Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical
Frank C. Senn
Number of quotes: 26
Book ID: 54 Page: 4
Section: 2A5,2A1,2A2
As the whole of human life and endeavors is a system of rituals, so is the life and mission of the Christian community a system of rituals.. . . .
The rites of washing (baptism) and eating and drinking together (eucharistic meal) that Jesus instituted and commanded to be done had a prehistory in Judaism and corollary rites in other religions.
Quote ID: 1205
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 54 Page: 5
Section: 2E6
The Christian liturgy, like the Bible on which it is largely based, makes ample use of symbolic and metaphorical language simply because sacred reality can only be expressed in images and symbols. This is why we must be on our guard against the Western demotion of symbolic language, as when it is said, “This is only a symbol.” Western thought has sometimes driven a wedge between “symbol” and “reality.” But the language of liturgy, like the language of the Bible, does not know of such a differentiation. Reality is expressed in symbolic language.
Quote ID: 1206
Time Periods: 27
Book ID: 54 Page: 10
Section: 2A1
Mosaics on early Christian baptistery walls suggest that the candidates were baptized naked, which was also the case with the Jewish rite.
Quote ID: 1207
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 54 Page: 21
Section: 2A4
The Pentecost of the Spirit fulfilled the Pentecost of the Law. Because the events commemorated in these three great festivals were personified in Jesus the Christ and his Spirit, there was no need for Christians to continue celebrating the old festivals. But the content of these festivals was spiritualized and elements of their meaning were retained and transformed in the new Christian festivals that celebrated the person and work of Jesus the Christ and his Spirit.
Quote ID: 1208
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 54 Page: 30
Section: 2A4,2B1
The profound water symbolism of baptism appeals to something aboriginal in human nature. Eating and drinking in the eucharist employ our most primal appetites. The image of the God-human may be at least five thousand years old, and the symbol of the trinity may be even older.{2}[footnote 2] See Carl-Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), 56ff.
PJ: Three in one.
Quote ID: 1209
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 54 Page: 31
Section: 2A6
Augustine of Hippo spoke of the visibility of the word: “The word comes to an element, and so there is a sacrament, that is, a sort of visible word.”. . . .
If we ask why we need such visible words, there is also a standard answer in the Christian tradition. Thomas Aquinas summarized it when he noted that human beings are “composed of body and soul, to whom the sacramental medicine is proportioned, that through a visible thing touches the body and through a word is believed by the soul.” It is by its visibility, its sign-value, its sacramentality, that God’s word to us is no mere transmission between pure spirits, but communication between persons. In our communion with God and with one another, we communicate through our bodies. Our bodily selves are our real selves. God takes that into account when communicating with us. The God whose word to us is sacramental is the God who comes to us to be spoken to and to speak. This is the God who has body and blood, the God who can enter deeply into our own flesh.
Quote ID: 1210
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 54 Page: 36/37
Section: 3C1
Jungmann also showed how anti-Arian concerns prompted the church to shift the role of Christ from mediator of worship to object of worship. This is seen especially in the doxological conclusion of prayers. We have seen examples of early Christian prayers which are addressed to God the Father “through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord.” The Arians, who held that the Son is subordinate to the Father, could justify their position by appealing to the public prayers of the church. The result was that prayer formularies were changed to stress the co-equality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So, if we may take this one formula as an example, a doxology such as “Gloria Patri per Filium in Spiritu Sancto” (Glory to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit) was changed to “Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto” (Glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit). In a similar way, Catholics in Spain during the fifth century, in reaction to the Arian Visigoths, began adding to the termination of Latin collects, “through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord,” the expansion “who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.” The result of these changes, according to Jungmann, was that “stress was now placed not on what unites us to God (Christ as one of us in his human nature, Christ our brother), but on what separates us from God (God’s infinite majesty).”
Quote ID: 1211
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 54 Page: 39
Section: 3C1
A true theology of Christian liturgy must be rooted in a theology of the holy Trinity.
Quote ID: 1212
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 54 Page: 46
Section: 3C1
Orthodoxia means “right praise” or “true worship” as well as “right opinion.” But, of course, the praise and worship is “right” only if it is directed to the right God. Orthodox liturgy is that which prays to and worships the Holy Trinity.
Quote ID: 1213
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 54 Page: 77
Section: 2A4
Probably the oldest eucharistic prayer text is that provided by Hippolytus of Rome, in the Apostolic Tradition, c. 215.The Apostolic Tradition is probably the most important document on the life and practice of the early church to have survived from the early centuries of Christianity. It is a complete manual for church life, including prayers for ordination and descriptions of the ordering of ministries; a detailed portrayal of the processes and rites of Christian initiation; and miscellaneous church observances ranging from the agape meal to daily prayer.
