Can 2000 years of history be wrong?
I had just finished leading a workshop on ‘Worship in the Bible’ at the recent TWIST conference. I had traced the Bible's teaching on the subject from the Old Testament into the New, making the biblically obvious point that how the Bible talks about worship is very different from how we talk about it today. When we mention the word ‘worship’, we are nearly always talking about some aspect of church services, whereas ‘worship’ in the New Testament is nearly always about Christ and his sacrifice, and the life of honour and obedience lived by those he has redeemed.
Among other things, I had also pointed out how quickly the early Christians had reverted to using Old Testament temple and worship language to describe New Testament church life (Christian ministers as ‘priests’ etc.), and how this mistake had continued for much of church history.
One of the delegates rolled up to chat afterwards, and asked a very interesting question: “If it's been Christian practice for most of church history to describe our church services as ‘worship’, then wouldn't we have to be very, very sure of ourselves before we declared 2000 years of church history mistaken?”
I mumbled something about tradition sometimes being a dignified name for ‘error grown old’, and thanked him for his point.
It was only afterwards that (typically) I thought of what I should have said. We shouldn't be at all surprised that the early church quickly fell back into Old Testament ways of thinking about church life, nor that this problem has persisted ever since. We shouldn't be surprised because that's precisely what we see happening in the New Testament itself.
From the very beginning, the relationship of the Old Covenant to the New was a crucial (excuse the pun) issue for Christians, and one which they frequently got wrong. Large swathes of Paul's letters, large portions of Acts, and pretty much the whole of Hebrews are devoted to clarifying the radical difference Jesus makes in God's history of salvation, and the problems that can follow when this is not properly understood. The mistake, in each case, was to fail to see how Jesus had fulfilled the Old Testament, and thus to drag Old Testament practices over into the New.
Thinking and talking about church as a temple-like ‘worship’ event is but one example of the tendency. It is with us still.