Why the Sacrament? Why Not the Word Alone?
This article was published in the Trinity 2013 issue of Gottesdienst..
There’s a new false doctrine afoot in the 21st century, at least according to certain guardians of orthodoxy in our midst. This so-called false doctrine doesn’t quite have a simple name. It’s called something like “holding that the Sacrament of the Altar is more important than the Word of God.” Unfortunately, there isn’t much research available on the history of this particular false doctrine—actually, I don’t think there’s any. Never in my historical studies have I ever come across a controversy in the Church, whether in the ecumenical councils, or in other regional councils, or in the Reformation, or in the annals of controversies among Lutherans since, have I ever run across this heresy.
But in fairness, perhaps it’s a new one. New heresies do sometimes arise, though generally they can be seen as re-workings of old heresies. In any event, the allegation of false doctrine is not one to be taken lightly, and as it happens, I have been personally charged with this false doctrine more than once, so I do claim a certain right to provide a defense.
As to the charge itself, “holding that the Sacrament of the Altar is more important than the Word of God,” it must be properly understood before a plea can be entered. This charge is made against those who, like me, believe that a Divine Service with the Sacrament is better than a Divine Service without the Sacrament. The charge here is not quite an allegation that we are denying all the power that is due the Word of God, though that might be the intended appearance of the charge. It seems to be a matter of logic: if the Word of God is infinitely powerful, then nothing can be greater. So therefore since we have alleged that something is greater, then we have denied that the Word of God is infinitely powerful. Of course that’s not what we’re saying at all, but rather that the Word of God itself directs us to the Sacrament of the Altar. It is in submission to the Word of God that we uphold the importance of the Sacrament.
But the charge is actually, if not intentionally, pitting the Word against the Sacrament, something we would never do. But this charge is almost an allegation that we are attributing to the sacramental elements some power apart from the Word, which would be as much as to charge us with superstition or witchcraft, and this would amount to a subtle shift of the charge, not to say a clever sleight of hand.
For, to be sure, our churches do have some very clear confessions on that matter. In the Small Catechism alone, we are told of Baptism that it is not the water indeed that does great things, but the Word of God which is in and with the water, and faith, which trusts such Word of God in the water, and that without the Word of God the water is simple water and no Baptism. And regarding the Sacrament of the Altar, similarly “great things” are done by the words “Given and shed for you, for the remission of sins.” The Large Catechism makes this even clearer: “It is the Word (I say) which makes and distinguishes this Sacrament, so that it is not mere bread and wine, but is, and is called, the body and blood of Christ . . . The Word must make a Sacrament of the element, else it remains a mere element” (LC, V, 10).
But if this is the true charge, then it’s a straw man, for no one here is denying these things. Straw man arguments are typically used to trump up charges that might otherwise not amount to anything worthy of consideration. In this case, however, it may be that what lies thinly veiled behind the accusation is something that does merit careful consideration and response.
The real basis of the charge, that which makes it a charge at all, is the fact that we truly do insist that a Divine Service with the Sacrament is better than a Divine Service without the Sacrament. To that accusation I plead guilty as charged. To use the old TLH parlance, Page 15 is better than Page 5.
In the first place, I’m not the only guilty one. In fact the historic participants at Holy Mass bear this out. There is not only a celebrant, but there is also a deacon and a subdeacon. The presence of a deacon to the celebrant’s right and a subdeacon to his left gives a Trinitarian portrayal to the High Mass that is quite evident in a carefully choreographed celebration.
There is also much more to the historic vestments of these ministers than to the officiant at a non-sacramental service, at least as they have come down to us from about the thirteenth century. By that time the evolution of the Eucharistic vestments was fairly complete (for details and a brief bibliography, see New Advent online: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15388a.htm). But in the Missouri Synod this matter has been blurred and disregarded, which is telling, and perhaps symptomatic. Technically the alb and even the stole are Eucharistic vestments, to be worn with amice, cincture, maniple, and chasuble. Interestingly, the matter of Eucharistic vestments has also been pretty much blurred and disregarded among Protestants across the board, which is also telling, since Protestants across the board have also historically denied the Real Presence in the Sacrament, but perhaps that’s another matter. Missouri Synod pastors with their ubiquitous albs, stoles, and cinctures tied at one side have unwittingly introduced a new trend in liturgical garb; and, truth be told, the trend is not all that flattering, especially if the officiant is overweight; the flowing chasuble for mass or surplice for prayer offices does a much better job of literally covering the man. Technically the wearing of an alb without the chasuble at Mass or the cope for other functions, is really an incomplete vesting of the sacred minister.
But of course vestments alone don’t settle the matter. The real question is whether there’s a legitimate cause to insist that the Sacrament is greater than the word. It’s hard to say just what might lie behind someone’s objection to the claim, and perhaps that doesn’t matter as much as the claim itself, and its defense.
To repeat, the Sacrament is more important than the Word. That is, a Divine Service with the Sacrament is better than one without it.
