The Dynamic Legacies of Cities and Councils of Eastern Christian Antiquity

Amidst the endless, and increasingly tedious, debates among Catholics at least over the Second Vatican Council--debates which are also about episcopal authority as well--some have put it about that eventually the legacy of that council will be no more easily recalled than that of, say, Nicaea I or Constantinople I or Chalcedon.

But the legacies of those early councils is not fixed, either, as a cleverly named new book reminds us once more: Justin M. Pigott, New Rome Wasn't Built in a Day: Rethinking Councils and Controversy at Early Constantinople 381-451 (English and Ancient Greek Edition) (Brepols, 2020), 231pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Traditional representations of Constantinople during the period from the First Council of Constantinople (381) to the Council of Chalcedon (451) portray a see that was undergoing exponential growth in episcopal authority and increasing in its confidence to assert supremacy over the churches of the east as well as to challenge Rome's authority in the west. Central to this assessment are two canons - canon 3 of 381 and canon 28 of 451 - which have for centuries been read as confirmation of Constantinople's ecclesiastical ambition and evidence for its growth in status. However, through close consideration of the political, episcopal, theological, and demographic characteristics unique to early Constantinople, this book argues that the city's later significance as the centre of eastern Christianity and foil to Rome has served to conceal deep institutional weaknesses that severely inhibited Constantinople's early ecclesiastical development. By unpicking teleological approaches to Constantinople's early history and deconstructing narratives synonymous with the city's later Byzantine legacy, this book offers an alternative reading of this crucial seventy-year period. It demonstrates that early Constantinople's bishops not only lacked the institutional stability to lay claim to geo-ecclesiastical leadership but that canon 3 and canon 28, rather than being indicative of Constantinople's rising episcopal strength, were in fact attempts to address deeply destructive internal weaknesses that had plagued the city's early episcopal and political institutions.

Episcopal Hearts of Stone

The last, and arguably most "radical" chapter in my Everything Hidden Shall be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power concerns the episcopate. It was only very late in the process of writing and revising that I included the recommendations in there for major changes to the episcopate based on reading reports (especially in Pennsylvania and California) of how utterly--indeed, demonically--cold, callous, calculated, and uncaring bishops were and are in their responses to people whose lives have been destroyed by the abuse, leading not a few of them to death at their own hands, through drug overdoses, or by similar means. It's not for nothing that Leonard Shengold has called child sex abuse "soul murder."

It was bad enough that bishops moved abusers around and protected the Church's assets first and last. What was truly sickening was their complete refusal even to see the victims as fellow human beings. They were an abstract category--a problem to be made to go away as quickly and quietly as possible, with mendacious promises of reform preferably, a lean cheque if necessary, and a confidentiality agreement in either case.

In reflecting on this, I realized, as Claudia Rapp and others have shown, that bishops have functioned as a self-protecting elite insulated from real life for some 1500 years, and the most important, and most pathological, criteria for membership in this elite is disdain for normal sexual and more generally human intimacy. More recently this episcopal elitism (the nastiest strain of the disease Pope Francis has often criticized as "clericalism") is made infinitely worse by the system which processes and produces these developmentally arrested men, first by requiring celibacy of them, and second by sending them to seminaries at unhealthy ages. In some cases they are taken out of human relationships as early as adolescence, sent to a high-school seminary with all men, then a regular seminary with all men, and on to ordination in a male-only presbyterate.

All the while they are told never to have "particular friendships" or really even human feelings and regular relationships. In addition, they are coddled and catered to, swanning about in collars and cassocks even before ordination, expecting and receiving the "docility" of "pious laity" whom they will shortly be given license to boss about however they see fit. This is a sick system stripped of humanity, and one way (there are many others in the book) to begin an overdue reform is to return, as I argued, to a married episcopate so that these men who are made bishop come from in-tact families and themselves remain human beings molded, humbled, and humanized by having children of their own whose very presence will give hierarchs an otherwise missing element of basic sympathy when confronted with child sex abuse victims.

Along comes a new report confirming yet again the need for such reforms. This story concerns the East Coast. I happen to know a priest of the Archdiocese of New York (to which Egan was "promoted" because, hey, he was good with money and that's all these men really care about) who said of Cardinal Egan (and not a few of his predecessors) that one always and only met the cardinal-archbishop of New York: one never met a human being. That is true for virtually all bishops today.

