John Mark Hicks

James Thompson of Christianity Today asked for a statement about the Lord’s Supper. This is what I gave him (and it was published in the paper today). “Table is the dominant metaphor among Churches of Christ. We practice it weekly. Given our Presbyterian roots, both Zwinglian (memorialist) and Calvinian (spiritual presence) perspectives are present. At […]

We pray for daily bread, and we eat daily meals. Yet, some restrict the Lord’s Supper—the meal where we eat at the table of the Lord—to only and exclusively the first day of the week, Sunday. This restriction is a rather unique dimension of Churches of Christ. Is eating with Jesus (Matthew 26:29) restricted to […]

What does it mean to eat and drink “worthily”? The church has variously interpreted the term “worthily.” A primary misunderstanding has been to read the term as an adjective rather than an adverb. Some believe they must be “worthy” to approach the supper, that is, they must have lived a pure, exemplary life before coming […]

Some seventy years, more or less, after the rebuilding of the temple, Malachi directs his attention to the priests of the Second Temple. Twice, in Malachi 1:6-2:9, addresses them directly which the NRSV translates as a vocative, that is, “O Priests” (1:6; 2:1). This divides Malachi’s oracle for the priests into two obvious sections (1:6-14 […]