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Ancient church councils (pre-ecumenical)

This article is about Christian church councils held before the First Council of Nicaea. For church councils in general, see synod.

In Christianity, Church councils are formal meetings of bishops and representatives of several churches who are brought together to regulate points of doctrine or discipline.[1][2] The meetings may be of a single ecclesiastical community or may involve an ecclesiastical province, a nation or other civil region, or the whole Church. Some of those convoked from the Church as a whole have been recognized as ecumenical councils and are considered particularly authoritative. The first ecumenical council is that of Nicaea, called by the Emperor Constantine in 325.[2][3][4][5]

Pre-ecumenical councils, those earlier than AD 325, were mostly local or provincial. Some, held in the second half of the 3rd century, involved more than one province. The sui generis Council of Jerusalem was a meeting, described in the Bible in Acts 15 and possibly in Galatians 2, of the apostles and elders of the local Church in Jerusalem.

In spite of lacking the authority of the decisions of ecumenical councils, the teachings and decrees of these pre-ecumenical councils are sometimes considered to be binding on the faithful in varying degrees, in particular certain councils held in Carthage and Elvira.[6] But even the Council of Jerusalem's decisions, known as the Apostolic Decree, in particular the obligation to abstain from eating blood or what has been strangled,[7] are not accepted by all Christian churches.

  1. ^ "Council", The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0-19-280290-3
  2. ^ a b Wilhelm, Joseph (1908), "General Councils", Catholic Encyclopedia (via online reprint from NewAdvent.org), vol. 4, New York: Robert Appleton Company, retrieved 2013-07-16
  3. ^ Timothy Francis Murphy, Religious Bodies, 1936, vol. 2, pt 1 (U.S. Government Printing Office 1941), p. 1549
  4. ^ Francis James Newman Rogers, A Practical Arrangement of Ecclesiastical Law (Saunders and Benning 1843), p. 250
  5. ^ Gerd Tellenbach The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century (Cambridge University Press 1993 ISBN 978-0-52143711-0), p. 36
  6. ^ Gerald O'Collins, Living Vatican II (Paulist Press 2002 ISBN 978-0-80914290-3), p. 40
  7. ^ Acts 15:29

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