Saturday, May 21, 2022

Baptismal Regeneration in Gregory of Nyssa’s Canonical Epistle to Letoius, Bishop of Melitine.

  

One thing there is of great movement towards a due observance of the Holy Festival (viz. of Easter), which is a right knowledge of the Discipline wherewith offenders are to be treated, according to the laws and Canons of the Church, that so every disorder and distemper of the soul, arising from sin, may find a cure.

 

For since this is through all the churches of God an anniversary solemnity sacred to the remembrance of Christ’s Resurrection, after His Fall by death, to which Fall of His sin answers in the analogy, as the sinner’s rise again by penance is correspondent to His Resurrection, it will be very suitable to the nature of this festival occasion that we should not only bring those to God who, by the grace of Baptism, are renewed in the spirit of their minds; but that those, also, should be begotten again unto a lively hope, who have indeed forfeited it by their sin, but are now desirous to retrieve it by their repentance, and by their conversion from dead works, to walk once more in the paths of life. (Nathaniel Marshall, The Penitential Discipline of the Primitive Church, for the First Four Hundred Years after Christ [Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1844], 185)