A Machine, a Head, and a Missing Proposition: A Critique of T. S. Flanders on the Ybarra-Sellen Debate

By Fr. Laurent Cleenewerck

Introduction

In his OnePeterFive essay of March 12, 2025, Timothy Flanders argues that the Pints With Aquinas debate between Erick Ybarra and Denny Sellen (“Ubi Petrus”) was structurally unfair: the Catholic side had to defend a proposition, while the Orthodox side only had to negate it.¹ We believe Flanders raises a legitimate methodological point, yet the argument he builds on it rests on several equivocations that are typical of the genre and, in our view, fatal to his conclusion.

We should begin with what is commended in the essay. Flanders rightly warns against triumphalism on both sides, he praises Ybarra’s scholarly honesty and Sellen’s courtesy, and he recognizes that the first-millennium evidence cannot simply be enlisted for a maximal papacy. On these points, we have no quarrel. His central claim is also partly correct: a fair debate should set one positive ecclesiology against another, not a thesis against its mere negation.

The difficulty lies elsewhere. Flanders assumes that the Orthodox have no positive proposition to offer, that “head” means the same thing in a canon of the Apostolic Canons and in the constitution Pastor Aeternus, that a binding decision must be an infallible one, that a functioning decision-making mechanism guarantees doctrinal continuity, and that the canons of Sardica codified a universal spiritual fatherhood. We take each of these in turn, in the order of the five points that structure this critique.

1. Proposition B exists: the Eusebian model of churches in communion

Flanders is right that the debate could have been framed as Proposition A against Proposition B. He is wrong to suggest that the Orthodox would have nothing to put in the B column. The alternative exists, it is ancient, and it has a well-known literary witness: the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea.

Readers who come to Eusebius for the first time often remark that the church he describes looks remarkably like the Orthodox communion today. What he presents is not a single organization with one point of final decision, but a family of local churches, each complete in itself, linked by communion and occasionally divided by its breakdown. The main features are easy to list:

• Local churches with their own successions. Eusebius traces episcopal succession lists for Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem side by side, as parallel witnesses to apostolic continuity, not as branches of one see.²
• Communion by letters. Bishops write to one another’s churches as peers, as Dionysius of Corinth does to Lacedaemon, Athens, Nicomedia, Crete, Pontus and Rome.³
• Regional synods to resolve disputes. The Paschal controversy is handled by synods in Palestine, Rome, Pontus, Gaul and Osrhoene, whose letters converge on a common practice.⁴ Montanism and Paul of Samosata are dealt with by synods in Asia and Antioch.⁵
• Diversity without rupture, and rupture without dissolution. Polycarp and Anicetus disagree on the date of Pascha yet keep communion, Anicetus even yielding the celebration of the Eucharist to Polycarp. When Victor of Rome attempts to cut off the churches of Asia, Irenaeus and others rebuke him, and the excommunication does not hold.⁶ The rebaptism dispute between Stephen and Cyprian follows a similar pattern, with Dionysius of Alexandria acting as mediator.⁷
• Primacy as a point of reference, not a source of being. Rome appears with real prestige, as when Aurelian assigns the church building at Antioch to those in communion with the bishops of Italy and Rome.⁸ The Orthodox have no difficulty with this. Communion with the great sees, Rome first among them, was a recognized test of orthodoxy. It was not the definition of the church.

This is precisely the Orthodox proposition: the local church gathered around its bishop is the catholic Church in a given place; the Churches are bound together by a common faith, mutual recognition and synodical action; primacies exist at regional and worldwide levels, but as useful (de bene esse) rather than constitutive (de esse) realities.⁹ Breaks in communion happen, and they are painful, but they do not dissolve the catholicity of each local church. Eusebius shows such breaks being healed by synods, correspondence and reception over time, not by the decree of a single see.

