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The Early Concept of the Trinity: Tracing the Roots

.... In this treatise, Tertullian defends the distinction between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit while maintaining the unity of the Godhead. Here is an excerpt from Tertullian's "Against Praxeas": We define that there are two, the Father and the Son, and three with the Holy Spirit, and this number is made by the pattern of salvation… They are three not in dignity, but in degree, not in substance but in form, not in power but in kind. They are of one substance and power because there is one God from whom these degrees, forms, and kinds devolve in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Ignatius and the Trinity Jesuit priest, theologian, and scholar Fr....

Does Easter Have Pagan Origins?

...Much like any major Christian holiday, there are the usual arguments and accusations about how it’s all just pagan festivities with a “Christian mask”. Easter is no different, and usually gets hit the hardest over its so-called “pagan roots”, or in the month or so preceding it, Lent being some “invention of the Catholic Church”. Table of Contents The Lenten Fast The Easter controversy and why we celebrate it when we do Is the Name “Easter” really the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre? Chocolate eggs and bunnies? Concluding Thoughts Further Reading and Sources I like to try and observe Lent, as it is one of the most ancient custom...

A City In The Sand: What A Fourth-Century Discovery In Egypt’s Western Desert Tells Us About The Early Church

...eological treatises. We know them only through an oven, a coin hoard, and a handful of broken pottery shards recording who owed what to whom. And yet they were the Church, every bit as much as Athanasius was. The ordinary, unrecorded faithfulness of people whose names survive only as labels on excavated houses is itself a kind of witness — a rare one archaeology occasionally lets us glimpse, however briefly, before the sand closes back over it. Things like this often remind me of the instructions Paul gave to the Thessalonians “to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands” (1 Thess. 4:11). These people met in this t...