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.
"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
"Following
in the footsteps of St Maximus, Loudovikos draws on the concept of the divine
energies to elaborate a profound and compelling vision of the Church".
~David Bradshaw,
University of Kentucky
The Rev
Nicholas Loudovikos is professor of dogmatics and chair of the Department of
Theological and Pastoral Studies at the University Ecclesiastical Academy of
Thessaloniki, as well as visiting professor at the Institute for Orthodox
Christian Studies of Cambridge and at the University of Winchester. He is the
author of numerous books and articles on Maximus the Confessor and Orthodox
Dogmatic Theology.
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