One is here put in mind of Julia Marchmain's regretful comments (in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited) about the man she foolishly ended up marrying, Rex Mottram, when thinking of Egan and others: “He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory....He was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.” Mottram was solely concerned with money and reputation. He would make a perfect candidate for the episcopacy.

That is clearly confirmed in the report of Egan's handling of cases with open contempt and a total lack of humanity. If he has made it as far as purgatory, I hope he's there for a billion years repenting of this and begging the Lord to replace whatever blackened stone he had rattling around in his chest with a beating, human heart of flesh to experience the pain and suffering he inflicted, or allowed to happen, on all the victims in his several dioceses. In a Church concerned about justice, we should pray that the memories of the victims are indeed eternal, but that memories of Egan and his ilk be subject to damnatio memoriae. 

St Cyprian of Carthage and the College of Bishops

Does anyone today like bishops, or see them as anything other than a corrupt bunch of self-serving gangsters and sexual abusers? If your local one is okay, what about his being yoked to his brothers? Can the Church retreat into local structures and communities and ignore the wider corruption? If not, what should we do then?

These are not new questions, as we see in a new book, St. Cyprian of Carthage and the College of Bishops by Benjamin Safranski (Fortress Academic, 2018), 250pp. I am especially gratified to see how much this new book is indebted to Afanasiev, who is no stranger to these parts.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This book assesses episcopal cooperation as envisioned by the third-century bishop Cyprian of Carthage. It outlines and assesses the interactions between local bishops, provincial groups of bishops, and the worldwide college. Assessing these interactions sheds light on the relationship between Cyprian’s strong sense of local autonomy and the reality that each bishop was responsible to the world-wide college. Episcopal consensus was the sine qua non, for Cyprian, for a major issue of faith or practice to become one that defined membership in the college and, ultimately, the Church.

The book brings this assessment into a modern scholarly debate by concluding with an evaluation of the ecclesiology of the Orthodox scholar Nicolas Afanasiev and his critiques of Cyprian. Afanasiev lamented Cyprian as the father of universal ecclesiology and claimed that Cyprian’s college wielded authority above that of the local bishop. This book argues that Afanasiev fundamentally misconstrued Cyprian’s understanding of collegiality. It is shown that, for Cyprian, collegiality was the framework for the common ministry of the bishops and did not infringe on the sovereignty of the local bishop. Rather, it was the college’s collective duty to define the boundaries of acceptable Christian belief and practice.

Afanasiev on Today's Catholic Crisis

Elsewhere you can read my thoughts on reform to help the Catholic Church through the crisis of episcopal malfeasance, gross negligence, and massive dereliction of duty.

As you'll see in that essay, I draw extensively on the work of the Orthodox canonist and ecclesiologist, Nicholas Afanasiev, especially his masterful book The Church of the Holy Spirit. That book was wonderfully edited by my dear friend Michael Plekon, whom I have often interviewed on here over the years about his own many fascinating and worthwhile books.

Foucault on Power and Authority in the Church (II)

Previously I noted that this book begins from the premise that the Church's understanding of power is problematic insofar as it is tied to worldly notions of sovereignty (which I have treated elsewhere at length). Much of the burden of the author consists in his trying to show how corrupting "sovereignty" is in a body which purports to incarnate in the world the kingdom of Him who came not to be served but to serve, and who surrendered His sovereignty by taking the very nature of a servant (cf. Phil. 2). In particular, Ogden notes that the Church has often failed to protect the innocent and vulnerable in e.g., child sex abuse cases, because of a belief that bishops are sovereign.

After addressing the challenges of using Foucault theologically, the author notes in his introduction that his other major interlocutor will be the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner.

Ogden's second chapter begins from the premise that "authority is an important concept in the Church but it is under-theorized," which I certainly find to be true. He goes on to note that in Foucault as in others, there is often a great deal of reflection on power, but relatively little on authority--which, as I noted previously, should not surprise us insofar as one of the achievements of emotivism is to obliterate precisely this distinction. Only towards the end of his third chapter will Ogden begin to attempt defining authority, a process that is itself not at all straightforward insofar as it is often self-legitimating. It is at this point that Ogden brings Hannah Arendt into the conversation with Foucault, especially her essay "What is Authority?"

