Should we withhold the giving of wine in Holy Communion?
Thomas Renz writes: Decisions that had to be made in response to the electric current pandemic previously prompted me to write briefly on the history of withholding the loving cup, on arguments against it, on the Communion of the sick, on the doctrines of transubstantiation and concomitance, and on God's real presence, pondering the implications for celebrating and receiving Holy Communion.
I noted:
The restoration of the loving cup to the laity was a key business of the Reformers. While they disagreed on the manner in which Christ should be understood to be present in the Eucharist, they were "united in demanding that there should be no celebration of the Eucharist which did non include the communion of the people and non only of the priest alone, and that this reception should exist of both bread and loving cup and not just of bread lone" (R. C. D. Jasper and Paul F. Bradshaw, A Companion to the Alternative Service Volume [London: SPCK, 1986], 162).
There seems to be no evidence of bishops or clergy within the Church of England denying the Cup to the laity in subsequent centuries, including during the not bad plague years, until the Swine Flu epidemic in 2009. This had mayhap been facilitated by the notes in the liturgy for ministry to the sick inCommon Worship which lacked the Book of Common Prayer's emphasis on the desirability of a congregation of communicants surrounding the sick…
Entreatment has, in the concluding year, been made to the Roman Catholic doctrine of 'concomitance', meaning that we receive Christ by faith equally in each of the elements of bread and wine, so that receiving just the staff of life is sufficient to still receive Christ in the sacrament. But, every bit I point out, this doctrine relies on an understanding of what is happening in Communion which is foreign to Anglican understanding.
New Church of England guidance allows its clergy to offer the common loving cup once more from nineteen July. Here I summarise the key theological points to consider equally clergy make up one's mind whether to have upward this offering and again offer the common loving cup.
What is offered to communicants with the cup? The claret of Christ, in a sense.
The cup of blessing that nosotros bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The staff of life that we suspension, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? (1 Corinthians 11:16).
Put like this, withholding the cup must present a serious impecuniousness. But many clergy have convinced themselves that considering what is offered with the cup is the aforementioned as what is offered with the bread – Christ, not different parts of Christ – it is permissible to offer only ane or the other. Is this true?
Kickoff, let us note that the elements were blessed separately and offered separately by Christ when he instituted the Lord'south Supper. The articulate distinction between the two elements speaks of the separation of body and blood on the cross and and then proclaims Christ's expiry (1 Corinthians eleven:26). But this does not mean that the bread offers u.s. the (dead) body of Christ and the vino His (shed) blood. Every bit we eat and drink, we are offered communion with the living Christ, even if the emphasis is on the benefits of his expiry (body broken, blood shed) which nosotros receive, every bit we receive Him. There is therefore a sense in which we can say that the cup and the bread offer exactly the same. But does it follow that we tin therefore dispense with consuming one or the other?
Our Anglican forbears, among others, did not think so. The Book of Common Prayer never envisages communion in i kind and William Laud calls it 'a damnable error' (see here for this and other voices against mutilating the sacrament). The Book of Common Prayer does, nevertheless, allow for spiritual communion which is participation in (not merely watching) Holy Communion without either eating or drinking. The relevant paragraph is worth reading and pondering in full:
Just if a human, either by reason of extremity of sickness, or for want of warning in due time to the curate, or for lack of company to receive with him, or by any other merely impediment, do not receive the Sacrament of Christ'southward Trunk and Blood, the Curate shall instruct him, that if he do truly repent him of his sins, and stedfastly believe that Jesus Christ both suffered decease upon the Cantankerous for him, and shed his Blood for his redemption, earnestly remembering the benefits he hath thereby, and giving him hearty thanks therefore, he doth consume and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ profitably to his Soul's health, although he do not receive the Sacrament with his mouth.
The reasoning behind this is clearly not a doctrine of concomitance (the whole Christ being present nether each Eucharistic species), since the Book of Common Prayer does non anticipate reception of either element. In fact, the doctrine of concomitance was rejected past Reformed Catholics and Church of England theologians of all shades, including Tractarians, right until the twentieth century. There is instead an emphasis on repentance and faith equally that which gets hold of Christ. Bread and vino are not essential to eating and drinking the trunk and blood of Christ.
But if Christ and His benefits can be received without physically eating and drinking, why did Christ institute the Holy Communion? Because we receive Christ and his benefits in a unlike mode, as we partake in the Holy Communion. Once we have understood this, we can come across that the question whether the cup offers u.s. something different from the bread is not the right question to ask. (It does not offer us something different, and neither cup nor bread offering anything dissimilar from what is offered in the faithful preaching of the word of God.) The question is whether the cup offers us Christ and his benefits in a different manner. I respond this in the affirmative because eating and drinking are different, albeit related, modes of receiving.
The Scottish Episcopalian Bishop Alexander Forbes in his Explanation of the Thirty-Nine Manufactures (1871) was more specific:
While the Sacrament nether one kind conveys all the graces necessary to salvation [equally does the faithful preaching of the discussion of God, I would add], the Chalice has a special grace of its own – the grace of gladdening.
He identified the special grace of "the meat" as "to strengthen the weak" (page 599). Perchance this is more than precise than warranted, but it is based on a careful reading of Scripture and nosotros would be foolish to deny the possibility that the same Christ is received in one way past eating and differently by drinking. Some certainly study that the shedding of Christ'due south blood for the forgiveness of our sins is especially imprinted upon them in receiving the wine.
