Primus INTER Pares, not Primus SUPER Pares

Excerpts from the address

“Not So Among You” - Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia

How Christian is Our Understanding of Church Authority?

Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia

Delivered at the Orientale Lumen V Conference, June 2001

recently posted by the author to the St. Andrew House Forum.

The bishop is not a feudal overlord nor an elected parliamentary representative. The chief bishop, or “primate,” is neither dictator nor a constitutional monarch nor the chairman of a board of directors. To interpret ecclesial authority by such analogies is to overlook the Church’s uniqueness as a Kingdom not of this world. It is to forget Christ’s severe and specific warning “not so among you.”

And this:

Any truly Catholic and Orthodox view of authority has to take into account that the Holy Spirit is given, not just to patriarchs, popes, or bishops, but to the whole people of God. Here we have an important scriptural indication in John 15:15. There, Christ says that He does not call us slaves or servants, but He calls us friends. Then He goes on to indicate the difference between a slave and a friend. “A slave,” says our Lord, “does not know what his Master is doing.” He obeys blindly, from fear of punishment. “But,” says Christ to His Disciples, “I have made known to you the Father’s will and purpose.” So you are not slaves, you are friends.

That means we don’t obey blindly, but willingly. We don’t obey out of fear, but out of love. When Christ says that we are His friends, surely that means every baptized member of the Church – all of us are His friends. He doesn’t restrict His friendship only to the hierarchy. So, the Church is truly a society of friends. There’s no polarization, then, in the Church between the absolute ruler and passive subject. What we have in the Church is sisterhood, brotherhood, co-responsibility, communion, koinonia.

Some years ago, the Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius of Antioch made a statement of great importance – simple but profound. He said: “Communion is the highest authority in the Church.”

And also:

So often the laity correct the hierarchs.

Our Lord Jesus said: “when the Spirit of Truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth.” The “you” there doesn’t just mean the Pope of Rome, the Patriarch of Constantinople, the bishops, the professional theologians. “You” means every baptized and chrismated member of the Church.

If we are to have a right understanding of the collegiality of bishops, the meaning of “synod,” and of the place of primacy in the Church, we must never forget that the Holy Spirit is poured out on the total people of God. We must never forget the sensus fidelium, the general conscience of the Church.

As for the bishops:

Yet the bishops, when they so proclaim the truth, speak not to the uninitiated but to those who know, who have all knowledge, in Saint John’s word. So there is a reciprocal relationship between bishop and flock.

When the first Orthodox bishop to serve in North America was consecrated in Russia in 1840, Saint Innocent of Alaska, he said in his consecration sermon: “The bishop is at the same time the teacher and the disciple of his flock.” Russian slavophile theologian Alexis Khomiakov singled out that phrase as possessing particular significance – teacher and disciple.

So there isn’t within the Church just a one-way power structure. There is a mutuality, co-responsibility, communion. The truth enlarges through the communion between the bishop and the people. Communion is the highest authority in the Church.

And finally:

I would venture to say, as an Orthodox, that all bishops, including the Pope, are fundamentally and sacramentally equal. So if any is to be styled a primate, his status is to be understood as primus inter pares, the first among equals. “All authority has been given to Me,” the risen Christ says to us. “Lo, I am with you always.” The only final authority in the Church is Christ Himself, ever-present within her through the Holy Spirit and in the Eucharist. Christ alone, as head of the Church, is the source of all exousia, all power, and any proper exercise of it can only be in Him and through Him. The highest call of appeal in the Church, the ultimate criterion of the truth remains always the Son of God Himself, living mysteriously in the Church and leading her in the way of truth.

God’s continuing presence in the Church is not to be externalized or materialized. It cannot be identified, that is to say, with the letter of Scripture, or with a single person such as the Pope, or with the collective person of the episcopate gathered in council. All of these together with the sensus fidelium, the general conscience of the Church, have their part to play in the exercise of authority, yet none of them is to be taken in isolation from the rest or from the total life of Christ’s body.

“The eucharist is a continual miracle,” a great eucharistic priest, Saint John of Kronstadt, used to say. The same is true of the Church as a eucharistic organism – a continual miracle. In our ecclesial vision, we need constantly to return to what remains beyond all external criteria and all formal infallibility – what remains the central mystery of the Church’s nature. The Church is the miracle of God’s presence among humankind.