From the Archives: Ad Orientem: Why the Celebrant Should Face East (Part III)
Triumphal Crucifix in Ardre Church, Gotland, Sweden. Photo: Bene Riobó, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
This paper was first presented at the annual St. Michael’s Conference held in late September 2011 at Zion Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Detroit, Michigan, under the title “The Conduct of the Service: Revisited,” a reference to The Conduct of the Service by the Rev. Dr. Arthur Carl Piepkorn, originally published in 1965, and the 1972 revision and expansion of Piepkorn’s work by the Rev. Charles L. McClean entitled The Conduct of the Services, both of which can be found for purchase in one volume from Emmanuel Press. This article is from Vol. XX, No. 4, Christmas 2012. The first installment can be found here, and the second here.
Ed: The final Sundays in Trinitytide with their eschatological emphasis and the subsequent season of Advent turn our eyes toward the last things, particularly toward the coming again of Our Lord in glory to judge both the quick and the dead. While we contemplate these things in particular at this time of the year, the Church’s ancient posture of eastward prayer, especially at the Eucharist, has served as a continual and daily reminder of the coming parousia, and the season of Advent seems a particularly good time to restore this ancient custom if it has fallen out of practice.
Ad Orientem: Why the Celebrant Should Face East (Part III)
Rev. Charles L. McClean
“There is really only one basic rule of altar decorum: ‘Be reverent!’ Every other rule is simply a practical amplification of this basic charge.” I am inclined to say that the “Notes on Reverence” at the beginning of The Conduct of the Service are probably more important than all that follows, because the reverence and spiritual preparation that Dr. Piepkorn insists on are the indispensable foundation of truly recollected worship. All of the ceremonial directions are intended to help make possible that recollected worship. And if the ceremonial becomes somehow distracting, then it, no less than the deplorable liturgical devastation and levity now seen in many places, can be a hindrance to worship in spirit and in truth. Our real goal is surely not some kind of ceremonial maximalism everywhere but the quiet dignity which grows out of genuine awareness that in the celebration of the Sacrament we are indeed admitted to the realm depicted in Revelation 4 and 5: for here the exalted Lamb of God, worshipped by angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, imparts the body and blood of His atoning, life-giving sacrifice under the consecrated bread and wine that rest upon our altars. When that conviction takes root in hearts and minds a worthy celebration will surely follow.
I believe that for people like ourselves The Conduct of the Service remains a useful guide—certainly not to be followed slavishly but as a fairly accurate guide to the ceremonial usages of the Church of the Augsburg Confession grounded in the historic liturgy of the Western Church. But I cannot help but wonder whether Dr. Piepkorn’s work and my own were and are perhaps a bit much for the average seminarian and pastor who for better or worse have neither the interest nor the patience to plough through all this material. And I suspect that there are relatively few parishes in our synod where the most complete ceremonial known to the Church of the Augsburg Confession can be implemented. Interesting in this connection is the fact that the old Liturgical Society of Saint James had as one of its goals the establishment of “one congregation in each of our great cities” where the most complete usages known to our Church could be implemented.
Having so recently returned to Synod, I am not aware of how liturgics is taught at our two seminaries or of what written guidelines there may be available for worship according to Lutheran Service Book. Perhaps we need something like the simple directions Luther Dotterer Reed provided in his fine work The Lutheran Liturgy, first published in 1947 and as a second edition in 1959. In the earlier edition Dr. Reed followed the rite of the Common Service Book and Hymnal of 1917; in the latter edition the 1958 Service Book and Hymnal. I have to admit that in my judgment the 1958 Service Book and Hymnal and The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941 in our own synod represent the last time that Lutherans in America were provided with a fully coherent, finished rite. I think that ever since then our service books and hymnals have more of the character of works in progress—not that there is anything wrong with that. But this is yet another large question which we do not now have time to explore.
In conclusion I have just a few practical observations.
Although it is unrealistic to expect that most of our churches will follow the full ceremonial known to the Church of the Augsburg Confession, there are, I believe, a few things that perhaps could be done better to embody in our celebration of the Sacrament the sense of what John Stephenson has called our gracious admission to the realm depicted in Revelation 4 and 5, of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven before the throne of God and the Lamb.
The church building, especially the chancel, should clearly say, “This is none other than the House of God and this is the Gate of Heaven.” But so many of our churches built since about 1960 are of an almost Puritanical plainness redolent of Reformed Protestantism’s principled and, I submit, finally heretical rejection of images. I am convinced that the contemporary profusion of homemade banners of very uneven quality in our churches, usually with symbols unintelligible to the laity or even worse with words, words, and more words, stems from an effort to bring some color and interest into rather colorless, severely plain buildings. Our old traditional churches with their—if you will forgive the expression—“gingerbread” altars and stained-glass windows have a completely different atmosphere similar to the old Lutheran churches of Germany and Scandinavia. If we could everywhere restore the crucifix, the chalice, and the so-called Altargesang of the pastor—customs virtually universal when we were a German-speaking synod—the worship in many places would take on a very different atmosphere. In recent years I have become more and more convinced of how much was lost in our synod’s necessary but difficult transition to being an English-speaking Church. The fear of the father founders of our synod, that the adoption of the English language would make us even more vulnerable to the prevalent Reformed Protestantism of this land, was not unfounded. I believe that the present Baptistification of our churches is only the reductio ad absurdum of that sad and lengthy process.
