Where the Church Ends

St Cyprian held that there are no sacraments outside the Church, and that anyone coming from heresy or schism must therefore be baptized, because what he received before was nothing. St Basil’s Canon 1 records a different practice, distinguishes heresy from schism from mere insubordinate assembly, and subordinates Basil’s own stricter judgment to what he calls the general economy. Both are saints of the Church; neither position has been condemned; and Orthodox practice has moved between them for eighteen centuries and still does. This file sets out both poles at their strongest and reports the variation as the fact it is.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Question, Stated Precisely

The Church has a visible boundary. She has an altar to which some are admitted and others not, a list of those in communion with her, and canons regulating entry. Nothing in what follows questions that.

The question is what obtains immediately outside it. When a body separated from the Church baptizes in the name of the Trinity, ordains, and celebrates a eucharist, what has happened? Three answers have been given within the Christian tradition:

Nothing. The rites are empty forms performed by those who do not possess what they purport to give.
Something, but not what it appears. A real rite is performed, but its effect is suspended or unfruitful while the separation lasts.
The Church cannot say. The boundary is known from inside; what obtains outside it is God’s business and not the subject of a doctrine.

Orthodox writers have given all three, and the tradition has canonized representatives of the first and legislated on the basis of something closer to the second. That is the situation this file describes.

The Cyprianic Pole

St Cyprian, bishop of Carthage from 248 or 249 until his martyrdom in 258, gave the first and most rigorous answer, and gave it in the course of a concrete controversy about the Novatianist schism.

The premise: the Church cannot be divided. In De ecclesiae catholicae unitate, written in 251 in the aftermath of the Decian persecution and the Novatianist separation, Cyprian argues that the Church is one as the seamless robe was one, that the episcopate is one and each bishop holds it entire (episcopatus unus est, cuius a singulis in solidum pars tenetur, De unitate 5), and that separation from her is separation from Christ:

“He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.” (De unitate 6; CSEL 3.1, ed. Hartel; trans. ANF 5)

The conclusion: there is no baptism outside her. If the Spirit is given in the Church and the schismatic has left the Church, he has nothing to give. Cyprian states the principle without qualification in the letter to Jubaianus, the longest and most careful of the series:

“There is no salvation outside the Church.” (salus extra ecclesiam non est; Cyprian, Ep. 73.21)

The letters. The controversy is carried in Epp. 69–75 in the numbering of Hartel’s CSEL edition, used by modern scholarship (the older ANF numbering differs, and the letters are safest identified by addressee): Ep. 69 to Magnus, on whether the Novatianists’ baptism avails; Ep. 70, the synodal letter of an African council to Januarius and others; Ep. 71 to Quintus; Ep. 72, the synodal letter of a further council to Stephen of Rome; Ep. 73 to Jubaianus, the fullest statement; Ep. 74 to Pompeius, replying to Stephen’s rescript; and Ep. 75, the letter of Firmilian of Caesarea in Cappadocia supporting Cyprian in far harsher terms than Cyprian himself used.

The council. On 1 September 256 a council of eighty-seven African bishops met at Carthage; its acts survive as the Sententiae episcoporum numero LXXXVII de haereticis baptizandis, in which each bishop gives his opinion in turn. All voted that those coming from heresy must be baptized.

And the point that is almost always omitted. Cyprian opened that council by refusing to make his position a term of communion: he declared that in stating his view he judged no one and removed no one from the right of communion who thought differently, since each bishop has his own free will and answers to the Lord (Sententiae episcoporum, Cyprian’s opening statement). This is not a marginal courtesy. It means that the most rigorous ecclesiologist in the patristic record did not treat the boundary question as itself a boundary question — and any modern use of Cyprian that does so has departed from him.

The Roman Counter-Practice

Stephen, bishop of Rome (254–257), took the opposite position and did make it a term of communion. His rescript, quoted by Cyprian, is a single sentence and became the classic formulation of the milder view:

“If therefore any come to you from any heresy whatever, let there be no innovation beyond what has been handed down, that hands be laid upon them in penitence.” (Stephen’s rescript, quoted in Cyprian, Ep. 74.1; trans. ANF 5)

Two features of the reply are worth noting. It appeals to tradition, not to a theory — Stephen does not argue that heretical baptism confers grace; he argues that the received practice is to receive by the laying on of hands in penitence and that no innovation should be introduced. And it is procedurally aggressive: Stephen is reported to have threatened to break communion with the African and Asian churches over the matter, which is what provoked Firmilian’s fury in Ep. 75.

The rupture did not occur. Stephen died in 257, Cyprian was martyred in 258, and the Church did not resolve the question — she outlived it. The African practice persisted for a time and was eventually assimilated to the milder one.

