Christianity made a series of related changes in the way that it performed the eucharistic celebration from the late third century onward that, it seems to me, whatever their merit in the shift from late antiquity to the medieval period, now serve to disconnect us from what the eucharist is and means. To give a brief account of those changes: the eucharist was originally a domestic banquet comparable to other forms of Greek, Roman, and Jewish sacred feasting, at which various kinds of discourse and ritual activity structured the event, held on the evening after the conclusion of the Sabbath (Saturday night, that is).1
In the first century, when the strong core of the movement remained Jews in Israel-Palestine and the Diaspora, the expectation would have been that the previous evening, Jewish families would have welcomed the Sabbath and, on the Sabbath Day itself, these Jews would have gone to synagogue to hear the Torah, the Prophets, and engage in interpretive debate about them. Retiring after the Sabbath, they would welcome the “eighth day” of the week—the first day of the new week, and therefore the first day of the new creation, on which Jesus had been raised—by celebrating the eucharistia or agape. Gentile members of local Christ-following ekklesiai, who might belong to communities led by Jews or of mixed Jew-gentile demographics or of exclusive gentile membership, may well have joined them in synagogue for the reading of Scripture, as St. James the Just expects they will in his decree at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:21). This means that in the earliest eucharistic assemblies—say, Paul’s Corinthian assemblies, for example—it is unlikely that Scripture was read in some way comparable to its reading and public debate in the synagogue, since these assemblies were connected, sometimes closely and sometimes loosely, to local synagogues and would not have had the need of reduplication of what was available there. It is only in the second century and onwards, as in some places Christ-assemblies and synagogues become estranged or even hostile to one another, that the need arises for Christ-assemblies to begin reading and commenting upon Scripture in a more sustained homiletical way, and the systematic collection, canonization, and commentary upon Scripture grows through the twin impetuses of decision-making about what is appropriate to read at the eucharistic leitourgeia and the academic context of early Christian scholars like Pantaenus, Clement, and Origen of Alexandria.2 These assemblies were plenty cultic: as early as 1 Corinthians 8-11, Paul makes the suggestion both that the eucharistic feast is comparable to pagan sacrificial banquets of which Paul disapproves, with the koinonia they effect between god and worshipers, as well as to the sacrificial worship of the Jerusalem Temple, which Paul does approve of.3 These meals involve—at least Paul thinks they should—a ritualized connection to the Last Supper account, suggesting minimally that the eucharistia is Christ’s sacrificial anamnesis and maximally that it re-presents his own action and accomplishes the significance he claims for the eucharistic elements (1 Cor 11:23-26).4 It is also clear that, for Paul anyway, this meal was equivalent to the pneumatic food and drink consumed by the Israelites in the wilderness (10:1-4), and itself conveyed the divine pneuma of Christ to the Corinthian assembly, slowly accomplishing their transformation into pneumatic beings which would be completed at and by the resurrection.5 The eucharist of the first few Christian centuries was not “house church” the way we ordinarily think of it, in an American, largely Protestantized and “low-church” context. It was instead a kind of mystical participation in the eschatological messianic banquet, uniting Jews and Greeks around the common table of the Lord in worship of Israel’s God and his Messiah by the power of the Spirit.
