The “House Church” and the Altar

by Randall B. Smith, appearing in Volume 47

One of those mistaken notions, the consequences of which many of us have felt vividly ever since, is the idea that, in the early Church, worship took place primarily in “house churches.” The theory that was proposed was that the family table was cleared off and used for the Eucharist, and an open-air pool in the courtyard provided water for baptism and for blessing oneself on the way into worship. In a related spirit, it was claimed that these individual “house churches” each developed its own distinctive liturgy, and a unified liturgy was only a “later development” enforced by the bishop seeking to exert his authority and put himself at the center of the Church community.

It was (and for many, still remains) an inspirational story, and it fit well with some of the progressive dispositions that had arisen after the Second Vatican Council. Indeed, it inspired a multitude of church interiors across the country resembling 1970s living rooms. A community of my fellow graduate students were condemned to worship each week in the living room of the university community center because the chaplain insisted that there should be no separate chapel for Mass, but that they should worship in the living room “as they did in the early Church.” The theory that all the congregants sat around the dining table in the house likely had much to do with the adoption of the church-in-the-round design in so many contemporary churches. The basilica form, it was claimed, was a later Hellenization or Romanization of church design that, again, had to do with centering authority hierarchically in the bishop rather than allowing it to remain spread out within small communal gatherings of the lay Christian faithful.

As Stefan Heid notes in his recent book, Altar and Church: Principles of Liturgy from Early Christianity (The Catholic University of America, 2023), the problem with this purported piety about the practice of the early Church is that there is almost no evidence for any of it. Some buildings built as houses were cleared and renovated for use as a church, but there is no evidence—indeed, much evidence to the contrary—that such buildings were ever used simultaneously to house a family. There was no clearing off the family table for Mass. And as Stefan Heid also convincingly argues, there were likely not multiple churches in a city. Rather, there was likely one church: the bishop’s church. A central liturgy did not arise out of smaller, communal liturgies. Rather, there was from the earliest days the liturgy used in the bishop’s church. If only Stefan Heid had been around to research and write this book fifty or sixty years ago, we might have been spared a great deal of foolish church architecture.

The salient question is whether those foolish practices will stop now that many of these myths about the architecture and practice of the early Church on which they were ostensibly based have been refuted. Probably not. It is easy enough to shift gears from “respect for the early Church” to “that was then, and this is now, so we need to do something different,” which was always at the heart of the Modernist credo. Hearkening back to the presumed practice of the early Church was often more of a way of silencing those devoted to “tradition” than anything else.

The underlying assumption was that, if things were done a certain way in the early Church, before all the corruption that arose with Constantine and the “capture” of the Church by the emperor and imperial power, then the true devotees of tradition would be devoted to those things, not to later “accretions” when the Church became less pure. This theory about the “pollution” of the purity of the Church because of its “Hellenization” or because it was corrupted by Constantine was a prominent notion among certain Protestants. It was never well supported by the evidence. But its implicit adoption by Catholic liturgists and architects had tragic consequences. Its unraveling should serve as a warning about being too eager to be seen as “cutting edge” or as adopting “the latest scholarship” from the “experts.” The old saying is: “time will tell where wisdom lies.” In retrospect, we can see that much of this scholarship should have been viewed the way people view the weather in Michigan and Indiana: if you don’t like it, just wait a bit, and it will change.

The main title of Heid’s book is Altar and Church because, as he makes clear, in the early Church and throughout the history of the Church, the altar has always had a central, important place in the church, even before images of the crucifixion became common. It was not merely seen as a “table”: it was always understood to be an altar for sacrifice. Thus, even today, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal stipulates that, “in keeping with the Church’s traditional practice and with what the altar signifies, the table of a fixed altar should be of stone and indeed of natural stone” (GIRM 301). In the United States, however, altars of wood are permitted, as long as they are “dignified, solid, and well-crafted…provided that the altar is structurally immobile” (301). The altar, says the General Instruction, “should occupy a place where it is truly the center toward which the attention of the whole congregation of the faithful naturally turns” (299), and it is requisite that the altar, like all the rest of the furnishings of the church, should be “truly worthy and beautiful and be signs and symbols of heavenly realities” (288). I think it fair to say that the new altar in the otherwise beautifully renovated Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris does not meet that standard, any more than the vestments they designed for the opening Mass did.

I imagine many readers will have encountered little, moveable wooden “table” altars in Catholic churches renovated in the 1970s and 80s. Not only was their use not supported by historical scholarship, they were installed in violation of Church regulations. And yet, at the same time as the clerics involved in their installation were violating the rules by which they themselves were bound, they were insisting (and continue to insist) that the faithful obey their rules against things like kneeling for communion at an altar rail, even though receiving communion at the altar rail was meant to symbolize receiving the Eucharist from the altar itself, which is why altar rails were supposed to be designed to resemble the altar.

There is likely a lesson to be learned here. Just as we should not leap to embrace the latest, cutting-edge theory out of the universities, but should allow time for those theories to be tested and refined, so it would be best not to incorporate the latest fads and fashions into church architecture and design. Few things look more dated than the fad from ten years ago.

So although we can hope that the wooden trusses that the expert architects and designers used to re-build the vaulted ceiling of Notre-Dame will last another 800 years like the previous ones did, it seems highly unlikely that the bathtub altar the current bishop installed will last the rest of the decade. Perhaps church design is best left to skilled artisans and architects who understand and respect the Church’s architectural traditions rather than given over to clerics or “liturgical consultants” with a smattering of reading in the latest liturgical fashions.