My own search for the unity that exists among believing Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians has taken me back to the common era, and to those convictions that precede a time when the church became Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant. . . . The old adage that those who would shape the future must know the past still stands. If we would shape the future of the church in continuity with its past, we need to know its tradition and why it has endured for so long.
-Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), 29.