Received a private email from a reader and responded as follows. This is not everything he wrote, but most of it, and gives his main points I thought helpful to respond to.
Dear (brother),
Thank you for your kind response. You write:
First, the ancient church practiced paedocommunion. This is an undeniable fact. Withholding communion to children was in innovation by the western church which would later become Papists.
The ancient church practiced and taught many things which now make our hair stand on end. The standard for our faith today is not the ancient church, however you may define it, but the teaching and practice of the Apostles. They were inspired and gave us the New Testament. The ancient church was not and did not. This is not even to point out your error in declaring paedocommunion to be the “historic church’s” practice. Which historic church are you choosing this particular moment?
The aberrations of the early church fathers ranged far and wide, but were especially clear in their falling into this sacramentalism. Maybe you think their sacramentalism was good? If so, that is where we depart, but make no mistake that there is none of that in the New Testament. Scripture demonstrates the existence of this error from the very beginning of the people of God by opposing it constantly.
Many have attempted to combine historic reformed faith and practice with some sort of restorationist dream based on the historic or ancient church. In time their fruit is clear as the fruit of the federal visionists/paedocommunionist is itself now becoming clear. In my part of the world, it is the Campbellites who have born their terrible fruit for the past 150 years or so. That men today think they can better the Reformers on the sacraments despite having none of their disciplined study of Scripture and church history as well as none of their Roman Catholic background is very sad to watch, especially because of how many sheep have been misled.
Second, the charge to examine oneself was in response to abuses by adults in the Corinthian Church. If you are to be consistent with your interpretation of this applying to young children you should expect to see a higher rate of child mortality and sickness in the Eastern Church.
The Eastern church is sacramentalist through and through. This is why many raised in Federal Vision and paedocommunionist fellowships have done the honest thing and left reformed Protestantism behind, converting to Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism. Peter Gillquist and his fellow Campus Crusaders did a similar thing back in the late seventies, going their own syncretistic way.
As for child mortality comparisons, I don’t get your logic. That I must demonstrate the truth of this or that Scripture by showing this or that morbidity stat seems faithless. What God says is that the abuse of the sacrament of the Lord’s supper by the sinful Corinthians prancing up to the table of communion whilst utterly failing to give themselves to self-examination caused many of them to get sick and others to die. That you believe I must prove the truth of this warning by showing sickness and death today correlated to souls prancing up to the communion table without self-examination is impious. If you think number of children and morbidity stats in your church prove paedocommunion is Biblical, I’ll leave you to your conviction.
You would also expect to see this in the paedocommunion practicing reformed churches. Having been a member of both kinds of churches I can assure you there is no difference in this outcome. If anything, I have found paedocommunion practicing churches to be more likely to have lots of healthy children. Where as reformed churches that hold to the papist practice of denying the meal to their children are more likely to use birth control and miscarriages.
Dear brother, if I were to want to argue the point of the fruit of paedocommunion in the lives of the families practicing it, I would have much to say having much experience observing such families. It is in large part because of my observations of this error in the fruit it produces that I write warning men like you to humble yourselves under your reformed fathers of the past five centuries.
There was a period of about 20 years between the time our Lord instituted communion and when the Holy Spirit inspired Paul to write that correction to the church in Corinth. That means for 20 years that warning was not part of the liturgy of the meal.
Dear brother, when a man’s commitment to paedocommunion leads him to oppose fencing the table as you have done above, even going so far as to claim fencing wasn’t practiced for two decades prior to the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, I simply abandon the the field to him. I could write and write about the body and blood of our Lord and the proper preparation for their reception and the proper method of dealing with sin in a body of believers in that preparation and so on, but it would be useless.
Why?
Because none of that is the mistake. Rather, the mistake is ex opere operata . And this is precisely what I’ve been saying: if you want to know whether your pastor is a sacramentalist, listen to whether he fences the table. Sacramentalists never do, and not because fencing the table was just a weird practice needed by the church of Corinth, but because…
They are sacramentalists.
Also with love,
Tim