Many thanks to Arthur Kay for his bracing essay about the various liturgical issues connected to the structure and use of communion rails. I am in broad agreement with his reasons for preferring more meal-like and celebratory modes of receiving communion, and I aim to offer some additional support for three of the positions he defends. Before making my case, however, I would like to clarify that I locate this entire discussion in the realm of liturgical wisdom, not liturgical law. These are not matters of absolute right and wrong that make the Eucharist valid or invalid but rather attempts to discern the wisest and fullest way to embody the theological meaning and purpose of the sacrament in liturgical form.
On the division of liturgical space
I agree with Kay that a physical barrier dividing chancel and nave creates an impression of exclusion at precisely the point that the Bible emphasizes access and inclusion. Thus, communion rails or any other physical barriers seem out of step with the advance of redemptive history.
The New Testament could hardly be clearer that the coming of Christ eliminates the zones of “graded holiness”[1] in the Tabernacle and Temple. Those zones of physical exclusion were a sign that the redemption securing our access to God had not yet arrived (Heb. 9:6-8). But Christ’s death caused the veil in the Temple to be torn signifying that the way into the Most Holy Place (and thus the presence of God encountered in worship) is no longer to be embodied in an architecture of exclusion. In Christ, all of God’s people now have free and equal access through the veil of the flesh of Christ (Heb. 10:19-20) to the true Most Holy Place in heaven because we have been raised with Christ and seated in heavenly places in union with him (Col. 3:1-4; Eph. 2:4-7). The liturgy is an embodied encounter with God in which the whole church ascends by the Spirit to participate in the worship of heaven on earth (Heb. 12:18-24; Rev. 1, 4-19). Thus, in Christian worship, all liturgical space (chancel and nave) becomes the locus of sacramental encounter with the life of heaven among us.
It is wise for the structure and arrangement of liturgical space to embody this open access in Christ as clearly as possible. Thus, it is hard to see how a physical barrier separating chancel and nave best reflects architecturally the theological truth of the open and equal access to God possessed by the whole priesthood of believers, especially if lay people are actually excluded in practice from the chancel and taught to interpret the chancel as a symbol of heaven vis-à-vis the nave.[2] Citing historian Robert Markus, Martin Stringer notes that early Christian churches increasingly adopted physical barriers and an architecture of exclusion when cultural ideas about the locus of holiness shifted from people united to Christ by the Spirit to “sacred” physical objects and places.[3]
On penitence
I agree with Kay that the posture of kneeling combined with the explicitly penitential elements of the liturgy of the Eucharist in the Book of Common Prayer tradition skew the tone associated with eating with God in Scripture by foregrounding confession of sin in ways that obscure many other celebratory dimensions of communion. As a corrective, Kay rightly points to the Old Testament liturgy of sacrifices, a consistent sequence that begins with purification offerings and ends with peace offerings, which were joyful meals of thanksgiving.[4] The same pattern occurs in the covenant-making liturgy at Mt. Sinai (Exod. 24:4-11), which begins with pouring out blood and ends with a meal in the presence of God, and in the book of Revelation, where the ministry of the Lamb who was slain initiates the sequence of heavenly words of revelation and the response of prayer culminating in the final wedding feast of the Lamb (Rev. 4-19).[5] The implication of this sequence for Christian worship is that expressions of penitence are most fitting toward the beginning of worship where they are not conflated with the experience of sacramental eating and drinking, which always have associations with festivity, peace, friendship, gratitude, and joy.[6]
The Eucharist does indeed presuppose confession and repentance. However, liturgical history furnishes ample evidence that when prayers, warnings, exhortations, and other expressions of our sinfulness and penitence become a substantial focus of the preparation of the Lord’s table and the immediate preface to eating and drinking, the Eucharist often comes to be perceived and experienced as a somber, extended time of confession rather than its biblical function as a joyful assurance and celebration of peace and friendship with God and the church and a foretaste of the wedding supper of the Lamb secured by the victory of God in Christ.
