How can Christian practices create artifacts that promote truths and challenge the wider culture?

In the early centuries, Christians enculturated their faith by using symbols that affected common life and worship. The following examples of historical symbolic forms reach across cultures and enrich the transmission of the gospel.

These examples pose questions for contemporary Christians seeking symbolic expressions in worship.

Catacomb art

Around the beginning of the third century, Christian communities began to produce and use visual art forms. Why so late? Injunctions against idolatry, resistance to the culture around them, insistence on an invisible God—these may have been reasons. We cannot know for sure. As we see in the Roman catacombs of the third century, Christians began borrowing and adapting a variety of contemporary symbols. Their theological reflection in written texts correlates with a visual language of sacred images. Visual art may have been illustrative or didactic, but it also could be richly exegetical and liturgical.

In catacomb paintings and as bas-relief sculpture on sarcophagi (tombs), heroes and stories of the Bible appear clad in the iconography of Greco-Roman culture. Jesus, as healer and wonder-worker, sometimes carries a “magic” wand. Depicted as a clean-shaven youth, Jesus could as easily be taken for an adolescent Orpheus, who in Greek mythology charmed all living beings with his music and challenged the power of the underworld. Apostles sculpted as full-bearded men look remarkably like heroic Roman statues. Favorite Bible stories (Jonah, the fiery furnace, Lazarus) and depictions of Christ or saints are frequent subjects. Birds and flowers, trees and rivers evoked more than appreciation for nature—they could also be symbols of paradise, of life after death. It is often difficult to differentiate early Christian symbols from pagan prototypes. In the century after the emperor Constantine, when it became safe and advantageous to be a Christian, Christian symbolism became more explicit.

Signet rings

In Roman times men of substance wore signet rings, which they used to authenticate documents or to label goods for trade. In the late second century, Clement of Alexandria instructed Christian men to wear the signet ring at the base of the little finger. On no account could the ring’s image be a lover, for we are a “chaste people,” or a sword or bow, “for we cultivate peace,” or a drinking cup, “for we practice temperance.” The image on the ring could be of a dove, a fish, a ship in full sail or an anchor, which could discretely evoke the cross. In this way Christians used distinctive and potent symbols to reflect their faith, values and life-practices.

Peace greeting

In the mid-second century, Justin Martyr mentioned the peace greeting as a part of the eucharistic liturgy of the church in Rome. This gesture continued throughout early Christianity in weekly eucharistic services and also at the conclusion of believers’ morning prayer following catechetical sessions. The kiss of peace is one of the oldest Christian liturgical practices, noted in several New Testament epistles as the holy kiss or the kiss of peace (e.g., 1 Thessalonians 5:26; 1 Peter 5:14). Kissing in public in Greco-Roman culture was reserved for relatives or social equals. The Christian liturgical kiss of peace was countercultural, even scandalous. Enemies of the Christians gossiped and slandered them because Christians exchanged the greeting across social and economic lines in their weekly eucharistic services, as they sought to be reconciled with each other following the teachings of Matthew 5:23–24.

At the appropriate time in the eucharistic ser­vice, a deacon announced the peace greeting, often asking if any member of the assembly had a grievance against another. This was the time to greet and be reconciled with the estranged person. Later, during the Christian centuries in Europe, this practice faded, becoming infrequent and in many places confined to the clergy. Since the 20th century, when the peace greeting was reintroduced into Christian liturgies, the physical gesture has varied according to culture—a bow, a hands gesture (namaste), an embrace, a kiss, a handshake.

Eucharist as a form of the Roman banquet

In 1 Corinthians 11–14, the apostle Paul addresses the Christian community in Corinth about its worship practices. The church had adopted the familiar cultural form of Greco-Roman banquet (meal plus symposium—the after-dinner conversation) for their Lord’s Supper. These chapters address a single worship event in a Corinthian house church. Chapter 11 relates to the meal. Chapter 14 deals with the symposium (conversation). Between these two chapters, chapter 12 presents Paul’s vision for the multigifted church, and chapter 13 is a paean of praise to the virtue of love and a call to “table manners” of courtesy, deference and honor. Paul, as a missionary theologian, accepted the enculturation of the church’s worship within the forms of the banquet.
However, Paul as a pastoral theologian pointed to distortions in the church’s practice of the meal and advised the church on how it should rectify these abuses and align its worship with the distinctive values of the Christian faith. For the meal, Paul admonishes the richer believers to stop “showing contempt” to the poorer believers and share food equitably (“discern the body,” 11:29). For the symposium (the conversation), Paul rebukes the church’s chaotic use of spiritual gifts, which prevented outsiders from participating in worship and kept Christian worship from expressing the character of the “God of peace” (14:33). “Each” and “all” were to contribute according to the gifts of the Spirit (14:26, 31). Multivoiced worship at table was what Paul considered “decent and in order” (14:40). This enculturated form of liturgy included countercultural gestures and practices that created social bonding and radical equalization.

Architectural space

New Testament churches were domestic gatherings. The host of the home often served as leader of the church. Worship on this domestic scale continued for several centuries, though in some instances the apartments or houses could be fairly large. In the fourth century, by imperial favor, churches in some cities were able to build large buildings to house growing congregations. But house churches continued into the fifth century, when in many places they were displaced by purpose-built church buildings. This new scale of worship necessitated an “amplification”—rhetorical sermons, glorious processions and dramatic liturgy. Now churches were filled with standing crowds and kept in order by patrolling deacons. Imagine the change in how individuals experienced worship. No longer face to face in someone’s home and courtyard, worshipers now stood in a grand public space, craning to see and straining to hear what was going on.

Questions then and now

All these symbols and gestures we have considered in early Christianity—in art, jewelry, meal practices, space—raise questions for today. How can Christians engage practices and create artifacts through which Christian truths become comprehensible yet challenge aspects of wider culture in the name of the gospel?

Eleanor Kreider teaches at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Ind. This article is excerpted from Worship and Mission for the Global Church (William Carey Library Publishers, 2013).