The era of the early church (AD 100-500), and particularly the second century, contains insights that [we] need to recover. Obviously, the early church is not perfect. Like other periods of history, the early church needs to be judged by the apostolic norm. But the best insights of the early church, those they struggled to maintain, were, in fact, those convictions they regarded as apostolic. Thus, to recover this era of the church is to restore the earliest expressions of Christian theology and church practice that grew out of apostolic teaching.
-Robert Webber, Common Roots: The Original Call to an Ancient-Future Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 32.