Portions of this first part also appeared as an essay in The Living Church.

It seems fitting, as other contributors engage with Richard Hooker’s account of faith and order, that we review the way the Church practiced common discernment and authority in other ages. In this essay I will give a hasty overview of what are called the ecumenical (or general) councils, as well as what such councils reveal about ecclesial discernment both then and now.
 
There are seven ecumenical councils accepted unquestionably by both east and west (whether all Anglicans accept them is another question). The fact that for Orthodoxy these seven are the only ecumenical councils while Rome calls them the first seven ecumenical councils suggests already something broadly true of how these two great Communions see the work of theology. To say the following may be caricature, but I think it still useful: in the west the tendency has been to increase theological precision even while alienating the east, while in the east the preference has been to maintain holy tradition even while totally ignoring the west.
 
Where do Anglicans fit into that mix? I do not think it too dramatic to say that we do not know yet. On the one hand we might hope that Anglicans have avoided both of these errors—the “development” obsessions of the west and the isolationism of the east. But on the other hand it is equally likely that we have taken both tendencies and made them our own: we seem to think we need to develop theology, but we do so based on a sectarian tradition isolated from the rest of the Church.
 
But that is not my primary subject. What, after all, is an ecumenical council? The seven councils called ecumenical happened between the 4th and 8th centuries, and they look basically like this:

 
Why were they “ecumenical”? For that it would be best to quote from Henry Percival’s classic edition of the conciliar documents:

An Ecumenical Synod may be defined as a synod the decrees of which have found acceptance by the Church in the whole world. It is not necessary to make a council ecumenical that the number of bishops present should be large, there were but 325 at Nice, and 150 at I. Constantinople; it is not necessary that it should be assembled with the intention of its being ecumenical, such was not the case with I. Constantinople; it is not necessary that all parts of the world should have been represented or even that the bishops of such parts should have been invited. All that is necessary that its decrees find ecumenical acceptance afterwards, and its ecumenical character be universally recognized.¹

From the start, as even Percival acknowledges, this definition presents problems. Certain eastern churches never accepted Chalcedon; others never even accepted Ephesus; obviously many Protestants have trouble with Nicea II, if not with all of the councils. What does “universal” really mean?

There is no easy answer to this question—certainly not one that I can find in this short essay. Suffice it to say that “universal” cannot mean universal in a modern sense, whether temporal or spatial; it cannot be reduced to the inspiring language of the Vincentian Canon (a favorite of Anglo-Catholics)—what has been believed at all times, everywhere, and by all—if “everywhere” means geography and “always” means strict chronology. These tests submit catholicity to arbitrary external standards; they presume that there is a way of measuring reality that is ultimately more determinative than the life of the Church. Let us propose an example: the liturgy is not “catholic” (or ecumenical; it seems that the words are largely interchangeable) because everybody does it and always has; the liturgy is “catholic” because it has the means to incorporate everybody, and because it is what everybody is, fundamentally, made to do.

In other words, you don’t get to stand outside of the Church and say what it means for a council to be ecumenical. In a certain way the postmodernists hit the nail on the head: truth is perspectival; truth is relative. But where the nihilist takes this claim as an indication that truth is arbitrary, the Catholic takes it as an indication that the only really solid ground is the Incarnation of the Son of God, the invisible God of Truth become visible. All truth is relative to him. The history of salvation—the creation of Israel, the death and resurrection of Christ—is true not because some external standard proved it to be true but because this story is truth itself.

So: does the postmodern deconstruction of “universal” make it impossible for us to understand the ecumenical councils? Only insofar as our Anglican identity is tied up in modern epistemology. There are real and significant questions—many of which are being asked right now in the current Anglican upheaval—about the possible collusions between Anglican ecclesiology and the foundational ideals of the liberal state. Again, it is not my task here to deal with such questions; I only bring them up to suggest the complexities of our situation and the impossibility of reading the history of the Councils with neutral eyes.

