Ancient Christian Worship

Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective

McGowan, Andrew B.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441246318
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Rituels et pratiques chrétiens

An Important Study on the Worship of the Early Church This introduction to the origins of Christian worship illuminates the importance of ancient liturgical patterns for contemporary Christian practice. Andrew McGowan takes a fresh approach to understanding how Christians came to worship in the distinctive forms still familiar today. Deftly and expertly processing the bewildering complexity of the ancient sources into lucid, fluent exposition, he sets aside common misperceptions to explore the roots of Christian ritual practices--including the Eucharist, baptism, communal prayer, preaching, Scripture reading, and music--in their earliest recoverable settings. Now in paper.

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Introduction

The Origins of Christian Worship

Christian worship—the set of communal practices of prayer and ritual characteristic of the followers of Jesus—is as fundamental to the church as its doctrine. Yet worship has also been contentious just as long as it has existed. The earliest surviving discussion of a Christian assembly is not a clear description of common order but an exasperated judgment of liturgical failure: “When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat” (1 Cor. 11:20 AT).

Early Christian literature about worship tends to emulate Paul’s ambition, if not his exasperation: much of what has come down to us was written to encourage, critique, and change what Christians were doing, not to describe it. There is nothing quite like a Book of Common Prayer (BCP), Directory of Worship, or a hymnal from the ancient church. A historical picture of ancient Christian worship is thus constructed not only from records of praise, ritual, and prayer but also from witnesses to debate, development, and instruction.

This makes the tasks of the historian and reader more complex, but more interesting too. The history of early Christian worship may not be a serene tour through idealized house churches full of believers “of one heart and soul” (Acts 4:32), as even a very early account nostalgically put it, but a diverse and challenging journey through the history of Christianity itself. For what these Christians confessed and contested when they wrote about “going to church” is not just about what might now be called “worship,” but involved their deepest beliefs and aspirations, and their embodied practice as well as their inner faith. Then as now, worship practices could be problematic and divisive, as well as engaging and inspiring.

The Challenge of “Worship”

Tracing “Worship”

If worship has always been contentious, the modern reader brings a particular unwitting difficulty to ancient Christian practice. Not only is ancient worship different from our own (whichever “our” that might mean), the language we use has shifted, even in quite recent times, sometimes without a corresponding awareness of that change.

This challenge is illustrated by tracing how the English word “worship” has changed drastically in meaning. Today “worship” can often mean communal prayer and ritual, as it will be used for the most part in this book; but for some, “worship” is more like a personal belief or orientation, which is inward in essence, if necessarily expressed in outward and communal forms.1 In some parts of contemporary Christianity, however, “worship” means a particular genre of music, often used in gatherings (as in the first definition) but intended to express and affirm personal devotion (as in the second). If the last of these definitions is most strikingly specific or even idiosyncratic, all of these uses are actually quite modern; not very long ago, “worship” meant something rather different.

The form for Holy Matrimony in the first English BCP in 1549 included these words at the time of the giving of a ring by groom to bride: “With this ring I thee wed; this gold and silver I thee give; with my body I thee worship; and withal my worldly goods I thee endow.” Although these spousal duties were religiously grounded, “worship” here does not imply some overly romantic devotion, nor does it play fast and loose with what pertained properly only to God. The sixteenth-century groom was referring not to “worship” of his wife as some inward disposition that he would manifest from that point on but to what he was actually doing by giving his bride tokens of his property, including a ring. This sharing of wealth was itself “worship”—a ritual, but also a literal form of reverent service, the founding example of a set of acts and dispositions inherent in marriage rather than merely a sign pointing to them.

A little later, “worship” is deemed appropriate by the translators of the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) to render a particular set of Hebrew and Greek words about obedience, service, and bodily performances related to them; God or gods are the sole referent. The actions described as “worship” are not those noted as modern definitions (rituals, beliefs, or songs); “worship” in the KJV is not a synonym for “praise” or for “faith.” As in the BCP marriage service, it refers to a whole set of dispositions, a relationship rather than just a ritual; but it also refers to physical performances that both reflect and enact such relationships, and most often to literal practices of bowing or prostration (see the series of “worship” actions in Gen. 24; cf. Matt. 4:9; 8:2; 28:9; etc.). “Worship” includes participation in sacrificial rituals such as those of tabernacle or temple (Gen. 22:5; 1 Sam. 1:3), within a broader notion of obedience or service, but does not equate to them or derive its meaning from them.