On posture
As Arthur Kay observes, kneeling to eat was neither Jesus’ example nor command. At the Last Supper, the disciples sat down to eat with Jesus, which is always the posture of meals with Jesus in the Gospels.[7]
Why did Jesus establish the sacrament in this setting and with this posture? First and foremost, communion is a meal, and thus a meal posture is fitting. The disciples sat by reclining around a table because that was how they ate a meal in their cultural setting, and in our cultural context we most commonly sit to eat meals together with other people as well.
Second, as the new covenant form of the peace offering,[8] the Lord’s Supper is a joyful celebration of peace and friendship with God, and sitting at a meal is a posture well suited for relaxation and peace. The Bible prescribes standing or kneeling for other liturgical actions (e.g., standing/walking/dancing in procession, kneeling for confession, standing for prayer, etc.) that embody some other mode of relating to God more appropriate to those particular liturgical functions.[9]
Third, sitting together at a table to share a common meal is a gesture that signifies the kind of acceptance and familiarity found between friends and family. While one would expect mere servants always to kneel or stand in the presence of a king (see, e.g., Luke 17:7), Jesus is the one who invites his servants to sit at table with him where he serves us (see Luke 12:37) because we are not only servants but also children and friends of God, and the posture of the meal embodies his close friendship and familial relationship with us.
Fourth, partaking communion while seated permits church members to serve one another more easily. The sacrament is essentially a communal act, and thus it has a social purpose of expressing and fostering the unity of the whole church (1 Cor. 10:17). By sitting at or about the table, the whole congregation of worshipers can embody this horizontal dimension of mutual service by passing the bread and cup to one another.
Finally, a more abstract reason of theological symbolism. Jesus is present in the whole church (which is the temple of his Spirit) and in the action of receiving communion by the whole church. When bread and wine are passed from the pastor and spread throughout the whole seated congregation, the very form of the action embodies this biblical teaching about the locus of Jesus’ presence. These movements enact the truth that the tangible signs and means of Jesus’ presence are not localized in one “holy” place in the chancel but rather distributed throughout the whole church as a sign that the holy place of Jesus’ special eucharistic presence is the whole people of God eating and drinking together.
It is true that churches that practice communion in a seated posture have not escaped a somber tone and excessively penitential focus. It has been quite common for people seated in pews to treat the whole liturgy of the sacrament as primarily a time for private introspection and silent, personal prayer, often emphasizing personal confession and repentance. Although this practice distorts the biblical tone and focus of the sacrament, it is not a distortion that necessarily follows from the posture of sitting per se. It is possible to eat and drink the Lord’s Supper while seated in a more appropriately joyful and social manner. I have attended and led the liturgy of communion in churches that sing glad songs of thanksgiving for God’s redeeming work in Christ during the distribution of the bread and cup. Congregation members who pass trays of bread and wine can also express their royal priesthood by speaking words of blessing as they serve one another.[10]
[1] Philip P. Jenson, Graded Holiness: A Key to the Priestly Conception of the World (JSOTSup 106; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992).
[2] Nevertheless, I would not go so far (pace Kay) to suggest that kneeling at a communion rail necessarily conveys a psychological feeling of “servitude rather than sonship.” No doubt many worshipers with a living faith in Christ and a positive relationship with their church leaders do not experience communion at a rail in this way. Nor does communion in this fashion necessarily violate the Second Commandment’s prohibition of bowing to created objects. It is not obvious that kneeling to receive the bread and wine from a person constitutes bowing to the bread and wine. Indeed, there is a long history in the Church of England that explicitly denies this interpretation of the meaning of kneeling from the insertion of the “Black Rubric” in the 1552 BCP and the later revision of that clarification in the 1662 edition.