For Arendt, authority is neither coercive nor persuasive, but personal and foundational, resting on an office and its respect. For Arendt (and other historians), such foundational offices passed from the Roman Empire into the Roman Church as the former began to decline and the latter picked up some of the pieces. In time, such a move would be legitimated by being considered part of "tradition," a notion Ogden addresses briefly at this point by drawing on MacIntyre.

Foucault rarely treats authority as such, preferring instead to concentrate his focus on the mesh of power-relations that is ever shifting. One must not see power in monochromatic terms here, for power is dynamic, and power-relations usually more complex than a simple binary of dominator-dominated. This is all the more true, Ogden says, in the Church whose "problems are more complex than a stereotypical bifurcation of exploitive leaders and ill-fated followers." And it is not the leaders Ogden is expecially concerned about so much as their, and the whole Church's reliance on "the influence of sovereign power" and the reliance on "a monarchical model of leadership."

From here, following Foucault, Ogden then examines the relationship between power and the production of knowledge. This has especial relevance in the Church insofar as episcopally structured ecclesial bodies see those hierarchs as having an authoritative teaching role to declare certain things to be true or false. The problem here, the very real risk abundantly in evidence in every church and indeed human organization of any sort, is that of "epistemic hubris," which Ogden introduces in ch.2 but develops further in ch.3.

The temptations to epistemic hubris seem inevitable in a system that sets up certain leaders as "my lord bishop," as patriarch of all the Russias, or "your all-holiness." Each of those figures presides over "sovereign" territory--whether a diocese, or a unit much larger. Once again, then, we are back to the problem of sovereignty, and as chapter 3 closes, Ogden rightly notes how much of the discussion here is indebted to Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and others.

At the end of ch. 3 Ogden has narrowed his focus to look at sovereignty, authority, and power, in the diocesan structures of the Anglican Communion, especially in Australia. But before he begins that, his next brief chapter "The Spell of Monarchy and the Sacralization of Obedience," deals with the fact that from its founding Anglicanism "still has not cut the head off the king." Thus Anglican episcopacy lives very much in imitation of monarchical patterns--ruling over sovereign territory, compelling conformity of behavior and discipline, and sacralizing authority and its commands as "pastoral."


A brief mention of the Christian East is introduced here from Foucault, whose understanding of "pastoral power" is traced through early Egyptian and Jewish monarchical ideas to later notions of spiritual direction in the Desert Fathers--so well treated in Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church by the Orthodox scholar George Demacopoulos.

The dangers of spiritual directors and confessors abusing their power is by no means limited to the first millennium, as this recent essay suggests.

If sovereignty, power, and authority all have risks--epistemic hubris, abuse of minorities and the vulnerable, etc--what alternatives have we? Here, in chapter 5, is where Ogden begins to sketch some alternative possibilities to conceive of the Church as "an open space of freedom."

Continues. 

Foucault on Power and Authority in the Church (I)

Ever since reading MacIntyre's After Virtue more than twenty years ago, I have been fascinated with the distinction between power and authority, a distinction which, he says, emotivism obliterates. That fascination led me in part to study the questions of papal power and authority in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy and in several other places.

It was, then, with great interest that I received recently in the mail Steven Ogden's new book, The Church, Authority, and Foucault: Imagining the Church as an Open Space of Freedom (Routledge, 2017), 190pp.

The author is an Anglican cleric in Australia, and much of this book is very focused on Anglicanism in particular, especially in its Australian context. But the author has a way of writing that is genuinely ecumenical without being heavy-handed about it, and thus the reader can easily see many parallels with Catholicism and Orthodoxy, two churches which are even more hierarchical than Anglicanism and which make even 'thicker' claims to authority.

