to spell out for us the theological convictions that shaped his liturgy, he would have mentioned his conviction that we wrong God, and would have noted that it was for this reason that he included a prayer for forgiveness in his liturgical composition. Of course, he would almost certainly not have been fully conscious of all the ways in which his theology shaped his liturgy. What I have described is pure fantasy. All the evidence points to the fact that the early Christian liturgies were not composed