Two consequences follow for Flanders’ argument. First, his demand that the Orthodox “call an ecumenical council” to prove that they are the first-millennium church proves too much. For roughly three centuries, the church Eusebius describes never held one, and yet nobody doubts that it was the church. Ecumenical councils, when they arrived, were convoked by emperors, as Flanders himself concedes. Their absence after 787 reflects the disappearance of a Christian imperial order, not the disappearance of the ecclesiology that preceded and outlived it. Second, his list of supposedly unprovable Orthodox claims dissolves under the Eusebian model. That the Orthodox Churches share one faith is shown exactly as it was shown in the second century: by mutual recognition, concelebration and common synodical texts. That the Orthodox reject the Filioque in the Creed can be documented from the council of 879-880, the Council of Blachernae (1285) and the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848), among other texts.¹⁰

We would therefore welcome the debate Flanders asks for, provided the proposition is stated honestly. A fair resolution might read: “The communion of churches described in Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History is better represented today by the Orthodox Churches than by the Roman Catholic Church as defined at Vatican I.” That is a positive Proposition B, and the Orthodox side should be glad to carry its burden of proof.

2. The equivocation on “head”

The weakest link in Flanders’ reasoning is a single word. He reports that Sellen, commenting on Pope Gelasius, spoke of the “head of the synod” whose signature turns a synodal decision into law. From this, Flanders concludes that “more erudite Orthodox” concede that the pope is “the universal head of the ecumenical council.” The step looks small. In fact, it moves between two entirely different concepts of headship.

The first concept is the one every Orthodox Christian knows from Apostolic Canon 34. The bishops of each nation must recognize the first among them and regard him as their head (kephalē), doing nothing of consequence without his consent, while each manages the affairs of his own diocese. The canon then adds the clause that is usually forgotten: the first bishop must likewise do nothing without the consent of all, so that there may be concord and God may be glorified.¹¹ This headship is real and binding, but it is relational, reciprocal and conciliar. It is the sense in which we speak of the Patriarch of Moscow as “head of the Russian Church,” or of the Archbishop of Athens as head of the Church of Greece. It presupposes the synod rather than standing above it. As we have argued elsewhere, Apostolic Canon 34 rests on geographical realism and mentions no worldwide primate at all.

The second concept is the one defined in 1870. According to Pastor Aeternus, the Roman pontiff possesses full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church, ordinary and immediate over each and every church, pastor and believer, and his solemn definitions are irreformable “ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae.”¹² Here, the head does not need the consent of the body. Headship is no longer the presidency of a synod; it is a juridical and doctrinal sovereignty attached to a single see by divine right, in a manner that the Orthodox reserve to Christ, “the head over all things to the Church” (Eph 1:22).

When an Orthodox apologist grants that Rome presided over the ancient synodical order, or even that a properly received Roman judgment carried great weight, he is speaking in the first sense. When Flanders cashes that concession as agreement with the papacy, he is speaking in the second. This is the familiar fallacy of equivocation, and it pervades Catholic readings of first-millennium sources. The flattering titles addressed to Rome in Eastern correspondence suffer the same fate: we must distinguish (1) a claim of authority, (2) the acceptance of that claim, and (3) the diplomatic and courtly language that Byzantine writers lavished on bishops of every rank.¹³ The Gelasius letter belongs to the first category. It tells us how Rome understood its own role at the end of the fifth century. It does not tell us that the Churches of the East, or of Africa, received that understanding.

Our own position, set out in From Auctoritas to Potestas, is that primacy is constitutive at two levels only: the family, where the father is originator, and the local church, where the bishop is father and the local church is the catholic Church. At the regional, patriarchal and worldwide levels, primacy stands in analogy to, but not in identity of nature with, those constitutive primacies.¹⁴ A primate may well be called “head” in an analogical sense. The error lies in sliding from analogy to identity and then from identity to the absolute headship of Vatican I.

3. Binding is not the same as infallible

Flanders challenges Sellen to name a universally binding council held without the pope, and in his third note he asks why the Palamite councils and the councils of the Raskol period are not “considered ecumenical and infallible.” The question fuses two categories that the Orthodox keep distinct: what is binding and what is infallible.

