One of the things I learned in my study of church history is how the early church began to make the Eucharist ceremony more elaborate. I think about the first church services, and how they were overseen by men who had walked with Christ, and later by men who had walked with these men, and seen their miracles, and heard their stories while looking into their haunted, awe-filled eyes. The Christian church in Jerusalem was founded on a miracle witnessed by its members. Surely, when they came together to pray, the simplest of vestments and ceremonies would have done nothing to diminish the stirring in their spirits, the sense of a God fearfully, blessedly close.

Subsequent Christians, however, coming to the church two or three hundred years after the apostolic miracles, must have felt less awe. Moses glowed in the wake of seeing God’s hindquarters; surely something similar must have held for the first church. That glow faded over time, and with it, Christian awe.

This, I think, might explain the introduction of more elaborate ceremony, as an effort by church fathers to instill in their flocks a greater and rightful sense of holiness. Ornately crafted tools of office accompanied the rise of ceremony itself, the intricacies of prayer and liturgy that became an integral part of early — but not earliest — church worship. These devices all served an iconic function, pointing their practitioners to a holy God of creation and judgment and redemption.

In modern times, however, an opposite tendency emerged, born of the same impetus, which was to give people a closer intimacy with the fullness of their God. Whereas early church leaders developed ritual to evoke awe, modern leaders began to strip away ritual, in service to the same end. Repetitive praise choruses replaced theology-laden hymns, jeans and a blazer replaced the priestly vestments, Father Wilson became Pastor Mike.

What strikes me is how either trend, toward or away from ceremony, is vulnerable to becoming a vehicle for hubris and corruption. The golden chalice from which communion wine is poured easily leads to the gilded trappings of the church leader — be he Pope Alexander VI or Joyce Meyer. While one might have expected modern elimination of ritual to reduce priestly hubris, these changes simply became new means of aggrandizing the church head rather than the Godhead. Pastor Mike, disencumbered of hymns and liturgies and the demands of close exegesis, had the opportunity to become, if he succumbed to temptation, the rock-star center of a mega-church.

It is curious and hopeful that God would entrust the care of his church to the likes of us. I suppose most of us feel like our church is getting it right, and harbor various levels of disdain for the others. This church prohibits dancing, that one sings only psalms, that other one burns incense. We come to Him in suits or jeans, pierced and unpierced, clapping or stern-faced, and I suspect we are all in some ways dreadfully wrong, and in others, by grace alone, in glorious communion. Somehow the church endures, despite churches.

Do you ever wonder what the service in Heaven will be like? I suspect we’ll all of us be surprised, except perhaps the children, the at times clapping, napping, dancing, babbling, solemn, curious, out-of-tune children. They’ll probably fit right in. The rest of us will have to pay attention from the back pews for a while, and likely unlearn a good bit of that which we once held certain.

I’ve been reading a bit on early church history. Six months ago, had someone told me I would be doing this, I would have disputed the prediction, because I’ve only ever been a dubious enthusiast of church, or history, and never in favor of anything that involves the word “early.” Now I’ve finished Henry Chadwick’s The Early Church, and I’m working my way through Jaroslav Pelikan’s five-volume The Christian Tradition. Pelikan drew a distinction between tradition, which he called “the living faith of the dead,” and traditionalism, or, “the dead faith of the living.” Lately I’ve felt compelled to sort out this distinction in my life as a Christian, church member, husband, and father. What are the proper rituals of worship and church and family, and why do they matter? What are the traditions of dead faith that must be cast off?

One can err in either direction, I suppose, when it comes to tradition. A critique of the Roman Catholic church, for example, is that it lets rituals obscure the relationship between man and God, hindering the call to “draw near with confidence to the throne of grace.” A critique of some modern Protestant churches, meanwhile, is that they are ungoverned by doctrine or discipline. Tradition divorced of meaning is a distraction, while complete independence neglects the wisdom of elders. I imagine one can even err in both directions at once, as in the elaborate rituals of a cult, or the contortions many of us go through to satisfy various family factions during the Christmas season. It is possible to get snared by traditions — in our churches, our families, even our personal habits — that serve no important, much less eternal, purpose.

The simple answer is to let our Bibles guide us, but as Pelikan explained, our philosophical worldview — be it Platonic, as in the case of early theologians, or a pot of pseudo-psychological mush, as with some bestselling authors specializing in “spirituality” — informs how we read the Bible. Tradition, in other words, is not so easily escaped. His solution was a thoroughgoing knowledge of doctrine and tradition, and an understanding of how each informs the other. Reading Pelikan has been refreshing, in fact, because his view about the illuminating effect of tradition is similar to the respect afforded custom and tacit knowledge by scholars like Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek, oft-forgotten intellectual giants upon whose shoulders modern-day conservatives wobble.

It is a serious thing, I think, to work out one’s salvation with fear and trembling. Thankfully my inadequate worship, these filthy rags I call my righteousness, aren’t the keys to heaven. I’m irreverent and rebellious by nature. Perhaps having children leads us to cast about for the wisdom of our ancestors. Or maybe I’m just becoming more curmudgeonly with age. Regardless of the reasons, I feel this call to delve more deeply into the meaning of human worship, this reaching out of the flawed to the divine. Coming as it does in the form of enthusiasm for early church history, it seems nothing less than a miracle. Who would have thought I would be sorting out the differences between Monophysites and Arians and Pelagians? The Lord indeed moves in mysterious ways.

I just hope His plans don’t include Greek lessons.