By Andrew B. McGowan

This creation to the origins of Christian worship illuminates the significance of historic Christian worship practices for modern Christianity. Andrew McGowan, a number one pupil of early Christian liturgy, takes a clean method of knowing how Christians got here to worship within the particular types nonetheless normal at the present time. Deftly and expertly processing the bewildering complexity of the traditional assets into lucid, fluent exposition, he units apart universal misperceptions to discover the roots of Christian ritual practices--including the Eucharist, baptism, communal prayer, preaching, Scripture examining, and music--in their earliest recoverable settings. scholars of Christian worship and theology in addition to pastors and church leaders will worth this paintings.

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

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Paul proposes that they avoid banquets directly linked to sacrifices (1€Cor. 10:21) but otherwise treat meat itself indifferently (10:25). The logic of his directive links the Christian banquet with both gentile and Jewish sacrificial meals: The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. Consider the people of Israel; are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar?

Ute€E. Eisen, Women Officeholders in Early Christianity: Epigraphical and Literary Studies (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000). 15 Scope This study begins with the earliest evidence for Christian belief and practice, and ends not long after 400. The reasons for this chronological scope are those that have often led to a working definition of the “early church” that spans those centuries; just as this period sees the emergence of relative clarity around the canon of Scripture and creedal definitions of doctrine, it also sees the formation of liturgical patterns that would remain fundamental to Christian practice thereafter.

He reports on the activity of a leader named Marcus who was associated with the school of Valentinus and hence of a broadly “gnostic” tendency: He makes as though to give thanks over mixed cups, and extending greatly the prayer of invocation, he makes them appear purple and red; with the result that it seems that Charis [Grace], who is from what is above all, drops her own blood into that cup through his invocation, and so those who are present should yearn to taste of that cup, so that the Charis lauded by this conjurer may also pour down on them.

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