The bodily acts at the center of “worship” in these early modern cases, primarily of prostration and gift, are not merely signs pointing to something else called “worship” but really are “worship”; they may be said to “effect what they signify,” to borrow from well-known language about sacraments. These performances thus exemplify theorist Catherine Bell’s suggestion that “the molding of the body . . . primarily acts to restructure bodies in the very doing of acts themselves. Hence, required kneeling does not merely communicate subordination to the kneeler. For all intents and purposes, kneeling produces a subordinate kneeler in and through the act itself.”2

In these cases, and also in the ancient ones underlying the KJV, “worship” refers not only to specific ritual performances but also to a wider reality they create and represent. That wider reality, or “worship,” is obedience or service, not gatherings, nor beliefs, nor song, nor ritual, except within that wider whole. Prayer and communal ritual nevertheless served, along with personal and physical acts of bodily “worship,” to create and express that obedience and service. For the ancients, therefore, such language was not specifically about liturgy any more than it was about music, and it had as much to do with what we would call politics and ethics as with what we call worship.

Although a millennium separates these two early modern texts from even the most recent ones discussed in the body of this book, their thought world seems closer to that of the ancient church (and to the usages reflected in the Bible) than to our own. Not just semantically but at a deeper conceptual level, activities for which words related to “worship” were used in the premodern world denote not a specific realm of activity like “liturgy” but the orientation of all forms of human activity, including the liturgical or ritual, toward a particular allegiance.

Modern participants and practitioners of the somewhat different actions now variously labeled “worship” could all properly insist that their activities are still, or at least should be, intimately related to such reverence and service to God. Yet there is an unmistakable difference between these various metonymies and the older senses of “worship.” The old is about embodied life and ethics, the new about inner life and aesthetics. No one in the ancient church could have asked about “styles” of worship.

“Worship” in Translation

“Worship” has nevertheless in the modern world become a distinct kind, or kinds, of practice, forms of human activity whose relationship to faith and discipleship is constructed along quite different lines from those that prevailed in ancient Israel, early modern England, or—most important for our purposes—the ancient church that appeared and grew in the Mediterranean world in the first few centuries of the common era.

Language, like ritual, exists in history and necessarily changes, and so these differences are matters for reflection rather than refusal. What can be problematic, however, is the failure to acknowledge the change, and thus (for example) to imagine that references to “worship” in ancient settings are about the same things we may call “worship” now. Such slippage is common, and indeed hard to avoid, given that the Bible itself is still usually rendered into English using the same equivalences made familiar when the KJV was translated. When patriarchs, kings, and apostles are now depicted “worshiping” God, something is arguably lost in translation.

Where modern translations attempt to depart from those early modern patterns of rendering the biblical text, however, they can confuse things further. So, for instance, a ritual prescribed in Leviticus for the grain offering (minḥah) is rendered thus in the KJV: “And when any will offer a meat offering unto the LORD, his offering shall be of fine flour; and he shall pour oil upon it, and put frankincense thereon: And he shall bring it to Aaron’s sons the priests” (Lev. 2:1–2a). The modern reader is likely to be confused by the KJV reference to “meat” in the older sense of “food,” and the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) fixes that; however, the new translation transports the ancient Israelite sacrificer to the world of twentieth-century Protestantism by gratuitously inserting its own idea of “worship”: “When anyone presents a grain offering to the LORD, the offering shall be of choice flour; the worshiper shall pour oil on it, and put frankincense on it, and bring it to Aaron’s sons the priests” (Lev. 2:1–2a, emphasis added). Leviticus, the book of the Bible most concerned with acts of communal ritual, does not actually use any word translatable as “worship” here or otherwise, with one problematic exception: in reference to making idols and prostrating or bowing to them (Lev. 26:1). The modern translators introduced this idea to gloss the type of activity they saw going on in the text.

Where ancient talk of “worship” was about the whole of service or devotion, modern “worship,” even though diverse, refers to more distinctive and discrete things. While then as now there was communal eating and drinking, music, symbol, prayer, Scripture, teaching, and those other things that now constitute “worship” as variously understood, we must admit something difficult at the outset: in the ancient world, what we now call “worship” did not quite exist.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430), whose works are a valuable source for the liturgical practice of his own North African church and others in the late fourth century, indicated that this puzzle about the language of “worship” was real in his time also, and suggested that the semantics of Latin were no more adequate to the task than we find modern English:

To make offerings and sacrifice, and to consecrate our possessions and ourselves . . . is the worship [cultus] that is due to the divinity . . . and since no Latin term sufficiently exact to express this in a single word occurs to me, I shall avail myself, where needed, of Greek. Latreia, whenever it occurs in Scripture, is rendered by the word “service” [servitus]. But that service that is due to humans, referring to which the apostle writes that servants must be subject to their own masters, tends to be referred to by another word in Greek, whereas the service that is paid to God alone by worship [cultus], is always, or almost always, called latreia in the usage of those who wrote down the divine oracles for us. So if we only used the word “worship,” it would not seem to be due exclusively to God; for we also speak of “worship” of humans, whom we celebrate with honors, whether in memory or in the present. (City of God 10.1.2)

It may by now seem faintly encouraging to find the problem of translating “worship” arising in ancient as well as in modern contexts. Augustine’s reflection suggests two things: first, that, as already seen, language itself changes and may not be completely adequate to convey the same ideas or describe the same practices across cultures or over time; and second, that there may nonetheless be a recognizable (if not readily defined) commonality of action and purpose across these same barriers, through which women and men are seeking to enact divine service.

