IN DEFENSE OF ANGLO-ORTHODOXY

Archbishop Athenagoras (Kokkinakis), standing with Archbishop Michael Ramsey outside the St. Sophia Cathedral, London, on June 20th, 1964

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

INTRODUCTION

The recent article published by the so-called "Union of Orthodox Journalists" (a known platform for Russian state-sponsored propaganda), The Rise and Fall of 'Anglo-Orthodoxy', is less a work of history than a polemical tract designed to advance Moscow’s old imperial narrative that it alone remains as the "one true church." It seeks to dismiss two centuries of serious Anglo-Orthodox dialogue and to portray all native English-born Orthodox movements as failed experiments. In doing so, it distorts the record, ignores the living witness of the Ancient Church of the West and her sister jurisdictions in the World Federation of Orthodox and Apostolic Churches, and recycles the Russian Church’s ethnophilic triumphalist myths about itself as the sole ark of salvation.

ON THE FALSE PREMISE OF A "FAILED" ANGLO-ORTHODOXY

The author presumes that Anglo-Orthodoxy was a nineteenth and twentieth-century scheme to lead the Church of England into submission to Byzantium or Moscow. This is historically false. The Oxford Movement and later the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius were not projects of political absorption but of realignment with the undivided Church, a recovery of the Patristic mind common to East and West before the schisms. Anglo-Orthodoxy was, and remains, a theological and liturgical witness to that older unity. English scholars, theologians, and clergy have largely never been won over by the false narrative of supremacy and tyranny that current Orthodox fundamentalists promulgate online. The greatest testimony to this fact is the Anglican scholars of Orthodoxy, such as Steven Runciman (an Archon and official historian in the Phanar), Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (translator of the Byzantine Euchologion into English, with all prayers and services, still used today as the standard for Eastern liturgical practice in English), the Rev. Hugh Wheybrew, the great Byzantine liturgical historian, and the indispensable C.S. Lewis.

The UOJ piece confuses the collapse of Canterbury’s faith under the pressures of modern liberalism with the vitality of the Anglo-Orthodox ethos itself. The failure of the Church of England to keep the Apostolic Faith does not invalidate the Anglo-Orthodox tradition any more than the horrific fall and Islamization of the Byzantine Empire invalidates Eastern Orthodoxy.

ON THE RUSSIAN IMPERIAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY

The article quotes Khomyakov’s famous "narrow ledge" metaphor as if it were prophecy fulfilled. Khomyakov was an insightful poet-theologian, but he was also a nineteenth-century Russian nationalist whose ecclesiology was shaped by the needs of a Tsarist empire. His appeal for England’s "return" to Orthodoxy must be read alongside his conviction that "the East was right and the West wrong," a claim alien to the Fathers of the first millennium who saw the See of Rome as first among equals and who received the British, Gallican, and Hispano-Celtic Churches as fully Orthodox in faith and order.

The UOJ author overlooks the fact that what truly shattered catholic unity was not "Western tyranny," but the political collapse of East-West communication, two successful councils of union from which the Orthodox East later withdrew after signing all the relevant documents, and a hardness of heart and love of schism for which we all must take equal responsibility. They also forget that the English Church of Sts. Bede, Augustine, Aldhelm, and Theodore of Tarsus professed the same Apostolic origin, declared the same Creed, celebrated the same mysteries, and sent missionaries as far as Frisia, Germania and back to the East, all centuries before Moscow’s conversion from paganism through a forced baptism in the Dnieper River. Britain is not some marginal and despised backwater, or un-Christianized pagan fortress, but the fountainhead of missionaries and martyrs that redeemed the world, freed the slaves, protected the weak, and translated the Bible into thousands of languages. 

ON THE MISREPRESENTATION OF ANGLO-ORTHODOX PATRIMONY

By reducing Anglo-Orthodox renewal to cosmetic liturgical reforms such as dropping the Filioque or using leavened bread, the article betrays its ignorance of the depth and theological grounding of the actual movement. To add insult to injury, it is not a piece of scholarship but a hit piece trying to capitalize on the hurt and confusion of conservatives in the Anglican Church who are reeling from the appointment of a woman of heretical faith and compromised morals to a position she cannot canonically, biblically, or historically fill - an effective decapitation of the historic See of Canterbury. As such, it is an exercise in scorn, marginalization, and political opportunism. This is unsurprising. The Russian propaganda department has issued many leaked memoranda that seek to “divide and conquer,” and this is very clearly the modus operandi of Russian Orthodox media whenever even the slightest Anglican figure falls or struggles. A vast number of loyal, tithing Westerners have been poached from Anglicanism, and it is therefore a high priority for the otherwise disorganized and self-impoverishing ecclesiastical apparatus to press as hard as they can whenever the Western world experiences difficulties. Figures such as the Blessed Lancelot Andrewes, Blessed Martyr William Laud, the Caroline Divines, and the Non-Jurors were not “Hellenizing Anglicans” but theologians of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church reclaiming their own fathers and mothers: Sts. Cuthbert, Hilda, Aidan, Patrick, Ninian, Willibrord, Boniface, and the many saints of the Isles who flourished long before the schisms hardened or the Slavs heard the words of Christ’s precious Gospel.

