Worshiping with the Church Fathers

Christopher A. Hall

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780830867127
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Christopher Hall invites us to accompany the fathers as they enter the sanctuary for worship and the chapel for prayer. He also takes us to the wilderness, where we learn from the early monastics as they draw close to God in their solitary discipline. The focus of this book is not liturgy but more broadly worship in its corporate and individual dimensions. We enter into the patristic understanding of baptism and the Eucharist. And we come under the instruction and discipline of great spiritual teachers of prayer. In two previous books, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers and Learning Theology with the Church Fathers, Christopher Hall has ushered us alongside the church fathers as they study the Scriptures and plumb the depths of theology. In this survey of the spiritual life of worship he informs and challenges Christians in faithful living today. Hall weaves his own experiences into his observations of the fathers' practices and teachings and so helps us close the gap of the centuries. Readers will enjoy a rich and rare schooling in developing their spiritual life.

part one

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Sacraments

Great is the baptism that lies before you: the ransom of captives, the forgiveness of sins, the death of sin, the regeneration of the soul, the garment of light, the holy perpetual seal, a chariot to heaven, the delight of paradise, a welcome into the kingdom, the gift of adoption.

Cyril of Jerusalem Procatachesis 16

It is the Holy Spirit who effects with water the second birth, as a certain seed of divine generation. It is a consecration of a heavenly birth and the pledge of a promised inheritance.

Novatian Treatise Concerning the Trinity[1]

Faith and baptism are two kindred and inseparable ways of salvation: faith is perfected by baptism; baptism is established by faith, and both are completed by the use of the same names. As we believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so we are baptized into the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Confession leads the way and brings us to salvation; baptism follows, setting the seal on our assent.

Basil of Caesarea On the Holy Spirit

one

BAPTISM

Entering the Worshiping Community

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The Sacramental Mysteries

Some readers, particularly those from an evangelical background and perspective, may find themselves surprised, bewildered and perhaps troubled to discover that the church fathers thought, lived and worshiped sacramentally. That is to say, the fathers believed that God delights to use tangible, concrete, earthy means—matter itself—to communicate his grace, redemption and presence to us, elements as simple and specific as bread, wine, water and oil. Sometimes this perspective is known today as sacramental realism.

The word sacrament (Lat. sacramentum) was borrowed by Latin Christian writers such as Augustine from its common use in the Western Latin world; in a Roman context sacramentum was the term employed for the oath sworn by a candidate entering the military service. Because entrance into Roman military service included religious rituals and sacrifices, sacramentum possessed religious connotations, non-Christian though they were.[2]

With the passage of time Latin fathers began to use sacramentum in a specifically Christian sense and related its meaning to the Greek word mysterion.[3] Sacramentum never lost its pagan Roman overtones, however, in terms of obligations taken under oath. To enter the church in baptism was to accept certain clear and distinct obligations and to profess a commonly held faith.[4] As we will see, baptism was serious business—both joyful and solemn.

Why would the church fathers embrace a sacramental worldview, a way of viewing the world that seems strange and counterintuitive, at least from an Old Testament perspective? Are we not a step away—if not closer—to the heinous sin of idolatry? Isn’t the attempt to merge the divine with the material idolatry’s foundation stone? One can imagine an Israelite carpenter fashioning an image out of wood or stone and quickly encountering the wrath and sarcasm of Isaiah. “To whom, then, will you compare God? What image will you compare him to? As for an idol, a craftsman casts it, and a goldsmith overlays it with gold and fashions silver chains for it. A man too poor to present such an offering selects wood that will not rot. He looks for a skilled craftsman to set up an idol that will not topple” (Is 40:18-20). To unite or combine the realm of the Spirit with the realm of the material, then, appears deeply troubling—both foolish and dangerous—from a biblical perspective.

So again we have to ask the question, why would the church fathers clearly and openly affirm that God has chosen to draw near to us through the medium of his own creation? There is only one safe, solid, coherent answer: Jesus Christ. In the incarnation of the eternal Word we discern the rhyme and reason of the sacraments. In the wondrous, mysterious, divine-human person nestled in the Virgin Mary’s womb, we encounter the sacramental principle. The eternal Word, the Son of God, has humbly joined his nature to the human nature trustfully and lovingly offered to him by Mary. In Christ the divine and human, the immaterial and the material, the Spirit and the flesh, are married. Who would have thought that such a wonder was possible?

The incarnation, then, is the bedrock upon which all sacraments are built. The sacramental principle—God wills, indeed, delights in using tangible, earthy means to draw near to his image bearers—is grounded on the Word made flesh. John of Damascus captures this principle well:

I do not venerate matter, I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake and accepted to dwell in matter and through matter worked my salvation, and I will not cease from reverencing matter, through which my salvation was worked. . . . I reverence the rest of matter and hold in respect that through which my salvation came, because it is filled with divine energy and grace. Is not the thrice-precious and thrice-blessed wood of the cross matter? Is not the holy and august mountain, the place of the skull, matter? Is not the life-giving and life-bearing rock, the holy tomb, the source of the resurrection, matter? Is not the ink and the all-holy book of the Gospels matter? Is not the gold and silver matter, out of which crosses and tablets and bowls are fashioned? And, before all these things, is not the body and blood of our Lord matter?[5]

Those grounded in the tradition of the fathers believe that to reject a sacramental worldview is to cut oneself off from the very means God has ordained for human growth and flourishing. Theophan the Recluse, a nineteenth-century Russian Christian and spiritual father of the Orthodox Church, puts it this way: to “reject” the “natural means” of the sacraments is similar to “someone who wants to cross a river by means of some spiritual power, while boats and bridges are at his disposal. Such a person will wait in vain for the power of the Spirit. And while others cross to the other side, he will be left on the riverbank, alone.” A sacrament, Theophan comments, “is like a framework that supports one’s inner attitude and ensures its stability.”[6]

Both Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa emphasize that the sacraments are indissolubly linked to “the historical economy of salvation in the events of the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”[7] For instance, when the fathers contemplate the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist (the Lord’s Supper), they interpret them through the lens of the biblical narrative from beginning to end. If God has chosen to use water in baptism to signify redemption and re-creation in Christ, it should not surprise us to find the fathers mining the Old Testament references to water for deeper redemptive, christological meaning.

