"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
Earlier this week, I gave a talk entitled “Worship In The Early Church”. In case you weren’t able to make it, the event organizer recorded my presentation and put it up on Vimeo:
It is also available here on YouTube:
Well this is rather cool… I recently came across an interactive timeline of the Early Church:
A little while ago, I was discussing with a Protestant the issue of baptism in the Early Church. The exchange was quite typical in that he rejected the beliefs of the Early Church, choosing instead to trump the witness of history with his own personal interpretation of the Scriptures.
In response to this, I did something unusual, departing from my usual strategy. Rather than trying to demonstrate to him that the Early Church was correct, I asked him, in his opinion, why did the Early Church get it all so wrong? After all, the question of whether baptism washes away sin isn’t some trivial doctrine, but one which relates to the question of our very salvation!
There’s a lot of discussion online at the moment about the conditions under which people may or may not receive communion. I have another post in draft on this subject, but I wanted to do a quick post outlining some of the earliest Church testimony on this subject.
In the First Century, the Didache teaches the following:
“On the Lord’s day, gather yourselves together and break bread, give thanks, but first confess your sins so that your sacrifice may be pure. However, let no one who is at odds with his brother come together with you, until he has reconciled, so that your sacrifice may not be profaned.” – Didache (Chapter 14)
So here we see that unrepentant sin or in a state of disunity cannot receive communion. We find Justin Martyr in the Second Century saying something very similar:
“This food we call Eukaristia [the Eucharist], and no one is allowed to partake but he who believes that our doctrines are true, who has been washed with the washing for the remission of sins and rebirth, and who is living as Christ has enjoined” – St. Justin Martyr, First Apology (Chapter 66)
Here we find the three basic conditions to receiving communion: baptized, assent to Church doctrine and right living.
I’ve got a more substantial post in the works on the subject of interdenominational communion which I’ll publish next week…
“When The Church Was Young” is the latest book from “Dr. Italy”, Marcellino D’Ambrosio.
I first came across Dr. D’Ambrosio when I was living back in England and was exposed to the Catholic Faith Exploration (CaFE) videos. His warmth and gentle presentation style made the Catholic Faith look rather attractive. During the priestly discernment of my mid-twenties, I read his book Exploring the Catholic Church which gave me a lot of light concerning my vocation during that somewhat turbulent time.
A couple of years later, I got to meet Dr. D’Ambrosio in person when I travelled to Walsingham for “New Dawn”, a charismatic Catholic family camp and retreat. Dr. D’Ambrosio was one of several speakers giving smaller talks around the campsite. I didn’t really understand the title of the talk listed in the schedule as I had no idea who the “Church Fathers” were, but having enjoyed watching him speak in the CaFE videos, I decided to go and have a listen…
A couple of days ago I posted some of the important dates concerning the setting of the Biblical canon. Closely related to the subject of the canon is the issue of the deuterocanon, the books referred to by Protestants as “the apocrypha”, which were removed from the canon at the time of the Reformation.
I haven’t done a “Quick Apology” post this week, so here goes. However, rather than dealing with just one objection in this post, today I’m going to provide a series of brief rebuttals of the top ten most common objections raised….
Protestants typically say that the deuterocanonical books shouldn’t be included in the Bible because…
Quite some time ago in the JP2 Group we studied the Liturgy of St. James. Today I finished recording the text onto MP3::
Liturgy of St. James
Part of my reason for putting these documents onto MP3 is to make it easier for people to understand how the Early Church worshiped. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths out there about what these early services looked like. Personally, I find it really interesting looking at the development of liturgy through the centuries, growth and continuity: