Position · 325

Conciliarity

The view that the highest authority in the church belongs to bishops acting together in council, guided by the Holy Spirit, with no single bishop ruling over the rest.

History

Roots

Conciliarity points back to the apostles. When the church at Antioch split over whether Gentile converts had to be circumcised, the apostles and elders met in Jerusalem, argued the case, and sent a letter that opened “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28). Orthodox writers read that phrase as the charter of every later council: a decision reached together, which the church then trusts as the Spirit’s.

Through the second and third centuries, bishops of a region met in synods to settle disputes over Easter, the readmission of lapsed Christians and the baptism of heretics. Out of this practice came a short rule that modern Orthodox writers cite more than almost any other. Apostolic Canon 34, from a fourth-century collection, says that the bishops of each nation must recognise the one who is first among them and do nothing important without him, “but the first cannot do anything without the consent of all” (quoted in the Ravenna Document, §24). A primate and a synod limit each other. That balance is the heart of the position.

The councils

The Council of Nicaea (325) turned regional practice into something larger. Constantine summoned bishops from across the empire to settle the dispute over Arius, and their creed became the test of orthodoxy. Its canons also set out an order among the great sees: the bishop of Alexandria kept authority over Egypt, Libya and Pentapolis “since a similar custom exists with reference to the bishop of Rome”, and Antioch kept its prerogatives too (canon 6). The Council of Constantinople (381) gave the bishop of Constantinople “the privileges of honour after the bishop of Rome” because it was “new Rome” (canon 3), and the Council of Chalcedon (451) confirmed this in its canon 28, which Rome refused to accept (text).

Not every gathering of bishops counted. Councils at Rimini and Seleucia in 359 accepted a creed that Athanasius and the Nicene party rejected, and later generations forgot them. The second council of Ephesus in 449 was disowned two years later at Chalcedon, and Pope Leo called it a “robber synod”. The council of Hieria in 754 called itself ecumenical and condemned icons; the second council of Nicaea (787) reversed it. These cases taught the eastern churches that a council’s authority depends on more than who attended. The wider church had to recognise its teaching as the apostolic faith.

The same history also divided the conciliar churches. The Oriental Orthodox accept the first three councils, up to the Council of Ephesus (431), and reject Chalcedon, so their list of ecumenical councils is shorter than the Eastern Orthodox list of seven.

After the schism

After the Great Schism of 1054, conciliarity became the Orthodox answer to Rome. The union agreed at the Council of Florence (1439) was signed by most of the Byzantine delegates but rejected at home. Mark of Ephesus refused to sign, and the union was never received by the people or clergy of the East (overview, secondary). Orthodox writers now treat Florence as the clearest case of a council with impressive attendance that failed the test of reception.

In 1848 the four eastern patriarchs replied to an appeal from Pope Pius IX. Their encyclical stated that “neither Patriarchs nor Councils could then have introduced novelties amongst us, because the protector of religion is the very body of the Church, even the people themselves” (Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, §17). Two decades later the First Vatican Council (1870) defined that papal definitions are irreformable “of themselves, and not by the consent of the church” (Pastor Aeternus, ch. 4). The two documents set the modern terms of the disagreement.

Influence

Conciliarity shapes how the Orthodox world is organised today: a family of self-governing churches, each led by its own synod under a patriarch or metropolitan, with the Patriarch of Constantinople given a primacy of honour. It shaped the Catholic–Orthodox dialogue from the 1980s on, and it gave the Second Vatican Council a partner as it recovered the idea of a college of bishops. It also set the goal behind a century of planning for a pan-Orthodox council, which finally met in Crete in 2016.

Key ideas and contributors

The church is a council. The Crete council of 2016 put the idea in one line: “The Church in herself is a Council, established by Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit” (Encyclical of the Holy and Great Council, §3). On this view councils are not an emergency tool for settling disputes. They show what the church already is: many local churches that hold one faith in common.

Primacy exists inside a synod. Every level of church life has a first bishop, but the first acts with the others and cannot act without them. Orthodox writers apply Apostolic Canon 34 at the level of a region, and most apply it at the universal level too. The Catholic–Orthodox dialogue agreed in 2007 that “primacy and conciliarity are mutually interdependent” (Ravenna, §43).