Rome does not read the Councils with neutral eyes. She has no problem declaring several additional councils through the Middle Ages and up to Vatican II as “ecumenical” because in Rome’s eyes that which is “universal” is that which is, to put it bluntly, Roman Catholic. Orthodoxy is more wary of making such declarations because, despite periodic anti-western rhetoric, its churches continue to think that “universal” must include the Roman west—and they cannot accept papal councils as “ecumenical” because they do not agree with their conclusions. If, hypothetically, the Orthodox Churches were to accept all the decrees of the Council of Trent, that council could conceivably be taken by them to be thus “ecumenical.” The opinions of Protestants on such matters are really no more significant than the opinions of atheists or Buddhists; they cannot determine catholicity because they are not part of the Church.

Anglicans have, as I see it, a somewhat disjointed view of the Councils, and this is, I would suggest, precisely because Anglican formularies in the 16th century and now try to avoid the subjectivity implied in the identification of “the Church” with a particular body. Scripture trumps all. There is, on the face of it, nothing objectionable in that claim—it certainly summarizes the way the ecumenical councils saw their own authority. Thus Article XXI states bluntly,

And when [General Councils] be gathered together, (forasmuch as they be an assembly of men, whereof all be not governed with the Spirit and Word of God,) they may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God. Wherefore things ordained by them as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of holy Scripture.

Despite what I imply above and say explicitly below about the “infallibility” of certain councils, I do not think that such language is fundamentally opposed to that of the Article. (And, believe me, I have no particular interest in maintaining the Articles for their own sake, notorious “Anglo-Papalist” that I am.) The question is what is meant by “General Council.” This is not the place to answer that question with real historical research, but in common usage “General Council” may or may not be interchangeable with “Ecumenical Council,” and of course there have been many such “general councils” in both east and west which are not known as “ecumenical.” I have no problem, and I think that most Catholics would agree, in saying that a general council may err. Even following the most rigorous interpretation of Vatican I, the pope may err, just not in a way that leads the whole Church into error.

So if we follow Percival’s definition (and mine) of an ecumenical council, it would be absurd to suggest that such a council could have erred, for to say that it is ecumenical in the first place is to say that the whole Church recognizes it as an authoritative interpretation of Holy Scripture. (It is worth nothing that councils “sometimes have erred,” not “always.”) With this in mind, it may be that the Church of England simply did not recognize any truly ecumenical council (perhaps a convinced Protestant would say as much given my definitions); yet given her insistence on the Nicene Creed, I find that very unlikely.

The difficulty I have with Article XXI is not, then, its literal content, but its tone. It implies in its last sentence that the Scriptures stand somehow outside the Church as an ever-accessible, impartial arbiter. It is this implication that has been repeated in some of the modern Protestant movements within the Anglican Communion. See, for example, this point from the Constitution of the newly formed Anglican Church in North America (ACNA):

Concerning the seven Councils of the undivided Church, we affirm the teaching of the first four Councils and the Christological clarifications of the fifth, sixth and seventh Councils, in so far as they are agreeable to the Holy Scriptures.

Even the Creeds are affirmed because they can be “proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.” Of course, one must insist, this is true, but it is apparently not true in general, or else everyone would agree with it. I suspect that Anglican reformers both now and in the 16th century would admit that “proof” here is only intelligible in the Church. But here is where the appeal to Scripture as final arbiter becomes strained, for Anglican divines refuse to identify “the Church” with any particular Church; the Church of England may be the Church in England, but she cannot be identified without qualification as the Catholic Church without falling into errors that she would rather avoid (i.e. Donatism, as in Article XXVI). So if Scripture were perspicuous, the reformer would say, all would be clear; but because it is apparently open to competing interpretations, as Hooker would say, the Church must give an authoritative interpretation. Yet it is unclear how authoritative Anglican interpretations of Scripture (e.g. Article XXVIII, that transubstantiation is “repugnant to the plain words of Scripture”) match with Anglican pretensions to humility in the wider Catholic tradition.

This roundabout, diffident kind of authority is, I think, deeply charming. It is extraordinarily appealing to those of us who have been formed by the kind of Protestant work ethic epistemology of modernity (which is: you’ll find the truth if you work hard enough at it). But such authority is totally foreign to the work of the ecumenical councils of the ancient Church. To the fathers, truth was not an achievement, but a gift—a tradition (literally: handed down). The Scriptures were the heart of this gift, but they could not be abstracted from the giving.