The Orthodox Churches possess a substantial body of binding, authoritative texts and decisions. The model is the Council of Jerusalem, whose decree was introduced with the words “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” and was delivered to the churches as decisions to be kept (Acts 15:28; 16:4). In the same line stand the local councils whose canons were received by canon 2 of the Council in Trullo (692), including Carthage, Laodicea, Gangra, Antioch and Sardica itself; the Synodikon of Orthodoxy; the Palamite councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351; the council of 1484 that repudiated Florence; the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848; and the condemnation of phyletism in 1872. None of these needs the label “ecumenical” to bind. Each binds because the bishops who issued it hold, each of them, the apostolic authority to teach, to bind and to loose (Matt 18:18; John 20:22-23), and because the Churches received it as an expression of the faith they already held.

Universal infallibility is a different claim. It asserts that a particular organ, under specified conditions, is guaranteed in advance to be free from error. As we argued in His Broken Body, we do not believe that such a charism exists, whether attached to the bishop of Rome or to any council considered as a mechanism.¹⁵ The Churches are indefectible: the truth is preserved in them, and the gates of Hades do not prevail. Indefectibility, however, is not a procedural guarantee. History offers several assemblies that met every formal criterion of the day and were later rejected: Ephesus in 449, Hieria in 754, and Florence in 1439, whose decree was signed by Eastern bishops before it was repudiated by the people and synods of the East. The test has always been reception, not a formula of convocation.

The answer to Flanders’ footnote is therefore simple. The Palamite councils are not called “infallible” because the Orthodox do not use that category, yet their teaching is binding on every Orthodox bishop, and the Churches proclaim it each year in the Synodikon on the first Sunday of Lent. The variation he notes in liturgical commemoration (he claims that the Sunday of St Gregory Palamas was not kept in Russia before the reforms of Nikon) concerns the calendar, not the doctrine, which the Russian Church professed throughout.

A note on the use of His Broken Body

Flanders quotes the first edition of His Broken Body to the effect that Orthodox Christians who call the Immaculate Conception a heresy “flatly rejected” by the Orthodox Church cannot point to a local or ecumenical council that condemns it.¹⁶ The quotation is accurate, and we stand by it. Its purpose, however, was to call for intellectual honesty in distinguishing dogma from theologoumenon, not to concede that the Orthodox lack any means of binding decision. The Orthodox objection to the Immaculate Conception is real and widely shared, resting on the patristic understanding of ancestral sin and on the conviction that the Theotokos is truly one of us. The point of the passage is that not every theological question requires, or has received, a synodical definition. A communion that leaves certain questions open is not thereby without authority. It is simply refusing to manufacture definitions where the Churches have not needed them.

4. “A doctrinal machine that actually works”

The most revealing sentence in the essay is this one: “we have a doctrinal machine that actually works.” We should take it seriously, because it names the real strength of the Roman model. A single point of universal decision can always produce an answer. The Orthodox communion, which requires the agreement of many autocephalous Churches, often cannot produce one quickly, and sometimes cannot produce one at all, as the absence of four Churches from the Council of Crete in 2016 painfully showed. We concede the point without hesitation.

The question, however, is not whether the machine produces outputs. The question is whether its outputs remain consistent across generations. A mechanism that guarantees decisions, but not continuity, solves the problem of authority only by displacing it onto the problem of interpretation. Over the past thousand years, the Roman machine has produced doctrinal statements, and pastoral and liturgical practices with doctrinal implications, that are difficult to reconcile with one another:

Earlier output	Later output	What is at stake
Unam Sanctam (1302): subjection to the Roman pontiff is altogether necessary for salvation	Unitatis Redintegratio 3 (1964): separated Churches are used by the Spirit as means of salvation	Necessity of communion with Rome for salvation
Florence, Cantate Domino (1442): heretics and schismatics outside the Catholic Church go to eternal fire unless joined before death	Lumen Gentium 15-16 and the Balamand statement (1993): the Orthodox are sister Churches	Status of the Orthodox
Quanta Cura and the Syllabus of Errors (1864)	Dignitatis Humanae (1965)	Religious liberty
Council of Constance (1415): the chalice withheld from the laity	Vatican II and later practice: Communion under both kinds restored	Liturgical practice with sacramental implications
Catechism 2267 (1997)	Catechism 2267 revised (2018): the death penalty “inadmissible”	Moral teaching
Summorum Pontificum (2007): the older Roman rite never abrogated	Traditionis Custodes (2021): the reformed books the unique expression of the Roman lex orandi	Lex orandi, lex credendi
The Filioque defended at Lyons II and Florence	Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (1995): the Greek form of the Creed, without the Filioque, acknowledged as normative and recited by the pope	The Creed itself

