospel from God, our loving Father, and we share them with our brothers and sisters in Christ. For myself, then, I would prefer the word, prefer the word, show forth, rather than act out and certainly more than dramatize. But as I said, Robertson makes his point. The sacrament is not just a visualization of the gospel, but an experiencing of the gospel as well. So that means change that third point to, what does he prefer? Show forth. This idea of the supper enacted a drama, posited several audiences for God's play. First, these fathers of the church understood the sacrament to be a dramatic display of the Father's love to the church itself. John Owen said that love is the moving cause of the supper. Out of this love, the Father Himself dramatically spreads the table for the church's nourishment. Here's the brilliance of the Puritans. The Puritans taught their people how to daydream during the Lord's Supper. I know Scotty Old wouldn't like that either. But how to daydream during the Lord's Supper? So the Puritans would say, you must think about the Father setting that table for you. He's setting out the plates and pouring the wine. Next, Calvin taught that the supper was a public and dramatic statement to the world that God was satisfied His justice in the death of Christ. Richard Vines reflected Calvin's influence by teaching that the church makes a public statement to the world by means of the sacrament that in Christ God has transferred the curse of the law to another who underwent it. We don't come forward and take the supper because we're better than our neighbors. We come forward and take the supper that was made necessary by our sin. We come forward and take a supper, we take from a broken Christ who was broken because we broke the covenant. It's a dramatization of our justification. In addition, the drama extends beyond the visible world to the spiritual world. Reformers said that the church also makes objective profession to the watching world and God's cosmic enemies. John Owens preached, in our celebration of the death of Christ, we do profess against Satan, that his power is broken, that he is conquered. tied to the chariot wheels of Christ who has disarmed him. John Cotton said similarly, it's a type of the last judgment, a foreshadowing of the final defeat of Christ's enemies, the ultimate crushing of the serpent's head. When you come to the Lord's Supper, you're not coming to see there to remember how defeated you are by your sin. You're coming there to see Christ's defeat of your sin and the devil who held you in power by the guilt of it. you come to see the defeat of your sin. The conforming Puritan pastor Edward Reynolds was particularly eloquent and inspiring in his description of how the supper shows forth the reality of the gospel. It's from the following excerpt of one of his sacramental sermons that I derive the title of this lecture. If we observe it, Divine miracles take ever the poorest and meanest subjects to manifest themselves on. If he wants an army to protect his church, flies and frogs and caterpillars and lamps and pitchers shall be the strongest soldiers and weapons he uses. The lame and the blind, the dumb and the dead, water and clay, these are the materials for his power. even where thou seest the instruments of the God weakest, there expect and admire the more abundant manifestation of His greatness and wisdom." undervalued not the bread and wine in his holy sacrament which do better resemble the benefits of Christ justified than any of the choicest delicates." These are the choicest delicates. These are the food of Daniels. These he uses as better instruments of power than dainties from the king's table. You know, that idea has transformed the way I do pastoral care and counseling in particular. You know, there were those times, especially as a young pastor, when someone would come to me and say, I can see no way forward in this relationship. I can't break out of this addiction. I can't get any victory over this besetting sin. I can't emerge from this depression. Now, of course, we want everyone to have all the resources that God has made available to us by His common grace and even His special grace, medical help and good physical attention. And we want counseling like you have in your counseling center. But, you know, that used to be all that I would give. I mean, I give Bible verses and so forth. But I started telling, asking people, when's the last time you've been to the Lord's Supper? How have you prepared for coming to the Lord's Supper? You must come to the Lord's Supper and come expectantly and hungrily because there you'll find, I didn't have the term at the time, but food for Daniels. God loves to take these despised little elements of wine and bread and use them as his weapons and His armaments to break the power of besetting sin in you, to move you toward reconciliation, to inject you with concentrated doses of God's grace through the physical accomplishments of Jesus Christ. Fourth idea, Eucharistic sacrifice. We've said something about this already. By the mid-third century, The church, the early