How do the Orthodox Decide Things?Authority and the Church

Orthodoxy, despite having a presence in the United States for well over a hundred years, has burst onto the scene of the religious landscape of the United States seemingly out of nowhere. Before two or three years ago, outside of certain circles, Orthodoxy was all but unknown in the United States. I remember well, when I was in high school, longer ago than I perhaps want to admit, a friend of mine asked me about my religion. I said: “Greek Orthodox.” His response was to ask if I believe in Zeus. Others have assumed that I was an Orthodox Jew. Others just stare blankly and then ask “what is that?”

Thank God, those days seem to be behind us. While the Orthodox Church remains a tiny minority in the West, the mystical theology and unchanging nature of the Church has become a lighthouse for many who are looking for safe harbor in what can only be termed to be turbulent times. Politically, spiritually, economically, societally, familially, we find ourselves in crisis after crisis. People are coming to the Orthodox Church in great numbers, returning to Christianity from nihilism, atheism, neo-paganism, but also from Protestant denominations and Roman Catholicism.

This has become such a phenomenon that in recent years one sees more and more polemic directed at Orthodoxy from both Protestant and Catholic apologists. Not too many years ago, this would have seemed unnecessary. One of the most common critiques that I have come across, particularly from the Roman Catholic apologists, is that the Orthodox, without a figure analogous to the Pope, are too splintered, too fractured. There is nothing unifying the Orthodox, so how can we be the Church? They will point to the lack of authoritative proclamations on various ethical and societal questions, saying that the Orthodox are too disunited to even respond to modern societal issues.

In some ways, one can see where such criticism comes from. We see, for example, that the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and the Patriarch of Moscow are at odds over (to simplify a very complicated issue) the canonical status of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). This is a serious problem and has even led to a break in communion within the Orthodox Church. So, then, how does the Orthodox Church come to decisions? Where does authority rest in the Orthodox Church? How is this authority expressed?

Christ and the Bishop

Perhaps what is frustrating to Western Christians in looking at Orthodox understanding of authority in the Church is that there is no one person, no one thing, that has absolute authority. The head of the Church is Christ and the Church is His Body. It is, then, the Church itself that is invested with authority, and against the Church the gates of hell will not prevail, as He says of it in Matthew 16:18.

As the assembly, in which “two or three are gathered together” (Matthew 18:20), the Church becomes a place of Parousia, of the eschaton. Christ is present in a mystical way in the assembly of the Church, and so it is in the assembly that the Church finds its Catholicity, its “completeness.”

Because Christ is present in the assembly, His disciples are promised: “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven.” Christ echoes these words again in John 20:21-23: “So Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace to you! As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.’ And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’” All of the apostles, then, were given the same gift as Peter in Matthew 16:19-21: “Peter, I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” If the result of being given the keys of heaven is the binding and loosing of sins, then all of the apostles, who too are able to bind and loose sins, are given the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

One does not hand over the keys to anyone but a trusted servant. In an ancient household, this would be the steward, one who oversees the household for his master. The apostles act as the stewards of Christ’s “household,” that is, the Church and are empowered to act within the community with this authority by the descent of the Holy Spirit on them at Pentecost.

The apostles, as they found Churches, and particularly as they begin to die, appoint successors. We see this in Acts 1:24-25 with the selection of St. Matthias by lot, who is then ordained to be one of the apostles, taking the place of Judas. Matthias is, after his election, “numbered among the eleven.” He is as much one of the apostles as any of the original apostles, and so participates in their authority. The successors whom the apostles elect later on, and whom they raise to the state through the laying on of hands (like St. Mark for St. Peter) like the original apostles, take on the mantle of steward of Christ’s Church. There is no lessening of this authority from the apostles to their successors, and so the successors to the apostles, the bishops, are acting in their place, they are the apostles. Each local Church, as the assembly of Christians, has the bishop as its focal point. The people surrounding their bishop constitutes the complete Church, with the bishop acting as an icon, a type of Christ within his community.

St. Ignatius of Antioch comments on the place of bishop within the community in the second century, and we see that his ecclesiology is based on this typological connection between the bishop and Christ.

See that ye all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father, and the presbytery as ye would the apostles; and reverence the deacons, as being the institution of God. Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. […] Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. […] Whatsoever [the bishop] shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be secure and valid. (St. Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, Ch 8) 

As the icon of Christ, the bishop participates mystically in the three-part ministry of Christ, as priest, prophet, and king. Christ is our high priest, it is He who is the offerer and the offering. It is in our mystical participation in the heavenly Divine Liturgy that we partake of His Body and Blood. It is the bishop who presides at the Divine Liturgy through which this mystical participation can take place. The bishop teaches. In the homily he “opens the Scripture” as Christ did to the disciples on the road to Emaus and on other occasions after His Resurrection. Christ is our “high king and Lord of all” and the bishop’s authority in his community derives from the true authority, which is Christ.

