The Authority of the Church

By Fr. Alexander Men

When we speak of the authority the Lord left to the Church, we must first banish, eliminate, and completely erase the idea of ​​its similarity to earthly authority. For now, let’s forget that, say, church authorities during the Middle Ages, the Modern Era, and modern times sometimes became state-like, ruling like a baron, prince, emperor, dictator, or president. This authority is of an entirely different nature; it cannot even be compared.

The Lord says: “Whoever desires to be first must be a servant of all,” “Do not be called rulers, teachers, or fathers—do not lord it over others.” This means He fundamentally rejects the social, sanctioned authority of the Church. “Let him be a servant of all.” And even the Pope is forced as a result of this to bear in his title the expression “servant of the servants of God”—that is, he is a servant of all—at least formally, but he must nonetheless. So, first of all, this caveat must be made. If ecclesiastical authority is not to be despotic, tyrannical, and administrative, then historically, that’s precisely what it has become. But the ideal has always remained, and in its name, constant renewal has taken place; it has always shone. Any distortion is nothing more than a distortion. And we have a criterion by which we can measure this.

Why was Peter appointed? First, all the apostles were not chosen from among people of high social rank, and we have every reason to believe that this was done intentionally. Then came Paul, then Apollos the Alexandrian—influential, educated men; then came those in power. Already in the time of the Apostle Paul, the state treasurer in the city of Corinth was a Christian—a man whose name is inscribed on monuments found in Corinth, and he appears in the Epistles. But above all, the Lord chose people who were outside the social establishment, who enjoyed no public recognition or respect, who held no place of honor in the world, “unlearned and simple,” as the Acts says. Nevertheless, of these, the most influential might have been the tax collector Matthew, who was obviously more literate than all the others, or the young John, who was close to the high priest and was apparently more than just a fisherman and also a man of considerable means.

Peter was appointed. This is the secret of his soul. For the Lord says, “Blessed are you, Simon, for this was not revealed to you by human flesh and blood, but by the Father in heaven.” When Peter saw the Messiah in Jesus, it was an epiphany. But the fact that he always stands first is a free election; we cannot assume that it is determined by any known factor. God chose a man who was neither learned nor simple, and appointed him to make it clear that the Church was born not through the energy, talent, education, or any other additional qualities of the first teachers, but by the power of the Spirit of God.

From the very beginning of his preaching, Confucius sought a princely patron because he understood that he needed to rely on some real state power; Buddha himself was a prince; Plato also sought, trying to find, so to speak, a political base.

Christ provides no political base; all his disciples are worthless politically, worthless economically, and that is precisely why the power of God was revealed—He built the Church on the faith of ordinary people, so that no one, not even the most outcast of the world, could say, “Of course, it was them, the apostles.” No, these were not rich, influential, noble, or particularly wise people. This does not mean that one must be a fool to be a Christian. Later, there were intelligent ones, and then came Paul, the wise man. But the foundation was laid by people who would ensure that no one could cite their own weakness, their low social status, and say, “Well, that’s not for me.” Moreover, this all began with Christ’s own way of life, which was not an extraordinary one. You see, when they say, “Here’s a yogi who breathes ten times a day and eats a handful of rice and that’s it,” that’s fine for some, but it immediately places him beyond the bounds of ordinary human standards. People say, “That’s wonderful, but it’s not for us.” But no one can say about Jesus, “Not for us.” John the Baptist came, an ascetic, fasting—people say he has a demon. Christ came, eating and drinking—they still don’t like it. But it was Christ who emphasized that He led an ordinary life. But this doesn’t solve all the problems. Our main question is this: the Church, that is, the family that the Lord founded on earth, as it grows, involuntarily takes on social forms—this, of course, is a community. And in a social community, as in an organism, certain functional elements begin to operate. And the Apostle Paul reduces all this to a biological analogy: he says that the body has various organs, and these organs have various functions. So it is in the Church—are all apostles, are all teachers, do all heal, do all have the gift of speech? For such a community to exist, it must be structured; as it grows, institutional differentiation must emerge.

