Tried With Fire

I am continuing my reading of A Brief History of Sunday by Justo Gonzalez. It's quite a page turner and has whet my appetite to read more church history. Here are some of my impressions after reading about the Middle Ages. This is the era that adopted the doctrine of transubstantiation - the Communion bread and cup become the actual physical body and blood of Jesus during the celebration of mass. This belief was widely held and spread via stories of a miraculous transformation before it was formally adopted as church dogma . So "popular piety and experiences in worship moved ahead of theological development." This doctrine changed the tone of mass from a joyous celebration to a "fearsome experience." In R.C. Sproul's lectures on Martin Luther, he described the young Luther as trembling and being barely able to speak when he performed his first mass for fear of mishandling the body and blood of Christ. This belief also changed how communion was served b...

Paulus Orosius (375-418) was a disciple of Augustine. He was from Hispania or what is now modern Portugal. He had been with Augustine, helped collaborate on the City of God , and returned home. By now, his home and most of Western Europe were invaded by Germanic tribes better known as "Barbarians." This is what he wrote: "If the only reason why the barbarians have been sent within the confines of the Roman borders was that throughout the East and West the church of Christ will be full of Huns and Suevi, of Vandals, and Burgundians, of diverse and innumerable peoples, then the mercy of God is to be praised and exalted, because so many people have attained a knowledge of truth that they would never have had without these events, even though it may be through our own loss ." ( History against the Pagans 7:41) I will leave you to make your own application. Source: A Brief History of Sunday , Justo L. Gonzalez, Eerdmans, 2017, pg. 67 (italics mine).

I started a new book by church historian, Justo Gonzalez,  A Brief History of Sunday .  The author traces the practice of the Lord's Day from the early church up to the present. It is a very, very interesting read. Early Jewish Christians celebrated the Sabbath and the Lord's Day separately because these two events were not considered one and the same. The Jewish believers would attend the synagogue as long as they were allowed and then meet for the Lord's Day after sundown on Saturday. The Jewish "day" was still in use, being sunset to sunset. The gentile Christians would only celebrate the Lord's day beginning on Saturday night. They would have the Lord's table before dawn on Sunday morning because they were not given a day of rest unlike the Jews - "who through the passing of generations had found ways to observe the Sabbath, either by working at trades where they could determine their own schedules - such as the tent-making that Paul and ...