The Anglican–Orthodox Dialogue — Moscow 1976, Dublin 1984, Cyprus 1992 and 2006: The Collapse and Reframing of a Dialogue

The Anglican–Orthodox Joint Doctrinal Commission convened its first plenary in 1973 and produced, across the following eleven years, two substantial agreed statements — the Moscow Agreed Statement (1976) on the Knowledge of God, the inspiration and authority of Scripture, Scripture and Tradition, the authority of councils, the filioque clause, the Church as the Eucharistic Community, and the invocation of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharist; and the Dublin Agreed Statement (1984) on the Mystery of the Church, faith in the Trinity, prayer, and worship. The Moscow text’s substantive achievement was the Anglican concurrence with the Orthodox that the filioque clause as an addition to the Nicene Creed should be omitted — a concession of ecclesial weight that the Anglican Communion’s subsequent reception has honored unevenly. The dialogue was then theologically reshaped, not through any intrinsic failure of its substantive work, but through three successive Anglican developments — the ordination of women to the priesthood (Episcopal Church decisions from 1976, the Church of England from 1992); the ordination of women to the episcopate (Episcopal Church from 1989); and the 2003 consecration of a partnered non-celibate bishop in the Episcopal Church — each of which the Orthodox tradition received as a condition of subsequent dialogue rather than as a topic within the dialogue’s convergent work. The 1992 Cyprus Statement, produced after the 1988 Lambeth Conference’s Resolution 1 on women in the episcopate, formally named the condition under which Anglican–Orthodox dialogue could continue; the 2006 Cyprus Agreed Statement: The Church of the Triune God, co-chaired by Metropolitan John of Pergamon (Zizioulas) and Bishop Mark Dyer of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is the reopened dialogue’s major statement — substantial, careful, and explicit about the conditions under which it proceeds. This document renders the arc from 1976 to 2006 as a theological datum: a record of what the Body has said together when it could say it together, and a record of what has bounded the saying since.

Cross-references: Layer 5 document 03 (ARCIC) is the Anglican–Roman Catholic parallel dialogue whose fifty-five-year arc has experienced related stresses from the same Anglican developments. Layer 4 document 04 (Apostolic Succession) treats the underlying question of Anglican orders that Apostolicae Curae (1896) names from the Roman Catholic side and that the Ecumenical Patriarchate addressed in its 1922 determination on Anglican orders — the Anglican-Orthodox question is on distinct terms. Layer 4 documents 02 (Papal Claims) and 08 (Filioque) treat the primacy and procession questions the Moscow Statement addresses. The Layer 5 document 09 on the Finnish Lutheran–Russian Orthodox dialogue is the adjacent Lutheran-Orthodox bilateral whose 2014 suspension and 2022 rupture have followed a structurally similar trajectory.

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1. The Dialogue

The pre-history: 1962–1966

The Anglican–Orthodox doctrinal conversations of the twentieth century have a pre-history reaching to the early decades. Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher visited Patriarch Athenagoras I at the Phanar in 1960 — the first sustained archbishop-patriarch meeting since the Great Schism — and the meeting established an institutional framework that would carry subsequent conversations.

In 1962, Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury and Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople authorised preparatory meetings to explore a formal theological dialogue. The 1964 Third Pan-Orthodox Conference at Rhodes formally decided to resume theological dialogue with the Anglican Communion — alongside parallel Pan-Orthodox decisions on dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church (which would produce the subsequent Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue treated in Layer 5 document 02) and with other bodies.¹

The Anglican–Orthodox Joint Doctrinal Commission

The Anglican–Orthodox Joint Doctrinal Commission was formally constituted in 1966 and held its first plenary in 1973. The Commission’s mandate was substantive theological conversation aimed at ecclesial reconciliation, following a method patterned on the broader post-Vatican II ecumenical commissions: paired papers from each tradition, plenary discussion, working parties, and the drafting of agreed statements for receptions by the sending churches.

The early co-chairs were Archbishop Athenagoras of Thyateira and Great Britain (Exarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Western Europe) on the Orthodox side and successive Anglican figures including, across the Commission’s history, Henry Chadwick (Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and later Oxford) and subsequent Anglican academic and episcopal figures. Bishop Kallistos Ware (Timothy Ware, later Metropolitan of Diokleia, 1934–2022) was the Orthodox commission member whose sustained presence across the 1970s through 2010s gave the dialogue much of its continuity.²

The Commission met annually or biennially in rotating locations — Chambésy, Moscow, Oxford, Dublin, Pendeli (Athens), among others — through the 1970s and 1980s.

The plenary cycle producing the Moscow Agreed Statement (1973–1976)

The first series of substantive conversations ran from 1973 to 1976 and produced the Moscow Agreed Statement on 2 August 1976 at the conclusion of the Moscow plenary (25 July – 2 August 1976). The plenary met at the Moscow Patriarchate’s facilities at a time when Cold War constraints shaped both the hospitality and the theological atmosphere; the Russian Orthodox hosts were generous within the limits of the Soviet-era ecclesial context.

