Bishop Maxim (Patriarchate of Serbia): Metropolitan John of Pergamon and the Holy and Great Council

Bishop Maxim (Patriarchate of Serbia)

Metropolitan John of Pergamon and the Holy and Great Council

Theological Vision and Conciliar Contribution

 (Chantilly, October 6th 2026)

It is a joy and an honor to mark two anniversaries: thirty-five years of the patriarchal ministry of His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and ten years since the Holy and Great Council in Crete. As a brother bishop who participated in the Council, I witnessed firsthand his patient leadership and steadfast commitment to Orthodox unity.

Today, I draw on my memories of the Council and its newly published Acts to revisit that historic gathering and the contribution of Metropolitan John Zizioulas.

Introduction

My title brings together two things that do not always sit comfortably together: a theological vision and a conciliar contribution. A vision can be coherent and complete. At a council, it must face other voices, disagreement, and the pressure of time. Metropolitan John of Pergamon spent fifty years developing his vision. In June 2016, at the Orthodox Academy near Chania, he faced the challenge of translating it into a common voice.

The Council’s preparation began at Rhodes in 1961. The young John Zizioulas took part in the Third Pan-Orthodox Conference there in 1964—an early encounter with the challenges of Orthodox unity. The biography records his participation as a special theological adviser at the First Preconciliar Conference in 1976. It also identifies his work on the message for the Synaxis of Primates in 1992. In each setting, the task was to help Churches find words they could say together. Finally, in March 2014, the heads of the autocephalous Churches agreed at the Phanar that the Council would finally take place.

Metropolitan John was far more than a participant in this process: he was one of its driving forces. Appointed by the Ecumenical Patriarch to preside over the Pre-Conciliar Preparatory Committee, he helped turn the Churches’ differing positions into texts all could accept. The procedure was painstaking: observations were gathered, agreements and disagreements identified, and texts revised until consensus emerged. His own account ends with an exclamation: δύναται νά φαντασθῇ τις περί πόσον ἐπιπόνου ἔργου πρόκειται!—“One can imagine how arduous a task this is!”

I shall follow the two halves of my title: first his vision, then its testing in the council hall. I draw on the published Acts, his August 2015 report to the Synaxis of the Ecumenical Throne, his reports on the Council’s preparatory work, and his handwritten notes for one of its most difficult debates. That debate concerned whether the Orthodox Church may call other Christian communities “Churches”—a question with particular resonance in this company. His working papers contain three arguments he prepared but did not use. They may be precisely the arguments this gathering would most wish to hear. We shall come to them.

Part One — Theological Vision

For Metropolitan John, communion belongs to the Church’s very being. Each local Eucharistic gathering manifests the body of Christ, but this fullness does not mean self-sufficiency. The bishop who presides bears responsibility for communion with the whole Church.

In his opening address to the Fourth Preconciliar Conference in June 2009, he makes the point plainly: unity is a gift of grace, but it requires care. Recalling Patriarch Bartholomew’s warning, he insists that autocephaly must not become autocephalism—as though each Church could act without regard for the others.

Convening the Council was therefore itself a theological task. Since his 1968 study of conciliar structures, he had wrestled with a central question: how can a council exercise authority without standing above the local Church? At Crete, he would return to it.

Pentecost and the urgency of gathering

Opening the Fourth Preconciliar Conference in June 2009, Metropolitan John begins with Pentecost and the worship the delegates have shared. The Spirit gathers the Church, but the delegates must still listen, debate, and decide.

Repeated postponements raise a painful question: can Orthodoxy assemble and act together? The Council would make visible a unity already given in Christ, but failure to gather could obscure that gift. For John of Pergamon, communion carries responsibility: the Churches cannot profess unity while endlessly postponing the common action it demands.

The diaspora and the local Church

The diaspora made this challenge concrete. In a single city, Orthodox communities belonged to overlapping jurisdictions shaped by national histories. John measured this against the principle of one bishop in one place: the bishop unites the local Church across ethnic and social differences. Cultural heritage matters, but it cannot justify ecclesial division.

With an immediate solution out of reach, the conference adopted Episcopal Assemblies to help bishops act together. This was a transitional step and a shared achievement, built on earlier work. Yet the delegation’s report also records strategies to advance the Patriarchate’s position. Theological convictions and institutional interests were intertwined.

Primacy and the limits of agreement

Autocephaly posed a harder question. The commissions John chaired in 2009 and 2011 made progress on the mother Church’s consent, pan-Orthodox agreement, and proclamation by the Ecumenical Patriarch. But agreement broke down over who would sign the tomos and how.

Signatures may seem a detail. Here they raised a fundamental question: who speaks and acts for all? The Churches could affirm communion without agreeing on how to give it institutional form.

