04 — Conciliarity

The Church decides in council, and a council’s authority is not established by the rank of those who convened it. This section treats the two halves of that claim: first, what makes a council ecumenical, and the doctrine of reception with its genuine difficulties stated rather than smoothed over; second, the relation of primacy to synodality, which Apostolic Canon 34 formulates as a reciprocal constraint and which the Orthodox churches have never agreed how to apply at the universal level.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

File	Description
the-council-and-the-question-of-reception.md	Acts 15 and the conciliar form; the seven councils and the criteria that have been proposed for ecumenicity; why the criteria fail as criteria and what reception actually is; the councils that were rejected despite proper convocation (Ephesus II 449, Hieria 754, Ferrara–Florence 1438–39) and the councils of secondary authority (879–880, the Palamite councils of 1341–1351, the 1848 Encyclical); the honest difficulties — reception is not a plebiscite, has no timetable, and cannot be made into a procedure — and the status of Crete 2016
primacy-and-synodality.md	Apostolic Canon 34 read whole; the canonical basis of the ranking of sees and why Chalcedon 28 grounds it in the civil status of the city; the pentarchy and what it was; the modern dispute — the Ravenna Document of 2007, Moscow’s Position on Primacy of 2013, Constantinople’s First Without Equals of 2014, and Chieti 2016 — with each position stated from its own text; and the plain admission that Orthodoxy has no agreed theory of universal primacy and that this is the structural cause of the crisis in section 09

File

Description

the-council-and-the-question-of-reception.md

Acts 15 and the conciliar form; the seven councils and the criteria that have been proposed for ecumenicity; why the criteria fail as criteria and what reception actually is; the councils that were rejected despite proper convocation (Ephesus II 449, Hieria 754, Ferrara–Florence 1438–39) and the councils of secondary authority (879–880, the Palamite councils of 1341–1351, the 1848 Encyclical); the honest difficulties — reception is not a plebiscite, has no timetable, and cannot be made into a procedure — and the status of Crete 2016

primacy-and-synodality.md

Apostolic Canon 34 read whole; the canonical basis of the ranking of sees and why Chalcedon 28 grounds it in the civil status of the city; the pentarchy and what it was; the modern dispute — the Ravenna Document of 2007, Moscow’s Position on Primacy of 2013, Constantinople’s First Without Equals of 2014, and Chieti 2016 — with each position stated from its own text; and the plain admission that Orthodoxy has no agreed theory of universal primacy and that this is the structural cause of the crisis in section 09

Why These Two Files Belong Together

Because reception and primacy solve each other’s problems and create each other’s. Reception without primacy leaves the Church with no way to convene, no way to conclude, and no way to know when a question is closed. Primacy without reception makes the Church’s judgment the act of an office rather than of the body, which is the Orthodox objection to the Roman development.

The canonical formula that holds both is Apostolic Canon 34: the first does nothing without the rest, and the rest do nothing of consequence without the first. It works well at the level of a province, where it originated. What it means at the level of the universal Church is exactly what the Orthodox churches disagree about — and the disagreement is not a misunderstanding to be cleared up but a genuine gap in the received tradition. Both files say so.

04 — Conciliarity

Contents

Why These Two Files Belong Together

See Also