In his lecture to an audience at the University of Pennsylvania, Keller reasonably argues for belief in God in an age of skepticism. He paints a beautiful picture of the gospel at the end of his talk that just left me in awe. You can follow this link to the lecture, which was sponsored by Westminster media.
http://www.wts.edu/resources/media.html
Enjoy!
“Symbolic memorialism also reduces the sacrament to an essentially subjective matter of mental recollection. There is nothing objectively present in the sacrament outside of the mind of the believer. Christ is not present in any unique way, and the sacraments are not objective means of grace. Christ is present in the sacrament only to the degree that each individual subjectively brings him and his work to mind. Symbolic memorialists are at a loss to explain the difference between the mental recollection that occurs in the sacrament from the mental recollection that occurs in prayer or the hearing of the word. They are at a loss to explain why the Lord’s Supper is really necessary or even significant. Such difficulty goes a long way toward explaining the neglect of this sacrament in the modern evangelical church.”
-Keith Mathison, Given For You. P. 265.
I must confess that paedocommunion makes sense to me. As a presbyterian, we baptize our children because we believe that God includes them in the covenant. They too are heirs of all the covenant blessings and promises made to us. We believe that when they die as infants, they go to heaven on the basis of God’s gracious promise, and feast with God at His heavenly table with all the saints of old. It seems justified and consistent, then, for me to say that this earthly table should also include them.
If you have ever been in a worship service at a typical evangelical church when the Lord’s Supper was being observed, you might have noticed a couple of things. First, the place is very quiet and solemn. Second, no one is looking around. Instead, many have their eyes closed and heads bowed. My intention here is not to question or criticize what people are doing. I understand what is happening since I grew up with this type of practice. The people are praying, confessing their sins, thinking about Jesus’ sacrifice, and thanking God for it because they want to partake in a “worthy manner”. In other words, they are practicing self-examination less they should bring “judgment upon themselves”. This is a common ritual during the Lord’s Supper in many evangelical churches. Let me say at the outset that there is nothing wrong with self-examination in itself; in fact, it should be practiced by Christian on a regular basis. It does become a problem for me when this age-old practice, or the ability to perform it, becomes the prerequisite for admittance to the table. What this does is prevent covenant children from participating in the supper, because the assumption is that unworthy participation is equated with lack of self-examination. I believe that the requirement for self-examination imposed upon the supper comes from a misreading of I Corinthians 11. In the letter, Paul calls the divisive Corinthians to examine themselves in order to prevent schisms at the table, and not as a prerequisite for access. Tim Gallant has rightly observed, “The sin, in context, is not lack of self-examination. The sin is schism at the table, which Paul hopes to counter by calling for self-examination.” In other words, as Gallant illustrates, the call for self-examination is like a reminder to get your brakes checked before taking a road trip so you don’t get into an accident. Just because you don’t get them checked doesn’t mean you’ll get into an accident. The purpose of the check is to detect problems and fix it. Therefore, what causes someone to partake in an unworthy manner is not a failure to examine themselves, but divisiveness at the table. This divisive attitude goes against the very core and message of the supper, which is koinonia (communal participation). In Corinth, children were not the ones getting drunk and eating ahead of others. They were not the ones “despising the church of God by humiliating those who have nothing”. In other words, they were not the ones who needed their brakes examined.
In his book, The Baptized Body, Peter Leithart makes an interesting analogy between baptizing infants and talking to infants. The point he makes is that parents establish relationships with their children through symbols. They speak to them, hug and kiss them. In the same respect, God establishes relationships with our children through the symbol of baptism. If the analogy is accurate, then the objection that infants should not to be baptized because they do not understand the symbol does not hold. In other words, as Leithart says, “[Even Baptists] speak to their children, that is, they employ symbols, not because they think the infant understands all that is being said or because they expect an immediate response. They speak to their child so the child will learn to understand and talk back. So too, we baptize infants and consistently remind them of their baptism and its implications so they will come to understanding and mature faith.”