The plenary cycle producing the Dublin Agreed Statement (1978–1984)

The second series of conversations ran from 1978 to 1984 and produced the Dublin Agreed Statement in 1984. The Dublin plenary reflected the deepening ecclesial pressure produced by the 1976 Episcopal Church (USA) General Convention at Minneapolis adopting the ordination of women to the priesthood, and the subsequent 1978 Lambeth Conference’s ambiguous response.

The pause, the 1989–1990 Cyprus consultation, and the 1992 Cyprus Statement

Following Dublin, the Commission did not produce another major agreed statement for more than two decades. The 1988 Lambeth Conference Resolution 1 — affirming the ordination of women to the episcopate as acceptable within the Anglican Communion — created an ecclesial condition the Orthodox tradition was unable to set aside. The 1989–1990 Inter-Anglican/Orthodox Consultations at Cyprus, and the resulting 1992 Cyprus Statement, formally addressed the ordination of women and the continuing conditions of dialogue.³ The 1992 text is not a retraction of Moscow or Dublin; it is an explicit statement that the dialogue’s continuation requires a different framework.

The cycle producing the Cyprus Agreed Statement (1990–2006)

The reopened Commission, under Orthodox co-chair Metropolitan John of Pergamon (John D. Zizioulas, 1931–2023) from 1989 and Anglican co-chair Bishop Mark Dyer of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (retired bishop), met for sixteen years before producing the Cyprus Agreed Statement: The Church of the Triune God in 2006.⁴ The text’s method is different from Moscow and Dublin: it takes previously agreed areas (the Trinity, the nature of the Church) as starting point and gives special consideration to the ordination-of-women question as a theological issue to be addressed rather than as a bracketed condition of dialogue.

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2. What Was Said Together

The Moscow Agreed Statement (1976) — on the knowledge of God

The Moscow Statement §§1–8 affirms:

“The knowledge of God is given to us in and through his self-revelation. Nothing about God in his essential being can be known apart from his self-revelation. This revelation is climactically given in his Son Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, crucified and risen — and in the Spirit’s continuing witness to Christ in and through the Church.”⁵

The language is deliberately shared: the Anglican and Orthodox participants framed the knowledge of God in ways drawn from the patristic sources common to both traditions (Irenaeus, the Cappadocians, Maximus the Confessor, the Liturgy of St Basil) rather than in scholastic or Reformation-confessional registers.

The Moscow Agreed Statement — on Scripture and Tradition

§§9–19 articulate a shared doctrine:

“Scripture and Tradition are not to be set over against one another. Scripture is the written witness within the living Tradition of the Church; Tradition is the living context of faith in which Scripture is rightly read. Both are subordinate to the Word of God who is Jesus Christ, and both are the instrument of the Holy Spirit’s witness to him.”

The formulation is compatible with classical Anglican Prayer Book framings (Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles; the Homilies; Hooker’s ecclesiology) and with Orthodox conciliar tradition.

The Moscow Agreed Statement — on the filioque

The Moscow Statement’s §§19–22 are the dialogue’s most theologically consequential section. The Anglican and Orthodox participants together articulated a shared reading of the Nicene Creed’s Article on the Holy Spirit:

“The Anglican participants in this dialogue agree with the Orthodox that the filioque clause should not have been inserted into the Nicene Creed. We agree that the original form of the Creed, ‘the Holy Spirit… who proceeds from the Father’ (τὸ ἐκπορευόμενον ἐκ τοῦ Πατρός), is to be affirmed as the authoritative creedal text. We recognise that the filioque as a Western theologoumenon — articulating the Son’s role in the temporal sending of the Spirit — has its own legitimate theological tradition, distinct from and subsequent to the creedal question proper.”⁶

The Anglican concurrence with the Orthodox that the filioque clause as a creedal addition should be withdrawn was subsequently received by the Episcopal Church (USA) in the 1994 Book of Common Prayer revision — which presents the Creed without the filioque as an option — and has been variously received across other Anglican provinces. The 1988 Lambeth Conference Resolution 6 encouraged Anglican provinces to recite the Creed without the filioque as an option for reception.

The Moscow Agreed Statement — on the Eucharist

§§23–28 affirm shared ground on the Eucharist as the Church’s central sacramental act — the real presence of Christ, the epicletic invocation of the Spirit, the eschatological dimension, and the Eucharist as constitutive of ecclesial communion. The Anglican and Orthodox articulations differ in their liturgical-theological registers but are affirmed as speaking of the same ecclesial-sacramental reality.

