“As it is, they are holy.”

When the baptism of infants is a topic of discussion, Paul’s exhortation to those living with unbelieving spouses in 1 Corinthians 7:13-14 often comes up.  Inevitably, there is then some debate over whether this could possibly be applied to the question of baptism at all.

Those who are strictly for credo baptism will no doubt point out that while the passage does speak the believing spouse’s children as sanctified, it also speaks of the unbelieving spouse as sanctified.  So to say that since Paul calls the children holy they ought to be baptized is to prove too much, since he also calls the unbelieving spouse holy, and surely he is not suggesting they ought to be baptized as well!  I think this is a reasonable point, given how the passage is often presented.

Which brings me to the question of how proponents of infant baptism use the passage.  I think we are often guilty of reversing Paul’s logic in here, if not in our own reading of the passage, then in how we represent his line of reasoning.  I know I am guilty of having done so in the past.  Just so we’re totally clear on what he says, here’s verse 14:

For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.

What I want to point out in this post is that Paul’s burden here is not about the status of the believing parents’ children!  It is rather the status of a believing person’s unbelieving spouse that is in question.  Paul is not making an argument here for the holiness of a believing parent’s children.  Instead, he is doing something much more powerful:

He is assuming it.

In order to bolster his main point that an unbelieving spouse of a Christian is in some way sanctified, Paul appeals to what he evidently considers obvious and well accepted by all—that the children of believers are holy.  Paul tosses the point regarding children into his argument as almost an afterthought, and he never brings children up again.  It’s almost an incidental feature of his case, and he expects all his readers to grasp it without further elaboration.  Notice how he phrases things:

Otherwise, Paul says, your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.

In other words, “Corinthians, you must accept that an unbelieving person is sanctified by a believing spouse, for if you reject this possibility, then by conclusion you must also say that your children are also unclean, but you of course know and understand that they, at least, are holy.”

Paul then goes right back to discussing the relationship between a believer and an unbelieving spouse.  So while the set-apartness of a spouse may be a question of debate here, the holiness of a believer’s children is not.

Does this by itself prove infant baptism?  No, it doesn’t.  But I think it strongly supports the case.  For unless the children of believers are baptized, recognized members of the covenant family, and so definitively sanctified, how else could Paul so readily appeal to their sanctified state as a given (as he here does) in order to argue for the apparently less obvious sanctification of an unbelieving spouse?

In short: if children were not baptized, then Paul would likely need to make a case for their holiness first.

Anamnesis: “Make Present,” or just “Remember”?

There are basically two ways of translating “anamnesis,” which is the word Christ uses in the institution of the Lord’s Supper when he says “do this in remembrance of me,” or “do this as my memorial.”

They mean basically the same thing, but the emphasis is different.  In any case, tied to the word anamnesis is the issue of remembering.  In a Eucharistic or Old Testament sacrificial context, it is the remembering of what God has done for his people and offering of oneself to him in return.  It is thanksgiving.

But what does it mean to remember?  Is remembrance a mere cognitive exercise, or is there something more to it?  Of course today, when we use the word, we generally mean simply to bring a past event to mind.  But is this a Biblical view of remembrance?

In his milestone work, The Shape of the Liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix modified the Roman Catholic suggestion of re-sacrifice¹ in the Eucharist to something a little less offensive to the Biblical mind.  Or much less so.  He defines remembrance as the act of making present.²

According to Dix, when the church remembers the sacrifice of Christ in the Eucharist, they are recalling it not only to mind, but also to present effect.  Remembrance brings the effects of a past event to bear on the present.  It identifies one directly with those people for whom that past event was a present reality.

Of course, since the popularization of this view, Roman Catholics have been using it to stump their Protestant friends who accuse them of viewing the Eucharist as a re-sacrifice.  “Why, no we don’t!  We believe it is simply a making present of the past sacrifice.”

Well, yeah, that’s true as far as it goes, but that’s only because they changed their tune.  Of course, they still believe it means to make physically present . . . though not locally, and that is where we go down the rabbit trail of medieval categories.

But aside from the dissonance, what about the basic melody of this new tune?  Is it any more pleasant than the last?  Let’s take a look.

First there is the language of how God himself remembers.

Genesis 9:15
I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.

Exodus 2:24
And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.

There are many other similar examples.  And there is one interesting example that seems to have a very strong relation to God’s presence.

Numbers 10:9
And when you go to war in your land against the adversary who oppresses you, then you shall sound an alarm with the trumpets, that you may be remembered before the LORD your God, and you shall be saved from your enemies.

