Devotional 141: The Communion of Saints in Worship: Fellowship in the Ordinances

The Confession Read

This communion which the saints have with Christ, doth not make them in any wise partakers of the substance of his Godhead; or to be equal with Christ in any respect: either of which to affirm is impious and blasphemous. Nor doth their communion one with another, as saints, take away, or infringe the title or propriety which each man hath in his goods and possessions.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 26, Section 3

Introduction

Two men, in two ages far apart, made the same mistake, and it is a mistake the fallen heart has never stopped making. The first fell upon his knees in prayer, and as the warmth of devotion rose within him he began to persuade himself that his soul had been melted into the very being of God, that the boundary between the creature and the Creator had been dissolved, and that he had become what he worshipped. The second looked upon the goods of his brother, and because he loved his brother he reasoned that what belonged to one belonged to all, and that the surest mark of true communion was a common purse and a common table. The first mistook communion with Christ for identity with Christ. The second mistook communion with the saints for the abolition of private property. Both men were wrong, and both their errors spring from a single root, for in each case a holy thing was loved so violently that it was pressed beyond its bounds until it ceased to be holy at all. We come now to a section of the Confession that many pass over as a mere caution, a string of negatives, a fence around a garden. But fences are not afterthoughts; they are what keep a garden a garden. In the two sections that have gone before, the divines have opened to us the riches of the communion of saints: our union with Christ by his Spirit and by faith, and our fellowship with one another in worship and in mutual edification and in the relief of outward things. It is a doctrine of piercing sweetness, and precisely because it is so sweet it is also dangerous, for the sweetest truths are the ones men most love to carry too far. And so the divines now set two bounds upon the doctrine, and each bound is a mercy. The first bound is drawn against the mystic. There have always been souls so transported by the thought of union with God that they have imagined themselves swallowed up into his essence, "godded in God," as one old writer put it, "christed in Christ," so that the distinction between the soul and its Maker is lost and the creature claims a share in the very substance of the Godhead. Against this the divines answer with a flat and solemn no: communion with Christ never makes any man a partaker of the substance of his Godhead, nor equal with Christ in any respect whatever. The second bound is drawn against the leveller. There have always been men who reasoned that because the saints have all things in common in Christ, therefore they ought to have all things common in the market and the field as well, and that the truest church is the one where no man calls any possession his own. Against this the divines answer with an equally firm no: the communion of saints does not take away or infringe the title or propriety which each man has in his goods and possessions. The eighth commandment is not repealed by love; it is love that keeps it. So the two halves of this short sentence stand sentinel over the doctrine we have been studying, one at each edge of the road. On the one side lies the ditch of the mystic, who would dissolve the creature into the Creator; on the other the ditch of the leveller, who would dissolve the brother's property into the common stock. The divines would keep us on the narrow road between them. Let us hear how Scripture itself draws these same lines, and then how the divines, and the teachers of the church after them, have walked it.

