At the beginning of the 20th century, as the public became increasingly aware of the new science of germs, churchgoers became increasingly wary of the practice of sharing a cup at their communion services. For Roman Catholics, this wasn’t an issue, as it was only the priests who drank from the cup prior to 1970 (after Vatican II). But for other churches, the options were: (1) to continue with the common cup, (2) to start using individual cups, or (3) to intinct (dip) the bread (usually a wafer) into the wine.
Individual cups very quickly became the norm in Nonconformist churches, but their adoption was resisted within Anglicanism, with the common cup remaining the norm, and with intinction (dipping) becoming the preferred alternative if the common cup was deemed unsafe. (Andrew Atherstone has written about this fascinating period of history in a recent academic article, which is summarised in a blog post.)
Fast-forward another century, and history began to repeat itself during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the Church of England, the common cup was deemed unsafe, and this led some churches to introduce individual cups (controversially), while many more churches began to administer communion using intinction. Specifically, they adopted the officially-sanctioned practice of ‘priestly intinction’, which involves the priest (the minister) dipping the bread (the wafer) into the wine before giving it to the communicant. (This is more hygienic than self-intinction, where the communicant dips their wafer into the wine.) Priestly intinction was described in some Church of England guidance using the language of ‘simultaneous administration’, because it involves the bread and the wine being administered simultaneously.
Is intinction a good way of sharing communion?
Before answering that question, it’s worth considering why we share communion at all.
Why do we share communion?
In an important sense, we don’t need to. We are saved by grace through faith. In other words, we can be friends with God because God loved us so much that he gave us his Son, and we receive the gift of salvation by putting our trust in Jesus. ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved’ (Acts 16:31, NIV). We don’t need to eat and drink in order to be saved.
This is why you don’t need to worry if you are unable either to eat the bread or to drink the wine, or indeed if you are unable to receive communion at all. God is generous, and God is perfectly able to bless you without the help of the bread or the wine. If necessary, it is completely acceptable to receive communion ‘in one kind’ (bread or wine), and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer even includes the following in its instructions for The Communion of the Sick (emphasis added):
But if a man, either by reason of extremity of sickness, … or by any other just impediment, do not receive the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood: the Curate shall instruct him that if he do truly repent him of his sins, and stedfastly believe that Jesus Christ hath suffered death upon the Cross for him, and shed his Blood for his redemption, earnestly remembering the benefits he hath thereby, and giving him hearty thanks therefore; he doth eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ profitably to his soul’s health, although he do not receive the Sacrament with his mouth.
Why, then, do we share communion?
It’s one of many gifts that God gives us to strengthen us in our faith. There’s no magic involved, but as we eat and drink in remembrance that Jesus died for us, and in obedience to him, we find ourselves feeding on Jesus in our hearts by faith. Just as food and drink give us strength and lift our spirits, so it is that as we feed on Jesus by faith through sharing communion together, God strengthens our faith and reassures us of his love for us.
There’s no perfect way to share communion, but we need to think about how we share communion, so that it really does strengthen us in our love for God and our love for one another. The first step is to look at what happened at the first communion.
‘On the night before he died…’
When Jesus shared a meal with his disciples on the night before he died, they ate bread and they drank wine. These were two separate actions. They didn’t dip the bread into the wine and then eat a piece of soggy bread. They ate bread, and they drank wine.
Is this significant?
Jesus said about the bread, ‘this is my body’, and about the cup of wine, ‘this is my blood of the new covenant’. The bread represents Jesus’ body, and the wine represents Jesus’ blood. Think about where your body is. Now then think about where your blood is. Hopefully they are in the same place! What if your body and your blood are in different places? It means you’re dead! And that’s precisely the point. Communion is a symbolic meal, but what does it symbolise? Does it symbolise Jesus’ teaching, or Jesus’ life, or Jesus’ resurrection from the dead? No: it symbolises Jesus’ death. The Apostle Paul said, ‘whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Corinthians 11:26, NIV). How does communion ‘proclaim the Lord’s death’? It does so because the body and the blood are separate, and that’s why we eat the bread and drink the wine, rather than combining the bread and the wine together. Dipping the bread into the wine goes against the symbolism of Jesus’ body and blood being separated in his death.
If communion originally involved eating bread and drinking wine, as two separate actions, why did some people start to dip the bread into the wine?
Dipping into history
It’s very easy to think that the way we do things now is the way everyone has always done things, but we often find that our cherished traditions are much more recent than we thought. The details are difficult to trace, but it seems that intinction in the Church of England has never been common, and would have been completely unknown prior to the twentieth century.
A previous post included a reading list on the topic, and I summarised the history as follows:
There are very few references to intinction in the early centuries of church history. It might have been introduced in some places as a way of making the bread easier to swallow for the sick or for young children. It is difficult to know when the practice arose, but in the Eastern Orthodox Church today, the bread and wine are mixed together and then served using a spoon. Intinction was a controversial practice in the Western (Roman) Church, and it was banned in the thirteenth century. In the Roman Catholic Church, the laity received only the bread (the host) between around 1415 and 1970, so intinction wasn’t a live issue in recent times prior to 1970. In other churches, it seems to have become more popular since the early twentieth century, in response to growing awareness of the role of germs in spreading diseases.
In the Church of England today, intinction is generally discouraged and is actually banned in many dioceses.
What about the risk of infection?
Self-intinction (where the communicant dips their wafer into the wine) is less safe than priestly intinction, and seems also to be less safe than sharing a common cup. As for the common cup, one review of the science concluded as follows: ‘From the part of the science, the common communion cup may serve as a potential vehicle for transmission. However, the risk is considerably lower compared to other conditions of social gathering.’ (I think this last bit means that you are more likely to transmit an infection by talking to someone after the service than by sharing a cup at the communion rail.)
Conclusion
There seem to be very strong reasons to avoid intinction, and instead to use the common cup or individual cups. Intinction stretches the meaning of ‘eat … and drink’, with the result that we ‘proclaim the Lord’s death’ less clearly. To put it simply, when Jesus commanded us to ‘do this’, he was commanding us to do two things: to ‘eat this bread and drink this cup’ (as the Apostle Paul expressed it).