3644 - The Love-Feast

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jan 23, 1912

3644 — The Love-Feast

Who originated the love-feast which is practised in the Methodist Church, by partaking of bread and water? and is there any authority for it from the Scriptures? P.

The love-feast comes from "agape," the Greek word for love, "used by ecclesiastical writers most frequently in the plural," says the "Popular and Critical Biblical Cyclopædia," "to signify the social feasts of friendship, love, or kindness in use among the primitive Christians." We have no command for these feasts at all. There is no scripture which makes them binding or obligatory. As stated by the authority above named: "These festivals were kept in the assembly, or church, towards evening, after prayers and worship were over. Upon these occasions the faithful ate together with great simplicity and union what each had brought, so that rich and poor were in no way distinguished. After a supper marked by much frugality and modesty, they partook of the sacramental signs of the Lord's body and blood, and gave each other the kiss of peace." Some of these believers, doubtless, were widely scattered, and coming together in that way found the simple meal a love-feast indeed, spoken of in Jude as "feasts of charity," or love. Afterward they seemed to have fallen into discredit, and became corrupted and perverted and shameful. The Council of Laodicea, Canon 28, and the Synod of Trullo, Canon 74, and the Council of Carthage, Canon 42, abolished them. Later they have been revived, and our Methodist friends still practise them. There is nothing obligatory in them, neither is there anything against the gathering of Christians and the holding of love-feasts at any time. Every such gathering of Christians ought to be a love-feast.