Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The historic friendliness felt by Anglicans for the Orthodox found expression in 1677, when Bishop Henry Compton of London licensed a church for Orthodox refugees from Ottoman tyranny (Greek Street in Soho – though he did not care for the liturgy once he had a firsthand encounter with it). Serious Anglican-Orthodox dialogue in the early 17th century became stillborn when Cyril Lukaris, the patriarch of Alexandria, who corresponded with Anglican bishops, was censured for Protestant leanings. The fall of Lukaris associated Anglicanism with heresy for most Orthodox, though the “Non-jurors” who severed relations with Canterbury after 1689 found sanction within Orthodoxy, attempting to work through Peter the Great for a reunion of all “Catholic” Christians, although this ended when the Orthodox found out the Non-jurors did not hold ecclesiastical power in England. Dialogue intensified with the Oxford Movement of the 1840s with its emphasis on liturgy and Catholicity. Anglican churchmen like the hymnodist and translator John Mason Neale and the theologian William Palmer helped found the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association, which became an official forum for interchurch solidarity. J. J. Overbeck went as far as to see Orthodoxy as “the only true Church” and believed full ecclesiastical reunion could only be accomplished on Orthodox terms. Isabel Florence Hapgood translated the Orthodox ... log in or subscribe to read full text