Believers Only—Jonathan Edwards And Communion

By Mark E. Dever

[This is the third article in the four-part series “A Puritan Vision of the Church,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 4-7, 2014.

Mark E. Dever is Senior Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington, DC, and President of 9Marks.]

The Reformers held that two essential marks of the church were the right preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments. On this there was unity between them and the generations that were to follow. And yet, inside this unity there was great diversity concerning how this was to be carried out. This is apparent in the ecclesiology of the Anglican Puritan Richard Sibbes and of the sort-of Baptist John Bunyan. Sibbes, Bunyan, and now Edwards each set out different guardrails, first against one problem and then against another, in the interest of keeping the church on track.

Jonathan Edwards came from a long-living family. His father died at 89, and his mother lived to be 98. Grandfather Stoddard died at age 85; grandmother Warham-Stoddard had been 92. Five of Jonathan’s sisters lived past their seventies. Edwards himself lived to be only 54. But in his brief life, he had a ministry of tremendous importance for a number of reasons. Not least among those reasons was his strong re-assertion of the visible nature of the church, particularly reflected in his understanding of the Lord’s Supper as an ordinance for believers. That will be the issue in focus here.

Jonathan Edwards is one of the most well-known figures from the Puritan movement. Less well-known is that he was fired from his church, and still less widely understood is why.

In brief, Jonathan Edwards came to have controversial views on communion.[1] The setting for the controversy was a church already frayed by tensions between the pastor and some of the church’s leading families. In what has been called “the Bad Book Case” in 1744, Edwards had alienated (probably unnecessarily) a number of families by reading publicly the names of children that he wanted to see concerning a certain scandal, thereby leaving the public impression that all of these children had behaved scandalously, when all Edwards was really doing was asking that certain of the young people come to see him so that he could get information from them.

Edwards continued to pastor the church and write prolifically, producing most notably A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections in 1746, and in 1747 A Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement, and in 1749 An Account of the Life of Rev. David Brainerd (one of the first popular biographies published in America).

Dealing with the difficulties of pastoral ministry became even harder for Edwards when, in 1748, his influential and supportive uncle, Col. John Stoddard, died. Various of the clergy who had been disaffected with Edwards for one reason or another began to feel more free to voice their dissatisfactions. So the divisions in his own congregation were almost encouraged. The Hawleys and the Williams’s had had differences with Edwards. Some matters of church discipline, perhaps poorly handled, had caused strains.

Against the backdrop of these existing tensions the controversy over communion broke out in earnest. In December of 1748, Edwards told someone that he must profess Christianity before he could take communion. The rejected applicant talked to others about this, and then refused to profess being a Christian. He was happy to profess godliness, he said. Tongues wagged, and eyebrows were raised. In February of 1749 Edwards proposed that he preach about this change in a series of sermons. The leaders preferred that Edwards make his case in print, and so he did. In the meantime, in April, Mary Hulbert presented herself for communion and membership, but Edwards and the Church Committee could not agree on whether she should make a profession of faith in order to do this, or whether such an action would prejudice the church. In order to break the impasse, Edwards bought time by offering to resign if the church would wait until after his defense of his change of view was written and published, so that they would have a chance to carefully consider his views.

In a letter to John Erskine in Scotland, written on May 20, 1749, Edwards mentioned the controversy:

A very great difficulty has arisen between my people, relating to qualifications for communion at the Lord’s table. My honoured grandfather Stoddard, my predecessor in the ministry over this church, strenuously maintained the Lord’s Supper to be a converting ordinance, and urged all to come who were not of scandalous life, though they knew themselves to be unconverted. I formerly conformed to his practice but I have had difficulties with respect to it, which have been long increasing, till I dared no longer proceed in the former way, which has occasioned great uneasiness among my people, and has filled all the country with noise.[2]

By August of 1749 his new book had arrived in Northampton: An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God concerning the Qualifications Requisite to a Complete Standing and Full Communion in the Visible Christian Church. That fall, a secular meeting of citizens urged the church to separate Edwards either from his new principles or from the church. In December a council of local ministers was convened to look into the case.