“Worship” in the New Testament

It should not now come as a surprise that words usually translated as “worship” in English versions of the New Testament (NT) are not primarily concerned with the conduct of Christian assemblies or communal rituals. Like their equivalents in the Hebrew Bible, these terms are concerned either with reverence and obedience or with bodily performances that enacted them; of the references to “worship” in most English translations, a great many in Greek are actually related to proskynēsis, prostration. So when, for instance, the apostles are depicted “worshiping” the risen Christ, they are not singing, reciting prayer, or (only) experiencing a feeling or attitude; they are flat on their faces (Matt. 28:17). Of course this is ritual—but not ritual intended to convey something else. “Worship” is about the body and about service.

“Worship” language in the NT can also indicate dispositions of piety and reverence on the part of a person or community (Rom. 12:1). This includes specific utterances, actions, or events, including ritual (John 4:20; 12:20; Acts 8:27; 24:11), as well as acts of charity and justice (James 1:27). “Worship” in the NT texts is not, however, tied strongly or distinctively to prayer or to Christian gatherings or communal activities. Of course practices traced to the command of Jesus (1 Cor. 11:24b, 25b; Matt. 28:19) or to apostolic authority might be regarded as “worship” in the senses outlined above, as a part of obedience and service. Still, the fact that this possibility is not directly taken up in NT documents is striking. There are various reasons for this silence, including the issues already raised, and also the continued existence of other gatherings and practices (especially the rituals of the temple, initially) that were more customarily regarded as communal forms of “worship” or service to God. Whatever its basis, however, this acknowledgment takes us to something of a fork in the road.

On the one hand, there is the biblical language or concept of “worship,” which suggests the reverent orientation of the whole person and of communities toward God—and sometimes just being flat on your face to make that real. This “worship” does include both speech acts and physical performance and may take place in the domestic and personal realm, as well as in the communal and public; but communal rituals of the Christian community are not actually presented as “worship” in the NT. “Worship” language in the NT texts suggests a great deal about ethos or a Christian way of life, but relatively little about the specifics of distinctive liturgical practice or performance.

On the other hand, there is a collection of distinctive practices attested and urged in Scripture, specific actions characteristic of the Christian community, which assume and embody proper reverence and service toward God, even if not always or anywhere labeled “worship.” Christians eat (1 Cor. 10:16–17; 11:17–34; Jude 12), baptize (Acts 2:41; Rom. 6:4; 1 Cor. 1:13–17; 15:29; etc.), fast (Matt. 6:16–18; Acts 13:2–3; 14:23), pray (Acts 1:14; 6:4; 14:23; Col. 4:2), teach or proclaim (1 Cor. 12; Col. 3:16), and more; these actions all have ritual elements such as prescribed forms of words, bodily performances, and use of particular objects and substances. Their uneasy relationship with the language or concept of “worship” does not make them any less essential to the emerging Christian movement. This list could be expanded to include less clearly communal or ritual actions, such as practical acts of concern for the poor (Gal. 2:10; 1 Cor. 16:1–2; James 1:27); if for present purposes we focus on the foundations of liturgical practice, or “worship” in the narrower modern sense rather than the ancient one, this is not to say that such a limitation best expresses the understandings of the earliest Christian communities about their distinctive actions.

Baptism and Eucharist have a particular place among these practices, and their continuation by the Christians was connected with the example and teaching of Jesus directly through NT texts. Each of these has its own rationale(s)—that is, sets of meanings that flesh out the ways it is constitutive of Christian identity for individuals and communities. So, for example, Paul suggests that baptism effects the incorporation of its members into the body (1 Cor. 12:13), which is itself made by sharing in the one broken bread (1 Cor. 10:17).

Creating Worship

In this book, “worship” henceforth means these practices that constitute Christian communal and ritual life, as reflected in the NT itself and thereafter, not merely or specifically what the NT itself calls “worship.” As the story of how this sort of “worship” develops, however, we may continue to bear in mind the other sense or senses in whic...