Blog

All Christians accept that God is active within creation, within and throughout human history.We believe that God’s greatest and most significant act in history is the Incarnation—in the conception, birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the person of Jesus, the Divine entered history—and entered humanity—by becoming one of us. For Christians, then, history matters. Ours is not a religion based on mythical events that happened in some hazy &ld …

How Early Christians Used Apostolic Letters in Liturgy So how do we know which books the early Christians used in the liturgy? As Valeriy Alikin of St. Petersburg Christian University explains,“Christians began to read apostolic epistles in their gatherings at the latest from the middle of the first century onwards.” At the end of his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul instructs,“I adjure you by the Lord that this letter be read to all the brethren”(5:27). And after the Council of …

As the number of Christian books grew, so did the need for the Catholic Church to discern which were truly authoritative, which were merely helpful, and which were positively harmful. This resulted in a process that gradually clarified which books did and didn’t count as Scripture.The guiding principle for Christians was Jesus Christ himself, so the question became which books he would consider authoritative. Since he presented his ministry as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, this …