The Worship of the Early Christians

A book I've been reading over the last couple of days is Mike Aquilina's The Mass of the Early Christians. It's a great, compact book I'd recommend to anyone.

Many Christian movements today desire or attempt a return to the practice of the early Church. They wish to recover what they believe to be the pristine worship of the first Christians, unfettered by what they see as any accretions, or add-ons that are the product of merely human traditions.

But, are the forms of worship that they propose anything that the actual early Christians would recognize as the kind of worship instituted by Jesus Christ himself?

There is a way to find out: simply compare the type of worship these folks offer to what the early Church actually did. And Mike Aquilina's gem of a book enables us to do just that. He traces the beginnings of Christian worship from the time of Jesus all the way through the fourth century, featuring well-chosen quotes from some of the greatest voices in early Christian history.

One of those voices is one of my favorites: Ignatius of Antioch. As Aquilina points out in his book, we really know two basic facts about Ignatius. First, he was the bishop of Antioch in Syria (the third in line from St. Peter himself); and, secondly, that he died a martyr's death, being thrown to the wild beasts in a public spectacle in Rome.

He left us, however, seven famous letters that he wrote en route to his martyrdom, circa AD 107. And in them, we find several important pieces of information. Maybe the most important anecdote he provides is what distinguished true belief from heresy, or false teaching. The heretics, he says, "abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess the Eucharist to be the flesh of our savior, Jesus Christ" (Smyrnaeans 7). Ignatius goes on to say that the Eucharist is the same flesh of Jesus that died on the cross, and that was resurrected on the third day.

So here is one thing that authentic early Christians believed: the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ in The Eucharist. This was not some later, medieval invention of the Church; it goes back to the very beginning. in fact, Ignatius was merely affirming our Lord's own words about the Eucharist in John 6.

I'll have more on the theme of early Church worship in future posts.