Devotional 139: The Communion of Saints: Union with Christ and Each Other

The Confession Read

All saints, that are united to Jesus Christ their Head, by his Spirit, and by faith, have fellowship with him in his graces, sufferings, death, resurrection, and glory: and, being united to one another in love, they have communion in each other's gifts and graces, and are obliged to the performance of such duties, public and private, as do conduce to their mutual good, both in the inward and outward man.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 26, Section 1

Introduction

There are words so familiar that they have become smooth as worn stone, and no word in the Creed has been more thoroughly smoothed than this one: the communion of saints. Millions have confessed it every Lord's Day since the ancient church, and millions have passed over it without a pause, as though it were a mere flourish added to the article on the church, a phrase to be recited rather than believed. Yet the divines at Westminster did not think it a flourish. They gave it an entire chapter, and they opened that chapter with a sentence so freighted with doctrine that it will bear the whole weight of the Christian life if we have strength enough to lift it. This sentence is not a definition to be learned and set aside. It is the anatomy of the soul's happiness, and to understand it is to understand at last why a Christian can never be alone. We live in an age that aches with loneliness, and yet flees from every bond that might cure it. Men are more connected than ever, and more alone; they are wired to a thousand devices and bound to almost no one. Into this loneliness the doctrine before us speaks a word of astonishing comfort, but it speaks it in the right order, and the order is everything. The divines do not begin with friendship, with community, or with the fellowship of believers, as though the church were merely a society of the like-minded. They begin with Jesus Christ. They tell us first that the saints are united to their Head, and only then that they are united to one another. The vertical communion comes first, and the horizontal communion flows from it as a stream from its spring. This is the whole structure of the sentence, and to reverse that order, seeking the fellowship of the saints before the fellowship of the Son, is to build a house without a foundation and to wonder why it will not stand. Consider what is actually claimed here, and measure how far it reaches. A believer, the divines say, has fellowship with Jesus Christ in his graces, his sufferings, his death, his resurrection, and his glory. That is not the language of a distant admiration; it is the language of a shared life. The Christian does not merely read about the death of Christ as one reads about the death of a king long buried. He dies in that death, is raised in that resurrection, and shares already, in a real though hidden way, in the glory that is to be revealed. And out of this staggering union there arises a second union: all those who are joined to the same Head are thereby joined to one another, so that the gifts and graces of each become the common treasure of all, and each believer is laid under a solemn obligation to seek the good of every other, in body and in soul. This is the communion of saints, and if we have never marvelled at it, it is only because we have never truly looked at it. There is a saying among the ancients that coals laid together burn, while a coal taken from the fire and set apart soon grows black and cold. It is a homely picture, but it is the very picture of this doctrine. The believer who is joined to Christ is joined to a fire that never goes out, and the warmth of that fire is meant to be shared, coal against coal, through the communion of the saints. Cut off from Christ, no man can burn at all; cut off from the body, no man can long keep his warmth. The sentence before us, then, is not a piece of ecclesiastical machinery. It is the doctrine of the fire, the doctrine of the body, the doctrine of the family, and it summons every believer out of the cold isolation of a private faith into the warm company of the redeemed.