church, the 3rd century church, began to teach that the supper was a propitiatory sacrifice, in that you had to come, and by coming, you did something to satisfy for your sins. Calvin corrected that error by showing that there were two types of sacrifices in the Old Testament, propitiatory, that is, intended to prepare for Christ's work, and thanksgiving sacrifices. The Lord's Supper is that latter. It's a thanksgiving sacrifice. The fifth major theme is that the Lord's Supper is to effect a bond of love. One of the most important and consistent Reformed themes is that the Supper creates a bond of love between Christ and believers, as well as believers among themselves. Actually, this emphasis stretches back farther than Calvin to Augustine. Calvin borrowed Augustine's terminology. The supper is a bond of love. As bread is made up of many grains and mixed together in such a way that they are indistinguishable, so the body of believers is made one by Christ. Being united to one another reminds us that everyone else's body is under our care as well as our own. Further, the supper produces love among God's people. both by reminding them of it as well as causing them to share in that reconciliation of Christ's love. I found nothing more powerful and to get people who are sideways with each other in my congregation to get together than by preaching from the pulpit ahead of the Lord's Supper. You can't come to this table and get nearer to Jesus without getting nearer to each other. And if you refuse to get nearer to each other, then you can't come to this table. I've found nothing to leverage people to get going, as Jesus said, get going and make it right with the one against whom you have ought or who has ought against you, than to leverage the correcting and inviting grace of the Lord's Supper. just a few weeks ago. They preached that with that kind of application. And literally, after the service, two men in our church who had refused to speak to each other for over a decade came to each other. They were walking toward each other. They came and told me later. They were walking toward each other and said, we can't let this go on. It didn't matter how much I'd talk to either one of them. It didn't matter how many people had talked to each one of them. It didn't matter if their wives had talked to each one of them. But the Lord Jesus, leveraging the work of the Lord's Supper, compelled them to come to each other and to be reconciled. Well, those same themes were found in Tenet's preaching and I'm going to speed through these things because I want to get to some concluding remarks and maybe entertain some of your questions. Gilbert Tennant's roots were much deeper than his father's log college. The spiritual vibrancy of New Side Presbyterianism or Dutch Reformed, or his Dutch Reformed friend Theodor Frelinghuysen's pietism. Rather, Gilbert Tennant was an heir of the Reformation. That strong bloodline explained his preaching. His preaching, especially his communion preaching, was biblically covenantal. He called his people to orthodox living as a fulfillment of the conditionality of the covenant while driving them to Christ and their union with him as the source of their ability. Carrying forward the tradition of his forebears, Tenet taught his people that the Lord's Supper was the objective sign and seal of their subjective communion with the body and blood of Christ. He emphasized the themes of purpose, union, drama, Eucharistic sacrifice and love, themes that were distinctively reformed, traced through Calvin through the English and American Puritans to Tenet himself. Retentant, the sacrament was a solemn occasion and yet solemnity was not morbidity, but rather an occasion. to think soberly about the fact that the Lord Christ himself was renewing his covenant with his people as he had done every Passover on the night of Jesus' betrayal, throughout the history of the early church, in Calvin's Geneva, and in Westminster Abbey, and in Boston, and New Brunswick, and Philadelphia, and on and on to Columbia and Augusta. I can't help but, before concluding the lecture, to just say a few words about major contributions to thinking about the Lord's Supper since the Great Awakeners. And, in reality, there hasn't been much. As Chris Wisdom and I were talking about earlier, I think Dr. Wisdom said that it's the greatest neglected grace in our thinking and in our practice. I would agree with that. But the Erskine brothers can't be accused of that. What would any Erskine lecture be without at least a reference to Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine? And the Erskine brothers had inherited the communion season practice and tradition from Scotland, and they had continued it on. You know, those were long celebrations, sometimes a month at a time, Sometimes every night, one Erskine brother talks about having 32 seedings of communion in one night. Ebenezer Erskine has a beautiful sermon called Christ in the Believer's Arms. And he says, you must embrace Christ even as you allow him to envelop you in his. That warm, affectionate, nuptial language is not