It’s perhaps inevitable that some
of the same issues that led a number of us out of Lutheranism and into the
Church should continue to work on newer generations of Lutheran pastors and on
those who remained. By no means least of these issues is the ongoing discussion
of so-called “infant communion”—a misleading designation, since infants are not
communed in the Church because they are infants, but because they are baptized
members of the Church. As St. Paul said to the Corinthians, “For I do not want
you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all
passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the
cloud and in the sea; and all ate the
same spiritual food; and all drank
the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which
followed them; and the rock was Christ.” (1Co 10:1-4 NAU, emphasis mine.)
In the last few months, another kerfuffle
about communion of the baptized
(hereafter COTB) has arisen amongst confessional circles of the LC-MS. I
don’t take all defenses of the LC-MS status quo equally seriously. Publishing
house blogs and radio-based grilling of guests are often propaganda, not rising to the level
of needing response. But two documents are worth responding to. One is the
recent set of theses by Prof. John Pless of the Ft. Wayne seminary. The other
is a little article in Gottesdienst
by the Rev’d. Dr. Burnell Eckardt. I hope to address the Pless statement at a
later time, when I have more leisure. But I would like to make a few remarks
about Dr. Eckardt’s article.
The article in question does not
address the issue head-on, but uses it as an occasion to reflect on the status
of preaching within Lutheranism. According to Eckardt, there are two new things
about this iteration of the discussion. First, one young Lutheran pastor has,
in his words, “gone off the reservation” and begun actually practicing COTB. Second, the rise of
social media means that the discussion runs more swiftly than it has in the
past. Dr. Eckardt is correct about the
swiftness of the debate. And it will be very interesting, from the outside, to
watch what happens to the young pastor in question. If he is disciplined in
some way, it may help others to recognize that Lutheranism has no place for
their ilk. If he is not disciplined, it suggests just another fault line along
which the LC-MS may eventually split. (I mean no offense to my friends who
remain there.)
One of my Antiochian brothers and colleagues has
suggested that preaching, not the Eucharist, is the heart and soul of
Lutheranism, and that this is symptomatic of a systemic flaw, doctrinally and
liturgically. My colleague cites AC Article 24, which says, “People go to
Gottesdienst to hear the sermon.”
Fr. Eckardt claims that the citation is
taken out of context. And in a formal way, he may be correct. Let us grant that
the intention of AC 24 was not to show the sermon is central, but to set the
sermon as a key element in “the devout use of the Sacraments.”
It’s noteworthy, however, what Eckardt
himself grants. He grants that “there is a flaw in Lutheran sacramental piety,
but it is not the fault of the Lutheran Confessions” (p. 16). He continues,
“There are all too many Lutherans for whom the Sacrament is not of critical
importance for faith, and their woeful lack of piety shows this sad reality for
what it is, all too clearly” (p. 16). I don’t intend to criticize Lutherans for
their sacramental piety or lack thereof; I merely cite the words of Dr. Eckardt
here.
But I do want to make a couple of
points about his article. First, no
Orthodox priest or bishop could or would quarrel about the use and value of the
homily in the context of the divine liturgy. We are, after all, the church of
St. John the Golden-mouthed, and even on occasions when the priest presiding
might not preach, the Vespers, Matins and Liturgy are full of distilled
homilies called “kontakia,” and other theologically rich verses. Each Sunday
morning, for example, we sing the words of Emperor Justinian: “Only
begotten Son and immortal Word of God, who for our salvation didst will to be
incarnate of the holy Theotokos and ever-virgin Mary, who without change didst
become man and was crucified, who are One of the Holy Trinity, glorified with
the Father and the Holy Spirit, O Christ our God, trampling down death by
death, save us.”
Second, what my
Antiochian brother is focusing on is not the statements Lutheran documents make about the centrality of the
Eucharist, but rather their actual
practice. Orthodox people and theologians have a delightful empirical bent,
which was reflected at one time in the Lutheran confessional documents
themselves.
I recall
now-Metropolitan Elpidophoros speaking to a group of us about his work in
Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue. When he wanted to know what Lutherans believe about
the real presence of Christ, he didn’t get into deep discussion about
confessional statements. He watched what was done with the reliquae.
