Claim
⭐ Olson draws it as a spectrum, not as two camps: Christian attitudes to the great general councils of the church, he writes, can be seen as a continuous spectrum, with the Eastern Orthodox at one extreme and most Pentecostals at the other; but the attitudes of most Christians fall somewhere between the two extremes.
At one end: the Eastern Orthodox. They accept 7 ecumenical councils and hold, as Olson puts it, that they have almost the same authority as Scripture itself — Scripture and these councils are both part of Tradition, and Tradition is God's authoritative revelation to his people in history. ⚠ After the seventh council they do not recognize any council as a council of the whole church, and the standing of the seventh itself is still disputed among them.
The Roman Catholics. They accept 21, the most recent being the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965 — and, Olson notes, the Roman Catholic Church will certainly hold more general councils in the future.
In the middle: magisterial Protestants. Lutherans, Reformed and Anglicans, Olson writes, accept only the first four councils as having special authority; even so, these churches all hold that the authority of those four councils stands under Scripture.
At the other end: the free churches. Baptists, Pentecostals, Mennonites, the Churches of Christ and others, Olson notes, pay little attention to the general councils, or none at all.
⭐⭐The basic claim of the Orthodox and Catholic end matters more than how many councils they accept. Olson puts this very clearly when he tells how the canon of Scripture was formed: the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholics (both of whom claim to be the true heirs of the church of the Roman Empire before it divided) still stress, he writes, that tradition has greater authority than the canon. That is, they believe that the canon of Scripture (the recognition of a certain set of inspired holy writings) was a product of apostolic tradition, and that apostolic tradition had earlier produced episcopal church order and the rule of faith.
⚠ This sentence is very easy to misread, and Olson heads off the misreading himself: this does not mean, he says, that they think the truth of Scripture is not God's work. On the contrary, their theology holds that tradition comes from the apostles themselves and has priority in history and in the church over the canon. It was the living tradition, held in the fellowship of bishops and expressed in the rule of faith, that finally led to certain writings being recognized as inspired Scripture.
⭐ That is, the argument at this end is one of time order: it was the church (through the fellowship of bishops and the rule of faith) that recognized which books are Scripture — so the thing that recognized Scripture cannot stand below Scripture. ⚠ We do not judge whether this reasoning is right (its other side belongs to the thread on Scripture and Tradition); we only ask the reader to see clearly that this end of the spectrum is not a matter of accepting a few more councils; it holds an entirely different account of where Scripture came from.
⭐The middle stretch — also where most Chinese churches stand. Magisterial Protestants (Lutherans, Reformed, Anglicans) and most modern evangelicals take a twofold position: on the one hand they accept the special authority of the first four ecumenical councils and the Nicene Creed; on the other they insist that all of these authorities stand under Scripture.
Olson's statement: these churches, he writes, accept only the first four councils as having special authority, and even so hold that the authority of those four councils stands under Scripture. And many modern evangelicals, Olson notes, regard the first four councils and the Nicene Creed as milestones of Christian truth, to be respected, but not to be revered as having the same authority as Scripture.
⚠ Please notice how hard this position is; it is not a refusal to choose sides. If you reject these councils altogether, you must explain why you still believe in the Trinity and in the Christology of Chalcedon (both of which were set out by councils in the first place); if you raise them to equal standing with Scripture, you go against sola scriptura. ⭐ So the middle stretch walks a narrow path — it grants that those councils got it right, but they got it right not because they were councils, but because they agreed with Scripture. ⚠ This is exactly the position on which this site's six threads are written. We say so openly, so that readers know they are reading material that stands somewhere.
Counterclaim
⭐ The free-church end is not simply indifferent; it has a diagnosis, and we record it in full. Many Protestant churches that hold high sola scriptura and do not accept creeds, Olson writes, dismiss the general councils — all the bishops gathered together, with the emperor presiding — as a symptom of Constantinianism: the disease of letting secular and pagan rulers manipulate the life of the church and interfere with the interpretation of Scripture and theology. They hold, Olson reports, that at some point after the death of the apostles in the 1st century the church had already fallen away from her true nature, and that the deference the Christian bishops of the 4th century showed to the pagan emperor Constantine was the last straw in the decline of Christendom from apostolic Christianity into something close to a pagan Roman religion.
⚠ But one point must never be left out. This does not mean, Olson writes, that Pentecostals and other free-church denominations reject all the doctrines and creeds of the councils — not at all. Many of them heartily agree with the doctrine of the Trinity, but argue that it can be found in Scripture itself, and that there is no need to accept the metaphysical language of the creeds. Their principle, as Olson gives it: from the point of view of Scripture, all humanly drafted statements of faith can be revised, and apart from Scripture they have no authority of their own. ⚠ And Olson records the cost too: a very small number of free-church denominations and traditions reject any formal statement of faith at all — and the result, he says, is of course doctrinal confusion and disorder.
⚠ The Orthodox position at the other end of the spectrum is just as clear-cut. Orthodox bishops, Olson records, regard all other Christian churches as schismatics — even the Roman Catholic Church is a schismatic body that separated from the orthodoxy formally recognized in 1054.