In his book on the Nicomathean Ethics, Aristotle describes how every virtue is a midpoint between two vices. Bravery, for example, is between cowardice and rashness. However, they are often not perfectly between their respective vices, as in the case of bravery. In other words, it would be better to have a bit more bravery than a bit more cowardice. In another example, humility is between despair and pride, but it is generally better to have a little more humility than a little more pride. I bring this up because I think there is a bit of a problem in the closed communion debate where some are, in avoiding the more obvious error, falling into the less obvious.
In this case, Open Communion is the first, most obvious, and most damaging error. In doing so, a pastor shirks his duty as a "steward of the mysteries of God" (1 Cor. 4:1), because he allows those who eat and drink at the table of demons to partake in the table of the Lord, provoking the Lord to jealousy (1 Cor. 10:18-22). This practice also would lead to the spiritual damage of those communing wrongfully (1 Cor. 11:29), which is clearly wrong as a matter of Christian love for the neighbor. For more information, I have addressed this in an older post of mine in defense of the practice.
With that said, there is also a more subtle error, which is a pursuit of purity to the point of damage. To many, this may sound strange, but there is a real danger involved in the wrongful forbidding of one to the Eucharist. This is not a matter of the offense of those forbidden, as I have heard some say, but rather, it is about keeping the Lord's Word. When Christ institutes the sacrament, He says that it is "for you" (1 Cor. 11:24) and that it is to be drank by "all of you" (Matt. 26:27). In addition, He commands the continuance of such a blessed feast when He says to "do this" (1 Cor. 11:24-25), and based on the description of the practice, it seems the expectation was communion weekly (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 11:17-18,20). Just as a steward must protect that which he is stewarding, so too must he use rightfully that which is in his care. Thus, one ought to be wary of withholding the supper from one to whom Christ has said it is for. This falls into the Aristotelian paradigm above, where open communion and a too closed communion would both be errors, but it is generally a bit better to have a more closed table than an overly-open one.
A scriptural analog to this issue would be the controversy over Moses' Nubian [black African] wife in Numbers 12. Miriam and Aaron both took issue with Moses having married her, and as a punishment for speaking against the prophet, Miriam was afflicted with leprosy for a week and thus had to remain outside the camp for the same period. This is a very powerful image because Moses' wife was black but Miriam's leprous complexion was described as "like snow" (Num. 12:10). What's more, in her need to separate from the non-Israelite, she ended up being cut off from the true Israel as a punishment. This scene is typologically significant because it is the Judaizers who reject the Gentiles but are then rejected by the Church for it. It also is super significant for our day, where there are some who hate their brother for their race and are rightly excommunicated. In a spiritual sense, though, this could also be analogous to those who, in trying to separate the impure from the sacrament, end up taking the gifts from those to whom Christ gave it, shirking their duties as pastors. This is a related issue, in my view, to the Roman Catholics that withhold the cup of Christ's blood from the laity. It originally came from a fear that they would desecrate our Lord, and so they refused to give it at all.
The biggest example of a table that is too closed is the practice of only communing members of a given church. Thus, if a visitor who is in good standing at another LCMS church were on vacation or visiting family in a given area, they could nonetheless not partake at such a parish. I would say that this errant response has two possible rationales. The first and in my view easiest to refute is that the pastor is called to serve the members of his congregation only. While I understand how this arises in Waltherian ecclesiology, I find it frankly ridiculous. When one receives the divine call and enters the office of the holy ministry in their ordination, they are not called to serve a given parish but to serve the Church. Now, in our current polity, a pastor can be "called" to a given church, but his ordination does not flow from the congregation who called him but from the Holy Ghost (1 Tim. 4:13-14). This opens up a larger discussion of Walther which I'm not wanting to nor really equipped to discuss here, but suffice it to say that I find this argument is bound to a great misunderstanding of the office and its scope. The second and more reasonable rationale for only communing members of your parish is that a pastor will be held accountable for his works (Heb. 13:17) and that giving the supper to the unworthy entails being "guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord" (1 Cor. 11:27). This is a valid concern for pastors with very lax communion practices, but there are others who do examine each and every visitor verbally. To these, some will say that they are merely trusting the word of those visitors and that they may be lying, so their testimony is not good enough. In addition, others will even use the fact that people may lie to the pastors as an excuse for lax practice. If people can lie, then there's no real reason to try, since even your best effort could be for naught. These both, however, are misunderstandings of what the job of a pastor's examination is. For one thing, I would think the skepticism of a pastor against a possible communicant who claims to be an LCMS member in good standing is an 8th commandment violation under the "best construction" clause. In this overly-scrupulous practice, the pastor is functioning as if a person is guilty of lying to him about their church membership until they can prove their innocence, rather than putting the best construction on their words and presuming they really are who they claim to be. A text which, in my view, puts this forth best is the call of the watchman in Ezekiel 3:16-21,
'And at the end of seven days, the word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, in order to save his life, that wicked person shall die for his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked, and he does not turn from his wickedness, or from his wicked way, he shall die for his iniquity, but you will have delivered your soul. Again, if a righteous person turns from his righteousness and commits injustice, and I lay a stumbling block before him, he shall die. Because you have not warned him, he shall die for his sin, and his righteous deeds that he has done shall not be remembered, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the righteous person not to sin, and he does not sin, he shall surely live, because he took warning, and you will have delivered your soul.”'
This text makes an argument akin to Pascal's wager for preaching the law of God even when it offends the sinner, symbolized here:
The point that the Lord is making here is that if one were to weigh the actual options, the preaching prophet delivers his soul and either gains a brother or loses him, but in the case of the abstaining prophet, his brother loses his soul and the prophet is held responsible for this. Thus, in terms of spiritual consequences, there is really no downside to preaching the word in its fullness. This same paradigm is true for the supper as well. If a pastor, the steward of the sacrament and preacher of the Word, were to practice open communion, they would be like the prophet in the bottom right corner who refuses to preach and allows the sinner to partake unworthily, and such will be required of them. Just as in the Ezekiel text, there is no room for the pastor refusing to preach and the person repenting anyway, since such an outcome would take a working of God through another or through exceptional means, which is outside the case of this image, and relying on such a scenario would be putting the Lord to the test. In the case of the pastor who preaches the word and forbids the wicked from partaking, if the sinner repents and is once more worthy, then he is in the best case scenario, the top left corner. There is still the bottom left corner, in which the prophet preaches but it falls on deaf ears. As mentioned above, there are already other reasons why one should not accept folks to the supper without an examination, so this doesn't quite fit with open communion. Rather, this would correspond to the deceitful visitor situation above, where a pastor warns all people of the consequences and accepts members which he reasonably believes to be in good standing at an LCMS church. If one were to lie and partake deceitfully, then in such case, the pastor did his job as a watchman warning and his soul is delivered, even if the sinner forfeits his own. So in summary, a pastor can uphold closed communion through frequent examination of his parishioners and examination of every guest. He must be thorough, seeing if they are a member in good standing of an LCMS church and whether they have been properly catechized. However, he need not keep back those who seem to fit such criteria, since doing so would keep back those whom the Lord wishes to give his gifts.
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