(P/B) CHURCH IN THE MAKING

Παρουσίαση

Over the past fifty years, Orthodox theologies of ecclesiology have been revoling around competing schools of ecclesiology - one "universal," the other "eucharistic." Father Loudovikos, in this masterful interconnected series of studies, moves beyond this dialectic by exploring the very mode of the Church's existence.
In the end, it is the profound theological insights of St Maximus the Confessor that propel Father Loudovikos beyond the familiar borders of ecclesiology and into a new way of understanding the Church's self that is indissolubly linked to the human person and his participation in the divine Love that is God. (From the publisher)

"While addressing the crisis of ecclesiological "infancy" in Greek Orthodoxy, Loudovikos's rigorous reexamination of historical ecclesiology results in a monumental contribution to ecumenical ecclesiology. His book provides real hope that longstanding binaries such as visible and invisible, hierarchy (institutionality) and charism, sacramentality and asceticism, etc., can be reconciled, especially through appeal to the "apophatic ecclesiology of consubstantiality" that Loudovikos discerns in Maximus the Confessor. This is the Church not reducible to "essence" or "existence" but contemplated as dynamically in motion, "in the making," participant in the living but incomprehensible God, and anticipating through its Eucharist the genuinely eschatological reality of the ekklesia, namely, the natural and not just "personal" communion which is the Church." (Paul M. Blowers, Emmanuel Christian Seminary at Milligan College)