St. Gregory of Nyssa, Anti-Apollinarian Writings. The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 131. Translated by Robin Orton. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015. Pp. xxiii + 285. $39.95. Theological controversy is messy and confusing. Politics…
The Eucharist in the Didache (Clary book)
In 1975, Hughes Oliphant Old published his dissertation entitled The Patristic Roots of Reformed Worship. Old persuasively argues that we have every reason to take Calvin and his colleagues seriously when they claim patristic support for their liturgical ideas. The Reformers deliberately developed…
Baptism in the Didache
Here’s my very brief introduction to baptism in the Didache. This topic deserves several articles, and I plan on following up with it in later posts. Stay tuned! What does the Didache teach us about the theology and practice of…
Hughes Oliphant Old Describes the Earliest Christian Hymnal
The Odes of Solomon is the earliest collection of Christian hymns. The forty-two odes in the collection were most likely composed in the late first or early second century by a Jewish Christian(s) in the region of Syria. The plural…
Hughes Oliphant Old on Worship
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my teacher Dr. Hughes Oliphant Old and reflecting on his insights into Reformed worship. Here are some of my favorite quotes from his writings. What is worship? We worship God because God created…
The Didache
The teaching of the Lord through the twelve apostles to the Gentiles:[1] 1:1There are two ways, one of life and one of death. And there is a great difference between the two ways.
The Origins of the Church Calendar
Now that Easter is over, this is a good opportunity to reflect on what just happened yesterday and to share some thoughts on the origin of the church calendar. As we noted in our previous post, Christians have been…
The Oldest Easter Sermon
The oldest extant Easter sermon from the ancient church is a sermon preached by Melito, the bishop of Sardis in Asia Minor at the end of the second century. This sermon gives us a taste of how Christians celebrated the feast…
Early Christian Worship
What would it have been like to worship with the saints at Rome in the middle of the second century? One can only imagine how thrilling it must have been to meet older Christians whose parents or grandparents actually knew…
Communion Prayers in the Ancient Church
In 1873, “Archbishop Philotheos Bryennios was browsing in the library of the Greek Convent of the Holy Sepulchre in Istanbul when, by chance, he noticed the text of the Didache hidden away within a bound collection of early church writings.”[1]
