Worship in the Patristic Age

The Patristic Age is also known as the age of the Church Fathers (the great early theologians of the church). On the Margins The church was still gathering in small communities. Occasionally there were persecutions, as the new faith collided with Judaism and with Roman emperor worship; in times of persecution, there was often a feeling that the Lord must be going to return very soon. Developing Practices There were evolving traditions. There are a few extant writings from this period that show some patterns emerging in how worship was done. Canon, Councils, and Creeds It was during this period that the canon of Scripture was decided upon by common agreement: that is, which books were considered to be God’s inspired word and thus belonged to the New Testament. (There were other writings, often fanciful, that were rejected as uninspired.) It was also during this time that great church councils were convened that formulated the creeds of the church: the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed. The councils and the creeds that arose from them were in response to various heresies and false teachings that were promoted by some, raising the need for the church to establish once and for all what doctrines undergirded the orthodox Christian faith, especially: the full deity of Christ, the nature of the incarnation and the so-called hypostatic union (the fusion in one person of complete deity and complete humanity in Jesus Christ), and the Trinity. Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi One interesting concept that arose during these debates and councils is represented by the Latin phrase lex orandi, lex credendi (literally, “the law of prayer is the law of faith”). As the leaders of the church gathered and formulated the creeds, they would often refer to already established patterns of worship as informing what the true doctrine should be. That is very interesting, because of course now we go to the Bible for the truths upon which to base our worship practices (hence the subtitle of this book is Biblical Foundations of Worship). But at that time there was the conviction that, in the absence of a completed canon of Scripture and authoritative creedal statements, the Holy Spirit nevertheless faithfully worked in the church to help it develop appropriate worship practices; and those practices were then themselves appealed to as a reflection of divine truth. For instance, the Trinity, though the word itself does not occur in Scripture itself, was nevertheless implied in Jesus’s baptismal command, which certainly was carried over into the early church’s practice of the baptismal rite: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. (Matt 28:19) And Paul’s Trinitarian benediction was probably used in numerous local churches: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. (2 Cor 13:14) Christopher Cocksworth writes: “The essence of the doctrine of the Trinity was first articulated in worship. Furthermore, during the whole process of the formulation of the doctrine, worship acted as a custodian of the trinitarian revelation of God and as a criterion for judging whether theological statements remained faithful to the way God had shown himself to be.” (Christopher Cocksworth, Holy, Holy, Holy: Worshipping the Trinitarian God, 123) Another example of early church practice informing doctrinal formulation was how Jesus from early on was worshiped as God, though the Christians (as the Jews who seeded the early church) were still firmly monotheistic. Bruce Shelley notes: “The mystery of the God-man was central to Christian worship long before it became central to Christian thinking. “Deep instinct,” J. S. Whale once told the undergraduates at Cambridge University, “has always told the church that the safest eloquence concerning the mystery of Christ is in our praise. The living church is a worshiping, singing church, not a school of people holding all the correct doctrines.” Whale meant that the most treasured hymns of the church have always treated Christ as an Object of Worship. You find the beating heart of Christian experience not in the church’s creed, but in its music.” (Bruce Shelley, Church History in Plain Language, 109) Thus the church’s worship guided its reflections and conclusions on the unique divine/human nature of Christ. Growing Formalism As the period progresses, we find that worship becomes more formalized, ceremonial, and sacramental. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and increasingly elaborate rites surrounding them, become more prominent. Infant baptism develops, and in some circles degenerates into the heresy of baptismal regeneration. This trend towards increased ceremonialism really hearkens back to the rituals of the Old Testament, leaving behind the simpler gatherings and patterns that characterized the very early decades of the church. This trend continued and in fact was magnified into and through the Middle Ages. AD 312 In this year a crucial event in the history of the church and of its worship occurred: the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine. Christianity, which had been a marginalized and sometimes persecuted sect, pitted against the Jewish faith and the pantheon of Roman and Greek gods, suddenly became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Persecutions immediately ceased. Shelley observes: “The [Christian] movement started the fourth century as a persecuted minority; it ended the century as the established religion of the Empire.” (Bruce Shelley, Church History in Plain Language, 89) It is actually still debated, many centuries later, whether this development was a good thing or not for the church. Christianity had become acceptable: as the state religion, people would naturally identify with it, whether or not it reflected their hearts’ reality. The secularizing of the church that has often accompanied this situation prompted Bernard Lewis to exclaim: “Christianity captured the Roman Empire, and was, in a sense, captured by it.” (Berhard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, 33) And that state-church pattern continued in most of Europe until recent decades. People in France normally considered that being French meant to be Catholic, and the same was true in Spain and Italy; and to be from one of the Scandinavian countries carried with it the assumption that you were Lutheran. (This identification is less strong in Europe today, but is still a strong influence in other areas, such as in postcolonial Latin America with its enduring Catholic tradition.) This intermingling of the church and state, in terms of a state and official state religion, is something that has often detracted from the witness of the church, because people would just identify with a branch of the church for political or cultural reasons, rather than for any sort of spiritual reason. (This prevalent state church pattern in Europe was the reason that the founders of the United States wrote into the Bill of Rights a strong commitment to the division of church and state, insisting that the new nation would have no officially sanctioned religion: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” (Amendment 1). It is also well documented that the church has often grown more and been more spiritually healthy in contexts of hardship and persecution: witness the explosive growth of Christianity in China under Communist rule, and a similar phenomenon in Eastern Europe under the yoke of the Soviet Union. (Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, there has been a marked rise of secularism, as well as inroads by various cults, in Eastern Europe.) The more difficult living conditions in the Third World and the so-called Global South have undoubtedly contributed greatly to the amazing growth and vigor of the church in those areas recently, as opposed to Christianity’s decline in the affluent West.