Restoring Apostolic Faith

Before the cross became a symbol, it was a scandal.

Before the altar became marble, it was a table.

The first believers didn’t approach communion with organ music or a priest’s polished phrases. They gathered around borrowed tables in homes, breaking bread with calloused hands, tears, and gratitude. The Eucharist was never a performance; it was participation — the heartbeat of a family who believed Christ was truly among them.

But once Christianity traded persecution for power, that table was redecorated — and the kingdom of God was remodeled into something that looked suspiciously like Rome.

The Table Before the Throne

The earliest record of the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor 11) shows a scene both sacred and scandalous. In Corinth, believers were eating together — the rich and poor, slave and free, Jew and Gentile. Paul doesn’t rebuke them for eating too casually; he rebukes them for eating unequally.

Some were feasting while others went hungry. The point of correction wasn’t ritual precision but covenantal justice.

The bread and cup weren’t mystical props — they were moral tests. To eat unworthily was to ignore the unity that the body of Christ created.

For the first two centuries, the Eucharist was still a meal. The Didache calls it a thanksgiving feast shared by those reconciled in Christ. Justin Martyr describes it in A.D. 150 as a communal act of gratitude following prayer and instruction — still simple, still familial, still accessible.

It wasn’t yet a sacrament in the later technical sense. It was a sign of shared allegiance and a taste of the kingdom to come.

When the Table Moved to the Palace

Then came Constantine.

When the empire legalized Christianity in the fourth century, the Church stopped gathering in homes and started assembling in basilicas — the architectural language of empire. The Eucharist moved from table to altar, from family meal to imperial ceremony.

The shift was subtle but seismic. The table of fellowship became the throne of the priest. The cup of remembrance became the chalice of consecration. The people became spectators again.

Under imperial favor, the Church began to mirror the empire’s hierarchy: clergy over laity, center over margins, Latin over Greek, reason over mystery. The Eucharist followed suit.

By the time of Theodosius, the meal had been transformed into liturgy — ornate, distant, controlled. The simplicity of breaking bread gave way to procession, vestments, and eventually metaphysical speculation about how, exactly, the bread became Christ.

From Thanksgiving to Transubstantiation

The Greek word eucharistia means “thanksgiving.” For the early Church, it meant gratitude for redemption and unity. But by the medieval era, the focus had shifted from communal thanksgiving to metaphysical precision.

Philosophy replaced fellowship.

Influenced by Aristotle’s categories of substance and accident, Latin theologians like Thomas Aquinas crafted the doctrine of transubstantiation — the belief that the elements literally change in essence while retaining outward form.

It was an intellectual triumph — and a relational disaster.

The mystery once embraced by the heart was now dissected by the mind. The meal of participation became an object of observation. Ordinary believers no longer broke bread; they watched the priest elevate it.

The Eucharist was no longer a table where believers met Christ together — it was a stage where Christ was re-offered through the clergy for the people.

The meal that once united became the ritual that divided.

Empire Never Left the Room

Constantine may have died, but his architecture survived.

Even Protestant reformers, for all their zeal to restore simplicity, kept the throne in the sanctuary. Luther fought transubstantiation but still preserved a quasi-sacramental hierarchy. Calvin spoke of “spiritual presence,” but only the ordained hand could break the bread.

The empire had baptized itself into every brand of Christianity.

The apostles’ table was flat; ours became tiered. The early Eucharist was communal; ours became clerical. We re-enacted fellowship but preserved control.

And so, centuries later, the table still carries the scent of empire — divided by rank, by denomination, by doctrinal shibboleth. What was once a shared thanksgiving has been turned into a litmus test of orthodoxy.

The Meal We Lost

Read Acts 2 :42–47 again. The believers “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayers.” That phrase wasn’t symbolic — they were literally sharing food.

It’s why Paul called it “the Lord’s supper,” not the Lord’s theory.

The earliest Eucharist was inseparable from generosity. You couldn’t claim to discern the body of Christ while ignoring the bodies around you. The poor ate first. The widow was honored. The orphan was fed.

Today, we pass sanitized wafers and call it communion while ignoring the hungry outside. The ancient table fed both body and soul. The modern one fits neatly into a fifteen-minute slot between songs.

The apostles would look at our ritualized fragments and wonder what happened to the feast.

The Theology of the Table

The Eucharist wasn’t invented at the Last Supper. It was reframed.

Jesus was reinterpreting the Passover — a meal of liberation and covenant. Every Jew at that table understood what He was doing. He wasn’t launching a metaphysical debate; He was sealing a new covenant meal, just as Moses did with blood in Exodus 24.

When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of Me,” the Greek term anamnesisdidn’t mean nostalgic recall. It meant active participation — a ritual that re-presents (not re-creates) the reality it signifies.

The earliest believers saw that clearly. When they broke bread, they weren’t watching a reenactment; they were stepping into the story again. It wasn’t theater — it was testimony.

That’s what empire can’t understand: that divine presence doesn’t need power to prove itself.

The Cost of Forgetting

When the table became the altar, we lost three things: equality, immediacy, and vulnerability.

• Equality: In Christ there was no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. But in the imperial church, only the ordained could approach the elements, and only the elite could afford the front pews.

• Immediacy: The early believers believed Christ was present with them, not mediated for them. Empire inserted a chain of command between soul and Savior.

• Vulnerability: At a shared meal, everyone’s humanity shows. You can’t hide hierarchy over bread. But the altar removed eye contact. It made communion safe, distant, aesthetic.

That’s how religion replaces relationship.

Rebuilding the Table

To rebuild the table, we have to deconstruct the stage.

That doesn’t mean abandoning reverence—it means returning to the original posture of thanksgiving and mutuality. It means seeing the Eucharist as family meal again, not ceremony.

Rebuilding the table means:

• Breaking bread in homes again. Not replacing Sunday, but recovering intimacy.

• Reuniting worship and justice. Feeding the poor is Eucharist.

• Letting the body speak. Testimony, confession, prayer, and reconciliation belong beside the bread, not before announcements.

• Recovering the cross in the cup. Remembering that participation means surrender, not sentiment.

Communion should taste like community and look like equality.

A Word to the Modern Church

Whether you’re Protestant, Catholic, or somewhere in between, the call is the same: take back the table from the empire’s habits.

You don’t need gold chalices to meet Christ. You need clean hearts and open hands. You don’t need Latin metaphysics to experience mystery. You need obedience to His command, “Do this in remembrance of Me.”

The Church’s unity will never be rebuilt in conferences or councils. It will begin again where it began before — over bread and wine, repentance and gratitude.

The world doesn’t need another sermon about community. It needs to see it at the table.

Final Thought

When the Church sat with emperors, it forgot how to sit with widows.

When it built altars of stone, it forgot the wooden table where the Lord once reclined among friends.

But the invitation still stands.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me.” (Rev 3 :20)

The empire can keep its altars.

Christ is still looking for a table.