Canons 13–15 of the Double Council in the Ecclesiological Discussions of the First Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

This article examines the Church debates in the first half of the 20th century, centered directly or implicitly on Canons 13–15 of the First-Second Council of Constantinople. The question under discussion was: to what extent it is correct to transpose the relationship between priests and their bishop onto the relationship between bishops and their metropolitan, and between metropolitans and the patriarch, i.e. to what extent to transfer relationships determined by jura ordinis to relationships determined by jura jurisdictionis. Interest in these canons first emerged at meetings of the Pre-Council Presence, in connection with the project to establish metropolitan districts in the Russian Church and the question of the composition of an ecclesiastical court authorized to judge the patriarch. The second important stage of the discussion was the controversy sparked by Metropolitan Sergius’ Declaration of 1927. This controversy, on the one hand, attempted to use canons to transpose St. Cyprian’s thesis, “Whoever is outside the bishop is outside the Church”, to the head of the auto­cephalous Сhurch. On the other hand, the dogmatic inaccuracy of such a transfer was pointed out. The third stage of the debate dates back to the late 1940s and early 1950s. Representatives of all three jurisdictions of the Russian Church then in power participated, and — within the framework of Trinitarian ecclesiology — the concept of autocephaly was formed as the integral Hypostasis of the Church, possessing all catholic fullness, which tacitly implies the identification of jura ordinis with jura juris­dictionis. The article concludes that this assertion lacks theological justification. To the author’s knowledge, the existing academic literature has not addressed the aforementioned debates from this perspective.