Closed communion

Closed communion holds that admission to the Lord's table belongs to the church that celebrates it, and that the table is therefore properly restricted to those already standing in full ecclesial fellowship with that church, rather than opened to any baptized Christian who happens to be present. The position does not rest on a judgment about the sincerity or the standing of those excluded from it; a closed table does not say that someone outside the communing church lacks real faith. What it says instead is that the shared cup declares a unity that has actually been reached in doctrine and church order, not a unity still being sought or hoped for, so that communing together across a real division in faith would assert something untrue about the state of the churches involved. Both the Eastern and Western halves of ancient Christianity hold some form of this position, worked out through canon law in the West and through the parallel canonical tradition in the Eastern churches, and it is on this point, more than almost any other, that they stand together against every tradition that practices an open table. The Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox communion and the Oriental Orthodox churches all restrict communion along broadly this reasoning, despite the real differences in canon law and church structure that otherwise divide them from one another.

Closed communion is often confused with a related but narrower practice called close communion, and the difference between the two turns on exactly what is doing the restricting. Close communion restricts the table to members of a single confessing body, drawing the line at a shared confession of faith rather than at membership in one particular institutional church, so that, in principle, a visitor from another congregation holding the identical confession might still be welcomed. Closed communion draws its line at the church itself rather than at the confession, restricting the table to those in full communion with that specific ecclesial body regardless of how closely another church's doctrine might otherwise match its own. A further and narrower practice sits inside closed discipline rather than replacing it: eucharistic hospitality by exception, where a church that ordinarily holds a closed table permits admission in specific, defined circumstances, typically for a baptized Christian in danger of death with no access to a minister of their own church, or during an extended period of ecumenical dialogue explicitly sanctioned by church authority. This exception is not a quiet loosening of closed communion into something closer to an open table; it remains bounded, occasional and governed by the same authority that maintains the closed discipline in every other circumstance.