So many of the most healing ideas for the Church to embrace in its relationship with culture, and its understanding of itself are existent throughout the ancient Church.
There are things long ago forgotten that the more hip, mod, faddish, culturocentric mindsets in our contemporary Church family is just now rediscovering. “Oh, look,” we say, “Here’s a new idea!” — when really the idea is not new… it is just new to us.
In Vladimir Lossky’s (an Eastern Orthodox theologian of this century) In The Image And Likeness, he articulates a cosmologically expansive, Trinitarian born, Christ-restored anthropological view of human beings — ideas which many in the evangelical and contemporary are just beginning to discover as “novel, healing and resonantly biblical” ideas for the Church’s worldview today.
Though there is much reformation to come even to ancient theological ideas, I think many ideas that have been brought out by the likes of Clement, Ignatius, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Basil Of Caesarea, Iraneus, Origen, Augustine, Theresa Of Avila, Francis, Catherine Of Sienna, Gregory The Great, and the list goes on and on, are simply revolutionary for the modern Church mind.
I’m ready to do my part, on the corporate worship end, to reinvest the contemporary worshiping Church with the riches of the past.
I think we’d rather sit on the shoulders of millenia-old giants to see the new vistas, rather than continually try to be a budding little giant all over again.
