Baptists, Eucharist, and History 3 – The Baptist Faith & Message of 2000

Finally, we’ll look briefly at the current state of Baptist belief and practice as reflected in the SBC’s 2000 Baptist Faith & Message. It’s extremely brief, so I’ll just quote the entire thing.

The Lord’s Supper is a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church, through partaking of the bread and the fruit of the vine, memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.

I would say we now take it further than even Zwingli intended. It’s a memorial ordinance. It’s purely symbolic. The bread and “fruit of the vine” (because Baptists became teetotalers in the late 19th century) are now mere bread and grape juice. No hint of the holy. No trace of even a spiritual connection to Christ. It’s not even a Thanksgiving (Eucharist) anymore. It’s a ritual we do out of obedience, as a memorial, and to anticipate the return of our Lord. This is a fairly common modern Western perspective today.

That completes my brief overview of the roots and development of the Baptist perspective on the Eucharist. Next we’ll step back into early Christian history and begin to explore how the Eucharist was understood and practiced by the early Christians. We’ll begin with the Ante-Nicene Christian period when Christianity was an illegal, though not always persecuted, religion in the Roman Empire.