In February of 1750 Edwards decided to lecture on his opinions on Thursday afternoons at two o’clock. The sermons were well attended by visitors, but not by his own people. And they were to no avail. There was a series of divisive church meetings throughout the spring, issuing in a meeting of a council of ministers during June 19-22, 1750. This council decided (by one vote) that the relations between Edwards and the congregation in Northampton should be dissolved.

On July 1, 1750, Edwards preached one of the most remarkable sermons that he—or any pastor to my knowledge—has ever preached. He preached his farewell sermon from 2 Corinthians 1:14: “As also ye have acknowledged us in part, that we are your rejoicing, even as ye also are ours in the day of the Lord Jesus.” This sermon is remarkable for its gravity and tenderness, its love and certainty, and the evident trust in God held by its preacher. Strangely enough, Edwards (in what must have been a rather awkward situation) continued to live in the parsonage and to preach for the church until October of 1751, fifteen months later.

The next year, 1752, Edwards sent to the press the only other major work he published on this question: Misrepresentations Corrected, and Truth Vindicated in a Reply to the Rev. Mr. Solomon Williams’s Book.[3] This was his answer to Solomon Williams, Edwards’s cousin, who had written defending Stoddard’s practice and the decision of the Northampton church. Of course, this controversy had been settled by the dismissal of Edwards, so it was not continuing to disturb Northampton. Nevertheless, Edwards thought that he must correct certain misrepresentations.

By the end of the century Solomon Stoddard’s “converting ordinance” idea—the idea that prevailed in the church at Northampton over Edwards’s objections—became virtually extinct. After his death, Edwards’s ideas won out.

In all of this, it is evident that Edwards’s concern was a concern that had marked various parts of the Reformation and that was especially typical of the New England Puritan heritage he had received—the concern for the visibility of the church. By requiring full membership for those allowed to come to the Lord’s table, Edwards was harking back to the need for a clear distinction between the church and the world.

As separatists had maintained before him, Edwards understood that the visible church will always be mixed, and yet its purity was an asset to be preserved and improved. Its certain mixture was in no way an excuse for indifference or complacence about the moral purity of the church. In his sermons and particularly in his Humble Inquiry he advocated the simple idea that “none ought to be admitted as members of the visible church of Christ but visible and professing saints.”[4] Edwards summoned the examples of the church in the New Testament, both in Acts[5] and in the epistles,[6] as supporting his case. Based on texts such as 1 Corinthians 11:28, “Let a man examine himself, and so let him eat,” Edwards argued that “it is necessary, that those who partake of the Lord’s Supper, should judge themselves truly and cordially to accept of Christ, as their only Saviour and chief good; for of this the actions which communicants perform at the Lord’s table, are a solemn profession.”[7]

What are we to learn from Edwards’s vision of the church as a visible church? We are to remember afresh that part of what we need to do is not simply try to make the church as accessible and comfortable as possible for the nonbeliever. We must labor to make it as pure and holy as we can for all concerned—believers and non-believers, ourselves and others, the church, and even for the glory of God himself.

J. H. Thornwell, the great Southern Presbyterian theologian of the nineteenth century, noticed the churches in his day moving in a dangerous direction, a direction he feared might compromise the message of the church. Thornwell warned,

Our whole system of operations gives an undue influence to money. Where money is the great want, numbers must be sought; and where an ambition for numbers prevails, doctrinal purity must be sacrificed. The root of the evil is in the secular spirit of all our ecclesiastical institutions. What we want is a spiritual body; a Church whose power lies in the truth, and the presence of the Holy Ghost. To unsecularize the Church should be the unceasing aim of all who are anxious that the ways of Zion should flourish.[8]

Somewhere along the way, something has happened to our ideas of church membership. We may not have self-consciously entered into a Halfway Covenant, but can anyone deny that membership in a church is less meaningful today than it was a century ago? Remember the line in the old spiritual “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” that says, “Some go to church for to sing and shout, before six months they’s all turned out.”

