Dogmatic and canonical problems of editing church legal documents (from example of documents of the council оf Crete)

The article, using the documents of the council of Crete as an example, examines the problem of editing church documents that claim to be of pan-Orthodox significance and are binding on all Local Churches. It affects both the wording of the pre-conciliar documents and the features of the Regulations, which excluded the editing of documents during the discussion at the council. The major Greek theologian Protopresbyter Theodor Zisis, the famous Bulgarian church scholar Archpriest Bozhidar Glavlev, Russian scholars Priest Alexy Knutov and P. V. Kuzenkov made the most significant contribution to the study of this problem from the point of view of conformity of the "Cretan" documents with the historical, dogmatic and canonical foundations of the Orthodox tradition. The authors of this article took attention to the aspect of editing documents at different stages. The object of the research was the pre-conciliar documents “Relations of the Orthodox Church with the rest of the Christian world”, “Mission of the Orthodox Church in the modern world”, which provoked the main polemic on the adequacy of dogmatic formulations, and the Regulations for the council. The work used the method of hermeneutic interpretation, discourse and intertextual analysis. The most acute problems were identified: 1) pre-conciliar editing of documents in connection with a conflict of interpretations, 2) regulations for the adoption of documents that do not allow to correct discrepancies lost in the pre-assembly period. The results and the conclusions were depicted at the end of the article: 1. The publication of draft documents made it possible to discuss them, however, from the publication of documents to the start of the council of Crete, there was clearly not enough time for serious editing of inappropriate language that was dogmatic (rather than appearing as a result of language negligence). 2. The text of the Regulations contains a “new ecclesiology”. 3. The requirements of methodological style in the preparation of conciliar documents, as well as their comprehensive discussion and editing in accordance with the formulas enshrined in dogma, should be mandatory not only in the pre-conciliar period, but also included in the Regulations for the council. 4. Following the principles of scientific editing is fully consistent with church tradition.