Turning Worshipers into Gods: Liturgy and Salvation in the Early Church [PHOTOS + VIDEO]

On Thursday, January 16, the Saint Benedict Institute founder and executive director, Dr. Jared Ortiz, stepped up to the podium. He spoke on “Turning Worshipers into Gods: Liturgy and Salvation in the Early Church.”

What is worship and what is it for? What is salvation and what does worship have to do with it?  In this talk, Jared Ortiz, associate professor of religion at Hope College, will address these questions by examining the prayers and rituals of the early Christian baptism liturgy.  In these rituals, early Christians understood that they were entering into Paradise, given a foretaste of the true Promised Land (heaven!), and were "being filled with all the fullness of God" (Eph. 3:19).  They prayed that they might "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1:4).  In short, the early Church believed that through their worship they could become divine.  Dr. Ortiz's reflections will be drawn from his recent volume Deification in the Latin Patristic Tradition (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019). The Catholic World Report published this interview with his comments on his latest book and the subject of this talk.

Dr. Jared Ortiz is associate professor of religion at Hope College, author of You Made Us for Yourself: Creation in St Augustine’s Confessions (Fortress Press, 2016), and editor of Deification in the Latin Patristic Tradition (The Catholic University of America Press, 2019). He is also founder and executive director of the Saint Benedict Institute.