Latin may be considered a dead language today, but in its day it was the English of the empire. Through the muscle of the Romans, everyone spoke Latin. So as the early church developed, the liturgy was naturally done in Latin- the common tongue.
But then came a twist.
As the Roman Empire crumbled in the 400’s, people tossed aside their imposed Latin language and returned to their native tongues. But the church didn’t notice. For the next 1000 years, the church continued to worship in Latin even though most people didn’t know what was being said.
Today we might call that “lack of contextualization” or “stubborn narrowness.”
As you might predict, the church grew dustier and drier over the centuries. The freshness of the first few centuries faded into a predictable, irrelevant institution that eventually collapsed in a heap of corruption, triggering the Reformation.
Some scholars suggest that once the church became a formality rather than a doorway to a relationship to God, the door was opened in the 600’s for the rapid expansion of Islam across north Africa and even into Europe. The church was too weak and isolated from the people to respond to Islamic evangelism.
There’s the lesson for us today: is the church tuned to the needs of the people? Is the church aware of the language of the community? Or is the church logged onto a dusty expression that connects with only an elite few?
Jesus spoke the language of the people. Do we?
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2 comments:
I've been reading Mark, and Jesus did speak the language of the people! Out of curiosity, do you think the Catholic church was ordained by G_d, at least at the beginning?
Thanks for checking in, Millie Jo. What a great question! I think God is able to use flawed vessels, which is what I think the Catholic church morphed into. I don't think God's plan was for the early church to turn into the formal wealthy powerhouse it became. I think that when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome, that wounded the early church. But it was out of the Catholic church that we have such great followers of Jesus such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm and Brother Lawrence. It seems like God always preserved a pure thread of followers, even in the worst of the church corruption. Sometimes that was through the monasteries. In the 1300's and 1400's, when the corruption in Rome was embarrassing, the passionate belief in the monasteries helped produce Luther, and many of the other leaders of the Reformation. God is bigger than institutions.
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