ON THE PRESENT REALITY OF THE ANCIENT CHURCH OF THE WEST

Contrary to the article’s insinuation, Anglo-Orthodoxy did not die with Michael Ramsey or with the Blessed Kallistos Ware. It lives on wherever the Ancient Western Rite, rooted in the ancient and unassailable Liturgy of St. James, is celebrated in fidelity to Scripture, the Fathers, and the Seven Ecumenical Councils. We are free of modernist apostasy and free also of Russian political pretensions to be the sole representatives of Christendom - a nation with equally low church attendance as England, a higher rate of abortion, a higher production of pornography, and a much more aggressive, apocalyptic, and destructive vision for the future.

The Ancient Church of the West and her sister jurisdictions worldwide stand as proof that Western Orthodoxy is neither a nostalgia project nor a failed experiment. We are growing. We are canonically undeniable in validity as well as fidelity to the ancient Church. We are the legitimate continuation of the pre-schism faith of the Latin and Celtic West, reconciled to the wider Orthodox communion through the Non-Jurors’ Great 1716 Concordat with Jerusalem, through the reception of regularization from the Ancient See of Antioch, and yet retaining our own patrimony of saints, liturgy, and canon law without bending the knee to Eastern tyranny. We agree with the great Russian Saint, John Maximovitch, that one must never equate being Eastern with being Orthodox. 

Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras and Archbishop Michael Ramsey Exchanging the Kiss of Peace in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom in the Early 1960’s

ON THE THEOLOGICAL ERROR OF TRIUMPHALIST EXCLUSIVISM

Finally, the UOJ essay’s conclusion that “The Orthodox Church is the Body of Christ; all others are built on sand” is true only insofar as Orthodoxy is defined by history and not by the radical revisionism of contemporary Eastern Synods that embrace the uncanonical principle of Theodore Balsamon that “the newer canon overrules the older canon,” and thus live in an undeclared and hidden modernism and evolution of doctrine, reducing the Church to caesaropapist ethnic enclaves with pretensions to universality, serving fallen, unchristian, and genocidal governments. This is not so much a confession of faith as a political slogan. The Fathers never identified the Church with one ethnic communion or one liturgical rite. As St. Vincent of Lérins taught, the true faith is that which has been believed “everywhere, always, and by all.” Wherever the apostolic succession, the right confession of the Incarnate Lord, the shared life of the Holy Trinity, and the valid mysteries endure, there the Church is manifest, whether at Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Seleucia, Canterbury, or Manila. Such validity and stability are not dependent upon the recognition of these failed political bodies, but upon the correctness of faith and practice that comes down to us from the Apostles.

CONCLUSION

The history of the Anglo-Orthodox witness is not a tragedy of failure but a testimony of holy perseverance: the effort to reclaim the undivided faith of the first millennium against both Roman centralization and Byzantine imperialism and ethnophyletism. The election of a female Archbishop in today’s Canterbury is indeed a lamentable milestone in the secularization of the English state-controlled church, but it is not the death of Anglo-Orthodoxy. Canterbury has struggled with revisionism, heresy, and infidelity to the Apostolic Deposit for many years. This changes nothing. The apostolic authority that it once held is now assumed and upheld by its orthodox and faithful descendants in the Ancient Church of the West, and we will continue the heritage of our Orthodox Faith in the Western Patrimony until the return of the One, True King!

If anything has crumbled, it is the credibility of those who weaponize Orthodoxy as an arm of nationalist propaganda for a system that serves a false Christ, a false Church, and a false Patriarch. The future belongs to the conciliar, apostolic, and truly catholic vision: the vision that Anglo-Orthodoxy has always sought to serve and exemplifies to the world.

COLLECT

O HOLY AND UNDIVIDED TRINITY, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, who didst plant thy Church upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief Corner-stone; defend, we beseech thee, the holy Patrimony which thou hast committed unto us in the Ancient Faith of the West. Preserve the Anglo-Orthodox vision in purity of doctrine, steadfastness of worship, and charity of life; keep us unshaken amid the storms of error and the tumults of the nations; and grant that, abiding in the truth of the Gospel once delivered to the Saints, we may with all the faithful of thine undivided, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Orthodox Church glorify thee, O blessed Trinity, one God, world without end; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.