As one must be “born of the Spirit” before he can experience the sustaining influence of Christ, so he must be “born of water” before he can properly be nourished by the Lord's Supper. Neither the unborn nor the dead can eat bread or drink wine. Only when Christ had raised the daughter of the Jewish ruler to life, did he say: “Give her to eat.”The ordinance which symbolizes regeneration, or the impartation of new life, must precede the ordinance which symbolizes the strengthening and perfecting of the life already begun. The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, dating back to the second half of the second century, distinctly declares (9:5, 10)—“Let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist except those baptized into the name of the Lord; for as regards this also the Lord has said: ‘Give not that which is holy unto the dogs’.... The Eucharist shall be given only to the baptized.”
(f) The standards of all evangelical denominations, with unimportant exceptions, confirm the view that this is the natural interpretation of the Scripture requirements respecting the order of the ordinances.
“The only protest of note has been made by a portion of the English Baptists.” To these should be added the comparatively small body of the Free Will Baptists in America. Pedobaptist churches in general refuse full membership, office-holding, and the ministry, to unbaptized persons. The Presbyterian church does not admit to the communion members of the Society of Friends. Not one of the great evangelical denominations accepts Robert Hall's maxim that the only terms of communion are terms of salvation. If individual ministers announce this principle and conform their practice to it, it is only because they transgress the standards of the churches to which they belong.
See Tyerman's Oxford Methodists, preface, page vi—“Even in Georgia, Wesley excluded dissenters from the Holy Communion, on the ground that they had not been properly baptized; and he would himself baptize only by immersion, unless the child or person was in a weak state of health.” Baptist Noel gave it as his reason for submitting to baptism, that to approach the Lord's Supper conscious of not being baptized would be to act contrary to all the precedents of Scripture. See Curtis, Progress of Baptist Principles, 304.
The dismission of Jonathan Edwards from his church at Northampton was due to his opposing the Halfway Covenant, which admitted unregenerate persons to the Lord's Supper as a step on the road to spiritual life. He objected to the doctrine that the Lord's Supper was “a converting ordinance.” But these very unregenerated persons had been baptized, and he himself had baptized many of them. He should have objected to infant baptism, as well as to the Lord's Supper, in the case of the unregenerate.
(g) The practical results of the opposite view are convincing proof that the order here insisted on is the order of nature as well as of Scripture. The admission of unbaptized persons to the communion tends always to, and has frequently resulted in, the disuse of baptism itself, the obscuring of the truth which it symbolizes, the transformation of Scripturally constituted churches into bodies organized after methods of human invention, and the complete destruction of both church and ordinances as Christ originally constituted them.
Arnold, Terms of Communion, 76—The steps of departure from Scriptural precedent have not unfrequently been the following: (1) administration of baptism on a weekday evening, to avoid giving offence; (2) reception, without baptism, of persons renouncing belief in the baptism of their infancy; (3) giving up of the Lord's Supper as [pg 973]non-essential,—to be observed or not observed by each individual, according as he finds it useful; (4) choice of a pastor who will not advocate Baptist views; (5) adoption of Congregational articles of faith; (6) discipline and exclusion of members for propagating Baptist doctrine. John Bunyan's church, once either an open communion church or a mixed church both of baptized and unbaptized believers, is now a regular Congregational body. Armitage, History of the Baptists, 482 sq., claims that it was originally a Baptist church. Vedder, however, in Bap. Quar. Rev., 1886:289, says that “The church at Bedford is proved by indisputable documentary evidence never to have been a Baptist church in any strict sense.” The results of the principle of open communion are certainly seen in the Regent's Park church in London, where some of the deacons have never been baptized. The doctrine that baptism is not essential to church membership is simply the logical result of the previous practice of admitting unbaptized persons to the communion table. If they are admitted to the Lord's Supper, then there is no bar to their admission to the church. See Proceedings of the Baptist Congress, Boston, November, 1902; Curtis, Progress of Baptist Principles, 296-298.
Thirdly,—Church membership.
(a) The Lord's Supper is a church ordinance, observed by churches of Christ as such. For this reason, membership in the church naturally precedes communion. Since communion is a family rite, the participant should first be a member of the family.