. A weekend of high drama is over and I have a headache. I have spent the morning reading through the 50 pages of the agreed texts of the Great and Holy Council of Crete, 2016, or the ‘rump council’ as the naysayers and separatists are calling it already. Whilst the UK is reeling from the effects of the EU referendum, academics are mulling over the implications of a ‘post-factual’ society. My writing is primarily about the intersection of religion and society. It’s what I teach. It’s what I’m paid for, as I volunteer as a priest. I have sought to reflect in the act, as the Council progressed over last week, capturing snippets of news and gossip remotely, and this is an attempt to reflect after the fact. There is much more to investigate. The documents in their final version will have to be compared to their earlier drafts, to find out what was lost or changed. There will be, one hopes, minutes of all the sessions of the Council. There have been calls for the audio or video of the sessions to be released. If they are, there will be much to receive and contemplate.
There has, of course, been a vocal group on social media who had dismissed the idea of the Council before it had already convened either as an ‘Orthodox Vatican 2’ or just not Pan-Orthodox enough. By ‘Vatican 2’ there are clearly projecting their anti-Catholic anxieties and outright rejection of any form of dialogue with non-Orthodox Christians. Their demand with respect to Orthodox representation- that all bishops should be invited and all should negotiate all of the texts, and vote on all of the amendments by a process of unanimity and veto was clearly an attempt to turn the church into the worst sort of democracy. In the end, getting over 300 bishops (about the same amount as previous Councils, both Ecumenical and not) meeting together to agree a common view on complex issues in less than a week, has been quite remarkable. The catastrophes that were expected did not happen. We did not get forced into communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Fasting was not abolished. There was no agreement to make the Ecumenical Patriarchate more powerful than the Pope. Indeed, the documents and amendments were unsurprising, moderate and modest. In fact, conciliarity was the most important new point to arise from the whole Council. I wrote last week that there is no agreed procedure by which a Council of the Church is agreed to be ‘Ecumenical’, both pertaining to the whole world, and binding on all Christians. This caused much confusion because there were claims and counter claims preceding the Council (which was only ever called a ‘Great and Holy Council’) about whether it was going to be an Ecumenical one, i.e. universally binding or whether it was going to declare any other ‘Great and Holy Councils’ to be Ecumenical in standing. The Council did neither. Whilst it declared the Councils after the 8th Ecumenical Council to be of ‘universal authority’, the Encyclical of the Council did not declare them to be ‘Ecumenical’. But in the same paragraph of the Encyclical, the gathered bishops did declare the Church to be a Church of Councils. This is vitally important. I wrote on Friday about the sinfulness of excessive ‘autocephaly’; self-governance. I argued (controversially) that the instinct to self-governance (autocephaly in Orthodox Church terms) and to ‘taking back control’ in the UK is the same instinct that led Adam to choose to eat the apple in Paradise. I argued that the instinct to be in control, which we all share in, resulted in the Orthodox Churches become more estranged from each other over the last 300 years. This instinct has led to a sense of self-sufficiency rather than interdependence. The independent Churches of the Orthodox communion have been separated by historical circumstances like the rise of communism in Russia, but there is a danger that the separation becomes itself an article of faith, that the churches should be separate and can make self-sufficient decisions. The message of the Council was clear that excessive autocephaly is not acceptable. It stated “The principle of autocephaly cannot be allowed to operate at the expense of the principle of the catholicity and the unity of the Church”. By this it means that conciliarity, the processes whereby issues and questions that are relevant to all 14 Churches can be discussed and decided upon by the whole Church, rather than by one on its own. The texts of the rest of this Council deal with some, and only some, of those issues that are universally important. Advances in science and technology, individualisation and globalisation, freedom without responsibility, the wholesale degradation of the environment through excessive and profligate consumerism, new forms of systematic exploitation and social injustice are big social changes that have occurred since the most recent of the Councils of ‘universal authority’. They are issues that cannot be adequately tackled by one church on its own, so therefore interdependency needs to be recognised and the Churches need to act as a whole, as the single Church of Christ. This witness, in the words of the Encyclical, “ is essentially political insofar as it expresses concern for man and his spiritual freedom”. There needs to be “a new constructive synergy with the secular state and its rule of law”, preserving “the specific (i.e. separate) identity of both Church and state” in order to assure social justice. These external issues, as well as the nature of our relationship with other Christians, as well as internal but global questions such as Orthodox governance in new territories (diaspora and autonomy), family and marriage and fasting were all discussed and agreed. Notwithstanding the detail of those texts, the next battle will be over the status of the Council itself. It won’t be an Ecumenical Council, in the formal sense, until such times as a Council like this can come to a consensus on what constitutes an Ecumenical Council and what distinguishes it from a ‘Council of universal authority’. But who is going to be bound, or more softly influenced, by the Council? The texts of the Council could be quietly dropped, or ignored outright. Some bishops may wish to distance themselves from the details of what they have signed- there is some slippage in meaning between the different translations, which can only have been arrived at in a hurry in five days of meetings. Naysaying commentators were suggesting that the presence of the US military providing security means that some of the bishops were being made to sign the documents against their will, or might have been strong-armed in some way by the other bishops.. They are bemoaning the fact that none of them turned out to be the heroic St Mark of Ephesus who famously was the sole voice in the Council of Florence Ferrara that almost resulted in the reunification of Orthodox and Catholic. They were expecting there to have been another St Nicholas of Myra, who apocryphally slapped Arius in disgust at his theology. Those who are not familiar with these churchmen, they are often invoked as an Orthodox version of Godwin’s law. Regardless of the correctness of the examples of St Nicholas and St Mark in those situations, these poor saints are invoked by all separatists and schismatics when the Church, either in this Council or even in the Council decisions of their own churches, cry foul and demand that their solitary analysis the only true and correct analysis. They are often more strident in their criticism of the purported actions of other Church’s Patriarchs especially if it smacks of the ‘pan-heresy’ of uncontrolled, over-enthusiastic and syncretistic ecumenism. This Council has marked out the boundaries of future ecumenical dialogue, and rejected such ecumenism, but those who wish not to be bound or influenced by anything apart from their own ego will find every iota to pick over in order to undermine the whole. The number of bishops attending was equivalent to the Ecumenical Councils of old, but they did not contain representatives of 4 of the 14 churches, but total representation of all the Patriarchates has not been a requirement in previous Councils, and nor has the participation of every possible bishop in the world. The problem was illustrated by the question of a Russian war correspondent (yes, I kid you not, a war correspondent) who asked the press conference whether the Council could be influential if it did not have the Russian Church represented. The answer came back “Let me ask you a question. You come from a democratic country (a long, suggestive pause). During the elections in Russia, do you expect your voice to count, if you fail to vote?” The fact that some bishops were not there to have their voice heard or to vote does not mean that the decisions are invalid, any more than a 72% turnout in the EU referendum renders that invalid. Like it or not, neither side can count the 28% of the population who didn’t vote as their own. 52% of those who actually voted decided to support the Leave campaign. The majority should be judged on the basis of how narrow it was, not on the basis of those who didn’t vote. The Great and Holy Council has proposed further meetings in which the other churches could return to the texts of this Council. It would be good to see these partial texts refined and expanded in scope. Their weaknesses are in what issues are not covered, or are dealt with in inadequate detail ,rather than in what they actually say. Ultimately, however, it won’t be Councils or Bishops who decide. It will be those ordinary people in parishes around the world who will read the documents and begin to live according to their precepts. It won’t be the facts of the documents that matter, but whether these documents create a harmonious symphony with the traditions and prayers of the people of God.
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