Scaffolds of the Church: Towards Poststructual Ecclesiology by Cyril Hovorun (review)

Fr. Cyril Hovorun's Scaffolds of the Church is a critical examination of the principal institutions of the church, focusing on historical accretions added to the church, as distinct from what really defines the church. Outwardly, these accretions seem to belong to the nature of the church, but, argues Hovorun, are in fact expedients put in place over time to facilitate the governance of the church. Since such accretions—the "scaffolds" of the book's title—are not part of the church's unchanging nature, they are not divinely established, and hence they can and must evolve in response to changing needs.

The thrust of Hovorun's book is thus to deconstruct received ideas about the sacredness and immutability of ecclesial structures. He approaches the nature of the church empirically rather than philosophically or mystically, according little attention to developing positive notions of what the church is. His principal criterion for separating the essential from the accretions is historical or empirical: "only what was always observable in the entire church belongs to its nature" (183). The invocation of this principle is frequently marked by the expression "there was a time when ": "there was no hierarchal strata" (9), "the church was not hierarchical" (141), "there was no supra-communal level" (183), "there was no 'laity'" (186). Armed with this sword, he despatches several apparently sacrosanct ecclesial features as belonging not to the nature of the church, but to the "scaffolding": hierarchy, canonical territory, autocephaly, primacy and boundaries between "church" and "non-church." Hovorun concentrates a lot of firepower against the principle of hierarchy, in some ways the support of the rest of the scaffolding. "The principle of hierarchy," he writes, "can be useful, but it is not essential" (3); and "The hierarchical principle … was borrowed from outside the church and remains there as its scaffolding" (141). Hierarchy has become an ideology, "hierarchism" (3; 188), "which projects the malfunctions of the structures onto the nature of the church" (188). In contrast, Hovorun rightly insists that ministry, not hierarchy, is of the nature of the church: "There was no time when there was no ministry" (145).

Hovorun's empirical approach is a refreshing change from other Orthodox writers who focus on the church as an institution, but it leaves him open to accusations of misreading history or ignoring evidence which could complicate his major theses. For example, could not ministry itself be perceived as hierarchy? He partly anticipates this critique by arguing, somewhat weakly, that "the initial logic of ministry was non-hierarchical, with the 'more important' members of the community serving the 'less important'" (146). Maybe. But some could also argue that the college of apostles was already a proto-hierarchy vis-à-vis the other disciples, with its status signified by the establishment of the office of deacon, to relieve the apostles from the "service of the table" to concentrate on preaching the Word of God (Acts 6:2).

On the sensitive issue of "canonical territory"—a principle strongly defended by the Moscow Patriarchate in particular—Hovorun states flatly that canonical territory is "not dogma, not a sacred institution, but a historic convenience of relative value," nor should it "substitute for more important values, such as the unity of the church" (86). In contrast, he elevates community above a legalistic interpretation of canonical territory, and thus sees some value, from a community perspective, in the current jurisdictional jigsaw puzzle of Orthodoxy in the "diaspora" (87), an affirmation which will dismay advocates of a unified Orthodox church in countries of Orthodox immigration.

Having discarded most of the familiar structures of the church as mere scaffolding, what remains as the true nature of the church? Hovorun wisely does not provide a definitive answer—the church is, as Boris Bobrinskoy reminds us in the title of his book on the church, "a mystery." Hovorun nonetheless offers some clues about essential aspects of the church: community; baptism, Eucharist and ministry; and sacramental, pastoral and administrative leadership "as long as it is exercised within the...