Still, all fourteen Churches participated in revising the preparatory documents, including those later absent from Crete. The preparation brought together more Churches than the Council itself.

By August 2015, Metropolitan John’s report to the Synaxis of the Ecumenical Throne had become a warning: the Churches must come together ready to listen and reconsider their positions. Insistence on unanimity could allow a single Church to block them all. Yet his concern reached beyond procedure: a Council absorbed in internal affairs might fail to speak to the world. These were the stakes as preparation gave way to the Council itself in Crete.

Part Two — Conciliar Contribution

His position, and the rules of the room

At Crete, Patriarch Bartholomew presided; Metropolitan John served within the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s delegation. His influence rested on his theological authority and long experience of preparation. Ten Churches participated; Antioch, Russia, Bulgaria, and Georgia were absent.

The rules shaped every debate. Each autocephalous Church had one vote, and amendments required unanimity. Persuading a majority was therefore not enough: every Church had to agree.

John of Pergamon had already warned of the difficulties. Ten months earlier, addressing the Synaxis of the Ecumenical Throne, he spoke frankly about meetings he had chaired. Too often, delegates came determined to defend their Church’s position, ἐνίοτε διά τῆς ἀσκήσεως τῆς ἀρνησικυρίας, ie., sometimes by veto, rather than ready to listen and reconsider. From that mentality, he says, the consensus rule itself arose: Russia insisted on it, while Jerusalem and Constantinople preferred the canonical principle ἡ ψῆφος τῶν πλειόνων κρατείτω, let the vote of the majority prevail. And to the objection that this governed only elections he answers that it does not stand historically — at Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon and the Sixth Council, minorities sat and were overruled on dogma itself. Unanimity was a worthy ideal, he said, but it allowed a single Church to block any decision. «Ἡ ἀρχή τῆς ὁμοφωνίας ἀποτελεῖ, βεβαίως, ἰδεατήν καί ἐπιθυμητήν ἐπιδίωξιν, ἀλλ’ ἐν τῇ πράξει σημαίνει ὅτι μία καί μόνον Ἐκκλησία δύναται νά ἀναστείλῃ καί παρεμποδίσῃ τήν λῆψιν οἱασδήποτε ἀποφάσεως.» The prolonged preparation and the deadlock over autocephaly had shown the cost.

He named the casualties: the length of the preparation, and the deadlock over autocephaly and the diptychs. So the man who entered that hall with a voice and no vote had said in advance, in public, that the rule under which he would work was a product of the disease he was trying to cure.

Yet he accepted the discipline of working within those rules. He also insisted that conciliar life requires us, at times, to step back when the assembly does not share our judgment. Disagreement need not mean refusing to sign. Here was the personal cost of communion: accepting a common decision even when it fell short of one’s convictions. At Crete, that principle would put him to the test.

Before turning to the debates, let me recall something the Acts cannot quite capture: his humor. One bishop, particularly critical of John, regularly began his interventions by saying, “I love and respect Metropolitan John…” Eventually, John could not resist asking: “Why do you always feel the need to express your love and respect for me before you start criticizing?”

It was a moment of lightness amid serious disagreement. These bishops still had five days of debate—and prayer together—ahead of them.

The language of the human person

One debate brought John’s theological vision directly into the council hall. Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos challenged the use of person for human beings, arguing that the term should be reserved for the divine hypostases—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

John first brought the discussion back to the task at hand: the Council had to choose the wording of its document, not settle the entire history of a theological term. But the stakes were high. “The term ‘person’ is very important,” he insisted. “We cannot anathematize this term.”

For him, human being and person expressed distinct dimensions of our existence. This mattered especially in dialogue with science. He warned against an account of humanity reduced to animal existence: how could the Church defend the sacredness of the human being if it surrendered the language through which it expressed that sacredness? In a text addressed to the wider world, person was a word worth explaining and defending.

Misuse, he continued, was a reason to clarify a concept, not abandon it. Here he turned to an authority his opponent had invoked: Elder Sophrony. Sophrony himself used the word person, John observed, κατά κόρον—abundantly. The question, then, was how to give it the right content. He also invoked Florovsky’s judgment that the concept of the person was patristic theology’s greatest contribution to the world.

His concern was ultimately the Church’s ability to speak beyond its own walls. Fear of straying into philosophy must not prevent engagement with science and contemporary thought. Otherwise, he warned, “we can have dialogue with no one, except with certain theologians among ourselves.”

The President thanked him “for the philosophical and theological clarifications.” Metropolitan Maximos of Selyvria spoke next: “I agree with His Eminence of Pergamon.” The Church of Greece withdrew its motion.

