The Red Book on liturgical services

             This post is the third in a series.  Previous posts in the series can be found here and here.
             In this post I examine the chapter of The Red Book which speaks of liturgical services—i.e. gatherings of Christians at which a set form of service is used, whether formally liturgical (using a printed service where the words are provided in advance), or informally liturgical (with the material, to quote the authors, “unwritten, but just as mechanical and predictable as if it were set in print”)   To their credit, Valentinus and Marcion recognize both types of service as essentially liturgical, since even traditions not having a set liturgy still prescribe in advance the basic order of service.

            For Valentinus and Marcion, this existence of liturgy is bad—Sunday mornings are thereby “set in concrete”, are “ironclad”, with the order of worship therefore “perfunctory”.   All such set worship is unbiblical:  “You can scour your Bible from beginning to end, and you will never find anything that remotely resembles our [Protestant] order of worship...In fact, the Protestant order of worship has about as much biblical support as does the Roman Catholic Mass.”  For Valentinus and Marcion and their intended readers, of course, the “Roman Catholic Mass” is the epitome of corruption.  Their verdict is plain:  “Both [Protestant and Roman Catholic services] have few points of contact with the New Testament.”

            We have seen that for the authors of The Red Book, anything differing from the praxis of the first century church is necessarily a corruption.  Since the Eucharist (to use a later term) was part of a meal in the first century churches to which St. Paul was writing, this means that it must continue to be so for us today.  Our authors characterize the worship of those early days as “marked by every member-functioning, spontaneity, freedom, vibrancy and open participation...a fluid gathering, not a static ritual.”

            Unwarranted dichotomies aside (can’t rituals be vibrant?), this is a not unfair assessment of the sacramental meals held, for example, in the Corinthian church to which Paul wrote.  But as we have said in our previous post, soon after this, under the authority of the apostles, the ritual elements of the meal were separated from the social ones, and the Eucharist separated from the agape/ love feast.  By the end of the first century, the Eucharistic partaking of consecrated bread and wine was held before dawn on Sunday, with the love feast/ social meal held later on that day (possibly at another location or locations). 

This is crucial to understand, because spontaneity, open participation and fluidity still characterized that social meal, the agape—but not the Eucharist.  People having a meal together of course interact.  There may be set prayers (whether a short “table grace” or more formal and lengthy prayers), but in between the prayers there is lots of time for talking and socializing, for sharing and spontaneity.  This is where “fluidity” is possible, for social interactions are not scripted.  From the late first century onwards, when the Eucharist was separated from the agape meal, fluid and unscripted social interaction took place during those meals and were confined to them. It follows then too that at the Eucharist held in the morning, there was no such informal social interaction or fluidity, but rather set ritual.

            For Valentinus and Marcion, such lack of social freedom invalidates the whole event.  They ask rhetorically, “Let’s suppose that the authors of this book attend your own church service.  And let’s suppose that the Lord Jesus Christ puts something on our hearts to share with the rest of His body.  Would we have the freedom to do it?  If not, then we would question whether your church service is under Christ’s headship.”  As one reviewer of The Red Book perceptively asked, “So, in short, [the author’s] measure for whether Jesus is in charge is whether he’s allowed to interrupt proceedings any time he thinks Jesus is talking to him? Doesn’t this beg the question of whether [he] is imagining such communications?”  Nicely put. 

            In fact (as the above reviewer also pointed out), the Christians of those early centuries assembled at the Eucharist not to express their own individual ideas, share their own individual stories, or sing their own individual song selections.  They came together as a body, to perform a set of corporate actions—that of listening to the Scriptures as a body, interceding as a body, exchanging the Peace among themselves, and offering up the Eucharistic Sacrifice as a body, led by the prayers of the one presiding.  To quote our perceptive reviewer again, “The early church was collectivist; expression was NOT ‘natural’ or ‘spontaneous’”.  In contrast to the early church, The Red Book “goes constantly wrong is in that [it] unwittingly panders to selfish individualism”.