We should realize by now that Biblically speaking, remembrance is more than a cognitive recollection.  God certainly does not need to be cognitively reminded of his people or covenants.  He knows all, and he does not forget.  We should also note that when God remembers, it is always a catalyst to action.  The remembrance and the resulting action are so inseparable as to be one and the same.

So what about human remembrance?  How does God command us to remember?

Deuteronomy 15:15
You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this today.

Was this command for that generation of the Exodus only?  This is after the forty years wandering in the wilderness.  An entire generation perished because of unbelief.  Most of those to whom Deuteronomy was given never saw slavery in Egypt.  How can they then rightly remember that God delivered them?  This is a question made all the more stark when we consider that the memorial sacrifices and feasts were to be observed by Israel continually.  Was the celebration of Passover by succeeding generations a mere cognitive exercise or was it an act of identification with God’s deliverance?

I read this passage a couple weeks ago, and found it quite interesting.  Pay attention especially to the pronouns.

Deuteronomy 26:3-10
“And you shall go to the priest who is in office at that time and say to him, ‘I declare today to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our fathers to give us.’ Then the priest shall take the basket from your hand and set it down before the altar of the LORD your God.

“And you shall make response before the LORD your God, ‘a wandering Aramean was my father. And he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor. Then we cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. And the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And behold, now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground, which you, O LORD, have given me.’

Notice how the perspective shifts in the act of remembrance.  The one offering thanksgiving here moves from a sort of separation between himself and his fathers to the point where speaks of himself and his fathers as one identity.  “A wandering Aramean was my father . . . he went down into Egypt” becomes “the Egyptians treated us harshly . . . the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand . . . and gave us this land.”

See how the identity of Israel as a people converge into one identity.  What God did for the fathers he did for the one who offers thanksgiving.  The suffering of the fathers is to be remembered as the suffering of the one who makes sacrifice, so that the deliverance of God might be known for all generations.

How does this apply to us?  Well, if Abraham is our father, we must do the same.  The deliverance of Israel we must recognize as our own.  The word of the prophets called us to repentance.  And finally, Jesus died and rose again for us.  When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we make present that reality in the sense that we identify ourselves with the sacrifice of Christ.  In remembrance, the Holy Spirit really (spiritual realities are real no less than the physical) applies to us the effects of the sacrifice.

Benjamin Warfield, in speaking of the Lord’s Supper, wrote this:

Assuredly, for example, the sacrificial feast is not a repetition of the sacrifice; and equally certainly it is something more than a mere commemoration of the sacrifice: it is specifically a part of the sacrifice, and more particularly this part—the application of it. . . . Precisely what our Lord did therefore . . . he, the true Passover, the Lamb of God, that takes away the sin of the world—was to establish a perpetual sacrificial feast, under universal forms, capable of observation everywhere and at all times . . . All who partake of this bread and wine, the appointed symbols of his body and blood, therefore, are symbolically partaking of the victim offered on the altar of the cross, and are by this act professing themselves offerers of the sacrifice and seeking to become beneficiaries of it. That is the fundamental significance of the Lord’s Supper.  Whenever the Lord’s Supper is spread before us we are invited to take our place at the sacrificial feast, the substance of which is the flesh and blood of the victim which has been sacrificed once for all at Calvary . . . ³

So then, with Dix, we might affirm that remembrance is indeed a making present to us the reality of Christ’s one sacrifice, and with Warfield, who it appears would agree with that, we say that it is the application of the sacrifice to the one who partakes.

Anamnesis, then, is the recollection to us the realities of the past in such a way that they may no longer be thought of to be a mere past reality brought to mind, but a present one as well.

There are more things to look at in this.  For instance, how our celebration of the Supper brings us to God’s remembrance, and so into his presence.  I don’t want anyone to think I overlooked that.  Dix deals with this at length, and to properly address Dix, we have to consider that sense of the word.  But this is enough for one post.  I’ll probably look at this again.

God’s Displeasure with Cain

Many of us know the Genesis 4 story of Cain and Abel from Sunday school.  The two sons of Adam and Eve bring forth offerings for the Lord.  Cain, the elder, is a farmer.  He brings the first fruits of his harvest.  Abel is a shepherd.  He brings the first of his flock.

And we know how the story goes from there.  God is displeased with Cain’s offering, but accepts the sacrifice of Abel.  Cain, jealous of his brother, kills him and becomes the first murderer.

It’s a simple and tragic story.  But there’s something going on beneath the surface.  Something that we likely did not get in Sunday school, at least in relation to this story.

