Page 223 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

T H E FAT H E R S O F T H E C H U R C H A N D T H E N E O PAT R I S T I C S Y N T H E S I S
words unchanged, but preserving their meaning.
To make the faith living in every age requires more than
replacing old terms with new ones. It requires placing past and
present within a common horizon, so that what was once said
becomes again intelligible and existentially meaningful. This
is the task of the Church in every generation: not to abandon
the Fathers, but to enter into their spirit.
Thus, the Fathers remain alive in the Church. They are not
voices from the past, but witnesses of a life that continues.
Through spiritual fatherhood, the Church remains what she
is: a communion of persons, receiving life as a gift and offering
it again, in freedom, in love, and in the Holy Spirit.
***
A proposal for a “neopatristic synthesis” was first intro-
duced by Georges Florovsky, who argued that only through a
return to the Fathers could Orthodox theology find its path in
the contemporary world. Florovsky initially saw this return as
a corrective, addressing tendencies in modern Orthodox the-
ology represented by figures such as Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai
Berdyaev, and Pavel Florensky, who employed European phi-
losophy, particularly German idealism.
Yet beyond this corrective purpose, Florovsky’s call carried
a deeper meaning. His central thesis was that during the pa-
tristic period, the way theological problems were framed and
resolved gave theology both significance and relevance in a
world shaped by Greek thought—a world that, in many re-
spects, remains our own. At the same time, the Fathers liber-
ated theology from elements incompatible with the biblical
message.
The achievements of the Greek Fathers left an indelible
mark on Orthodoxy, to such an extent that every authentic
theologian must undergo a kind of spiritual “Hellenization.”
223