But before such a structure can emerge, there’s a secret: when we, the ministers, bring forth the true word of the Gospel, it’s not our word, it’s His: “Whoever listens to you, listens to Me.” Of course, there are differences. I can speak for myself; who knows what comes to mind. Then, of course, this criterion is completely inappropriate. But if it corresponds to the Gospel—and we can always know and sense the degree to which it does—then it is so, because He commands us that through us all things exist. Look, He wants to do something in the world, that is, He is planting the Kingdom of God on earth, but He also says: “I continue to remain and will act.” Yes, He will act, but through us. Through us—therefore, we are all endowed with the authority of God’s servants, Christ’s servants, priests; as the Apostle Peter says: “You are a royal priesthood, a chosen generation.” This means we are all consecrated to God. Then come the functional differences within the Church organism. Jesus told the apostles, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Why “bind and loose”? This is an ancient expression denoting certain statutes or regulations, that is, “You affirm this—then so be it; you deny that—then so be it.” But here the question naturally arises: what if some regulation does not correspond to the Gospel? Then it automatically loses its power, it loses its inner grace, because it is not the word of Christ spoken through a pastor or an archpastor—whoever. It is now only their word. But still, the word must be kept alive through people, because books alone are not enough, because there is—as each of you knows—a special power that is transmitted from soul to soul. A book has its advantages, but it also has its drawbacks, because there are things that cannot be conveyed by words alone. Note that this is why Christ wrote nothing. He didn’t write to prevent the letter from being deified; He didn’t create a strictly regulated church organization, which is why Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants still argue over how to organize the Church.

Catholics believe it should be built as a single organism led by a single pastor; Orthodox believe that each nation should have its own pastor; Protestants go even further—each community can be more or less partisan. But Christ left us no instructions on this—lest we canonize the statutes and lest we cultivate the cult of these statutes, because this is a human matter. Even Holy Scripture was not commanded by Him. In Jesus Christ Super Star, the disciples sing at the beginning, as they sit at the Last Supper: “The time will come, we will write the Gospel…”—that’s a parody! You won’t find a word in Holy Scripture where the Lord says, “Well, now go and write the Gospel, do it.” No! He said, “Go ye and teach,” which didn’t mean writing at all, and, “Do this in remembrance of Me,” meaning celebrate the Eucharist. That’s all! He left no more commandments. “And lest it be among you as among the Gentiles, where the kings lord it over the Gentiles, and ye are not so: but he that is greatest among you shall become as the youngest, and he that rules as he that serveth; and among you let every man be a servant.” Everything else developed as a natural process: we needed the Gospel—through it the Spirit of God worked, and all the other aspects were necessary. But, of course, in the course of history they naturally became infected with the traditions of the elders.

The most dangerous enemy is the traditions of the elders. After all, the Lord rebuked few, but He rebuked the traditions of the elders and the Pharisees. And so the Church is always in a state of Holy Week: it always dies—and rises again. And the entire history of the Church proceeds like this: human principles bury it, hammer nails into its coffin lid, then the coffin bursts open, and it emerges again and again. The Czech Marxist historian Zdeněk Nejedlý said: the revolutionary poison of the Gospel continued to operate throughout the Middle Ages and the modern era. He interpreted this, so to speak, socially, which is, of course, incorrect; it is much broader. Therefore, reformist tendencies in the Church, although sometimes extreme and veering somewhat to the left, were nevertheless always justified, for the words of John Chrysostom remain immutable: “The Church is eternally renewed.” And when we say that we are the Church of tradition, the Church of tradition, this can be misunderstood: that we are a Church that has died, a Church that has stopped and frozen, like a mummy. No. The Church of tradition is a Church that develops the Spirit originally given to it.

As for the issue of Peter as the head of the apostles, this problem pertains to the realm of faith. If Catholics believe that God acts through Peter’s successor, then He does so. This is impossible to prove historically or scientifically. And when, in polemics against the Catholic structure, we begin to advance the idea that such authority did not exist before, then a Protestant can expand on our argument and say that there were no weddings before, for example, no icons. Of course not! So what does that mean, should we abolish this and much more?

