§ 137. General Survey

The Founder of the Church entrusted legislative power to His apostles, and from the apostles it passed to their successors, the bishops, who through common action have exercised it through all the ages just as they exercise it today (§. 13.).[1]

Founded upon divine authorization, and in accordance with the task of the Church herself (§. 1), the legislative power of the Church develops along its determined and precisely marked course. The exercisers of the Church’s legislative power, in issuing the corresponding laws, do not act therein in their own name, as though exercising their own personal power, but in the name of the divine Spirit who lives in the Church, of which they are only instruments through which His will is accomplished on earth. In keeping with the promise of the Founder of the Church to be always with His apostles and their successors, the apostles—and likewise their successors—have not issued, nor do they today issue, laws for the Church of themselves and in their own name, but in the name of the Holy Ghost, who acts through them. “It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us,” say the apostles, prescribing that the Old-Testament ritual law is no longer to be kept by Christians.[2] The Fathers of the Church express themselves in the same way every time they issued laws meant to hold force in the Church.[3] But in order that the will and power of the Holy Spirit be truly expressed in the Church’s legislative power, two fundamental conditions must be preserved: first, that the legislative power act with the voice of the whole Church, as of a body which the Holy Spirit quickens; and second, that the exercisers of that power bear upon themselves the mystery of the priesthood, with which a special grace of God is joined. The preservation of these conditions is indispensable to the very significance of the Church’s laws; and the Church’s lawgivers give expression to these conditions in their ordinances in exactly the same way as they do when they invoke the Holy Ghost, in whose name the legislative power in the Church is exercised.[4]

Given such significance of the Church’s laws, legislative power for the whole Church cannot belong to a single person, even were he the most senior bishop in the Church; for just as there is no one visible, personal head of the whole Church (§. 49), so too, by the fundamental teaching of the Orthodox Church, no person can by himself be so exalted above the Church as to prescribe laws to the Church of himself—he cannot, therefore, be so infallible as to issue to the Church such laws as they must be, given the sanctity of the Church herself and the loftiness of the matters with which they deal.[5] Accordingly, the right of legislation in the Church belongs to conciliar authority alone, to which alone the Founder of the Church promised His help and presence, whenever it should act in His name (§. 57). And for this reason, from the very beginning of the Church it was established and confirmed by legal enactment that councils of bishops must gather every year, at which all matters touching the life of the Church would be jointly discussed and administered, and at which those councils would issue laws so that everything in the Church should be as the Founder of the Church willed. The ordinance concerning the convening of councils was always regarded in the Church as an ordinance of divine right, and this same ordinance was often repeated by both the ecumenical and the local councils.[6]

On the basis of, and in the spirit of, the legislation of the conciliar authority, the bishops themselves may also issue particular laws in the churches entrusted to them; but these laws must proceed from the conciliar legislation and stand with it in indissoluble connection, and must in nothing depart from it, still less stand in any contradiction to it. The legislative power of the bishop may move only within the bounds of the laws established by the conciliar authority, and can be only a particular application, to certain cases, of what has been established by the conciliar legislative authority (§. 141).