One need only try a couple
of thought-experiments to see whether, in
fact, the Eucharist is the heart and soul of Lutheranism. Imagine a regular
Sunday morning across the entire range of those who call themselves Lutheran.
Let us narrow the universe of this discussion to that range of Lutherans who
call themselves “confessional”—i.e. those who take a quia subscription to the Confessions seriously. Does that group of
Lutherans, in fact and not in theory
alone, mark the Eucharist on that given Sunday? A “heart” that does not, in
fact, beat is not a heart in any meaningful sense.
Again, if on a given
Sunday a parish did not mark the Eucharist in a Lutheran context, would the
people who attended still claim that they had been to church? What if the
sermon were omitted? It seems to me beyond dispute that of the two elements,
sermon and Eucharist, sermon clearly predominates. It is, in any meaningful sense, the heart of
Lutheranism.
I recall a discussion
a colleague of mine and I had with a visiting German Lutheran professor back in
the days when I taught at a Lutheran seminary. The visiting scholar claimed
that no one could properly distinguish Law and Gospel in less than 30 or 40
minutes of preaching. I replied that if I had thought through what needed
saying, I could preach a decent Law/Gospel homily in under 10 minutes. As the
visitor’s face began to redden, my friend said “I think the homily is so special
we should only have one four times a year.” We had to work hard to calm the
visiting German down and explain we were--mostly--joking.
The problem for many
who remain in Lutheranism is that the confessional documents are no longer what
they started out to be: a description
of what actually takes place “on any given Sunday.” Note the claims of
Augustana 24. They are not “we’d like to” or “we used to,” but “we do” and “we
practice.” When Dr. Eckardt cites AC 24’s saying that “none are admitted except
they be first examined,” does he forget that the examination in question was individual and private confession? It is
ironic that for Lutherans, who pride themselves on the centrality of the
Gospel, their confessions have changed from a description of evangelical
practice to a Decalogue of distant memories.
Fr. Eckardt also
addresses the question of whether the problems diagnosed are “systemic.” His
claim is that “the best of Lutheran sacramental catechesis and piety
demonstrates that they are not.” He cites AC 24 to support his case. Lutherans
refuse to commune baptized infants because, he says, it is “…an integral part
of what constitutes the dignity and use of the Sacrament, namely, instruction
and examination.” If he worries that defenders of COTB are “charging the entire
Western Church, including all of Lutheran history, with the same ‘sin’,” may it
not be countered that he himself charges the Eastern Church and the pre-Fourth
Lateran Council Western church with the opposite sin? Robert Taft, an eminent
Roman scholar who has no axe to grind in this discussion, says “…the plain
facts of history show that for 1200 years the universal practice of the entire
Church of East and West was to communicate infants” (Liturgy in the Life of the Church).
Eckardt cites the
plague of pietism as the cause for present Lutheran distress. Pietist movements
did not simply affect Lutheranism; they also had an impact on Orthodox
practice. But it is noteworthy how that impact differed. In Lutheranism,
pietism led to an abandonment of the weekly Eucharist—making it so rare that,
in the end, Luther’s statement of the importance of communing minimally four times a year was taken as
a de facto maximum practice for many
years. The Eucharist itself was offered only four times a year. In Orthodoxy,
pietist strains led to less frequent communing on the part of the laity—but
never to the abandonment of the Liturgy itself.
I leave it to the reader to judge which was a relatively minor and
accidental impact, and which a major and substantial one.
It has now been a
little over a decade when, after the Synodical Convention of 2001, I phoned a
number of Lutheran pastors whose Internet posts suggested we were on the same
wavelength. I asked them two questions: first, do you agree that the LC-MS has
significant problems? All of them answered “Yes.” The second question was, “Do
you believe these problems are accidental or genetic?” Nearly all of them said
“genetic.” And nearly all of those men are now Orthodox.
Two men, an optimist
and a pessimist, were sitting on a park bench. The optimist said, “It doesn’t
get any better than this.” The pessimist sighed and answered, “I’m afraid
you’re right.” The election of Matthew Harrison as president of the LC-MS
instituted halcyon days for those who call themselves confessional Lutherans,
like Dr. Eckardt. It doesn’t get any better than this. Whether in the end the
optimist’s perspective or the pessimist’s perspective is correct, remains to be
seen.
