ABSTRACT
Many have said that the twentieth century, the century of two world wars, the Holocaust, the Great Depression, the atom bomb, was also the century of the rediscovery of the church. Over against such massive events as these, such a rediscovery might seem small. Yet it would not be too much to say that the recovery of the sense that the church is the people of God, not the hierarchy, not the canons or other rules, not simply texts and structures, is a most significant reappraisal. And perhaps even more important was the work of Nicolas Afanasiev (1893–1966) in restoring the “eucharistic ecclesiology,” that is, the understanding that the church makes the Eucharist but that the Eucharist also makes the church. Afanasiev’s groundbreaking work in many ways opened up ecclesiology once more in the twentieth century, and while he has had his critics and while revived ecclesiological directions have diverged from his—those of Henri de Lubac, Georges Florovsky, his own younger colleague Alexander Schmemann, John Zizioulas, J.M.R. Tillard, Paul McPartlan—the vision he retrieved of the church in the early centuries remains precious and invaluable, not only for thinking about the liturgy and the ordained ministries but especially about the priesthood of all the baptized.