Authority in the Church belongs to Christ and through Christ to the Church as a whole, exercised by the bishops. Each bishop is equal, and it is, as we see in Acts 15, in Synod that issues that affect the wider Church are resolved. In this, the bishops of the Synod are guided by the Holy Spirit and the Tradition of the Church.

Sources of Tradition

In the carrying out of his apostolic authority, the bishop does not arbitrarily make decisions, he is not a capricious tyrant. Rather, he is applying Church Tradition to whatever question has arisen. The Church, as the Body of Christ, is itself infallible and the bishop speaks with authority when he speaks in accordance with the Tradition of the Church. Where does the bishop turn, however, in order to discern what Church Tradition has to say on certain topics?

Scripture

Perhaps the most obvious source of Church Tradition is Holy Scripture. Scripture lays out the history of salvation, from the fall of Adam through the second coming of Christ. It is in Scripture that God reveals Himself and how He has worked in human history. St. John of Damascus says:

No one has seen God at any time; the Only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. The Deity, therefore, is ineffable and incomprehensible. For no one knws the Father, save the Son, nor the Son, save the Father. And the Holy Spirit, too, so knows the things of God as the spirit of the man knows the things that are in him... God, however, did not leave us in absolute ignorance. For the knowledge of God’s existence has been implanted by Him in all by nature. This creation, too, and its maintenance, and its government, proclaim the majesty of the Divine nature. Moreover, by the Law and the Prophets in former times and afterwards by His Only-begotten Son, our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, He disclosed to us the knowledge of Himself as that was possible for us. All things, therefore, that have been delivered to us by Law and Prophets and Apostles and Evangelists we receive, and know, and honour, seeking for nothing beyond these (St. John of Damascus An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith Book I Chapter 1).

In Scripture, we see Creation arise out of God’s infinite love. We see Him place humanity in Paradise, and we see Him guide human history following Adam’s fall. Scripture follows the series of covenants God makes with humanity, with Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David. The whole of the Old Testament points toward the Incarnation. In the New Testament we hear the Good News of Christ’s Incarnation, His Crucifixion, and His Resurrection. We see the story of the earliest Christian communities, and we see the glorious Second Coming.

The Fathers of the Church

At the end of the Gospel of Luke, Christ appears to two of the disciples on the road to Emaus. As they walk on the road together, Christ explains to these two disciples all those things about Himself in the Scriptures, that is in the Law and the Prophets. The Epistles of Paul, James, Peter Jude, and John, which make up the majority of the books of the New Testament, are a continuation of this “opening of the Scriptures,” in which the apostles explain what occurred in the Incarnation to the new Christian community, and how they must live out their new life as Christians.

The authors of these Epistles do not, however, only spend time writing. They carried out their apostolic authority within these communities: they preached, taught, and led worship. All of their teaching becomes part of the Tradition of the Church, not only what they had written. Their apostolic authority, and that of the other apostles, also does not end with these men in the first generation of Christian history. As we see in Acts 1:15-26 with the choosing of Matthias, the apostles have the authority to add to their number, and so apostolic authority is granted to those whom the apostles then choose as their successors, and so on, to the present day. In every generation theologians, monastics, arise to do exactly what was done in the Epistles, not to offer new theology, but to explain the theology of the Church in new contexts and to offer guidance to the faithful about how to live out a Christian life in different societal contexts.

No one Church Father is infallible himself, rather we speak of the consensus patrum, that the Fathers speak with one voice and this one united voice is the opinion of the Church. If there is a discordant voice, this does not invalidate the consensus, it is not a unanimitas patrum, after all. Iconography and Hymnography

The Orthodox Church has a rich and varied tradition of iconography and hymnography. Anyone who has tried to put together the hymns for Vespers can attest to this. Icons and hymns play a vital role in the spiritual life of the Orthodox Christian, but their use is not “just” spiritual. Icons and hymnography also serves to educate the faithful in theology (insofar as this can be differentiated from worship, which the Orthodox would not really say is a possibility).

In a largely illiterate society, in which the difficulty in producing books made them prohibitively expensive, writing books is important to disseminate theological discussion among aristocracy, but not the best way to educate the majority of people. Iconography and hymnography fill this need well. Icons are created following a set tradition, and every aspect of the Icon’s production, color, and style offers theological truths to the viewer. The hymns of the Church are filled with poetic theology, and with exhortations to virtuous life, which because of its rhythm and meter is easy to remember for the people who hear it.

The Icons and the hymns of the Church fill, then, the same purpose as the writings of the Fathers, to teach and to lead the people to salvation. As such, they form a part of the apostolic tradition.

Canonical Tradition

Christians are called to unity: “...endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (Ephesians 4:3-6). How, then, can the Church deal with the numerous controversies that arise and threaten to break this unity?