At these assemblies, it does indeed seem that episkopoi presided, though these episkopoi were originally wealthy householders who could “liturgize” in the classical sense—that is, philanthropically fund the assembly’s worship by collecting money and food from the members of the community, contributing his own goods and living space for the feast, and redistributing these things to the people and especially to the poor there present.6 The offices of episkopoi and diakonoi are borrowed from wider Hellenistic society: they are administrative and financial officers of state and collegia, associations or guilds, the latter of which probably provided the most immediate model for Diaspora Christ-assemblies, whatever their makeup of Jewish and gentile members. Indeed, the inclusion of these words in the Septuagint from time to time (e.g., LXX Num 4:16) reflects an attempt at cultural translation from roles and responsibilities described in the Hebrew Bible to those familiar to a Hellenistic audience, and Hellenized synagogues in the Diaspora as well as in Israel likely had these offices as aspects of their associational character (at least, for association synagogues, as Jordan Ryan describes).7 It seems likely that apostolic missionaries like Paul or Apollos or Barnabas or whomever would indeed target these individuals, whether Jewish or gentile, to be the primary overseers of the communities they left behind, since these would be the people most capable of acting as patrons to support the clientele of the local Christ-following community; several episkopoi would therefore function in a singular polis, each leading their own house congregation, and assembling as peers under the title of presbyteroi, or “elders.” Women may well have held these not-yet-fully-developed offices, not least since Paul mentions female householders like Chloe (1 Cor 1:11), and he mentions female diakonoi or diakonissai like Phoebe (Rom 16:1-2). There is no exegetical or historical reason to suspect that these women did not perform the same patronal roles of liturgical benefaction and presidency as men in their equivalent positions did; and in point of fact, there is good evidence to suggest that they did despite later theorizations of the restriction of these offices to men.8
Monepiscopacy only arose sometime later, as multiple federated Christian households, led by singular episkopoi, came under the control of singular episkopoi, eventuating, at least by 235, in the ascendancy of a single episkopos over the whole polis in Rome and Alexandria, meaning that the household episkopoi were recast as presbyteroi. Roles for women were increasingly marginalized, until they were altogether forfeited. It is not incidental that around the same time, the transference of the eucharistic feast from Saturday evening to Sunday morning was occurring, as well as its truncation to allow for readings, homilies, and other kinds of public activity; moreover, moving from the late third into the early fourth century, whereas previously public buildings serving as designated space for Christian liturgical activity had been extraordinary and domestic contexts continued to be the norm, now, by contrast, Christian basilicas came to dominate as the singular locus for the eucharistic liturgy. And while the eucharist had, as noted, already been conceived of as a kind of cultic event, a sacrifice even, with divine qualities, it was now explicitly articulated as a replacement for the public sacrifices of the now-defunct pagan templa, on the one hand, and for those of the long-destroyed Jerusalem Temple, on the other. Christian liturgical orders like episkopos, presbyteros, and diakonos came to be seen as hieratic offices: i.e., that these Christian ministers were now the new sacrificers, replacing pagan sacrificers on the one hand and the Levitical priesthood on the other.9 Hence the Christianity we have received: singular bishops, surrounded by councils of priests and an entourage of deacons, the kleroi presiding over the eucharistic sacrifice together with the Christian laos, lauding their worship on the “new Sabbath” of Sunday over against the alleged obsolescence of Judaism and vanquished paganism. And politically, such a hieratic, public Christianity was quite useful to the newly Christianized Roman imperium, as a tool for reiterating pre-Christian Roman values as much as if not more than for catechizing gentiles into submission to Christ—precisely the reason so many early Christians left for the desert in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. The rest—episcopal councils, patriarchates, popes, Christian kings and emperors, the rise and fall of Christendom—is history.
It is a little precious to wring one’s hands over centuries in the face of millennia. On the one hand, it is absolutely true that the shape of things as we have inherited them was not strictly “apostolic” in character, at least if by that we mean that the apostles invented the eucharistic liturgies and systems which came to prevail in the late third and early fourth centuries and defined Christian worship ever after. And it is also true that we in the 21st century have more reason to take issue with at least some of these developments than late antique, medieval, and early modern Christians did. For one thing, we are rightly less invested in Christendom’s narratives about itself. As David Bentley Hart has argued at length in multiple venues, the main problem with Christendom is that it compromised the ethics of the gospel for the sake of imperial expediency, and the proof is in the pudding insofar as it did not work: the modern desire of traditionalists and integralists all to “restore” Christianity by retreating merely to a late antique, medieval, or early modern model of Christian society is therefore as arbitrary as it is morally grotesque. For another, contemporary movements for women’s liberation, politically, socially, and religiously, together with the renewal of theology in the 20th and 21st centuries, have coalesced to unveil how baseless traditional arguments for, say, an all-male priesthood or complementary gender roles within the Christian Church are. It is obvious that in Paul’s assemblies, the transcendence of sexed existence through baptism into Christ (Gal 3:28) meant that, at least in the context of the eucharistic assembly, cosmic distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, and male and female did not obtain, even if they continued to have relevance for the paths of sanctity Paul expected his assemblies to follow in their worldly lives.10 And finally, on this note, it is also equally obvious that the earliest Jesus Movement(s) were not in any sense anti-Jewish or even para-Jewish: they were founded and led by Jews, who thought of themselves as fully within Judaism, and not as superseding Judaism by the creation of a new mystery cult, a tertium genus,11 or a new imperial “religion.” In reality, gentile inclusion in the eucharistic assemblies through baptism did not require conversion to Judaism, per se, but it did involve its own form of Judaization through exclusive worship of the Jewish God and of the Jewish Messiah, and moral reformation in accordance with Jewish expectaitons.12 The separation of Judaism and Christianity as fully distinguishable ethnic and “religious” entities was gradual, piecemeal, and not really complete until the rise of Islam, if ever.13 So a prescriptivist reaction to the liturgical history outlined above—of a thoroughgoing primitivism or return to form of the earliest centuries, even at the expense of merely early ones—is understandable: in many ways, our situation is more analogous to that of the earliest Christians than it is to that of our more recent forbears in faith.