The author's starting premise is that the Church has largely modeled herself (!) on age-old notions of sovereign power which still, often unconsciously, continue to haunt her imagination and inform her structures--a point I suggested recently in this essay where I noted that we need a new reading of Freud's Future of an Illusion to pry us away from an often infantilized ecclesiology with its unconscious imperial assumptions. (If you are going to read Freud's work, the Broadview edition edited by Todd Dufresne is the way to go as its translation is more felicitous than the Standard Edition's and as a bonus contains a number of other related, and often very recondite, essays, including, most significantly, Oskar Pfister's rejoinder "The Illusion of a Future: a Friendly Disagreement with Prof. Sigmund Freud," which Freud himself solicited and then had published in the psychoanalytic journal he founded, thus complicating considerably the picture of Freud as being desperately insecure about his views and very closed to critics.)

Ogden's is a worthwhile and very important study, and I shall be returning to it in the days ahead.

A Note on Episcopal Elections

Whenever I argue, as I did here today, about episcopal elections in the Catholic Church, invariably someone reacts with horror at the prospect of sinful lay people participating. To which my response is always the same: find me an election, to any office however lowly, at any point anywhere in history in any ecclesial body on the planet that was not composed of and conducted by sinners.

Catholics are unused to the idea of episcopal election, but those in the Christian East (including Eastern Catholics) are not. I documented the different synodal-electoral structures and practices across the East in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, reviewing more than a dozen different models for the selection of bishops--some very centralized on the modern Roman model, and others very much involving lay people and parish clergy at the local level.

Is any one model perfect? Of course not. Has any one model a monopoly on producing saints for candidates? Don't be silly. I am well aware that local election by no means guarantees--as I said in the final paragraph of my essay--that we will not have "lunatics" (Adrian Fortescue's phrase). No system is perfect. The idea that papal appointment will always produce competent non-criminals, much less saints, is obviously false to anyone who has been paying attention. Each system has flaws, which is to be expected since they are all composed by and of human beings.

My overall point was a simple one: local election is the minimum necessary to convince the Orthodox of Catholic good faith and desire for full communion. I am, in other words, arguing this out on ecumenical-ecclesiological grounds, not because I'm a romantic populist of some sort.

For those who want to get into some of the historical details about episcopal elections, then let me recommend several works. Joseph O'Callaghan's book, Electing Our Bishops: How the Catholic Church Should Choose Its Leaders, is perhaps a good place to begin for the non-specialist. It is, as the title suggests, more of a plaidoyer than an historical monograph strictly recounting details.

For that, one must turn to Peter Norton's fascinating and invaluable Episcopal Elections 250-600: Hierarchy and Popular Will in Late Antiquity. He shows, inter alia, that "election" sometimes meant ham-fisted imperial appointment, sometimes meant little more than mobs dragging candidates to the altar, and sometimes meant something closer to the popular selection we moderns imagine by that term of  "election."

Norton's study is now just over a decade old. More recent works include the wide-ranging collection Episcopal Elections in Late Antiquity, eds. Johan Leemans,‎ Peter Van Nuffelen, and‎ Shawn W. J. Keough.

Finally, and more widely for those who want to consider the larger issue of synodality, in addition to my book noted above, I also commend to you the wide-ranging, multi-lingual collection Synod and Synodality: Theology, History, Canon Law and Ecumenism in New Contact, edited by Alberto Melloni and‎ Silvia Scatena.

Primacy in the Church, vol. II

In the very early days of 2015, I was honoured and humbled to get a call from the Archdeacon to the Ecumenical Throne John Chryssavgis, inviting my participation in an international collection on the themes of primacy and authority in the Church. I noted here the details of the first volume, and hope to return to commenting in more detail on some of its riches.

The second volume, Primacy in the Church: The Office of Primate and the Authority of Councils (Volume 2), released this summer, features another distinguished cast of scholars including, mirabile dictu, an essay from me. I have myself only read about a third of the essays, which are very rich, and look forward to reading the rest of them soon and having more to say about them in the coming days.

In the meantime, the description from the publisher, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, gives you a good overview, along with the table of contents:

Primacy in the Church is a careful and critical selection of historical and theological essays, canonical and liturgical articles, as well as contemporary and contextual reflections on what is arguably the most significant and sensitive issue in both inter-Orthodox debate and inter-Christian dialogue—namely, the authority of the primate and the role of councils in the thought and tradition of the Church.

Volume One examines the development and application of a theology of primacy and synodality through the centuries. Volume Two explores how such a theology can inform contemporary ecclesiology and reconcile current practices. Chryssavgis draws together original contributions from prominent scholars today, complemented by formative selections from theologians in the recent past, as well as relevant ecumenical documents.