[3] In his book The End of Ancient Christianity, “[Markus] suggests that at the beginning of the third century a pagan discourse on space, which identified specific sacred ‘places’ . . . and which saw the city itself as one of these places, was still dominant. Christian discourses at this time, however, tended to reject the idea of sacred ‘places’ and to situate the sacred in people, whether these were the Christian congregation gathered for worship or, more specifically, the holy person or martyr. Over the following three centuries, Markus claims, the Christian understanding gradually gained the ascendancy and was then slowly transformed, through the cult of the martyrs, back towards the older pagan discourses of sacred ‘places.’” (A Sociological History of Christian Worship [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 86). Stringer goes on to document this shift with respect to the sequestering of the Lord’s table behind physical barriers, the growing importance of Jerusalem and desert monastic communities as sites of pilgrimage, and the increasing use of relics as sacred objects.
[4] For the full sequence, see Exod. 29:1-28; Lev. 8-9; Num. 6:16-17; 2 Chron 5-7; 29:20-36; Ezek. 43:19-27. For the liturgical meaning and significance of this sacrificial pattern as a biblical norm for Christian worship, see Michael A. Farley, “What Is ‘Biblical’ Worship? Biblical Hermeneutics and Evangelical Theologies of Worship,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 51/3 (2008), 591-613; Peter Leithart, Theopolitan Liturgy (West Monroe, LA: Theopolis Book, 2019).
[5] Note that this central section of Revelation portrays the worship of heaven using the imagery of the Tabernacle and Temple. This is the true heavenly archetype of which the earthly buildings were types and shadows (Heb. 8:5). For further explanation of the sacrificial-liturgical structure of Revelation, see Peter J. Wallace, “Revelation 4-5: The Heavenly Pattern.”
[6] For example, see Deut. 12:10-12; 14:22-27; 16:11, 14, 15; 26:11; 27:7; 2 Chron. 29-30, and the many texts expounded in Peter Leithart, Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord’s Supper (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2000). Thus, Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham was right to describe the peace offering as a “joyful barbecue” (“The Theology of Old Testament Sacrifice,” in Sacrifice in the Bible, ed. Roger T. Beckwith and Martin J. Selman [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995], 83-84).
[7] See. e.g., Matt 14:19; 15:35; 26:20; Mark 6:39; 8:6; 14:18; Luke 9:14–15; 22:14; John 6:10. Since biblical narratives are often quite spare in their details, it is noteworthy and instructive that this posture is so frequently noted by the Gospel writers as the posture in which Jesus feeds people. I grant that we cannot and need not imitate every detail in the narrative of the Last Supper or other meals with Jesus. Most churches today must adapt the core actions of the sacrament to settings that accommodate larger numbers of people and different spatial settings. And yet the need for contextualization doesn’t make the form of every adaptation equally wise or equally good at embodying the intrinsic meaning of the sacrament.
[8] C. John Collins, “The Eucharist as Christian Sacrifice: How Patristic Authors Can Help Us Read the Bible,” Westminster Theological Journal 66 (2004): 1-23.
[9] Kneeling or prostration are biblical postures for giving offering prayers of praise and thanks to God (Neh. 8:6; Ps. 5:7; 95:6; 138:2; 2 Chron. 7:3; 29:29-30; Rev. 4:10; 5:8; 7:11; 11:16) and for prayers of petition (1 Kgs. 8:54/2 Chron. 6:13; 2 Chron. 20:18; Dan. 6:10; Acts 20:36; 21:5; Rev. 11:16) but not for meals.
[10] Indeed, I have firsthand experience in shifting the practice of a congregation in this way. I was once the worship director of a new Presbyterian congregation planted by a mother church that observed communion in the pews in a highly somber and introspective fashion. Because we wanted to celebrate communion in a more joyful manner in the new church plant, we began to sing songs of praise in a confident, joyful fashion while bread and cup were passed among the congregation, giving thanks for God’s work in Christ that focused not only on the cross but also on the whole breadth of redemption both past and future. More than any other factor, it was the tone and content of the singing that enabled this congregation to move away from the mother church’s practice and gladly embrace a joyful tone and eucharistic focus for the sacrament.