The Augustinian Development, and Why It Is Not Orthodox Dogma

The most influential later handling is St Augustine’s, in the anti-Donatist writings and especially De baptismo contra Donatistas. Augustine faced Donatists who cited Cyprian in support of rebaptism, and he had to honour Cyprian while rejecting his conclusion. His solution was a distinction: the sacrament can be truly present outside the Church’s unity, since it is Christ’s and not the minister’s, but it is not profitable there; the schismatic who returns is not rebaptized because he has the sacrament, and he receives its benefit only on entering unity.

Augustine’s distinction between the possession of a sacrament and its fruitfulness became foundational in Western sacramental theology and eventually took the technical form of validity and liceity. The Orthodox Church has not received this scheme as dogma. The distinction is not the property of an Orthodox council, its metaphysics of sacramental character was elaborated in the Latin scholastic tradition, and Orthodox theologians have generally resisted it as importing a juridical account of grace. What can be said is that Orthodox practice frequently resembles the Augustinian outcome without adopting the Augustinian explanation — and that this is exactly why the two competing framings of reception described below both survive.

Basil’s Canon 1 and the Practice It Records

The Eastern tradition’s foundational text is St Basil’s first canonical epistle to Amphilochius (Ep. 188), and its first canon is a masterpiece of canonical caution rather than a ruling.

The three-fold distinction. Basil classifies separations by degree:

Heresies (αἱρέσεις): those wholly broken off and estranged in the faith itself.
Schisms (σχίσματα): those separated over ecclesiastical questions and disputes admitting of remedy.
Parasynagogues (παρασυναγωγαί): unlawful assemblies gathered by insubordinate presbyters or bishops, or by untaught laity.

Of the second class he says that they are to be received without rebaptism, “as being still of the Church” (Ep. 188, Canon 1; trans. NPNF II/8). Of the first, on the strict view, the baptism is nothing.

Basil reports both positions and adopts neither absolutely. He records that “the ancients” — he names Cyprian and Firmilian — rejected the baptism of the Cathari (Novatianists), Encratites, and Hydroparastatae; he gives reasons for that judgment; and he then does something remarkable. He concedes that in Asia a milder custom prevails for the Cathari, and directs that the ancient local custom be followed. And with respect to the Encratites, where his own judgment is strict, he writes that if insisting on his view is going to be an obstacle to the general good, then custom should prevail and the Fathers who ordered these things should be followed.

That is an explicit subordination of a bishop’s own considered canonical judgment to what Basil calls the general economy — the phrase from which the whole later doctrine of oikonomia in this area takes its warrant (Akribeia and Oikonomia). It is also, on any reading, an acknowledgement that the Church of Basil’s day did not have one practice.

The canonical schedule. What crystallized in law is not Cyprian’s rule but a graded schedule: Constantinople I, Canon 7 — itself, on the editors’ consensus, a later addition to the acts drawn from a fifth-century letter of the Church of Constantinople to Martyrius of Antioch, though undisputed as received canon law and confirmed by Trullo, Canon 2 — receives Arians, Macedonians, and Novatians by chrismation and Eunomians, Montanists, and Sabellians “as heathens,” that is by baptism; Trullo, Canon 95 consolidates and extends the schedule. Nicaea I, Canon 19 requires the rebaptism of Paulianists.

The schedule is unintelligible on a strict Cyprianic reading unless every milder mode is an economy. It is intelligible on a recognition reading without further apparatus. Both readings have been given, and neither has been condemned.

The Variation Is a Fact

The most important thing this file has to say is descriptive.

Across time. The practice of receiving Latin converts has oscillated. A synod at Constantinople under Patriarch Symeon in 1484, repudiating the union of Florence, prescribed reception of Latins by chrismation without rebaptism. A Moscow synod under Patriarch Philaret in 1620 required rebaptism of Latins and Uniates. The Great Moscow Council of 1666–67, citing the 1484 precedent, reversed the Russian ruling and adopted chrismation. Patriarch Cyril V of Constantinople issued in 1755–56 an Oros requiring the rebaptism of all Western converts, treating Latin baptism as no baptism; the Oros was contested at Constantinople itself and was not received in Russia. From that point Greek and Russian practice diverged, and they have never been formally harmonized (Reception of Converts).

Across jurisdictions today. The Russian Church and churches in its tradition generally receive Trinitarian-baptized Western Christians by chrismation. ROCOR has inclined toward akriveia and has more frequently required baptism (Pastoral Economy). Greek-tradition practice most often receives by chrismation while the 1755 Oros remains a reference point for those urging baptism. In North America the mode can differ between two parishes a few miles apart.

Within a single jurisdiction. Because economy is the bishop’s, the same church can receive one convert by baptism and another by chrismation without inconsistency in its own terms.

This variation is reported here as a fact. It is not evidence that the Church does not know her own boundary; it is evidence that she has consistently declined to legislate a single answer to a question her Fathers answered differently.

What Cannot Be Said

Three things this file rules out, because all three are said regularly.

