From the Archives: Ad Orientem: Why the Celebrant Should Face East (Part II)

Fresco in Keldby Church, Møns, Denmark. Allie_Caulfield from Germany, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, 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. 3, Michaelmas 2012, and the first part can be found here.

Ed: The 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 II)

Rev. Charles L. McClean

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. Well, here is a point on which both Hermann Sasse and the present Bishop of Rome are in agreement! For many years Cardinal Ratzinger had registered his deep misgivings about the versus populum celebration and, not least through his motu proprio making possible the celebration of the old pre-Vatican II Mass, has encouraged the restoration of the eastward position in the church, also setting an example by celebrating ad orientem when he celebrates the Novus Ordo Mass in the Sistine Chapel. But he has also said that it would be a mistake to demand that all the altars must now immediately be turned around again! Here we see the wisdom of thinking in terms of generations, a virtue of the Roman Church which Dr. Sasse often pointed out. So for now Pope Benedict has suggested as a possible solution that a crucifix be placed on the altar facing the celebrant so that when Mass is celebrated versus populum, both the celebrant and the people can face the Lord together instead of gazing at one another! 

With reference to the versus populum celebration he has this to say:

Now the priest—the “presider” as they now prefer to call him—becomes the point of reference for the whole liturgy. Everything depends on him. We have to see him, to respond to him, to be involved in what he is doing. His creativity sustains the whole thing. Not surprisingly, people try to reduce this newly created role by assigning all kinds of liturgical functions to different individuals and entrusting the “creative” planning of the liturgy to groups of people who like to, and are supposed to, “make their own contribution.” Less and less is God in the picture. More and more important is what is done by human beings who meet here and do not like to subject themselves to a “pre-determined pattern.” The turning of the priest toward the people has turned the community into a self-enclosed circle. In its outward form it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and above but is closed in on itself. The common turning toward the east was not a “celebration toward the wall”; it did not mean that the priest “had his back to the people”; the priest himself was not so important. For just as the congregation in the synagogue looked toward Jerusalem, so in the Christian liturgy the congregation looked together “toward the Lord.” As one of the fathers of Vatican IPs Constitution on the Liturgy, J[osef] Jungmann put it, it was much more a question of priest and people facing in the same direction, knowing that together they were in a procession toward the Lord. They did not close themselves into a circle; they did not gaze at one another; but as the pilgrim People of God they set off for the Oriens, for the Christ who comes to meet us. [emphasis added] (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, transl., John Saward [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000], 80.)

I think the Bishop of Rome is right when he says that the versus populum celebration tends to make the celebrant a focus of attention in a way he never was in the ad orientem celebration, and that with that overexposure of the celebrant has also come the “assigning all kinds of liturgical functions to different individuals. . . More and more important is what is done by human beings.” Now this is not to say that in an ideal celebration of the Sacrament the celebrant alone must have a role, but I believe that it is a caution worth hearing. One of the limitations of chapter six in The Conduct of the Services are these words which describe the eucharist as “an action. . . . For this reason these ceremonial directions encourage the participation of as many people as possible: reading the lessons, bringing the gifts of bread and wine to the altar, and so on” (Arthur Carl Piepkorn, the Conduct of the Service [Fort Wayne: Redeemer Press, 2006], 58). Now, while there is nothing intrinsically wrong with laymen reading the lessons—although there is something terribly wrong about poorly read and therefore scarcely intelligible lessons!—and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the so-called offertory procession of the bread and wine to be consecrated, we still need to think very carefully about anything that suggests that the Holy Eucharist is primarily an action on the part of human beings, when it is in fact a great and wondrous Sacrament in which God Himself acts. Now, in fairness to our Roman Catholic brethren, I think we have to admit that the emphasis on the people’s active participation in the Mass was a completely understandable reaction to the pre-Vatican II arrangements in which the people tended to be nothing more than silent spectators except in those very few parishes such as Holy Cross Church in Saint Louis, where Monsignor Martin B. Hellriegel was pastor, where the ideals of the old pre-Vatican II liturgical movement had been beautifully implemented. But failure to participate in the liturgy has certainly not been a problem in our churches, since our people have more or less always participated in the liturgy and hymns.