Many thanks to Arthur Kay for his bracing essay about the various liturgical issues connected to the structure and use of communion rails. I am in broad agreement with his reasons for preferring more meal-like and celebratory modes of receiving communion, and I aim to offer some additional support for three of the positions he defends. Before making my case, however, I would like to clarify that I locate this entire discussion in the realm of liturgical wisdom, not liturgical law. These are not matters of absolute right and wrong that make the Eucharist valid or invalid but rather attempts to discern the wisest and fullest way to embody the theological meaning and purpose of the sacrament in liturgical form.
On the division of liturgical space
I agree with Kay that a physical barrier dividing chancel and nave creates an impression of exclusion at precisely the point that the Bible emphasizes access and inclusion. Thus, communion rails or any other physical barriers seem out of step with the advance of redemptive history.
The New Testament could hardly be clearer that the coming of Christ eliminates the zones of “graded holiness”[1] in the Tabernacle and Temple. Those zones of physical exclusion were a sign that the redemption securing our access to God had not yet arrived (Heb. 9:6-8). But Christ’s death caused the veil in the Temple to be torn signifying that the way into the Most Holy Place (and thus the presence of God encountered in worship) is no longer to be embodied in an architecture of exclusion. In Christ, all of God’s people now have free and equal access through the veil of the flesh of Christ (Heb. 10:19-20) to the true Most Holy Place in heaven because we have been raised with Christ and seated in heavenly places in union with him (Col. 3:1-4; Eph. 2:4-7). The liturgy is an embodied encounter with God in which the whole church ascends by the Spirit to participate in the worship of heaven on earth (Heb. 12:18-24; Rev. 1, 4-19). Thus, in Christian worship, all liturgical space (chancel and nave) becomes the locus of sacramental encounter with the life of heaven among us.
It is wise for the structure and arrangement of liturgical space to embody this open access in Christ as clearly as possible. Thus, it is hard to see how a physical barrier separating chancel and nave best reflects architecturally the theological truth of the open and equal access to God possessed by the whole priesthood of believers, especially if lay people are actually excluded in practice from the chancel and taught to interpret the chancel as a symbol of heaven vis-à-vis the nave.[2] Citing historian Robert Markus, Martin Stringer notes that early Christian churches increasingly adopted physical barriers and an architecture of exclusion when cultural ideas about the locus of holiness shifted from people united to Christ by the Spirit to “sacred” physical objects and places.[3]
On penitence
I agree with Kay that the posture of kneeling combined with the explicitly penitential elements of the liturgy of the Eucharist in the Book of Common Prayer tradition skew the tone associated with eating with God in Scripture by foregrounding confession of sin in ways that obscure many other celebratory dimensions of communion. As a corrective, Kay rightly points to the Old Testament liturgy of sacrifices, a consistent sequence that begins with purification offerings and ends with peace offerings, which were joyful meals of thanksgiving.[4] The same pattern occurs in the covenant-making liturgy at Mt. Sinai (Exod. 24:4-11), which begins with pouring out blood and ends with a meal in the presence of God, and in the book of Revelation, where the ministry of the Lamb who was slain initiates the sequence of heavenly words of revelation and the response of prayer culminating in the final wedding feast of the Lamb (Rev. 4-19).[5] The implication of this sequence for Christian worship is that expressions of penitence are most fitting toward the beginning of worship where they are not conflated with the experience of sacramental eating and drinking, which always have associations with festivity, peace, friendship, gratitude, and joy.[6]
The Eucharist does indeed presuppose confession and repentance. However, liturgical history furnishes ample evidence that when prayers, warnings, exhortations, and other expressions of our sinfulness and penitence become a substantial focus of the preparation of the Lord’s table and the immediate preface to eating and drinking, the Eucharist often comes to be perceived and experienced as a somber, extended time of confession rather than its biblical function as a joyful assurance and celebration of peace and friendship with God and the church and a foretaste of the wedding supper of the Lamb secured by the victory of God in Christ.
