A council is what the Church does when a question cannot be left open
Councils are not the ordinary way the Church teaches. Most of the time the faith is handed on by baptising, preaching, burying the dead and serving the Liturgy, and nobody writes anything down. A council happens when something has gone wrong: when a bishop begins saying something his own congregation cannot recognise, when two cities are no longer praying the same faith, when the question being asked will not go away by itself.
The pattern is older than any of the seven. In the fifteenth chapter of Acts the apostles and elders meet in Jerusalem over whether Gentile converts must be circumcised, argue it out, and send a letter beginning, in the RSV, "For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us" (Acts 15:28). Every later council is an imitation of that meeting: men in a room, speaking plainly, believing the Spirit is present in the speaking.
What follows sets out the seven in order, with the question each faced and the answer it gave. The dates are firm; the debates behind them were not always dignified. Bishops were exiled, mobs gathered, emperors interfered. It is worth knowing that the definitions Christians now recite calmly were hammered out by tired men in difficult rooms.
Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381): who God is
Nicaea I met in 325 in Bithynia, summoned by the Emperor Constantine. The question was put by Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, who taught that the Son is the first and highest of God's creatures — that there was a time when the Son was not. If Arius was right, the Christian who worships Christ is worshipping a creature. The council answered that the Son is begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father, using the Greek word homoousios. It also settled the reckoning of Pascha and issued twenty canons on church order.
Constantinople I met in 381 under the Emperor Theodosius I, with about one hundred and fifty bishops and no representation from the West. The question this time concerned the Holy Spirit. A party sometimes called the Pneumatomachi, the Spirit-fighters, granted the Son's divinity but treated the Spirit as a creature. The council confessed the Spirit as Lord and giver of life, proceeding from the Father, worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son.
A point of honesty here. The creed sung on Sundays is called Niceno-Constantinopolitan and is associated with these two councils, but historians still discuss how directly the council of 381 produced the text we have; it is first explicitly ascribed to the hundred and fifty fathers in the acts of Chalcedon, seventy years later. The faith it states is not in doubt. The documentary history is untidier than the label suggests.
Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451): the one Christ
Ephesus met in 431, called by Theodosius II. Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, had objected to calling the Virgin Mary Theotokos, God-bearer, and preferred Christotokos, Christ-bearer. Behind the word stood a question about Christ: is the child born of Mary one and the same person as the eternal Word, or are there two who are somehow associated? The council deposed Nestorius, upheld Theotokos, and approved St Cyril of Alexandria's second letter to him. The title had been in Christian prayer long before it was in a decree.
That council was disorderly. Cyril opened the sessions before the bishops from Antioch had arrived; when they came they held a rival meeting and deposed him in turn. The breach was repaired two years later by the Formula of Reunion of 433. Ecumenical status was not conferred by good manners.
Chalcedon met in 451 under the Emperor Marcian. Eutyches, an archimandrite in Constantinople, had swung to the opposite error from Nestorius, teaching that after the union there is only one nature in Christ; a council at Ephesus in 449, later known as the Robber Council, had supported him. Chalcedon's Definition confesses one and the same Christ, made known in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, each nature keeping its own properties and concurring in one person.
Reception also failed in part at Chalcedon. The Armenian, Coptic, Syriac and Ethiopian churches did not accept its wording, though they reject Eutyches as firmly as anyone. A joint theological commission of Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox representatives issued agreed statements in 1989 and 1990 reporting a shared faith in Christ expressed in different terms. Communion has not been restored, and the reception of those statements is itself still argued over.
Constantinople II (553) and Constantinople III (680-681): finishing the sentence
Constantinople II met in 553 under Justinian I. Its question was how Chalcedon was to be read. Many Christians in Egypt and Syria heard the Definition as a concession to Nestorius, and the empire was splitting along that fault. The council condemned the Three Chapters — the person and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the writings of Theodoret against Cyril, and the letter of Ibas of Edessa to Maris — and set out fourteen anathemas affirming that the one who suffered in the flesh is one of the Holy Trinity.
Origen is also named among those condemned, and the Seventh Council later recalled the Fifth as having anathematised "the fables of Origen, Evagrius, and Didymus". Scholars continue to debate whether the fifteen anathemas directed specifically against Origenism were issued by the council itself or by a synod shortly before it. Pope Vigilius resisted the council and afterwards assented to it.
Constantinople III sat from 7 November 680 to 16 September 681, convoked by the Emperor Constantine IV. The question was whether Christ has one will or two. Monothelitism had been proposed as a formula that might bring the non-Chalcedonians back, and it was politically attractive. The council answered that Christ has two natural wills and two natural operations, the human will not opposed to the divine but freely subject to it.
This was not hair-splitting. If Christ has no human will, there is no human "nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done" in Gethsemane, and nothing human has been healed by being taken up. St Maximus the Confessor, who had argued this at the cost of his tongue and his right hand, died in exile in 662. The council vindicated him nineteen years after his death, and condemned Sergius, Cyrus, Pyrrhus, Paul, Peter, Macarius of Antioch and Pope Honorius.
