How Should We Then Live 2-1

Dr. Francis Schaeffer examines the Middle Ages

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Francis
• Schaeffer
• Roman
• Age
• Early
• Christianity
• History
• Art
• Faith
• How should we then live?
• Middle
• Ages

[fggerv]

Let's all worship a piece of Bread. How profiund.

[Excaliber02]

I think we're mixing individual worship and corporate worship. The doctrine of the twelve was the same as their Master's doctrine, Jesus. Go and preach the good news. That was their charge. Did they use the Eucharist in corporate worship? Of course; Christ instructed them to do so in remembrance of His sacrifice. When you subtract the evangelical side, and rely solely on the strictly corporate symbolic worship, the symbolic has lost its savor; making it a distorted form of worship.

[VictorLepanto]

@Venerated07: His notion of a "gradual distortion" is the only real distortion here. He has no idea at all as to what the early Church was like. As I said, there are very clear discriptions of early worship in works like the Didache Apostolorum, the writings of Justin the Martyr & others. The center of early Christianity was NOT preaching but was the Eucharist. It did NOT resemble some Evangelical potluck. I understand him quite well, he is simply wrong.

[Venerated07]

@VictorLepanto: That was what I meant by verbal traditions; because of the schism between the Jews and Christians, and that fact that so many of the converts were Greek, they inherited these traditions from the Apostles and their heirs. What are we arguing about?

Besides, I think you misunderstood Schaeffer; his criticism stems from the infiltration of Jewish and Roman mystical IMAGERY into a religion that originally started with the sacrificial atoning death of the Lord in Human flesh, Christ.

[VictorLepanto]

@Venerated07: It didn't "just develop" it was deliberately begun by the Apostles themselves. The rites of the Jewish synagogue were well established by the Christian era. As Jews, the Apostles would have almost certainly followed some ritual form resembling what the knew from the synagogue. Go to a mesianic synagogue & then go to a (especially Eastern Christian) liturgical church. You'll see it. The early Christian did not just blunder unthinkingly into how they worshipped.

[Venerated07]

@VictorLepanto: True, but the first churches were set in houses where worship focused heavily on songs and the verbal traditions/written Scriptures available to the churchgoers at that time. Paul in particular preached in such settings. However, you are right in that a hierarchy and art form developed much quicker than most people suppose, and that at least communion was practiced quite early in the history indeed.

[VictorLepanto]

I love this fantasy of an early Protestant house church type phenomenon. What projection! I notice he quotes nothing on what records we have of how the early Christians conducted themselves. Not one quote from Justin the Martyr's description of early worship or from the Didache. The art he presents as a sign of decadence is in fact a prefect reflection of what was typical of Synogogue art. The early Church simply continued the aesthetic forms of Jewish worship.