Recovering The Love Feast [Hardcover]

What is a Love Feast? How did the early church celebrate the Love Feast? How might Christians today celebrate the Love Feast? In Recovering the Love Feast, Paul Stutzman addresses these questions, offering a unique blend of liturgical history and practical theology. Part I outlines the history of the Love Feast, noting its prevalence in early church worship, its gradual decline, and its reemergence in the practices of several Pietist groups (e.g., the Moravians, Methodists, and Brethren). Particular focus is given to five elements of the celebration, that is: eucharistic preparation, feetwashing, the fellowship meal, the holy kiss, and the Eucharist proper. In Part II, Stutzman argues that the Love Feast is a valuable Christian practice and a celebration worth recovering in those traditions that may have forgotten the feast. Rather than prescribing a specific method for celebrating the Love Feast, Stutzman proposes that there are five key disciplines that today's Love Feasts should embody: submission, love, confession, reconciliation, and thanksgiving. This book encourages Christians from a range of traditions to experiment with reclaiming the Love Feast, with the hope that each celebration serves as an act of worship to God and an authentic expression of Christian discipleship. --As a young scholar, Paul Fike Stutzman offers careful exegesis of scripture and historical and theological texts on the Love Feast and Eucharist, traces the varieties of beliefs and practices associated with the Love Feast across the centuries, and invites readers--those familiar with the Love Feast as well as the uninitiated--into a provocative reconsideration of its significance for the postmodern church seeking to embody the gospel in a hungry world.-- --Ruthann Knechel Johansen author of The Narrative Secret of Flannery O'Connor: The Trickster As Interpreter --Rather than treat the Love Feast as a static artifact, like an insect in amber, he envisions a future in which the rite becomeslÓî