The Council retained the term. That was a significant achievement, but its meaning should be stated precisely: the Council had not endorsed John’s whole theology of personhood. It had kept this language available to the Church, leaving its meaning and limits open to further discussion. He had defended both a word and the possibility of dialogue.

Fasting and the coming Kingdom

The Patriarch had asked for brevity and no further patristic citations. Metropolitan John praised the document on fasting as comprehensive, lacking nothing essential. But he raised one theological objection: it described fasting as an image of the life to come.

“This troubles me,” he said. The Church suspends fasting precisely when it celebrates the Resurrection. And its fullest image of eternal life is the Divine Liturgy. Could a Council therefore present fasting itself as an image of the coming Kingdom?

Responding to a question from the floor, he sharpened the point: Christian fasting comes to an end. Its goal lies beyond itself. If the Lenten fast did not give way to the joy of the Resurrection, Christian asceticism would lose its meaning.

In this brief intervention, a central conviction of his theology became clear: fasting matters, but we understand it through the feast towards which it leads. The coming Kingdom gives meaning to the discipline of the present.

Bishop Irinej of Bačka supported and developed his argument. The Patriarch closed with a gentle observation: happily, the Council was meeting during Pentecost week, when neither Wednesday nor Friday was a fast day. The calendar itself offered an illustration of John’s point.

The adopted text omitted the disputed expression. His intervention points towards that outcome, although the omission alone cannot establish how the final wording was decided.

Calling other Christians Churches

The Council’s most sustained controversy concerned a seemingly simple word: could Orthodox Christians call other Christian communities “Churches”? John identified this as the principal problem before the Council. A usage long accepted, he observed, had recently become contested. He had therefore undertaken a painstaking search of the sources.

He presented a striking succession of witnesses, all opponents of Rome. Balsamon, writing after the schism, still called Rome a Church. Gennadios Scholarios, a vigorous opponent of union with Rome, instructed the monks of Sinai to give Latins the blessed bread, or antidoron, “for they are Christians.” The Council of 1484, which rejected Florence, received them by chrismation rather than rebaptism. And the Encyclical of 1848 repeatedly spoke of the Church of Rome.

Then came the question that brought this historical evidence into sharp focus:

“If the Church of Rome were not a Church, our own Church would certainly have had to elect a Bishop of Rome, in the course of all these centuries.”

He acknowledged the underlying theological difficulty: how can we confess the one Church while also calling others “Churches”? That question required serious examination. But leaving it unresolved did not entitle the Council to erase a thousand years of usage.

His challenge became pointed:

“Were they all in error? … Let this Council decide, then, that whoever used this term, let him be anathema! … Has the Holy Spirit only now breathed in the Church? Why with such delay?”

«Ἔσφαλλον ὅλοι αὐτοί; … ἀνάθεμα ἔστω! … Τώρα ἔπνευσε τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ Ἅγιον εἰς τὴν Ἐκκλησίαν; Διατί μὲ τόσην καθυστέρησιν;»

The Acts record the response in one word: applause.

His argument deserves attention, especially in this gathering. Here, he defended the term through the Orthodox tradition itself. Those seeking to remove it had to explain why the language of their own predecessors was no longer acceptable.

The arguments he left unspoken

Seven sheets of unpublished handwritten notes, found in his archives, reveal how carefully John prepared for this debate. With numbered footnotes, precise references, and references to an appendix of complete letters, they formed a substantial dossier.

They also contain the questions that brought his intervention to its climax: were all his predecessors in error? Had the Holy Spirit only now breathed in the Church? What sounds spontaneous in the Acts had been prepared in advance.

Yet three striking passages in these notes do not appear in his recorded intervention.

Florovsky describes the two Churches as “Siamese twins,” neither able to die without endangering the other.

Karmiris calls Orthodoxy and Rome “the two halves of the ancient Catholic Church.”

And Mark Eugenikos addresses Pope Eugenius at Ferrara: “Receive, most holy father, your children come from far in the East; embrace those long separated by time who have fled to your arms.” John copied these words and added an exclamation mark.

The first two could have invited accusations of “branch theory”—the idea that separated Churches are branches of one Church. The third revealed an unexpectedly warm address to a pope from a revered opponent of union with Rome.

John had all three passages ready. In the hall, he confined his case to established Orthodox usage and the consequences of rejecting it.

We cannot know why he left them unspoken. Time alone may explain it. But the contrast suggests careful judgment: he used the evidence most directly suited to the decision before the Council, leaving the larger questions open.

These are the three passages I promised at the beginning. They remained in his notes in 2016. Ten years later, what might they invite us to consider together?

