The Ecumenical Work

Ware entered Orthodoxy through an Anglican–Orthodox society and spent the next sixty-four years working in the space between the two communions: as a member and lifelong advocate of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, as editor of Sobornost and the Eastern Churches Review, and finally as Orthodox Co-Chair of the international Anglican–Orthodox commission. This file covers that work, the agreed statements it produced, and the intra-Orthodox criticism it drew — the last set out under METHODOLOGY §4.2 without adjudication.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius

The Fellowship, founded in 1928 to foster understanding between Anglicans and Orthodox, is where Ware’s story begins and effectively where it ends. He joined as an Oxford undergraduate “under the influence of my close friend from school days, Donald (A. M.) Allchin,” and wrote that “The summer conferences of the Fellowship had a decisive effect on me” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000). At those conferences he heard Michael Ramsey, Derwas Chitty and H. A. Hodges argue that Orthodoxy was “the integral fullness of the Christian tradition, to which Anglicanism needed to return” — and it was at the Fellowship’s August 1956 conference that Fr Lev Gillet’s definition of an Orthodox precipitated his own departure from the Church of England (see The Reception of 1958).

The irony is exact and Ware never disguised it: the society founded to keep Anglicans and Orthodox in conversation was the instrument of his conversion. He remained a lifelong member and advocate of it, and its journal, Sobornost, was one of the two periodicals he edited.

The Editorships

  • Sobornost — the journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius; Ware was among its editors, and it carried his work on Anglican–Orthodox questions of unity and diversity.
  • Eastern Churches Review — which he edited with George Every and John Saward, and which the obituary literature describes as a pioneering venture in English-language Eastern Christian studies.
  • He also sat on the editorial board of the Eastern Churches Journal, an Eastern Catholic periodical — a fact recorded, disapprovingly, by his traditionalist critic Hieromonk Patapios, who conceded that “his decision to be involved with such a publication may be purely academic” (Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church,” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72).

The editorial work matters more than it looks. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, a scholar writing in English on Eastern Christianity had few places to publish; these journals, together with the Spalding post, were the institutional scaffolding of a discipline that barely existed in Britain when Ware began (see The Spalding Lectureship).

The Anglican–Orthodox Commission

Ware served as the Orthodox Co-Chair of the International Commission for Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue (ICAOTD), appointed by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. The commission’s own statement on his death gives the dates as 2009–2016 and credits him with guiding the production of the 2015 agreed statement In the Image and Likeness of God: A Hope-Filled Anthropology, which it says “has been well received and brings depth and beauty to a common theological anthropology that enriches both Communions.” Its tribute was that he “served the Commission with outstanding theological wisdom and with great joy and humor” (ICAOTD statement, 26 August 2022).

[Disputed: the dates of his co-chairmanship. The Commission's own 2022 statement gives 2009–2016; some secondary summaries give 2007–2015. The Commission's account is preferred here.]

The dialogue Ware inherited was already old. Its published fruits, across its phases, include the Moscow Agreed Statement (1976), the Dublin Agreed Statement (1984), the Cyprus Agreed Statement, The Church of the Triune God (2006), and the 2015 statement named above. [Disputed: the extent of Ware's participation in the pre-2009 phases. He was a long-standing participant in Anglican–Orthodox theological conversation and the standard obituaries describe him as central to the dialogue over decades, but this file does not assert his membership of, or drafting role in, any particular earlier commission, because no source consulted documents it precisely.]

For this labor the Archbishop of Canterbury awarded him the Lambeth Cross for Ecumenism in 2017, “for his outstanding contribution to Anglican–Orthodox theological dialogue” (Orthodox Times, 24 August 2022).

Several obituaries add that he served as “joint president of the international commissions for Orthodox–Anglican and Orthodox–Roman Catholic dialogue” (obituary summaries relayed in the 2022 press coverage). [Disputed: a co-presidency of the Orthodox–Roman Catholic dialogue. The Anglican commission's role is documented by the commission itself; the parallel Roman Catholic claim appears in obituary summaries and is not corroborated here from a commission source. Cite with caution.]

What He Actually Held

Because ecumenical involvement is the most-contested part of Ware’s record, it is worth setting down what he actually taught about the status of non-Orthodox Christians — in his own words, from his conversion essay, written as a bishop:

“Orthodoxy has the plenitude of life in Christ, but it does not have an exclusive monopoly of the truth. I did not believe then, nor do I believe now, that there is a stark and unmitigated contrast between Orthodox ‘light’ and non-Orthodox ‘darkness.’ We are not to imagine that, because Orthodoxy possesses the fullness of Holy Tradition, the other Christian bodies possess nothing at all. Far from it; I have never been convinced by the rigorist claim that sacramental life and the grace of the Holy Spirit can exist only within the visible limits of the Orthodox Church.” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”)

He grounded this in Lossky’s position that non-Orthodox communities “still retain a certain link with the unique and life-giving center,” and drew the conclusion himself: “while these non-Orthodox communities possess part of the saving and life-giving truth, in Orthodoxy alone is the fullness of that truth to be found” (ibid., quoting Lossky’s introductory note in Messager de l’Exarchat du Patriarche Russe en Europe Occidentale 21 [1955], 9–10; see Vladimir Lossky).

