Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans: Diplomacy, Theology, and the Politics of Interwar Ecumenism
2011; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 93; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2163-6214
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoEastern Orthodox and Anglicans: Diplomacy, Theology, and the Politics of Interwar Ecumenism. By Bryn Geffert. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. xi + 560 pp. $60.00 (cloth). Bryn Geffert holds an undergraduate degree from St. Olaf College and a doctorate from the University of Minnesota. With a specialty in Russian studies, he is formerly director of the library at the United States Military Academy at West Point and now for the past year the h'hrarian of Amherst College. Currently he is working on a documentary history of Eastern Orthodoxy. Geffert is to be congratulated for the massive amount of research that has gone into this history of the ecumenical efforts toward rapprochement between Anglicans and Orthodox in the period of the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the years between World War I and World War ?. Spanning over fifteen chapters with no less than 1,630 footnotes and twenty-seven blackand-white illustrations, this extremely detailed coverage makes for tedious reading at times, but it does represent a significant amount of investigation in obscure sources both primary and secondary. Depicted on the cover from the seventh Lambeth Conference of 1930 is not only Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang of but also the famous Patriarch Meletios Metaxakis, who in 1922 gave the highest Orthodox recognition of Anglican Orders, and of whom the reader is afforded glimpses throughout the narrative. The foci of this book rest mainly in England and Russia, and readers knowledgeable of the wider dimensions of Anglican relations with the Orthodox will look in vain here for much coverage of the considerable North American involvement in such matters, nor for much detailed treatment of such American Episcopalians known for their pioneering work with the Orthodox as Bishop Lauriston Scaife, Canon Edward West, Bishop Charles Reuben Hale, Isabel Florence Hapgood, William Chauncey Emhardt, Paul Anderson, Bishop Charles Chapman Grafton of Fond du Lac, and Professors Frank Gavin and Edward Hardy. The background of that earlier, and very intense, crescendo in relationships of the Episcopal Church with the Orthodox was formed especially in the decades of the 1860s and 1870s under the sponsorship of the now famous that was by the General Convention oitha Episcopal Church. Generally regarded as the first corporate attempt of any non-Orthodox to establish official ecumenical relations with churches of the Orthodox tradition, its active membership came to involve John Freeman Young, subsequentiy bishop of Florida (1867-1885), William Rolhnson Whittingham, and Milo Mahan, eventually St. Mark's Professors of Ecclesiastical History at The General Seminary, and Charles Reuben Hale, the linguistics scholar who became assistant bishop of Springfield, Illinois. Geffert may be correct that the English bishop John Wordsworth established for the first time [1898] direct correspondence between the ecumenical patriarch and the archbishop of Canterbury (p. 20), but it needs to be said that the founding of the Russo-Greek Committee in America had already preceded and direcdy influenced the establishment of a similar committee in England. Geifert would have done well to acknowledge and build upon this precedent of efforts (and success) from the Episcopal Church, for in many ways this earlier period of diplomacy from die U.S. was the necessary and substantial precursor for the later developments chronicled in the present volume. Although the great strength of this book lies in its investigation of countless secondary sources, especially those rescued from obscure periodicals, there are nonetheless just enough slips of the pen, so to speak, to make one wonder just how familiar Geffert is with Anglicanism itself. Beginning early on, this book suffers from a constant but ill-defined and very un-Anglican use of the term confession without any clearly defined meaning and where the word church is probably intended. …
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