something just new in the Jesus is my boyfriend music, but it is something that's been around since Samuel Rutherford and Ebenezer Erskine. Ralph Erskine said to his congregation on one occasion, preaching on Jacob, pray for Bethel moments in the Lord's Supper. As Jacob was resting and he had the vision of Jacob's ladder, you know, I don't know about you, but I learned that we are climbing Jacob's ladder. But that's not what Jacob was learning. Jacob was learning that God was climbing down Jacob's ladder to bond with Jacob. And Ralph Erskine said, pray. for baffled moments in the Lord's Supper, where you know that you know that Christ has come down the ladder through the Holy Spirit and says, you are mine, you belong to me. Archibald Alexander, the first professor at Princeton Seminary, which was Later in the history of the College of New Jersey, the Logg College, Archibald Alexander was preaching on one occasion the Action Sermon in those days. It was just the sermon that preceded the Lord's Supper. It was called the Action Sermon. And Archibald Alexander was preaching with such vigor and such reality, realism, about the grace of God in Christ. in the supper. He pointed down at the table at some point and said, there, there is God's lamb once for all slain for you and the people were so enraptured by his preaching they stood up and looked at the table. It's not because they were a superstitious people. We should have that much expectation. Not that the Lamb is literally there, not that those elements are somehow transformed into something they were not before, but rather, as Calvin said, what we will experience there is real because the Holy Spirit is real. Thomas Chalmers talked about the inviting voice of God himself in the Lord's Supper. I should like to invite you into the firmer, faithfuler, and more closely knit alliance with that living intercessor who is now looking over you. Thomas Chalmers, a man who himself was prayed into the kingdom by his congregation. The people who knew that their preacher wasn't saved, they kept coming, and they just prayed that he would be saved, and he nearly died on his deathbed. I tell my people, don't always pray for me. But they prayed, and he went to the sickbed, and there he realized, I can't do anything to make myself right with God. The only command I can keep is that first command, believe on the Lord Jesus and you'll be saved. That command that includes all the commands. And thereafter he leveraged the Lord's Supper to invite people to the Father who was inviting them. Well, we've had other contributions from men like Robert Latham in his Lord's Supper book, which appeared in 2001, and it was unique in its time. There's nothing really new about it, but he did bring to our attention afresh a serious appreciation of the supper. The controversial Peter Lightheart, with whom I have little sympathy on a lot of things, but his recent contributions on the idea that that there is something real in ceremony. Now sometimes I think he steps over into sacerdotalism, that is, that by doing the act, grace comes. But his idea that ceremony does something real is something that we need to embrace more heartily, because to realize that if God... it's not magic, it's just that God has said, look, I'm setting up this for you, it's not magical, but if you keep my commandment, I'll use this to comfort you, to seal to your conscience the reality of your salvation, because you're a finite person. I'm using finite elements to do finite things for you as people who are weak in faith. And then finally, this recent contribution by the greatest, a theologian of Reformed worship, Hughes Oliphant Old, Scotty Old, whose 800 and some page book on the Lord's Supper just kept me saying after every page, after every page, after every page, I am not worthy. I am not worthy. Hughes Oliphant Old says that we should think about seven things in reforming our practice of the Lord's Supper. Number one, we should do it more often. We should do it more often. Scotty said that when he took his first pastorate, they only had communion one time a year. That's in a reformed church. And you know the reformers thought they were being pretty radical when they said you ought to have communion four times a year. And then Calvin was really radical and too radical even for the magistrates at Geneva when he said it really should be every Sunday. And he couldn't convince them of that, so he put them on a rotation schedule. They had four churches and each one had it a different Sunday. He got his every Sunday, he just didn't get it all in one congregation. We should do it more often. The Puritans, no one in the Reformed tradition, outside of recent people, has ever been prescriptive of how often you have to have the Lord's Supper. All they've said is, you should have it as often as you can. Secondly, Dr. Oll says that the preacher should include a Eucharistic prayer. This is a theme that he makes on almost every one of the 800 pages. Such an important theme to him that we should pray at the Lord's Supper thanking him for his great acts of redemption throughout all