Clarification on the inquiry’s purpose

If missed Part 1, you can find it here: https://michaelrdurso.wordpress.com/2022/02/04/communion-more-than-a-ceremonial-pill/.

The purpose of this inquiry should be explained to avoid confusion. There are some who would say that the way the ancient church operated is the very way the modern church should operate. By virtue of the fact that it was first and earliest, the thought goes, it should be what we model today. There are a number of problems with this view. History can be defined in many different ways, and one of the ways it could be thought of is as a stream of happenings or events. Let’s grant that view temporarily. There is a tendency to think of anything that has come and gone as having come and gone for a reason, that is, if it is past, then it has rightly been moved past. This view of history views progress in time as progress in development, history as perpetual improvement. This would be what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” The best you can do is to get with the times, and the worst you can do is be “on the wrong side of history.” But to take this view you have to assume that if something has happened, then it ought to have happened. Cultural changes and decisions concurrent with the chronological progress to tomorrow is the progress that should happen, because yesterday is in the past. But that would mean, that to the people of the 1920’s, the developments and crimes of Nazism, Fascism, and Communism to follow in the 30’s and 40’s ought to have happened. Certainly there are things in history that ought not to have happened.

“Chronological snobbery” is the type of confusion I’m trying to avoid, although in the opposite direction.

In the other direction, then, there are those who would argue, from a religious fundamentalist perspective, that we must continually seek to go back, that those earliest writers must be the most reliable as they are closest to the source. In a sense, and in a particular way, they are perfectly right. This is why it matters a great deal when the biblical material was written. If it was written early, closer to the events they depict, then that adds to their credibility as witnesses. If they were written much later, then confidence in the documents diminishes. So in a sense, this is a good view to take for many subjects. But this doesn’t always work.

It isn’t always the case that the oldest way is the best way, or that the earliest Church Fathers are more trustworthy sources of biblical interpretation just because they wrote in a time closer to the crucifixion than we do. The Church as a collective entity has had centuries more than the Fathers had to study the relevant texts, and methods of interpretation have developed and changed, sometimes right and sometimes wrong. They may have written closer in time to the events, and they may have gotten many things right, but we also live in a time that benefits from centuries of study and collective scrutiny of ideas. We are not beholden to the conclusions and methods of the ancient church.

Older can never mean better, or right, purely on the basis of its oldness. The modern church need not conform exactly to practices and methods of the ancient church on the basis of its ancientness. The “happening” of their practice is not necessarily what ought to have happened just because it happened a long time ago.

Interestingly enough, with as important as the communion meal has been to the church, and in the New Testament, scarce details of the practice have been preserved from those earliest expressions of the Church. It seems this must be intentional on the part of the Divine Author. If providence has shaped the biblical canon as we have it today, then that must mean the text contains what it ought to contain, no more or less. It seems reasonable, then, to say that a practice taught in Scripture without practical specifics has no perfect or correct form. If the text does not specify how, then our focus should immediately become why, and the next task is to conform our practice to fulfill the why rather than the how.

I have no interest here in mere conformity to mechanics or technique. My purpose here is to attempt to identify as accurately as possible, not how the earliest churches took the bread and cup so as to do likewise, but identify what practical and spiritual function it was intended to serve in the community of believers so that we might then benefit from the benefit Christ intended. I might conclude that we are “doing it” exactly right, and that will be a successful discovery. I might end up understanding something different than the current practice, and that would also be a success.

The search goes on.