Arthur Kay’s biblical argument is clever, creative, and idiosyncratic. It will not be the last word on communion rails or anything else because there will always be more creative and idiosyncratic biblical arguments for and against a host of other things in Anglican liturgy.
Tensions and Mysteries
The Bible is biblical revelation of the infinite-personal God. Because it comes from Him, it is full of tensions between aspects of His mystery that we find difficult or impossible to reconcile. For example, according to Scripture God is sovereign over all that happens. We also find in Scripture an emphasis on our responsibility for our choices, suggesting a degree of freedom of the will that even Calvin and Luther acknowledged. There is tension between God’s sovereignty and human freedom.
Another tension in Scripture is between God’s holiness and love. God hates sin so much that he allows His creatures to reject him and endure unending hell. Yet He loves the world so much that he sent his own Son to suffer and die to save sinners who cling to him through the fires of sanctification. Modernists in the Church love God’s love but hate God’s holiness. They cannot abide the tension.
The great theological and liturgical traditions negotiate those tensions in different ways; the heretical ones collapse the tensions in pursuit of what they call consistency or reasonableness.
Scripture is also a revelation of mysteries, which is paradoxical. God reveals Himself through mysteries that cannot be understood. Jesus spoke of the mystery of the Kingdom (Mark 4:11). Paul wrote of the mystery of Israel (Rom 11:25), the mysteries of God (1 Cor 2:1; 4:1), and the mystery of iniquity (2 Thess 2:1-12, KJV).
Of course Scripture sheds light on each of these mysteries. We can know something about each because of special revelation. But even the light given leaves much in shadows. Yet as Augustine observed, we should expect this of the true God: If we think we are (fully) understanding something about God, it is not the true God we are contemplating.
Ignoring the Tensions in Scripture
Arthur Kay tries to make Anglican worship reasonable or comprehensible. Of course he does not tell us his hatred for communion rails makes reasonable everything about God. But he uses Scripture to argue against things that seem to him unreasonable.
Yet in the process he ignores or flattens out the tensions between his observations and other parts of Scripture. This is why I say his article is clever and creative but idiosyncratic and therefore unpersuasive.
For example, he sets out one part of his method when he speaks of “Old Covenant theology to which Christians are forbidden to return by Jesus’ propitiatory death and the letter to the Hebrews.” This suggests standard supersessionism which more and more Hebrews scholars are rejecting.[1] It also implies a radical break between the two Testaments that Jesus himself rejected.
Jesus told his disciples not to think that he had come to abolish the Law (Torah) or the prophets, but to realize that he had come not to abolish but to fulfill them (Matt 5:17). He added that not one “horn” (the smallest stroke of the pen in Hebrew) of Torah would pass away until all things are accomplished, condemned those who relaxed the “least” of Torah’s commandments, and praised those who practiced and taught them (Matt 5:18-19).
What might be the “least” commandments? Arguably, those of Leviticus, which Jesus-followers in Matthew’s day and ever since have questioned. Why keep them when Jesus and Paul rejected Jewish law in the New Covenant?
But Jesus did not reject Jewish law, as this troubling passage shows. Neither did Paul, who wrote in his final commentary on Jews and Gentiles that “by no means do we overthrow the Law by this faith! On the contrary, we uphold the law!” and “The Law is holy and righteous and good” (Rom 3:31; 7:12).
My point is not that we are to obey Leviticus as Jews are obligated to, but that we Gentile Christians cannot reject “Old Covenant theology” in such cavalier fashion as Kay suggests. If Jesus did not, we cannot. There is far more tension here than Kay acknowledges.
The same thing is true of most of Kay’s other assertions about the Bible. He misfires when he claims laymen are barred from the chancel, as if this violates the priesthood of all believers, for–as he admits–since the Reformation lay singers in church choirs have sung from there. But the principle of his “architecture of exclusion” suggests it is not so much architecture but exclusion in principle that is offensive. Here again he ignores the tension with another biblical principle of exclusion–Holy Orders restricted to men—which the Free Church of England upholds. Why not admit the tension here?
