Monday, April 22, 2013

Lift High the Christ, His Flesh and Blood Proclaim

Here is Part IX of my ACELC free conference paper (16 April 2013).  It is one of the sections that I omitted in my presentation of the paper, because of time constraints.  The entire paper will be made available on the ACELC website.

[There is one] particular ceremony, or pair of ceremonies, [that] needs to be considered, because it touches upon a decisive theological point.  Here I refer to the Elevation and the Adoration of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar.  Actually, more time and attention should be given to this topic than this paper can afford, but for now, if nothing else, let us have it on the table for discussion.

The Elevation of the Sacrament occurs after each of the elements is consecrated with the Word of the Lord.  Thus, after Christ has spoken, “This Is My Body,” His Body is lifted up by the celebrant at the Altar, in and with the consecrated Bread, in order that all may see it; and all are thus invited to adore the Lord in His Body.  In the same way also, after Christ has spoken, “This Is the New Testament in My Blood,” the Chalice is lifted up for all to see, that all may adore the Lord in His Blood.

Luther dealt with questions concerning the Elevation and the Adoration of Christ in the Sacrament throughout his lifetime as a reformer.  His attitude and criteria remained consistent, but were applied somewhat differently in the advice that he gave, depending on the particulars of each situation and its immediate context.  Bear in mind that he had to confront competing challenges on either side: Roman sacrificial notions, and the adoration of the Host apart from the Holy Communion, on the one hand; and Zwinglian denials of the Sacrament altogether, on the other hand.

Because of its associations with the Roman sacrificial Mass, Luther was at first inclined to do away with the Elevation.  However, several considerations led him to preserve the practice, and to defend it against critics and detractors: First, he wanted to exercise patience and care for the piety of the people, lest they be scandalized by such a dramatic change at the highest point of the Divine Service.  Second, he recognized that the Elevation could be understood evangelically, as a commending of the Body of the Christ to the communicants.  For this very reason, Luther notably retained the Elevation in both his Latin and German Masses, describing it as a proclamation of Christ in the Sacrament, and as a gracious invitation to eat and to drink His Body and His Blood for the forgiveness of sins.

As a third and final reason for retaining the Elevation, Luther set himself in opposition to Karlstadt and others, who insisted that the practice was contrary to the Gospel and to the Holy Scriptures, and that it therefore had to be abolished.  Here, as previously mentioned, Luther insisted on its freedom.

It was not Luther, but his own pastor, Johnannes Bugenhagen, who finally did away with the Elevation in Wittenberg (in the late 1530s).  He did so while Luther was away, and there are some indications that Luther was unhappy with this change in practice, especially because there were many people who then perceived it to be a capitulation to Zwinglianism.  In any case, Luther consistently supported Pastor Bugenhagen, and he did not publicly object to the change in ceremony.  Although he mentioned on occasion the possibility of restoring the Elevation to the Liturgy in Wittenberg, that did not happen.

Toward the end of his life, Luther indicated that it would be just as well for the Elevation to be let go from the practice of the churches; not because he was opposed to it, but for the sake of unity among the Lutheran territories, since many of them had already done away with this ceremonial practice.

In considering the Elevation of the Sacrament, it has to be taken into account what a prominent and visible part of the Roman Mass this practice was, and what a volatile issue it became in the context of the Reformation.  In that light, it is actually remarkable that the Lutherans kept it at all, and for so long.  That this continuation of the practice was not solely as a consolation for the weak, nor simply a matter of polemics against the Zwinglians, is demonstrated by a similar but slightly different practice that developed in some of the Lutheran territories of the Sixteenth Century.  In those places, the Body and Blood of Christ were elevated before the people at the Pax Domini, the pastor facing the people with the Host and the Chalice in his hands.  Evidently there was also a rite that would sometimes accompany this new ceremony, drawing upon the words of Luther from one of his writings against Karlstadt: “Look, dear Christian, here are the Body and Blood of your Lord Jesus, which He gives to you for the forgiveness of sins.”  In some cases, this new ceremony was used in addition to the historic Elevation.  Both practices were understood as a strong confession of the Body and Blood of Christ.

With or without the Elevation, as far as Luther himself was concerned, and for other Lutherans after him, there still remained the Adoration of Christ in the Sacrament; although this practice became controversial among the Lutherans, mainly after Luther’s death, in connection with a receptionist trend in Melanchthon and his followers.

The “Adoration,” here, refers specifically to bending the knee (or genuflecting) at the consecration of the Sacrament.  That is to say, it is the bodily worship of Christ, the Lord our God, in His Sacrament.

“Receptionism” is the view that Christ is not present in the bread and wine, except in the actual eating and drinking of the elements.  This view developed with Melanchthon, and continued after him, on the basis of Aristotelian philosophy (or, rather, on a misunderstanding of Aristotle’s “four causes”).  Especially as Melanchthon grew closer to John Calvin, in the years after Luther had died, he and others would make disparaging remarks about “bread worshipers,” referring to those (such as Luther!) who adored the Lord Jesus Christ in His Sacrament.