Scripture Foundation

The first bound the divines draw, the bound against sharing in the substance of Christ's Godhead, is not their own invention; it is written into the opening of the Gospel according to John. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). Every word of that verse is a wall raised between the Creator and the creature. The Word was: not became, not was made, but was, in the beginning, before there was any beginning at all; he already existed when all that is began to be. The Word was with God, face to face with the Father, distinct in person; and the Word was God, one in essence, sharing fully in the divine nature. And then John adds the sentence that settles the whole matter: "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3). Here is the gulf no saint may cross. The Word is the Maker; the saint is a thing made. The Word is uncreated; the saint is a creature. The distance between them is not a difference of degree but a difference of kind, the difference between the potter and the clay, between the one who gives being and the one who receives it. Communion may join the creature to the Creator as closely as the bridegroom is joined to the bride, but it can never turn the bride into the bridegroom, the clay into the potter, the creature into the Creator. The very gospel of our salvation depends upon this distance remaining, for if the saint could ever become God, he would have no need of God to save him. Paul presses the same truth to its sharpest point in his letter to the Colossians, and there we meet a word that carries the whole doctrine in a single syllable. "For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily" (Colossians 2:9). The Greek word behind "Godhead" is theotēs, and Paul has chosen it with care. It occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, and it means the very essence of deity itself, the being of God in its infinite depth, rather than the divine qualities that might be shared or imitated. Paul has another word he might have used, theiotēs, the divinity, the divine power and glory, and indeed he uses it elsewhere in speaking of what may be known of God from the things that are made. But here, of Christ, he reaches for the stronger term. In Christ dwells the theotēs, the Godhead itself, all of it, in its fulness, and it dwells there bodily, in the very flesh of the incarnate Son. And mark where the Godhead dwells: in him. It is his by nature, his by right, his from all eternity, not his by gift or by grace or by the overflow of some higher being. Whatever we receive from Christ, and we receive everything, we receive as those who are full of his Spirit and his grace; the theotēs itself is never given to us. The fountain may fill the cup, but the cup is never the fountain; pour out the water and it is empty clay again. The Godhead is Christ's own, and the creature's glory is not to share it but to be filled from it. And because the Godhead is Christ's alone, equality with him is Christ's alone, and Paul tells us as much in the passage that above all others forbids our grasping after it. "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God" (Philippians 2:6). Here two Greek words repay the slowest reading. The first is morphē, the "form" of God. Paul does not say Christ was made in the image of God, as man was made in the image of God, a likeness that may be marred and may be lost. He says Christ subsisted in the form of God, and morphē means the essential nature itself, the abiding reality of what a thing is. Christ's being was divine; deity was not a robe laid over him but the very shape of his existence. The second word is harpagmos, rendered "robbery," and its meaning is a thing seized, a prize snatched and clung to. Christ, being by nature equal with God, did not regard that equality as a thing to be grasped, for it was already his. A man does not grasp at what he already owns. He who never possessed equality may grasp at it, and the grasping is robbery; but the Son's equality was his from before the world began, and so, far from snatching at it, he laid its outward glory aside and emptied himself for our redemption. Consider what this teaches the soul that would be equal with God. Christ, who had the right to equality, laid it down; and we, who never had the right, would climb up into it? The very humility of the Son condemns our pride, and the passage that sets forth his self-emptying is the death of every ambition to share his throne. But there is a text the mystic seizes upon, and because the divines knew it would be seized upon, we must handle it with care, for the whole first half of this section turns upon it. Peter writes that God has given us exceeding great and precious promises, "that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). Here, the enthusiast cries, is the very thing the Confession denies. And yet the Confession does not deny this text; it denies a certain reading of it. The word rendered "partakers" is koinōnos, and it belongs to the same family as the word we learned when this chapter opened, koinōnia, fellowship, a sharing in common. To be a koinōnos of the divine nature is to have fellowship in it, to share in it, but the question remains what we share, the nature itself or its fruits. The answer Scripture everywhere gives is that we share the fruits, the graces, the moral likeness of God, and never the substance. Peter himself says as much in the very next verse, for he explains the promise by listing what this participation brings: escaping the corruption that is in the world through lust, and adding to faith virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness, love. These are the divine nature we are made partakers of: the holiness and righteousness and love of God, written upon the soul by the Spirit, restoring in us the image we lost in Adam. We become like God in his moral perfections; we do not become God in his essence. The iron laid in the furnace glows with the fire and shares its heat and its light, so that a man can scarcely tell where the iron ends and the fire begins; but the iron remains iron, and when it is withdrawn it cools, for the fire is not its own. So the saint, kindled by the Spirit, burns with a borrowed holiness; the fire is real, but it is the fire of grace, and the soul remains a creature still. The second bound, the bound against the abolition of property, is drawn with equal firmness in the record of the early church, and there the divines found their surest anchor. Luke tells us that in the first days of the church "all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need" (Acts 2:44-45). At first hearing this sounds like the very community of goods the divines forbid, and the leveller has always quoted it so. But the same book tells us how that passage is to be read, and it tells us in the most terrible way. When Ananias sold a possession and brought a part of the price to the apostles, pretending it was the whole, Peter did not rebuke him for failing to give, but for lying, and his words are the charter of private property within the communion of saints: "Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?" (Acts 5:4). There it is, as plainly as words can set it down. Before the sale, the field was Ananias's own; after the sale, the money was in his own power. He was under no compulsion to give any of it, and the apostles had not declared his possessions common. His sin was not that he kept, but that he lied about keeping, pretending a whole-hearted surrender he had not made. The "all things common" of Acts was no abolition of ownership but a fervent and voluntary charity, the love of the first believers overflowing so freely that no man counted his goods too precious to part with when a brother was in need. The eighth commandment, "Thou shalt not steal" (Exodus 20:15), was not suspended in Jerusalem; it was the very law that made the giving holy. For if there is no such thing as "mine," there is no such thing as giving, and charity, which is the soul's highest act, becomes impossible. God would have us give what is ours; the leveller would have us seize what is another's, and call the seizure love.

