Praying and Believing in Early Christianity: The Interplay between Christian Worship and Doctrine

Finally! A renowned historian of liturgy explores at length the creative interplay between liturgical practice and theological reflection. This has been a desideratum for some time now, especially given the fresh readings of early Christian sources and the glimpses these provide of liturgical practices. In his new book, Max Johnson offers a nuanced, carefully argued, and expertly corroborated look at how doctrine shaped liturgical prayer and how prayer shaped the church's faith in the early centuries. Mapping the interplay between praying and believing in a multidimensional way, Johnson makes an important and much needed contribution to the ongoing conversation about the relationship between worship and doctrine in the church's life. I highly recommend this book.
-Teresa Berger,
Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale Divinity School

Professor Maxwell Johnson of the University of Notre Dame has written a short but fulsome account of the influence of the liturgy on the development of the doctrines of grace, Trinity, Christology, and Mariology in the ancient Church and on early Christianity's moral practices. Entering into current debates in liturgical theology, Johnson challenges claims about liturgy and prayer as primary theology (lex orandi) and disagrees with the understanding of orthodoxia as right praise' (it is right teaching'). Rather, he sees a simultaneous development of both liturgy and dogma in the early centuries in which one should look for the theology embedded in the liturgy and doxology and supplication expressed in theology. While Johnson aimed this book at master's level students, it will be of interest also to his peers, who will find points to challenge precisely because they are so engagingly made.
-The Rev. Dr. Frank C. Senn, STS,
Pastor (retired), Immanuel Lutheran Church, Evanston, Illinois

Assembling ample documentary evidence from the early Christian centuries, and drawing on supportive argumentation from recent scholarship, Maxwell Johnson here demonstrates the prime role of worship and devotion in shaping the Church's doctrine and ethics; and then in turn he signals the recurrent need for the classical faith to inform contemporary liturgy and the moral life. A tightly reasoned book, with many illustrative examples!
-Geoffrey Wainwright,
Robert Earl Cushman Professor Emeritus of Christian Theology, Duke Divinity School