Quote ID: 1214
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 54 Page: 173/174
Section: 1A
Moreover, the “barbarians” were not pagans; they had been converted by Arian missionaries from Constantinople. So the successive waves of peoples – Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, and Lombards – were not enemies of Christianity. Most likely, the Roman Empire never “fell” in the conventional sense of the word.
Quote ID: 1215
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 54 Page: 174
Section: 3D2
Independent kingdoms were carved out of Italy by Odoacer (476-493) and Theodoric (493-526). In spite of their glorification of the warrior, it seems that the Ostrogoths were content to live in peace with the Romans and even assimilate Roman ways and institutions. Theodoric the Great sought accommodation between Catholic Romans and Arian Goths, and even a better relationship between the Roman pope and the Byzantine emperor, since he craved the recognition of both. After the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476, there was no further emperor in the West until Charlemagne in 800. But the Germanic commanders and kings still regarded themselves as nominal subjects of the Roman Emperor enthroned in Constantinople.
Quote ID: 1216
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 54 Page: 174/175
Section: 3A1,4B
In the sixth century, these Gothic kingdoms were overrun by the Lombards, although the newcomers were not able to conquer either Rome or Ravenna. The Italian peninsula was ruined by wars between the Lombards and the eastern Roman Emperors, who tried to reclaim Italy as a part of the Roman Empire. They did not succeed.Only the pope remained as a representative of the old culture, and the popes increasingly sided with the Gothic kings against the Byzantine emperors. This independent position of the papacy was firmly established when King Pippin of the Franks compelled the Lombards to surrender the territories of the Byzantine exarchate and turned them over, not to the emperor, but to the see of St. Peter as a papal state in 756. Pope Stephen II made Pippin, his wife and sons, “patricians of the Romans.”
Quote ID: 1217
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 54 Page: 175
Section: 3D2
The Franks, originating in the Lower Rhineland, were able to carve out a vast kingdom that included the present-day Low Countries, the Rhineland, and France. The Roman church had looked favorable on the Franks since the conversion of King Clovis (481-511) to Catholic Christianity (whether from Arianism or paganism is not clear). The Carolingian dynasty of Charles Martel, Pippin the Short, and Charlemagne succeeded, step by step, in consolidating power and commanding the loyalty of chieftans.
Quote ID: 1218
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 54 Page: 175/176
Section: 3A4C,3G
The prospects of political and ecclesiastical stability under this dynasty were blessed by the church in the anointing of Pippin as king of Boniface and the crowning of Charlemagne as emperor at Saint Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Day, 800, by Pope Leo III. In the interests of shoring up law and order in their unruly realm, the Carolingians imported Roman books and practices into their court and churches, but inevitably they put their own stamp on them in the transmission of texts and the development of praxis.
Quote ID: 1219
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 54 Page: 184
Section: 2A4
The procession into the church was quite elaborate. The schola cantorum sang the Introit psalm while the pope entered, accompanied by the arch deacon and a deacon. The pope was preceded by a subdeacon bearing incense and seven acolytes holding lighted tapers. All of these ceremonial trappings – the choir of singers, the assistant on either arm, the lights and incense – were influences from imperial court protocol, now acquiring spiritual significance.
Quote ID: 1221
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 54 Page: 188
Section: 2E4
The church year calendar as it is known today in the Western churches came to full development in the period of the sacramentaries. Sunday had been firmly established since early times as the fixed day of Christian assembly. Not until the ninth century were saints’ days allowed to take precedence over the Lord’s Day, with propers for the lesser festival replacing those of the Sunday in Eucharistic liturgy.Easter, too, was well established since early Christian times, and since the end of the fourth century, especially through the influence of Jerusalem, Holy Week was also well established.
Quote ID: 1222
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 54 Page: 194
Section: 2A1,2D
There were two sources for the theology of confirmation. First is in the letter of Pope Innocent I to Bishop Decentius of Gubbio (c. 416), to which we have already referred. On the post-baptismal ceremonies Innocent asserts: “it belongs solely to the episcopal office that bishops consign and give the Paraclete Spirit.” He cites the example of the apostles in Acts 8 going to Samaria to confirm the work done there by Philip the deacon by laying their hands on the newly baptized and giving them the Holy Spirit.. . . .
It should be noted that Jerome, who had served as secretary to Pope Damasus until the latter’s death in 384, and who knew Innocent and was supported by this pope in his monastic endeavors in Palestine after 401, lampooned the notion that “from the bishop alone proceeds the calling down of the Holy Spirit” on the baptismal candidates.