Perhaps it is not strictly that membership has become meaningless and that it doesn’t matter, but that it has the wrong meaning, and that it matters wrongly. Today, at least in the circles I travel in, a high affection, low commitment idea of membership is common. That is, it means much to “leave someone’s membership” in a particular place, but membership in itself evidences no commitment to attend the church or pray for its ministry, to give to the church, or to work to forward the gospel through it. What we need is an exact reversal to take place. Ideas of membership should not be so associated with affection and should be linked more simply to commitment. Yes, make allowances for those who have recently moved, those who are unable to attend, those who are temporarily away for education or business or military service. But normalcy should be that a member of a church is in regular attendance and is growing in love to God and man and in holiness of life.

Why is Edwards’s recovery of the idea of regenerate church membership important? Why is the Reformation heritage of the visibility of the church important? Because the gospel matters! And because God has elected to move in human history in a corporate way. Did he send his Son uniquely? Yes. Did he raise up prophets and apostles? Yes. Does he gift his church with pastors and teachers, servants and workers of mercy? Yes. Does he save us as individuals? Yes. But that is not the whole story.

Edwards is only reflecting God’s own concern as we see it on the pages of Scripture when he desires those who are members of the church to be those who are manifesting and displaying the glory of God. How will the satanic slander against the Creator’s character be refuted? Not merely by individual conversions, but by the church, as the society of the redeemed, the company of the elect, trophies of God’s grace, showing his love and grace, his justice and holiness to each other.

Why should we act, like Edwards, to exclude certain people from the Lord’s table in our own local churches? Why should we act to discipline or exclude people from communion? We could give many reasons, but let me give just five.

1. For the good of the individual disciplined (1 Cor. 5:5; Gal. 6:1; 1 Tim. 1:20; Titus 1:13). The man in 1 Corinthians 5 was lost in his sin, thinking God was fine with him having an affair with his father’s wife. The people in the churches in Galatia thought it was fine that they were trusting in their own works rather than in Christ alone. Alexander and Hymenaeus thought they were fine in blaspheming God. But none of these were. So out of love for people, we want to see church discipline practiced. We don’t want our church to encourage hypocrites who are hardened, confirmed, lulled in their sins. We do not want to live that kind of life individually or as a church. We don’t want to see people who are not partakers of Christ by faith being treated as if they were, and this is for their own good!

2. For the good of other Christians, as they see the danger of sin (1 Tim. 5:20). When Paul wrote to Timothy, he said that if a leader sins, he should be rebuked publicly. That doesn’t mean that anytime I, as the pastor of my church, do anything wrong, members of my church should stand up in a public service and say, “Hey, Mark, you were wrong when you did this.” It means that when there is a serious sin (particularly sin not repented of), it needs to be brought up in public so that others take warning by seeing the serious nature of sin. Even Solomon Stoddard understood that those who were “scandalous livers” were not to partake of the Lord’s table. Is there anything at your church that would inhibit “scandalous livers” from taking the Lord’s Supper?

3. For the health of the church as a whole (1 Cor. 5:6-8). When Paul was pleading with the Corinthians, he said that they should not boast about having such toleration for sin in the church. He asked rhetorically, “Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough?” Here yeast represented the unclean and spreading nature of sin. So Paul said, “Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the festival”—the Passover supper—“not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.”

For the Passover meal there was a lamb slaughtered, and there was unleavened bread eaten. Paul here told the Corinthians that the lamb (Christ) had been slaughtered, and that they (the Corinthian church) were to be the unleavened bread. They were to have no leaven of sin in them. They as a whole church were to be an acceptable sacrifice. This would seem to mean that none would be partaking who were not Christians, who had not been forgiven by Christ.