            For Valentinus and Marcion, the history of liturgy is the history of a catastrophic downward spiral.  They trace many elements of the Protestant liturgical tradition to their origins, such as the “altar call”, the centrality of the sermon, the use of “the sinner’s prayer”.  This is salutary, since it reveals these elements to be of recent vintage, and not a part of the Church’s historic inheritance.  But it does not look at that historic liturgical inheritance in any real way.  In a footnote we read, “The story of the origin of the Mass is far beyond the scope of this book.  Suffice it to say that the Mass was essentially a blending together of a resurgence of Gentile interest in synagogue worship and pagan influence that dates back to the fourth century.”  It is difficult to know how to respond to such unhistorical twaddle.  To find such a combination of heated polemic and historical ignorance one usually has to peruse the pages of an Awake! magazine such as is thoughtfully provided by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  “Suffice it to say” that the Mass (or Divine Liturgy) was essentially the fruit of Christ’s commands during His Last Supper, and the influence of the apostles.

            One can see this when one looks at writings before the fourth century, such as those of Justin Martyr, who wrote in the second century.  In his Apology, he describes the Sunday morning service of the church with a kind of studied naivety, so that his hostile pagan readers can see that there is nothing to the slanders which they had heard, slanders about Christians eating the body and blood of babies.  In this work, he describes the service is this way:  on a Sunday morning, the Christians of the city “gather together in one place and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits.  Then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.  Then we all rise together and pray. [A little before this, Justin also added the detail that after these prayers, “we salute one another with a kiss”.]   When our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings according to his ability, and the people assent, saying, ‘Amen’, and there is a distribution to each...” (Apology, chapters 65-67).

            The main elements of the Sunday morning Eucharist that Justin knew in about 150 A.D. are thus as follows:

-assembly

-Scripture reading

-homily from the one presiding

-intercessory prayer

-the exchange of the Peace

-Eucharistic Prayer of Thanksgiving

-reception of Holy Communion

            These elements are basically the same ones as later found in the Roman Mass in the west and the Byzantine Divine Liturgy in the east.  Certain other elements would be added later to fancy it up a bit—in the Byzantine service, three hymns would be added to the beginning, and a Creed inserted before the Eucharistic Prayer of Thanksgiving—but the essential elements, the backbone of the service, remain the same.   And let’s be clear:  if Justin was offering this description of the service in about the year 150, then it must have predated him by about a generation at least, for Justin gives no evidence that the service he describes was a controversial newcomer on the liturgical field.  A date of a generation before Justin puts the service he described almost in apostolic times, given that the apostle John died in the last decade of the first century.  In short, after the apostles separated the Eucharist from the agape, the Eucharist remained pretty much the same until Justin’s day—and our own.  There is no room or time for “a resurgence of Gentile interest in synagogue worship and pagan influence” to intrude themselves (whatever might be meant by those terms).  The Mass or Divine Liturgy is the apostolic way of worshipping on Sunday morning.   “Every member-functioning, spontaneity, freedom, vibrancy and open participation” might still be found in Sunday evening agape meals (though I suggest there was far less of that even there, since the early church did not value these things as do Valentinus and Marcion), but on Sunday morning, there was what The Red Book would call “static ritual”. 

            We Orthodox, whose Liturgy has not changed substantively for about a thousand years, are delighted with such static ritual—mostly because we do not experience it as static but as dynamic.  That is, it has a power, a dynamism, it is capable of transforming us and moving us and bringing us into the presence of Christ.  It is nonsense to define submission to His headship as the freedom to interrupt a service.  True submission to His headship is found in fidelity to the praxis established by His apostles.  Our Liturgy is not “set in concrete” as The Red Book alleges.  It is built upon a rock.

The Red Book on Church Buildings

           In a previous post, I mentioned a volume I referred to as The Red Book, a volume denouncing the practices of the historic church (both Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant) in favour of its own prescription for a house church re-imagining of what its authors thought the first century church looked like.  These authors I referred to as Valentinus and Marcion, changing their names, as C.S. Lewis changed the names of the authors of a volume he called The Green Book.  In this post I would like to examine their teaching about church buildings.

            For proponents of the house church, the use of a building specially set apart for the worship and glorification of God is problematic, if not anathema.  Accordingly, a chapter of The Red Book consists of a demonization of the whole concept of church temple.  “The story of the church building,” they write, “is the sad saga of Christianity borrowing from heathen culture and radically transforming the face of our faith.”  It makes the obvious point the “the Church” (Greek ekklesia) refers to the people of God, wherever they may meet, not whatever building they may use for their meeting, and that “the Christianity that conquered the Roman Empire was essentially a home-centered movement.”  That is, from the earliest days, the Christians largely met in the homes of other Christians.  Obviously, in the first century, the Christians did not have the resources to build structures dedicated to the worship of Christ, nor, since their Eucharistic worship then was incorporated into a common meal and the numbers participating in this were small, did such structures seem necessary.  But the numbers soon grew.

