Eucharist and Mission

J. H. Bavinck’s An Introduction to the Science of Missions (first published in English in 1960) is superb. Bavinck is flexible and balanced, yet principled, in dealing with the myriad complications of missionary work. He is aware of developments in cultural anthropology and other fields that give assistance to missionaries. His biblical theology of missions reads at points like something written by N. T. Wright.

This makes it all the more remarkably that Bavinck says virtually nothing about the connection of Eucharist and mission. He has a long, very fine paragraph on pages 184-5 regarding meat sacrificed to idols. He perceives that the issue in 1 Cor is not merely diet but one’s “place in the life of the society” and he puts the issue starkly: “If [converts] refuse [to participate in traditional festivals] they exclude themselves from the community of their own people, and if they take part they have difficulty with their own consciences.” His conclusion is right too: “it is clear that in such an environment Christians rightly feel that they ought to refrain from eating such meat.” Nowhere in this section, however, does Bavinck recognize that Paul places his most detailed discussion of the Lord’s Supper in the very same context where he raises the question of meat sacrificed to idols.

There are at least two possible explanations of this. The first has to do with the peculiarities of sacramental theology and practice in Dutch Calvinism, where in some cases (though by no means all) the Supper is marginalized in practiced and in ecclesial consciousness. I don’t know enough about Bavinck’s ecclesiastical setting to know how relevant this point is to him. The second issue, and the one I have more confidence about, is that Reformed sacramental theology, and perhaps Protestant sacramental theology in general, has severed the links between the OT sacrificial rites and the NT sacraments. (Not that this is a uniquely Protestant failing; the links were already being severed in some medieval theology.) Because Bavinck is not assuming any continuity between sacrifice and Supper, he fails to recognize that tribal festivals and the Eucharist are competing on and for the same cultural ground. He can watch animals slaughtered and eaten, and it never occurs to him that he is watching a pagan ceremony for which the Eucharist is the Christian alternative.