It’s a scene every moviegoer remembers: Vizzini, convinced of his own brilliance, keeps shouting “Inconceivable!” every time events defy his expectations. Finally, Inigo Montoya turns to him and delivers the perfect rebuke: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” The same could be said of much modern Orthodox talk about economia and akribeia. These are ancient theological terms with precise meanings shaped by the canons and the Fathers, yet today they’re flung about as if akribeia meant harshness and economia meant leniency. But that’s not what they mean, and confusing them has led to deep distortions in the way we understand the Church’s reception of converts. Like Vizzini’s “inconceivable,” these words have been repeated so often and so wrongly that they’ve lost their meaning. It’s time to recover what the Church actually said.
A proper response to rigorist claims about economia, akribeia, and the reception of converts must rest on the actual canonical and theological tradition rather than modern zealot reinterpretations. The rigorist claim that “akribeia would have us baptize all, economia allows some exceptions” reverses the historical meaning of both terms and distorts the canonical mind of the Church.
The Real Canonical Framework
No ecumenical or universally received canon ever speaks “economically.” Every canon expresses canonical akribeia. Exact, prescriptive normativity. When the Quinisext Council (Canon 95) reaffirmed the established threefold system of reception (by baptism, chrismation, or confession) it was not describing economia but enshrining canonical exactitude for different categories of heretics based on faith and form. To reinterpret this canonical precision as “economia” would make Canon 95 the only case in the Church’s canonical tradition where a canon enacts leniency rather than law, rendering the canonical corpus incoherent. The canonical system prescribes normative discernment, not individual whim. The canons concerning baptism, as worded in the Councils, are themselves the akribeia of the Ecumenical Councils.
Economia as Pastoral Governance, Not Leniency
Writers such as Florovsky, Rentel, and Baker have shown that economia (oikonomia) in the Orthodox sense does not mean “leniency” or “indulgence.” It denotes the wise stewardship of God’s household. It is the ability of the Church’s hierarchy to apply the canons with discernment for the healing of souls. Fr. Alexander Rentel emphasizes that oikonomia “is not the opposite of akribeia, nor reducible to pastoral convenience, but the art of applying the canonical tradition with Kairos, with timing and discernment”. This accords with Canon 102 of the same Trullan Council, which defines the entire canonical corpus as therapeutic, not juridical: the canons must be applied as a spiritual physician applies medicine to a patient, not as a judge imposes a legal penalty.
Akribeia, therefore, simply means fidelity to the rule, that is, the canons as written. Akribea does not mean maximal rigor. The exactness of the Church in this case is precisely the observance of the canonical threefold mode of reception. To violate that pattern by baptizing all indiscriminately is not akribeia but innovation.
The 1756 Council and Modern Rigorist Reconstruction
The idea that every convert must be baptized was resurrected not in patristic canonicity but in the Council of Constantinople of 1756, convened under Patriarch Cyril V. Its decree mandating baptism for all Western converts was a reactionary measure born of 18th century polemical pressure against Latin proselytism, not a universal or ecumenical determination. Later theologians such as Florovsky rightly classified this as a local excess inconsistent with the canonical and patristic consensus of earlier centuries. The subsequent Orthodox world (including Moscow, Antioch, and the Balkans) never universally accepted this council, nor did it carry conciliar authority across the Church. In fact, as Fr. Matthew Baker has noted in his analyses of Florovsky’s method, such modern rigorism represents an ahistorical retrojection of later polemical categories onto the patristic past.
The Genuine Orthodox Principle
To confess “one baptism for the remission of sins” refers, as the Fathers insist, to the one baptism of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. But this confession also implies, as Saints Augustine and Optatus taught, that the grace of baptism is Christ’s own act and therefore cannot be annihilated by human schism. Heterodox Trinitarian baptism, when performed with proper faith in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is not a null rite, because its minister is ultimately Christ Himself; yet its grace remains latent until it is actualized through reception into the Orthodox Catholic Church. In Florovsky’s words, the Church does not create a new sacrament at reception nor recognize an alien one; rather, she restores and fulfills Christ’s own gift within the life of communion. Reception by oikonomia thus does not bestow grace ex nihilo but perfects what God has already given through the Church’s sacramental economy.
When clergy insist that baptism must always be repeated, they collapse the patristic distinction between sacramental reality and ecclesial efficacy, confusing the canonical principle of akribeia with zealotry and mistaking the Church’s power to heal for a judgment on grace outside her bounds. The true exactness- the genuine akribeia-is obedience to the canonical and conciliar order, following the Fathers who discerned both the inviolability of Christ’s baptism and the necessity of its completion within the fullness of the Orthodox communion. To overturn that balance, as the 1756 rigorists did, is not “strictness” but a rejection of the very theology of baptism that unites the patristic consensus in one mind of the Church.
Conclusion
Therefore, yes, it is up to the bishop to decide the mode of reception, rightly dividing the word of truth by applying God’s oikonomia according to the canonical akribeia of the Church. The threefold system of reception is not an expression of leniency but of exact canonical discernment, the only pattern sanctioned by the undivided Church. To baptize everyone as a rule is not “strictness”; it is to act uncanonically and contrary to the very akribeia of the Ecumenical Councils that rigorists claim to defend. True Orthodoxy stands in fidelity to those canons- wise, patristic, and pastoral-not in modern hyper-maximalist reinterpretations of them.
