While looking in any detail at the seven ecumenical councils falls outside of the main concerns of this book, a list of them in aggregate, along with some brief commentary, may be helpful.
First we must acknowledge that there is not universal agreement nowadays amongst the major divisions or communions of Christendom about which councils are still to be accepted. There is, however, no question that they did occur, nor is there any question about the fact that governance by council rather than by ordained hierarchy was the original modus operandi of the Church. One of the more poignant ironies of Church history is, by the way, that Nicaea both opens and closes the era of conciliar Christianity.
The seven ecumenical councils are:
(First) Council of Nicaea, 325 CE
(First) Council of Constantinople, 381
Council of Ephesus, 431
Second Council of Constantinople, 553
Third Council of Constantinople, 680
Second Council of Nicaea, 787
The Third Ecumenical Council, which was convened in Ephesus in 431, centered almost entirely around the Nestorian controversy that was besieging the Church at that time. Nestorius, who held the influential post of patriarch of Constantinople, was deeply opposed to the assignation of the Greek word, theotokos, “God-bearer,” to Mary, the mother of Jesus. He argued instead that Jesus was two more or less connected persons or personages in one body. That is, he taught that divinity entered humanity without default to either the incarnated Deity or the hosting humanity.
If that were true, then Mary simply bore a child like any other child, except for the fact that this particular child was later taken over and occupied by God. And if that were true, then she could hardly be called the Mother of God, for God was not involved until later in the life of the human male named Jesus.
Nestorius, of course, lost this one personally, being deposed from the patriarchy and ultimately exiled. His ideas, which were declared heretical by the Third Ecumenical Council, continued to live on, albeit very discretely, and eventually came to be accepted as doctrinal in some non-Mediterranean Christian communities. Beyond that, Nestorius’s concepts, or variations of them, are still private and unexamined parts of the Christology of many Western Christians who, never having heard of Nestorius, are nonetheless troubled by the same questions and inconsistencies that troubled him. Not the least of these are, of course, the questions of who Mary was, what her essence was, and what her role in Christian faith and praxis now is.
The Fourth Ecumenical Council was convened twenty years later in 451 in Chalcedon, part of today’s Istanbul, in the eastern portion of ancient Christendom. In many ways, Chalcedon is the most sorrowful of the Church’s seven ecumenical councils. Certainly it is the one at which Christianity lost its youthful naïveté and began to evidence its passage into a stormy adolescence, for it was at Chalcedon that doctrinal differences first began overtly to separate the Church into Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity.
Put another and equally valid way, it was at Chalcedon that the growing secular and political tensions between the western and the eastern portions of the empire first found religious expression in doctrinal fights. No religion, either then or now, can stand separate from and impervious to the secular context in which it is. Likewise, one of the major hallmarks of a maturing religion is its shift from being simply a factor to being considered in the larger secular conversation to becoming an instrument, barometer, and map for everything, secular or religious.
Religiously, politically, socially, and culturally, what lay ahead for the Mediterranean world at Chalcedon—what was already hovering in the offing—was the Great Decline and Fall of the sixth century. Scholars, working all these many centuries later, still mark Ephesus and Chalcedon as ominous salvos in the lead-up to the Great Decline and Fall—as clear harbingers of the disaster that, after a century and a half of massive upheavals, would ultimately destroy most of the givens of life as it had been for centuries and then reconfigure all of them.
The Fifth Ecumenical Council of the Church was also the Second Council of Constantinople, or vice versa, according to one’s point of view. In any event, it was convened in the spring of 553 and was, far and away, the shortest council ever held as well as, arguably, one of the shortest “official” gatherings in all of Christian history. It lasted less than a month and, in essence, was really more a matter of housecleaning than innovative construction. That is, it was principally about the business of tidying up Nestorianism yet once again. As a council, it re-iterated the positions taken at Ephesus in 431, but with added insistence on the necessity for their absolute adoption.1
The Third Council of Constantinople, held in 680–81, became known also, in later church history, as the Sixth Ecumenical Council. In substance or focus, the council was held to debate, and ultimately condemn, the notion that Jesus had possessed both human and divine wills. As a rare heresy, that one was known as monothelitism but, even as a heresy, it was not without appeal. The idea of two wills or levels of operative intention within the Son was a way, on the part of some churchmen, to avoid the two-substances and/or condemned Nestorian theology while still in some way explaining the contradictions or confusions of God/Man in one human flesh and one Holy Trinity.
