New Testament Presupposes Liturgical Service

From Dom Gregory Dix, widely respected Biblical Scholar, in his work The Theology Of Confirmation In Relation To Baptism

We know now, too, that the Apostolic paradosis of practice, like the Apostolic paradosis of doctrine, is something which actually ante-dates the writing of the New Testament documents themselves by some two or three decades. It is presupposed by those documents and referred to more than once as authoritative in them. This paradosis of practice continued to develop in complete freedom from any control by those documents for a century after they were written, before they were collected into a New Testament ‘Canon’ and recognized for the first time as authoritative ‘Scripture’ beside and above the Jewish ‘Scriptures’ of the Old Testament, which alone formed the ‘Bible’ of the Apostolic Church. Now that the history of the Canonization of the New Testament is better understood, we can begin to shake ourselves free from the sixteenth century — or rather the medieval — delusion that primitive Christian Worship and Church Order must have been framed in conscious deference to the precedents of a New Testament which as such did not yet exist. The purely occasional documents now found in it do not contain, and were never intended by their authors to contain, anything like the Old Testament codes of prescriptions for the rites of worship. That was governed by the authoritative ‘Apostolic Tradition’ of practice, to which it is plain that the scattered Gentile Churches adhered pretty rigidly throughout the second century. I am not for a moment seeking to question the authoritative weight of the New Testament Scriptures for us as a written doctrinal standard. I am only trying to point out that there is available another source of information on the original and authentic Apostolic interpretation of Christianity, which the Scriptures presuppose and which must be used in the interpretation of the Scriptures. I do not deny that in time the recognition of this fact will be bound to lead to some considerable readjustment of ideas for more than one set of people. But tonight all I would say is that the liturgical tradition can be shewn to be older in some of its main elements than the New Testament Scriptures, and that down to the end of the second century, at least, it was regarded as having an ‘Apostolic’ authority of its own independently of them. We cannot look, therefore, for any attempt in this period to conform the practice of worship to them artificially. Nevertheless, the two do illustrate one another in a remarkable way.

Some thoughts on this passage:

1. "there is available another source of information on the original and authentic Apostolic interpretation of Christianity, which the Scriptures presuppose and which must be used in the interpretation of the Scriptures"... to discard this other source is to lose the ability to interpret Scripture in a consistent way, hence the extreme splintering amongst post-reform confessions.

2. "The purely occasional documents now found in (the NT) do not contain, and were never intended by their authors to contain, anything like the Old Testament codes of prescriptions for the rites of worship."... hence the wide variety of worship rites practiced amongst the churches spawned from the reformation - a sola scriptura approach leaves one without a coherent instruction in worship

3. "in time the recognition of this fact will be bound to lead to some considerable readjustment of ideas for more than one set of people"... Dix put this out in about 1948.  It's not unusual to see a lag on the order of a couple decades between the time scholars begin publishing on a topic and the time the effects are measurable among the general populace.  So I think Dix was correct judging from the growing number of converts from protestant circles to Roman Catholic and Orthodox liturgical communions.

Thanks to a guy named Andrew over at Energetic Procession for the Dix quotation.