Scripture Foundation

The doctrine rests, first and last, upon the union of the believer with Christ, and no text states that union more plainly than the opening of John's first epistle. The apostle writes that he declares what he has seen and heard "that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ" (1 John 1:3). The word rendered fellowship is koinōnia, and it is one of the most consequential words in the New Testament. It means a common sharing, a joint participation, a having of things in common so intimate that the sharers are bound into a single life. John is not describing a pleasant sentiment. He is describing the very substance of salvation, for to be a Christian is to be brought into koinōnia with the Father and with the Son. And notice the direction of the logic. The fellowship of believers with one another, "that ye also may have fellowship with us," is not the foundation but the consequence. It exists because there is first a fellowship with God, into which the apostles have already entered and into which they summon their readers. This is the exact order of the Confession: union with Christ first, communion with one another second. John would not know what to do with a man who craved the fellowship of the saints but had no fellowship with the Son, for the first is impossible without the second. The same word reappears at the very heart of the church's worship, and there it binds the two communions into one in a manner that nothing else can match. Writing to the Corinthians, Paul asks, "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:16-17). Here is the deepest mystery of the section compressed into two verses. The cup is the koinōnia of Christ's blood and the bread the koinōnia of his body: in the supper the believer has real fellowship with the crucified and risen Lord, receiving by faith all that his sacrifice purchased. But Paul will not let the communion rest there, for the one loaf produces a second and inseparable truth. Because we all partake of that one bread, we who are many are one body. The same supper that unites each believer to Christ unites all believers to one another. One Christ, one loaf, one body: the Lord's Supper is the visible seal of precisely what the Confession confesses, and it is no accident that the divines would later call this chapter the communion of saints, for the communion is both with the Head and with the members at once. If we would see how this communion works itself out in the daily life of the church, we must turn to Paul's great exposition of the body in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27, a passage so rich that the Confession breathes its air on every line. "For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body." The apostle's point is twofold, and both halves belong to the section before us. First, the body has one life, the life of Christ, and every member shares it, so that there is no believer so obscure as to be dispensable and none so eminent as to be self-sufficient. Second, the members belong to one another in a union so close that what touches one touches all: "whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it." The Greek term for the body is sōma, and Paul's image is not a figure of speech but a fact of grace: the Spirit has so joined believers to Christ and to each other that their interests are now indivisible. The sorrow of the least saint is the sorrow of the whole, and the honour of any is the joy of all. This is the communion of gifts and graces of which the Confession speaks, and it is the death of every merely private Christianity. The wonder of it is that this fellowship extends even to the bitterest things, for the believer is a sharer in Christ's glory and in his sufferings. Paul, writing from a Roman prison, counts everything loss for Christ, "that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death" (Philippians 3:10). The phrase "the fellowship of his sufferings" is again koinōnia, and it is among the most startling expressions in the New Testament. Paul does not fear that fellowship; he covets it. He longs to be so joined to Christ that the afflictions of the Head are felt in the members, for he knows that the road to the resurrection runs through the grave, and that no man shares the crown who has not shared the cross. This is why the divines place "sufferings" in their list before "resurrection" and "glory": the believer's fellowship with Christ is a fellowship in the whole of his saving work, the bitter before the sweet, the humiliation before the exaltation. And because every member shares the same fellowship of suffering, each is bound to the others in their trials, so that Paul could elsewhere command, "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). Here the doctrine turns at last into a duty, and the whole circle is closed: fellowship with Christ, fellowship with the saints, and the mutual bearing of burdens as the law of the whole.