What the Divines Meant

The divines, in drawing these two bounds, were answering errors that were not ancient history to them but living threats, and each half of their sentence has its own enemy in view. The first half is aimed at the mystics, and the word the divines use to condemn their error is severe because the error is severe. There had arisen in the centuries before the Reformation a whole school of piety that spoke of the soul's ascent into God until it was "deified," absorbed into the divine essence, lost in the uncreated light. Its teachers wrote of being "transformed into God" and "swallowed up in the Godhead," and the Reformation had to decide whether this language was the language of devotion or of blasphemy. The divines judged it blasphemy, and they set down their judgment in words that allow no middle way: to affirm that the saint becomes a partaker of the substance of the Godhead, or that he is equal with Christ, is impious and blasphemous. The strength of the language is deliberate. They were not dealing with a slight excess of warmth in prayer but with the overthrow of the distinction between God and man, and once that distinction falls, the gospel falls with it, for the gospel is nothing else than the good news that a holy God saves a sinful creature. Dissolve the creature into the Creator, and there is nothing left to save. But note carefully what the divines do not say. They do not say the saint has no real communion with Christ, for the two whole sections before this one have been given to proving that communion is real and deep. They do not say the saint receives nothing of Christ, for the believer receives everything: his Spirit, his grace, his righteousness, his life, himself. What they deny is only this: that the saint ever shares the substance of the Godhead, or ever stands equal with Christ. The distinction is the same one Turretin drew for us when this chapter opened, between union and communion. Union joins the saint to Christ; communion conveys Christ's benefits. The second half is aimed at a different enemy, and it too was very much alive in the divines' own day. A century before the Assembly met, the fanatics who seized the city of Münster had abolished private property among their followers and made all things common, and the memory of that madness was still a warning to the churches. And nearer still, in the same decade in which the Assembly sat, the Civil War that was tearing England apart had thrown up its own prophets of community of goods, and the Assembly's own work had scarcely been finished before they made themselves heard: the Diggers, who in 1649 went out upon the common land at St George's Hill and declared that the earth was a common treasury for all, and the more sober Levellers who pressed for the equal division of estates. The divines, writing in the midst of that turmoil, knew that the temptation to mistake the communion of saints for the common ownership of goods was no academic question; it was a doctrine that could set a nation ablaze. And so, against it, they wrote that the communion of saints does not "take away, or infringe the title or propriety which each man hath in his goods and possessions." The phrase is as precise as a surgeon's knife. "Title" and "propriety" are words of law and ownership, and the divines chose them to make the point that property is not a concession to the fall but a part of God's order for the world, guarded by the eighth commandment and honoured by love itself. What the communion of saints does to a man's goods is not to abolish his right to them but to sanctify his use of them. The door of the believer's house is to stand open to the needy brother; the deed of the house remains in the believer's own hand. He gives, and giving is his glory; but he gives what is his own, and if it were not his own, his giving would not be giving at all. The divines would have the saints free with their goods and scrupulous about their rights: free to pour out their abundance upon the needy, scrupulous never to touch what belongs to another, for the love that opens the hand must never become the love that reaches into a brother's pocket. Charity is commanded; confiscation is forbidden; and the difference between them is the difference between the gospel and the gallows.