The late Patriarch Sergius said that the Church developed along the line from pluralism to unity; At first, the communities were all independent and scattered, then they united, then episcopates and metropolitan sees emerged, then the patriarchate emerged—and this entire movement was undeniably centripetal. Organizationally, the Church was just one step away from becoming a unified state organism. But Divine Providence prevented this. He utilized human sins, the strife between the Latins and Greeks, to preserve pluralism at least at the two poles of the Roman Empire; and two types of piety emerged, and now three. In reality, there are several types of Christianity; there must be at least four, since, according to tradition, there are four types of human character. And we can say, as if parodying it, that Protestants are choleric, Orthodox Christians are phlegmatic, or rather melancholic, and Catholics are sanguine, and so on. I’ve been very crude, but if you dig deeper and look into it, you’ll see that some people, who are considered Orthodox and by all appearances are, are at heart a perfect Baptist, while there are Baptists who are completely Orthodox. Some Jews are such that if you rip off their hat and put on something else, they’d be a truly Orthodox person, a true Orthodox. These are human types.

Then the question arises—we’re back to square one again—why did God entrust this authority? Well, there is no such authority. A.S. Khomyakov’s merit is that he demonstrated (admittedly, with some twists) that there is no external authority in the Church. The downside was that he lost touch with reality, the physical reality of the Church—and that any human union requires a certain discipline, otherwise everyone will be like the swan, the crayfish, and the pike. But we must always remember that this discipline is not divine, but conventional, conditional.

Preserve the structure of the Church as a community. I like one thing, another needs another; one likes iconography, another likes painting—we need to find some way to accommodate each other. But essentially, Khomyakov was right, because in the Church there should be no external authorities, only spiritual ones. We freely accept the authority of the Gospel. Even the authority of Christ is not an external authority. (Berdyaev later tried to express this, developing Khomyakov’s thought.) Yes, it is, of course, an authority for us, an authority in the sense of the highest, it is the bearer of the highest truth—but it is not something that oppresses us, but something we have accepted, freely opening ourselves to this flow. It’s not easy to express, and Khomyakov struggled with it, and Berdyaev later struggled with it, but still, it is Khomyakov’s achievement—the assertion that here the freedom of God’s children remains…

A young man, a teacher from a neighboring village, baptized, came to me recently. He wanted to understand this, he wanted to go to church. Well, of course, he started asking about the Inquisition and other things. I tell him: this is the simplest thing. Because we have a criterion by which we can distinguish the genuine from the imaginary. In Graham Greene’s novel, “The Power and the Glory,” it’s very aptly stated in the conversation between the hero and the lieutenant who is leading him to execution. The hero says: if all your people are bad, then everything is lost, because for you, everything depends on people; we may have bad people, but in reality, everything for us lives by other things. He literally said: “God makes sons of Abraham from stones, and he will always find them.” To make it clear that this is, after all, not a human matter.

And therefore, I am deeply amazed by the reasoning of many Western theologians who speak about the future of Christianity. They reason in the same terminology and in the same psychological atmosphere in which one might speculate about the fate of any organization or party: “How will it be? Will it succeed or not? Will it have a market for its ideas or not? “Yes, things are rather bad…” Absolutely pointless reasoning. Because if these gentlemen were invited back to the times of the apostles—what would be the need there? What social conditions would they have there?! “The rebel is crucified!” (Remember, there is a poem by A.K. Tolstoy, “Against the Tide,” a very good one; they say there: the rebel is crucified—it’s all over, so what, we can now rest in peace.) But it turns out—no, everything came to the surface. And Pope Leo X said the same in the 16th century: this is some kind of monastic squabble…—and got the reformers*. So, judging the Church solely on the basis of sociology is simply a completely short-sighted decision. This is precisely why we talk about its duality, about the divine-human nature. Here we are, members of the Church, its instrument, but what happens to us is, generally speaking, always a miracle… Always a miracle. We are not a club of common interests, although, of course, you and I have much in common in life, character, and aspirations. Nevertheless, there is a certain mystery that will continue to bind us together, because “where two or three are gathered in My name, I am among them”—and this will overcome our weaknesses.

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* This refers to Martin Luther’s conflict with the Catholic Church.

Power is indeed given, but conditionally, for a time—”whoever wants to be great must be a servant…”

As for the idea of ​​a high priest, sociologically speaking, it certainly makes a lot of sense. It is certainly more convenient when church leadership is outside the state, when it enjoys autonomy, when it has a vast global network of theologians, and so on, and therefore is more mobile. But this also carries its own danger, and that’s natural—humanity can always turn this against itself. But we must always see where Christ’s Church is, and where its external aspects are.

Source in Russian: From the collection “World Spiritual Culture,” Conversations on Christ and the Church,