What the Divines Meant

The divines framed this sentence as a careful answer to two errors, and it is only by seeing both that we grasp their intent. On the one side stood the Roman doctrine, which had so swallowed up the individual believer in the institution of the church that communion with Christ was made to run through a priest, a sacrament, and a visible hierarchy, and the believer was taught to seek his fellowship with God at second hand. On the other side stood the sectaries and enthusiasts of the age, who so exalted the private work of the Spirit that they despised the gathered church altogether, and claimed a communion with Christ that needed no brother, no assembly, and no body. The divines walked between these two, and their sentence is the narrow path they marked. Against Rome they insisted that the believer's communion with Christ is immediate, by the Spirit and by faith, needing no human mediator to stand between the soul and its Head. Against the enthusiasts they insisted that this same communion binds the believer, in the same breath, to the communion of the saints, so that no man may claim the Head while he disdains the members. The sentence holds both truths in a single grip, and to drop either is to fall into the ditch on one side or the other. The first weight to be lifted is the phrase "united to Jesus Christ their Head, by his Spirit, and by faith." The divines are here naming the union that lies beneath everything else, the union the theologians call mystical or spiritual. It is the work of the Holy Spirit, who takes the believer and joins him to Christ as a branch is joined to a vine, and it is received by faith, which is the empty hand that lays hold of Christ. The divines name both the divine side and the human side, and they do so deliberately. The Spirit is the bond from Christ's side, quickening the dead soul and making it one with the living Head; faith is the bond from our side, receiving and resting upon Christ alone. Neither without the other avails. A man may talk of the Spirit while he has no faith, and he has nothing; a man may pretend to a faith that is not the gift of the Spirit, and he has a shadow. But where the Spirit works and faith receives, there is a union as real as the union of head and members, and this union is the fountain of every blessing the section describes. From this union the divines draw their first conclusion, and it is a conclusion that reaches from grace to glory: the saints "have fellowship with him in his graces, sufferings, death, resurrection, and glory." Mark how comprehensive the list is. It begins with graces, for everything Christ has purchased is shared with his people: his righteousness is counted theirs, his Spirit is poured into them, his merits cover their sins. It passes to sufferings and death, for the believer is so one with Christ that he is said to die with him and to be buried with him, and the trials he endures are called a fellowship in Christ's sufferings. It rises to resurrection and glory, for the same believer is already raised with Christ in newness of life and already seated with him in heavenly places, and the glory of the Head is the certain inheritance of the members. The divines are not speaking of a future hope only, though the fulness is future; they are speaking of a present possession, a fellowship now begun, real and tasted though not yet complete. This is the height of the Christian calling, and it is the answer to every melancholy that whispers that the believer is alone, or that Christ is far off, or that salvation is a distant transaction and not a present union. But the divines do not stop at the vertical line, for the union with Christ has an immediate horizontal consequence: "being united to one another in love, they have communion in each other's gifts and graces." The bond that joins the members together is love, and it is the same love with which Christ loved them, shed abroad in their hearts by the Spirit. By this love they are so knit that what each one has is no longer his alone. The gifts and graces God has distributed among his people are, in the divines' phrase, "each other's," a common stock held for the good of all. The wisdom of one is for the guidance of many; the faith of one strengthens the weak; the wealth of one relieves the want of another; the comfort wherewith one is comforted flows to the mourner at his side. This is a truth that humbles and cheers at once, for it strips the strong of their pride and the rich of their selfishness while it assures the weak and the poor that they are not paupers in the family of God but joint-heirs of a common treasure. And because this communion is real, it is also obligatory. The saints "are obliged to the performance of such duties, public and private, as do conduce to their mutual good, both in the inward and outward man." The word "obliged" is the divines' stern and necessary word. Communion is not a sentiment to be enjoyed but a duty to be discharged. Publicly, the saints are bound to the worship of God together, to the assembly, the ordinances, and the mutual edification of the body gathered; privately, they are bound to prayer for one another, counsel, rebuke, comfort, and relief as need arises. And the good they seek is twofold: the good of the inward man, the soul's growth in grace, and the good of the outward man, the body's necessities and the outward estate. The divines will expand this in the sections that follow, but already the principle is set: he who professes the communion of saints and yet lives as though he owed nothing to any saint has denied in his life what he has confessed with his lips. The communion of saints is a fellowship with obligations, and its obligations are nothing less than the law of love.