Contents:

• Foreword , John [Zizioulas], Senior Metropolitan of Pergamon
• Introduction: Reflecting on the Future, John Chryssavgis
• The Principles of Accommodation and Forgetting in the Twenty-first Century,
   Adam A.J. DeVille
• Primacy and Apostolic Legend: The Challenge to Christian Unity,
  George E. Demacopoulos
• Does Primacy Belong to the Nature of the Church?, Cyril Hovorun
• Reflections on Authority and Synodality: A Eucharistic, Relational,
  and Eschatological Perspective, Bishop Maxim [Vasiljević]
• The Canonical Tradition: Universal Primacy in the Orthodox Church,
   Alexander Rentel
• The Ministry of the Bishop of Rome: From Doctrine to Modes of Exercise
   Bishop Dimitrios [Salachas] of Gratianopolis
• The Ravenna Document and Canon 34 of the Apostles: The Position of the Patriarchate     of Moscow on Primacy
   Bishop Kyrillos [Katerelos] of Abydos
• Vatican I: Papal Primacy within a Juridical Model of Church
   Bernard P. Prusak
• Collegiality and Primacy in John Henry Newman,
   Mark Reasoner
• Sentinel of Unity: Jean-Marie Tillard on Primacy and Collegiality
   Brian P. Flanagan
• Primacy and Synodality: An Essay Review of Official Statements,
   with Special Focus on the Ravenna Document, Nikolaos Asproulis
• The Synodal Institution: Reduction and Compromise,
   Stylianos [Harkianakis], Archbishop of Australia
• The Place of the Papacy in a Historically Conscious Ecclesiology
   Neil Ormerod
• Sister Churches and Problematic Structures, Robert F. Taft, SJ
• A Tale of Two Speeches: Secularism and Primacy
   in Contemporary Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy
   Brandon Gallaher
• Recent Trends and Tensions: Intra-Orthodox and Intra-Catholic Thinking
   on Primacy and Synodality, Will Cohen
• The Orthodox Church and the Primacy of Peter: Are We Any Closer to a Solution?              Metropolitan Kallistos [Ware] of Diokleia
• Reflections on the Catholic-Orthodox Dialogue Concerning Primacy,
  Walter Cardinal Kasper
• Afterword - Contemporary Ecclesiology and Kenotic Leadership:
  The Orthodox Church and the Great Council,
  John Behr and John Chryssavgis
• Index of Names and Subjects

City of Demons

The University of California Press has put into my hands a new book City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity, written by Dayna S. Kalleres and published last fall. Comprising 392 pages, with helpful maps at the outset of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Milan, this book, the publisher tells us, looks at an overlooked area in the burgeoning studies on episcopal roles and authority in antiquity:

Although it would appear in studies of late antique ecclesiastical authority and power that scholars have covered everything, an important aspect of the urban bishop has long been neglected: his role as demonologist and exorcist. When the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the realm, bishops and priests everywhere struggled  to “Christianize” the urban spaces still dominated by Greco-Roman monuments and festivals. During this period of upheaval, when congregants seemingly attended everything but their own “orthodox” church, many ecclesiastical leaders began simultaneously to promote aggressive and insidious depictions of the demonic. In City of Demons, Dayna S. Kalleres investigates this developing discourse and the church-sponsored rituals that went along with it, showing how shifting ecclesiastical demonologies and evolving practices of exorcism profoundly shaped Christian life in the fourth century.

The first section treats of St. John Chrysostom and Antioch, while the second treats Cyril of Jerusalem; and the third Ambrose of Milan.

Primacy in the Church (I)

I was greatly delighted, almost exactly a year ago, to get a call from John Chryssavgis, archdeacon to the Ecumenical Throne and a well published scholar in his own right, asking me to be part of this two-volume collection he was editing on the theme of primacy in the Church. I was flattered to be sharing the page with such august company as the metropolitans of Pergamon and Diokleia, scholars such as Brian Daley and Christiaan Kappes, and my friend Nick Denysenko, inter alia.