For the question remains: why did God not accept the offering of Cain?  When Cain is jealous, what does God mean when he admonishes him with the words: “If you do well, will you not be accepted?” So what was the problem?  What did Cain do that was not “well”?  We aren’t even really told how God indicated that he accepted one offering and not the other.

At least when I was a child, we were told that Cain’s heart was not right when he made his sacrifice, and so God was not pleased.  And this is certainly the case.  God makes clear in many places that he desires the obedience of the heart, and not only outward sacrifice.

However, there is something more fundamentally wrong with Cain: while Abel brought blood atonement, Cain brought a grain offering.  He should have known that blood was required to atone for sin before harvest could be brought in thanksgiving.  Hebrews 9:22 tells us that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.”

But this is before the law, is it not?  That is, the Mosaic Torah, with it’s Levitical system.  So it is.  But God sets the example of sacrifice for Adam and Eve from the beginning with he sheds the blood of animals to clothe them.  All are in sin.  All require the shedding of blood.  Whether God then gave them specifics of what and how to sacrifice, we aren’t told.

He didn’t have to.  The pattern was set.  Abel understood this, and so brought a spotless lamb as sacrifice, prefiguring Christ.  Cain also should have known.  He did know, and so God exhorted him to “do well.”  But Cain’s rebellious pride was too great.  And so the blood he shed, instead of atoning for sin, cried out from the ground to accuse him.

And so we must find ourselves in Christ, covered by His blood, if we hope for the atonement of our sin.

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
Hebrews 12:22-24

For if we are found in the blood of the Lamb as Abel was, then the blood that covers us atones for our sin, and does not cry out from the ground to accuse us, as it did for Cain.

Jesus is the Bread of Life: Lukan Bookends

We are into the third week of Advent, with Christmas less than a couple weeks off.  So I wanted to take a brief look at the Gospel of Luke, and particularly at Luke’s theme of Jesus as the Bread of Life.

Luke never actually calls Jesus “the bread of life”—that title comes from John’s Gospel.  But the theme of Jesus and His relationship and identification with bread runs deep through Luke’s account, with stories like the feeding of the five thousand, the comparing of the kingdom to leaven, etc.  In fact, the Gospel of Luke is bookended by stories that relate to bread.

At the end of Luke’s gospel we have the story of Jesus meeting the disciples on the road to Emmaus.  The crucifixion has taken place just a couple days prior, and two disciples are returning home from Jerusalem, somber for the events of the past week.  Jesus meets them on the road and expounds the entire Scripture to them and how the witness of the prophets made it plain that the Messiah must die and rise again on the third day.

Even so, they don’t really get it until Jesus administers to them the first Eucharist after the institution at the Last Supper.  He takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them.  That’s when their eyes are opened.  Jesus is here!  He is present with us now in the breaking of bread. It is the first anamnesis, and the disciples immediately recall what is meant by this ritual action.  Apart from the berakah, there are no words spoken by Jesus here.  It is the action itself that is the memorial—that reveals Christ to them and makes present the moment when he first took bread and said “This is my body, which is given for you.”

By now, Jesus has vanished, but his disciples have gotten the point.  So they do exactly the same thing that we are commissioned to do after every observance of the Supper—they return to Jerusalem, proclaiming the good news of Christ’s resurrection:

Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.
~Luke 24:35

In the same way, Jesus is known to us also in the breaking of bread.  It is Luke’s final lesson to us (until we get to Acts, where there is much more breaking of bread).

But back to our Christmas theme.  The story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus is the climax of Luke’s gospel.  It’s the realization of what he foreshadowed at the beginning of his account.

It is not insignificant for Luke that Jesus is born in a town called Bethlehem—the house of bread.  Matthew also records that Jesus is born in Bethlehem, but he is more focused on how the birth in Bethlehem fulfills the Old Testament prophets, and makes less of the name itself.

Luke, on the other hand, leaves aside the prophets for a moment to set out for us the scene of Jesus’ birth.  He first gives an extended account of what brought Mary and Joseph to this remote town, and then, in case we missed the significance of the town’s name, he includes the detail of Mary laying Jesus in a feeding trough (Luke 2:7).  The point is repeated and emphasized when the angels proclaim the good news to the shepherds.  “This will be a sign for you: you’ll find a baby . . . lying in a feeding trough” (verse 12).  Wait . . . that’s a sign?  A sign of what?  Again a third time, in case our wits are slow, Luke tells us: “They went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a feeding trough” (verse 16).

In Bethlehem.  In the house of bread.

So.  Have we got it yet?

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