            Meeting in homes for the Eucharist became unnecessary in the second century because by then the Eucharist proper (i.e. the blessing of bread and cup) had become separated from a full meal.  The separation was probably effected in the first century by the apostles themselves.  St. Ignatius of Antioch, martyred in about 107 A.D., refers in his letters to both “the Eucharist” and “the agape” (i.e. the love feast) as two distinguishable and separate events.  Since terminology usually lags at least somewhat behind phenomenon, the phenomenon of the separation of Eucharist from meal clearly took place earlier—that is, in the first century.  That it took place with apostolic authority may be implied from the total lack of any evidence of controversy about the separation, for if the apostles had not sanctioned such a separation, separating it would have evinced strenuous protest.  Since we have no evidence of any such protest anywhere, we may confidently assume that the separation of Eucharist from love-feast took place under the authority of the apostles.  The Eucharist could then take place in any locale, and homes with dining room facilities were no longer necessary for Eucharistic worship.

            This is not to say that Christian worship instantly abandoned the domestic locale.  Building church temples especially dedicated for worship was not high on the list of ante-Nicene priorities, especially when the Christians were happy to fly under the Roman radar.  A secular Roman report tells us that the Christians of the early second century met before dawn on Sunday morning “to sing a hymn to Christ as to a god”, and then met later that day for an evening meal—evidence of an early morning Eucharist and an agape later on.  Possibly the same house was used for both; possibly not.  More people could fit in a room for the former than for the latter.

            But soon the Christians did begin to build structures set apart for the Eucharist and the sacraments of the Church.  The Red Book even mentions one of them—the so-called Dura-Europus in modern Syria, a former house in which its owners knocked down a wall or two to transform a domestic dwelling into a place set apart for Eucharistic assembly and baptism.  Valentinus and Marcion state that “remodelled houses like Dura-Europus cannot rightfully be called ‘church buildings’”, but it is difficult to see why not, since such remodelled houses clearly no longer functioned as homes as they did before.  A store-front church is a church, not a store, and the Dura-Europos structure was a church building, not a house.

            Valentinus and Marcion are emphatic that Constantine was “the father of the church building”, so that “for the first three centuries, the Christians did not have any special buildings”.  (We have seen that for Valentinus and Marcion, Dura-Europus did not count.) 

            To put it bluntly, this is a lie.  The Dura-Europus structure was, unsurprisingly, not unique.  Wherever money and political situation allowed, the Christians soon built structures of their own, dedicated to the worship of Christ.  We know this because the pagan emperor Galerius referred to them in the so-called “Edict of Toleration” in 311, issued also in the names of Constantine and Licinius.  Church buildings which had been seized by pagans were ordered to be returned to the Christians:  “Concerning the Christians,” the Imperial decree ran, “we before gave orders with respect to the places set apart for their worship.  It is now our pleasure that all who have bought such places should restore them to the Christians, without any demand for payment”.  Clearly, the Christians had erected “places set apart for their worship”, which had been seized by pagans in times of persecution and which now the government was demanding be returned.  It is simply untrue therefore that the Christians “did not have any special buildings”; they had enough of them even before Constantine called off the dogs of war to figure in this edict of toleration.  In fact, the church historian Eusebius writes that even in the third century, there were “famous gatherings in the houses of prayer, on whose account the Christians, not being satisfied with the ancient buildings, erected from the foundation large churches in all the cities”.  The Church Father Lactantius writes that the persecuting Emperor Diocletian was disturbed that there was a Christian basilica near the Imperial palace at Nicomedia.  Dura-Europus was therefore but one of many such church buildings erected in the third century, well before the peace of Constantine.

