Cultus vs ethical path vs cerebral belief. . .

The fact that we do not have definitive records from early Christianity does not seem to prevent those who want to draw conclusions from drawing the conclusions they favor.  I am thinking here of the myth of the simple faith of Jesus.  How many have been tempted to minimize both doctrinal truth and institutional worship as a late and unwelcome invention?  You do not need to be Roman or even among the seven sisters of Evangelical Christianity to hold to your sacred truth over fact.  Lutherans do it as well.  Most are drawn to the mythology of an early and pristine Christianity uncluttered by doctrine, liturgical form and test, and a sacramental understanding of things.  Instead they combine to preserve the falsehood that early Christians would be scandalized by what institutional Christianity has become and fear the devil won after all.  They would insist that the recovery of a simple, easy, non-cultic form of Christianity is the cause which will save us and that anything else is an imposition upon the first Christians and a distortion of any kind of church they would have known.

They have sold to us the lie that early Christians worshiped in their living rooms in a first century version of a Barcalounger while being engaged either by a cerebral version of the faith or exhorted to a certain moral shape of everyday life.  They have come to the conclusion that there were no altars in early Christianity but only tables -- the same ones that held lunch and afternoon tea -- and that any development of a religion of doctrinal tenets, liturgical worship, vestments, chant, and altars was a deformation rather than a formative maturation.  So their goal has been as much as possible to disdain the present in favor of such a pristine Christianity of potlucks, universalism, and love for everyone.  Their vision has exchanged the vertical for the horizontal and encouraged us to a noble simplicity over the excesses of later eras.

Are they correct?  It would seem that some on both sides of the theological spectrum want to agree with their history of it all.  The evangelicals were sure all along that nothing mattered except people being happy though they differed on how to make them happy (rigorous moral living or consent to the right set of doctrinal propositions.  Bronze age Lutherans somewhat embarrassed by their own liturgy and vestments seem as likely to concede that what God wants is right believing and that nothing else matters all that much (from sacraments to good works!).  Preaching, believing, and right acting are all that really matter and the rest is, well, adiaphora (falsely meaning nothing all that important).  They marvel at how the Church devolved into a cultic religion.  I do just the opposite.  I am amazed at how quickly Christians were able to leave behind their forced gatherings in homes for proper church buildings and all the accoutrements of worship.  Constantine must have been a very powerful man to be blamed for everything from invoking what is Scripture and what is not to the corruption of a simple faith into a complex one of creeds and truth statements.

The problem we have today is that some insist upon framing their lives as Christians and their association with the Church in the realm of volunteers who share a set of words on paper and who live the Amish paradise of a most unceremonial pattern of worship.  However, worship is not some little sideline for some in the faith but the place where we are nearest to God and actually receive His grace through means and glimpse the promise of the eternal to come.  Doctrine does not live in the realm of reasoned proposition or theoretical faith held mostly by the mind but is how we live out our faith together. Doctrine touches every aspect of Christian life.  That is the genius of lex orandi lex credendi.  The phrase gets this correlation between doctrinal integrity and liturgical unity, between conceptualizing God and meeting Him where He is to be found (means of grace).

Luther, the modern Roman Liturgical Movement, moralistic and therapeutic deism, and the goal of a noble simplicity all got it wrong if they insisted that heart and mind were where it happened over Word and Sacrament.  BoGiertz got it correct.  Mission and worship do not compete but are different sizes of the same coin.  Let's just be radical here.  If you think Jesus would be shocked and offended by vestments, pipe organs, choirs, chant, altar parments, crucifixes, bowing, kneeling, and the like, then you know a different Jesus than does the Scripture and the blessed who hear and believe.  You cannot read the passages on worship in the Old Testament and then jump to St. John the Divine's vision of Revelation and presume that in between God just wants us to gather around the kitchen table and much upon some symbolic food along with supper, think about Jesus and how we can follow Him, and keep the doctrine stupidly simple.  I am tired of those who have made Mid-Century Modern into a religious architectural style and entertainment into worship but I am also weary of having to defend to those who want it all but less of it that Christianity is cultus and not simply ethical path, that this faith is about a real taste and vision of eternity and not simply how to have your best life now.  We have surely screwed up a few things over time but recognizing the liturgical shape of worship and the Christian life is not one of them.  St. Matthew's Gospel begins and ends with Immanuel -- from the name given to the Child born of a Virgin to the promise of the Risen Savior.  This Immanuel takes shape, form, and flavor in the Holy Eucharist and within it unfolds the liturgical and ceremonial shape of how then we live.  Faith comes by hearing the Word but it does not live solely in the mind.  We behold Him not merely with the ear but with all the senses.