Theological Depth

Shaw, whose Exposition of the Confession has guided us through this chapter, takes hold of this section as the guard it is meant to be, and he names the two errors the divines were fencing against with a precision worth borrowing. On the one side he sets the mystic's claim to be "godded in God," as though the soul, in its ecstasies, could be dissolved into the divine essence and lose its creaturehood; on the other he sets the Anabaptist's community of goods, the claim that the saints, having all things common in Christ, must have all things common in the world as well. And against the second he points to the Ananias story as the anchor, for the very text that proves the early church's generosity is the text that proves the early church's private property. Peter's question ("Whiles it remained, was it not thine own?") would be meaningless if the saints held everything in common. Shaw's whole treatment turns on a single insight that holds both halves together: communion is real, but it has limits, and the limits are as much a part of the doctrine as the communion itself. Grace does not dissolve the difference between the Creator and the creature, and love does not dissolve the difference between mine and thine. Calvin, who spent much of his ministry in combat with the very spiritualists the divines had in view, pressed the first half of this section with an urgency born of long battle. His commentary on Peter's words about partaking of the divine nature is the classic Reformed statement, and it is as careful as it is firm. When Peter says we are made partakers of the divine nature, Calvin insists, he does not mean that we pass over into the being of God, nor that God is transfused into us, as though the Creator and the creature could be mingled like two rivers flowing into one. He means that we are renewed after the image of God, that the corruptions of our nature are healed and the moral perfections of God, his righteousness, his holiness, his truth, are impressed upon us by the Spirit, so that we become like him and yet remain what we are. The point, Calvin would have us see, is precisely that we are creatures and he is Creator, and that our blessedness lies not in ceasing to be ourselves but in being made wholly like him while remaining wholly ourselves. To the mystic who would climb into the Godhead, Calvin answers that the creature's highest glory is to bear the Creator's image, and that the soul which covets the essence of God has fallen from the very love it professes. Owen, whose doctrine of the believer's communion with God is among the most searching the Reformed church has produced, guarded the same boundary from the side of the creature's dependence. The great thing to be observed in all communion with God, Owen taught, is that it is a communion of persons, never a confusion of natures. The believer and his Lord are two, and must remain two, if there is to be any communion between them at all, for communion is the meeting of distinct persons, and the moment two become one in essence, communion is ended, not perfected. He pressed this against every error that would swallow the soul up in God, and rooted it in the very nature of grace. Grace, Owen insisted, is not the imparting of the divine essence to the creature; it is the free and sovereign favour of God toward a creature who is, and ever shall be, other than himself. The saint's joy is that God, who needed nothing, has stooped to love him; and the saint's humility is the knowledge that he is loved as a creature, kept as a creature, and glorified as a creature, for that is the whole dignity of his nature. Hodge, in his commentary, reduces the section to its two propositions and gives each its practical edge. The first proposition, that communion with Christ does not make us partakers of the substance of the Godhead nor equal with Christ, he reads as the Bible's answer to every form of pantheism, whether the old pantheism of the mystics or the newer pantheism that would soon make God nothing more than the soul of the world. The infinite distance between God and the creature is not a defect in the creature to be overcome but a truth to be rejoiced in, for it is what makes grace possible. The second proposition, that communion does not infringe the title each man has in his goods, he reads as the Bible's answer to every form of communism, and he grounds it in the very character of God, who is a God of order, who has set the poor and the rich alike under his law, and who has made love the spring of giving rather than force the instrument of levelling. Hodge's summary is worth the whole: the communion of saints is a communion of love, and love gives, but love does not absorb, and love shares, but love does not seize. Turretin's distinction between union and communion, which carried the opening of this chapter, stands quietly behind this section as well. Union joins the saint to Christ; communion conveys Christ's benefits. Union is the root; communion is the fruit. And because it is benefits that are conveyed, and never essence, the saint may be filled to overflowing with the grace of Christ and yet remain, now and for ever, a creature of dust who has been loved into glory. This is not a denial of intimacy but its true foundation. Only because God and man remain God and man can there be a meeting between them at all; and the deepest communion of all is the communion of a creature who is kept in being and a Creator who, in infinite condescension, has made that creature his friend.

