When I teach evangelical college students about the practicalities of Communion, I’ll often begin with the Last Supper, with Jesus and the disciples, because it raises some straightforward questions. I’ll ask them: Should we obey Jesus? Should we celebrate the meal as he instituted it? Should we do what he said? Should we use what he used, eating what he ate and drinking what he drank?
Obviously, they respond—but then they catch themselves. On second thought, their churches don’t do that. And it occurs to them that they can’t quite offer an explanation why.
Some of their churches have taught them that the Communion elements don’t matter at all: Cheez-Its and Minute Maid will work in a pinch. Whatever’s on hand can do the job. Why be such a legalist? God doesn’t care. It’s about the intention of your heart.
COVID-19 lockdowns exacerbated this attitude. While most churches fasted from the Lord’s Supper if they couldn’t assemble, some encouraged families and even individuals to “self-serve” at home. Apart from questions of spiritual solemnity, communal ritual, or pastoral authority, the practical matter of what to use was answered by whatever was in the fridge and pantry. I suspect that not a few young people’s assumptions about Communion were formed quite powerfully during that time—and not for the best.
Years after the pandemic, with those unusual circumstances past, Communion is once again little discussed in many Christian circles. This may be because, in certain respects, it is a rare point of relative Christian unity. We disagree over so many things that it is always a joy to be able to say that “all Christians agree” about anything. But regarding the sacraments, happily, all Christians agree about three important things:
First, though we disagree about whether there are more than two sacraments, all Christians agree that there aren’t fewerthan two: baptism and Communion. And if you twist their arms, Catholics, Orthodox, and Christians in other “high church” traditions will generally admit that these two are the most important.
Second, all Christians agree that Jesus himself instituted both Communion and baptism and commanded his followers to continue practicing them until his return from heaven.
And third, all Christians agree that the church ought to celebrate baptism and Communion in accordance with God’s will, starting with Jesus’ own words in the Gospels before turning to the teaching and practice of the apostles in the rest of the New Testament.
Now, it’s true that I’ve overstated a little. Some Quakers don’t celebrate Communion; Baptists avoid the word sacrament; and many traditions persist in denying the validity of other Christian groups’ practice of Communion, baptism, or both. We remain divided, even here. I don’t want to gloss over that.
Nevertheless, Christian unity is worth pursuing. Last year I wrote an article for CT in which I called on evangelicals and other Protestants to embrace a higher view of baptism—of its necessity, its efficacy, and its power. I wanted to make the strongest possible case primarily because of what I believe is Scripture’s own teaching, but secondarily to draw divided Christians together. What I didn’t address was baptism’s practice, avoiding entirely the question of sprinkling or dunking babies or adults.
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Here I want to do something with Communion, only reversed. That is, instead of discussing the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, I’d like to address its practice. I want to show you that, whatever we understand to be happening in the meal, our practice of it can converge.
There’s much to discuss here, not least the frequency of the Supper’s celebration as well as its placement and importance in worship. But I’ll limit myself to a single practical question: What should we eat and drink? While this may seem like a minor matter, I hope to convince you it is anything but.
Start in the Upper Room, at the Last Supper of Jesus mere hours before he was betrayed by Judas (Luke 22:12; 1 Cor. 11:23). There’s little doubt that, when Jesus instituted what we call the Lord’s Supper, he and his disciples shared unleavened bread and wine (Mark 14:12–25).
This was, after all, not just a Passover meal but also the Feast of Unleavened Bread (v. 1; Luke 22:1), and according to the Law of Moses, “if anyone eats what is leavened, from the first day until the seventh day [of the feast], that person shall be cut off from Israel” (Ex. 12:15, ESV).
Moreover, Jesus refers to having drunk “the fruit of the vine” from the shared cup (Mark 14:25), and this is a biblical shorthand for wine (Num. 18:12; Deut. 18:4; 28:30; Josh. 24:13; Zech. 8:12, ESV).
Most churches, to be sure, are not as casual about the elements as those that allowed Cheez-Its at home in 2020. They use unleavened bread, generally some kind of wafer. But that’s only half of the meal. The other half is the problem: They don’t use wine. This is the sacramental pebble in the evangelical shoe.
By contrast, most of the world’s Christians, including many Protestants, do use wine in Communion. That includes some Methodists, many Presbyterians, and all Lutherans and Anglicans, along with the Orthodox and Catholics. Those who don’t use wine tend to be “low church” evangelicals: Baptists, Pentecostals, Churches of Christ (my own tradition), and a variety of nondenominational believers. Instead of wine, these groups tend to use grape juice.
My students usually hail from these churches, and they’ve never given the grape juice a second thought. So it comes as quite a shock to them to realize, first, that they’re not following Jesus’ stated instructions; and second, that this is a radically new development in church history, having nothing to do with divisions stemming from the Reformation.
Far from being a scriptural or doctrinal matter, grape juice in Communion was introduced by the American temperance movement. It was made possible by Mr. Welch himself, a teetotaling Methodist minister in the late 19th century who pioneered a way of preventing the process of fermentation in the sweet juice squeezed from grapes. This enabled believers who wished to abstain from drinking alcohol to do so every day of the week, Sunday mornings included.
Since then, grape juice as both a drink and a substitute for Communion wine exploded in popularity—here in the States and as an export abroad. There are millions of Christians around the world who now use grape juice in the Lord’s Supper because American missionaries bringing the gospel also brought a novel cultural practice—a product not of centuries-long Christian tradition but of temporary domestic conflict in America over whether drinking alcohol was compatible with following Jesus.