Yet on the other hand, it is certainly the case that Christianity as most people alive today have received it, known it, and practiced it is almost entirely defined by this imperialized form. Liturgically, intellectually, and practically, the basic shape of the Christian life—defined by a Sunday assembly headed by a clerical official and following a well-developed tradition of lectionary and homiletical commentary, capped by the sung or spoken confession of a conciliar creed and then the recitation of an inherited anaphora during the re-presentation of the eucharistic sacrifice—is so ubiquitous and normative for Christians, and has been for a little more than 1700 years now, that this kind of primitivism can easily reflect naïve optimism about the power of reconstruction rather than a real option forward. Indeed, the contemporary fragmentation of the Christian oikoumene (itself a conceptual artifact of the imperial church) along Assyrian, non-Chalcedonian or “Oriental Orthodox,” Chalcedonian or “Eastern Orthodox,” Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant lines is held together by relatively little beyond the thin points of commonality provided by the ecclesiological heritage represented by conciliar and imperial monepiscopacy. And it would be lying to say that real goods have not also come out of the demographic, social, and cultural changes of late antique and medieval Christians. There would be no Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, no Byzantine iconography, no Latin Mass (traditional or otherwise), no Anglican Evensong, no Christmas Carols or Paschal Vigils, no Halloween, etc. without this intervening set of liturgical changes. Much of what is distinctively Christian, both negative and positive, is tied to the history I have described here; so if there is to be retrieval of the liturgical practices most closely related to Christian Origins, there will have to be both sufficient cause and strategic care not to lose what goods have been procured needlessly from our nearly two millennia of worship.
Is there sufficient cause? Statistics around church-attendance and decline, before and now during the pandemic, would suggest yes: something about the inherited shape of Christian communities and practices is not working for most contemporary Americans. As I have written about here, there can be various reasons for the loss of one’s religion, but often it is reducible to a loss of intellectual or moral credibility as a cosmology and ethics, and liturgy is indisputably the primary place where we encounter a religion’s ability to orient us in relationship to the universe and in relationship to moral goodness. For instance, only 1/3 of American Catholics actually believe what the Catholic Church teaches about the eucharistic sacrifice: that certainly does not have nothing to do with the way that the Mass is ordinarily experienced today. Likewise, mass Catholic dissent from Catholic Social Teaching, whether positively or negatively, cannot be divorced from poor Catholic liturgical catechesis and community formation, either, not least since the Church has lost a great deal of moral credibility in the eyes of ordinary laypeople over its failure to successfully address the abuse crisis.14 Lex orandi, lex credendi, and, we might add, lex agendi. So in seeking to meet the contemporary scene with a form of Christianity that is both continuous with the Christian Tradition at large as well as sensitive to particular needs today, we may well wish to draw on streams within the Tradition that have fallen into disuse but which seem to better match our situation than those that have until now predominated.
