03 — The Local and the Universal

If the Church is catholic in the qualitative sense — whole, not merely widespread — then the local church gathered around its bishop at the Eucharist is not a part of the Church but the Church in that place. That claim is old and it is the structural heart of Orthodox ecclesiology. It also creates the problem this section exists to state: if each local church is the whole Church, in what sense are the many local churches one Church, and what are metropolitans, patriarchs, synods, and diptychs for?

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Contents

File Description
the-bishop-and-the-eucharistic-assembly.md St Ignatius on the one altar, the one bishop, and the assembly; the transition to the presbyter-led parish and what the antimension records about it; the twentieth-century recovery of eucharistic ecclesiology in Afanasiev and its correction in Zizioulas — reported as one Orthodox account among others, with its critics named
how-the-local-churches-are-one.md The mechanisms of communion: commemoration of names, letters of communion, the rule that no bishop consecrates alone, the provincial and patriarchal synods, Apostolic Canon 34, and the diptychs; then the underlying question of whether the local or the universal is prior, with the Afanasiev–Zizioulas dispute left unresolved because the Church has not resolved it

The Question in One Sentence

Orthodox ecclesiology insists simultaneously that the local church is fully the Church and that a local church out of communion with the others is in a defective state — and it has never produced an agreed theory that holds both without strain. That is the accurate state of the question, and its practical consequences are large: the diaspora’s overlapping bishops in one city, in flat contradiction of Nicaea I, Canon 8; the absence of an agreed procedure for granting autocephaly (section 07); and a rupture between churches with no mechanism for its own repair (section 09).

What Is Settled and What Is Not

Settled: that the bishop is the head of the local church and the normal celebrant of its Eucharist; one bishop to a city (Nicaea I, Canon 8); no bishop acting beyond his own bounds (Apostolic Canon 35; Constantinople I, Canon 2); that consecration requires more than one consecrator, so that no church can perpetuate its episcopate alone (Apostolic Canon 1; Nicaea I, Canon 4); and that communion is expressed by the commemoration of names.

Not settled: whether the universal Church is prior to the local or the reverse; what a primate’s authority consists in beyond the coordinating role of Apostolic Canon 34; and how the requirement of communion bears on a local church that finds itself isolated. These are stated as open in How the Local Churches Are One and in section 04.

See Also