Ministries, Charisms, and the Bishop

Having established that every Christian is consecrated, Afanasiev spends the central chapters of his book working out what the particular ministries then are. His answer is that they are charisms — gifts of the Spirit for the assembly — and that this holds all the way up: the presiding minister and the bishop are not the non-charismatic institution that governs the charismatic body, but themselves gifts within it. The bishop appears seventh in a book of eight chapters, and the position is the argument.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration; the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Western European exarchate)

No Non-Charismatic Ministries, No Non-Charismatic Members

The premise stated in the title of the book governs the whole treatment of ministry: “Without the Spirit there is no life in the Church, no activity, no ministry; in short, there is no Church” (Afanasiev’s premise as summarized by Peter C. Phan, review of Nicolas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, Catholic Books Review, 2013, catholicbooksreview.org).

Afanasiev is dismantling a dichotomy that had structured the discussion of ministry since Rudolph Sohm — the German Lutheran canonist and church historian whose work he knew well and whose influence on his method Anastacia Wooden considers highly probable (Anastacia Wooden, “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev,” The Wheel 36 [Winter 2024]: 56–59, at 57). Sohm had opposed the charismatic Church to the legal Church and argued that the second was a fall from the first. Afanasiev takes from Sohm the question and refuses the answer. He does not divide the Church into a charismatic order and an institutional order at all. There is one Church, in which everyone has a gift and every ministry is a gift; the ordained ministries are not an intrusion of law into charism but particular charisms of presidency, teaching, and service.

The two denials are exact mirrors of each other:

  • There is no member of the Church without a charism. The laity are not the ungifted remainder; the royal priesthood is their charism (see The Royal Priesthood and the Ordination of Laics).
  • There is no ministry that is not a charism. The clergy are not an office-holding class set over the gifted; ordination is the Church’s recognition and reception of a gift given for her.

Phan states the resulting position: for Afanasiev “ordained ministries are themselves charisms of the Spirit, not non-charismatic roles opposed to lay gifts” (Phan, review, 2013).

The Vocabulary of the Sources

Chapters 4 through 6 of The Church of the Holy Spirit are a historian’s work on the language of ministry in the New Testament and the sub-apostolic writings, and their titles are quotations chosen to make a point.

“Those Who Preside in the Lord” takes its name from 1 Thessalonians 5:12 — “those who labour among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you” — and from the participle προϊστάμενοι that recurs in the Pauline letters and in the earliest church orders. Afanasiev’s argument is that this vocabulary names a function performed in an assembly, not a rank held independently of one, and that the later transposition of these terms into the language of office is precisely the shift he is tracking.

“The One Who Offers Thanksgiving” names the presiding minister by his eucharistic act. This is the pivot of the whole treatment. Afanasiev’s proestos is defined by presidency at the eucharist, and every other function he holds — teaching, admonition, the direction of the church’s affairs — is derived from that one. He does not first hold an office and then, among other duties, celebrate; he presides at the thanksgiving, and everything else follows.

Alexandrov, who reads Afanasiev against Zizioulas, describes the resulting figure carefully: “Afanasiev’s proestos is a more modest figure. His main role, from which all other functions derive, is . . . presiding the Eucharist. He occupies the place of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, but I doubt Afanasiev ever considered his proestos an icon of Christ — despite the fact it might have been a stable element of the Byzantine liturgical symbolism — and by no means claimed that the proestos incarnated his local Church. His proestos is rather the sacramental presider of the eucharistic assembly, and also a teacher who shares the ministry of the government of his Church with the presbytery surrounding him” (Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278, at 276).

Three things in that sentence are worth marking: the presider occupies the place of Christ at the supper; he is not said to incarnate the church; and he shares the governing ministry with the presbyterium. Afanasiev’s bishop is neither a functionary nor a monarch.

The Bishop

Chapter 7 is the bishop, and its position is deliberate. In a book whose thesis is that the Church’s structure was built to secure the exercise of the royal priesthood, the episcopate is not the foundation but the crown — derived from the assembly, internal to it, and unintelligible apart from it.

The bishop is included in the concept of the eucharist. Afanasiev is explicit that treating the eucharistic assembly as the principle of the Church’s unity “does not exclude the thesis . . . that a distinctive empirical feature of the local church is a bishop because he is included in the concept of Eucharist” (“Una Sancta,” Irénikon 36, no. 4 [1963]: 453; English in Michael Plekon, ed., Tradition Alive, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, 14; discussed in Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 238–239). This sentence matters more than any other for the charge that Afanasiev’s ecclesiology has no bishop in it. He put the bishop inside the definition.

What he refuses is the reverse derivation — the bishop as sign of unity by virtue of his membership in an episcopal college, considered apart from the church he heads. That, on his reading, is the universal-ecclesiological move (see Two Ideas of the Universal Church). Christopher Ruddy states the contrast: universal ecclesiology places the bishop above the church by identifying him with the college; eucharistic ecclesiology makes him head of the eucharistic assembly and situates him within it, and it is from that position that he becomes a member of the college (Christopher Ruddy, The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology, New York: Crossroad, 2006, 18).

