The Orthodox Church as seen by the Anglican Church

By Archbishop Methodios Fouyas, 1972

The Church in England at the time of its foundation and for four and a half centuries afterwards was in Communion with the Orthodox Church. When the final separation between Rome and Constantinople took place, 547 years after St. Augustine came to England, the Church of England was not given an opportunity to express its opinion of the Roman attitude towards the East. The obscurity in the position of the Anglican Church towards the East is the result of the Church of England having never officially broken with Rome.

The Provincial Synods of York and Canterbury did not withdraw from communion with the Church of Rome. "What the Church of England did was to say that 'the Bishop of Rome hath no greater jurisdiction given to him in Holy Scripture by God in this Kingdom of England than any other foreign Bishop'.1 But the actual breach of Communion was brought about by the act of Pope Paul III and by the Bull Regnans in Excelsis of Pope Pius V (1570). The Church of England from its foundation to King Henry I (1135) was an independent Church and the Popes interfered very little with it. Therefore its position is very peculiar with regard to the East, because just as it never withdrew from Communion with Rome, neither did the Anglican Church ever withdraw formally from communion with the Orthodox Church. What makes the Communion of Orthodox and Anglicans difficult now is the confusion prevailing in the Orthodox view of the rise of Anglicanism. On the contrary, Anglicans believe that their Church has never been separated from the undivided Catholic Church.

This belief is clearly stated in the appeal of Archbishop Cranmer, who said, in 1556, when under Queen Mary Tudor he was charged with heresy: As touching my doctrine, it was never in my mind to teach contrary to the Word of God and the Catholic Church of Christ according to the exposition of the most Holy and learned Fathers and martyrs. I only mean and judge as they have meant and judged. I may err, but heretic I cannot be, inasmuch as I am ready to follow the judgement of the Word of God and of the Holy Catholic Church, using the words that they used, and none other, and keeping their interpretation.2

Implicit in this declaration that the Anglican Church has never broken away from the Undivided Church is the supposition that it is not separated from the faith of the Orthodox Church. And since the Orthodox Church made no claims of jurisdiction over the Anglican Church the latter never condemned the doctrine or the practice of the Orthodox Church. On the contrary, since the time of the Reformation the view has been held in the Church of England that in the East the Catholic faith has remained intact.

For instance Alexander Knox (d. 1831) and his disciple Bishop Jebb, 'taught that the Greek Church represented the original body of Christendom; that the Church of England perpetuated the Greek tradition; and that since she represented this tradition rather than the Latin, she should seek an understanding of, and an approach to the Churches of East'.3 Again, A. C. Headlam wrote that 'the Eastern Church professes to be the only true Church, both Catholic and Orthodox'4 — though it is still one thing to assume a common faith, and another to discover whether this is really so, or to seek to re-establish intercommunion. E. L. Mascall suggests that

when we do approach Orthodoxy, whether in historic Byzantium or present-day Europe .. . we shall be faced with much the same task as when we approach the Churches of the West, namely the task of disentangling the authentic Christian norm from its accidental, and largely falsifying, accompaniments. For Orthodoxy no more than Western Christianity has been free from these embarrassments. Greek theology for the last few centuries has very largely been based upon Latin scholasticism, often of a very decadent type, with slight modifications about the Papacy, the epiclesis and the Filioque, and has more recently shown a readiness to accept somewhat excessively and uncritically the biblical theories of German liberal Protestantism. Russian Orthodoxy ... has been quite as much influenced by German mysticism and idealism as by the genuine Orthodox tradition.5

He also refers to the report Catholicity which spoke of 'the excessive dependence of the Byzantine Church upon the civil power and . . . the fact that it remained outside the main stream of European history, thus missing the Renaissance and the Reformation and the whole of the great scientific movement of the modern world.'6

Some Anglicans have considered that the practice and teaching of the Orthodox Church provides a convenient touchstone for deciding what things may find a place within a national branch of the Catholic Church without tending towards papalism. Others have been interested in the Orthodox Church because of their hostility to Rome. It is also true that many Anglicans have been as hostile to Orthodoxy as to Rome, and have shared the doubts expressed by the Lambeth Conference of 1888: 'it would be difficult for us to enter into more intimate relations with that Church so long as it retains the use of icons, the invocation of Saints, and the cultus of the Blessed Virgin'.7

But according to the 'Branch Theory', developed by Newman and his followers, Anglicans say that the Catholic Church consists of three branches, growing from one trunk, the Eastern Orthodox, the Roman and the Anglican.8 So Fr. Puller, lecturing at St. Petersburg in 1912, said that the Anglicans think of themselves as forming a part of the same Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of which the Russian is another part; 'and we are therefore accustomed', he said 'to regard the Holy Church of Russia and all the Holy Orthodox Churches of the East, as Churches which are sisters of the Holy Church of England'. And although 'the faithful members of the English Church love the Russian Church, they do not know so much about her as they would wish to know. And perhaps it is the same with you here.'9

It is significant that in the Church of England the Greek Fathers have been read and honoured to a degree unusual in the West. And the Anglican appeal to the traditions of the undivided Church has generated a similar attitude to that of the Orthodox Church towards them. 'Whereas in the East', said Dr. Ramsey at the University of Athens in 1962, 'the Holy Tradition had remained in essence the same, in the West the Tradition had been complicated in the Middle Ages.'10 Dr. Ramsey has also written:11

The Church of England is debtor both to East and to West, and to the unity which once belonged to them. As regards the East, she has striven to recognise the debt in two ways. One way is by recovering within herself the true inheritance of Eastern theology, and a long line of the greatest Anglican teachers have found inspiration in the Greek Fathers; Thorndike, Maurice, Wescott, Gore are among them.