history, not just in our lives. Thirdly, he says that communion should be served not just on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday, but on Easter Sunday. Fourth, he says that we should receive new members on a day when we're serving the Lord's Supper. Fifth, he says that we should have a prayer of dedication after. That is, we have received grace from the Lord, now we should pray to the Lord, dedicating ourselves afresh to putting that grace into action. Sixth, he says that we should arrange the furniture and the architecture of our churches in such a way, whatever way will communicate to our people that we're coming around a table. And finally, he says that we should take up a deacon's offering. on the Sunday of the Lord's Supper, because there we have received mercy of all mercies, and there's the appropriate place to give to the poor. Some years ago I read an account by Andor Fowles, the famous Hungarian pianist. And Fowles said that He was very discouraged in his some kind of personal crisis in his life. He didn't tell what the personal crisis was. But someone took him for his encouragement to visit with Emil von Sauer. And Emil von Sauer was the last living student of Franz Liszt. Franz Liszt had studied with Beethoven. So he came into Emil von Sauer's living room, or his piano room, and von Sauer told him to sit down at the piano and start playing something. And he did it, he started playing. And he expected to be interrupted and stopped and criticized, but von Sauer encouraged him to keep playing and playing and playing. And when he finished, von Sauer came over and kissed him on the forehead. And he said, that kiss was entrusted to me by Liszt. And Liszt was kissed by Beethoven. Beethoven kissed Liszt, Liszt kissed me, and now I am entrusting the kiss of Beethoven to you. Be a good steward of it. You would not believe the scholarly debate over those kisses. Some question whether they actually happened. Some suspect they were homosexual. Others think they were insincere and wasted on a youth. Debates ruin the beauty of the image. Likewise, we are capable of marring the beauty of the sacrament by senseless nattering. We debate the mode of baptism or how old the recipient should be for fear the event might be wasted on the child. We debate the frequency of communion. Who would ever debate the frequency of kissing? We debate whether the bread should be leavened or unleavened, whether the cup should be fermented or not, whether the bread should be dipped into the cup or not. What an insult to the heart of God. His promises are sufficient in and of themselves, but He stoops in the Lord's Supper to kiss us and confirm our faith. We must be prepared to be conquered by the love of God in Christ in the celebration of the Lord's Supper. Let me pray. Our Lord Jesus, how good you are to have obeyed your Father to come and take us as your bride How good you are, Holy Spirit, in your jealous love to hover over us and continually fight for the allegiance of our hearts and enable us in keeping all of God's commands. And how loving and good and faithful you are, Heavenly Father. Not just to tell us about all of these things that you have done for us, our redemption which has been accomplished and applied by Christ in the Spirit But you also stoop down to us. And with these humble, very simple elements, you say, here, let me show you that my grace is as real and palpable as the taste of this bread. And my love for you and Christ is just as sweet as the scent of this cup. O Lord, would you revive us again by bringing us back to your love? And would you revive us again by means of the preaching of the gospel as it's manifested in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper? Cause your blessings to rest on Erskine. We do praise you for this long, faithful history of producing preachers of the Word of God and producing undergrads who would plant the flag of Jesus Christ in every discipline and every vocation. Oh Lord, would you be favorable to her? Would you give her and her president and vice presidents and staff members and faculty and students everything that they stand in need of in order for you to get a name for yourself? Cause your blessing to rest on this church who by her long history has contributed to the transformation of the world and the advancement of the gospel. And thank you for her current pastor. His mind, his heart, his abilities as a preacher joined rarely as they are to a pastor. Would You keep the evil one far away, but instead cause us to ride triumphantly against His Kingdom by Your Word and works. In Jesus' name, Amen. Take a few questions. You can stand at your place. We will not take long, but we will take a few minutes for a few questions. Dr. Montgomery, I know you had one. Did you have a question, Dr. Montgomery? I did. Do you have a microphone? I think it would be helpful to tie some of the strings together that you have presented to talk about a fundamental distinction. You've alluded and sometimes touched on this, but you haven't actually articulated it. That is the distinction between consubstantiation