The Christian Passover: Agape Feast or Ritual Abuse?

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Quotations

The logic of an idea, once it has gained a foothold in the human psyche, has a tendency to work itself out with a relentless consistency to its ultimate con-clusions even among men of disparate cultures who have little or no contact with or knowledge of each other, but more especially so where that idea is widely accepted by a community—unless it is effectively challen-ged. And so it has been with sacerdotalism and prelacy, which even the Reformation was not able to expunge entirely from the minds of Christian men, and so the wretched harvest produced by these ideas began to grow once more before the dust thrown up by the ploughing of the Reformation had settled on the ground. And this is all the more remarkable because, as Max Weber pointed out, “every consistent doctrine of predestined grace inevitably implied a radical and ultimate devaluation of all magical, sacramental and institutional distributions of grace, in view of God’s sovereign will.”

— Stephen Perks,
The Christian Passover:
Agape Feast or Ritual Abuse?, p. 46

The Officials of the Roman Empire in time of persecution sought to force the Christians to sacrifice, not to any of the heathen gods, but to the Genius of the Emperor and the Fortune of the city of Rome; and at all times the Christians' refusal was looked upon not as a religious but as a political offence.

— Frances Legge,
Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity,
Vol, I, p. lvi.

The history of Eastern Christianity under the rule of Islam has already been written. The story is a depressing one. The history of Western Christianity under the rule of Islam has yet to be written. Whether it will ever be written may well depend on how seriously the Church in the West takes the Great Commission in the next few decades and on whether the zeal and self-sacrifice of Muslims for their jihad can be matched by the zeal and self-sacrifice of Christians for the Great Commission - indeed, whether Muslims, with their zeal and self-sacrifice, can be converted from jihad to the Great Commission.

— Stephen Perks,
"From Jihad to Great Commission"
in Christianity & Society, Vol. VIX, No. 3

Friday

Jun152012

ISBN 978-0-9522058-4-5It has been accepted by virtually all Christian traditions that the Last Supper was a Passover meal. It has also been accepted by virtually all Christian traditions that in the early Church the Lord’s Supper, for which the Last Supper is the model and pattern, was celebrated as part of a common fellowship meal, the agape feast. Yet by the second half of the first millennium the Lord’s Supper had been separated from the Agape and the Church had banned the celebration of the latter in church buildings with the result that it fell into complete disuse. Why did this happen? The reason is to be found in the fact that it was difficult to transform the Agape into a clergy-controlled and regulated ritual, whereas the Eucharist, separated from the Agape and accompanied by an expanding liturgy, was easily transformed into a rite that could be sacralised and subjected to clerical domination. The life of the Church was then redefined and its most important communal expressions were transformed into rituals performed by the priesthood (sacerdotalism). The ability of the Christian community, the Christian society, to achieve the potential of its life as the true social order was restricted as an inevitable consequence. If the Church is to fulfil the task entrusted to her by her Lord in the Great Commission Christians must reclaim their citizenship of the Kingdom of God from those who have sought to dispossess them of it for so long. Centralised bureaucratic control of the Church by clergymen has vitiated the life of the Church as a social order and wrecked the mission of the Church. The life of the Church as the true society, the true social order, must be restored if the Great Commission is to be accomplished, and the combined Eucharist and Agape is an important element of that life, since it is the central ritual of the Christian Church and therefore vital to the well-being of the Christian community.

Author: Stephen Perks

Paperback | 56 pages | £3.95, plus postage | ISBN: 978-0-9522058-4-5

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