The whole body of Christ shares in the apostolic faith, handed down in the life of the church through the centuries. . . . I once believed that the church became apostate at the close of the first century and hadn’t emerged again until the Reformation. . . . This attitude results in a negative view of the early church fathers and Christianity prior to the Reformation. The fact is that God’s church has existed from the Pentecost described in Acts. We belong to the whole church and need, for our own spiritual health, to affirm every part of it.
-Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), 88-89.