The Search For The Origins Of Christian Worship

It is tempting to assume that the worship practices of the earliest churches are reflected in the more developed liturgical traditions that emerged in the fourth century. A resulting view has been that Christian celebration has exhibited essentially the same shape since the apostolic period. This entry challenges that assumption and suggests that the most ancient forms of Christian worship were not uniform but quite diverse. The basic problem we encounter in the search for the origins of Christian worship is that evidence for liturgical practices during the first three centuries of the church's history is simply too meager, and fragmentary to enable us to paint a clear picture of it. Liturgical historians, however, have not been content with this limitation, but have attempted to bridge the chasm of ignorance that stretches between the beginnings of Christianity and the fourth-century church. In order to do this, they have had to make a number of assumptions: (a) that we in fact know…