Charism and Institution

The Spirit is not the Church’s opposition party. The modern habit of setting free charism against fixed office is a nineteenth-century construction with a traceable origin, and the Church’s own tradition treats ordination itself as a gift of the Spirit and the bishop as the Spirit’s minister. This file reports the framing and its sources, sets out the patristic material, gives the twentieth-century Orthodox eucharistic ecclesiologies as accounts among others rather than as settled teaching, and defers the ecclesiological substance to the treatment of the Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Where the Opposition Came From

The idea that “charism” and “institution” name two rival principles in the Church’s life is not patristic and is not ancient. It has a datable origin in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German scholarship.

Rudolph Sohm (1841–1917), in Kirchenrecht (Leipzig, 1892), argued that the Church’s nature is spiritual and that canon law is therefore in contradiction with her essence: the primitive community was ordered by the Spirit’s free gifts, and the emergence of law and office marks a fall from that condition. Max Weber took over the vocabulary and generalized it into a sociological typology, in which charismatic authority is by nature unstable and undergoes “routinization” into traditional and legal-rational forms (Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen, 1922). Adolf von Harnack’s reconstruction of early Christian ministry, distinguishing itinerant charismatics from local officers, supplied the historical narrative.

The framing had enormous influence, including on Orthodox writers who inverted its evaluation while accepting its terms. It should be named as what it is: a modern thesis about the sociology of religion, arrived at from outside the Church’s own self-understanding, and resting on a reconstruction of the first century that has not held up well. It is not a neutral description of the problem.

What the Sources Actually Show

The New Testament does not know the opposition. In the same letter in which St. Paul catalogues the charisms — word of wisdom, knowledge, faith, healings, working of miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, tongues, interpretation — he lists among them “helps, governments” (κυβερνήσεις, 1 Corinthians 12:28), which are offices. The gifts are “for the profit of all” and are ordered: God “hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers” (12:7, 28). And the entire discussion ends in a rule of order: “Let all things be done decently and in order” (14:40), because “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace” (14:33). The apostle who gives us the vocabulary of charism also gives us its regulation, in the same breath.

The Pastoral Epistles are more explicit still: the gift given by the laying on of hands is a charisma — “Neglect not the gift (χάρισμα) that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery” (1 Timothy 4:14); “stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands” (2 Timothy 1:6). Ordination is not the domestication of charism; it is a charism.

The second-century witnesses say the same thing from the other side. St. Ignatius of Antioch, for whom the bishop is the visible principle of the community’s unity, roots that unity in the Spirit: he writes as one who has “heard some men saying” things, and says that “the Spirit made an announcement to me” of the very obedience to the bishop he urges (Ignatius, Philadelphians 7; trans. ANF I). Ignatius is at once the strongest early witness to episcopal order and a man who claims to speak by the Spirit; on the modern framing he ought not to be possible.

St. Irenaeus states the mutual implication in a sentence that has become the standard patristic formula:

“For where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church, and every kind of grace.”
(Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.24.1; trans. ANF I.)

The sentence runs both ways deliberately. The Spirit is not confined by the Church’s boundaries in the sense of being her possession; but neither is he found by leaving her. And Irenaeus has just said what he means by “the Church”: the succession of presbyters and the assembly holding the apostolic faith (Against Heresies III.3.1–4; III.24.1).

Montanism: The Test Case

The one occasion on which the opposition was actually staged in the early Church is the New Prophecy, which arose in Phrygia in the second half of the second century around Montanus and the prophetesses Prisca and Maximilla. It matters here because it is the case in which the Church had to say what she does and does not object to in prophecy.

She did not object to prophecy as such: prophets are in Paul’s list, the Didache legislates for visiting prophets, and the Church has never held that the prophetic charism ceased. What the sources record as the objection is threefold — the manner of the prophesying, in which the prophet spoke out of a displaced consciousness rather than as himself; the claim that the new utterances superseded what had been received; and the rigorism that followed, including the refusal of second repentance and the multiplication of fasts. Eusebius preserves the anti-Montanist writers on the first point, that the true prophet is not beside himself (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V.16–17; trans. NPNF II/1). Tertullian’s adherence to the movement in his later years is part of the record and should not be suppressed.

The bearing on this file is limited but real. The Church’s answer to a charism that set itself against the received faith was not to deny charism but to apply a criterion — and the criterion was the confession and the tradition, not the office as such. The machinery of discernment belongs to section 08 (see The Criteria and the Counterfeits).