On posture
As Arthur Kay observes, kneeling to eat was neither Jesus’ example nor command. At the Last Supper, the disciples sat down to eat with Jesus, which is always the posture of meals with Jesus in the Gospels.[7]
Why did Jesus establish the sacrament in this setting and with this posture? First and foremost, communion is a meal, and thus a meal posture is fitting. The disciples sat by reclining around a table because that was how they ate a meal in their cultural setting, and in our cultural context we most commonly sit to eat meals together with other people as well.
Second, as the new covenant form of the peace offering,[8] the Lord's Supper is a joyful celebration of peace and friendship with God, and sitting at a meal is a posture well suited for relaxation and peace. The Bible prescribes standing or kneeling for other liturgical actions (e.g., standing/walking/dancing in procession, kneeling for confession, standing for prayer, etc.) that embody some other mode of relating to God more appropriate to those particular liturgical functions.[9]
Third, sitting together at a table to share a common meal is a gesture that signifies the kind of acceptance and familiarity found between friends and family. While one would expect mere servants always to kneel or stand in the presence of a king (see, e.g., Luke 17:7), Jesus is the one who invites his servants to sit at table with him where he serves us (see Luke 12:37) because we are not only servants but also children and friends of God, and the posture of the meal embodies his close friendship and familial relationship with us.
Fourth, partaking communion while seated permits church members to serve one another more easily. The sacrament is essentially a communal act, and thus it has a social purpose of expressing and fostering the unity of the whole church (1 Cor. 10:17). By sitting at or about the table, the whole congregation of worshipers can embody this horizontal dimension of mutual service by passing the bread and cup to one another.
Finally, a more abstract reason of theological symbolism. Jesus is present in the whole church (which is the temple of his Spirit) and in the action of receiving communion by the whole church. When bread and wine are passed from the pastor and spread throughout the whole seated congregation, the very form of the action embodies this biblical teaching about the locus of Jesus’ presence. These movements enact the truth that the tangible signs and means of Jesus’ presence are not localized in one “holy” place in the chancel but rather distributed throughout the whole church as a sign that the holy place of Jesus’ special eucharistic presence is the whole people of God eating and drinking together.
It is true that churches that practice communion in a seated posture have not escaped a somber tone and excessively penitential focus. It has been quite common for people seated in pews to treat the whole liturgy of the sacrament as primarily a time for private introspection and silent, personal prayer, often emphasizing personal confession and repentance. Although this practice distorts the biblical tone and focus of the sacrament, it is not a distortion that necessarily follows from the posture of sitting per se. It is possible to eat and drink the Lord’s Supper while seated in a more appropriately joyful and social manner. I have attended and led the liturgy of communion in churches that sing glad songs of thanksgiving for God’s redeeming work in Christ during the distribution of the bread and cup. Congregation members who pass trays of bread and wine can also express their royal priesthood by speaking words of blessing as they serve one another.[10]
[1] Philip P. Jenson, Graded Holiness: A Key to the Priestly Conception of the World (JSOTSup 106; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992).
[2] Nevertheless, I would not go so far (pace Kay) to suggest that kneeling at a communion rail necessarily conveys a psychological feeling of “servitude rather than sonship.” No doubt many worshipers with a living faith in Christ and a positive relationship with their church leaders do not experience communion at a rail in this way. Nor does communion in this fashion necessarily violate the Second Commandment’s prohibition of bowing to created objects. It is not obvious that kneeling to receive the bread and wine from a person constitutes bowing to the bread and wine. Indeed, there is a long history in the Church of England that explicitly denies this interpretation of the meaning of kneeling from the insertion of the “Black Rubric” in the 1552 BCP and the later revision of that clarification in the 1662 edition.