Nicaea II (787): the icons and the Incarnation
The seventh council met at Nicaea in 787 under the Empress Irene and Patriarch Tarasius, after some sixty years of imperial iconoclasm and an iconoclast council held at Hieria in 754. Its question was whether images of Christ, his Mother and the saints may be made and honoured at all. The council answered that they may and should, and drew a distinction it thought essential: icons receive salutation and honourable reverence, in Greek timetike proskynesis, and not the true worship of faith, latreia, which belongs to the divine nature alone.
Its reasoning is about the Incarnation rather than about art. The God whom no one has seen has taken flesh and been looked at, touched and painted; to deny that he can be depicted is, in the council's reading, to flinch from saying that he really became man. In the words of the Definition, "the honour which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents", so that what is venerated is never the wood and pigment.
The matter was not closed in 787. Iconoclasm returned under the emperors from 815 and was ended only in 843, a day the Orthodox Church still keeps as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. In the West the decree reached the Frankish court in a poor Latin translation that made it say something close to the opposite, and the Frankish bishops reacted against it at Frankfurt in 794. Unease about Nicaea II is a great deal older than the Reformation.
What makes a council "ecumenical"
Here is the part that surprises most enquirers. Nothing about the way a council is convened makes it ecumenical. Emperors summoned councils that the Church afterwards rejected: Ariminum in 359, the Robber Council of Ephesus in 449, Hieria in 754. The Council of Ferrara-Florence of 1438-39 was large, learned, attended by the Eastern patriarchs' representatives and signed by most of the Greek delegation — and it was not received in the East. Numbers, imperial backing and even signatures settle nothing on their own.
What makes a council ecumenical, in Orthodox understanding, is reception: the whole body of the Church, bishops and priests and monastics and ordinary believers, over time recognising in the council's words the faith they were already living. The Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848 puts it bluntly, arguing that neither patriarchs nor councils can introduce novelty because the guardian of the faith is the whole body of the Church, the people themselves. Constantinople I is the clearest illustration: a regional Eastern gathering with no Western bishops present, received later as the voice of the universal Church.
Two things follow. The first is that there is no mechanism for deciding in advance; reception is slow, and it cannot be organised. The second is that the number seven is a convention rather than a closed door. Some Orthodox writers have argued that the Council of Constantinople of 879-880 under St Photius, and the fourteenth-century Constantinopolitan councils on St Gregory Palamas, carry the same authority. That discussion is live among Orthodox theologians and has not been settled.
Where Protestant Christians stand, and why the divide is not simple
Most Protestant Christians hold more of this than is often assumed. The classical Reformers accepted the first four councils explicitly; Lutheran and Anglican confessional documents keep Nicene and Chalcedonian language; the Nicene Creed is recited or sung weekly in a great many Protestant congregations. The substance of the christological councils — one person, two natures, two wills — is ordinary teaching in evangelical theology, whether or not Constantinople III is ever mentioned by name.
Nicaea II is the usual point of difficulty, and it deserves to be treated as a real conviction rather than a lapse. A Christian formed on the second commandment, who has been taught to see carved and painted images as exactly what God forbade, is not being obtuse when the veneration of icons troubles him. The Frankish bishops of the eighth century felt the same difficulty. Orthodoxy's answer is the one the council gave: God has become visible, and honour given to the image is not worship and does not stop at the image.
There is a further difference of principle worth naming plainly, because blurring it would be no kindness. A Christian who holds Scripture to be the final authority may accept the councils because he judges their teaching to be scriptural — the council is confirmed by the Bible. Orthodoxy receives the councils as the voice of the Church in which the Bible is read, and does not treat the two as separable. Two people can recite the same creed, mean every word, and still not agree about where its authority comes from.
That difference is real, and Orthodox Christians should not pretend otherwise. What is not permitted is turning the councils into something to win an argument with. Fr. Seraphim Rose, himself raised a Protestant, wrote in print against exactly that habit among converts.
Even when it is worded in a theologically correct manner, this attitude is spiritually wrong
Fr. Seraphim Rose, "In Defense of Fr. Dimitri Dudko", The Orthodox Word no. 2 (1980), p. 131, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
Why seven councils matter on an ordinary Sunday
In our parish in Kovan the creed is sung by everyone, in several languages at once, most of the congregation not thinking about Bithynia at all. That is the point. The councils did not produce a syllabus; they produced the words a fisherman's widow and a university lecturer can say together without either of them meaning something different. Four Greek syllables in homoousios cost a century of exiles and reversals, and they are now sung in under two seconds by people who will never hear the word explained.
A council is a fence rather than a map. Each of the seven marks the place where the Church said: past this line you are talking about someone other than the Christ we know. Within the fence there is a great deal of room, and the Orthodox tradition has never pretended that every question has been answered. Enquirers are welcome to come and stand inside it for a while before deciding anything.
Fr. Seraphim Rose spent years outside the Church before he entered it, was raised in a Protestant home, and never forgot either fact. Writing to a catechumen who was distressed by the way some Orthodox converts spoke of other Christians, he passed on a formulation he credited to the Moscow priest Fr. Dimitry Dudko. It is the right note on which to leave the councils, which were called to guard the faith and not to give anyone a stick.
We should view the non-Orthodox as people to whom Orthodoxy has not yet been revealed, as people who are potentially Orthodox
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)