The Bishop and the Catholic Local Church

The mature form of Zizioulas’ ecclesiology: the local community gathered around its bishop for the eucharist is the catholic Church in that place, whole and lacking nothing; the bishop is the head of that assembly rather than the governor of a territory; and local churches relate to one another by identity, in a communion without which none of them would be catholic at all. This file sets the argument out, follows it into ordination and conciliarity, and names the difficulties it creates for the modern diocese.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

Catholicity: a Predicate of Quality, not of Extent

The word “catholic” in ordinary modern usage means “worldwide.” Zizioulas’ contention, argued historically in 1965 and systematically in 1985, is that in its earliest Christian use it meant something else: whole, entire, wanting nothing.

The text on which everything turns is St. Ignatius of Antioch: “Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be; even as where Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 8.2; trans. J. B. Lightfoot). Ignatius is speaking of the church in a single city. If the assembly at Smyrna can be called hē katholikē ekklēsia, then catholicity is not an extensive property that only a worldwide body could have; it is the property of being the whole Church, because the whole Christ is present in the eucharist of that assembly (Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, ch. 4, “Eucharist and Catholicity”; the historical case in Eucharist, Bishop, Church, trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001; see Unity Around the Eucharist).

From this Zizioulas draws the corollary that governs the rest: the local and the universal cannot be related as part to whole. If the church of Smyrna were a fragment of a larger Church, the eucharist celebrated there would be a fragment of the eucharist, which is absurd — one does not receive a portion of Christ. The relation between local churches must therefore be a relation of identity: each is the same one Church, wholly present, and their communion is the coincidence of identicals rather than the assembly of components (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 4; John Zizioulas Foundation, “Church,” zizioulas.org, summarizing what it calls the unity of identity).

He thought this excluded two errors at once. It excludes a centralized universalism, in which a worldwide Church exists prior to and above the local churches and delegates to them a share of its life; and it excludes a congregational localism, in which each community is complete in itself and communion is optional. Both, on his reading, presuppose the part/whole grammar that the ante-Nicene evidence does not support.

The Bishop as Head of the Assembly

The second pillar is the bishop, and Zizioulas’ account of him is deliberately narrow: the bishop is what he is because he presides at the eucharist of his church.

In the ante-Nicene picture Zizioulas reconstructs, there is one assembly in a place, one altar, one bishop, with the presbyters seated in council around him and the deacons serving; the bishop’s office is the office of the one at the head of the many. Ignatius’ language of the bishop presiding “in the place of God,” with the presbyters as the council of the apostles (To the Magnesians 6), is on his reading a description of the assembly’s iconic structure and not an assignment of powers. The bishop images the One around whom the many are gathered, which is why for Zizioulas the episcopal office and the eucharist are inseparable: subtract the eucharist and the bishop becomes an official; subtract the bishop and the assembly loses the “one” without which the “many” cannot be one (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001; Being as Communion, 1985, chs. 4–6).

Two negations follow, and Zizioulas pressed them hard.

The episcopate is not a jurisdiction. A conception of the bishop as the holder of authority over a region — an authority he could in principle exercise without ever standing at an altar — is, on his account, a fourth-century and later deformation, whose consequences shaped both Eastern canonical practice and the Western doctrine of the papacy.

Ordination is not the transmission of a power. In the earliest evidence the ordination takes place within the eucharistic assembly, with the community’s assent, and the ordinand receives a place in a relation rather than a portable faculty. The ancient prohibition of “absolute” ordinations — ordination with no community to serve, forbidden by the sixth canon of Chalcedon — is for Zizioulas the canonical crystallization of exactly this ontology, and its erosion the canonical symptom of the deformation (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 6, “Ministry and Communion”; Council of Chalcedon, canon 6, in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1990; see The Holy Mysteries).

Why Communion Is Necessary and Not Optional

The step that distinguishes Zizioulas from a purely local eucharistic ecclesiology is his insistence that the local church’s catholicity is itself relational, and that isolation would destroy it.