[3] In his book The End of Ancient Christianity, “[Markus] suggests that at the beginning of the third century a pagan discourse on space, which identified specific sacred ‘places’ . . . and which saw the city itself as one of these places, was still dominant. Christian discourses at this time, however, tended to reject the idea of sacred ‘places’ and to situate the sacred in people, whether these were the Christian congregation gathered for worship or, more specifically, the holy person or martyr. Over the following three centuries, Markus claims, the Christian understanding gradually gained the ascendancy and was then slowly transformed, through the cult of the martyrs, back towards the older pagan discourses of sacred ‘places.’” (A Sociological History of Christian Worship [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 86). Stringer goes on to document this shift with respect to the sequestering of the Lord’s table behind physical barriers, the growing importance of Jerusalem and desert monastic communities as sites of pilgrimage, and the increasing use of relics as sacred objects.
[4] For the full sequence, see Exod. 29:1-28; Lev. 8-9; Num. 6:16-17; 2 Chron 5-7; 29:20-36; Ezek. 43:19-27. For the liturgical meaning and significance of this sacrificial pattern as a biblical norm for Christian worship, see Michael A. Farley, “What Is ‘Biblical’ Worship? Biblical Hermeneutics and Evangelical Theologies of Worship,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 51/3 (2008), 591-613; Peter Leithart, Theopolitan Liturgy (West Monroe, LA: Theopolis Book, 2019).
[5] Note that this central section of Revelation portrays the worship of heaven using the imagery of the Tabernacle and Temple. This is the true heavenly archetype of which the earthly buildings were types and shadows (Heb. 8:5). For further explanation of the sacrificial-liturgical structure of Revelation, see Peter J. Wallace, “Revelation 4-5: The Heavenly Pattern.”
[6] For example, see Deut. 12:10-12; 14:22-27; 16:11, 14, 15; 26:11; 27:7; 2 Chron. 29-30, and the many texts expounded in Peter Leithart, Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord’s Supper (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2000). Thus, Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham was right to describe the peace offering as a “joyful barbecue” (“The Theology of Old Testament Sacrifice,” in Sacrifice in the Bible, ed. Roger T. Beckwith and Martin J. Selman [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995], 83-84).
[7] See. e.g., Matt 14:19; 15:35; 26:20; Mark 6:39; 8:6; 14:18; Luke 9:14–15; 22:14; John 6:10. Since biblical narratives are often quite spare in their details, it is noteworthy and instructive that this posture is so frequently noted by the Gospel writers as the posture in which Jesus feeds people. I grant that we cannot and need not imitate every detail in the narrative of the Last Supper or other meals with Jesus. Most churches today must adapt the core actions of the sacrament to settings that accommodate larger numbers of people and different spatial settings. And yet the need for contextualization doesn’t make the form of every adaptation equally wise or equally good at embodying the intrinsic meaning of the sacrament.
[8] C. John Collins, “The Eucharist as Christian Sacrifice: How Patristic Authors Can Help Us Read the Bible,” Westminster Theological Journal 66 (2004): 1-23.
[9] Kneeling or prostration are biblical postures for giving offering prayers of praise and thanks to God (Neh. 8:6; Ps. 5:7; 95:6; 138:2; 2 Chron. 7:3; 29:29-30; Rev. 4:10; 5:8; 7:11; 11:16) and for prayers of petition (1 Kgs. 8:54/2 Chron. 6:13; 2 Chron. 20:18; Dan. 6:10; Acts 20:36; 21:5; Rev. 11:16) but not for meals.
[10] Indeed, I have firsthand experience in shifting the practice of a congregation in this way. I was once the worship director of a new Presbyterian congregation planted by a mother church that observed communion in the pews in a highly somber and introspective fashion. Because we wanted to celebrate communion in a more joyful manner in the new church plant, we began to sing songs of praise in a confident, joyful fashion while bread and cup were passed among the congregation, giving thanks for God’s work in Christ that focused not only on the cross but also on the whole breadth of redemption both past and future. More than any other factor, it was the tone and content of the singing that enabled this congregation to move away from the mother church’s practice and gladly embrace a joyful tone and eucharistic focus for the sacrament.
-->