And incidentally, to put the matter more pointedly, and bluntly, the absence of the Sacrament on a Sunday morning is really a travesty. To want to withhold this inestimable gift from the people of God on that day, the day of the Resurrection, ought to be unthinkable. I’ll grant that there are a great number of pastors who are seeking to move in the direction of correcting the error, and more power to them. But we cannot correct what we do not recognize, and we cannot be drawn to the urgency of the correction if we do not see it for what it is: unacceptable. This is because it is actually better to say not merely that the Sacrament is more important than the Word, but that the Sacrament is, as it were, the completion of the Word, the fulfillment of the Word, the end point of the Word. It is the Visible Word, and therefore that to which the Word always ultimately directs us.
This may be demonstrated by a number of Biblical references. To mention a few, God did not merely promise to take care of Abraham; he promised him land. The provision of land is significant because it is a provision of material substance. Or again, God did more than merely to stay his hand from sacrificing Isaac; he provided a ram caught in a thicket. Why was this necessary? Why would it not have been sufficient for the Lord merely to call to him out of heaven, and to say, “Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me” (Genesis 22:12)? He passed the test, after all. Why kill the ram? The importance of material substance is suggested in this and, for that matter, in all the sacrifices of Israel. Why, speaking of sacrifices, was it necessary to sacrifice the Passover lamb, and spread its blood on the door posts? Surely the angel of death could have discerned which houses were Jewish without this ritual. We note in all these things a kind of Christological prolepsis. They foreshow Christ’s coming; and since they do, they bring us to the most important question of all, namely why it was necessary that he become a sacrifice for sin. Or why was it necessary that he become man? Cur Deus Homo?, as St. Anselm put the question some 900 year ago.
One way of answering the question is to say that John Calvin was wrong. God is not quite as utterly sovereign as Calvin famously held. Calvin, we recall, held that even the merit of Christ ultimately lies in the will of God: “In discussing Christ’s merit, we do not consider the beginning of merit to be in him, but we go back to God’s ordinance, the first cause” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.17.1; Library of Christian Classics, Vol. 20, Ed., John T. McNeill [Philadelphia: Westminster, 150], 529). Francis Pieper also noted Calvin’s ascription to this “acceptilation theory” according to which Christ’s opus “has no redeeming value in itself, but redemptive value is imputed to it only by God’s decree” (Christian Dogmatics [St. Louis: Concordia, 1950] 2.265). For Calvin, then, the question of the incarnation remains essentially an unanswered one, inasmuch as the incarnation was not really absolutely necessary at all, since even its value is only seen as sufficient by virtue of God’s decree; ultimately God could as easily have decreed to attach sufficient value to anything else, or to have made his decree without an attachment of value to anything, since he is sovereign.
The Lutheran dogmaticians have rightly rejected Calvin’s view (ibid., 277-8) as a failure to grasp the full meaning of the incarnation. What is important to note for our purposes is that the question of the need for the incarnation does not depend on the will of God, but on the essence of God. Luther’s emphasis on God’s divinity (Gottes Gottheit) likewise affirms that God cannot not be himself. He is who he is, and he must be who he is, or he would not be God. As Luther put it, “God’s omnipotence does not consist in having the power to do what he actually does not do, but in the ceaseless activity with which he works all in all” (WA 18,718, quoted in Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, transl., Robert C. Schulz [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966], 110n).
The very fact that he is the Creator of the world bears this out: he created physical substance. So we can actually say that he bound himself to the physical substance of creation not only when he became incarnate, but already when he made it. It was then that he committed himself to carrying out this project, as it were: he committed himself, as in, he put his entire being behind its ultimate success, even if that would mean making personal atonement. It is not only because of the Biblical witness that it is important for us properly to confess the two natures of Christ—though it is because of that—but because of what this tells us about God’s utter, irrevocable, substantive, and eternal dedication to mankind. This is not a matter of God’s will so much as it is a matter of God’s heart. God has always been bound to his creation, precisely because it is his creation.
The Christian Church has had to affirm this reality for a very long time, against the philosophical heirs of Plato who held that the true substances are not physical bodies, but the eternal Forms of which bodies are imperfect copies. As it turns out, those heirs themselves became imperfect copies of Plato. There were the Gnostics, who put creation in the hands of a much lower deity than the highest one (there were many deities for the Gnostics), so that the highest deity who would not have to sully himself with creation. There were the Docetists, who held that matter and spirit are antagonists and that therefore Christ only appeared to have been made flesh, to say nothing of his actually suffering in the flesh. There were the Arians, who insisted that Jesus was a mere creature and not the Creator himself. And there were the Nestorians, who posited the assumption of a complete man by the second Person of the Trinity, with the result that there were in effect two Christs, the one human and the other divine, the latter of which could not possibly have a mother, nor possibly suffer and die. There has always been a strain of heresies that will not allow the flesh of Jesus Christ to get too close to his divinity.
To suffer any of them is to give away the very essence of what we believe. That is, to whatever extent these heresies, in whatever form they come, could keep the flesh of Jesus from touching his divinity, it is to that extent that will have robbed the Church of her most precious faith.
