Did early Christians Worship Openly or Secretly?

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neilgodfrey
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Did early Christians Worship Openly or Secretly?

Post by neilgodfrey »

In the letters of Paul we encounter the admonition that worshipers should not look like mad people to outsiders. Example: What if someone comes in on your worship and finds you babbling in nonsense-sounding tongues? The gospels have Jesus teaching followers to let their light shine for all to see their good works.

But then we come to early accounts of persecution of some kind in which the rationale for viewing Christians as undesirables is their secrecy in worship and the suspicions that this arouses. Example: Minucius Felix reports that among pagans there are suspicions of cannibalism and incestuous orgies behind closed doors after lights out. It is easy to imagine such lurid accusations if Christians were indeed secretive in their practices.

One can understand a culture of secrecy if Christians are seeking to avoid persecution but if we accept the arguments that there was in fact relatively little persecution in those early years, and therefore no widespread cause for fear of being thrown to the lions merely because one is a Christian, why would Christians appear to go against the instructions we read in Paul and the gospels and worship in secret?

If the persecutions were justified by suspicions arising from secrecy then the secrecy must have preceded persecutions. What might have led to a change from openness to secrecy, if that's what happened?

This question may also relate to the notion that early Christianity was akin to "mystery cults". But the evidence we have indicates pagans knew at least the fundamentals of what happened in pagan mystery cults but they seem to have had no idea about Christianity (e.g. except for a report we find in a letter from Pliny to Trajan -- but I think that may not be genuine.)

I am speaking of Christians here as one body but I'm open to any response that applies to any part of "the Christian phenomenon" and makes sense of the evidence for apparent secrecy.
Giuseppe
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Re: Did early Christians Worship Openly or Secretly?

Post by Giuseppe »

To me, all that negative hearsay remembers the accusations of anti-nomianism: if the Law of the Creator has to be disobeyed, then the sin itself is a tool of liberation. Philo accused in similar terms some anti-demiurgists of the his time.

Someone has advanced the hypothesis that the same worship of a crucified man is a form of antinomianism (the creator's Law having cursed who is hanged on the tree).
Paul the Uncertain
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Re: Did early Christians Worship Openly or Secretly?

Post by Paul the Uncertain »

Not a comprehensive answer, but there are some psychological avenues to explore, I think.

Secrecy contributes to the maintenance of a sense of sacredness. To the profane witness, baptism looks a lot like taking a bath and in the eucharist, it would look like there's a lot of fuss being made over a snack of bread and watered wine.

Ideally, the believer would look upon the same scenes and see something profound going on. That's easier to achieve if there isn't somebody around who's oberving, "it's a cracker, for crying out loud." On the contrary, everybody around is saying, "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof." That can be very powerful (it works in politics, too, but that's another story).

Also psychologically, there can be a sense of taboo about loose talk concerning the supernatural. Yeats, in his essay "Magic" wrote,
They say in the Aran Islands that if you speak overmuch of the things of Faery your tongue becomes
like a stone, and it seems to me, though doubtless naturalistic reason would call it Auto-suggestion or
the like, that I have often felt my tongue become just so heavy and clumsy. More than once, too, as I
wrote this very essay I have become uneasy, and have torn up some paragraph, not for any literary
reason, but because some incident or some symbol that would perhaps have meant nothing to the
reader, seemed, I know not why, to belong to hidden things.
That's not a complete account of the pychology of secrecy to be sure. But just those two complementary impulses might explain some of a felt preference for secrecy. And there are other factors, more sociological than psychological, like establishing a cadre of "those in the know" who are "superior" to others who look forward to becoming "in the know," who in turn are already "superior" to those outside the group who don't even know that they aren't "in the know."

Just my two cents.
andrewcriddle
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Re: Did early Christians Worship Openly or Secretly?

Post by andrewcriddle »

One should probably distinguish the Synaxis or Worship Service which was in principle open to all, (in practice in times of persecution discretion was necessary), and the sacramental services of Baptism and Eucharist which were from early Christian times only open to Christians and maybe to really serious enquirers.

See e.g. Dix Shape of the Liturgy

Andrew Criddle
rgprice
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Re: Did early Christians Worship Openly or Secretly?

Post by rgprice »

I'm not sure how much worship was really going on. The cannibalism charge seems to a misunderstanding of the Eucharist - eating the body and drinking the blood. I think the earliest "persecution" that occurred had to do with Paul's advocacy against circumcision and the Law among communities of Jewish proselytes, which led to persecution by Jews. But this had to do with the teachings against the Law and circumcision.

It seems that a huge portion of the supposed persecution of Christian was all fabricated by martyrologists. So I think that before we can address a question like this, we first have to establish the facts of the charge.

It seems that "Paul's ministry", if it even really existed (and when we aren't sure) was extremely small. There is little or no evidence of early Christian worship until the 3rd or fourth centuries. To what extent was Christianity really a working religion and to what extent was it an academic pursuit engaged in my readers of scriptures and stories prior to Constantine? I think that the actual practice of "Christianity" as a distinct working religion was extremely small prior to the fourth century.
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Irish1975
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Re: Did early Christians Worship Openly or Secretly?

Post by Irish1975 »

2 Corinthians 5:11-15 probably says something about (a) Paul’s ecstatic mode of worship, and (b) how it was in those “channeling” experiences that he both received and delivered the belief in the central mystery of Christ worship, i.e. the redemptive death and resurrection of Christ:

Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest to God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences. We are not again commending ourselves to you but are giving you an occasion to be proud of us, so that you will have an answer for those who take pride in appearance and not in heart. For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are of sound mind, it is for you [εἴτε γὰρ ἐξέστημεν, θεῷ· εἴτε σωφρονοῦμεν, ὑμῖν]. For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.

Paul certainly gives multiple hints that he worked himself into a state of frenzy, perhaps epilepsy, when he mediated Christ to his followers. It makes sense that he would not want profane eyes to see this or to know about it. This could have been the origin of the secrecy of Christian worship, even if the form of that worship changed in the later generations (as surely it did).
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