Frank Viola: From Eternity to Here
Viola’s story is missional, emphasizing that Missio Dei is not for a select few, but all mankind and creation. The mission of God is not about going to foreign lands but bringing it home where the real issues are. God’s love remains the only spiritual principle that maintains the center of the Gospel—the incarnation of Christ. The essence of being missional, then, becomes the central dimension to the life and ministry of the church.
Viola considers the church to have lost its missional dimension when it was absorbed into the culture of Rome and Byzantium. It was this cultural ideology, described by Eastern Orthodoxy as a symbiosis between church and state, that slowly but surely removed Christ from the center of church and life.
From Eternity to Here proposes a new ideological presupposition that encounters and resolves the deconstruction of church beliefs and praxis proposed by Viola’s book Pagan Christianity. Many traditional and even postmodern representatives of organized religion are terrified by the idea which Viola suggests. They are watching thousands of people leaving their churches to form not another church, not even a movement, but a new and phenomenal experience—a new phenomenon in the experience of God.
Have the old models for organized religion outlived their usefulness?
Reviewed by Dony K. Donev
Further Reading:
In “Frank Viola and From Eternity to Here,” Ed Stetzer interviews Frank Viola and comments on the book.
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