The Living Tradition An Orthodox Archive of the Church Fathers and Early Church

Theme

The Church, bishops and councils

Apostolic succession, the conciliar habit, and why reception is what makes a council ecumenical.

  • Received Orthodox teachingTaught consistently and received throughout the Orthodox Church, though not necessarily formulated in a conciliar definition. This is not a claim that no Father ever wrote differently.
  • Historical consensusBroadly agreed among historians working from the surviving evidence. Consensus can shift when the evidence or the method changes.

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The Church in Orthodox understanding is not an organisation that possesses the truth but the body in which Christ is present. Its bishops are not delegates of the people or officers of a corporation; they stand in a succession that is at once of ordination, of faith and of communion.

The pattern for settling what cannot be settled locally appears already in Acts 15: the question is brought to the apostles and elders, argued, decided, and sent to the churches in a letter that they receive. Every later council follows that shape.

What makes a council ecumenical is not the emperor who called it or the number who attended. It is reception by the Church, sometimes long afterwards — as the history of the Council of Constantinople in 381, an Eastern council with no Western participation, shows more clearly than any argument.

Follow this theme through the archive

  • The Apostolic Council of Acts 15

    The pattern for every later council: a question the Church could not settle locally, brought before the apostles and elders, argued out from experience and Scripture, and decided in a letter sent to the churches.

    Council

  • The First Council of Nicaea

    The council that confessed the Son to be of one substance with the Father, addressed the date of Pascha, and issued twenty disciplinary canons. It did not decide which books belong to the Bible.

    Council

  • The First Council of Constantinople

    The council that confessed the divinity of the Holy Spirit and gave the Church the Creed it recites today. It was not ecumenical when it met; the Church made it so by receiving it.

    Council

  • Ignatius of Antioch

    Bishop of Antioch, martyred at Rome early in the second century, whose seven letters are the earliest sustained witness to the Church ordered around a bishop, presbyters and deacons.

    Father or writer

  • The Church, apostolic succession and councils

    What holds the Church together, and how it settles what it cannot settle locally.

    Lesson

Sources for this page

  1. Tier C The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church Henry R. Percival (ed.); Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (series eds.) The Seven Ecumenical Councils annotated edition of conciliar texts Source record

Tiers are explained in the methodology. No page on this site has been reviewed or approved by any bishop, priest, synod or seminary.