Kay charges that “degrees of holiness” are foreign to Scripture and therefore should not be suggested by the liturgy. Here again he ignores the Bible’s tension between our (singular) solidarity in sin and redemption, and our (plural) degrees of holiness. For the latter, think of Paul admonishing “infants in Christ” who are not ready for solid food, contrasting such spiritual babes with the mature (1 Cor 3:1-4). In 1 John the apostle distinguishes among little children, young men, and fathers—clearly referring to stages in holiness, not chronological age. Peter urges his readers to move on from one stage of sanctification to the next: “Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love” (2 Pet 1:5-7). Not only does Peter portray a stair-step progression in the virtues, but he also states explicitly in the next verse that we need to keep “increasing” in these virtues (2 Pet 1:8). These are degrees of holiness.
If Kay were simply to say that one side of the biblical antinomy is that we all participate in the singular “divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4), that would be one thing. But to assert that there are no degrees of holiness in Scripture is to close one’s eyes to the heights and depths of biblical revelation and reduce it all to a plain. It ignores the tensions.
Kay denies any sense of “consecration” of the Eucharistic elements in Scripture, and reinforces this denial with the declaration that in Scripture no thing—only persons—is ever blessed. It is hard to believe that he skips right over 1 Cor 10:16: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not participation in the blood of Christ?” Here Paul asserts not only that a thing can be blessed, but that the blessing changes the ontological nature of the thing blessed.
This also flies in the face of Kay’s insistence that there is no local presence of the body or blood of Christ because Christ is at the right hand of the Father in heaven. Apparently this was not a problem for Paul, who agreed that Christ is at the right hand of the Father (Eph 1:20) but could also share His body and blood with those at His table (1 Cor 10:16). He makes statements to both such effects. Paul was a Hebrew and not a Greek or a nominalist. Hebrews could say that God saved them through the Red Sea centuries before and at the same time in their Passover liturgies (which go back toward the first century) say that God was lifting them up into sacramental time where they were participating in that crossing: “We are passing through the Red Sea.”
The letter to the Hebrews is similar in this Hebrew notion of zikkaron remembering that brings the past into the present. Christ “now” appears “in the presence of God on our behalf” (9:24) with his once-for-all blood sacrifice of himself (9:14, 26).
Again, Kay could be taken seriously if he simply said that Christ’s human nature is at the right hand of the Father in heaven. But to say that this forbids any local presence on the communion table is to find a dichotomy that is absent in biblical revelation. This is good nominalist logic but not biblical logic. It misses the tensions and replaces them with Greek binaries.
Kay also declares that no good Christian should ever doubt his salvation when at the communion table. A liturgy that suggests the possibility of doubt is unbiblical, he alleges.
Then Paul must be unbiblical. For precisely in the middle of his instructions for conducting the Lord’s Supper he tells the Corinthian Christians that “a man should examine himself and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (1 Cor 11:28). In the previous chapter he tells the Corinthians that the Hebrew fathers in the wilderness ate the same spiritual food and drink which was Christ but that the Corinthians should learn from their bad examples of idolatry and sexual immorality: “Let anyone who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor 10.12). Immediately Paul then introduces the Lord’s Supper as a participation in the blood and body of Christ (1 Cor 10.14-16).
The problem is not that Kay reassures Christians that they should be assured of their salvation as they take the Eucharist. For Christians who know of the work of Christ to save them and who are walking in repentance, this is a good word. But Paul knew that not all Jesus-followers are always walking in repentance, even those participating in the Eucharist. And therefore they needed reminders to examine themselves, just before they partake. Kay is mistaken to charge that liturgies that do the same are unbiblical.
Kay’s suggested liturgical changes are more consistent and reasonable, as it were, but in ways that flatten out the peaks and valleys of Scripture. He misses the tensions.
Rejecting Anglican Liturgical Tradition
The Anglican liturgical tradition respects those tensions. That’s why you see the peaks and valleys in the Book of Common Prayer which nominalists call inconsistencies. It is also why Kay’s revisions conflict with the only official version of the BCP—the 1662.[2]
The 1662 restored but changed the Black Rubric so that it ruled out adoration of “Christ’s natural flesh and blood,” that is, his earthly preresurrection body, while implicitly permitting adoration of the real sacramental presence of Christ’s body and blood.