Catholic theologians have proposed ways to harmonize each of these pairs, and some of the harmonizations are serious. That is precisely our point. If every reversal requires a theologian to explain why it is not a reversal, the believer is thrown back on the very private judgment that Flanders attributes to the Orthodox. The traditionalist readership of OnePeterFive knows this better than anyone. Flanders described the pontificate of Francis as a “crisis” and maintains a category of essays against ultramontanism, which means that he, too, sorts the machine’s outputs according to a standard he holds independently of the machine. We do not criticize him for this. We simply observe that a “rusty machine” whose current outputs must be filtered by its own users does not deliver the certainty that the essay claims for it.

The Orthodox approach, by contrast, accepts slowness as the price of fidelity. It holds that the faith is already given (Jude 3), that synods confirm rather than invent, and that a decision becomes authoritative when the Churches recognize in it the faith they have always held. This is less efficient. It is also far less exposed to the problem of contradictory outputs, because no single organ can impose a novelty on the whole body.

5. Fallen nature, authority, and Sardica

Flanders closes with a spiritual diagnosis: “no one born of Adam really wants to be under the Papacy, because our fallen human nature hates authority.” Applied to the Orthodox, this is disingenuous. It treats the refusal of one particular claim of authority as though it were a refusal of authority as such, and it ignores the actual shape of Orthodox church life.

Orthodox Christians are not left to their “own private judgment.” They live under the strong, local and binding authority of their bishop, who is the head of their church in the full biblical and patristic sense. St Ignatius of Antioch could not be clearer: nothing is to be done without the bishop, and where the bishop appears, there the people should be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church.¹⁷ Every Orthodox priest serves on an antimension signed by his bishop, commemorates him at every Liturgy, and can be suspended or deposed by him. Every bishop is answerable to his synod. Such authority is not distant or theoretical. For most Orthodox faithful, it is considerably more immediate than the authority of a pope is for most Latin Catholics. Flanders’ own phrase concedes the point: the Orthodox “rightly emphasise spiritual fathers.” The ultimate spiritual father of the local church is its bishop, and this is exactly the headship that Ignatius, Cyprian and the Apostolic Canons describe.

The argument from fallen nature also proves too much. Cyprian of Carthage resisted Stephen of Rome; Firmilian of Caesarea rebuked him sharply; the African bishops of 419 and their successors refused to accept appeals “across the sea.” Cyprian is commemorated in the Roman Canon of the Mass. If resisting a papal claim were a symptom of hatred for authority, the Roman Church would be venerating a rebel at every celebration of its oldest Eucharistic prayer. The argument can also be reversed with equal ease: one might say that fallen nature craves a machine that relieves it of the burden of discernment. Neither psychological explanation settles anything, and both should be left aside.

In passing, Flanders states that the Council of Sardica (c. 343) codified a “universal spiritual fatherhood.” It did not. The relevant canons (3, 4 and 5 in the Greek numbering) allow a bishop deposed by his provincial synod to appeal to the bishop of Rome, “honoring the memory of the holy apostle Peter,” who may then order a new hearing by the bishops of a neighboring province and send presbyters to sit with them.¹⁸ This is a judicial procedure of cassation and remand concerning bishops. It is granted by a synod, which means it is a canonical arrangement and not a statement of divine right. It says nothing about the spiritual fatherhood of the pope over the faithful of the whole world. Sardica itself was a Western assembly from which the Eastern bishops withdrew. When Rome later cited its canons to the African Church as though they were Nicene, Carthage checked the Eastern copies, found no such canons, and in its letter to Celestine asked Rome to stop sending its agents to receive African appeals.¹⁹