Consider how the Fathers have affirmed this with such emphasis, even in the Creed we say every Sunday. The Creed doesn’t even have the word credo in the second article, but only et. That is, it begins with “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible,” but does not go on to say, “and I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,” but rather, merely, “and in one Lord Jesus Christ.” The single credo—the “I believe—goes with the Father and with the Son. This binds the Father and the incarnate Son together inseparably, one God. This is important because of what is affirmed next about Jesus, that he is the Son of God. Not, that is, a lesser being, but in fact the same being, who, though he is begotten of the Father, is begotten from eternity. And lest there be any doubt about what the fourth century bishops assembled at Nicea meant, they went on to say more, especially in view of the fact that they were contending with the heretic Arius. Arius had already said, blasphemously, that there was a time before Jesus came into existence. So against him they saw fit to affirm, in his face, both figuratively and literally (since he was present at Nicea), that they in no way meant to allow that the being of Jesus is somehow lesser or other than that of the Father, but rather that Jesus is God of God, Light of Light, Very God. And then, just in case anyone had any doubts about what being “begotten” meant, and what it did not mean, they reaffirmed it more precisely: begotten, not made. And still they were not finished with their unanimous affirmation here, though one might have thought enough was enough. Yet the pummeling of Arius continued: being of one substance with the Father, and then finally, the coup de grace: by whom all things were made, expelling every whiff of Arian odors from the room.
It bears repeating that this is the Creed we confess every Sunday. It is meant to expunge also from our minds all hints of a nascent dualism, because it ties Jesus to the creation, not as creature but as Creator. He wears the flesh of the creature, but he is himself the Creator. In fact, the original text of the creed had these words added at the end, rather obviously against Arius:
But as for those who say, There was when He was not, and, Before being born He was not, and that He came into existence out of nothing, or who assert that the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or substance, or created, or is subject to alteration or change - these the Catholic and apostolic Church anathematizes.
http://www.earlychurchtexts.com/public/creed_of_nicaea_325.htm
Whatever the reason, it has always been difficult, to say the least, to comprehend or accept the idea that God would attach himself to earth, much less that he would become incarnate. The incredulity of Jesus’ disciples is itself testimony to the historicity of the Gospel accounts. Philip’s question, “Show us the Father” (St. John 14:8) belies a failure to grasp what Jesus had been teaching all along: “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?” (9), and is perhaps a fitting paradigm for the failure of all rationalism to fathom the joining of heaven to earth in the Person of Jesus Christ.
It now remains for me to make the connection between this truth—that Jesus is true God in the flesh, in two natures as one indivisible Person, as the church catholic maintains—with the truth that the Gospel comes to us sacramentally, rather than simply verbally, and so to demonstrate that the Sacrament is, in fact, greater than the Word alone.
Those who wish to maintain otherwise are likely worried, as I have opined above, that our declaration takes some power away from the Word, or somehow pits the Sacrament against the Word, or seeking to ensure that no superstition attaches to the Sacrament. But if this is the case, then it is in fact they who are guilty of the very things that they allege. For just as the divine nature of Christ invests his human nature with divine attributes—a doctrine our dogmaticians call the genus maiestaticum—so also, the divine Word of God invests the Sacrament with the heavenly power given to the humanity which is the Body of Christ. For he did not say, “This is my Spirit,” but “This is my Body,” and therefore this, this bread, because it is the Body of Christ, is invested with the divine honor and glory of him who sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven.
The Word indeed makes the Sacrament what it is, as Augustine put the matter: “Accedit verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum, etiam ipsum tamquam visibile verbum – the word is added to the element and makes a sacrament, that is, so-to-speak, a visible word” (Jaques Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina (1815-1875) – Vol. 35, Col. 1840: In Evangelium Joannis Tractatus CXXIV), and this quote is, as you may know, referred to with approval by Melanchthon in the Apology (Apol. 13:5). And since the Word does this, therefore, the Sacrament is what it is: a visible Word. Just as the divine nature of Christ makes his body what it is, the very flesh of the Incarnate God, so also the Word makes the Sacrament what it is: this very Body of Christ.
So if we were to say that a Divine Service without the Sacrament—whether it be a “Page 5” or one of its offspring, or a matins or vespers, or other prayer office—is just as important for us as Holy Mass with the Sacrament, then not only would we be failing to grasp the intent for which those prayer offices were historically crafted, namely to prepare for the celebration of the Mass, and not only would we be disregarding the profoundly greater attention historically to the rubrics and vestments attending the Mass, but most importantly of all, we would be saying ultimately that the incarnation of God is of little significance. The incarnation and the Sacrament are bound together, rather obviously and, in this context, ironically, by the very word the naysayers call so great, the word that declares, “This is my Body.”
So therefore, in short, it is without question that we must maintain that the Sacrament is that toward which we must always move in Christian life, for it is the Sacrament toward which the Word ultimately directs us. To this “heresy” I gladly subscribe, and I bid every Christian to do the same.