A strong view of the Real Presence of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist can be seen in the Prayer of Humble Access (“Grant us therefore . . . so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son . . . and to drink his blood”), the words of administration (“The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee” and “The bloud of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee”), and the post-communion prayer (“We most heartily thank thee, for . . . the spiritual food of the most precious body and bloud of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ”).
The 1662 also teaches baptismal regeneration for infants, which Kay agrees the Free Church should shy away from. Here is the 1662: “We yield thee hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased thee to regenerate this infant with thy holy Spirit, to receive him for thine own child by adoption, and to incorporate him into thy holy Church.”
Kay concedes that the Free Church BCP uses language of consecration and blessing things (rubrics instructing the priest to place his hands on the elements) which he thinks the New Testament forbids. He complains that the Prayer of Humble access introduces a penitential tone where it should not.
All this shows that Kay’s idiosyncratic suggestions conflict with Anglican liturgy, even with the Free Church BCP which has already been partly amended.
This demonstrates that if Kay’s liturgy were to be accepted, it would no longer be recognizably Anglican.
Clever, yes. Anglican, no.
And insensitive to the tensions and mysteries of biblical revelation.
This is the danger of all modern attempts to resist the influence of tradition—especially the great liturgies of the historic Church—and to use modern reason to interpret the Bible and its worship. Inevitably the results are quirky, reflecting the culture and eccentricities of the interpreter.
This is why the Anglican method has been to read the Bible and liturgical tradition at the feet of the Fathers. It is to prize the creeds and worship of the undivided Church of the first millennium. Its worship—aptly preserved in the 1662–retains the mysteries and tensions of the biblical vision.
Gerald R. McDermott is the editor of The New Christian Zionism (IVP) and the author of Israel Matters (Brazos).
[1] David M. Moffitt, “Jesus’ Sacrifice and the Mosaic Logic of Hebrews’ New-Covenant Theology,” in Gerald McDermott, ed., Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2021), 51-68; Richard Bauckham et al, The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).
[2] William Sydnor, The Prayer Book Through the Ages, rev. edn. (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1997), 51: The 1662 is “still the official Book of the Church of England.”
Arthur Kay’s biblical argument is clever, creative, and idiosyncratic. It will not be the last word on communion rails or anything else because there will always be more creative and idiosyncratic biblical arguments for and against a host of other things in Anglican liturgy.
Tensions and Mysteries
The Bible is biblical revelation of the infinite-personal God. Because it comes from Him, it is full of tensions between aspects of His mystery that we find difficult or impossible to reconcile. For example, according to Scripture God is sovereign over all that happens. We also find in Scripture an emphasis on our responsibility for our choices, suggesting a degree of freedom of the will that even Calvin and Luther acknowledged. There is tension between God’s sovereignty and human freedom.
Another tension in Scripture is between God’s holiness and love. God hates sin so much that he allows His creatures to reject him and endure unending hell. Yet He loves the world so much that he sent his own Son to suffer and die to save sinners who cling to him through the fires of sanctification. Modernists in the Church love God’s love but hate God’s holiness. They cannot abide the tension.
The great theological and liturgical traditions negotiate those tensions in different ways; the heretical ones collapse the tensions in pursuit of what they call consistency or reasonableness.
Scripture is also a revelation of mysteries, which is paradoxical. God reveals Himself through mysteries that cannot be understood. Jesus spoke of the mystery of the Kingdom (Mark 4:11). Paul wrote of the mystery of Israel (Rom 11:25), the mysteries of God (1 Cor 2:1; 4:1), and the mystery of iniquity (2 Thess 2:1-12, KJV).
Of course Scripture sheds light on each of these mysteries. We can know something about each because of special revelation. But even the light given leaves much in shadows. Yet as Augustine observed, we should expect this of the true God: If we think we are (fully) understanding something about God, it is not the true God we are contemplating.
Ignoring the Tensions in Scripture
Arthur Kay tries to make Anglican worship reasonable or comprehensible. Of course he does not tell us his hatred for communion rails makes reasonable everything about God. But he uses Scripture to argue against things that seem to him unreasonable.
Yet in the process he ignores or flattens out the tensions between his observations and other parts of Scripture. This is why I say his article is clever and creative but idiosyncratic and therefore unpersuasive.