All this raises a fundamental question: If Jesus used wine in his institution of his Supper, does that matter? Did Jesus—does God—care whether what we drink from the Communion cup is fermented? And if he does, why?
The best way to approach these questions is to consider the nature of the elements as symbols. This, too, is a matter about which all Christians agree: Whatever else they may be, the bread and wine are symbols, and what symbols do is symbolize. They are signs, and signs signify. They are significant. They are pregnant with meaning. They are eloquent without words. In and of themselves, they point beyond themselves. They are inaudible arrows, drawing your gaze to what lies beyond them.
Symbols work because of what they are—and because of what they are not. The shape and color of a stop sign are not incidental to its meaning. The number of stars on the American flag is not accidental. And I’ve never heard of someone getting baptized in oil, tar, or urine. Water is a loaded symbol: It is clear, clean, and pure. And even as it’s good for washing, it’s also good for drowning.
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These rules about symbols apply to Communion as well. The bread is unleavened because this is the new Passover meal for God’s new covenant people (Luke 22:20). We have been delivered by Jesus from the Pharaoh of sin, death, and the Devil, and this is our sustenance for the journey, at once the bread baked in haste (Ex. 12:8, 33–34) and the manna from heaven in the wilderness (John 6:25–59). It is the bread of the new and final exodus—the Lord’s own body broken for our sake (Luke 9:31; 1 Cor 11:24). Therefore, 1 Cor 5:8 (KJV) instructs, “let us keep the feast”!
If the type of bread is so significant, it would be odd if the contents of the cup were irrelevant. But as it happens, Scripture has much to say about wine. In fact, wine is ubiquitous in the Bible. It’s not usually prescribed, as in 1 Timothy 5:23, but it’s everywhere, in story and prophesy and theology alike. Cutting it out of Communion is almost like cutting out these verses—a teetotaling Jefferson Bible.
There is Melchizedek, the king of Jerusalem and priest of God, who brings out bread and wine to share with Abram (Gen. 14:18)—a type of Christ in every one of these respects (Heb. 5–7). There is the role of wine in libations commanded as drink offerings in the Law (Lev. 23:13; Num. 15:1–10). There is the promise of God to the Israelites that he will richly bless them when they possess the land: “He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers. He will bless the fruit of your womb, the crops of your land—your grain, new wine and olive oil—the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks” (Deut. 7:13).
In the Psalms and the Prophets, the language of wine—of vines, vineyards, and winepresses—becomes a symbolic world unto itself. God uses the language of wine to speak of Israel as his beloved and to warn of wrath and judgment—or to do both at once, as in Isaiah 5:1–7. One theologian goes so far as to refer to the extraordinary “oino-theology” of the Bible’s “typology of wine.”
When Jesus—not only the master interpreter of Scripture but its very author—takes up the cup at the Last Supper, he is drawing on all this and much more. And it is crucial to see that none of this is foreign to our own culture today. It’s not merely what wine meant “in Bible times.”
Compare the symbolism of wine and grape juice for us. The one signifies adulthood, maturity, festivity, and celebration. It’s valuable and, as in Jesus’s own ministry (John 2:1–11), capable of marking an occasion as momentous, meaningful, and memorable.
Grape juice signifies children. Preadolescence. It’s what parents and teachers offer to young kids as a treat instead of water. It’s cheap and mass-produced. No adult goes to a restaurant and asks for a glass of their finest grape juice. No man impresses his date by buying her a bottle of grape juice. A teetotaler wedding might have sparkling grape juice, but even there the juice requires something more to be special.
Biblically, grape juice signifies nothing—except perhaps its eventual transition into wine, as in the Nazirite vows of abstention found in Numbers 6:1-4. And culturally, it signifies worse than nothing—assuming that we want to take our practice of the Supper seriously. And yet for millions of Christians, juice has become an unquestioned substitute for wine, one of the most richly significant and important symbols in all of Scripture.
Jesus instituted both unleavened bread and wine on purpose—that is to say, with purpose. These are signs that, in the Bible and in human culture alike, mean something. And if Jesus did this on purpose, then it remains his purpose now. We don’t have to wonder what the Lord’s will is here. His will is that we use what he used in his institution of the Supper.
And why not? There are no good reasons at the general level for churches to systematically substitute grape juice for wine in Communion. There may be local, person-specific, or missionary situations that raise reasonable questions about exceptions to the rule. But for an exception to work, there has to be a rule. And the rule is—or rather, ought to be—wine.
There’s an irony here that cannot go unremarked. Strict teetotalism and principled abstention from wine as forms of Christian piety have their roots in American evangelicalism. But as I have written at CT, that generational strictness has been loosened in recent decades. All the evangelicals I know now drink—and so do their parents, who once abstained.
Whatever the virtues of this change (and I don’t want to be glib about the downsides, which are all too real), it has produced a bizarre situation in many churches. Evangelical pews are filled with adult believers who drink wine at home but not in the Lord’s Supper. We have perfectly inverted the 19th century: avoiding alcohol only on Sundays.
Surely we can agree that, practically speaking, this is the worst of all possible worlds. At least it made a certain kind of sense for Christians who never drank at home to avoid wine at church too. The present inconsistency is simply too much to bear.
Be that as it may, the reasons to reintroduce wine into Communion practice are not themselves practical but theological, biblical, and ecclesial.
To use wine in the Supper would bring our churches into alignment both with the rest of the global church and with Christian tradition prior to Welch’s grape juice. It would bring them into alignment, too, with Scripture’s rich symbolism of the fruit of the vine. And finally, it would bring them into alignment with—I want to say, obedience to—the teaching and practice of the apostles and of the Lord Jesus himself.
There is no better reason than that.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.
