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. 2, Trinity 2012

Ed: The approaching Feast of All Saints, the final Sundays in Trinitytide with their eschatological emphasis, and the subsequent season of Advent all 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 I)

Rev. Charles L. McClean

As I prepared these past weeks for this talk there repeatedly came to mind some words of T. S. Eliot in his poem, “Little Gidding,” words which have become very important to me as one who has returned to the church of his Baptism after far too long a sojourn in another part of Christendom:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Now people of a certain age are much given to nostalgia. Being of a certain age I begin these reflections with the memory of the celebration of the Sacrament of the Altar as I experienced it from childhood at the church in which I was baptized, confirmed, and ordained—old Martini Church in Baltimore. Martini was formed when the mother parish of the Missouri Synod in Baltimore, “old” Saint Paul’s, which had been founded in 1839, divided into three separate congregations. Friedrich Wyneken and then Ernst Gerhard Wilhelm Keyl, Dr. Walther’s brother-in-law, had been the pastors of the mother parish. Dedicated in May 1868, Martini Church had only three pastors in the first eighty-nine years of its life, and this made for a great deal of continuity. And so the custom of the so-called Altargesang— the pastor’s chanting of the liturgy—continued without interruption through the spring of 1957 when Pastor Engelbert, who had served the congregation since 1918, retired. One of my earliest memories of Good Friday is of the pastor and congregation chanting the Litany on bended knee. The Sacrament of the Altar was not as frequently celebrated as it is nowadays, but when it was celebrated there was an unmistakable atmosphere of the deepest reverence. I remember how as a child I was deeply moved by the familiar chant of the Preface, the Lord’s Prayer, and of the Consecration, which was sung to the once very familiar Bugenhagen melody that was in our synod’s German Agenda and in our English liturgy through the publication in 1944 of The Music for the Liturgy, but which now seems to have disappeared from our service books for no apparent reason. At the Communion the communicants knelt at the altar rail to receive the Lord’s body in their mouths and Christ’s blood from the chalice, which no communicant ever thought of touching. No layman ever assisted in the distribution of the Sacrament. If no assisting pastor was available, even on Easter Day the pastor himself administered both the body and blood of the Lord. Upon returning to his pew after receiving the Sacrament, each communicant knelt for silent prayer. Stanzas of a Communion hymn, with a quiet organ interlude between each stanza, occupied the time of Communion. The “ushers” at every Communion were two very longtime members of the Church Council who would quietly ask any stranger, “Have you announced for Communion?” And if they had not, they would be told that they must not approach the altar. The pastor wore a black gown with a rather ornate silver pectoral cross.

The church itself was very beautiful due to a renovation carried out in 1905 under the aegis of the then pastor Dietrich Henry Steffens, a pastor from our synod’s past who needs to be better known. He was the author of the biography Doctor Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther, published by the Lutheran Publishing Society of Philadelphia in 1917, and was an authority on church architecture and liturgies. His splendid essay for the 1925 Eastern District Convention, “Safeguarding the Lord’s Table,” displays his considerable erudition and unshakeable confessional faithfulness (Steffens, in Synodal Bericht, the report of the Proceedings of the Fifty-second Convention of the Eastern District of the LCMS, 37–61). He also played a leading role in preparing the first musical setting for the English Liturgy of our synod, the largely forgotten Common Service with Music, published in Pittsburgh in 1906. The old Martini Church, until it fell victim to an expressway in 1977, was a living expression of Pastor Steffens’ faith and learning. He saw to it that the altar triptych was filled with a copy of Raphael’s wonderful painting of the Transfiguration. In the ceiling of the chancel were paintings of the four Evangelists, each with his symbol. The tall windows in the nave were filled with stained glass portraying the life of our Lord, and in the spandrels at the top of each column in the nave were copies of the coats-of-arms of the princes and cities which presented the Augsburg Confession. Pastor Steffens obtained the plates for these coats-of-arms from the Ecclesiastical Arts Society in Berlin; they were approved by the Imperial College of Heralds of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

But why recount this memory of the Sacrament as celebrated in just one parish church so many years ago?

I mention all this because it presents such a contrast with present-day conditions in so many places. It is truly cause for melancholy reflection that, although the frequency of the celebration of the Sacrament has increased remarkably in the past forty or so years, abuses in connection with the celebration have also increased. It would of course be absurd to claim that the celebration of the Sacrament was everywhere marked with great reverence fifty or so years ago, but the abuses which now have become so distressingly common were then simply unthinkable: more or less open Communion, the failure to use only the dominically mandated elements of the Sacrament, together with casualness and irreverence in the administration of the Sacrament. All of this displays a distressing decline in that sense of mystery and awe which should certainly accompany the celebration of the Holy Mysteries of the Lord’s Body and Blood. It is cold comfort to reflect that much the same could be said of the sacramental practice in Roman Catholicism in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, a deplorable state of affairs now recognized as such and being addressed under the leadership of the present Bishop of Rome.

