The Reception of Tradition

Since not every council that claimed to speak for the Church truly did, how is the true Tradition recognized? This file treats the Orthodox doctrine of reception — the role of the whole body of the Church, laity as well as bishops, in recognizing and confirming the authentic Tradition — its classic formulation in Khomiakov’s sobornost, the decisive test-case of the rejected “robber councils,” and the genuine and unsettled question of how far the appeal to reception extends.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Question of Recognition

The theology of Tradition raises an unavoidable practical question. If Tradition is the life of the Spirit in the Church, and if the councils are its solemn organ, how does the Church recognize the true Tradition and the true council, and distinguish them from the false? History supplies the sharpest form of the question: there have been assemblies with every external mark of an Ecumenical Council — imperial convocation, great attendance, patriarchal presidency — that the Church nonetheless rejected as false. Something more than external form must therefore authenticate a council; and the Orthodox answer to what that “something more” is has centered on the concept of reception — the recognition and confirmation of a council’s teaching by the whole body of the Church over time (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, Fordham, 1974; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, pp. 251–254; and see The Councils as Tradition).

The Rejected Robber-Councils

The doctrine of reception is not an abstraction but the reading of hard historical facts. Two councils in particular function as the classic test-cases. The first is the Second Council of Ephesus in 449, convened by imperial authority under Dioscorus of Alexandria, which vindicated Eutyches and the Monophysite position — and which was decisively rejected by the Church and overturned two years later at Chalcedon. Pope Leo the Great branded it a latrocinium, a “robber council” or “den of robbers,” and the name has stuck: the Council of Ephesus 449 is remembered precisely as the assembly that had the form of a council but not the truth of one (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 25–26; and see The Councils as Tradition). The second is the iconoclast Council of Hieria in 754, which convened with imperial backing, claimed for itself the title of the seventh ecumenical council, and condemned the icons — and which was in turn condemned as a false council by the true Seventh Council at Nicaea in 787 (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 30–32; and see The Icon as Tradition in Color).

These cases establish the negative point beyond dispute: a council is not ecumenical merely because it says it is, nor because it is large, nor because it is imperially sponsored, nor even because prominent hierarchs subscribe to it. What is lacking in a false council is that the Church does not, finally, recognize her own faith in it — it is not received. The true council is known, in part, by the fact that the Body recognizes and confirms it; the false, by the fact that the Body ultimately rejects it (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1974; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 251–254).

Khomiakov and Sobornost

The most influential Orthodox articulation of the positive doctrine of reception came from the Russian Slavophile lay theologian Alexei Khomiakov (1804–1860), through his concept of sobornost’ — a word he derived from the Slavonic rendering of “catholic” (soborny) in the Creed, and used to name the organic, conciliar unity of the Church as a communion of freedom and love rather than a juridical institution. For Khomiakov the Church’s unity is neither the external authority of Rome nor the individualism of Protestantism, but an organic unity of love in which truth is known and held by the whole Body together, through the mutual indwelling of all its members (Khomiakov, The Church Is One; and see the topical article Holy Tradition, on Khomiakov and sobornost). On this account, the guardian of the faith is not a single office or organ but the whole people of God in communion — the “Church-people” — and the truth of a council is confirmed by its reception into the living faith of this whole Body.

Khomiakov’s most famous statement of the point is often summarized in the claim, associated with the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848, that “the guardian of piety is the very body of the Church, that is, the people (laos) itself” — a phrase the Slavophiles seized upon as scriptural warrant for the doctrine of reception (the 1848 Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, §17; discussed in Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 251–252). The faith cannot be imposed on the Body from above against its recognition; the whole Body, animated by the one Spirit, is the bearer of Tradition, and it is in the Body’s reception that the Spirit’s confirmation of a true council is manifest.

The Limits and the Live Dispute

The doctrine of reception, powerful and widely received, is also genuinely contested at its edges, and honesty requires marking both its force and its dangers. Taken carelessly, “reception” can be misread in a populist or democratic direction, as though a council’s authority hung upon a subsequent plebiscite of the laity, or as though the faith remained permanently in suspense until ratified from below — a reading that would subvert the very authority of the councils and dissolve the episcopate’s teaching office. The mainstream of Orthodox theology has resisted this overstatement.

[Disputed: the weight and mechanism of reception. (a) The strong Slavophile reading (Khomiakov and his heirs) emphasizes that no external authority — not even an episcopal council — is self-authenticating; the truth of the faith is confirmed by the reception of the whole Body, so that the ultimate guardian is the conscience of the whole Church, laity included. Its critics fear this makes the laity a court of appeal over the bishops and leaves conciliar authority hostage to popular ratification. (b) A more balanced reading — associated with Florovsky, Meyendorff, and others — affirms reception as real and necessary (the robber-councils prove that a council can fail to be the Church's voice) while denying that it is a democratic vote: reception is the Spirit's confirmation manifest over time in the life, worship, and confession of the whole Church, not a referendum, and a true council binds by its truth, not by subsequent popular approval. On this reading reception is a *sign* by which the true council is recognized, not the *cause* of its authority. (c) A further caution, pressed by critics of Khomiakov (including Florovsky himself), is that the Slavophile doctrine was shaped by German Romantic and organicist philosophy and can overstate the spontaneity of ecclesial consensus. This is a genuine and unsettled tension in Orthodox ecclesiology, and the compendium names the positions without resolving them; see the parallel treatment in [The Councils as Tradition](../04-the-councils-and-the-symbols/the-councils-as-tradition.md) and [Khomiakov, Sobornost, and the Ecumenical Dialogue](../08-tradition-and-the-modern-theologians/khomiakov-sobornost-and-the-ecumenical-dialogue.md).]

What Reception Secures

Whatever the resolution of that dispute, the doctrine of reception secures something essential to the whole theology of Tradition: that Tradition lives in the whole Church and cannot be reduced to any single organ within her — not the individual, not the theologian, not even the council considered in isolation from the Body whose faith it confesses. Tradition is the life of the Spirit in the whole Body of Christ, and the recognition of the true Tradition is an act of that whole Body, in which bishops define and the faithful receive, each in their proper place, under the one Spirit. This is why Orthodoxy has no single earthly organ of infallibility on the Roman model: the infallibility it confesses is that of the whole Church guided by the Spirit, manifest in the consensus of the faith across the councils, the Fathers, the Liturgy, and the reception of the faithful — the same living, indivisible Tradition this compendium has traced throughout. The rejected robber-councils stand as the permanent reminder that authority in the Church is finally the authority of the truth received by the Spirit-bearing Body, and of nothing less.

See Also

References

  • Khomiakov, Alexei. The Church Is One. Various editions. (Sobornost; the organic unity of the Church; the whole Body as bearer of the faith.)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Reception; the robber-councils; the 1848 Encyclical and the guardian of piety, pp. 25–26, 30–32, 251–254.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. (Conciliar authority and reception.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition and Ways of Russian Theology. Collected Works vols. 1, 5–6. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972, 1979. (Reception affirmed; critique of Khomiakov’s Romantic sources.)
  • Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848), §17. (The guardian of piety is the body of the Church, the people itself.)