Councils and authority

[Fr Raphael Vereshack]

The Quest for Eastern & Oriental Orthodox Unity thread seems to have gone for the moment at least in the direction of authority in the Church and how this is reflected in the Councils. So I've also posted this related question to the Ecclesiology area.

Maybe some useful questions at this point would be how we relate the authority of Councils to the fact that the Church no longer follows all of the canons proclaimed by them or reinterprets their original meaning.

What part if any of Councils is unchanging? Or turn the question around- what part can change?

How can we have respect for the authority of a Council as well as the need to constantly be interpreting it and applying it in a practical living way?

What then does this suggest about the authority of Councils?

Where does the authority of the Church lie and how is this expressed?

I bring this up partly from our own present ROCOR-MP experience where spiritual life & death issues (ie our future direction as part of the Church) are affected by how past documents and statements are interpreted.

In Christ- Fr Raphael

[Kris]

What part if any of Councils is unchanging? Or turn the question around- what part can change?


Your blessing Father,

I think the answer to that question can be found by looking at the purpose of the Councils' respective decisions. Proclamations on faith and doctrine are absolute and timeless. Canon Law, on the other hand, are usually a reaction to a particular problem that arose in a particular place, at a particular time, within a particular social context, etc.

Based on this, one can say that dogmatic issues cannot ever be revised, changed or re-interpreted, but Canon Law can wherever the situation to which it was a reaction has changed or disappeared.

For example, the Second Ecumenical Council states in canon 3 that the Bishop of Constantinople should "have the priorities of honor after the Bishop of Rome, because of its being New Rome," which changes the order laid out by the Council of Nicea.

When Nicea was held, Constantinople was not particularly important, and as such was not elevated to the rank of Patriarchate. When the second Council was held it was the capital of the Empire and it was therefore appropriate to elevate it above Alexandria - not because the first canon was wrong (it was right in its context), but because teh situation had changed.

That being said, even in that case, the Canon Law is not being changed as such, but merely rendered superflous by a changing world, and it does not, as far as I can see, justify priests or laity ignoring various canons (unless it be out of <I>economia</I>) at will; such as kneeling on sundays or rejecting fasting rules.

Please pray for me, a sinner.

[Athanasius Abdullah]

Dear Orthodox11,

+irini nem ehmot


I think the answer to that question can be found by looking at the purpose of the Councils' respective decisions. Proclamations on faith and doctrine are absolute and timeless. Canon Law, on the other hand, are usually a reaction to a particular problem

I would be more specific, personally, and argue that it is the substanceof the "proclamations on faith and doctrine" which are "absolute and timeless". In my opinion, the very language used by the Fathers to express that substantial faith is liable to change so long as that substantial faith is not compromised in the process, for ultimately the language and philosophical constructs employed by them were historically accidental and reactionary.

For example, the term homoousios, as used in the Nicene Creed, aroused quite a storm upon its employment in the Creed, primarily because of its controversial historical usage (being anathematised by a local Antiochian Synod because of the heretical Sabellian context in which it was applied by Paul of Samosata) and the ambiguity of its philosophical implications. Despite such a stigma attached to the term and the heated debates that followed upon its employment, it was rigorously defended nonetheless.

The historical incident that shed the most light for me as to why the Fathers ultimately agreed upon and defended this specific term to express the dogmatic truth of Christ’s co-equality with the Father in His Divinity, was the incident where an Arian representative at the Council of Nicaea spoke of the term homoousios (before its being seriously considered by the Fathers) in a manner which indicated that such a term would be detrimental to the whole Arian cause. It was at this point that the Fathers seemed to have started to seriously consider the term. In other words, language seems to have been chosen for the practical and historical purpose of unequivocally denying the Arian heresy. Homoousios was used, not because it was the best available expression of Orthodoxy, but because it was the best available negation of Arianism in that immediate historical context.

My point is reinforced by the fact that St. Gregory the Theologian, in attempting to reason with the semi-Arians, more or less conceded that language and terminology were meaningless, and that all that really mattered was that the substantial faith was being confessed.

