Open and Closed Communion

The oldest instructions that survive are restrictive, and they are restrictive for a reason that is not about worthiness. The Didache tells the assembly to let no one eat or drink of the eucharist except those baptised into the name of the Lord, and Justin Martyr, writing in Rome in the middle of the second century, says the same. Catechumens were present for the readings and the sermon and were then dismissed by the deacon before the eucharistic prayer began, a break so structural that both the eastern and the western liturgies still show the seam where it was. The logic is that the meal is the act of a body, and that a person who has not yet been joined to the body cannot perform its act.

Reformed practice produced the most elaborate machinery for the same idea. Communicants were examined by the elders in the days before a communion season and issued with a small metal token, which they handed in at the table; no token, no admission. Before the elements were distributed the minister fenced the table, reading aloud the categories of person who should not come. The custom was not primarily about excluding strangers but about the congregation's own members, and it rested on the warning in the eleventh chapter of First Corinthians about eating and drinking unworthily.

Roman Catholic and Orthodox practice restricts the table for a different reason again: not preparation but communion itself. Receiving together is held to state that a shared faith and a shared church order already exist. Where they do not, the statement would be false, and the closure is a refusal to say something untrue rather than a judgement on the person turned away.

The sharpest Protestant version of the argument broke out among English Baptists in the 1670s, and both sides agreed on the theology of the supper. John Bunyan, writing from and after his imprisonment, held that a difference of judgement about water baptism was no bar to communion, and that to refuse the table to a Christian whose faith and life were not in question was to make a secondary matter into the test of fellowship. William Kiffin and others replied that baptism is the door into the church and the table is inside it, so admitting the unbaptised, or those baptised only as infants, reverses an order that is not the church's to rearrange. Neither man doubted the other's Christianity, which is what made the exchange difficult, and Baptist churches have divided on it ever since: some open the table to any believer, some to any baptised believer, and some to members of that congregation alone.

The same argument has reappeared in a harder form. From the late twentieth century congregations in the Episcopal Church and elsewhere began inviting the unbaptised, on the grounds that Jesus ate with people before they had qualified for anything and that a meal used as a boundary has become the opposite of a meal. Their opponents answer that this makes baptism ornamental and inverts the sequence of Christian initiation kept since the second century. The canons of the Episcopal Church still require baptism and successive General Conventions have debated the practice without changing them, so the position exists as a widespread practice that its own church has not authorised, which is an unusual state for a liturgical question to be in.