Ecumenical council

A church that decides together

The church took counsel together from the beginning. When believers disagreed over whether Gentile converts must be circumcised, "the apostles and elders met to look into this matter" (Acts 15:6). They heard Peter, Paul and Barnabas, weighed the Scriptures, and wrote to the Gentile churches:

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond these essential requirements

Acts 15:28

Matthew Henry notes that wise men avoid disputes where they can, "yet when false teachers oppose the main truths of the gospel, or bring in hurtful doctrines, we must not decline to oppose them" Matthew Henry. In later centuries bishops met in regional synods, and when a question troubled the whole church they were summoned from across the empire. Such a gathering is called ecumenical, from oikoumenē (οἰκουμένη), the inhabited world: the word Luke uses when Caesar Augustus ordered a census of "the whole empire" (Luke 2:1).

The seven councils

The councils received by both East and West are seven. Emperors summoned them, and which gatherings truly spoke for the church became clear only as the churches received their decisions over time; a council held at Ephesus in 449 was rejected as the ‘Robber Synod’.

The story of how Nicaea and Constantinople answered Arianism with the confession that the Son is homoousios is told in Nicaea: is the Son truly God?, and Ephesus and Chalcedon in Chalcedon: one person, two natures. Their teaching lives on in the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon, which still mark the line between orthodoxy and heresy.

What authority councils have

The Orthodox churches receive the seven councils as the Spirit's unerring guidance of the church into truth. The Catholic Church counts twenty-one councils, among them Trent (1545–1563) and the First and Second Vatican Councils, and teaches that an ecumenical council in union with the pope teaches infallibly on faith and morals. The Oriental Orthodox churches, which did not receive Chalcedon, accept the first three; the Assyrian Church of the East, which grew up in Persia, accepts the first two.

The Reformation churches gladly received the doctrinal decisions of the first four councils as faithful to Scripture; Calvin honoured them as containing the pure interpretation of Scripture Calvin, Institutes 4.9.8. Yet they placed councils, too, under Scripture. The Thirty-Nine Articles say that general councils "may err, and sometimes have erred" Thirty-Nine Articles, art. 21, and the Westminster Confession states:

All synods or councils since the apostles' times, whether general or particular, may err, and many have erred; therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith or practice, but to be used as a help in both.

Westminster Confession 31.4

So Protestants confess what the ancient councils confessed because Scripture teaches it. They have also kept the practice of meeting to search the Scriptures together, in assemblies such as the Synod of Dort and the Westminster Assembly.