My point is further emphasised when we consider the choice of terminology employed in the Creed’s redaction at Constaninople 381. If homoousios was truly the best available term to describe a co-equally divine relationship between two hypostases, then surely the Fathers would have used it to describe the relationship between the Father and the Holy Spirit as it was used to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son. However, it wasn’t, and this seems to have been a conscious omission by the Fathers. The reason why the Fathers chose the terminology they ultimately did was, I believe, historically accidental. It was in consideration of the aftermath of Nicaea that the Fathers realised that there could be another way of expressing the Divinity of the Holy Spirit without re-igniting the controversy that had previously (and that had still at that present time) loomed. Yet the Fathers weren’t compromising the “Tradition of the Church” for the sake of being diplomatic; the fact of the matter is that the term homoousios had no intrinsic absolute value; it served its historical purpose, but was subsequently, some fifty-five years later, deemed unnecessary in asserting the Divinity of the Holy Spirit.*

It should also be noted that the Nicene Creed was not only redacted in terms of its being elaborated upon; there were clauses that were in fact struck out from the original creed, such as the clause attributing the source of the Son’s begetting to the Father’s ousia.

*I'm not sure about other Churches, but in the Coptic Orthodox Church, the term homoousios, despite its ommission from the articles of the Creed relevant to the Holy Spirit, is consistently used in application to the Holy Spirit in our liturgical prayers.

In IC XC
-Athanasius

[Kris]

+irini nem ehmot


Peace,



I would be more specific, personally, and argue that it is the substanceof the "proclamations on faith and doctrine" which are "absolute and timeless". In my opinion, the very language used by the Fathers to express that substantial faith is liable to change so long as that substantial faith is not compromised in the process, for ultimately the language and philosophical constructs employed by them were historically accidental and reactionary.


I agree with you. Language is incidental and is constantly subject to change. That being said, I do think there comes points where a certain term is rendered absolute.

For example, when the Holy Evangelist John chose to use the term Logos in his Gospel, the definition of this word became fixed as it moved out of Greek philosophy and into a Christian context.

In the same way, when your namesake and the other great Fathers of Nicea decided to include omoousios in the Creed, that word became "fixed" in a sense in its use to describe the relationship between the Persons of the Holy Trinity.

But, yes, it is the substance and not the language that is absolute.



*I'm not sure about other Churches, but in the Coptic Orthodox Church, the term homoousios, despite its ommission from the articles of the Creed relevant to the Holy Spirit, is consistently used in application to the Holy Spirit in our liturgical prayers.


It is used in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom prior to the recitation of the Creed in reference to the Holy Trinity: "Patera, Yion, kai Agion Pneuma. Triada omoousion kai achoriston" (Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Trinity consubstantial and undivided), so its something we share with the Egyptian Church.

In XC,
Kris

[Fr Raphael Vereshack]

I've really loved reading these posts today.

Maybe the words we use in the Church like homoousios have to do with the context they arise in. This word can and did mean many different things before Nicea & it still could afterwards. But Nicea gave this word a specific set of meanings so that we now have a fair idea of what we each mean when we use this word. Not that the word's only purpose is practical- ie: it can convey a set of ideas that most understand. But it also conveys a sense of the spiritual insight the Church fathers had who struggled so much over this issue. Maybe for this reason- because it is such an inestimable and enduring treasure of the Church- we also would not lightly abandon such words as homoousios.

On the other hand it does seem more than correct to remember not to absolutise any of this. In theological contexts we do for example remain very faithful to the use of the word homousios. These many centuries later with our own languages and cultures we translate this word as best as possible and seek to understand according to our ability. This faithfulness to language asks for a theological vigiliance on our part so that we're not too comfortable and lazy in the way we think about the Faith.

But even a brief reading of the Fathers and spiritual writers of the Church shows that the word homoousios is not always used to describe Christ's relationship with the Father. When writing in more general terms many different words are used which if looked at carefully could be seen as being a real problem. In all of this intent has to be kept in mind and that no matter how it's being said what this comes down to is the One Faith that is seeking to be expressed.

In Christ- Fr Raphael