            What led these early Christians to create buildings set apart for worship?  Like any such question beginning with the word “why”, we can only guess at the answer.  Certainly numbers had something to do with it.  As the renovators of the Dura-Europos house discovered, you can fit more people into a building specially designed for worship than you can into your living room, and after the first century, the numbers of Christians kept on increasing.  Also, a building set apart for Christian worship would have been “owned” by the Christians corporately, not by a single individual:  even though one individual held the deed of ownership of the building (to use modern terms), all the Christians worshipping there would have regarded it as “theirs”, and held a stake in it.  Thus no one person could dominate and personalize the gathering, putting their idiosyncratic “stamp” on it.  The strong sense of corporate identity which the Christians had led them to create buildings which were corporately “owned”.

            This is the unacknowledged problem with all house churches.  When a person makes a building his home, it looks like his—since it is his home, its decoration, lay-out, and interiors all express his personality and tastes.  The owner of the building is thus uniquely positioned to dominate the gathering, even if he (or she) is not a domineering sort of person.  When the church meets at Bob’s house, Bob’s views, opinions, and convictions have a tremendously important role to play in whatever that church decides.  This is all the more so in the absence of an ordained and authoritative clergy who themselves submit to an already-established Tradition.  The modern house church that meets at Bob’s place inevitably becomes Bob’s church, and such idiosyncratic personalization of “church” is the essence of heresy.  Even if Bob is not strictly speaking heretical, the fullness and catholicity of the Faith will be lacking, because for all his good intentions and piety, Bob, or any other individual, cannot express the fullness of the Faith.  Only the universal apostolic Tradition can do that.  The modern house church movement thus has a personalizing tendency already built in.  This unfortunate tendency is minimized when the church meets in a public building that all share equally.   

            I think, though, that the main reason the Christians of the second and third centuries began to create church buildings was not simply to avoid personalization of the Faith (possessing an ordained and authoritative clergy who themselves submitted to an already established Tradition, there was little danger of that).  Buildings were not just structures to house people and keep the rain off their heads.  Erecting a building was a statement—a challenge, if you like.  When the Jews erected synagogue buildings, this building was an assertion of the legitimacy and truth of Judaism.  A pagan temple was a statement of the power and glory of the pagan deity worshipped there.  Statements can be made in stone as well as words.  And if the Christians of the second and third centuries (and later) were going to commend their Faith to the world, these statements in stone needed to be made.  To refuse to make the statement—to refuse to build church buildings and to continue to worship only in homes—would’ve been to tell the world that the Christian Faith did not possess the legitimacy of Judaism or of paganism.  It was a matter of credibility before the world—that is, of evangelism.  

That is why Constantine (who as far as Valentinus and Marcion are concerned could do nothing right) was indeed right in building large churches.  It is true that something was lost as far as intimacy was concerned when the church building now could hold not just seventy persons but seven hundred.  For what its worth, Constantine’s building projects were not that numerous compared to the number of actual church buildings, and lots of smaller church buildings remained.  He was concerned to build spacious and beautiful structures in Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and other important places; he was less concerned to splurge limited funds in tiny towns in out of the way spots.  There were still plenty of small churches, which afforded a corresponding intimacy.  But the world’s attention was on the larger places, and making architectural statements there was a necessary part of commending the Christian Faith to a still largely pagan world.  This is all the more important when one reflects that a church temple erected especially for worship will continue to be used for that purpose for generations, which would not be the case if one met for worship in a private home.  Meeting for worship at Bob’s house will cease when Bob moves away or dies; meeting for worship in a specially-built church temple will continue long after we and Bob have gone—a further manifestation of the abiding truth of the Faith.

For us today, the existence of buildings set apart for the worship of Christ serves yet another purpose—that of carving out a place, in a militantly secular world, where everything speaks of the glory of Jesus, and where prayer is encouraged by our surroundings.  One can, of course, pray anywhere, and one does not need icons or outward beauty in order to commune with God.  Christians have prayed (and are praying) in terrible gulag conditions.  But if you’re like me, you appreciate all the help you can get.  Since we are animal as well as spiritual, our outward surroundings do effect us, often profoundly, and an environment in which everything points us to God is helpful as we strive to lay aside all earthly cares and commune with the King of all.  The church building itself therefore becomes part of our self-offering, something beautiful which we offer to God, an architectural hymn, a way of singing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.  Constantine was not the first one to sing this song.  But he sang it very well, and we can still appreciate its fading echoes as we strive to sing the same song.