Christianity was Young Once

Christianity was Young Once

This is an ongoing series of meditations on faith, in response to readings from the articles that preface The Oxford Study Bible.

I will trust the reader to dig up the context if the meaning is unclear.


This stirs me:

The oldest surviving document delineating regulations for church life ... usually goes by the title The Didache ... After establishing ethical expectations for the community, The Didache then prescribes the proper performance of Christian rituals, establishes rules for the community organization and discipline, and concludes with apocalyptic prophecies (page 119).

Today, Christianity is two thousand years old with all the inertia, the generational ancestry of practice, that one could want. Today, I look for ways to transform or even recreate my tradition, and balk in the doorway because one person doesn't have the weight to wield that kind of inertia, the kind it would take to turn the direction of such a force.

But once, Christianity was young. Once, they wrote this document defining what it looked like, because it was new and had no inertia, no established practice.

I suppose we have permission to do so again.

I suppose what will last is what resonates, and continues resonating, with those who encounter it.