His argument is drawn from ordination. A bishop is not ordained by his own church alone; the ancient rule, embedded in the canons, is that a bishop is consecrated by other bishops — the first canon of the Apostles requires two or three. The constituting act of a local church therefore reaches beyond it: the church of a place cannot produce its own head out of its own resources. Communion with the other churches is thus not an addition to a church already complete, but part of what makes it the catholic Church at all (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, chs. 4–5; Apostolic Canon 1).

From this Zizioulas derives the council as a structure required by eucharistic ecclesiology rather than tolerated by it. If each local church is wholly the Church, and if each is constituted in communion, then the bishops — as heads of churches, not as delegates of a supra-local body — must meet, and their meeting is the way the many churches are one Church without any of them ceasing to be wholly the Church. This is the argument that becomes, when applied at the regional and universal levels, his doctrine of primacy (see Primacy, Conciliarity, and Canon 34).

The Difficulties Zizioulas Did Not Hide

The ecclesiology is elegant and it creates problems, several of which Zizioulas named himself.

The parish. If the eucharistic assembly under the bishop is the local church, then the modern parish — a eucharistic assembly under a presbyter — is theologically anomalous, and the modern diocese, containing many altars, is not the ante-Nicene local church but its successor institution. Zizioulas treated the fourth-century multiplication of presbyter-led parishes as a genuine rupture with lasting consequences; he did not propose abolishing the parish, and concluded instead that the eucharistic meaning of the episcopate had to be recovered theologically where it could not be recovered structurally (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001; see The Argument of the First Three Centuries).

Critics reply that this leaves the actual, ordinary Christian life of nearly two millennia in a permanently deficient condition — that an ecclesiology which can only call the normal Sunday liturgy a diminished instance of the Church has judged the Church’s own history rather than described it. The observation is a standing one in the literature and it is a fair one to record.

The titular bishop. The difficulty has a personal edge in Zizioulas’ own case. Pergamon has had no substantial Orthodox flock since the population exchanges of 1923; the theologian who insisted more than anyone that a bishop is the head of a eucharistic assembly was himself the bishop of an assembly that no longer existed (see Harvard, Florovsky, and the Academic Career). The irony is noted by his critics and acknowledged by his defenders; it is a fact about a situation the Ecumenical Patriarchate has long maintained for reasons of its own, and not a charge of hypocrisy.

The place of the laity. Zizioulas’ assembly is structured: the one and the many, head and body, without which neither is what it is. Afanasiev’s is more insistently a priesthood of the whole people, with the ordained ministry located inside it. The difference of emphasis is real, and readers who come to Zizioulas from Afanasiev often feel that the bishop has grown and the laity shrunk. Zizioulas’ answer is that the “many” are as constitutive as the “one,” that there is no head without a body, and that his structure is not hierarchical in the sense of superiority but relational in the sense of mutual constitution (see Zizioulas and Afanasiev).

What This Is and Is Not

The Orthodox Church confesses one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church; she confesses the episcopate as of the essence of the Church’s order and the eucharist as the Church’s central mystery. She has not defined catholicity as a purely qualitative predicate, has not ruled on the relation of local and universal in Zizioulas’ terms, and has not adopted the ante-Nicene structure as a canonical norm binding on the modern diocese. The account given here is Zizioulas’ theological reconstruction, argued from historical evidence whose reading is contested, and it stands or falls on its own arguments (see Ecclesiology for the Church’s own confession, and Section 08 for the criticism).

References

Zizioulas, John D. Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries. Trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001.
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985. (Chs. 4–6.)
Ignatius of Antioch. To the Smyrnaeans 8.2; To the Magnesians 6. Trans. J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, Part II, vol. 2.
Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990. (Chalcedon, canon 6.)
Apostolic Canons, canon 1. (Consecration of a bishop by two or three bishops.)
McPartlan, Paul. The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993.
John Zizioulas Foundation. “Church” and “Eucharist.” zizioulas.org (accessed 2026).