The exchange: Friday night, Saturday morning

By half past seven on Friday evening, the Council was deadlocked over paragraph 6. The Patriarch warned that even an all-night session might not resolve it. He proposed a drafting committee, bringing Metropolitan of Pergamon and Metropolitan of Nafpaktos together—with a touch of humour:

“They will speak neither about ‘man’ nor about ‘the human person,’ but about the matter in hand.”

The hall applauded. The exchange that followed shows two men who had worked together for forty years navigating a crisis in public.

John thanked the Patriarch for choosing him for “this not altogether pleasant task,” but suggested that the Church of Cyprus had already offered a way forward.

The Ecumenical Patriarch: «Ἄρα δέν θά ξενυχτήσετε.»
“So you won’t be staying up all night, then.”

The Cypriot amendment retained Churches, replacing other with heterodox. The Patriarch supported its historical basis: even Fathers and Councils firmly opposed to Rome had called it a Church. Why should that word now become an insurmountable obstacle?

As discussion resumed, John reminded the chair that he had not finished:

Pergamon: «Εἶχον τόν λόγον καί διεκόπην. Ἐάν δοθῇ ὁ λόγος καί εἰς ἄλλους δέν θά ὁλοκληρώσω ἐκεῖνο, τό ὁποῖον ἤθελον νά εἴπω.»
“I had the floor and was interrupted. If others are given the floor, I shall not finish what I wanted to say.”

The Ecumenical Patriarch: «Συγγνώμην. Νά ὁλοκληρώσετε.»
“I beg your pardon. Please finish.”

John argued that heterodox addressed the concern without equating other Churches with the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Then he named what was at stake:

“This Council cannot break with history. Everyone will say that the Holy and Great Council met only to stop us calling Churches those whom we have called Churches for twelve hundred years.”

«Δέν εἶναι δυνατόν ἡ παροῦσα Σύνοδος νά φθάσῃ εἰς τό σημεῖον νά διακόψῃ τήν ἱστορίαν. Ἐκεῖ θά σταθοῦν ὅλοι, λέγοντες ὅτι ἡ Ἁγία καί Μεγάλη Σύνοδος ἔγινε μόνον καί μόνον διά νά παύσωμεν νά λέγωμεν Ἐκκλησίας ἐκείνους, τούς ὁποίους ὠνομάζομεν «Ἐκκλησίας» ἐπί χίλια διακόσια ἔτη.»

He could accept the Cypriot amendment, he said. The decision now rested with the Church of Greece. If it agreed, no committee would be needed—and everyone could have a quiet night.

He had offered a way out through a proposal already before the Council. Its acceptance depended on the Churches themselves.

On Saturday morning, Archbishop Hieronymos presented the Church of Greece’s own formula. John read it aloud and responded:

«Βεβαίως, ἐξασθενεῖ πολὺ τὸ ἀρχικὸν κείμενον. Θὰ ἔλεγον, πρὸς χάριν τῆς ἐπιτεύξεως συναινέσεως, ὅτι θὰ ἠδυνάμεθα νὰ τὸ δεχθῶμεν.»

“Certainly, this greatly weakens the original text. I would say that, for the sake of achieving consensus, we could accept it.”

Here was the discipline he had advocated in 2015, now practised in public. He named the cost and accepted it. Agreement did not make every compromise right; his response indicates that he judged this wording sufficient for a common decision, despite its limitations.

The Patriarch thanked the Church of Greece and its delegation, described the difficulty as one “we all had,” and moved to paragraph 7. The Church that had raised the objection had helped make agreement possible.

Crete measured against Zizioulas’ hope

What did Crete fulfil? It brought the participating Churches together in worship and deliberation. John helped prepare it, shaped its debates, and accepted the discipline of shared decisions. Yet the absence of four Churches left his larger hope unfulfilled. Near the end of his life, he said privately: “We fought our whole lives for a pan-Orthodox council where the entire Orthodox Church would gather and demonstrate its unity; unfortunately, we did not succeed.” Publicly, he also insisted that Crete’s first achievement was that it happened at all—and that the bishops present celebrated the Eucharist together.

Both judgments matter. He could recognize a real act of communion while grieving that the gathering remained incomplete. His gratitude and disappointment arose from the same conviction: the Church’s unity must become visible in its life.

That conviction is his lasting challenge to us. Communion must shape how the Churches gather, listen, and decide. His acceptance of an imperfect formulation shows what this requires; his disappointment reminds us how much remains unfinished.

To honor him is to take up the question he leaves us: how can the unity we receive in the Eucharist become a shared responsibility for the whole Church? At Crete, he helped put that conviction into practice. The task continues. Thank you!

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photo: Nikos Papachristou