As stewards of Christ'due south mysteries, clergy should not curtail Christ'southward offering to "have and swallow" the staff of life which is his trunk (Matthew 26:26) and to accept the loving cup and "drink from it, all of you" (Matthew 26:27). It is one thing for individual members of the congregation to refrain from eating or drinking with their mouths, it is a dissimilar thing for clergy to withhold the bread or the cup from faithful believers. Should Church of England clergy therefore immediately return to offering the common loving cup?
If Holy Communion has any spiritual health benefits, and it stands to reason that information technology does, so those who have withheld the cup from the laity for the last sixteen months should arguably restore it as a matter of urgency. There are two concerns, notwithstanding. One is to do with the possibility of viral manual through sharing a cup, the other is that fear of infection will prevent people from taking the cup. How can these be addressed? Not entirely satisfactorily, information technology seems to me, by those who experience bound to adhere to the Church of England guidance which continues to country that "Methods of administering the wine other than by means of a shared cup or simultaneous administration should not be employed." We take already noted that "simultaneous administration" (that is, the administration of wine simultaneously with the breadstuff by dipping the staff of life in the vino, often called 'intinction') obscures the proclamation of Christ's death in the clear separation of body and blood and eating a wafer that has been dipped into the cup does non constitute eating and drinking. The Church of England guidance offers no theologically audio alternative to a shared loving cup. The employ of purificators that are soaked in high alcohol spirits might be the only way to mitigate the ii concerns noted with putting lips to a shared cup.
Others, mindful of the loftier infection rates and noting that the guidance saying what should not be washed is (explicitly) "not instruction" stating what must not be done, may decide to depart from the guidance in favour of safeguarding both spiritual and physical health. The way frontward then is to consecrate a single cup (with covered chapeau) or flagon and to invite communicants to agree out their easily for the bread and their own cup for the wine. The fretfulness about ablutions is fed past the aforementioned erroneous doctrines that support the claim that just eating the staff of life is entirely sufficient. The Book of Common Prayer is merely concerned with making sure that what has been consecrated is consumed and then that information technology cannot be used for any purposes other than Holy Communion.
In short, it is fourth dimension to offering the cup to the laity whether straight offering the same cup to the lips of all the faithful or by style of sharing the contents of the one loving cup by ways of smaller cups. Non doing so, however infrequently, is negligent and risks the further spread of doctrines that are reverse to the audio educational activity of Scripture and the formularies of the Church of England.
Revd Dr Thomas Renz came to England from Germany in 1993 to pursue doctoral studies and taught Old Attestation and Hebrew at Oak Hill Theological College for 12 years before inbound parish ministry. He has been Rector at Monken Hadley since 2012. His wife is a Modern Strange Languages Teacher at St Albans School and they take two adult children.
Other articles on the result of receiving Communion in both kinds:
A yr agone, Andrew Goddard commented:
Nosotros face many months, perhaps more than than a year, before we tin once again share wine from a mutual loving cup. The bishops therefore need urgently to review this situation given Anglican doctrine about communion in both kinds. The answer given to Synod members that communion in one kind is preferable and indeed required because the culling – using individual cups – is "opposite to law" is not simply legally dubious at all-time merely, much more importantly, information technology is biblically baseless, theologically erroneous, and likely to prove pastorally damaging.
Andrew Atherstone followed upwardly with this ascertainment on the question of the legality of individual cups:
Private cups don't need to be made lawful. No law needs rescinding, no catechism needs revising, no Prayer Book rubric needs glossing, no Full general Synod vote needs counting. If individual wafers are legal, and so there tin can exist no case confronting individual cups. Unless the Firm of Bishops is planning to ban individual wafers, then they must concede that individual cups are already lawful as things stand up. Local congregations must thus exist at liberty to use them immediately, if they can observe a safety and applied way to do so.
I explored the possibility that Jesus and the disciples really used multiple (individual) cups at the Final Supper:
All through the Seder liturgy there is reference to 'the cup' or 'the four cups'. But no-1 thinks that this refers to i or a prepare of physical objects. If yous had the text, but were unaware of actual practise, then y'all might try and recreate the result using one or several large shared cups—and of course this is exactly the situation that whatsoever Gentile reader or hearer of the Last Supper accounts would be in. It turns out that the linguistic communication of 'mutual cup' here refers non to a single vessel, merely to a shared experience and a shared understanding of the symbolic meaning of what it happening in the ritual.
And Andrew Atherstone offers guidance on how to use private cups in practise, in which he notes:
Individual cups are too entirely Anglican, and indeed are used in other parts of the Anglican Communion (like the Province of Kenya, for instance). The English language House of Bishops have made the surprising error of trying to ban individual cups before finding a theological rationale for doing so. They are now playing catch-upwardly, with theological seminars for the College of Bishops in Oct 2022 and the Firm of Bishops in Jan 2021. Some bishops will e'er resist the do, on the Tractarian principle that there may be miniscule droplets of wine left unconsumed, because individual cups cannot be ritually cleansed. But this has never been the mainstream teaching or exercise of the Church building of England – at to the lowest degree not since the Reformation – and it is wrong for a few bishops to hold the rest of the Church of England in earnest to their personal liturgical preferences. No 1 has been able to produce a coherent Anglican case against private cups, because at that place is none. On the contrary, the Anglican case in favour of individual cups has been laid out repeatedly and at length.
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