Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (Ancient-Future Series) (1999).
Sequels:
- Ancient-Future Evangelism: Making Your Church a Faith-Forming Community (2003)
- Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (2004)
- Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (2008)
Referenced in:
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
As the title of the series suggests, Webber suggests that the path for the church’s future, or the effectiveness of the church as it transitions from the modern to the current era, is to go through the past. And by the “past,” he means ancient paths of the first few centuries of Christian faith and practice, often referred to as classical or historic Christianity. Webber suggests that going back to these roots of the Christian faith helps guard against the polarizing reactionary tendencies of our time that either hold tenaciously to the remnants of modernism or surrender entirely to the postmodern ethos.
Webber reflects the thinking of many Younger Evangelicals who seek points of contact between classical Christianity and postmodern thought. The church during this ancient period, he argues, was less conditioned by accommodating to culture (which evangelicals have tended to do), but was more interested in presenting a biblical alternative way of life. As such, the wisdom of the ancients is uniquely suited to equip the postmodern church to succeed, “not by watering down the faith, but by being a counter cultural community that invites people to be shaped by the story of Israel and Jesus.” Webber draws from ancient writers, and also garners insights from all the major epochs and Christian traditions – Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, evangelicals, etc. – to address the challenges of our era.
The four books of the Ancient-Future series translate wisdom from these ancients into four areas of ministry: faith, worship, ministry, and spirituality.
Ancient-Future Faith is the foundational volume of the Ancient-Future series, where Webber lays out the essential ancient future philosophy. He looks at how Christians throughout history have filtered Christianity through the philosophical currents of their cultures. This is understandable. The difficulty arises, however, that without the benefit of history, Christians will often see the filter of their time and place as “the standard of expression of faith, and then judge all other movements or periods of time by that standard.” What is necessary, he argues, is a model that helps us to break from our over-dependence on the limited interpretive tools of our time and “affirm the whole church in all its previous manifestations…as a dialogue and encounter that may inform and strengthen our Christian understanding in a different culture.”
Webber surveys six epochs of Christian history. In each period, the church sought to define itself amid unique cultural challenges, but with a dominant lens or focus. The six periods, and their corresponding foci: the formation of the church out of the Jewish culture and religious context; the ancient or classical (100-600 AD) focused on mystery; the Medieval (600-1500) focused on institution; the Reformation (1500-1750) focused on individualism; the modern (1750-1980) focused on reason; and the postmodern (1980-the present) which has cycled back to mystery as in the classical era.
Webber suggests that the period that is most instructive for the postmodern church is the classical era. This is true not only because of the shared focus on mystery, but other cultural similarities as well. Their cultural environment, much like ours, was marked by political upheaval, clashing world views, religious pluralism, moral relativism, and social injustice. The early Christians navigated this climate not by accommodating to their surroundings, but by being a theological, moral, and spiritual counterculture that defined itself by the story of scripture. In this sense, they were more “transcultural” and less accommodationist, thereby serving as an excellent model for today.
He describes how the task of engaging the postmodern ethos
“will not be accomplished by abandoning the past, but by seeking out the transcultural framework of faith…that has been blessed by sociocultural particularity in every period of the church…The point of integration with a new culture is not to restore that cultural form to Christianity, but to recover the universally accepted framework of faith that originated with the apostles, was developed by the Fathers, and has been handed down by the church in its liturgical and theological traditions…Our calling is not to reinvent the Christian faith, but, in keeping with the past, to carry forward what the church has affirmed from its beginning.”
In other words, this classical period, with its creeds and faith formations, formed the deposit of faith that all periods since then have carried forward.
Webber believes to reach our generation we must adapt the classical tradition to the postmodern time. Only by returning to these established truths that have transcended and remained through all of the great periods of Christian history will we be effective.
In this volume Webber surveys the implications of the ancient-future principle for faith, spirituality, evangelism, nurture, and mission. The other titles in the series expand on the foundations offered in this first volume.
- Ancient-Future Evangelism: Making Your Church a Faith-Forming Community (2003)
- Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (2004)
- Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (2008)
About the Author
Before his death in 2007, Robert Webber was the William R. and Geraldyn B. Myers Professor of Ministry at Northern Seminary in Lombard, IL. He was also the President of the Institute for Worship Studies and Professor of Theology Emeritus at Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL. Dr. Webber authored or edited more than forty books on worship and other ministry-related subjects.
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