Of course, none of this means that discipline is the point of the church. Discipline is no more the point of the church than is medicine the point of life. There may be some times when you are necessarily consumed with it, but generally, it is simply what allows you to get on with your main task; it is certainly not the main task itself. The main task, Edwards, Bunyan, and Sibbes would all have agreed, is the preaching of the good news of Jesus Christ. Having said that, though, for the health of the church as a whole, discipline should be practiced, and only those who give continuing evidence of conversion should be members of the church.

4. We should want to see discipline practiced in this church for the corporate witness of the church (1 Cor. 5:1; John 13:34-35; Matt. 5:16; 1 Pet. 2:12). Friends, this is a powerful tool in evangelism! People notice when lives are different, especially when there’s a whole community of people whose lives are different. Not whose lives are perfect, but whose lives are marked by genuinely trying to love God and love one another. Conformity to the world in our churches makes our evangelistic task all the more difficult. As Nigel Lee of English Inter-Varsity once said, “We become so like the unbelievers they have no questions they want to ask us.” May we so live that people are made constructively curious.

And finally, the most compelling reason we have to practice church discipline is

5. For the glory of God, as we reflect his holiness (Eph. 5:25-27; Heb. 12:10-14; 1 Pet. 1:15-16; 2:9-12; 1 John 3:2-3). You see, that’s why we’re alive! We humans were made to bear God’s image, to carry his character to his creation (Gen. 1:27). So it is no surprise that throughout the Old Testament, as God fashioned a people to bear this image for himself, he instructed them in holiness so that their character might better approximate his own (Lev. 11:44a; 19:2; Prov. 24:1, 25). This was the basis for correcting and even excluding some of the people in the Old Testament, as God fashioned a people for himself.

And that was the basis for shaping the New Testament church as well (2 Cor. 6:14-7:1; 13:2; 1 Tim. 6:3-5; 2 Tim. 3:1-5). In these and other passages, we find that Christians are to be conspicuously holy, not for our own reputation, but for God’s reputation. So in Matthew 5, we read that we are to be the light of the world, so that when people see our good deeds they glorify God (Matt. 5:16). Peter wrote the same thing, “Live such good lives among the pagans that though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Pet. 2:12). This is why God has called us and saved us and set us apart (Col. 1:21-22). What else should we look like, if we bear his name? Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, “Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:9-11). From the very beginning, Jesus had sent his disciples out to teach people to obey all that he had taught (Matt. 28:19-20). God will have a holy people to reflect His character.

And then when we see the picture of the church at the end of the book of Revelation, we see a glorious bride that reflects the character of Christ himself. We read the words of Christ, who says, “Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood” (Rev. 22:15).

Taking 1 Corinthians 5 as a model, churches have long recognized church discipline as one of the boundaries that make church membership mean something. The assumption is that a church member is someone who can appropriately take communion without bringing disgrace on the church, condemnation on themselves, or dishonor to God and his gospel (1 Cor. 11). It is by such people coming together that God is glorified as the church is made visible.

What was it Jesus said? “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). It is this shining, this visibility of the light of God’s Word and of his hope for sinners that is the role of the church and that pastors should cultivate in churches—even if people resent it and misunderstand us, gossip about us and are cruel to us and our families, even if it costs us our jobs and our reputations—as it did Jonathan Edwards. But then, Edwards did not live to please men, but to please God. This was Jonathan Edwards’s puritan vision of the church—the visible church—visible to the glory of God.

Notes

1. For more on the background of the communion controversy, see the chapter from which this article is excerpted: Mark E. Dever, “How Jonathan Edwards Got Fired, and Why It’s Important for Us Today,” in A God Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards, ed. John Piper and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 129-44.
2. Quotes of Jonathan Edwards are from The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2 vols., ed. Edward Hickman (1834; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1974), 1.cv.
3. Ibid., 485-531.
4. Ibid., 436.
5. Ibid., 451-53.
6. Ibid., 453-57.
7. Ibid., 459.
8. From a letter dated July 24, 1846, by J. H. Thornwell, “Question of Romish Baptism,” in The Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell, ed. B. M. Palmer (1875; reprint, New York: Arno, 1969), 291.