To return to Pope Benedict’s remarks: I believe that they address not only the problems of post-Vatican II liturgy in the Roman Church but also the disintegration of worship in so many churches of our synod. In the worst cases even the altar has been removed or is removable, and in not a few cases the constant center of attention is an often jeans-clad clergyman holding a microphone in his hands like some kind of entertainer or rock star, assisted by similarly clad “musicians” forming what is called a “praise band.” I submit that Pope Benedict’s words speak to that pitiful state of affairs and also to all the misguided and unfortunate attempts at what is called “creative worship.” But the liturgy of the Church is an organic product of the ages, and what an irony it is that the people involved in these activities seemingly have no idea that their “worship” has become no less man-centered than the worst medieval misunderstandings of the Mass. And here I cannot resist saying how very telling and how very sad is the frequently heard claim in these same circles that “we worshiped five hundred people last weekend.” “We worshiped five hundred––people”? But I had always assumed that we as Christians worship––the Holy Trinity. “We worshiped five hundredpeople last weekend.” One can only say with sadness,“Your speech betrays you!”

And now let us leave behind the question of the versus populum celebration together with the effects of the Roman and Anglican liturgical movements, and think about what it is that we were attempting to achieve some forty years ago. As I thought these past weeks about both Father Piepkorn’s work and my own, it became very clear to me that we were primarily concerned about continuity and reverence.

First let me say something about continuity.

Now much has been made of the differences between Dr. Arthur Carl Piepkorn and Dr. Hermann Sasse, and Dr. Sasse’s misgivings concerning Dr. Piepkorn are documented in Dr. Feuerhahn’s essay, Hermann Sasse’s Critique of Arthur Carl Piepkorn in the Festschrift for Bishop Roger Pittelko’s seventieth birthday. Among other things Dr. Feuerhahn says that Dr. Piepkorn “intimated a greater demand for liturgical correctness than for a sense of the liturgy as a handmaiden for the means of grace and a guide for the pastor.” (Ronald R. Feuerhahn, “Hermann Sasse’s Critique of Arthur Carl Piepkorn,” in Shepherd the Church: Essays in Honor of the rev. Dr. roger D. Pittelko [Fort Wayne: Concordia Theological Seminary Press, 2002], 97). I can only say that this is not Dr. Piepkorn as I knew him: for example, as he taught his splendid course “The Theology of the Lutheran Rite” and as he advised soon-to-be-ordained seminarians not to make any changes in the liturgy for at least a year after you arrive in a parish so that your people may first learn to know that you truly love them.

But whatever their differences were—and they were real differences—both of them were deeply convinced of the continuity of the Church of the Augsburg Confession with the Church which has been in the world since the first Pentecost. They were also both deeply convinced that this continuity should characterize and in fact has characterized the worship of the Church of the Augsburg Confession. In his splendid study, What the Symbolical Books of the Lutheran Church Have to Say about Worship and the Sacraments Dr. Piepkorn writes: “In its concrete form the Lutheran rites of the Reformation century—like the Lutheran doctrinal formulations of the Reformation century—reflect the fact that the Church of the Augsburg Confession is consciously and determinedly a part of the Catholic Church of the West” (Arthur Carl  Piepkorn, What the Symbolical books of the Lutheran Church Have to Say about Worship and the Sacraments [St. Louis: Concordia, 1952], 10). And Dr. Sasse writes:

Lutheran theology differs from Reformed theology in that it lays great emphasis on the fact that the evangelical church is none other than the medieval Catholic Church purged of certain heresies and abuses. The Lutheran theologian acknowledges that he belongs to the same visible church to which Thomas Aquinas and Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustine and Tertullian, Athanasius and Irenaeus once belonged. The orthodox evangelical church is the legitimate continuation of the medieval Catholic Church, not the Church of Trent and the Vatican Council which renounced evangelical truth when it renounced the Reformation. For the orthodox evangelical Church is really identical with the orthodox Catholic Church of all times. And just as the very nature of the Reformed Church emphasizes its strong opposition to the medieval church, so the the very nature of the Lutheran Church requires it to go to the farthest possible limit in its insistence on its identity with the Catholic Church. (Hermann Sasse, Here We Stand: Nature and Character of the Lutheran Faith, transl., Theodore Tappert [Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1946], 102)