The announced theme of this conference is “The Conduct of the Service: Revisited.” My own work in that manual begins with the words: “Readers familiar with The Conduct of the Service by the Rev. Arthur Carl Piepkorn will immediately recognize how largely indebted this manual is to that work.” Although Dr. Piepkorn was not a member of the committee involved in the production of this manual, he did in fact read the entire manuscript and suggested improvements. Needless to say he is in no way responsible for the inadequacies of my own work.

In his exposition of the Fourth Commandment in the Large Catechism, Dr. Luther says that “God, parents, and teachers can never be sufficiently thanked and repaid” (LC IV, 130, Tappert, 383). And so here I must express an immense debt of gratitude to Father Piepkorn, an especially dear and wonderful person, who taught not only by what he said but perhaps even more by what he was: a cheerful and unfailingly charitable child of God. When he stood at the altar you sensed that here was a man who knew that he was standing in the presence of his Maker and Redeemer. He would be among the last to claim infallibility for himself! Typical of his modesty are the comments he made in introducing a series of articles on the ecclesiastical arts in the old American Lutheran magazine—the predecessor of Lutheran Forum—way back in 1947, where he says that he regards his role in presenting these articles “as being editorial and not oracular,” and says that since “the Sacred Scriptures hand down few binding declarations relating to the ecclesiastical arts there is accordingly ample room for honest difference of opinion, for cheerful disagreement, for constructive dissent” (“The Ecclesiastical Arts,” in Christian Worship [New York: American Lutheran Publicity Bureau, n.d.], 11). It goes without saying that I hope my own remarks will be seen in the same way.

So revisiting The Conduct of the Service involves reflection on the work of Dr. Piepkorn. It also necessarily involves revisiting the question of the celebration of the Sacrament facing the people. And here a bit of history: although the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council, which closed in December 1965, said absolutely nothing about the versus populum celebration, that innovation was swiftly adopted throughout the Roman Church, and many Lutherans and Anglicans quickly followed suit. And so early in 1969 the members of the Saint Louis seminary faculty who had responsibility for teaching liturgies—Robert Bergt, George Hoyer, John Damm, and Mark Bangert— concluded that there should be some kind of guide for pastors of our synod who wished to introduce this practice. And so I was asked to return to Saint Louis from my Long Island congregation to work on this project with them. The way it worked was that I would prepare some material and then about once a month we would all gather to review my work. I was not then nor am I persuaded now of the desirability, let alone the necessity, of the celebration facing the people. I remember with pleasure how at one of the meetings of the committee Professor Hoyer said, “You know, Charles keeps his distance from all this!” Some evidence for that can still be found in the first paragraph of chapter six of the manual.

The year 1969 saw not only the appearance of the Missal of Paul VI, which came into use on Advent Sunday of that year, but also the appearance of the Worship Supplement in the Missouri Synod, consisting of materials which had been gathered together for a projected revision of Synod’s liturgy and hymnal, a project abandoned with considerable misgivings in the interest of taking part in the preparation of a common liturgy and hymnal for Lutherans in North America, a project which resulted in the appearance in 1978 of the regrettable Lutheran Book of Worship. I say regrettable because the Lutheran Book of Worship represented a decisive break with the Common Service tradition and was clearly influenced by some of the more dubious theories, then accepted as indisputable facts, of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Liturgical Movement, notably the “four-fold action” shape of the Liturgy: offertory, thanksgiving, breaking of the bread, communion—a theory proposed by the learned Anglican Benedictine monk Dom Gregory Dix in his great work, The Shape of the Liturgy. It is interesting to note that Dr. Piepkorn was never impressed with Dom Gregory’s thesis and, while admiring Dom Gregory’s historical erudition, would refer to his book as “that tract”! Although Dom Gregory’s theory has now been largely discredited, his theory still influences the rites of Western Christendom. But it is now widely agreed throughout Christendom that the essential parts of the Holy Eucharist are the consecration and the reception of Holy Communion. The placing of the gifts of bread and wine on the altar and the breaking of the bread are simply practical measures, although they have of course over the centuries acquired varied symbolic meanings.

If you ask how it was that Lutherans could so easily succumb to prevalent opinion, it has to be remembered that the late sixties were a heady time, not least because in the years of and following the Second Vatican Council it actually looked for a while as if the reunion of divided Christendom was a real possibility. And in that atmosphere there was an understandable desire to conform our own liturgical practice to what was perceived to be an emerging ecumenical consensus. And part of that consensus at least in the Western Church was the acceptance of the celebration versus populum. I say Western Church because the Eastern Orthodox have universally continued to celebrate the Sacrament in the eastward position, ad orientem, toward the east, toward the rising sun, symbol of the risen Son who will on the Last Day appear in glory and welcome His Church to the marriage supper of the Lamb in His kingdom. It has always seemed to me that this consistent practice of the Eastern Orthodox Church should have been sufficient evidence against the notion that the versus populum celebration was common in Christian antiquity. For surely no part of Christendom has been as resistant to innovation as the Orthodox! To be sure, every Orthodox altar is freestanding, but the priest always faces the east as he celebrates the Sacrament—not “turning his back” on the people, but facing in the same direction as the people—to the east, ad orientem.

