In Procession Before the World
Martyrdom as Public Liturgy in Early Christianity
9780874625813
75 pages
Marquette University Press
Overview
One consistent and widespread Christian teaching in the first three centuries of the church, and an important early witness to the concomitant understanding of the liturgy as the axis of earth and heaven, was the public and liturgical sacrifice of martyrdom.Martyrdom was concerned less with the church as a corporate entity than with the kingdom of God, which is to say that it participated in a kind of expectant, not a realized, eschatology. Christians expected it and trained for it in the communities where it occurred, and its possibility was proven by the exceptions to the rule, namely, those volunteers who buckled under persecution, or who found ways to avoid it. It functioned as a public liturgical sacrifice in which the word of Jesus and his kingdom was confessed and acted out, and an offering made that repeated his own. If the Eucharist of the early Christians was a kind of substitute sacrifice, then the martyrs' was an imitative one. When the Eucharist was still private, not open to non-Christian view, the martyrs' sacrifice was public and dramatic.
