The Faith of the Early Church: An Ancient Apologetic for the New Evangelization by Nicholas L. Gregoris (review)

Readers of a certain age may remember a time when carrying a Bible around was considered a Protestant thing to do. Cautious was the Catholic attitude toward the private study of Holy Scripture, and with good reason: it is easy for the uninstructed to misinterpret biblical texts and fall into doctrinal error—something Scripture itself warns against in 2 Peter 3:16. Much has changed since Vatican II, in its Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, encouraged a renewed attention to the sacred texts of the Bible in every dimension of Church life. Today Bible courses and study groups are a popular forum for adult education in Catholic parishes. Few, however, are the parishes that offer classes on the Fathers of the Church, those champions of orthodoxy whose biblical interpretation is the foundation of early Christian theology. To read the Church Fathers is to enter more fully into the truth of Jesus Christ that Scripture reveals. Father Nicholas Gregoris’ The Faith of the Early Church presents an introductory journey through the teachings of that motley company of theologians and pastors, monks and bishops, missionaries and martyrs whose homilies, treatises, meditations and deliberations wove a fabric of arguments that thickened the scriptural revelation. Following the conventional periodization, Gregoris takes up the enormous epoch from the course of the second century and ends in the eighth century with the Second Council of Nicaea.

But why should this book be reviewed in a liturgical journal such as Antiphon? Because patristic theology is in many ways an exposition of faith informed by the Church’s developing patterns of worship. This is in keeping with the well-known maxim of Prosper of Aquitaine (d. c. 463) that “the rule of prayer should lay down the rule of faith.” And so, scattered throughout the book are instances of the Fathers relating what happens in the liturgy to our knowledge and experience of God in Christ.

Indeed, the Church herself is defined by what she does at worship. From the anonymous Didache (late first or early second century), a work known and cited by the third-century Alexandrians Clement and Origen, we learn that the fixed day of Christian worship is Sunday, the first day of the week, to honor the Lord’s Resurrection; on that day the early Christians gathered to celebrate the Eucharist, also called the “Breaking of the Bread” (230–231). Though it is not mentioned, several of the Fathers referred to Sunday as the “eighth day,” the first day of the new aeon, the eschatological day of the Lord. For Ignatius of Antioch (d. c. 110 at Rome), the unity of the Church, which is an essential mark of her nature as the body of Christ, is grounded first in the oneness of faith and is most fully manifested when the Eucharist is celebrated in communion with the bishop (117–118). In his First Apology (mid-second century), Justin Martyr cites the giving of alms that took place at the end of the primitive liturgy as a demonstration of Christian charity, which he identifies as the primary fruit of Eucharistic communion (274). The threefold profession of faith accompanied by a threefold immersion in the baptismal rite according to the Apostolic Tradition, which used to be attributed to Hippolytus of Rome, is an embryonic form of the Apostles’ Creed, the tripartite structure of which exhibits the Trinitarian character of Christian faith and the economy of salvation (252–253).

Other patristic references could have been adduced to illustrate the influence of the rule of prayer on early Christian theology. While Gregoris gives due attention to the formation of orthodox Christology (chapters 2–8), he says nothing of its liturgical underpinning. The same is true of the doctrine of atonement or reconciliation through the work of Christ (the subject of chapter 27), which has never received dogmatic definition. According to Jaroslav...