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Dr. Robert Webber said, "Evangelicals will do well to affirm a Christianity that has a deep kinship with the faith of the early church. … The challenge for us is to return to the Christian tradition." Last week this well-known theologian and early-church advocate died of pancreatic cancer at age 73. During his life, Dr. Webber revived evangelicals' interest in the early church through his Ancient-Future book series and his many years of teaching at Wheaton College and, more recently, Northern Seminary. Most recently, he organized "A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future" urging evangelicals "to strengthen their witness through a recovery of the faith articulated by the consensus of the ancient Church and its guardians in the traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation and the Evangelical awakenings."

In tribute to Dr. Webber, this week's Christian History & Biography newsletter contains excerpts from a few of his books and statements from those who knew him or were influenced by him.

"Classical Christianity was shaped in a pagan and relativistic society much like our own. Classical Christianity was not an accommodation to paganism but an captionernative practice of life. Christians in a postmodern world will succeed, not by watering down the faith, but by being a countercultural community that invites people to be shaped by the story of Israel and Jesus.

"We now live in a transitional time in which the modern worldview of the Enlightenment is crumbling and a new worldview is beginning to take shape. Some leaders will insist on preserving the Christian faith in its modern form; others will run headlong into the sweeping changes that accommodate Christianity to postmodern forms; and a third group will carefully and cautiously seek to interface historic Christian truths in the dawning of a new era.

"My argument has been that evangelicals will do well to affirm a Christianity that has a deep kinship with the faith of the early church. … For here is a faith that, like a tapestry, weaves everything in and out of the main thread—Christ. … Here, I believe, is a faith for our time, a faith that finds in the ancient Christian tradition a power to speak to the postmodern world."

—From Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (Baker: 1999)

***

"The concern of this writing is to go back to the earliest convictions of Christian spirituality. Why go back? Because the Roman culture in which Christianity first emerged is very similar to the culture of today's world. It was a culture of political unrest, a world of numerous religious options, a time of moral confusion and poverty. The religions of the day made no demands on believing, behaving, or belonging. In this context the Christian message was not presented as one more spirituality among the spiritualities but as Alan Kreider points out, Christians proclaimed, "We believe, we behave, we belong." One would think that the clarity of union with God in the context of the plurality of religions would doom it to failure. But it was that very union with God—lived out in belief, behavior, and belonging—that resulted in the rapid spread of the Christian faith throughout the Roman Empire."

—From The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Baker, 2006)

***

"How do you deliver the authentic faith and great wisdom of the past into the new cultural situation of the twenty-first century? The way into the future, I argue, is not an innovative new start for the church; rather, the road to the future runs through the past. These three matters—roots, connection, and authenticity in a changing world—will help us to maintain continuity with historic Christianity as the church moves forward."

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