Can you identify these in the Bible? If not they're no better than the prayers at the end of my old hymn book.
ealgeone:
Can you identify anywhere in the NT where it lays out what a Church Liturgy [Worship] is to look like. I am not going to use your paradigm of “sola scriptura” which itself is unbiblical and contrary to reason and history as it has been shown that sola scriptura is nothing but every man[woman] for him/herself with respect to the Bible.
Christ founded a Church, that is clearly taught in scripture and he appointed Apostles who were sent and they further built the Church and passed on what they received from Christ to the next generation of Men appointed to Shepherd the Church, i.e. Bishops. The Church as Saint Paul states is the pillar and foundation of Truth [1 Timothy 3:15] and The Father sent the Holy Spirit as Christ promised to strengthen and guide the Church. The NT 27 books were written within and to the Church and it was those 2nd century Church Fathers who started the process to determine the canon of the NT [not finally settled until the 4th century]. While the Canon was being formed, the Church worshiped using Liturgy as evidence by the late 1st century work the Didache, Saint Justin Martyr in 150AD writes to the Romans what the CHristians did on Sunday and he outlines a Liturgy. In the East, we see the same thing in Saint Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catechetical Letters and in Saint John Crystostem writings as well. Thus Apostolic Tradition was passed from Christ to the Apostles to the Bishops who took over as the Apostles died and that Tradition came down in written form [NT canon] and via Creeds, Councils and Liturgy which expressed what the early Church believed because of how it worshiped God in the Divine Liturgy.
The Incarnation, as Pope Benedict stated, means we are tied to a place in time where Christ was incarnate. It gives us a concrete history and thus the way Liturgy developed from the place of Christ Incarnation, which was the union of 3 cultures, Roman-Greek and Jewish is the History willed by God. I Believe the Holy Spirit led those early Church Fathers, who new the Apostles to worship in an orthodox fashion.
For American protestants to think that worship in the early Church looked like the stuff that passes for worship in all of these groups is downright stupid, naïve, and arrogant all at the same time. In God’s providential plan, Christ was incarnate in a Roman-Greek Culture and the Jewish Liturgy was received into the early Church and it [the Church] formulated her Liturgy to worship the Holy Trinity and at the heart of that Liturgical worship was the Holy Eucharist.