Church in the Making

In the year when at long last Orthodoxy is set to hold its much-anticipated 'great and holy synod,' discussions of conciliarity, synodality, and ecclesiology are very much in the air as I have noted on here and elsewhere.

Those who have read widely in contemporary ecclesiology will be long familiar with the on-going struggle to think through the implications of such pious nostrums as "the Church is an icon of the Trinity," a notion to which many give lip-service but do not always consider in any serious detail. One such book does, as I noted on here several years ago, is Radu Bordeianu's splendid study, Dumitru Staniloae: An Ecumenical Ecclesiology. I interviewed him here about the book.

Another book has just been released that also takes up obvious Trinitarian themes in ecclesiology: Nikolaos Loudovikos, Church in the Making: An Apophatic Ecclesiology of Consubtantiality (SVS Press, 2015), 296pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

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.