A Response to McClure's Response

This is a response to Heath McClure's "Response to “Paedocommunion vs. Confirmation” which is found on www.wittenberghall.com. I am responding to him here simply because the comment feature on that page will not allow a response of this length.

Let me say first of all that everything said there regarding the congeniality of this correspondence is absolutely true. For one thing, Heath and I agree with the majority of issues at hand. I would side with him against those particular antipaedocommunionsts he sides against, though I would do so for some other reasons. I know that he likes this kind of discussion and I do as well; it “stimulates the brain cells,” as Clouseau would say.

I also want to be sure everyone knows that I notified Leithart about the post in my puny blog and he thanked me for that. I’m sure he has better things to do than to trouble himself with it.

Let me now break my response to Heath into parts:

1. The issue of my not understanding the audience to whom Leithart is writing: I may indeed be wrong about this, but the language of the article itself is my defense.

Leithart writes, “For centuries, sacramental theology in the Reformed and other traditions [my emphasis] has focused narrowly on the effect of sacraments on individual recipients, and as a result, the theology and practice of the sacraments have been horribly distorted.” Do you see how he is bringing in the whole church into his article with this language?

Let’s take this excerpt: “We must think about baptism and the Supper in these (overlapping, if not identical) ecclesial and evangelical contexts if we want to grasp what is at stake in the paedocommunion debate.” Ah, now here he mentions “the paedocommunion debate.” This could be used by Heath as an example of his understanding of Leithart’s article, but he goes on. “The question is not only who's in and who's out, but rather what our decisions about who's in and who's out say about the church and the gospel we proclaim” [my emphasis; if he starts talking about “the church” and “the gospel” that includes everybody]. “What kind of community are we claiming to be if we invite children to the Lord's table, or, as is more commonly the case, what are we saying about the church when we exclude them? What do our ritual statements about the church say about the church's relation to Israel and the character of salvation? Put our theologies [note the plural; he mentions Luther somewhere] and our sermons to the side for a moment: What gospel does our meal proclaim? Within this framework, I will be pursuing a positive case for paedocommunion, under three points.” So, he has laid out his framework for the rest of the article, and that framework, according to the bulk of what he says, affects the Church and the Gospel. Thus, it is not a debate affecting only a portion of the Church.

Leithart, in trying to make the paedocommuion debate affect the definition of the gospel and of the Church necessarily stretches the paedocommunion debate beyond his circle. Perhaps Heath is correct in that Leithart was really aiming at only those in Reformed circles he has been debating with, but that is not evident from the general impression one gets due to some of the very things he says.

Let us not forget that my original article was not a confrontation with Leithart for the sake of confronting Leithart. I was using Leithart’s article as an example of how paedocommunionists argue their position – in whatever context - responding to it as a “confirmer.”

2. Problems with Heath’s arguments for his position: Heath objects to my bringing up I Cor. 11 as applicable to the debate. He says it “has no direct bearing on the issue.” He says this, however, based upon his particular interpretation of I Cor. 11, which is not that which has been generally accepted. He really should not say such a thing. It is, from my perspective, the main passage under debate, though Leithart here states that he’s trying to stretch the debate beyond what is involved in that passage. Perhaps it’s just the way Heath said it; it would have been better to say “should have no…” instead of “has no….”

As I mention in other posts, there is the theological understanding of I Cor. 11’s “discerning the Body”, which requires a degree of mental maturity before partaking, and then there is what we could call the spiritual understanding, which is Heath’s and my own: viz., the “discerning” has to do with loving relationship in the Body. The problem with Heath’s dismissal of I Cor. 11, based on his (our) interpretation of it, is that we still have a prerequisite. It’s just different from the theological one and can be fulfilled at an earlier age. This is where my post regarding the application of the spiritual interpretation comes in. Kids are going to have to be old enough to meet the prerequisite, whatever it is.

This is the passage that the paedocommunionist has to find a way of dismissing because it does order a prerequisite to partaking. What we face as Anglicans is that our church follows, with the majority of Christianity as far as I can tell, the theological interpretation. So do the antipaedocommunionists in Presbyterianism. The passage necessarily bears on the issue because of the history and nature of the debate. What paedocommunionists must do is prove that their interpretation of it is correct. Thus, the one passage which is used primarily against them can become their main tool to change the minds of their opposition.

It may be that Heath, in the course of his Response, thought he had proven his interpretation and then proceeded to cast I Cor. 11 out wherever he found it.

3. Regarding Heath’s conclusion that I was oversimplifying: I’m afraid Heath is not following the flow of Leithart’s and my arguments. Here is where I may owe Leithart an apology. Before listing the questions which I took issue with, he wrote, “At the risk of oversimplification (and provocation), I will briefly pose the options on these wider issues:” Now, having admitted that, was it fair for me to take him to task? Perhaps not. However, I was, as stated above, responding to an example of a paedocommunionist’s argument and this is how he decided to state it.

My responses to Leithart were accusations of his oversimplification, which he admits he might be committing. What I think Heath is meaning is that I was somehow oversimplifying Leithart by not discerning the audience to which Leithart was writing. Yet, Leithart himself recognises that, in his questions, he was potentially oversimplifying, opening the door for someone like myself to object to his questions because he was mischaracterising some of the people in the antipaedocommunion camp. A straw-man argument contains an element of oversimplification. I was only seeking to expose this element in his questions.

As for Heath’s comment that my mentioning that the Passover is not the Eucharist did not prove anything, let me say that it does address one of the arguments I’ve heard over and over again in favour of paedocommunion. It goes like this: since the children partook of the Passover and since the Eucharist is also a spiritual meal and since there is continuity between the two testaments, therefore children should partake of the Eucharist as they did of the Passover. As much as that kind of argument is being made, so pertinent is my comment. It proves discontinuity between the two partakings, thus opening the possibility that such an argument above has fault.

Oh, well, enough of this. I could say a little more, but not much. As is evident from his “Response” there wasn’t that much we disagree on. What I plan to do is e-mail to Heath those sections of his Response wherein I think we can together agree on a statement that brings a resolution to the discussion that has arisen.