“It Seemed Good to the Holy Spirit, and to Us”

The Council of Jerusalem’s formula joins the Spirit’s judgment to the Church’s in a single verb, and every subsequent council has claimed the same conjunction. This file asks what the claim amounts to — since assemblies of bishops have also erred, and have said the same thing while doing so — and gives the Church’s answer: that a council is authenticated not by its convocation but by its reception, and that reception has no procedure, which is a real weakness honestly held.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Formula

The apostles and elders at Jerusalem, having settled whether Gentile converts must be circumcised, send a letter beginning:

“For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things.”
(Acts 15:28; ἔδοξεν γὰρ τῷ ἁγίῳ πνεύματι καὶ ἡμῖν.)

The construction is startling and has never stopped being so. One verb, two subjects: the Holy Spirit and a room full of men. Not “the Spirit revealed and we transmitted,” and not “we decided and asked the Spirit’s blessing” — a joint decision.

The passage supplies the Church with the form of every later conciliar act. The councils repeat it. Nicaea II opens its definition by “following the divinely-inspired teaching of our holy Fathers and the tradition of the Catholic Church, for we know that this is of the Holy Spirit who dwells in her” (Nicaea II, 787, Definition; trans. NPNF II/14). The fathers of Chalcedon acclaimed Leo’s Tome with “Peter has spoken thus through Leo” — the acclamation is in the acts, and it is a claim about the Spirit speaking through a bishop’s letter, tested by the assembly and found to agree with Cyril (Chalcedon, 451, Session II; trans. Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, Liverpool, 2005).

The claim is not modest. It is that a body of men, deliberating and voting, produces a judgment that is the Holy Spirit’s.

The Problem

The claim is embarrassed by an obvious fact: assemblies of bishops have gone wrong, and have said the same thing while doing so.

The council that met at Ephesus in 449 was convened by the emperor, presided over by the patriarch of Alexandria, attended by bishops from across the East, and reinstated Eutyches while deposing Flavian of Constantinople and others. Pope Leo called it a latrocinium, a den of robbers, and the name stuck. The iconoclast council of Hieria in 754 assembled some three hundred and thirty-eight bishops and issued a definition it claimed as the seventh ecumenical council. The Council of Florence in 1438–1439 was numerically imposing, included the Emperor and the Patriarch of Constantinople, and produced a union that the Orthodox Church rejected and whose sole non-signer she honours as a confessor (see St. Mark of Ephesus).

None of these was defective in its convocation, its attendance, or its procedure. Each said, in substance, that it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to them. The Church’s judgment that they were wrong therefore cannot rest on a procedural test — and this is the point at which Orthodox ecclesiology says something that no other communion says in quite the same way.

Reception

The Orthodox answer is that a council’s authority is established by its reception by the whole Church. Not by the number of bishops, not by imperial ratification, not by the assent of any single see, but by the Church’s recognition, over time, that what the council said is what she has always believed.

Two features of this answer must be stated together, because each is misleading without the other.

Reception is not a vote. It is not that the laity ratify what the bishops decide, or that a majority of the faithful constitutes a court of appeal. The Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848 says that “the protector of religion is the very body of the Church, even the people themselves” — a sentence often quoted as though it made the Church a democracy, which it does not and cannot, since a body cannot be the guardian of a faith it is free to alter. What reception names is the recognition of the apostolic faith by the body indwelt by the Spirit, which is a different thing from consent.

And reception has no procedure and no timetable. There is no rule specifying how long, how widely, or by what act a council becomes received; there is no tribunal that declares reception complete. Nicaea’s reception took decades and was contested for most of them; Constantinople I acquired ecumenical standing by later recognition rather than by its original composition; Chalcedon was and remains unreceived by a substantial part of the Christian East. Orthodox writers have acknowledged that this is a genuine difficulty. Fr. Georges Florovsky, who is the modern Orthodox authority on the subject, states plainly that there is no external criterion of truth in the Church and that the appeal is finally to the mind of the Church — which is not a procedure (Florovsky, “The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Collected Works, vol. 1).

This is not a weakness to be concealed. It is what one would expect if the Church’s guarantee is a person rather than a mechanism. A mechanism can be specified; a person is trusted. But the honest consequence is that the Orthodox Church can say, of a live question, that she does not yet know how it will be settled, and has no timetable for finding out.

What the Formula Does Not Claim

Four limits, each of which the Church has enforced in practice.

It does not claim that any assembly of bishops speaks for the Spirit. The claim attaches to what the Church receives, not to what a synod asserts.

It does not claim that councils receive new revelation. The councils define what is already believed, under the pressure of a denial. Nicaea II is explicit that it follows the tradition; the standard conciliar self-description is of guarding, not of discovering. This is why the Church has defined nothing about the inner life of God since 381 and does not regard that as a deficiency (see The Councils as Tradition).

It does not make conciliar decisions infallible in their disciplinary parts. Canons have been amended, relaxed, and applied by economy for as long as they have existed; the Church distinguishes dogmatic definitions from canonical legislation, and treats the latter as the Church’s own order rather than as revealed.

And it does not exclude the Spirit’s working outside a council. St. Athanasius against a majority, St. Maximus the Confessor against the patriarchs of his day, St. Mark of Ephesus against a council he attended — the Church honours as confessors men who were, at the time, in a minority of one. That the Spirit spoke through them and not through the assemblies is a judgment the Church made afterward, by reception. Any account of conciliarity that could not accommodate St. Maximus would be false to the Church’s own memory.

The Spirit’s Part

If the formula is not a procedure, what does it assert about the Holy Spirit?

Three things. That the Church’s deliberation is not merely human — that when bishops argue, cite, and vote, something else is also happening, and the result is not the sum of the arguments. That the Spirit does not bypass the human process: the apostles at Jerusalem debated at length (“there had been much disputing,” Acts 15:7) before anyone said the Spirit had judged, and the Spirit’s judgment was reached through the disputing rather than instead of it. And that the guarantee is prospective and unforced: the Spirit will not let the Church fall away, but he does not prevent particular assemblies from erring, and the Church’s confidence is in him and not in her own machinery.

This is why the whole subject belongs to pneumatology and not only to ecclesiology. The Orthodox account of conciliar authority is unintelligible unless the Spirit is a person who is present, who acts within a deliberation without abolishing it, and who can be trusted over a span the participants cannot see. It is a doctrine that requires patience of the Church, and Orthodox history is full of periods in which the patience was hard.

[Disputed: whether reception is a formal criterion of conciliar authority or a description after the fact. (a) The reading associated with Khomiakov and with much modern Orthodox theology treats reception by the body of the faithful as constitutive of a council's authority. (b) Florovsky and others hold that reception is not an additional authority beside the council but the Church's recognition of the truth already stated, and warn that the first formulation risks making the faith depend on a plebiscite (Florovsky, "The Authority of the Ancient Councils," in *Collected Works*, vol. 1; cf. the assessment of Khomiakov's *sobornost* in [Khomiakov, Sobornost and the Ecumenical Dialogue](../../holy-tradition/08-tradition-and-the-modern-theologians/khomiakov-sobornost-and-the-ecumenical-dialogue.md)). The difference bears directly on the modern debates about the standing of the 2016 Council of Crete, which several local churches did not attend. This collection reports both and adjudicates neither.]

References

Council of Nicaea II (787). Definition. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1.
Council of Chalcedon (451). Acts, Session II. Trans. Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 3 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.
Florovsky, Georges. “The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers” and “The Catholicity of the Church.” In Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View (Collected Works, vol. 1). Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848), §17.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993.
Scripture: Acts 15:1–29.