Now let me say before I go on with these remarks that I would not wish to be understood as condemning the versus populum celebration or as failing to realize that the Sacrament has been and continues to be celebrated with great reverence, beauty, and devotion in that way. But I do remain persuaded that it has been a mistake.

In a letter to Dr. Peter Brunner dated December 4, 1974, Dr. Hermann Sasse addresses Dr. Brunner’s advocacy of the versus populum celebration. Sasse admits that Dr. Luther had indeed contemplated the possibility of the versus populum celebration in his Deutsche Messe of 1526 in the familiar words: “In the true mass, however, of real Christians, the altar should not remain where it is, and the priest should always face the people as Christ doubtlessly did in the Last Supper” (AE 53:69). But in saying that, Dr. Luther was—as it turns out, understandably—mistaken. Dr. Uwe Michael Lang in his excellent study of orientation in liturgical prayer, Turning Towards the Lord, tells us why Dr. Luther was mistaken. He writes:

From about the thirteenth century, depictions of the Last Supper adopted the contemporary seating arrangement, with Jesus occupying the place of honor in the middle of a large table and the apostles to his right and left, as, for example, in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous fresco in Milan. An image of this type may have been in the mind of Martin Luther when, in 1526, he suggested that the altar should not remain in its old position and that the priest should always face the people, as no doubt Christ did at the Last Supper. (Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000], 78)

Father Lang notes in passing that Luther’s proposal was never implemented in Wittenberg, nor, we might add, has it been in the churches of the Augsburg Confession until relatively recent years.

Consider what . . . Louis Bouyer has to say on the subject: “The idea that a celebration facing the people must have been the primitive one, and that especially of the last supper, has no other foundation than a mistaken view of what a meal could be in antiquity, Christian or not. In no meal of the early Christian era, did the president of the banqueting assembly ever face the other participants. They were all sitting, or reclining, on the convex side of a C-shaped table, or of a table approximately the shape of a horse shoe. The other side was always left empty for the service. Nowhere in Christian antiquity, could have arisen the idea of having to ‘face the people’ to preside at a meal. The communal character of a meal was emphasized just by the opposite disposition: the fact that all the participants were on the same side of the table.” (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, transl., John Saward [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000], 78).

There are in fact examples of Christian art prior to the thirteenth century (for example, a mosaic in S. Appollinare Nuovo in Ravenna of about the year 520) that reflect this type of arrangement (Lang, 62).

It seems that the idea of the universality of the versus populum celebration in the ancient church rests on the evidence of basilicas such as Saint Peter’s in Rome, where the apse was in the west rather than the east end of the church. In order that the celebrant might face east, the celebrant did stand behind the altar. But the point was not “facing the people.” Bouyer quotes Professor Cyrille Vogel as saying that “even when the orientation of the church enabled the celebrant to pray turned toward the people, when at the altar, we must not forget that it was not the priest alone who, then, turned East; it was the whole congregation, together with him” (Ratzinger, 79). So important was prayer ad orientem in Christian antiquity. I remember the late Dr. Thomas Talley, a distinguished liturgical scholar and also a warm and very funny Texan, saying to his class in liturgies at the General Theological Seminary in New York City that, although he himself favored the versus populum celebration, the idea that that form of celebration is somehow primitive is a myth.

But I digress. In his letter to Peter Brunner, Dr. Sasse had this to say—and Dr. Sasse was that perhaps unusual phenomenon, a German theologian with a sense of humor! Do catch the irony and humor in his comments! He writes to Brunner:

What concerns me and to speak frankly has saddened me is your proposal for a new form of the altar and a way of celebrating the Sacrament which would conform to this proposal. What has earlier been proposed in this connection I have taken with as little seriousness as the comical ideas and proposals which were made forty years ago in the Liturgical Movement, when the Benedictines demanded the restoration of the ancient Christian mensa while at the same time the “Scoto-Catholics” of the land of John Knox fashioned their communion table into a kind of high altar. In both instances the praying clergyman was turned around 180 degrees! (Corpus Christi: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Abendmahlskonkorie [trans. C. McClean] Lutherische Blaetter, 31. Jahrgan, Nr. 117/118, hrsg. von Friedrich Wilhelm Hopf [Erlangen: verlag der Ev.-Luth. Mission, 1979], 105f.)

Sasse then goes on to say:

The significance of prayer to the east—the altar always stands liturgically in the east—is that the pastor and people pray to the Lord who will come again, who as the Sun of Righteousness will appear in the east where Paradise lay. The Jews pray toward Jerusalem, the Mohammedans toward Mecca. We have our “kiblah” [the Kaaba at Mecca]; why should we give it up? The anticipated Parousia already takes place so to speak on the altar. (ibid.)

Here I must mention in passing that many years ago, when a friend of mine discussed the versus populum celebration with Dr. Martin Franzmann, Dr. Franzmann admitted that in the versus populum celebration something of the eschatological reality of the Sacrament is somehow obscured. 

To be continued.