The Eucharistic Prayer: Continuity, Tradition, and the Living Liturgy from Apostolic Origins to the Roman Canon.
Our liturgy, shaped around our sacramental life, did not arise from Scripture as a finished product. While it is rooted in the Old Testament, the apostolic Church, from its earliest beginnings, already possessed a rich patrimony of worship and sacramental life. The New Testament was assembled into its current canonical form later, by the Church Fathers, whose lives were often touched by the testimony of the disciples themselves and unfolded at a time when apostolic memory was still close. This is not so much an apology for the eucharistic prayer as it is a historical reflection on it, an understanding of a sacrament given to us by Christ himself and the celebration thereof which developed a certain language in a form that changed little over the centuries. One of the criticisms of ritualism is that time embellished the original, pure, simple form of early Christian worship. The mostly well-intentioned reformers emerged much later, within the distant cultural, temporal, and geograp...