Theological Depth

The doctrine here confessed drew the best thought of the Reformed tradition, for it stands at the very centre of the gospel, and the great teachers of the church did not rest until they had unfolded its depths. Calvin, in the fourth book of the Institutes, made the communion of saints the great practical test of a man's union with Christ, and he stated the matter with a bluntness that has never needed improvement. It is a mark of a false and hypocritical faith, he taught, to wish to enjoy Christ while remaining separate from his members, for the Head and the body cannot be divided. Christ cannot be torn in pieces; if we would have him for our Head, we must have his church for our body. Calvin pressed the point to its consequence in the ordering of the church's life: the gifts of the Spirit are distributed to individuals precisely so that they may be shared, "for to each is given not that he might enjoy it alone, but that all might be made rich by the common possession of it." There is no solitary Christianity in Calvin. The man who says he has Christ but needs no church has, in Calvin's judgment, neither the Head nor the body, for the two are one Christ, and he who would possess the one must possess the other. It is a hard saying, but it is the saying of Scripture, and Calvin merely refused to soften it. Watson, whose gift it was to turn the severest doctrine into devotion, takes this very truth and presses it toward the heart in his Body of Divinity. He lingers over the sweetness of the communion of saints, and he does so because he had tasted it. To be a member of the body of Christ, Watson teaches, is to be so joined to the rest that "nothing has a greater power and energy to effect holiness than the communion of saints." The saints are grapes in one cluster, drawing from the same root and the same sap, and what flows into one flows into all. He would have the believer feel what the Confession states, and he is not ashamed of the warmth of it. The communion of saints means that the believer's prayers and tears, his mercies and graces, are a common treasure laid up for the whole household of faith; that the strong believer's faith is a stay to the weak, and the weak believer's sigh is a prayer that reaches heaven for the strong. Watson delights especially in the thought that Christ counts the honour of every saint as his own, and the suffering of every saint as done to himself, so that he who refreshes one member refreshes the Head. It is a doctrine, in Watson's hands, that makes the church not a cold institution but a warm family, and every believer a brother in whose joy and grief the rest are bound to share. This is the note of tenderness the section needs, and Watson sounds it in full. Turretin, in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, brought his accustomed precision to the distinction that lies at the bottom of the section: the distinction between union and communion. Union with Christ, he taught, is the foundation and the root; communion is the fruit and the consequence that flows from it. The union is once and for all, wrought by the Spirit and never dissolved; the communion is continual, and may be interrupted on our side by sin, though the root remains alive beneath. The saints are first united to Christ, and then, and only then, do they have fellowship with him and with one another. Turretin's care here is not pedantry but protection, for the distinction guards the doctrine from two fatal errors at once. It guards against those who would make the believer's union with Christ depend upon the fluctuating warmth of his own feelings, as though the bond were broken whenever the heart grows cold; and it guards against those who would dissolve the distinction between Christ and the believer altogether, as though the believer were made part of the divine essence. The union is real but it is not a confusion; the communion is sweet but it rests upon a union more sure than any feeling. This is the exact ground on which the Confession stands. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, takes up the two halves of the section and unfolds each with his characteristic clarity. The fellowship with Christ, he observes, is a fellowship in all that Christ is and has done: in his graces, which are imputed and imparted; in his sufferings, which the believer shares as a member of the body of a suffering Head; in his death and resurrection, which the believer experiences spiritually in dying to sin and rising to newness of life; and in his glory, which is the believer's certain and eternal inheritance. And the communion with the saints, Hodge continues, is a communion both in spiritual things and in temporal things, a fellowship of gifts and graces that issues in a fellowship of goods, so that the wealthy believer and the poor believer are bound to one another in a mutual obligation that neither may ignore. Hodge would have us see that the doctrine is not a bare sentiment but a network of duties, and that the man who will not serve the body of Christ has not yet learned what it means to be a member of it. Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession, supplies the briefest and most serviceable summary of the whole, and it is worth lingering over because it keeps the two lines of the doctrine from ever becoming tangled. The saints, he writes, have fellowship with Christ in all that he is and has done for them; and they have fellowship with one another, first in spiritual things, in each other's gifts, graces, prayers, and experiences, and second in temporal things, ministering to one another's outward necessities according to their several abilities. Shaw is careful to note that this communion does not abolish the rights of property, a point the next sections will press, but he is equally careful to note that it does bind the believer to the performance of every duty of love. His exposition is valuable because it is so nearly transparent: the communion of saints is simply the life of the body of Christ, lived out in the world, the Head supplying all and the members ministering to all. Whatever obscures that life, whether the pride of the strong or the envy of the weak, obscures the gospel itself. To these voices we may add the later witness of B. B. Warfield, who saw plainly that the union of the believer with Christ is the very heart of the Christian religion. Warfield held that this union is the truth around which all the rest of Paul's teaching is organized, and he insisted that it is not a metaphor but the most intimate of all real relations, closer than any earthly bond, for by it the believer is joined to Christ as a member to its head and a branch to its vine. Out of this union, Warfield argued, flows everything else: justification, sanctification, adoption, and, not least, the communion of the saints, which is simply the union of the many members in the one body because they are all united to the one Head. Warfield's contribution to this section is to teach us to feel the weight of what the divines confess. The communion of saints is not an appendix to the gospel; it is the gospel's social shape, the necessary outward expression of the union with Christ in which all salvation consists. Where that union is, the communion cannot fail to be; where the communion is absent, we may well ask whether the union was ever more than a name.