Sasse then goes on to say:

It was no mere ecclesiastico-political diplomacy which dictated the emphatic assertion in the Augsburg Confession that the teachings of the Evangelicals were identical with those of the orthodox Catholic Church of all ages, and no more was it romanticism or false conservatism which made our church...cling tenaciously to the old forms of worship. (Ibid.)

Both The Conduct of the Service and The Conduct of the Services seek continuity and reverence. Both works begin with the claim that “there is really only one basic rule for those who lead the church in worship: ‘Be reverent!’ Every other rule is simply a practical application of that basic charge.”

I love the words of Dr. John Stephenson in his splendid study of the Lord’s Supper where he says:

Lutheranism’s inexorable accommodation to the Puritan-Arminian milieu of North American Christianity is much exacerbated by the current catastrophic collapse of our public culture. The melding of these two factors underscores the imperative quality of an aspect of Eucharistic celebration which the confessors of 1577 took from granted. Solid Declaration VII.44 notes that “this most holy sacrament...is to be used until the end of the world with great reverence (mit grosser Reverenz/magna cum reverentia) and in all obedience.” Since separation from the common and consecration to God pertains to the biblical reality of holiness, the behavior of celebrant and communicants at the Holy Supper should reflect their gracious admission to the realm depicted in Revelation 4 and 5. Recovery of this core awareness is far more important than such secondary matters as the reintroduction of such ceremonial details as full Eucharistic vestments. For colorful paraphernalia can coexist with a lackadaisical carnival atmosphere which never quits the confines of this world. [emphasis added]”(John R. Stephenson, “The Lord’s Supper,” Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics XII [ St. Louis: Luther Academy, 2003], 209)

Along with Dr. Piepkorn’s insistence that “There is really only one basic rule of altar decorum: ‘Be reverent!’” there is also his insistence that “spiritual preparation is more essential to reverence than the proper ordering of the physical adjuncts. A meditation, brief if need be, but as long as time permits, ought never to be overlooked” (Piepkorn, Conduct, iii).

I believe that Dr. Piepkorn’s insistence on spiritual preparation is even more necessary today than it was some forty years ago. It is of course a truism to say that we live in a world which perhaps more than ever before is indescribably noisy, a world where the silence necessary to spiritual preparation is harder than ever to come by. All the marvelous inventions of the modern world—radio, television, computers, cell-phones, and who knows what else—conspire to rob us of silence. But isn’t it true that without silence we can hear neither ourselves nor God nor other people, for that matter? And here we are not thinking of the delusion of those who, as the Apology of the Augsburg Confession says, “sit in a dark corner doing and saying nothing, but only waiting for illumination” (Ap XIII, 13, Tappert, 213), but of the obvious truth that we cannot hear another if we ourselves are not sufficiently quiet––not only externally but inwardly quiet—so as to give attention to what another says. It is surely delusional to imagine that we can suddenly enter that heavenly “realm depicted in Revelation 4 and 5” (Stephenson, 209) without the slightest preparation. And that surely applies both to the clergy and to the worshiping congregation.

And here we must note the widespread collapse of the fine custom of keeping silence in church before the Divine Service and the other services of the church. What do we have instead? In not a few places we have incessant chatter, a cacophony of voices even during the organ prelude. Until relatively recent times people instinctively knew that there was need for quiet reflection if one is to be ready to hear the Word of the Lord. And if the worshipers need a time of quiet to prepare for their participation in worship, how much more do the officiating clergy! I am convinced that so much of the difficulty and weariness with the Church’s customary worship, the incessant clamor for endless “variety,” grows out of a failure to understand that the entire liturgy must not simply be read but prayed, and prayer involves deliberate departure from the world of noise and distraction, also inward noise and distraction.

To be continued.