Anglican Communion

Ok - so this one's a bit sooner than expected. Having been in conversation about the Lord's Supper in Anglican Churches yesterday, I thought I'd put down a few thoughts here.

Although it wasn't the only issue in the Protestant Reformation, the theology and practice of the Lord's Supper was pretty front and centre. It was one of the key issues over which the Church of England separated from the Roman Catholic Church. Without going into all the details, the English rejected the ideas that the body Christ was physically present in the Communion and that the act of taking communion was in any way meritorious. They weren't purely memorialists like the Swiss (although they came pretty close at a couple of points), but believed in a spiritual presence of Christ in the bread and wine that was conditional upon the faith of the recipient.

Interesting as all this is (!), the thing I've been discussing lately is whether or not anyone cares anymore. In the sixteenth century, this stuff was considered to be so important that endless hours were spent developing more and more complex, refined and detailed theologies, and whole movements were prepared to break away from each other over their differing beliefs. Those separations still exist today in the form of different denominations and national churches, but are we still concerned about this big issue that was so important to the split in the first place?

That last question is sparked by two of the approaches that I've seen to the Lord's Supper in Anglican Churches, both of which seem strange to me. One is effectively a return to something like the Catholic Mass, with the sense that more is going on in the Communion than the Reformers would ever have been happy with. I wonder if in some cases, churches that have this 'Anglo-Catholic' approach to the sacraments got there via an attraction to the aesthetic of Catholic worship, rather than a conviction about non-Protestant theology. I suspect that in some cases these kinds of churches don't like the separatist flavour of Protestantism and are wanting to express their endorsement of the 'universal' ideal of the Catholic Church. Although both of these things might be ok as far as they go, I do think that for integrity's sake, once you step over into Catholic sacramental theology, you should probably consider whether or not it's time to leave the Anglican Church and formally join the Catholics.

The second thing that I've seen tends to happen in those Anglican Churches with a more evangelical bent and it's the downplaying of the sacraments altogether. This can even get the point where Communion is shared very infrequently and when it does happen, the minister seems to feel the need to offer an extended apology for it - or almost to even explain it away. I suspect this happens out of a fear that no one present should fall into the trap of thinking that what's going on is the same as what goes on in Catholic Churches and, to be fair, I think for many punters, this distinction is necessary. But sometimes it can get to sounding like the Lord's Supper has been downgraded, which is not at all what the first Protestants did. They didn't marginalise or diminish the Supper, they reformed it - or even attempted to restore it to its proper biblical pattern. They maintained a high view of Communion, even if not a Roman view. The other thing that sometimes happens in these sorts of churches is that a lot of effort goes into explaining what Communion isn't, but not much goes into explain what it is, and why it matters. This is a problem because negative information about something never builds up a positive understanding.

A wise friend once said to me that a person's sacramental theology reveals a great deal about their entire theological framework and I believe that's worthy of some reflection. If you have a semi-Catholic view of the Lord's Supper, do you have a semi-Catholic theology overall? Does that matter? If you have a low view of the Lord's Supper, do you have a low view of theology overall? Does that matter? And if you just have an underdeveloped view of the Lord's Supper, do you also have an underdeveloped theology? And does that matter?

I'm actually putting these as more than just rhetorical questions too. Given that, on the whole, we don't seem as fazed by sacramental theology these days as we were five hundred years ago, does any of it really matter? Was the big Reformation blow-up really a storm in a teacup (or a chalice)? Is the looser grip that we now seem to have on these questions actually a better reflection of gospel priorities? Have we progressed or regressed since the early days of the split with Rome?