Participative Decision Making of the Faithful in the Church
Abstract
The life of the primitive church, to this day, reflects the authenticity of the Church’s practices and its inner arrangement. As such, this article discusses the possibilities of the inner life and order of ecclesiastical communities in the most ancient times of the Church. It does not, however, question the significance of the role of the leading figures within the Church, as it corresponds with concrete pleas to the faithful for obedience, as already mentioned within New Testament writings, likewise does so the institution of the monarchical bishop, as propagated by the epistles of Ignatius of Antioch. However, Luke’s Acts of the Apostles do, for example, contain testimonials of the participation of the entire ecclesiastical community on the appointing of Apostle Matthias and the first seven deacons. Didache, the early Christian treatise, does too, on one note, stress the importance of the carriers of the prophetic charism, nonetheless it does offer ecclesiastical communities with certain criteria regarding their participation on the service of said charismatics, and their assessments thereof. The Gospel of Matthew, along with Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians, point towards participation of all the members of the ecclesiastical communities on the execution of essential penal measures against convicted Christians.
References
Alberigo G. et al.: Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta. Bologna 2002.
Balz H., Schrage W.: Die „Katholischen“ Briefe. Berlin 1982.
Berger K.: Kommentar zum Neuen Testament. Gütersloh 2011.
Blum G. G.: Tradition und Sukzession. Studien zum Normbegriff des Apostolischen von Paulus bis Irenäus. Berlin—Hamburg 1963.
Brooks St. H.: Matthews Community. Sheffield 1987.
Campenhausen H. von: Aus der Frühzeit des Christentums. Studien zur Kirchengeschichte des ersten und zweiten Jahrhunderts. Tübingen 1953.
Campenhausen H. von: Kirchliches Amt und geistliche Vollmacht in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten. Tübingen 1953.
Code of Canon Law. Latin-English Edition. New English Translation. Washington 2012.
Filipi P.: Církev a církve. Kapitoly z ekumenické ekleziologie. Brno 2000.
France R. T.: The Gospel of Matthew. Grand Rapids 2007.
García Martín J.: Le norme generali del Codex Iuris Canonici. Roma 1996.
Gaudemet J.: Storia del diritto canonico. Ecclesia et Civitas. Cinisello Balsamo 1998.
Grant R. M.: The Apostolic Fathers. A New Translation and Commentary. New York 1964.
Hahn F., Klein H.: Die frühchristliche Prophetie. Ihre Voraussetzungen, ihre Anfänge und ihre Entwicklung bis zum Montanismus. Eine Einführung. Neukirchen-Vluyn 2011.
Heckel U.: Hirtenamt und Herrschaftskritik. Die urchristlichen Ämter aus johanneischer Sicht. Neukirchen-Vluyn 2004.
Jacoš J.: Cirkevné právo. Prešov 2006.
Kirschläger W.: Die Anfänge der Kirche. Eine biblische Rückbesinnung. Graz—Wien—Köln 1990.
Migne J.-P.: Patrologiae cursus completus. Series graeca. Vol. 161. Paris 1864—1866.
Milavec A.: “Synoptic Tradition in the Didache Revisited.” In: Journal of Early Christian Studies. Journal of the North American Patristic Society, Cincinnati, 11, 4/2003, pp. 443—480.
Mühlsteiger J.: “Zum Verfassungsrecht der Frühkirche.“ In: Tradition — Wegweisung in die Zukunft. Festschrift für Johannes Mühlsteiger zum 75. Geburtstag. Eds. K. Breitsching, W. Rees. Berlin 2001, pp. 741— 810.
J. Nolland: The Gospel of Matthew. A Commentary on Greek Text. Bletchley 2005.
Pesch R.: Die Apostelgeschichte. Neukirchener-Vluyn, Ostfildern 2012.
Regula Benedicti. Řehole Benediktova. Praha 1998.
Sebott S.: Fundamentalkanonistik. Grund und Grenzen des Kirchenrechts. Frankfurt am Main 1993.
Trilling W.: Das wahre Israel. Studien zur Theologie des Matthäusevangeliums. Leipzig 1975.
Wiezsäcker C.: Das apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche. Tübingen—Leipzig: Mohr—Siebeck, 1902.
Winzeler Ch.: Einführung in das Religionsverfassungsrecht der Schweiz. Zürich 2009.
The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.