‘But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”’
- Matthew 19:14 -
When the New Testament was completed, silence fell on the issue of child baptism and communion in the church for 150 years. So, unsurprisingly, the debate about children and church ordinances centers on early, non-biblical historical accounts. Enter Cyprian of Carthage, the first Christian to write on child communion around 250 A.D. He records a time when a Christian couple’s baby was left in the care of her wet nurse. The nurse abandoned the infant to a local pagan magistrate who, Cyprian says, involved the child in any number of demonic practices.
When the Christian parents regained their child and returned with her to church, Cyprian says: “The deacon began to offer the communion cup to those present. The little child, by the instinct of the divine majesty, turned away its face. The deacon persisted, and forced on her some of the sacrament of the cup. The draught sanctified in the blood of the Lord burst forth from the polluted stomach. So great is the Lord’s power, so great is His majesty. The secrets of darkness were disclosed under His light.” The little girl vomited up the Lord’s Supper, which Cyprian believes was due to the idolatrous practices she had unwillingly participated in.
We learn two things from this incident:
1) Young children received communion along with the rest of the church.
2) Their inclusion was not controversial but part of the normative practice.
The next pertinent account comes 125 years later in a book known as The Constitutions of the Holy Apostles. It prohibits unbaptized, unbelieving, or heterodox individuals from taking communion. Yet it also tells mothers to bring their children to church to receive the bread and the cup. The book even lists the order in which people are to receive communion: first bishops, then elders, then deacons, sub-deacons, readers, singers, deaconesses, virgins, widows, children, and finally, everyone else.
Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.) mentions children taking communion, but only in passing. He writes: “They are infants, but they receive Jesus Christ’s sacraments. They are infants, but they share in His table, in order to have life in themselves.” So it’s hard to argue that the early church didn’t welcome children to the communion table. But if this was a typical practice in the days of Cyprian and Augustine, why did acceptance of child communion diminish? First, we must look at the doctrine of transubstantiation.
Transubstantiation is the Roman Catholic view that during the blessing of the bread and wine, communion elements transform into the literal body and blood of Christ. This terrified medieval people, who were so scared to lose a crumb of God’s actual body that they began baking wafers instead of loaves to share. After all, this was Jesus’ flesh being consumed - so every crumb counted. The wine, seen as Jesus’ real blood, grew so precious that priests started drinking it on behalf of their congregants. Therefore what happened to the kids? Well, children are a sloppy, sticky bunch. So no communion for them! Thus ended 1000 years of child communion in the West.
But, you may ask, and rightly so, just because a view is historical doesn’t mean it is biblical. Some church fathers wrote ‘interesting’ things that we wouldn’t defend today. So does the Bible teach child communion or not? Well, it was to Mount Sinai that Moses led the ragtag Hebrew slaves who had fled the clutches of Egyptian slavery. They had survived the wrath of Pharaoh against all odds, even being rescued from the Angel of Death by the blood of the lamb. The Passover meal (from which the lamb’s blood came) was prepared for the whole household, but no one uncircumcised could eat the lamb. That is, no one living outside of covenant with God could share in His special memorial meal.
Because this covenant meal was so vital, God told the Jews: “When your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this meal?’ you shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover, for He passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when He struck the Egyptians but spared our houses’” (Ex. 12:26-27). By eating this memorial meal, the children were to learn about God and His grace. But how does this connect to Christian communion?
It connects because the Lord’s Supper is the Greater Passover. This meal memorializes God’s wrath passing over us thanks to the Lamb’s sinless blood. By taking the bread and the cup, all of us reborn into the church remember God’s final act of salvation in Christ. And if children ate the original Passover to learn of grace and salvation, what biblical warrant is there to keep them from the greater communion table?
In the Roman province of Achaea sat the Greek city of Corinth. The apostle Paul planted a church there in Acts 18, and boy was it a mess. There was constant infighting where believers formed factions around their favorite theologians, and there was even incest among the redeemed. What was more, they had made a complete mockery of the Lord’s Supper. So Paul gave them this stern warning: ‘Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord … For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself’ (1 Cor. 11:27-29). Serious words indeed.
In light of Paul’s warning, the argument against child communion goes like this:
1) Paul requires us to examine ourselves and to discern the body.
2) Young children cannot examine themselves, nor discern the body.
3) Therefore children are not qualified to take the Lord’s Supper.
4) To allow them to take communion might bring judgment upon them.
John Calvin liked this argument, and so he wrote: “If only those who know how to distinguish rightly the holiness of Christ’s body are able to participate worthily, why should we offer poison instead of life-giving food to our tender children? What remembrance of this thing, I ask, shall we require of infants when they have never grasped it?” But was Calvin correct? To grasp Paul’s point to the Corinthians, we must recall how the church was perverting communion through divisions and turning the Lord’s Supper into a drunken banquet for some, while leaving many members hungry.
Paul’s solution was for the church to ‘wait for one another’ (1 Cor. 11:33). The Lord’s Supper is a corporate meal meant to unite the body of Christ, therefore he asked: ‘The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread’ (10:16-17). When Paul called them to discern the body of Christ, he wanted believers to recognize the unity of the church. We are one, so it is counterintuitive to exclude children. If we send them away (spiritually) hungry, we fail to discern the body of Christ. And where does it end? If we exclude children as incapable of self-examination, should we also bar the mentally handicapped or elderly saints suffering from dementia? God forbid!
The Lord’s Supper is a powerful tool to saturate the church in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. By the bread and cup we participate in the body and blood of Christ and examine ourselves of sin. But just as with the Passover, the household is responsible before God, meaning parents must work to keep their children in covenant fellowship with God. It is our duty and joy to help our offspring mature as Christ-followers, noticing sin in their lives and helping them to repent of it more and more as time goes by.
So to recap, we’ve seen that there is a strong historical precedent for child communion. We made a solid biblical case for welcoming children to the Lord’s table. We must not take lightly the practical benefits of communion. The bread and cup catechize children by doing, which we all know is the best way to teach young ones. The holy ordinance not only defines but maintains unity in the church, so why not declare with our Lord: “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:14).
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