Some Recent Liturgical Books

Abstract

Nothing could be more fitting than to begin a Liturgical Review with a notice of Dr. Oscar Cullmann's Early Christian Worship (Studies in Biblical Theology No. 10. Pp. 124. London: S.C.M. Press, 1953. 8s.). The English book is in two parts: the first entitled ‘Basic Characteristics of the Early Christian Service of Worship’, being a translation of Urchristentum und Gottesdienst (Zürich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1950); and the second, entitled ‘The Gospel according to St John and Early Christian Worship’, being a translation of Les Sacrements dans l'Evangile Johannique (Presses Universitaires de France, 1951). Part 1 occupies only thirty-six pages. Whatever it may have lost in argument through conciseness, it has gained in definiteness and clarity of statement. Dr. Cullmann summarily rejects the distinction commonly drawn between two types of early meeting for worship, one for ‘proclamation of the Word’, the other for the Eucharist. ‘In the service described by Justin, therefore, we are not dealing with a later development, for here the Eucharist and the other elements of worship, above all the proclamation of the Word, are bound up together. That was certainly the case from the beginning’ (30). Yet, if we take, in its plain and grammatical sense, Justin's account of a Baptism and of the Eucharist which follows it, it is not easy to find a reference to, or a place for, a proclamation of the Word of the kind described as forming part of the normal Sunday worship.