The Twentieth-Century Orthodox Accounts

Two Orthodox theologians of the last century made the relation of Spirit and Church order their central subject, and both are widely cited. Their accounts are reported here as accounts, with their disputes named, because that is what the treatments devoted to them already do and this collection agrees with them.

Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev argued that there is no non-charismatic ministry in the Church: every service, including the bishop’s, is a gift of the Spirit given at ordination, and the Church knows no distinction between a charismatic order and a legal one. His formula is that the Church is governed by “the law of grace,” not by juridical power; the whole people is a royal priesthood, and the presiding minister presides within the assembly rather than over it (Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, trans. Vitaly Permiakov, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007; see The Argument of the Book; Ministries, Charisms and the Bishop). Afanasiev’s historical reconstruction, his contrast between “eucharistic” and “universal” ecclesiology, and his reading of St. Cyprian have all been contested, and the critique is set out where it belongs (see The Critique).

Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) pressed a different point: that the Spirit is not something added to a Church already constituted by Christ but co-constitutes her, so that the very institution is pneumatologically formed. On his account the Spirit’s characteristic contributions are eschatology and communion, and any ecclesiology that treats the Spirit as animating an institution given in advance has already gone wrong (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985, ch. 3; see The Bishop and the Catholic Local Church). His use of the patristic material and his account of personhood have been substantially criticized within Orthodoxy, and that criticism is likewise set out where it belongs (see The Patristic Question).

[Disputed: the standing of the modern eucharistic ecclesiologies. (a) Afanasiev and Zizioulas are widely read as having recovered the pneumatological constitution of the Church against a juridical model, and their work shaped twentieth-century Orthodox ecclesiology and the ecumenical dialogues. (b) Their historical reconstructions and systematic conclusions are contested by Orthodox scholars on multiple grounds — the patristic basis of the person/nature distinction, the reading of Cyprian, and the relation of the local to the universal Church — and neither account has the standing of the Church's teaching. See the surveys in the collections devoted to each. This collection reports both as theological accounts and does not adopt either as the Orthodox position.]

What the Church Actually Holds

Underneath the modern dispute the received doctrine is not obscure, and it can be stated in four propositions.

Ordination is a gift of the Spirit. The ordination prayer begins, “The divine grace, which always healeth that which is infirm and completeth that which is wanting, ordains…” — the verb has God as its subject and the bishop as the one through whom it acts (see The Theology of Priesthood).

The Spirit’s gifts are wider than the ordained ministry. Prophecy, teaching, healing, discernment, mercy, and hospitality are gifts distributed “to every man severally as he will” (1 Corinthians 12:11). Monasticism, which is a lay institution in origin, is the standing evidence that the Church’s most influential spiritual authorities need not be clergy; the eldership of St. Seraphim or of the Optina fathers is not an office in the canonical sense (see The Acquisition of the Holy Spirit).

Gifts are judged by the Church, not the reverse. “Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29). No claim to the Spirit exempts its bearer from the Church’s judgment, and this is a rule the Church applied to saints as well as to enthusiasts.

And the office is not made holy by its holder. The Church has consistently refused to make the validity of the mysteries depend on the worthiness of the minister — the position she took against the Donatists, and holds still. The Spirit works through unworthy ministers because the gifts are his and not theirs (Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Corinthians 30; trans. NPNF I/12). This is the most practically important thing in the whole subject and is the reason charism and office cannot be rivals: if they were, an unworthy priest’s Liturgy would be empty, and the Church has never taught that.

The ecclesiological substance — the marks of the Church, the local and the universal, conciliarity, the canons, the boundaries — is the subject of a separate treatment and is not duplicated here (see Ecclesiology; Ecclesiology).

References

Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies III.3.1–4; III.24.1. Trans. ANF, vol. 1.
Ignatius of Antioch. Philadelphians 7; Smyrnaeans 8. Trans. ANF, vol. 1.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History V.16–17 (the anti-Montanist writers). Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1.
John Chrysostom. Homilies on 1 Corinthians 29–30. Trans. NPNF, First Series, vol. 12.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit. Trans. Vitaly Permiakov. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985.
Sohm, Rudolph. Kirchenrecht, vol. 1. Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1892.
Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr, 1922. (Charismatic authority and its routinization.)
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12:7–11, 28; 14:29, 33, 40; 1 Timothy 4:14; 2 Timothy 1:6.