For example, he sets out one part of his method when he speaks of “Old Covenant theology to which Christians are forbidden to return by Jesus’ propitiatory death and the letter to the Hebrews.” This suggests standard supersessionism which more and more Hebrews scholars are rejecting.[1] It also implies a radical break between the two Testaments that Jesus himself rejected.
Jesus told his disciples not to think that he had come to abolish the Law (Torah) or the prophets, but to realize that he had come not to abolish but to fulfill them (Matt 5:17). He added that not one “horn” (the smallest stroke of the pen in Hebrew) of Torah would pass away until all things are accomplished, condemned those who relaxed the “least” of Torah’s commandments, and praised those who practiced and taught them (Matt 5:18-19).
What might be the “least” commandments? Arguably, those of Leviticus, which Jesus-followers in Matthew’s day and ever since have questioned. Why keep them when Jesus and Paul rejected Jewish law in the New Covenant?
But Jesus did not reject Jewish law, as this troubling passage shows. Neither did Paul, who wrote in his final commentary on Jews and Gentiles that “by no means do we overthrow the Law by this faith! On the contrary, we uphold the law!” and “The Law is holy and righteous and good” (Rom 3:31; 7:12).
My point is not that we are to obey Leviticus as Jews are obligated to, but that we Gentile Christians cannot reject “Old Covenant theology” in such cavalier fashion as Kay suggests. If Jesus did not, we cannot. There is far more tension here than Kay acknowledges.
The same thing is true of most of Kay’s other assertions about the Bible. He misfires when he claims laymen are barred from the chancel, as if this violates the priesthood of all believers, for--as he admits--since the Reformation lay singers in church choirs have sung from there. But the principle of his “architecture of exclusion” suggests it is not so much architecture but exclusion in principle that is offensive. Here again he ignores the tension with another biblical principle of exclusion--Holy Orders restricted to men—which the Free Church of England upholds. Why not admit the tension here?
Kay charges that “degrees of holiness” are foreign to Scripture and therefore should not be suggested by the liturgy. Here again he ignores the Bible’s tension between our (singular) solidarity in sin and redemption, and our (plural) degrees of holiness. For the latter, think of Paul admonishing “infants in Christ” who are not ready for solid food, contrasting such spiritual babes with the mature (1 Cor 3:1-4). In 1 John the apostle distinguishes among little children, young men, and fathers—clearly referring to stages in holiness, not chronological age. Peter urges his readers to move on from one stage of sanctification to the next: “Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love” (2 Pet 1:5-7). Not only does Peter portray a stair-step progression in the virtues, but he also states explicitly in the next verse that we need to keep “increasing” in these virtues (2 Pet 1:8). These are degrees of holiness.
If Kay were simply to say that one side of the biblical antinomy is that we all participate in the singular “divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4), that would be one thing. But to assert that there are no degrees of holiness in Scripture is to close one’s eyes to the heights and depths of biblical revelation and reduce it all to a plain. It ignores the tensions.
Kay denies any sense of “consecration” of the Eucharistic elements in Scripture, and reinforces this denial with the declaration that in Scripture no thing—only persons—is ever blessed. It is hard to believe that he skips right over 1 Cor 10:16: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not participation in the blood of Christ?” Here Paul asserts not only that a thing can be blessed, but that the blessing changes the ontological nature of the thing blessed.
This also flies in the face of Kay’s insistence that there is no local presence of the body or blood of Christ because Christ is at the right hand of the Father in heaven. Apparently this was not a problem for Paul, who agreed that Christ is at the right hand of the Father (Eph 1:20) but could also share His body and blood with those at His table (1 Cor 10:16). He makes statements to both such effects. Paul was a Hebrew and not a Greek or a nominalist. Hebrews could say that God saved them through the Red Sea centuries before and at the same time in their Passover liturgies (which go back toward the first century) say that God was lifting them up into sacramental time where they were participating in that crossing: “We are passing through the Red Sea.”
The letter to the Hebrews is similar in this Hebrew notion of zikkaron remembering that brings the past into the present. Christ “now” appears “in the presence of God on our behalf” (9:24) with his once-for-all blood sacrifice of himself (9:14, 26).