Luther, in his lifetime, explicitly answered the receptionist position, along with its implications for the celebration of the Sacrament, especially in a couple of letters that he wrote to a Pastor Wolferinus.  Therein he indicated that the proper “use” of the Sacrament, in accordance with the Lord’s Institution, begins with the consecration of the elements (with the Verba Domini) and continues until everything has been consumed.  Within that breadth of “use,” as Luther describes, the bread is the Body of Christ Jesus, and the wine is the Blood of Christ Jesus, exactly as the same Lord Jesus Christ has spoken in the consecration: “This Is My Body,” and “This Is My Blood.”  Therefore, we eat and drink because the Holy Supper is the Body given and the Blood poured out for us.  Likewise, everything is consumed, in keeping with the Word of Christ: “Eat,” and “Drink.”  None of the elements that He has consecrated with His Word should be returned to common usage, nor simply “disposed of.”

The Lutherans of the Sixteenth Century (and well beyond) followed Luther’s lead in this regard, and took these matters quite seriously, as the various Lutheran Church Orders (and several controversies) make plain.  In fact, church practices emulated Luther’s “consecrationist” position, in spite of the growing entrenchment of Melanchthon’s “receptionism” in subsequent generations.  Regrettably, the Formula of Concord, in its article on the Lord’s Supper, has frequently been interpreted through the filters of those later developments, and has therefore been misunderstood in a “receptionist” manner.

As regards the Adoration, in particular, the Formula of Concord has likewise been misunderstood.  On the surface, it would seem as though the Formula rejects this ceremony, when it explicitly disavows the adoration of the bread and wine.  However, that particular “antithesis” is actually confessed in response to those (including Melanchthon) who had accused the Lutherans of “bread worship,” as mentioned earlier.  The point is made, precisely because Luther himself, and many others, did adore the Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament, while yet distinguishing His sacred flesh and blood from the creaturely elements of bread and wine, which do of course remain in the Holy Communion.

It is especially clear that the Adoration is actually defended and affirmed, when one compares the Formula of Concord on this point with the corresponding section of the Examination of the Council of Trent, by Martin Chemnitz (a primary author of the Formula).  For “no one except an Arian heretic can or will deny that Christ Himself, true God and Man, who is truly and essentially present in the Supper when it is rightly used, should be adored in Spirit and in Truth in all places but especially where His community is assembled” (FC/SD VII.126).  As Luther had also written in 1544: “In the Sacrament of the Eucharist, which is deserving of honor and adoration, the body and blood of Christ are truly and substantially present, proffered, and received both by the worthy and by the unworthy” (LW 34: 355).

17 comments:

  1. I recall Marquart explaining that the real presence is in the "totality" of the sacrament. I think that frees us from crass receptionism on one end, and adoration on the other.

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    1. Thanks for your comment, and Christ be praised for His faithful servant, Prof. Marquart. I won't presume to speak for that dear departed man, who is among my own fathers in Christ. As to Christ being present in the "totality" of the Sacrament, however, that has the ring of the later Melanchthon to it, and does not fit so well with Luther's strong confession of our Lord's "is." Not simply "the presence" of "Christ," but the Body and Blood of Christ, administered, given, and received in the Sacrament. And it is precisely because of that strong faith and confidence in our Lord's Word, and because He is rightly to be worshiped and adored wherever He manifests Himself to us, that Luther (and many other Lutherans) adored His Body and His Blood in the celebration of the Sacrament. I believe that, in our own day, such Adoration would be meet, right, and salutary, not only in reverence for our Lord, but as a confession of His Name, of His Word, and of His presence.

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  2. Fr. Stuckwisch,
    What is the reference for Luther's statements on receptionism with Wolferinus? Thank you in advance.

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    1. WABr 10:336-42, and WABr 10:347-49, as noted in the Kolb-Wengert edition of the Book of Concord, page 608, footnote #214. Translations and discussions of these letters have been made available, especially by Bjarne Teigen, in various places. In particular, cf. CTQ 43:4 (October 1979): 295-310, which is also available online here:

      http://www.ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/teigenlostlutherref.pdf

      The Edward Peters dissertation (St. Louis, 1968) is particularly helpful: The Origin and Meaning of the Axiom: “Nothing Has the Character of a Sacrament Outside of the Use,” in Sixteenth-Century and Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Theology. (Fort Wayne, Indiana: Concordia Theological Seminary Press, 1993)

      Some additional bibliography can be found here:

      http://four-and-twenty-something.blogspot.com/2011/10/consecration-and-conduct-of-holy.html

      The work of Tom Hardt, Hermann Sasse, and John Stephenson on this topic, as well as Scott Murray's Logia article from several years ago, are particularly beneficial. It is my intention to cite the sources, document the evidence, and reference other resources in a published article at some point in the near future.