The first volume has just come out from St. Vladimir's Seminary Press: Primacy in the Church: The Office of Primate and the Authority of Councils (Volume 1). The details are below.

A second volume will follow, and that volume will include my own essay--an update, as it were, on Dvornik's Byzantium and the Roman Primacy that looks in part at the fate of the principles of accommodation and apostolicity in the twenty-first century.

But for now, look at the riches in the first volume. Both volumes will be absolute must-haves for any library, public or private, that is serious about its collections in ecclesiology, Orthodoxy, and ecumenism.

The publisher tells us the following about volume I:

PRIMACY IN THE CHURCH is a careful and critical selection of historical and theological essays, canonical and liturgical articles, as well as contemporary and contextual reflections on what is arguably the most significant and sensitive issue in both inter-Orthodox debate and inter-Christian dialogue—namely, the authority of the primate and the role of councils in the thought and tradition of the Church.

Volume One examines the development and application of a theology of primacy and synodality through the centuries. Volume Two explores how such a theology can inform contemporary ecclesiology and reconcile current practices. Chryssavgis draws together original contributions from prominent scholars today, complemented by formative selections from theologians in the recent past, as well as relevant ecumenical documents.

The publisher also gives us the contents of the first volume:

Foreword, Metropolitan Kallistos [Ware] of Diokleia

Introduction, John Chryssavgis

The Meaning and Exercise of “Primacies of Honor” in the Early Church, Brian E. Daley,SJ

The Apostolic Tradition: Historical and Theological Principles, John Chryssavgis

St Irenaeus of Lyons and the Church of Rome, John Behr

Primacy, Collegiality, and the People of God, Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia

Mark of Ephesus, the Council of Florence, and the Roman Papacy, Christiaan Kappes

The Ethical Reality of Councils: An Anglican Perspective, Paul Valliere

Primacy and the Holy Trinity: Ecclesiology and Theology in Dialogue, John Panteleimon Manoussakis

A Liturgical Theology of Primacy in Orthodoxy, Nicholas Denysenko

Primacy and Eucharist: Recent Catholic Perspectives, Paul McPartlan

Primacy in Orthodox Theology: Past and Present, Metropolitan Maximos [Vgenopoulos] of Selyvria

Primacy in the Thought of John [Zizioulas], Metropolitan of Pergamon, Aristotle Papanikolaou

Primacy in the Thought of Stylianos [Harkianakis],Archbishop of Australia, Philip Kariatlis

Primacy, Ecclesiology, and Nationalism, Metropolitan John [Zizioulas] of Pergamon

Primacy and Synodality: An Essay Review of Contemporary Theological Literature, Nikolaos Asproulis

The Petrine Office: An Orthodox Commentary, Paul Evdokimov

The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology, Alexander Schmemann

The Primacy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate: Developments since the Nineteenth Century,
Metropolitan Maximos [Christopoulos] of Sardis

The Ecumenical Patriarchate in the Twentieth Century, John Meyendorff

Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity, and Authority:The Ravenna Document

Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church.


The volume has also attracted some high-octane praise:

"This is an important two-volume work on the issue of primacy in the Church. The subject is significant, and has attracted attention resulting in the publication of numerous studies produced in many countries and in different languages. The relevant bibliography is enormous. The present work constitutes a selection of articles and short studies, and offers a very helpful picture of the various aspects, questions, and problems related to the central topic.

The contributors to the two volumes are well-known theologians who have dealt with the issue extensively. The editor and contributor of four articles, Fr John Chryssavgis, is to be commended and congratulated because he managed—cooperating with St Vladimir’s Seminary Press—to place at the disposal of Church authorities and theologians a valuable resource on a crucial issue."

~His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America

"The theology of the Church has in the last few decades become once again an area of real interest and creativity, as our attention has been drawn back to the role of the sacramental Body of Christ in our human liberation into divine communion. Yet when it comes to the details of inter-confessional dialogue, the temptation is still strong to revert to familiar and comfortable positions, with—among other things—an assumption that historic polarizations over primacy and collegiality are fixed and given quantities. These excellent essays insist on going deeper. They do not pretend to resolve the issues that still divide Christians, issues over the charism of the Petrine office or the limits of sacramental fellowship or the authority of the episcopate; instead, they represent a clear and searching exploration of fundamental matters starting from first principles. We need more reflection of this quality. This book will be a major resource for all who believe that the ecumenical encounter is still a powerfully energizing context for theological thought."

~Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College (Cambridge University) and former Archbishop of Canterbury

"I have eagerly looked forward to such a publication on primacy and synodality in the Church, which is the central issue between the Eastern and Western Church. These two volumes include research from a broad range of leading theologians, predominantly Orthodox and Catholic, on the present state of such discussions. I have long been convinced that there can be reconciliation between East and West if the question of primacy is properly redefined and resolved, primarily on the Roman side: on the one hand, not solely as an authoritarian primacy of jurisdiction and, on the other hand, not simply as an ineffective primacy of honor, but primarily as an inspirational and mediatory pastoral primacy at the service of the whole contemporary ecumenical Church. In the recent past, John XXIII exemplified such a primacy; and today, the same could be expected of Pope Francis. His fraternal encounters with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew are a promising step forward in addressing these vital issues."

~Hans Küng, Professor Emeritus of Ecumenical Theology at the University of Tübingen

Canon Law and Episcopal Authority

I recently attended a colloquium with Judge Michael Talbot, chief justice of the Michigan Court of Appeals and also the chairman of the Review Board for the Archdiocese of Detroit. He gave utterly fascinating insights into how, as a civil lawyer in private practice and then a judge in Michigan for decades, he had to learn a radically different legal culture when he entered the world of canon law and began dealing with ecclesiastical organs and tribunals attempting to root out clerical sexual abuse. The differences he discussed were very considerable--sometimes a cause for wonder, sometimes a cause for despair. But fascinating nonetheless.

In our discussion, I raised with him some of the early canons about clerical abuses, and their complete intolerance for any of this activity (even consensual activity). He noted that unlike Anglo-American law, canon law does not have a healthy doctrine of stare decesis and thus legal precedent does not carry the same weight. As a result, earlier canons can safely be ignored. As I was reflecting on this, it occurred to me that this may well be because canon law is concerned above all with the salvation of souls, and thus there are substantial theological reasons behind this different legal culture.

But this is not to say that precedent is irrelevant, or past canons carry no weight. No Eastern Christian would say that. But what weight should they have? Which canons are still important today, and which can safely be left behind? A new book, set for release this summer, will help us grapple anew with old canons still of enormous relevance to Orthodox-Catholic relations and the vexed question of the papacy. Did the papacy ever function as an "appellate court" as it were in the early Church, hearing cases from patriarchates and dioceses unable to resolve them independently? That question has long needed more consideration, and in Christopher Stephens, Canon Law and Episcopal Authority: The Canons of Antioch and Serdica (Oxford, 2015) it should at long last get it. 

About this book we are told:

Christopher Stephens focuses on canon law as the starting point for a new interpretation of divisions between East and West in the Church after the death of Constantine the Great. He challenges the common assumption that bishops split between "Nicenes" and "non-Nicenes," "Arians" or "Eusebians." Instead, he argues that questions of doctrine took second place to disputes about the status of individual bishops and broader issues of the role of ecclesiastical councils, the nature of episcopal authority, and in particular the supremacy of the bishop of Rome.

Canon law allows the author to offer a fresh understanding of the purposes of councils in the East after 337, particularly the famed Dedication Council of 341 and the western meeting of the council of Serdica and the canon law written there, which elevated the bishop of Rome to an authority above all other bishops. Investigating the laws they wrote, the author describes the power struggles taking place in the years following 337 as bishops sought to elevate their status and grasp the opportunity for the absolute form of leadership Constantine had embodied.

Combining a close study of the laws and events of this period with broader reflections on the nature of power and authority in the Church and the increasingly important role of canon law, the book offers a fresh narrative of one of the most significant periods in the development of the Church as an institution and of the bishop as a leader.

Introduction
Part One: The Canons of Antioch
1. The Canons of Antioch and the Dedication Council
2. The Canons of Antioch in Context
Part Two: Antioch and Serdica
3. The Dedication Council
4. Serdica, Rome, and the Response to Antioch

Part Three: Canon Law and Episcopal Authority
5. Law, Authority, and Power
6. Constantine, Control and Canon Law