Sunday, February 05, 2006
Bringing The Love Back To Church
1 Pet 5:14 - Greet one another with a kiss of love. Peace be to you all who are in Christ.Sense a theme here? Never read any serious scholarship on this subject? Neither had I -- until now.
Rom 16:16 - Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ greet you.
1 Cor 16:20 - All the brethren greet you. Greet one another with a holy kiss.
2 Cor 13:12 - Greet one another with a holy kiss.
1Thes 5:26 - Greet all the brethren with a holy kiss.
Kissing Christians begins with a quotation from Clement of Alexandria: "There are those who do nothing but make the church resound with the kiss." He worried about the "impure kiss, full of poison, feigning holiness." Penn admits that his discovery that "early Christian men and women kissed each other on the lips forced [him] to reevaluate [his] image of the ancient church." He assiduously tracked the kiss, "one of the most prevalent features of early Christianity," finding over 1,000 references to it in ancient writings.Funny how it is not just a figure of speech. Further, imagine the church doing anything to distinguish those on the inside from those on the outside.
Further, he found that kissing-on-the-mouth was encouraged among the faithful but discouraged with catechumens, visitors and outsiders, since-and this is his thesis-kissing was a boundary-setting act. Some people were ruled out by kissing and some were ruled in.
The appropriateness of a kiss can be debated, but I think there is huge value in a special greeting of some sort between believers, and that such a greeting would be explicitly loving.
What do you think?
Related Tags: holy kiss, church, greeting, love, believers