In his apostolic authority, the bishop is able to apply the Canonical Tradition of the Church to situations that arise. The canons are drawn from the Ecumenical Councils, the local Councils, from certain of the Church Fathers, from the commentaries on the canons, as well as from law texts, such as Justinian’s code. The canons are not, however, a “church law,” the word “κανών” means “rule/line” and comes from architecture, as opposed to the word for law, “νόμος” (nomos). The canons are a reflection of divine truth expressed within a human context, not a rigid law code. The purpose of the canons is to lead the faithful to salvation, and so the bishop can apply the canons with either oikonomia (οἰκονομία) “dispensation” or akriveia (ἀκρίβεια) “exactness” depending on the necessity of the situation.

While I have presented these sources of Tradition as different categories, they should not be understood as divided from one another, nor are they opposed to one another. Rather, together they form a symphony of voices through which the Holy Spirit continues the guide the Church into all truth (John 16:13).

The Church in Society

Our society is beset by many polarizing issues, within the Church and in society at large. How can the Church deal with these issues without a centralized authority? This question presupposes that the answer to each of these issues is a uniform approach that must be imposed. St. John Chrysostom, however, tells us that: “The Church is a hospital for souls, not a courtroom.” The Church’s approach is to lead souls to salvation, and this requires not an imposition of a one size fits all approach. St Gregory the Great speaks about this in his Book of Pastoral Rule:

But in some cases, what is openly known should be judiciously tolerated because the circumstances do not offer an opportunity for proper correction. For [physical] wounds are made worse by untimely surgery, and if a medicine is not suited to a certain situation, it would not be profitable to use it. Therefore, as we look for the proper time for [the spiritual] correction of the laity, the patience of the prelate is tried by the weight of their sins.

The model we see here, is not that of a central authority, but that of the spiritual father, who applies divine truth to the situations his spiritual children find themselves in. The Tradition of the Church is this truth, and the bishop, exercising his apostolic authority, interprets how this must be applied.

Would it not be better, though, for some of the issues facing the Church and society to be addressed by an Ecumenical Council? Without a central authority, how can such a Council be called? First of all, if an Ecumenical Council were needed, there would be one. Christ promised that the “gates of hell” would not prevail against the Church, so if an Ecumenical Council would be necessary to deal with modern issues, the Holy Spirit would guide the Church to having one. Secondly, there is nothing facing the Church today, which would require an Ecumenical Council. An Ecumenical Council deals with theological questions with potentially existential ramifications, while also deciding canons on various other subjects as well. Arianism, for example, which taught that Christ was not God, but a created being, if true, undermines our very salvation, and so was the topic of the First Ecumenical Council, and the semi-Arian groups, which denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, that arose in the aftermath of this Council were the topic of the Second.

Unity in Liturgy

One of the few things that all the different denominations of Christianity agree on is that Scripture is important (how important is another question). Scripture contains the narrative of Christ’s life and works in the Gospels, the stories of the earliest Christians, letters from the apostles to their communities, the law, the prophets, the whole story of salvation from the time of the fall to the Incarnation. There is, however, no universally accepted canon of Scripture. There are several early canon lists, including those of Eusebius, Origen, St. Cyril of Jerusalem and St. Athanasius of Alexandria. While these early lists are similar, they are not identical. One of the earliest of such lists, the Muratorian fragment, from the turn of the third century, does not include Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and 3 John, for example. It was not until the late fourth century, that a local Council discussed the canon of the New Testament. The Old Testament canon was not, at least in the East, the topic of a Council until the 1672 Council of Jerusalem, which affirmed that the Deuterocanonical books were to be part of the canon of the Old Testament.

These Councils, unlike an Ecumenical Council, are not universal, as they are local Councils, and there is still some variation between the local Churches in the canon. How could such a lack of uniformity, of central authority, not cause major issues? Once again, we see that authority is found in the worshipping Church gathered together in Eucharistic celebration, led by the bishop. Scripture is liturgical, and the books of Scripture are those that are read in the Liturgy. Issues arise when theology belies the reality of our Eucharistic worship. The Arians were able to muster a great deal of seeming evidence from Scripture to support the position that Christ is not God. The Orthodox did not reject this theology based on who had more quotes from Scripture, but because saying that Christ is not God cannot be reconciled with worshipping Christ in the Eucharist. St. Gregory the Theologian, or someone in his circle even composes a liturgy which is directed entirely to Christ, emphasizing this fundamental issue in Arian theology.

The complete (catholic) local Church, led by its bishop, gathered in liturgical worship is the source of authority, the Church does not require an ineffable authority other than itself because Christ promises that the Spirit will “lead you into all truth” (John 16:13). Christ is speaking to His disciples, who will become the leaders of the local Churches, no one of them individually, but the Church as a whole is led into all truth, is infallible.