The branch theory is not available. That the Church has not defined what obtains outside her does not license the claim that she subsists divided among several confessions, and the Eastern patriarchs declined that proposal explicitly in 1848 (One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic).

“Grace outside the Church” is not established by the milder practice. A church that receives by chrismation has made a decision about what she will require; whether she has thereby recognized grace or exercised economy over its absence is precisely the disputed question (The Limits of Economy).

Nor is the strict practice a judgment on the persons concerned. Cyprian himself, holding the strictest possible view of the rites, declined to judge the bishops who disagreed with him, and the Church has never taught that she knows the eternal state of those outside her communion. The maxim frequently quoted in this connection should be handled as what it is. [Apocryphal: the saying "We know where the Church is; it is not for us to say where she is not" is widely circulated in Orthodox writing and is variously attributed to A. S. Khomiakov, to Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow, and to twentieth-century Russian émigré theologians. It has not been located here in a primary text under any of these attributions, and is reported as a floating maxim rather than as a citable authority. Its substance — that the Church confesses where she is and does not pronounce on the eternal state of those outside — is defensible on other grounds, and this file rests on those grounds and not on the quotation.]

The Modern Argument

The question has been argued continuously in the modern period and remains open.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s encyclical of 1920, “Unto the Churches of Christ Everywhere,” proposed a koinōnia of churches and practical cooperation, and is a foundational document of Orthodox ecumenical engagement. Against that trajectory stands a substantial body of Orthodox opposition, from Athonite and Old Calendarist quarters and from ROCOR, which has historically maintained strict boundaries against participation in the ecumenical movement (ROCOR: Anti-Ecumenism; The Ecumenism Debate).

The most recent conciliar attempt to speak was the Holy and Great Council of Crete in June 2016, whose document on relations with the rest of the Christian world states that the Orthodox Church accepts the historical name of the other non-Orthodox Christian churches and confessions not in communion with her, while affirming that the unity of the Church cannot be perturbed. The wording was contested at the Council itself, amended at the insistence of the Church of Greece, and declined by some hierarchs present; four autocephalous churches were absent altogether. Its reception is therefore exactly the open question described in The Council and the Question of Reception, and it cannot be cited as settling anything.

[Disputed: what obtains outside the visible boundaries of the Church. The Cyprianic position holds that there are no sacraments outside the Church, so that all reception short of baptism is an exercise of economy supplying what was absent (Cyprian, *De unitate*; *Epp.* 69–75; St Nikodemos, footnotes in the *Pedalion*). The moderate position, reflected in the canonical schedule of Constantinople I Canon 7 and Trullo Canon 95 and in Basil's deference to local custom in Canon 1, treats the milder modes as receptions of something genuinely performed. Both positions are held by canonized Fathers, neither has been condemned, and no council has adjudicated between them. John H. Erickson argues that both the "economy" and the "validity" frameworks are later rationalizations of a more varied early practice (*The Challenge of Our Past*, SVS Press, 1991).]

References

Cyprian of Carthage, De ecclesiae catholicae unitate 5–6; Epistulae 69–75 (Hartel/CSEL numbering; addressees: Magnus, Januarius, Quintus, Stephen, Jubaianus, Pompeius, and Firmilian’s reply); CSEL 3.1–3.2, ed. Wilhelm Hartel, Vienna, 1868–71; trans. ANF 5 (whose epistle numbering differs).
Sententiae episcoporum numero LXXXVII de haereticis baptizandis (Council of Carthage, 1 September 256); CSEL 3.1.
Basil the Great, Ep. 188 to Amphilochius, Canon 1; trans. NPNF II/8.
Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople I, 381), Canon 7 (a later addition drawn from a fifth-century letter of the Church of Constantinople to Martyrius of Antioch; NPNF II/14 with notes); Council in Trullo (692), Canons 2, 95; First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea I, 325), Canon 19.
Augustine of Hippo, De baptismo contra Donatistas; trans. NPNF I/4. (Cited for the position it states; the validity/fruitfulness distinction is not an Orthodox conciliar teaching.)
Synod of Constantinople (1484), reception of Latins by chrismation; Moscow Synod of 1620; Great Moscow Council of 1666–67, ch. 6; Oros of the Synod of Constantinople under Patriarch Cyril V (1755–56).
St Nikodemos the Hagiorite, footnotes in The Rudder (Pedalion); trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957.
Erickson, John H. The Challenge of Our Past: Studies in Orthodox Canon Law and Church History. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1991; “The Reception of Non-Orthodox into the Orthodox Church: Contemporary Practice,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 41 (1997).
Ecumenical Patriarchate, Encyclical “Unto the Churches of Christ Everywhere,” 1920.
Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, Constantinople, May 1848.
Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, “Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World,” Kolymbari, Crete, June 2016 (holycouncil.org).