Obedience and its limits: submission, conscience and the faith

1. Obedience is owed to an order, not a will

Scripture commands obedience to those set over us, and the tradition never softens it: obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves (Heb. 13:17). But the same Scripture fixes the ground of the command before it issues it. We obey rulers as those who watch for our souls and who must give account, that is, as servants under a higher accounting. Obedience in the Church is never the surrender of one soul to another soul's mere will. It is the ordering of both, the shepherd and the sheep, under a rule neither of them authored.

This is why the Fathers speak of the bishop as an icon. An icon has authority precisely as a window: it commands veneration because it shows forth its prototype, and the veneration passes to the prototype, not the wood. St Ignatius' whole doctrine of the bishop runs on this: follow the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the Father. The likeness is the measure. A bishop is to be obeyed as Christ is imaged in him, and the faith is the image. Where a hierarch effaces that image by teaching against the faith, he does not carry his authority with him into the heresy; he leaves it at the threshold, for it was never his to take.

2. The deposit is the measure of the command

Every lawful command in the Church is bounded by what the Church has received. St Paul draws the line himself, and draws it through himself and through heaven: though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed (Gal. 1:8). The apostle subjects his own future self, and the angelic orders, to the deposit already delivered. No office is exempt, because the deposit is not the property of any office. Chrysostom, expounding the very text on obedience, states the conclusion without flinching.

Notice the exact structure of Chrysostom's answer. He does not abolish obedience; he distinguishes its object. For a wicked life, he says in the same place, do not judge and do not withdraw, endure. For wickedness in the faith, flee. The distinction is not between small faults and large ones; it is between the man's failings, which are not our commission, and the faith's corruption, which is every believer's concern because it is every believer's inheritance. Obedience covers the whole of the first category and stops dead at the threshold of the second.

3. Conscience, rightly defined

Here the argument must guard its own flank, for the modern ear hears in the limit of obedience a licence for private judgment, the very disease this library warns against. So the term must be defined against its counterfeit. The conscience that limits obedience is not the individual's opinion, taste or grievance. It is the συνείδησις informed by the faith, the mind that has been given the Church's own mind, judging not by itself but by the deposit it has received. When such a conscience refuses an order, it is not preferring itself to the Church; it is preferring the Church's settled faith to a present officer's innovation. The confessor does not say, I know better than the Church. He says, I hold what the Church has always held, and it is you who have departed.

This is exactly why the tradition surrounds the limit of obedience with such strict conditions, the same conditions the course sets out: the heresy must be already condemned, not privately suspected; open, not whispered; persistent, not a slip; and the judgment of the man reserved to the synod while the discernment of the teaching is owed by all. Strip those conditions away and conscience collapses back into self will. Keep them, and conscience is not the enemy of obedience but its highest exercise, obedience to the Lord of the bishop when the bishop commands against Him.

4. Disobedience as the deepest obedience

The paradox at the centre of this subject is only apparent. The confessor who ceases to commemorate a heretical bishop is charged with disobedience, and pleads guilty to disobeying the man in order to obey the Master whose icon the man has defaced. St Maximus, pressed at his trial to commune with the imperial Church for the sake of peace and obedience, answered that he could not, though the whole world commune, for the faith forbade it, and he went to mutilation and exile rather than yield. The Church did not finally reckon him a rebel. She reckoned him a confessor and canonized his disobedience, because it was obedience aimed higher than the throne that tried him.

Set beside him the counterfeit, and the difference is exact. The rebel disobeys to please himself and calls it conscience; the confessor obeys the faith and is called a rebel for it. One withdraws from a man's failings, which he was told to endure; the other withdraws from a man's heresy, which he was told to flee. The words look identical from outside, submission refused in both. The hearts, and the objects, are opposite.

5. What this study does not license

The limit of obedience is a narrow gate, and most of what passes through it is contraband. This study therefore ends where it must: everything short of open, condemned, persistent heresy is covered by the obedience it has defended, endured, protested within, prayed over, but not made the ground of separation. The full discipline of that restraint is set out in the lesson on private judgment and the question on lay judgment. Conscience earns its authority only by its submission to the faith; the moment it serves the self, it has forfeited the very ground on which it claimed to stand.