Early Christian Spirituality
February 27, 2010 3:59pm
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photo by Mercedes Camelo
The attitude of the first Christians toward Scripture differed in no significant way than that of believing Jews.
Every word of the sacred text was pregnant with divine meaning and everything of religious significance was expressed in the context of biblical categories and by means of biblical language consequently, the entire religious experience of the early church was steeped in and articulated by biblical symbolism.
At first this symbolism was drawn entirely from the Hebrew Scriptures. Late, as we have seen, the Christian community produced its own writings which were themselves profoundly influenced by the Old Testament.
Proclamation, the preaching of the gospel to those who had not yet heard it, was the first task of the new community that was inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus.
As we see from the records of the earliest preaching by Peter, Paul, and the other apostles as recounted in the Acts of the Apostles, every effort was made to interpret the Christ-event in terms of the promises given to the ancestors in the Old Testament. Jesus was presented in the preaching of the early church as the New Adam, the New Moses, the prophet promised in Deuteronomy, the promised heirs to the David throne, the Isaiah Suffering Servant, and the mysterious Son of Man in the Book of Daniel.
All of the titles that the early church employed in order to understand the Old Testament and transformed by the Christian experience of Jesus to become vehicles for the interpretation of his life, work and destiny.
Catechesis, the further formation of new converts in the life of Christ was likewise virtually entirely biblical as was the prayer life, both liturgical and individual, of the early Christians.
The celebration of baptism in connection with the solemnity of the resurrection (Easter) was an initiation of the Christian into the mystery of Christ in his passion, death, and resurrection understood against the background of creation, the fall, the flood, the promise to the ancestors, the exodus, the covenant, the exile, and the return, all understood as types of salvation finally effected in Christ and now communicated to the members of the believing community.
Eucharist, the commemoration of the Lord’s last supper with his disciples, was interpreted by the Christian community against the background of the paschal meal. Thus, the death of Jesus was understood as an exodus by which Jesus, the New Moses, leads the community to life and freedom in a new and eternals covenant that was sealed in his blood, shed for them on Calvary.
The daily prayer of the early Christians consisted of the psalms of the Old Testament as well as the prayer that Jesus himself had taught them (the Our Father (see Luke 11:1-4), which was itself profoundly scriptural.
Theology as it developed in the early church, beginning with the work of the apologists and that of the masters of the earliest catechetical schools of Alexandria and Antioch, consisted entirely in the exegesis of Scripture.
In attempting to make the new teaching acceptable to the Jews, the Christians relied almost exclusively on the exposition of the Hebrew Scriptures as prophesy fulfilled in Jesus. For the Gentiles, especially those knowledgeable in philosophy, the exposition of the Scriptures aimed at showing the reasonableness of the biblical material and its compatibility with pagan learning.
Indeed it was not until the high Middle Ages that theology began to take an independent dialectical form that relied primarily on philosophy rather than on Scripture.
In short, the Scriptures played the role in the religious experience of the early church that the Second Vatican Council claimed it should play in the life of Christians of our own day.
Scripture was indeed the “pure and perennial source of the spiritual life” (Dogmatic Constitutions on Divine Revelation) Dei Verbum, chapter 6, art. 21).