The Orthodox do take Sardica seriously, precisely as an appellate canon. In our view, its model of referral to a third party for a rehearing is the one that should have been followed in the Ukrainian crisis. Constantinople did not refer the Kiev case to a third party, and Moscow would likely have accepted the verdict of a synaxis of all the patriarchs and heads of autocephalous Churches, as earlier cases involving Bulgaria and Jerusalem suggest. That is a self-criticism, offered honestly. It is also evidence that the Sardican procedure belongs to the living canonical order of the Orthodox Churches, as an instrument of conciliarity, not as a charter for a universal monarchy. Finally, the conclusion that the Orthodox are in “spiritual peril” because extra ecclesiam nulla salus sits uneasily with the Second Vatican Council, which teaches that the Orthodox Churches possess true sacraments and apostolic succession.²⁰ Here again, the private judgment of a traditionalist editor overrides the output of his own doctrinal machine.

Conclusion

Flanders’ review contains valid points, and we should acknowledge them plainly. The tone of the East-West debate online is often a scandal; triumphalism on either side breeds fragile converts; and a debate that sets a thesis only against its negation is indeed lopsided. The Orthodox should be willing to state their ecclesiology positively and to defend it, including its failures in practice, from the Council of Crete to the crisis in Kiev.

The essay’s conclusion, however, rests on five flaws that are typical of Catholic apologetics on this question:

1. It assumes that the Orthodox have no Proposition B, when the Eusebian model of a communion of local churches is both ancient and recognizably Orthodox.
2. It equivocates on “head,” moving from the conciliar headship of Apostolic Canon 34 to the absolute headship of Pastor Aeternus.
3. It conflates binding with infallible, and so overlooks the large body of authoritative synodical texts that bind the Orthodox Churches without any claim to an infallible organ.
4. It identifies a functioning decision-making mechanism with doctrinal continuity, although the mechanism’s own outputs over the past thousand years are difficult to reconcile.
5. It psychologizes the Orthodox refusal of Vatican I as a refusal of authority as such, and it attributes to Sardica a universal spiritual fatherhood the canons do not contain.

We agree with Flanders that the real debate is between two positive ecclesiologies. We would add that, once the terms are defined without equivocation, the burden of proof falls more heavily on the side that must show how a single see came to hold, by divine right, the absolute headship that the first millennium reserved to Christ and exercised, in His name, through the bishops of the Churches in communion.

Notes

1. T. S. Flanders, “Erick Ybarra and the Unfair Orthodox Debate,” OnePeterFive, March 12, 2025, https://onepeterfive.com/erick-ybarra-and-the-unfair-orthodox-debate/. All quotations of Flanders are from this essay.
2. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.2, 3.4, 3.22, 4.5, and passim.
3. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.23.
4. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.23.
5. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.16.10; 7.27-30.
6. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.24.9-17.
7. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 7.2-5.
8. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 7.30.19.
9. Laurent Cleenewerck, From Auctoritas to Potestas: The Development of Roman Primacy from the Pre-Nicene Era to Vatican I (Euclid University Press, 2026).
10. Council of Constantinople (879-880), Horos; Gregory of Cyprus, Tomus (Blachernae, 1285); “Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, 1848: A Reply to the Epistle of Pope Pius IX.”
11. Apostolic Canons, canon 34.
12. First Vatican Council, Pastor Aeternus (1870), chaps. 3-4.
13. Patrick Truglia, The Rise and Fall of the Papacy: An Orthodox Perspective (2023); A. Edward Siecienski, The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
14. Cleenewerck, From Auctoritas to Potestas.
15. Laurent Cleenewerck, His Broken Body: Understanding and Healing the Schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, 3rd rev. ed. (Euclid University Press, 2026).
16. Cleenewerck, His Broken Body, 1st ed., 45, as cited in Flanders, “Unfair Orthodox Debate.”
17. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Smyrnaeans 8; To the Trallians 2-3; To the Magnesians 6-7.
18. Council of Sardica, canons 3-5 (Greek numbering).
19. Council of Carthage, Letter to Pope Celestine (Optaremus), c. 424.
20. Second Vatican Council, Unitatis Redintegratio (1964), 15.