Puritan Application

First, keep your place as a creature, and count it your glory, not your grievance. The error this section guards against is not rare; it is the oldest error in the book, the very sin of the garden, for the serpent's first whisper was that we might be as gods. Every pride of the intellect and every presumption of the heart is a new attempt to climb into the place that belongs to God alone. Guard against it in the secret places of your own soul, where no eye sees but his. When you pray, and the sense of God's nearness grows warm and sweet, do not imagine that the sweetness has dissolved you into God, or that the creature has been swallowed up in the Creator. Rejoice rather that you are a creature, and that the Creator who made you has stooped to meet you, and that he meets you as a person meets a person, not as a flame melts a candle. The distance between you and God is not a wall to be broken down; it is the very ground of your blessedness, for it is what makes his condescension condescension and his love love. Second, read the promise of partaking in the divine nature aright, and let it do the work God meant it to do. When Peter tells you that you are a partaker of the divine nature, he is not inviting you to an ecstasy but summoning you to a holiness. The divine nature you are made to share is the moral likeness of God: his righteousness, his purity, his love, and the proof that you share it is not the height of your feelings but the fruit of your life. Ask yourself, then, not whether you have been rapt above yourself in devotion, but whether you are escaping the corruption that is in the world through lust, whether you are adding to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience. The mystic seeks to be lost in God; the Christian seeks to be like God, and the likeness is a likeness of character, written line upon line upon the soul by the Spirit through the long discipline of obedience. Aim at that likeness, and the promise will be fulfilled in you more surely than in any ecstasy. Third, honour the eighth commandment, and let your love of the saints be a love that gives and never seizes. It is a subtle temptation of the tender-hearted to feel that true communion would abolish the difference between mine and thine, and to look with impatience upon the very notion of private property. The Scripture will have none of it. The eighth commandment was given not as a concession to a fallen world but as the guard of love itself, for where there is no "mine," there is no giving, and where there is no giving, there is no love. Keep your hands off what belongs to another, and teach your heart to honour the boundary that makes charity possible. Do not envy the rich their abundance, nor begrudge the poor their little, nor ever cloak covetousness in the language of community. The communion of saints is a communion of open hands and honest deeds, and the man who would seize a brother's goods in the name of the saints has made the saints a byword for theft. Fourth, practise the true community the early church practised, and learn to hold your goods with a loose hand. The believers at Jerusalem did not abolish property; they did something better, something far harder: they held their possessions so lightly that the moment a brother was in need, the property was on its way to him. That is the community the gospel commands, and it is a community of the heart before it is ever a community of the purse. Ask yourself whether you hold your goods as Ananias held his, or as the first believers held theirs. Are your possessions your own to hoard, or God's to distribute? The Lord does not ask you to make all things common; he asks you to make all things ready: ready to be given, ready to be lent, ready to be laid down the moment love requires it. The Christian is a steward, not an owner; the title may be his, but the use belongs to God, and the saint who has learned that has learned the better half of this section. Fifth, take comfort in the limits of communion, for the boundaries the divines draw are the fences that keep you yourself. It is a strange and beautiful thing that the same sentence which forbids you the Godhead also preserves you in your own being, so that you shall not be absorbed, but adopted; not melted, but married; not lost in God, but loved by him as a distinct and particular soul, known by name, kept by his hand, and destined for his presence for ever. The mystic's dream of being swallowed up in God is, when examined, a kind of despair, for it would destroy the very self that is loved; but the gospel promises you something better: that you shall remain yourself, and yet be wholly his. Your union with Christ does not erase you; it restores you. You are not a drop lost in the ocean of deity; you are a vessel filled and a creature glorified, and you shall live for ever as yourself, in the presence of the God who loved you enough to keep you from being anything else.

Prayer

O Lord God, who art the Creator of the ends of the earth, and we but dust before thee, we bless thee that thou hast made us creatures, and that in thy great condescension thou hast deigned to have fellowship with us. We thank thee that thou hast not left us to ourselves, but hast united us to thy Son by thy Spirit and by faith, and hast made us partakers of thy grace, though never of thy Godhead. Forgive us the pride that would climb into thy place, the presumption that would grasp at an equality that belongs to Christ alone, and the unbelief that would rather be lost in thee than loved by thee. Keep us, we beseech thee, in our proper place, and let it be our joy. Grant that we may never covet the secret of thy being, but may rest in the nearness thou thyself hast given us. Make us partakers of the divine nature, not in the essence that is thine alone, but in the holiness and righteousness and love that thou dost impress upon the souls of thy children. Renew in us thine image, line upon line, until we are conformed to the likeness of thy Son. Teach us also to honour the goods of our neighbour, and to give with an open hand that we may never seize with a covetous one. Make us stewards of all thou hast lent us, holding our possessions so lightly that they may fly to the need of a brother the moment love requires. Suffer us never to cloak theft in the name of fellowship, nor envy in the name of zeal, but make our communion with the saints a communion of honest deeds and open hands. And grant, O Lord, that we may find our comfort in these very bounds, for they are the tokens that thou dost love us as we are. We would not be absorbed, but adopted; not melted, but married; not lost in thee, but found by thee. Keep us as ourselves, and make us wholly thine, until that day when we shall stand before thee, not as God, but as thy children, creatures redeemed and glorified, rejoicing for ever in the presence of him who, being in the form of God, emptied himself that we might be filled. We ask it in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.