The people make the bishop, with God. Afanasiev gives great weight to the assembly’s part in ordination — the ancient testimony of the people to the candidate, the acclamation axios, the amen of the whole church over the prayer of consecration, and the reception of the new bishop by the neighbouring churches. These are not, for him, decorative survivals of a democratic past. They are evidence that ordination is an act of the whole church receiving a gift, and that a bishop who is not received by his church is a contradiction in terms. Even Zizioulas, whose theology of ministry runs on quite different lines, retains the emphasis on axios and amen — one of the few surviving traces of Afanasiev’s royal-priesthood theology in his successor (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 274–275).

The participation of other bishops. Afanasiev’s treatment of the presence of neighbouring bishops at an episcopal ordination is one of the points on which Zizioulas engaged him most directly, and one of the ten disagreements Christophe D’Aloisio catalogues between them (D’Aloisio, Institutions ecclésiales et ministères chez Nicolas Afanassieff, 318; listed in Praveen Joy Saldanha, “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 [2022]: 117–140, at 132 n. 46). The issue is substantive: if a bishop must be ordained by bishops of other churches, does that not show that the local church cannot constitute itself, and therefore that catholicity comes from communion rather than from the local eucharist alone? Afanasiev reads the practice as witness and reception by sister churches; his critics read it as evidence of a constitutive dependence he cannot account for.

Where He and Zizioulas Actually Part

Because the two are so often run together, it is worth stating the difference at the point where it really lies, which is here rather than in the formula about the eucharist.

Alexandrov’s account: Zizioulas’s bishop is not only the one who stands in Christ’s place in the liturgy but an icon of Christ, and sometimes one who “incarnates” his church; Afanasiev’s is a presider, teacher, and colleague of the presbyterium. Alexandrov observes that Zizioulas’s excessive weight on the episcopal ministry is one of the most criticized elements of his ecclesiology, and cites Kallistos Ware to the same effect (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 274, citing Kallistos Ware, “Sobornost and Eucharistic Ecclesiology: Aleksei Khomiakov and His Successors,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 11, nos. 2–3 [2011]: 232).

Zizioulas, for his part, regards the difference as fatal to Afanasiev, and said so at St. Sergius in 2008 in Afanasiev’s own house: “that eucharistic ecclesiology which is not episcopocentric — this is one of the shortcomings of the ecclesiology of Afanasiev — makes a bishop a mere administrator and not a eucharistic proestos. This undermines the sacramental basis of the authority of the bishop in the Church and leads to a dichotomy between doctrine and canon law” (Zizioulas, “L’apport de la théologie orthodoxe occidentale,” Service orthodoxe de presse 326 [March 2008]: 28; quoted in D’Aloisio, Institutions ecclésiales et ministères, 321–322, and in Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 276).

Alexandrov’s response concedes the description and rejects the diagnosis: measured against a bishop who is an icon of Christ and incarnates his church, Afanasiev’s ecclesiology is indeed not episcopocentric — but Afanasiev’s proestos is a eucharistic presider and not an administrator, which is the one thing Zizioulas’s charge gets factually wrong (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism,” 276). The full argument is in The Critique.

What Follows for Church Order

The theology of ministry set out here has a direct consequence for the theology of authority, and it is the bridge to Section 07.

If every ministry is a charism given for the assembly and exercised within it, then authority in the Church cannot be a power held over the Church by some of its members. It must be something else — and Afanasiev’s name for that something else, in the lecture of 1949 that became his last chapter, is the power of love. Whether that is a profound reconception of ecclesial authority or an evasion of the problem is the question his critics press hardest, and it is taken up in The Power of Love.

See Also

References

  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit. Translated by Vitaly Permiakov. Edited by Michael Plekon. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
  • Afanassieff, Nicolas. “Una Sancta.” Irénikon 36, no. 4 (1963): 436–475. English in Michael Plekon, ed., Tradition Alive, 3–30. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
  • Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev.” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 223–278.
  • D’Aloisio, Christophe. Institutions ecclésiales et ministères chez Nicolas Afanassieff.
  • Phan, Peter C. Review of Nicolas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit. Catholic Books Review, 2013.
  • Ruddy, Christopher. The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology. New York: Crossroad, 2006.
  • Saldanha, Praveen Joy. “Nicholas Afanasiev’s Dissent from Universal Ecclesiology.” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 13, no. 2 (2022): 117–140.
  • Ware, Kallistos. “Sobornost and Eucharistic Ecclesiology: Aleksei Khomiakov and His Successors.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 11, nos. 2–3 (2011): 216–235.
  • Wooden, Anastacia. “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev.” The Wheel 36 (Winter 2024): 56–59.
  • Zizioulas, John D. “L’apport de la théologie orthodoxe occidentale.” Service orthodoxe de presse 326 (March 2008): 25–29.