THE FALSE MYSTERY IN THE LORD’S SUPPER OFTEN PRESENTED

De: Guillermo Santamaria

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The book argues that much contemporary Baptist practice surrounds the Lord’s Supper with a false mystique that obscures Paul’s actual concerns in 1 Corinthians 10–11. It begins by carefully cataloging the concrete ways Scripture says believers may “eat and drink unworthily”: turning the ordinance into something “no longer the Lord’s Supper,” privatizing it as “one’s own supper,” indulgence (gluttony and drunkenness), despising the church and shaming the poor, failing to examine oneself and to “discern the Lord’s body,” refusing corrective self-judgment, not waiting for one another, mixing the Lord’s table with idolatrous fellowship, maintaining open scandalous sin in table fellowship, and carrying party spirit and factions straight into the ordinance. In short, the Supper is violated whenever behavior at the table publicly contradicts the crucified Christ and the one-body fellowship the Supper proclaims.

From there, the paper critiques common evangelical misreadings of 1 Corinthians 11: “unworthily” is routinely treated as “unworthy person,” generating introspective fear and driving tender consciences away, while Paul is actually rebuking corporate abuses—status games, neglect of the poor, and congregational division. The Supper is wrongly reduced to a private mystical exercise (“me and Jesus time”), turned into a recurring assurance exam (“Am I really saved?”), and even made less frequent out of fear of judgment. At the same time, the passage’s social edge—“shaming them that have not”—is frequently ignored in favor of highly individualized moralism.

The study then contrasts Corinth with typical Baptist observance. Modern practice, with mini-elements and synchronized partaking, usually prevents literal feasting and drunkenness, yet often reproduces the same principle of failure to “discern the body”: extreme individualization, the quiet exclusion of the poor and “messy,” and the reduction of the Supper to a brief, tacked-on ritual. A historical interlude on the agapē or “love-feast” traces how the early church’s fellowship meal, once intertwined with the Eucharist, gradually separated from the sacramental action and survives today as a non-sacramental fellowship meal in some traditions.

The final sections analyze the “mysticism” that often clings to the Supper. On one side stands high-church mysticism, loading metaphysical power into the elements themselves; on the other, low-church mysticism, which relocates the “magic” into a carefully staged emotional moment or treats the Supper as a quasi-“converting ordinance.” Against both, Old School Baptist writers such as Beebe and Trott are presented as insisting that the true “mystery” lies not in elements or atmosphere but in Christ and his mystical body. For them, the Supper is a simple, symbolic ordinance of a visible gospel church, for baptized, walking members, proclaiming a finished work. They would preserve the reality of Christ’s spiritual presence and the church’s real union with him, while stripping away sacramental machinery and revivalist theatrics—a call to recover seriousness and simplicity rather than cultivated fog around the table.