Again, Kay could be taken seriously if he simply said that Christ’s human nature is at the right hand of the Father in heaven. But to say that this forbids any local presence on the communion table is to find a dichotomy that is absent in biblical revelation. This is good nominalist logic but not biblical logic. It misses the tensions and replaces them with Greek binaries.
Kay also declares that no good Christian should ever doubt his salvation when at the communion table. A liturgy that suggests the possibility of doubt is unbiblical, he alleges.
Then Paul must be unbiblical. For precisely in the middle of his instructions for conducting the Lord’s Supper he tells the Corinthian Christians that “a man should examine himself and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (1 Cor 11:28). In the previous chapter he tells the Corinthians that the Hebrew fathers in the wilderness ate the same spiritual food and drink which was Christ but that the Corinthians should learn from their bad examples of idolatry and sexual immorality: “Let anyone who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor 10.12). Immediately Paul then introduces the Lord’s Supper as a participation in the blood and body of Christ (1 Cor 10.14-16).
The problem is not that Kay reassures Christians that they should be assured of their salvation as they take the Eucharist. For Christians who know of the work of Christ to save them and who are walking in repentance, this is a good word. But Paul knew that not all Jesus-followers are always walking in repentance, even those participating in the Eucharist. And therefore they needed reminders to examine themselves, just before they partake. Kay is mistaken to charge that liturgies that do the same are unbiblical.
Kay’s suggested liturgical changes are more consistent and reasonable, as it were, but in ways that flatten out the peaks and valleys of Scripture. He misses the tensions.
Rejecting Anglican Liturgical Tradition
The Anglican liturgical tradition respects those tensions. That’s why you see the peaks and valleys in the Book of Common Prayer which nominalists call inconsistencies. It is also why Kay’s revisions conflict with the only official version of the BCP—the 1662.[2]
The 1662 restored but changed the Black Rubric so that it ruled out adoration of “Christ’s natural flesh and blood,” that is, his earthly preresurrection body, while implicitly permitting adoration of the real sacramental presence of Christ’s body and blood.
A strong view of the Real Presence of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist can be seen in the Prayer of Humble Access (“Grant us therefore . . . so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son . . . and to drink his blood”), the words of administration (“The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee” and “The bloud of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee”), and the post-communion prayer (“We most heartily thank thee, for . . . the spiritual food of the most precious body and bloud of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ”).
The 1662 also teaches baptismal regeneration for infants, which Kay agrees the Free Church should shy away from. Here is the 1662: “We yield thee hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased thee to regenerate this infant with thy holy Spirit, to receive him for thine own child by adoption, and to incorporate him into thy holy Church.”
Kay concedes that the Free Church BCP uses language of consecration and blessing things (rubrics instructing the priest to place his hands on the elements) which he thinks the New Testament forbids. He complains that the Prayer of Humble access introduces a penitential tone where it should not.
All this shows that Kay’s idiosyncratic suggestions conflict with Anglican liturgy, even with the Free Church BCP which has already been partly amended.
This demonstrates that if Kay’s liturgy were to be accepted, it would no longer be recognizably Anglican.
Clever, yes. Anglican, no.
And insensitive to the tensions and mysteries of biblical revelation.
This is the danger of all modern attempts to resist the influence of tradition—especially the great liturgies of the historic Church—and to use modern reason to interpret the Bible and its worship. Inevitably the results are quirky, reflecting the culture and eccentricities of the interpreter.
This is why the Anglican method has been to read the Bible and liturgical tradition at the feet of the Fathers. It is to prize the creeds and worship of the undivided Church of the first millennium. Its worship—aptly preserved in the 1662--retains the mysteries and tensions of the biblical vision.
Gerald R. McDermott is the editor of The New Christian Zionism (IVP) and the author of Israel Matters (Brazos).
[1] David M. Moffitt, “Jesus’ Sacrifice and the Mosaic Logic of Hebrews’ New-Covenant Theology,” in Gerald McDermott, ed., Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2021), 51-68; Richard Bauckham et al, The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).
[2] William Sydnor, The Prayer Book Through the Ages, rev. edn. (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1997), 51: The 1662 is “still the official Book of the Church of England.”
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