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What Counts as a Council

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What Counts as a Council

Orthodox ecclesiology has no single office that can declare a council authoritative. There is no pope in the Orthodox churches, and the Ecumenical Patriarch holds a primacy of honour rather than of jurisdiction. What makes a council binding, on the classical Orthodox account, is reception: the church as a whole, over time, recognises the council as having spoken the faith, and that recognition cannot be produced on demand or certified in advance.

That is a coherent position and it makes Crete genuinely unsettled rather than merely disputed. The churches that attended regard the documents as decisions of a council of the Orthodox Church. The churches that did not regard the meeting as a gathering of some Orthodox churches whose documents have whatever weight their own synods choose to give them. Both are arguing within the same tradition and neither has an instrument for overruling the other.

Nothing since has resolved it, and the underlying quarrel has hardened. The grant of autocephaly to a church in Ukraine in 2019 by the Ecumenical Patriarchate led Moscow to break communion with Constantinople, which is a considerably graver rupture than a disagreement about a council's standing.

The atlas records the disagreement and does not adjudicate it. Whether Crete was a council in the full sense is a live question inside a living church, being argued by the people whose church it is, and it is theirs to settle. What can be said plainly is what happened, who was there, what was adopted, and what the two positions are.

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