The significance of Third Constantinople lies as much, however, in its circumstances as in its content. This Sixth Ecumenical Council was the first to be held in a world increasingly informed by Islam. Jerusalem had fallen into Muslim hands in 637, and the Christian patriarch, Sophronius, had surrendered the city and his domain to the Rashidun caliph in that year. Thereafter, clarity about Christian doctrines and practice had taken on a new urgency, both culturally and theologically. The charge of Christian polytheism was now finding its expression in very real political and cultural realignments in the world as the bishops and Church fathers understood it.
The Second Council of Nicaea—or Seventh Ecumenical Council of the Church—was convened in 787. What it did is perhaps less spectacular than were the reasons behind its doing so. What Second Nicaea did was declare that, contrary to earlier rulings by the bishops and councils, it was right, proper, and a good and worthy thing to venerate icons. What it did in substance, in other words, was declare iconoclasm to be heretical. What it did in implication, however, and perhaps more important, was to reach out for unity across the great East/West divide that was growing with frightening rapidity in both the Church and the world at large.
Less than a century earlier, in 689, the insertion of the filioque into occasional Western recitation of the Nicene Creed had given formal and tangible evidence of the abyss’s widening presence, and if the symbolic chasm of double procession would never be undone, it could maybe at least be bridged. Some token could perhaps be offered, some peace offering of estranged, but still operative, brotherhood. The East desperately wanted its icons, and that became a vulnerability the Western bishops were willing to accommodate for the sake of a more united front in troubled times. Indeed, sic simper est.
The Second Council of Nicaea was not only the seventh of the Church’s ecumenical councils, but it was also the last gathering of the Church Universal. Those seven councils, stretching from Nicaea in 325 to Second Nicaea in 787, were to become, ever afterward, the sum total of essential religious authority for Orthodox churches throughout the world. After Second Nicaea, and despite their united condemnation of iconoclasm there, the two bodies—East and West—would enter into the first stages of what until the closing years of the twentieth century had appeared to be irreparable rupture.
The Great Schism that would formally and viciously separate East from West and Orthodox Church from Latin Church were almost two hundred and thirty years in the offing still when Second Nicaea met. After Second Nicaea, however, the two communions never met again in shared council, nor would either side of their divide ever thereafter acknowledge the orthodoxy or rightness of the doctrinal and ecclesial positions that the other would evolve over the coming centuries. Each would convene its own councils for the discussion and ultimate determination of the correct expression of the faith, but never again would actions on such issues be taken by all the parts of the Church in concert with each other.2 The East would take its icons, and the West would soon come to once again forbid them. The mysterium and the mystical would find their principal home in the East, while the declarative, didactic, and rendered would settle down and domesticate in the West.
For their own part, when the churches of Western Christendom chose to move beyond the patterns of the Jerusalem Conference and the seven ecumenical councils, they began as well the process of altering the authority and leadership model of the Church itself. Subtly, but irrevocably, the West with its papacy and its increasing centralization in Rome moved toward the assumption that authority in matters theological and ecclesial must emanate from the top down, rather than from the bottom up or, put another way, vertically rather than horizontally. Just over a millennium or so later and in our own time, Emergence Christians would join Eastern and Orthodox Christians in questioning the validity not only of that shift but also of the concept or principle behind it.
Notes
1. We should note here that it was at Ephesus that the “hypostatic union” was officially affirmed as the orthodox way of explaining how Christ’s two natures, human and divine, were both essential (of the same hypostasis) to his personhood from eternity.
2. The whole business of ecumenical councils is as convoluted as any part of established religion could ever hope to be. According to Orthodoxy, it is the churches—and only those churches—who acknowledge the seven ecumenical councils and who are in communion with the patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem that are the purest form of the Christian Church. It is they, and they alone, who retain the true Christianity that emerged out of Judaism and the way of Jesus two thousand years ago.
Not only does Western Christianity not agree with that position, but it also refers to the seven councils as being only the first seven of the Church’s many councils, all of the subsequent ones having been convened by the West and not including any Eastern theologians or churchmen. To further complicate matters, many Protestant bodies do not admit of the legitimacy of all of the seven that were convened. Lutheranism and Presbyterianism, for example, accept only the first four councils as efficacious, and only Anglicanism, among the divisions of the Church born out of the Great Reformation, honors all seven.
So hidden now is this fundamental rift in the Church Universal that today’s most prominent Orthodox thinker and priest—Metropolitan Kallistos Ware—disturbed a number of even professional religionists when he insisted, in an interview with the editor of Christianity Today, on referring only to “the seven ecumenical councils” (David Neff, “The Fullness and the Center: Bishop Kallistos Ware on Evangelism, Evangelicals, and the Orthodox Church,” Christianity Today, July 2011, 38).