And elsewhere Dr. Ramsey says that a Westerner discovers from coming into touch with the East three things: (1) He discovers a vivid realization of the centrality of the Resurrection in Christianity; (2) he discovers also how the worship of the Eastern Church is filled with the lifting up of earth to heaven; and (3) he sees the Eastern realization of the Communion of Saints.

Professor Hodges, who is very much involved in the relations of Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, writes that:

in the Eastern Orthodox world, the Apostolic faith has lived on substantially unaffected by either Papal or Protestant innovations. It presents to us the faith and life of the undivided Church, not as a historical memory but as a present fact; it shows us the meaning of the non-Papal Catholicism, not as a theoretical possibility but as an actuality.12

Professor Hodges continues:

I am not idealising the Orthodox Church as it now exists, or saying that its day to day life at the present time is necessarily healthier or more vigorous than ours in the West. I should hesitate to say such a thing even if I had had the opportunity (as I have not) of seeing Orthodoxy at close quarters in a country where it is at home. The Orthodox world presumably has its good and bad spots, as has the West, and all of us, East and West, live an ambiguous life which partly exemplifies our faith and partly betrays it. Such is the condition of human existence, including even Christian existence in this world. I am not now speaking on this empirical level. I am speaking on the level of doctrine, and saying that the Orthodox Faith, to which the Orthodox Fathers bear witness and of which the Orthodox Church is the abiding custodian, is the Christian Faith in its true and essential form, to which we all aspire and by which we are all judged. Nor does this mean that all Orthodox theologians are individually wiser or sounder than their Western colleagues. It is a question of principles, not of persons, and the wind of spirit, bringing the gifts of wisdom and understanding, blows where it will.13

_______________________________________

1 Richard W. Dixon, History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction (2nd ed., London, 1884), Vol. i, pp. 227, 238.

2 ibid., p. 502.

3 cf. Remains of Alexander Knox, Vols. i-iv, especially vols. iii, pp. 210, 211, and iv. See also Thirty years Correspondence between John Jebb and Alexander Knox, ed. by Charles Forster, Vol. i; cf. moreover Tavard, La Poursuite de la Catholicite, pp. 177-180.

4 cf. A. C. Headlam, The Teaching of the Russian Church (London, 1897), p. i. This does not mean that all the Anglicans admit Headlam's opinion, as the quotations from Mascall show. In these we can see the German tendency, which dominates Western Roman and Protestant scholarship, 'to characterize Orthodoxy on the basis of modern and contemporary documents.' Such was, for example, the case of Wilhelm Gass, who in his book, Symbolik der Griechischen Kirche (1872), in which he emphatically wrote that 'the modern Greek Church is not identical with the Ancient Church, and has widely departed or deviated from the early foundations'. Opposed to Gass was Ferdinand Kattenbusch in an article 'Kritische Studien zur Syrnbolik im Anschluss an einige neuere Werke' in Theologische Studien und Kritiken, Jahrg. 51 (1878), pp. 94-121, and in his book Lehrbuch der Vergldchenden Confessions-Kunde. Erster Band: Prolegomena und Erster Teil: Die Orthodoxe Anatolische Kirche (Freiburg i/Br. 1892), who maintained that 'in order to grasp the genuine spirit of Orthodoxy one has to go back to the Fathers, to St. Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and indeed to Pseudo-Dionysius, rather than to Mogila or Dositheus', who wrote occasional polemical books addressed primarily to the problems of the Western Controversy between Rome and the Reformers. Cf. G. Florovsky, The Ethos of the Orthodox Church, pp. 182-3.

5 The Recovery of Unity. A Theological Approach. (1958), p. 62-3.

6 ibid., p. 61. See also B. Leeming, 'An Anglo-Catholic on "The Recovery of Unity" E.C.Q. xii (1958), pp. 265-6.

7 R. Davidson, The Five Lambeth Conferences 1867-1320 (London, 1929), pp. 168-9. (See above, p. 40).

8 A full description of the Branch Theory can be found in Newman's works; see especially J. H. Newman, Introduction to [Deacon] William Palmer's Notes of a Visit to the Russian Church in the years 1840, 1841 (1882) pp. v-vii, 'through the division each party to it loses some spiritual treasure, and none perfectly represents the balance of truth, so that this balance of truth is not presented to the world at all'. William Temple quoted these words to describe the divided Churches in his inaugural sermon at the second Conference on Faith and Order August, 1937. See the Orthodox answer in E.R. iv (1949) pp. 434-43; cf. Tavard, La Poursuite de la Catholicite, pp. 185 ff.

9 Puller, op. cit. p. 2.

10 Constantinople and Canterbury, p. 2.

11 The Church of England and the Eastern Orthodox Church (London, S.P.C.K., 1946), PP- 7-8.

12 H. A. Hodges, Anglicanism and Orthodoxy, p. 39.

13 op. cit., p. 47.