Ethan D Good’s Reviews > The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church > Status Update

This chapter was very fascinating, as the author clearly admits that modern Orthodox ecclesiology is, along with Catholic ecclesiology, inconsistent with the ecclesiology of the early Church.
Where Catholics have a single, universal leader, the Orthodox have a group of national leaders of the universal Church, which is refuted as a nationalistic heresy and merely a different form of universal ecclesiology.

This chapter didn't end how I expected it to, as it actually acknowledges the very glaring flaws I was seeing in the modern Orthodox practice of governance, compared to the perfect pre-Schism model.
The issue isn't that Orthodox have a Eucharistic, priority-based ecclesiology, and the Catholics have a Universal, primacy-based one, it's that both have failed to embody the Eucharistic former ecclesiology properly today

Continued...

Why does the Pentarchy even exist if "priority" is given to the church which best witnesses to Faith in love?

Furthermore, why was Constantinople elevated to 2nd place in the Pentarchy? The answer to all of this is because of the Roman Emperor. The fact that the State and the Church were intertwined so early makes things confusing...

Also, Peter was placed at the head of the first church, Jerusalem.

So Jerusalem had "priority" over the whole Church because of her witness to the Faith, but after 70AD, Jerusalem fell. Afterwards, Rome clearly and decisively earned priority because of her undeniable witness across the empire, and her roots in Peter and Paul. However, if "priority" is granted based on witness, not authority, why did Constantinople inherit Rome's authority instead of a more charitable church?

...Continued

I'd argue it doesn't, as having one bishop at the head of the Universal Church, in the same way you have a bishop at the head of the local body, is a natural/logical development. Also, I doubt any catholic would claim that the local catholic parish is lacking in it's fullness because it has the fullness of Christ in the Eucharist, which is the same Eucharistic Ecclesiology that's supposed to contradict.

These pages draw a clear line: Universal Ecclesiology and Eucharistic Ecclesiology are contradictory. However, I fail to see why. The latter suggests that the "Universal Church" is found in every local church, with the entire body of local churches representing the Universal Church, not by empirical sum, but by oneness.
How then, does that in any way contradict the (obviously Catholic) Universal Ecclesiology?

Continuing...

This chapter so far is clear that universal ecclesiology, taken to its logical extreme leads to one bishop over the Universal Church, just as you might have one bishop over the local church.
The issue is that, while logical, the early Church was conciliar, and a universal bishop naturally has universal primacy which negates the conciliar principle, reducing all other councilmen to advisory positions.

I have an issue with the "First Among Equals" perspective of Orthodox governance because, as this chapter highlights, it is very difficult to balance *equality* among bishops whilst also affording one bishop *first* privileges.

This difficulty seems to be made even more apparent given lack of ecumenical councils in Orthodox history post-Schism, as well as an inability to solve simple disputes without a primate.

It is clear that the Western idea of what is the Papacy, in the early Church, developed without the knowledge of the East. It was only until the Roman sacking and occupation of Constantinople in 1204 that the East was finally confronted with the Western developments.
This development in the West is understandable to be fair, seeing as the only See in the West was/is Rome. That said, the gradual stray of Rome is sad.

...Furthermore, there is not a special distinction between a local church and a universal (or "Catholic") Church, as every local church embodies the universal "Church" in it's entirety.

"The idea of a universal church, in which each local church is only a part of a larger whole, is not the teaching of the New Testament Neither is the concept of Peter's trans-apostolic authority."