Puritan Application

First, make sure of the foundation before you presume upon the fellowship. The communion of saints begins with union with Christ, and there is no fellowship with the body where there is no union with the Head. Many a man has been busy in the church's company, and warm in its affections, who has never once closed with Christ by a living faith, and such a man has the shadow of the thing without the substance. Examine yourself, then, before you examine the church. Is Christ truly yours? Do you rest upon him alone for righteousness, and is the Spirit at work in you, turning your heart from sin to the living God? If this is not settled, nothing else is settled, and the sweetest fellowship on earth is but a feast eaten by a man who is still dead. But if it is settled, then rejoice, for you are joined to Christ, and because you are joined to him, every other blessing of this chapter is yours already and cannot finally be lost. Second, live as a member of the body, and refuse the private Christianity that our age so readily commends. It is the peculiar temptation of our time to suppose that a man may be a Christian in isolation, nourished by sermons on a screen and warmed by no living fellowship at all. The Confession knows nothing of such a Christianity, and neither does the New Testament. Join yourself to a true church, and be present at its assemblies, and let your faith be shaped and corrected by the body of Christ, for a coal taken from the fire grows cold, and a member severed from the body dies. The assemblies of the saints are not an optional addition to the Christian life; they are the appointed means by which the Head ministers to the members and the members to one another. He who will not be gathered with the saints on earth should ask himself with trembling whether he is gathered with the saints in heaven. Third, receive the gifts of others with humility, and give your own with generosity, for the gifts and graces of the saints are a common stock. God has distributed his gifts with a sovereign and unequal hand, giving to one wisdom, to another wealth, to another sympathy, to another the gift of prayer, precisely so that none might be sufficient in himself and all might be necessary to all. Do not envy the gift your brother has and you lack, as though the body were a competition; and do not hoard the gift you have and your brother needs, as though it were your private property. The strong are to bear the infirmities of the weak, the rich are to relieve the necessities of the poor, and the wise are to instruct the simple, for all that we have we hold as stewards for the common good. The member of a body that keeps its life to itself is a member that is already dying. Fourth, bear one another's burdens, and let the fellowship of the saints be felt especially in the house of sorrow. It is easy to rejoice with those who rejoice; the world does that readily. But the communion of saints is proved in the harder fellowship, the fellowship of Christ's sufferings, when we weep with those who weep and enter into the grief of a brother as though it were our own. Visit the sick, comfort the mourner, pray for the tempted, bear with the froward, and forgive the offending, for all this is the law of Christ fulfilled in the body. And remember that your own sorrows are not meaningless in this fellowship: the affliction that feels so solitary is, in the hands of the Head, a means by which you are made able to comfort others with the comfort wherewith you have been comforted. There is no grief in the body that does not touch the whole, and no comfort given that does not strengthen the whole. Fifth, come often to the Lord's Table, for there the doctrine of this section is taught and tasted. The supper is the seal of your union with Christ and of your communion with the saints in one and the same act, for there you feed upon one Christ and are made one bread with all who feed with you. Never let the Table become a solitary thing or a mere routine; come to it as a member of the body, rejoicing that you do not come alone, that the same Lord whom you receive is received by saints in every land and every age, and that in eating one bread you are made one with them all. The communion of saints is never more real than at that Table, and the believer who comes to it in faith comes away with his love for Christ warmed and his love for the brethren renewed. Let this be the seal upon all the rest, and let the doctrine of the communion of saints cease to be a phrase in the Creed and become the shape of your whole life.

Prayer

O blessed Lord Jesus Christ, Thou who art the Head of Thy body the church, we bless Thee that Thou hast not left us alone, but hast joined us to Thyself by Thy Spirit and by faith, and hast made us to have fellowship with Thee in Thy graces, Thy sufferings, Thy death, Thy resurrection, and Thy glory. We marvel that such a union should be ours, and that we who were far off should be brought nigh, and made members of Thy flesh and of Thy bones. Grant us, we pray Thee, to feel the power of this union, and to live in the daily joy of it, that we may never sink into the coldness of those who have the name of Christ without the life of Christ. And because we are joined to Thee, our Head, we beseech Thee to make us faithful members one of another. Bind us together in love, and teach us to count the gifts and graces of our brethren as our common treasure, and their burdens as our own. Deliver us from the proud self-sufficiency that would live without the body, and from the cold selfishness that would enjoy its comforts while refusing its duties. Make us to weep with them that weep and to rejoice with them that rejoice, to bear the infirmities of the weak and to relieve the necessities of the poor, and to seek in all things the mutual good of Thy people, in the inward and the outward man. Forgive us, O Lord, the many ways in which we have broken this communion: the envy that grudged a brother's gift, the sloth that withheld our own, the tongue that wounded where it should have healed, the heart that grew cold toward Thy people. Have mercy upon us, and renew a right spirit within us, that the communion we profess may be found in truth, and not in word only. And do Thou gather Thine whole church, in every place and in every age, into the perfect communion of that day when faith shall be turned to sight, and the body shall be complete, and every member shall be made like the Head. Bring us, with all the saints, to that blessed assembly, where love shall never grow cold and fellowship shall never be broken. We ask all this in the name of Jesus Christ our Head, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.