Holy Corona Communion, Batman!

I got embroiled in a Twitter brawl by accident, when I happened upon a Tweet, by someone I didn’t know, and responded. He complained he was not able to take Communion, in his home, because there was no authorised person. I asked, why he didn’t do it himself? I shouldn’t have said it. I felt like an internet troll. And the thread eventually involved famous theologian John Milbank no less. A High Anglican, he defended needing a priest to officiate at Communion.

For me, this re-opened debates from when I taught at Spurgeon’s College – could we have sacraments online? Are they not necessarily physical events? I’ve seen, for example, baptisms in a MUD site, where people’s avatars are ‘dunked’ in virtual water. Is this a valid baptism? What about Communion, with virtual bread-and-wine, in “Second Life”? It seems to me, nevertheless, that sacraments do need physical embodiment. As Woody Allen said: “80% of life is turning up”. While I sympathise with those wounded by their church experience, that’s what the incarnation teaches: the essential bodied nature of Christian life.

But, even if the materiality of sacraments is important, what about the specificity of the elements? For instance, regarding Communion, we’ve done it online twice since lockdown. In both cases, I sat at home, in one case with my family, at another alone, using blackcurrent juice, with a slice of wholemeal bread. I encouraged viewers to source the elements at home, and participate, while I led prayers. 

Of course, this is anathema to traditional churches. But, what’s the problem? If my small group leaders do it, in their online meetings, what’s the harm? Is it not actually more akin to New Testament house churches, where small groups met, led by an assortment of people – even women?

Free Churches already use unfermented wine, or grape juice, or even sometimes blackcurrent squash – because it’s ‘red’, and ‘looks like’ wine? Japanese churches frequently use rice wine and rice crackers. And how many youth fellowships have not used Coke and crackers, in their enculturated, contextualised, gatherings? If the Lord’s Supper represents the use of ordinary, everyday, foodstuffs, for spiritual symbolism, thus redeeming the workaday world, then why should we not use similar products from our own digital context?

And as for ‘one loaf’, have not the Catholics (Roman or Anglican) already sold the pass on that one, by eating ‘wafers’ instead of actual ‘bread’? And the antipathy of many to the small squares of white sliced bread, carefully placed on lace doilies, used in traditional Nonconformist Churches, is similarly more an expression of the aesthetic tastes and cultural prejudices of middle class hipsters, than any thought-through theological position. To (mis)use Aristotelian-Thomist categories, are bread and wine a ‘substance’, or an ‘accident’, when celebrating the Lord’s Supper?

As for needing to have sacral person present, a priest; or holding Communion in a sacred space, a church-building – what have these to do with Jesus? Does Covid not give us a chance to rediscover the ‘primitive’ early church?