Fr. Boris Bobrinskoy: The Church in God's eternal plan

 I would like to emphasize the care taken in the great patristic tradition to show the continuity in the divine plan of salvation through the successive covenants between God and mankind. It is not enough to assert the Church's New Testament foundation in the work of redemption, the Cross, the Resurrection and Pentecost. The Church is not something outside the work of salvation; she is not a mere consequence. Therefore, she cannot be juxtaposed to the mystery of salvation. She is its revelation, its necessary extension, its sacramental epiphany within history, between the parousias¹. In the words of Clement of Alexandria: "Just as the will of God is an act called the world, so His intention is the salvation of mankind and is called the Church" (Pedagogue II.6.27). Thus, the entire Old Testament preparation is endowed not only with a communal dimension, with respect to the chose people, but also an ecclesial dimension, because the theology of the people of Israel is itself prophetic, typological, apocalyptic, and eschatological. But we have to go further still and rediscover, within the ecclesiological tradition of the Orthodox Church, the very roots of ecclesiology, the origins of the Church in the primordial plan of the Creator, a plan of glory, love, and communion inherent in the very mystery of the Trinity. We have seen the care taken by the Father and certain modern theologians, mainly in the Russian tradition, to avoid keeping ecclesiology in a closed temporal context, and instead to situate the Church in a more coherent manner within God's plan: within the context of salvation, but also within the initial plan of creation. Thus the Lord himself says: "inherit the Kingdom prepared from [or before] the foundation of the world" (Mat 25:34).

+Fr. Boris Bobrinskoy, from The Mystery of the Church, chapter 1, Ecclesiology and Trinitarian Counsel.
¹Divine presence or visitation, here referring to the first and second comings of Christ.