The restoration of the eucharistia as the agape feast, of liturgical worship to the context of a domestic banquet, would seem to have many advantages in that evangelistic effort, but for brevity I will identify just a few. For one thing, a domestic Church would encourage more domestic—that is, married and potentially gender-diverse—clergy, rather than a clerical class that is of necessity divorced from the ordinary experiences of most of their parishioners.15 The associational character of such ecclesial communities would also provide an answer for the epidemic of loneliness and existential dread that many people feel in late capitalist societies: just as the earliest Christ-assemblies were eucharistic fellowships that extended familial bonds across familial boundaries to all baptized members of a particular household group, so, too, would contemporary domestic assemblies strengthen that sense of deep connection in a way that the parish system as it has come down to us generally does not in our context (hence the phenomenon of parish-hopping). Restoration of the eucharistic banquet would also reconnect more strongly and obviously the existential connection between Jesus’ apocalyptic and radically communistic politics of Jubilee, the economic practices of the earliest Christians, and the eschatological significance of the eucharist itself: the eucharistic feast is the memorial sacrifice of Jesus’ death and the proleptic messianic banquet, and for this reason it should be the place where the poor are guaranteed food to eat.16
Restoration of the normative eucharistic celebration to Saturday evening, at the conclusion of the Sabbath, would both reinforce the domestic setting—the eucharist is the Christian family gathering for dinner—as well as liturgically reinforce the existential connection to Judaism that is now normative in Christian academic theological discourse. It would also encourage and perhaps catalyze greater Christian participation in local Jewish liturgical life, with the caveat that this cannot and should not be done with any kind of missional mindset, but rather in a spirit of receptivity and desire for living engagement with the Scriptures and people of Israel. Christian Sunday morning assemblies could be retained, but as what they originally were: assemblies for teaching and prayer, at which the Eucharist’s distribution was from what remained of the previous night’s assemblies. Indeed, Sunday worship could acquire a whole new meaning if what was distributed was the collected eucharistic gifts of local domestic assemblies in the greater assembly of the whole church in a local parish or basilica. And for what it is worth, this practice would also better connect Western Christians—including the Chalcedonian Orthodox—to the practices of many Christians of more Eastern and Globally Southern origin, such as the Ethiopians, who traditionally worship on the Sabbath and who treat the Sunday celebration as secondary to it. Indeed, the Paschal triduum could be represented each week by Christian observation of Friday fasting in memory of Christ’s death, of the Sabbath as the day of Christ’s resting in the tomb having mystically accomplished the world’s creation, and of Sunday as the day of his resurrection—as is still retained officially in the weekly calendar of the Chalcedonian Orthodox, but absent as a living experience of time’s construction for arguably most individually.
Can all of this be done without sacrificing what inherited Christiana are genuinely worthy of preservation? Of course it can. The question is not whether synthesis is possible, but whether we are willing to do the work of trying to effect it—that is, how interested in Christian renewal we really are.
See Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2014), 19-64.
McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship, 65-110.
See John Fotopoulos, Food Offered to Idols in Roman Corinth: A Social-Rhetorical Reconsideration of 1 Corinthians 8:1-11:1, WUNT 2.151 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).
It is worth pointing out that ἀνάμνησις occurs only a few times in the Septuagint, and three of them are sacrificial in character (LXX Lev 24:7; Num 10:10; Ps 37:1).
See M. David Litwa, We Are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul’s Soteriology, ZNW 187 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), especially 119-171, for more on pneumatic transformation.
See Alistair Stewart, The Original Bishops: Office and Order in the First Christian Centuries (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2014). It is on his reconstruction that I am dependent in what follows, though sadly the Kindle edition lacks page numbers.
See Jordan Ryan, The Role of the Synagogue in the Aims of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 22-78.
See Ute E. Eisen, Women Officeholders in Early Christianity: Epigraphical and Literary Studies (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 2000); Patricia Cox Miller, Women in Early Christianity: Translations from Greek Texts (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005); Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek, eds. and trans., Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2011); Ally Kateusz, Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). It is the historical ubiquity of women’s ordained leadership in the earliest centuries only gradually snuffed out by changing theologies and social needs that, I wager, leaves contemporary Catholic and Orthodox theology in such a pickle when trying to justify the restriction of the priesthood to men today. See, e.g., Gabrielle Thomas and Elena Narinskaya, eds., Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church: Explorations in Theology and Practice (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2020).
The English word priest comes from the Greek word presbyteros, and derives as such: presbyteros —> presbyter —> prester —> prest —> priest; this word simply means “elder.” But typically, we use it to translate the Hebrew kohen and the Greek hiereus, both of which mean “priest” more in the sense we mean it, as someone who presides at a sacrifice.
See, e.g., David J. Rudolph, “Paul’s ‘Rule in All the Churches’ (1 Cor 7:17-24) and Torah-Defined Ecclesiological Variegation,” Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 5 (2010): 1-23; idem, A Jew to the Jews: Jewish Contours of Pauline Flexibility in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2011).
See Terence L. Donaldson, Gentile Christian Identity From Cornelius to Constantine: The Nations, the Parting of the Ways, and Roman Imperial Ideology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).
See Paula Fredriksen, “How Jewish is God? Divine Ethnicity in Paul’s Theology,” JBL 137 (2018): 193-212; eadem, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
See Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).
See Adam A.J. Deville, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power (New York: Angelico Press, 2019).
See Deville, ed., Married Priests in the Catholic Church (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021).
See Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), and Roman Montero, All Things in Common: The Economic Practices of the Early Christians (Eugene, OR: Resource, 2017).
Restore the Agape Feast
I have seen this cry come from many corners of Christianity, most low-church/house church Protestants, some Anglican. But now to hear it from a high-church context, so succinctly explained tells me this is really where we are headed.