Reception. A council’s teaching is confirmed when the whole church, laity included, recognises it as the faith it already holds. This is what separates Nicaea from Rimini, and Chalcedon from the second council of Ephesus. It also means no single office can guarantee a council in advance, which is the point the 1848 encyclical pressed against Rome.

Sobornost. The Russian lay theologian Alexei Khomiakov (1804–1860) took the Slavonic word used for “catholic” in the Creed, sobornaya, and read it as “conciliar”. In his essay The Church Is One (written c. 1840s, published posthumously; text) he described the church as a unity of free persons held together by love, where truth is kept by the whole body rather than by any one office (background, secondary). His idea of sobornost passed into Russian religious thought and then into Orthodox theology in the West.

Eucharistic ecclesiology. Twentieth-century émigré theologians rooted conciliarity in the eucharist. Nicholas Afanasiev argued that each local church gathered around its bishop at the eucharist is the whole church, not a fragment of it. Alexander Schmemann’s essay “The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology” (1960) argued that the Orthodox need a real, though not juridical, primacy. John Zizioulas, in Being as Communion (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), linked the one and the many: no local church is complete in isolation, and no primate stands above the communion of churches.

Key controversies

What makes a council ecumenical. Reception is easy to apply to the distant past and hard to apply in the present. Emperors called the seven councils, and no emperor exists to call an eighth. Critics, Catholic and Protestant, say reception is circular: a council is true because it was received, and it was received because it was true. Orthodox writers answer that the church has never needed a formula to know its faith. The Westminster Confession gave the Protestant view: “All synods or councils since the apostles’ times, whether general or particular, may err, and many have erred” (ch. 31.4).

Primacy at the universal level. Catholics and Orthodox agree that in the first millennium Rome was first among the patriarchs; “they disagree, however, on the interpretation of the historical evidence” (Ravenna, §41). The commission’s later Chieti Document, Synodality and Primacy During the First Millennium (PDF, 2016), left the question open. For Catholics, Papal Primacy is part of the church’s constitution, and Vatican II taught that the college of bishops “has no authority unless it is understood together with the Roman Pontiff” (Lumen Gentium 22). The Orthodox also disagree among themselves. The Moscow Patriarchate held in 2013 that universal primacy is a primacy of honour, granted by the consensus of the churches (Position on the problem of primacy). A Constantinople reply in 2014 by Metropolitan Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, “First without Equals”, argued that the Ecumenical Patriarch’s primacy has real authority (reprint).

Crete and Ukraine. Conciliarity’s weakest point is that it needs everyone to show up. The pan-Orthodox council planned since the 1960s met in Crete in June 2016, but the churches of Antioch, Bulgaria, Georgia and Russia withdrew in the final weeks. The churches that stayed called it the Holy and Great Council; Moscow and others said it was not pan-Orthodox and its decisions bound only those present. Two years later, when Constantinople moved to grant independence to a Ukrainian church, Moscow broke communion with it in October 2018. Constantinople said it acted within its historic rights; Moscow said a question touching the whole Orthodox world needed a pan-Orthodox decision. Each side accused the other of violating conciliarity.

The role of the laity. The 1848 encyclical and Khomiakov gave the whole people of God a part in guarding the faith. Some Orthodox and Catholic critics have read Khomiakov as romantic or close to Protestant, since he seemed to place authority in a collective consciousness rather than in the bishops. Defenders answer that reception does not replace the bishops’ teaching; it confirms it.

The Western mirror. The Latin West had its own conciliar movement. The Council of Constance (1415) declared that a general council “has power immediately from Christ” and that everyone, “even papal”, must obey it in matters of faith (Haec Sancta). Rome later rejected that claim, and Vatican I closed the door on it. The Orthodox position is not the same as Western conciliarism. It does not set the council above a pope as a rival sovereign; it denies that any one bishop or any one council is sovereign apart from the whole church.

What remains unresolved

Every party to the debate now uses the word “synodality”, and every party agrees that primacy and synod belong together. The open question is who decides when they collide. A papal model gives the answer in advance and risks making the synod advisory. A conciliar model waits for the church to receive the answer, and in Crete and Ukraine it showed that waiting can mean division with no court of appeal.