Two things are true of this position simultaneously, and both belong in an accurate account. It is an exclusive claim: Orthodoxy alone has the fullness; it is the true Church. And it is a non-rigorist claim: it denies that grace is bounded by the Church’s visible limits. Ware held both without embarrassment for sixty-four years, and every argument about his ecumenism is in the end an argument about whether the two halves can be held together.

He was also capable of sharpness about ecumenical practice. Quoting the 1954 Evanston statement of the Orthodox delegates to the World Council of Churches — “the Holy Orthodox Church alone has preserved full and intact ‘the Faith once delivered to the saints’” — he added: “What a pity that Orthodox delegates at recent meetings of the WCC have not spoken with so clear a voice!” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”).

The Criticism (§4.2)

The ecumenical work is one of the two or three points on which Ware’s Orthodox critics have been most vocal. Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, the case is set out here without adjudication.

The critical case. The fullest published statement is Hieromonk Patapios’s, written from an Old Calendarist standpoint. Its charges are specific:

  • That Ware’s ecumenical activity progressively softened his historical judgments — most concretely in his treatment of the Unia and of the filioque, which Patapios claims were substantially rewritten between 1963 and 1993 in a direction friendlier to Rome (Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique”; these particular allegations are examined in The Revisions Between Editions).
  • That Ware’s reliance on the WCC’s 1950 Toronto Statement — under which member churches are not committed to recognizing one another “as Churches in the true and full sense of the word” — is not sustainable against later WCC documents that do ask member churches to “recognize in other churches parts of the true church” (Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique,” citing “Towards a Common Understanding and Vision of the World Council of Churches”).
  • That participation in ecumenical bodies is spiritually hazardous even for the strong, Patapios invoking the case of Florovsky, whose heavy ecumenical involvement he claims Florovsky came to regret.

The defending case. Ware’s own answer is the passage quoted above: the exclusivity of the Church’s claim is affirmed, and only the rigorist corollary — that no grace whatever exists outside the visible boundary — is denied, on the authority of Lossky and of the practice of the Church in receiving converts by chrismation rather than baptism. His defenders add that the Ecumenical Patriarchate itself appointed him co-chair of the dialogue; that agreed statements are not acts of union and bind no one; and that the alternative to Orthodox participation is not Orthodox purity but Orthodox absence from conversations that shape how a hundred million Western Christians understand the Christian East.

A further criticism, from the other direction. Brandon Gallaher — a sympathetic scholarly obituarist, not a traditionalist — identifies a different blind spot: Ware’s reluctance to confront nationalism and corruption in the Moscow Patriarchate, which Gallaher attributes partly to gratitude for the Russian Church’s post-Soviet recovery and partly to personal friendships with Russian clergy (Gallaher, “True Man,” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022). This is worth registering precisely because it cuts against the usual charge: the man accused by traditionalists of excessive accommodation to the West is here accused of excessive indulgence toward the East.

The collection does not adjudicate. It records that Ware’s ecumenical work was authorized by his Church, that it produced texts of no binding force, that it was and remains contested among Orthodox, and that the underlying question — the relation of the one Church to the divided Christian world — is treated in the repository’s own doctrinal files (see Ecumenism Debate and Ecclesiology).

See Also

References

  • Ware, Kallistos. “Strange Yet Familiar: My Journey to the Orthodox Church.” In The Inner Kingdom. Collected Works, vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, 1–24. (The Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius; the position on grace outside the visible boundary; the Evanston 1954 statement and his comment on it.)
  • International Commission for Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue. Statement following the death of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, 26 August 2022. (Co-Chair 2009–2016; In the Image and Likeness of God: A Hope-Filled Anthropology, 2015.)
  • International Commission for Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue. The Church of the Triune God: The Cyprus Agreed Statement. London: Anglican Communion Office, 2006. (Also the Moscow Agreed Statement, 1976, and the Dublin Agreed Statement, 1984.)
  • Orthodox Times. “Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia fell asleep in the Lord,” 24 August 2022. (Lambeth Cross for Ecumenism, 2017.)
  • Patapios, Hieromonk. “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church.” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72. (The Old Calendarist case against Ware’s ecumenism, the WCC/Toronto Statement argument, and the Eastern Churches Journal board membership.)
  • Gallaher, Brandon. “True Man: Kallistos of Oxford as Orthodoxy’s First Universal Teacher of the Global Age.” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022. (The Moscow Patriarchate blind spot.)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. Introductory note to Patriarch Sergius of Moscow, “L’Église du Christ et les communautés dissidentes.” Messager de l’Exarchat du Patriarche Russe en Europe Occidentale 21 (Paris, 1955), 9–10. (Quoted by Ware.)
  • World Council of Churches. Toronto Statement (1950); Towards a Common Understanding and Vision of the World Council of Churches (1997). (Both invoked in the dispute.)