Quote ID: 1223
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 54 Page: 198
Section: 2E2
The Gallican-Celtic monastic rules claim a spiritual lineage that goes back to the desert fathers of Egypt, as communicated to Western Christians through John Cassian. He is thought to have been born around 360 in Scythia Minor (present-day Romania) near the delta of the Danube. He went to Egypt as a young monk and encountered hermetic monasticism, possibly including the Rule of Pachomius to which he refers in the Preface to his Institutes. In this famous and influential work, written between 417 and 425, Cassian is not giving a history of Egyptian monasticism, but is drawing on his memory of it to reform and establish on a sounder basis Gallican monasticism.
Quote ID: 1224
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 54 Page: 199
Section: 2E2
Cassian’s little history is intended to prove that monks are traditional Christians, perhaps because there were still plenty of vocal critics of monasticism in the Western church. But he also wanted to show that monasticism was, by the fifth century, a long-established tradition in the East. The Gauls wish to have monks; but they do not know how to be monks. All they need to do is to conform to a long-established and well-tested manner of ascetic life that has nothing in it of novelty.Yet here lay the first of Cassian’s difficulties. To imitate Egypt invited trouble in Gaul. The climate of Provence and the character of its people prevented the austere life that prevailed in Egypt. For Cassian, Egypt was heaven on earth; but he must temper Egyptian practices where they are unsuitable with customs from less rigorous sources. As he wrote in the introduction to the Institutes,
I do not believe that any way of life, that might newly be designed in Gaul, could be better or more reasonable than the institutes which began in the age of the apostles and have been kept in the monasteries of Egypt and Palestine to this day. But I shall take this liberty: that if I think anything in the rules of Egypt are by climate or by difference of habits impossible or hard in this country, I shall temper the Egyptian customs by those of Palestine and Mesopotamia.
Quote ID: 1225
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 54 Page: 213
Section: 2E3
The floor plans of early medieval church buildings followed those of the ancient basilicas: a central nave leading to an apse or a choir, with side aisles. The major difference is that the altar was pushed farther into the apse, sometimes butting up against the east wall, in order to accommodate a choir section in which monks or canons could gather to sing the divine office. In cathedrals this also displaced the bishop’s throne to the side. Thus, the defining liturgical characteristic of the basilican plan – the centrality of the bishop’s chair with the surrounding benches of presbyters – was lost in the medieval churches.
Quote ID: 1226
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 54 Page: 213
Section: 4B
In typical Romanesque architecture, the classical columns of the Roman basilicas gave way to massive piers supporting rounded stone arches. There are few decorations and very small windows, giving the impression of a medieval fortress (which, indeed, the church sometimes was). The cathedral at Worms in Germany, built c. 1182-1234, actually has four massive towers, one at each corner. What added to the massiveness of the walls and columns was the concern to build stone roofs. The timber roofs over the old basilicas, it was thought, lacked dignity and could easily be destroyed by fire. But the Roman art of vaulting such large buildings demanded a technical knowledge that had largely been lost. As a result, the eleventh and twelfth centuries became times of ceaseless experimentation.
Quote ID: 1227
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 54 Page: 242
Section: 2A2
The display of the eucharistic host at the elevation during the words of institution, which was deemed by many to be the high point of the mass, fits naturally into this architectural and theological context. The spiritual satisfaction derived from gazing upon the host in contemplation was certainly one reason for the growing infrequency of reception of Holy Communion, along with the rules of abstinence before receiving the sacrament and the sense of personal unworthiness in the presence of Christ himself in his sacramental body.It is important to take this empirical worldview – that what is real is what is seen – into account as background for the most important issue in sacramental theology during the Western Middle Ages: the real presence.
Quote ID: 1228
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 54 Page: 243
Section: 2A2
The witness of the church fathers is unequivocal that what the faithful receive in Holy Communion is the body and blood of Christ, even if they variously refer to the bread and wine as figures (figurae), types (typoi), antitypes (antitypoi), or signs (sacramenta) of the body and blood of Christ. The earliest discussion of an act or formula by which the bread and wine are changed (metabole, metarruthmizo, convertere) into the body and blood of Christ can be traced to the fourth century.
Quote ID: 1229
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 54 Page: 248
Section: 2D
The issue of the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament of the altar was the dominant concern in sacramental theology during the Middle Ages in the West.
Quote ID: 1230
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 54 Page: 487
Section: 1B
The consequence of the destruction of the Byzantine Empire, in the Russian point of view, was that guardianship of Orthodoxy passed from Constantinople to Moscow. The monk Philotheos, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, formulated the theory that Moscow was the “third Rome.” The first Rome had fallen because of heresy; the second Rome (Constantinople) had fallen because of unfaithfulness; “but a new third Rome has sprung up in the north, illuminating the whole universe like a sun . . . the third will stand till the end of history; a fourth Rome is inconceivable.”Naturally, this ideology served the expansionist aims of the Dukes of Moscow, who became the caesars (czars) of the Third Rome.
Quote ID: 1231
Time Periods: 17
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