My friend Steve Skojec has started chronicling his struggles with understanding church authority in Roman Catholicism. Above all, he's feeling powerless and burnt out because of institutionalized hypocrisy. Moreover, he’s questioning whether his religion's top-down approach to enforcing moral and factual claims is still feasible in modern times.
But is there an alternative model for church authority?
The Rev. John Chryssavgis writes against idolizing any centralized earthly authority, arguing that “Orthodox [Christian] faithful [...] should not seek 'refuge' in the simplistic belief that supreme authority lies in the hands of a patriarch, or in ecumenical councils, or in certain local synods, or perhaps in the local bishop. Such notions are not entirely erroneous, but they are surely limited, threatening to objectify and institutionalize the Church. Synods and Bishops are sources of authority which operate primarily in cases of conflict and necessity, that is in abnormal situations such as the condemnation of heresy or the establishment of disciplinary order and pastoral care. Authority in the Church is in the final analysis undefinable, never limited to an order or council or to any one individual or group of individuals. Ecclesial authority is the experience of the mystery of God in Christ through the Spirit who guides the Church. This reality is incarnate and exercised as a mutual subordination of love deriving from the sharing in common of the saving mysterious life of the Church. This is the all-transcending and binding authority, the dimension of the Church beyond any kind of structure and institution and organization. In the final analysis, the Church can never be identified with authority, since authority as a worldly structure is alien to her very nature."
Proper church authority, in other words, is not found in an external set of rules imposed on believers. Rather, it is experienced by believers through the vital force of the Holy Spirit that animates all the members of God’s Church. “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with [the Body of] Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12, ESV). Thus, the Body of Christ is analogous to our own human bodies. One cannot find a physical center for the seat of our personality or will. The soul is the form of the whole body, and our personality emerges from an integrated, redundant, and anti-fragile hierarchy of organs that can withstand substantial injuries and cannot be reduced to any of its parts. Even the brain doesn't have a fixed or singular center of consciousness, yet somehow, a unified will and human experience arises from a harmonious orchestra of living parts moving and working together.
Holy Tradition, then, which is the sum of “the traditions that you were taught by [Christ and his Apostles], either by [their] spoken word or by [their] letter[s]” (2 Thessalonians 2:15), is like the soul of the Body of Christ, and this proper church authority stands apart from all the members of the Church while yet enveloping them, guiding them, and shaping their purpose. This proper church authority is not something enforced from the top-down; instead, it's the vital, divine energy of the Holy Spirit that animates us believers and holds us together, and any member of the Body of Christ that becomes disconnected from it dies. “If anyone does not abide in [Christ] he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned” (John 15:6). Only by living the fullness of Christian life through repentance, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving can we come to know the proper authority of the Church and the power and will of God.