and transubstantiation. You can't read the history of theology in the 6th century without being aware of the fierce debates there, especially with Luther. And many of us, of course, have Catholic friends who have a very different view of the Eucharist or the communion from us. So could you articulate the difference between those two doctrines and why Presbyterians and other Protestants are so firm in holding on to one, how we differ with the Catholic tradition, and what the crucial scripture is that supports the partisan point of view? Well, that's an easy question. It's so easy, Mark has the microphone, I'm going to let him speak. Three minutes, okay? Three minutes, thank you. Generous time. Actually, I only studied the 18th century, so I can't speak to that. Well, transubstantiation, of course, is the Roman Catholic view that developed in the medieval church, which says, basically, that at the moment the priest rings a bell or gives some kind of indication that it's happened, the wine and the bread become the literal body and blood of Christ. And therefore you take those elements in your body and you ingest Christ and he becomes, then grace literally is ingested with the elements. You know, after the Eucharist, the hosts, the elements, are put into a host chapel. At First Pres we have one. Strike that from the record, please. In Augusta, there are several host chapels. One is down the street from my house, and I see the my dear Catholic friends going at all hours of the day and night just to sit in the presence of those elements because they believe that they have been transformed into the body and blood of Christ. So the Reformers, of course, argued strenuously against that, including Martin Luther. that those elements don't become substantially the body and blood of Christ by some kind of magical transformation. And they of course said that was a new form of idolatry. In other words, the focus is on the wrong place. God has simply accommodated himself to our senses by adopting these very common elements of everyday life to say, I'm going to attach promises to this worship experience so that I can comfort your conscience, and here you've made a tool that I've used into an idol that you worship. Consubstantiation is a term that Luther never used and Lutherans don't like to use. It's a reformed caricature of the Lutheran position. that they're not transformed into those substances, but that Christ comes by, beside of, or by, with, and under those elements in such a way that by the time you leave the service, you have, Christ has come into you in a real way, physically, by the act of the Lord's Supper. It still was this emphasis on Christ becoming real physically in you at some point of the worship service. John Calvin and the other Reformers were united in their opposition to that, and it seems to me that Calvin and Luther never met each other. they knew of each other, they slightly overlapped. But Luther died before they could meet with each other and second-generation Lutherans tried to develop some kind of compromise with the Reformers and it just never came off for one reason or another. But I think if perhaps, if Luther had lived long enough and gotten old enough and mellow enough, there might not have been this difference. But Calvin and the Reformers' primary opposition to transubstantiation and consubstantiation was that for Jesus to be able to do that, he would have to become something other than a real human being. The Lutherans talk about how they had to develop a doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ. that came in later scholastic Lutheran theology. But the idea was, you know, for Jesus to become a physical reality in people's bodies in Columbia, South Carolina, and in Augusta, and in Bogota, Colombia, all at the same time. His body has to be ubiquitous. His body has to be able to morph physically into all of these various places. And Calvin and the Reformers' objections to that was, you have no Christ if you don't have a real human Christ. And a body which can be ubiquitous is not a human body. And if we don't have a human body that died for us and continues to intercede for us, we don't have a Christ. And so, the argument of the Reformers against the Catholics and even against the Lutherans was not focused so much on philosophical, metaphysical topics that Christ had become, that a body could become something else. It was focused on Christ. On who Christ is and who we need Him to be. And I think that's where our focus must be as well when we're talking about these things. We can't be dragged into these kinds of para-philosophical debates. or extra-biblical debates. We go back to the Bible and say, and this is the way I talk about baptism, the way I talk about predestination. I will not talk about it philosophically. Let's talk about it from Scripture. Let's look at what the Scriptures say, and what the import of it is, and what God's purpose for it was. And what we will find is that in all of these things, in all of these doctrines, in all of these means of grace, these sacraments, God intends this for our blessing.