Faith That Makes Sense

 There are only two sacraments ordained by our Lord Jesus Christ for the New Testament church. One is baptism and the other is the Lord’s table.  Even though our Lord conducted the first communion and set an example for how it should be done in our Sunday worship, he did not give any elaborate teachings on it. Paul provides us with further insight into communion. There are four concepts in chapters ten and eleven of 1 Corinthians that we need to focus on to gain Paul’s understanding of the communion. 1.            Communion shows that we are one in the Lord. (10:14- 17). This was a revolutionary statement for Corinthians. The church had both Jews and Gentiles, and both masters and slaves. Monday through Saturday, they belonged to different social groups and different social classes. But on Sunday, they all became brothers and sisters when they came to worship Jesus. The proof was that they were eating from the same b...

            The modern theology in America is heavily influenced by pluralism and not modeled  on the God of the gospels, according to Scriptures or the Ecumenical Creeds or Reformation.  Those who interpret the recent history of American Christianity may level a charge of  apostasy against it. 1 The fatal flaw in American Christianity can be traced back to ancient  festering Christological issues that were never really resolved either at Chalcedon or in the  sixteenth-century controversy between Lutherans and Calvinists. 2           Robert W. Jenson has analyzed the flaw of American Protestantism that allows it so easily to ‘substitute political ideology or psychotherapeutic spirituality for the gospel.’ 3 Jensen thinks American Protestantism might have experienced the reformation that Bonhoeffer missed had Jonathan Edwards not lost the battle he fought against Arminians and dei...