From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhuxt!mhuxa!mhuxh!bwkna!ljs Newsgroups: net.misc Title: Hutchinson and Religious Matters Article-I.D.: bwkna.133 Posted: Wed Feb 2 13:33:27 1983 Received: Thu Feb 3 05:24:44 1983 As a "Liberal Christian" with some knowledge of RC (Roman Catholic) - Anglican - Mainline-Protestant Churches, I have never heard of a Church which offers the sacrament of Communion to a non-Christian. Often Communion is even denied to members of other denominations. (By the way, in some churches Communion is not even a sacrament - the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace - it's a "memorial.") Often the test of the acceptability of persons of other denominations is whether or not they are baptized members of some Christian body. Again, I have never heard of a Communion service without some form of confession preceding it. Sincere repentence is generally considered a requisite to the communion, but mainline Protestantism generally maintains that confession need not be heard by anyone but God; an intercessor like a priest or other "trustworthy believer" is not necessary. They're 'hard-wired' and don't need a dialup. These religious articles on the net indicate a rather surprising ignorance about Christianity in general. Most people seem to think there is much more coherence and unanimity of belief in the Christian world than is generally true. Any two Christians, even of the same denomination, can have widely divergent religious beliefs. That's what all the fuss was about during the Reformation, when Hus and Zwingli and Luther and Calvin got in their licks. They didn't agree with one another, and their religious descendants are even more widely at variance today.