Gordon Lathrop, Holy Things, II

Lathrop starts with the Bible, which he describes as the source of both texts (such as readings and prayers) and of imagery. Its enacted meaning, however, comes from being used in the assembly, and from the resulting juxtaposition of old text and contemporary people. This pattern itself is biblical.

Nothing in worship arises de novo. Everything has some sort of precedent, even as it changes. No matter how significant the change or important the one making the change, the resulting form uses preexisting material. Thus for the sacraments, we cannot look to their institution as the moment they spring into existence. They have a prehistory, even if scholarship cannot reconstruct it and no documents exist to attest to this prehistory. (Consider, and this is my own comparison, the Goths, who were Arian. Surely they had worship texts, as they are contemporary to written orthodox texts, and furthermore we known they had literacy, even in their vernacular, Gothic, because Wulfila translated the Bible into it. But we do not know anything about the content of their liturgy.) This prehistory does not dictate the meaning of the ritual, however.