Sacraments as Eschatological Gift and Promise

A paper for the ALC/LCA Communion Practices Committee [Apparently February 4, 1975]

[When I became the pastor of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Edison, New Jersey, I discovered a file drawer full of documents left by my predecessor Peter Wuebbens from his service on the “Communion Practices Committee” of the American Lutheran Church (ALC) and the Lutheran Church in America (LCA). The 1970s were a contentious decade regarding Lutheran liturgical revisions, as documented in studies of the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship. Among the papers was this essay by Gerhard O. Forde, probably from February 4,1975, according to the Committee’s minutes. To my knowledge, it has never been published before. Paul Rorem, Editor]

I have been asked to speak to you, as I understand it, in the capacity of one who teaches a course in the sacraments at a Lutheran Theological Seminary to give you something of the manner in which I go about the matter. I must apologize first of all, for the fact that I was not able to complete this paper in time for you to have it in your hands so that you could study it and respond to it. The press of other duties made it impossible for me to do so. Secondly, I must admit that I have not been able as yet to make my way through the mass of material dealing with the more liturgical side of the matter. I find it difficult enough, I guess you might say, getting something of a grasp on the historical and systematic materials! So at the present my sorties into the confusing liturgical debates have been at best, occasional, and by no means comprehensive. I must say, however, that these sorties have been enough, together with actual experiences of the new experimental liturgies, to provoke considerable dismay when measured against what seems to me to be the Lutheran theological and liturgical tradition on these matters, although I do resonate favorably, I think, to genuinely responsible attempts to express that tradition in new ways. That is to say that I do not want what I am about to say to be taken as being against liturgical renewal or reform; we can always stand some of that and no doubt need it. But I am concerned that such reform be a genuine advance which seeks to further the genius of the tradition rather than a retrograde reaction which simply betrays or denies it.

With that short preamble, let me turn to the manner in which I attempt to teach the sacraments. Basically the way in which I approach the sacraments is to say that they must be understood and used in terms of the conceptuality within which they stand in scriptures. That conceptuality is eschatological. With most Lutherans I would insist that one cannot begin with a prior understanding or definition of what sacraments are “in general” in terms of an already given conceptuality be that mythological, ontological, or whatever, but that one must begin with the acts themselves, in particular, as they stand within their own conceptual framework, and only then deduce from them what “sacraments” in the Christian sense are. When this is done it seems to me obvious and unavoidable to say that what we have to do with, in what we have come to call sacraments, is eschatology. This is true, certainly, of both baptism and the Lord’s Supper. When I attempt to define sacraments, I try to define them as eschatological gifts and promises. Sacraments are, I would say, occurrences of the end and new beginning in the midst of our time. As such, they are applications of the once-for-all breaking into our time, our lives, of the Christ-event, the crucified, risen Christ, the Christ who is our future and who draws us into his future and life. The conceptuality, it seems to me, is eschatological and what we have to work out is a hermeneutic of word and sacrament and a liturgy adequate to the conceptuality.

It seems to me that one can interpret the development of the dogma of the...