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  3. A couple quotes from the Catalog of Testimonies are interesting regarding adoration of the Lord's flesh:

    "ATHANASIUS, On the Incarnation, as quotes in Cyril in his Defense of the 8th Anathema, and in his book, On the True Faith to the Queens: 'If any one says that the flesh of our Lord as that of a man is inadorable, and is not to be worshiped as the flesh of the Lord and God, him let the Holy Catholic Church anathematizes'" (Triglot 1123)

    "AUGUSTINE, Of the Words of the Lord, Discourse 58 (t. 10, p. 217): 'If Christ is not God by nature, but a creature, He is neither to be worshiped not adored as God. But to these things they will reply and say: Why, then, is it that you adore with His divinity His flesh, which you do not deny to be a creature, and are no less devoted to it than to Deity?'

    The same, on Ps. 99, 5 (t.8, p. 1103): 'Worship His footstool.' His footstool is the earth, and Christ took upon Him earth of earth, because flesh is of earth; and He received flesh of the flesh of Mary. And because He walked here in this very flesh, He also gave this very flesh to be eaten by us for salvation. But no one eats that flesh unless he has first worshiped it. Therefore the way has been found how such footstool of the Lord may be worshiped, so that we not only do not sin by worshiping, but sin by not worshiping'" (Triglot 1127).

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    1. Thank you for these references, Fr. Beane. I'll add them to my growing collection.

      I might add that Bjarne's Teigen's book on Martin Chemnitz's Theology of the Lord's Supper, includes some really significant material on this question, stemming from Chemnitz and several of his colleagues following the publication of the Formula of Concord. It becomes increasingly clear in those subsequent publications, one of them known as "The Apology of the Formula of Concord," and the other one, "A History of the Controversies on the Lord's Supper" (or some such title along those lines), that the Lutherans not only defended but practiced the Adoration of Christ in His Sacrament.

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  4. The elevation had largely disappeared in Lutheran areas of Germany by the 1660s, but it persisted long in some of them. The late Prof. Bodo Nischan told me that the last Landeskirche in Germany to retain the elevation was that of Schleswig, where it was not abolished until 1797. In Sweden it was abolished in 1593. King Christian II of Denmark mentioned that it had been abolished there in a letter of 1556, but there is no official declaration to that effect, then or later. In the revised Church Order for Norway issued in 1685, the elevation was explicitly mentioned as a mandatory ceremony. It appears effectively to have disappeared in the mid-18th Century during the Pietistic (Haugean) revival, and it was not mentionewd in the 1814 Norwegian Church Order.

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    1. Thank you for this information, William. I appreciate the data, and the leads. What you have written here fits with what I have read elsewhere, and with my general impressions of the way things developed, but you've given me some more specific details than I've known before. It seems to me that, in our own day, the Elevation and Adoration of Christ in the Sacrament is not only a free and appropriate ceremonial possibility, but has the potential to make a powerful confession of Christ and His Word, and of His Body and His Blood, vis-a-vis the pietism, rationalism, and receptionism that has established itself in our midst. I do not claim that such things are necessary, and I'm not attempting to invoke some kind of "status confessionis" argument (though such things always do bear sober reflection); but I believe that such ceremonies are worthy of serious consideration in the life and Liturgy of the Lord's Church.

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    2. The late Prof. Nischan wrote a number of articles on these matters; so, also, IIRC, did Prof. Susan Karant-Nunn. I would strongly recommend your perusing Nischan's *Prince, People and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg* (Philadelphia, 1994: University of Prnnsylvania Press) which, although dealing with Lutheran responses to the ruling Hohenzollern elector's conversion to Calvinism in 1613, contains a great deal of "background information" relevant to your paper.

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    3. Thank you kindly, William, for this recommendation. I will certainly look into it, and I am deeply grateful for the tip. The joy and peace of our Lord's Resurrection be and abide with you and yours, throughout this glorious Eastertide!

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    4. My copy of Nischan's Prince, People and Confession arrived in today's mail. I was able to locate a comparatively inexpensive copy via the Amazon marketplace, and now I hold the book in my eager hands. Glancing at the contents and the index, I can certainly see why you recommended it, William, and that I will benefit greatly from reading it. Many thanks again!

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    6. Just a few notes of information: Christian III was king of Norway as well as Denmark. And the Church Order of 1685 was the Church order for Denmark and Norway.
      It is most probable that the "holding" of respectively the paten and the chalice prescribed during (not after) the consecration in the Church Order of 1685 does not represent, properly speaking, elevation as adoration, but rather the "taking" of respectively the bread and the cup and "holding" them only slightly elevated while the words of institution are spoken over (!) them ...

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    7. Thanks for your comments and clarifications, Jais. I appreciate the info.

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    8. Finished reading Nischan's "Prince, People and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg" yesterday, and I thank you again for the recommendation. A bit tedious in some respects, as such academic treatments can be, but well worth the effort.

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  5. It might interest you, in this vein, that a century and a half earlier the Church Ordinance for Denmark and Norway of 1539 -which represents the implementation of the 1536 Reformation in these two countries, at the time united by a common monarch - specifies that the pastor may "appropriately lift up" (my translation) and let the bells ring "if the servant so deigns" ...

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    1. Yes, that is of interest, and helpful to my thinking and work. Thanks much for the information.

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