Surviving and Growing in an Era of Change

Andrew Robinson’s helpful article Liturgy Schmiturgy prompts the following reflection about a lesson to be learned from early Christian history about the survival and propagation of the Christian faith. I am thinking of the decades before and after the close of the apostolic age in circa AD 100. The great apostolic leaders had passed on, there was considerable theological confusion due to Gnosticism and other deviant views and, furthermore, the Lord had not returned.

One interesting element in apostolic and early post-apostolic Christianity was a willingness to learn from Jewish practices. Initially, the first Christians were Jews and the Jewish influence in the churches continued throughout the first century, although diminishingly. So Christianity grew out of the soil of Judaism, a Judaism that in previous centuries had survived the fires of persecution on the one hand and the subtle syncretistic seduction of Greek beliefs and practices on the other. The Jews were careful to adopt activities that enabled them to survive in hostile environments, such was their commitments to their beliefs. It was no accident that these early Christians learned from and adapted the practices of the Jews.

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