Council of Chalcedon

“For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these requirements.”

— Acts 15:28

The Council of Chalcedon was the fourth of the first seven ecumenical councils, convened in AD 451 at Chalcedon, a city in Asia Minor, by the emperor Marcian.¹ It met to correct a disputed regional synod held two years earlier at Ephesus, deposed the bishop chiefly responsible for that synod’s irregular conduct, and adopted the Chalcedonian Definition of Christ’s two natures.² Presided over, by special imperial grant, by legates of the bishop of Rome, the council also passed disciplinary canons governing the wider church, one of which Leo the Great protested at the time and Rome never accepted.³

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not name the Council of Chalcedon or any other council by name. The Second Helvetic Confession does, receiving it as the fourth of the “first four most excellent synods convened at Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon,” alongside the Athanasian Creed, on the ground that “nothing is contained in the aforesaid symbols which is not agreeable to the Word of God.”⁴ That is the standard Reformed position on a council’s authority as such: Benedict Pictet states it directly, that the decisions of councils carry “an authority far beneath that of scripture; nor can their decisions bind the conscience any further, than they appear to be consistent with the word of God.”¹ Chalcedon is received, on this view, because its content is judged Scriptural, not because a council convened by imperial authority carries binding force in its own right.

Historical Development

The council’s occasion was a prior synod’s failure. In 449, Dioscurus, bishop of Alexandria, used his influence to convene a general synod at Ephesus at which the opponents of the monophysite teacher Eutyches were forcibly excluded and Eutyches restored to office.⁵ That synod’s conduct was disorderly enough that history has remembered it as “the robber council.”⁶ The emperor Theodosius II sanctioned its decisions, but he died the following year. His successor, Marcian, was hostile to Dioscurus and summoned a new general synod, which met at Chalcedon in AD 451.²

Pictet places Marcian in a line of Christian emperors who convened the great councils, “Constantine the Great, Theodosius I, Theodosius II, Marcian, and Justinian, who called together, respectively, the councils of Nice, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and the second of Constantinople,” on the model of Old Testament kings who convened Israel’s assemblies.¹ The council itself was, on this telling, an act of civil government under Christian magistrates, not an assembly the church’s own officers convened on their own authority.

At Chalcedon, the legates of Leo, bishop of Rome, held first place in the council’s proceedings, but Calvin’s own reading of the record denies this was a standing right of the Roman see. Leo requested the honor from Marcian and his empress, Pulcheria, and grounded the request not in any claim of primacy but in the disorder of the previous year’s synod: “he does not maintain that it is due to him, but only pretends that the Eastern bishops who presided in the Council of Ephesus had thrown all into confusion, and made a bad use of their power.”³ Calvin reads the request itself as proof the precedence was “asked as a special privilege, and out of the usual order,” not a right belonging to Rome by office.³

The council deposed Dioscurus and adopted a letter Leo had written to Flavian of Constantinople, known as Leo’s Tome, as “a true exposition of the faith of the Church,” then framed its own Definition of the two natures of Christ on that basis.² Some six hundred bishops or more were present, by Calvin’s count.⁷

Among the council’s disciplinary canons, one proved contentious. Canon 28 acknowledged Rome’s priority as the seat of empire but assigned “equal priority” to Constantinople as “the most holy See of New Rome.”⁸ Leo protested the canon at length, and Calvin records the protest as excessive: Leo “assailed them with bitter reproaches” over what Calvin considered “so small an affair,” and none of the Eastern patriarchs whose own rank the canon touched raised any objection.⁷ The decree stood despite Leo’s opposition, and his successors “quietly desisted from that petulance.”⁷ Bavinck traces the same dispute forward: Leo I was the pope who “developed this primacy of the Roman See and elevated it to the rank and value of a religious dogma,” while “the East… continued steadfastly to resist the aggressive dominance of the primacy of the bishop of Rome and asserted the rights of the See of Constantinople.”⁸

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic theology holds, in Bavinck’s summary, that “a council is ecumenical only when its decrees have been endorsed by the pope and have thereby acquired an infallible, universally binding character.”⁹ Yet Rome never accepted Canon 28’s grant of equal privilege to Constantinople, even though the canon issued from the same council, with Roman legates present, whose Christological Definition Rome received as authoritative.⁷

Eastern Orthodoxy treats Canon 28 as settled conciliar law: Constantinople holds equal privilege to Rome as “New Rome,” a status the East continued to assert against later Roman claims to primacy.⁸

Reformed theology holds a council’s authority, on either question, to be instrumental rather than final. Pictet states plainly that conciliar decisions on doctrine are received “in the same light as the maxims of wise men,” and that even lawful councils bind the conscience no further than their content agrees with Scripture.¹ On this view Chalcedon’s Christological Definition is received for what it says, not because a council or a pope decreed it, and the same council’s Canon 28 dispute is treated as ordinary church history rather than a question either see’s claims can settle.

Objections and Responses

A council whose presiding legates held their place “by concession of the Emperor” rather than by inherent office looks like a political arrangement, not evidence of orderly church government. Calvin does not treat this as an embarrassment to be explained away but as the point: Leo’s own request for the honor, framed as a remedy for the previous synod’s disorder rather than a claim of right, shows precisely that Roman precedence at Chalcedon was circumstantial, not a standing prerogative of the Roman see.³ The council’s proceedings are cited by Calvin as evidence against later Roman primacy claims, not as an awkward exception to be minimized.

If Chalcedon’s own Canon 28 placed Constantinople on equal footing with Rome, doesn’t Rome’s later claim to universal primacy over the whole church depart from a decision the council itself, with Roman legates present, arrived at? Leo protested the canon immediately and never accepted it, so Rome’s later doctrine of primacy was not, in its own account, a departure from Chalcedon but a rejection of one of its provisions from the outset.⁷ Rome accepted the council’s Christological Definition while rejecting its Canon 28, a distinction the East never granted.⁸

Related Doctrines

References

Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), 391. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 402. ↩ ↩² ↩³
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 7, sec. 2, 366-367. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 11, “Of the True Faith,” under “The Creeds of Four Councils Received.” ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II, 400-401. ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II, 402. ↩
Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 7, sec. 15, 376-377. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