Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Despite often claiming that they alone constitute the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, the Orthodox have taken a keen interest in Christian unity and have tried to respond to Western Christians in this matter. Since the estrangement (which cannot be precisely dated) from the Roman Catholic church, the Orthodox have held that the breach should be healed by an ecumenical council including the hierarchs of both sides; attempts to hold such a council at lyons in the thirteenth century and at florence in the fifteenth did not, however, produce the desired result. Lutherans and Anglicans have sometimes approached the Orthodox; in 1573 a delegation of Lutheran divines from Tübingen presented ecumenical patriarch jeremias II with a Greek translation of the Augsburg Confession. Some correspondence followed, but in 1581 the patriarchate terminated it. Soon afterwards, Patriarch Cyril lucaris showed leanings towards Calvinism, but the Orthodox church repudiated Cyril's ideas. The eighteenth-century Non-juring Anglicans initiated correspondence with the Eastern patriarchs and with the russian orthodox church . There were no immediate results, but the contacts were remembered. The patristic revival has been an essential factor in Orthodox involvement in ecumenism. Orthodoxy above all sees itself as the church of the fathers; when Protestants and Roman Catholics study the ... log in or subscribe to read full text