Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective

by Andrew McGowan

Publisher:

Baker Academic

, 2014

Overview

This introduction to the origins of Christian worship illuminates the importance of ancient Christian worship practices for contemporary Christianity. Andrew McGowan, a leading scholar of early Christian liturgy, 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. Students of Christian worship and theology as well as pastors and church leaders will value this work.

Contents

Top Highlights

“in the ancient world, what we now call ‘worship’ did not quite exist.” (Page 5)

“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.” (Page 4)

“Christians met for meals. A distinctive meal tradition—here called the ‘breaking of the bread’—was not a social event additional to worship, or a programmatic attempt to create fellowship among the Christians, but the regular form of Christian gathering.” (Page 19)

“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.” (Page 6)

“Lord’s supper’ does not appear again as a way of talking about the Eucharist itself until the fourth century, when vestiges of an actual ‘supper’ have fallen away, and the term can be used with a certain holy irony; even then, it is not a name so much as an epithet for the liturgical Eucharist. The tendency of modern scholars to imagine that Paul reflects some wider usage—for which there is no evidence at all—reminds us how influential our own liturgical experience can be in imagining that of the past.” (Page 34)

Product Details

• Title: Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective
• Author: Andrew McGowan
• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Print Publication Date: 2014
• Logos Release Date: 2015
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subject: Worship › History--Early church, ca. 30-600
• ISBNs: 9781441220707, 9780801031526, 9780801097874, 1441220704, 0801031524, 0801097878
• Resource ID: LLS:NCNTCHRSTNWRSHP
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T01:44:31Z

About Andrew McGowan

Andrew McGowan (b. 1961) is Joan F.W. Munro Professor of Historical Theology at Trinity College Theological School, Melbourne and canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, also in Melbourne. He is warden of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne and is a member of the Doctrine Commission of the Anglican Church of Australia. He is also the author of Method and Meaning: Essays on New Testament Interpretation in Honor of Harold W. Attridge.