You may have noticed that in The Conduct of the Service nothing is said about the use of individual cups; the use of such cups was not nearly as widespread in our churches as it has become in recent years. I was about twenty years old before I ever saw such things, and I must admit that I am hard pressed to think of anything that has had such a deplorable effect on the celebration of the Sacrament in our churches as the introduction from Reformed Protestantism of this custom. It frankly amazes me that the clergy who first capitulated to pressures to introduce them didn’t immediately realize that the word individual and the word communion are somehow mutually exclusive! And is it not the use of individual cups that has made possible departures from the dominically instituted elements in the Sacrament? Both Walther in his Pastoral Theology and Pieper in his Christian Dogmatics insist that it is the pastor’s responsibility to see to it that nothing but genuine wine is used in the Sacrament. But our synod has changed in the past fifty years. Then it was a generally unquestioned assumption that we should exercise the greatest, most scrupulous care to celebrate the Holy Sacrament in exact conformity with our Lord’s Institution. But now many in our synod seem to be oblivious to that confessional commitment and are seemingly concerned not so much with the conformity of the celebration of the Sacrament to the Lord’s Institution but with the accommodation of every possible and impossible cultural expectation.
I frankly do not know what the solution is to the problem of individual cups. In the parishes where the cups are firmly ensconced we must in charity bear with them in the hope that patient catechesis will perhaps lead to better things. I have of late begun to wonder if the only practical way to rid our churches of this problem would be to introduce, for those who will not receive from the chalice, the practice of intinction, whereby the communicant receives the Host on the palm of his right hand held flat over the left hand with the person administering the chalice then dipping the edge of the Host in the precious blood and placing it on the tongue of the communicant. I know that some have said that intinction does not fulfill the divine command to “drink” the precious blood. There may be something to that. But is it in keeping with the divine command when, instead of partaking of the Lord’s precious blood from the cup, each communicant drinks from his own little cup? I wonder which is less defensible. Perhaps it would be useful to begin a thorough discussion of this problem, for among the many undesirable effects of using individual cups is the difficulty in seeing to it that the precious blood is consumed at the end of the Distribution as Dr. Luther directed. This practice is in fact reflected in the directions for the reverent treatment of what remains after the Communion in Walther’s Pastoral Theology. In this connection let me call your attention to two splendid articles, one by Bishop Emeritus Jobst Schӧne of our German sister church, Pastoral Letter Regarding the Divine Service and the Sacrament of the Altar, and the other by Dr. John Stephenson, Reflections on the Appropriate Vessels for Consecrating and Distributing the Precious Blood of Christ. Both articles are readily available in A Reader in Pastoral Theology published by the Fort Wayne Seminary. I only wish that every pastor in our synod would “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” these articles which show how our confession of the true body and blood in the Sacrament should shape our practice.
Let me finally make a plea for the restoration of the full frontal to our altars. Even the plainest imaginable altar gains in significance and beauty where this ancient practice is followed. Pictures of Lutheran churches in the sixteenth century and thereafter show that the frontal was very common indeed. It needs to be remembered that that purpose of altar paraments is not to have bits of cloth showing the liturgical colors but to clothe the altar which is itself a symbol of Christ, Himself the Victim and Himself the Priest. And so from earliest times the Church both East and West has clothed its altars with splendid coverings. As the Psalmist says, “The Lord reigns, He is clothed with majesty” (Ps. 93:1).
Since this is the two hundredth anniversary of the birthday of Dr. Walther, the father founder of our synod, he shall have the last word. Speaking to the sixteenth convention of the Central District of our synod meeting in Saint Paul’s Church in Indianapolis on August 9, 1871, Dr. Walther had this to say:
We are not insisting that there be uniformity of perception or of taste among all believing Christians–neither dare anyone demand that all should be minded in this as he is. Nevertheless it remains true that the Lutheran liturgy distinguishes Lutheran worship from the worship of other churches to such an extent that the houses of worship of the latter look like mere lecture halls, while our churches are in truth houses of prayer in which the Christians serve the great God publicly before the world. (C.F. W. Walther, “Adiaphora,” in Essays for the Church, St. Louis: Concordia, 1992, II, 194. This whole essay should be read as demonstrating the attitude of Dr. Walther toward the worship of the Church.)