The apostle Paul himself provides the pattern for this Christ-centered reading of Scripture. Paul teaches that key events in the exodus experience of Israel were themselves a kind of baptism. The food (manna) and water providentially provided for Israel in the wilderness came from Christ’s presence with them. “They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ” (1 Cor 10:2-4).

Key figures, events and practices in the covenantal history of Israel prefigured the fulfillment of God’s purposes in Christ. The type (Gk. typos) of the Red Sea, for instance, finds its eschatological and sacramental fulfillment in the waters of baptism as the age to come invades this present evil age. Peter links the protection of Noah and his family within the ark to the protection baptism offers. “In [the ark] only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a good conscience toward God” (1 Pet 3:20-21).

Augustine provides a well-known definition of a sacrament: a sacrament is “a visible form of an invisible grace.”[8] Irenaeus speaks of the sacraments as “the mysterious operations of God.” Chrysostom refers to them as “spiritual realities under sensory signs,” grace-filled wonders that “bring to pass what they signify . . . and make visible.” They are “the invisible in the visible.”[9]

The sacraments of the church are not magical rites, divorced from the faith of the person receiving them. “They are like fire: if the wood is damp—that is, if the soul is passion ridden, the inner warmth does not make itself felt immediately after receptions of the sacrament.”[10] The sacraments’ pattern and efficacy are based on faith—faith in God’s actions in history on our behalf, that God in Jesus Christ is presently reigning in the midst of this present evil age. The fathers ponder God’s actions in history as related in the narrative of the Bible and build their sacramental worldview on this biblical basis. Thus the sacraments are both biblical and eschatological in nature. God has invaded this present evil age in Christ, and the sacraments communicate that reality to believers. Hence, a sacrament is a lively, living remembering of the holy Trinity’s loving actions for human beings, “the bringing of the past into the present before God’s (and not primarily men’s) eyes, so that He may remember, act, and make his people walk forward from the covenant towards the end of the ages.”[11] Indeed, the fathers’ linking of sacramentum with Paul’s use of mysterion indicates their clear awareness that “the plan of salvation eternally hidden in God,” the Lord’s divine secret, has now been “revealed in and by Christ.”[12] This is the mystery now revealed in the “economy.”

Latin writers such as Ambrose connect sacramentum and mysterion in phrases such as sacramenta mysteriorum and mysteria sacramentum. In these phrases the sacramentum designates what we can see, for instance bread and wine, while the mysterion is the interior aspect of the sacrament, the spiritual reality the sacrament is conveying and communicating. “The sacramenta introduce us to the mysteria and, in turn, the mysteria make us understand the outer sign, the sacramenta.” One reality functions as “a sign of another,” an “efficacious sign” which wondrously, mysteriously, sacramentally communicates what it signifies.[13] There is “a force in the sacrament,” a power communicated by the Holy Spirit, so that the sacrament actually “produces the signified effect.”[14]

Two Key Sacraments: Baptism and the Eucharist

In the first two chapters of this book, I want to focus on the fathers’ fruitful reflection and teaching on two key sacraments: baptism and the Eucharist. The fathers view baptism as the door through which one enters the church and receives the life of salvation. It is the great initiatory rite of the church. In turn, it is the Eucharist that early Christians viewed as “a key component in the continued development of the believer and a central element in Christian worship.”[15] Boris Bobrinsky comments on the “bipolarity of baptism and the Eucharist. . . . This bipolarity . . . signifies in particular that every baptism tends toward the Eucharist as to its fullness, and that every Eucharist finds its source in baptism, as in the entrance door of the world to the Church.”[16]

Both baptism and the Eucharist are concrete, grace-filled, earthy means God employs to communicate central themes of the gospel narrative and the overarching biblical story to the mind and body of a Christian. Henry Chadwick speaks of Christians gathering together on the pattern of the Jewish synagogue, but to celebrate a new covenant in continuity with the old. In “water, bread, and wine” the church possessed “covenant signs . . . means of divine grace and . . . ordered rites which provide both form and vitality to the disorder of human life.”[17] In early Christian worship, believers communed with God through “a pattern of symbolic words and actions through which the presence of the Lord” was “expressed.”[18]

We should not overlook the ethical dimension of church’s sacramental life. To be baptized and to share in the Eucharist entailed a definite “yes” to Christ and “no” to sin. In a word, the renunciations involved in baptism, “dramatically reinforced by exorcism, affected people’s jobs.”[19] For the baptized, certain activities and vocations were off limits.

A married man who also had a concubine or mistress or slept with his slave-girls had to change his ways. A priest serving idols could not so continue. (It is instructive that there were applications from people employed in this way.) Actors and actresses, who in antiquity were mostly slaves, or professional gladiators had to find different work, raising inevitable questions about trying to finance emancipation, perhaps with help from the church chest. In general th...