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III. A Eucharistically Malnourished Baptist's Desire for Intercommunion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2018

Steven R. Harmon*
Affiliation:
Gardner-Webb University

Extract

While I am not claiming credit for this year's panel session devoted to the question of intercommunion in the context of College Theology Society's convention with Baptist participation, I am deeply gratified that we as the church's theologians, Baptist and Catholic, are now raising the question in this manner, and that Professor Freeman has made clear for us what the ground rules seem to be for playing the hypothetical game of Baptist-Catholic intercommunion at a CTS convention. I have nothing to add to his spot-on summary of the Baptist “rules” for open communion and the Catholic “rules” for exceptional intercommunion articulated in the documents he has cited.

Type
Theological Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © College Theology Society 2018 

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References

72 Outlined in Dulles, “Eucharistic Sharing,” in 153–71.

73 I have commended to Baptists the practice of reciting the ancient creeds as an act of worship, offering a Baptist ecclesiological rationale for the practice and citing precedents within the Baptist tradition for doing so; see Harmon, Steven R., “Towards Baptist Catholicity: Essays on Tradition and the Baptist Vision,” Studies in Baptist History and Thought 27 (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2006), 163–65Google Scholar.

74 On hymnody as a locus for Baptist practices of receptive ecumenism, see Harmon, Steven R., Baptist Identity and the Ecumenical Future: Story, Tradition, and the Recovery of Community (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 153–56Google Scholar.

75 I treat various worship practices with roots in ancient Christian liturgy as means by which Baptists may reappropriate catholicity liturgically; Harmon, Towards Baptist Catholicity, 151–77.

76 On the other hand, in a subsequent conversation a Catholic member of the CTS shared with me an experience of a eucharistic service in which there were two altars from which two Eucharists were offered to worshipers, one Catholic and one Protestant, with the resulting implication that they represented options from which the worshipers might choose as if they were consumers in a marketplace—which is not an implication any of us involved in the CTS intercommunion conversation would want to convey with an alternative interim eucharistic practice.