The Dublin Agreed Statement (1984) — on the Mystery of the Church

The Dublin text’s §§1–20 develop a trinitarian ecclesiology:

“The communion manifested in the life of the Church has the trinitarian fellowship as its basis, model and ultimate goal. Conversely, the communion of the Persons of the Holy Trinity creates, structures and expounds the mystery of the communion experienced in the Church.”⁷

This formulation — anticipating by more than a decade the ecclesiology that would subsequently appear in Lumen Gentium reception and in the broader Catholic-Orthodox ecclesiology of the Ravenna/Chieti trajectory — is the dialogue’s distinctive theological contribution beyond its specific filioque and sacramental agreements.

The Dublin Agreed Statement — on the filioque again

Dublin §45 returned to the filioque question with greater precision, drawing on Maximus the Confessor’s distinction between the Spirit’s procession from the Father alone (ἐκπορεύεσθαι) and the Spirit’s shining forth or manifestation (ἔκφανσις) from the Father and the Son together:

“St Maximus, in his Letter to Marinus, allows a distinction between the causing of the existence of the Spirit by the Father alone — the Spirit’s eternal procession as from a single principle — and the ‘shining forth’ of the Spirit from Father and Son together in the economy of salvation. The Anglican and Orthodox participants affirm this distinction as fruitful for the theological work on the filioque question.”⁸

This Maximian distinction was subsequently taken up by the 1995 Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity clarification on the filioque (Layer 5 document 05) as one of the principal texts available to the Catholic-Orthodox conversation on the same question.

The Cyprus Agreed Statement (2006) — on the Church of the Triune God

The Cyprus text is structured as a systematic ecclesiology in three parts: (1) The Trinity, Christ, and the Church; (2) The Church as Communion of the Triune God; (3) Christian Anthropology in the Light of the Trinitarian Koinonia. The specific question of the ordination of women is addressed within the anthropological section — as a question of Christian anthropology and of the specific theological character of ordained ministry — rather than bracketed.

The Cyprus text’s working conclusion on ordination of women:

“The question of whether the ordination of women constitutes a church-dividing matter is the question this Commission has been unable to resolve. The Orthodox participants affirm that, on the Orthodox tradition’s reception, the ordination of women to the priesthood and to the episcopate is not an ecclesial possibility within the apostolic tradition as the Orthodox Church has received it. The Anglican participants affirm that, on the Anglican Communion’s present doctrinal teaching and praxis, the ordination of women is an accepted feature of Anglican order. The conversation on this question continues.”⁹

The Cyprus text does not claim to have resolved the ordination-of-women question; it claims to have articulated why the dialogue cannot bracket it and what would be required for its resolution.

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3. Reception by Tradition Witnesses

3a. Within the Orthodox tradition

Metropolitan John of Pergamon (John D. Zizioulas) — co-chair of the Commission 1989–2006 — was the dominant Orthodox theological voice. His ecclesiology as developed in Being as Communion (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985) and in subsequent work shaped both Dublin’s and Cyprus’s trinitarian-ecclesiological framework. Zizioulas held the Orthodox position — that the ordination of women is not an apostolic possibility within the Orthodox reception — firmly while engaging the Anglican developments as theological questions rather than as mere deviations.¹⁰

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (Timothy Ware) — sustained Commission member from the 1970s, until his death in 2022 — was the principal Orthodox voice in the English-speaking world. Ware’s The Orthodox Church (Penguin, 1963; rev. eds. 1993, 2015) and The Orthodox Way (1979, rev. 1995) are the standard introductions that have shaped Anglo-Orthodox mutual understanding in the period of the dialogue.

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh (1914–2003) — Russian Orthodox hierarch in London, Exarch of the Moscow Patriarchate in Great Britain for decades — was not formally a Commission member but shaped the Anglican-Orthodox encounter in the British context through his pastoral ministry and theological writing.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s post-dialogue position, articulated through successive Ecumenical Patriarchs (Demetrios 1972–1991; Bartholomew 1991–present), has been to affirm the dialogue’s achievements while naming the Anglican developments as conditions of ongoing reception. The Phanar’s 2019 grant of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine — and the subsequent rupture with Moscow — has reshaped the Orthodox world such that “the Orthodox position on Anglican developments” is no longer spoken with a single voice.

The Russian Orthodox Church’s post-dialogue position has followed the broader Moscow-Patriarchate trajectory. The 2003 consecration of V. Gene Robinson was named in the 2008 official Moscow Patriarchate Synod statement as making the continued engagement with the Episcopal Church “impossible at the level of ecclesial communion.” Subsequent developments — particularly the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and Patriarch Kirill’s endorsement of it (see Layer 5 document 09 §6) — have further attenuated Moscow Patriarchate participation in ecumenical bodies including the Anglican-Orthodox dialogue.

The Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian Orthodox Churches have maintained Commission participation across the decades with varying degrees of emphasis; the post-2022 Ukraine crisis has affected each differently.

3b. Within the Anglican Communion

Archbishop Michael Ramsey (Canterbury 1961–1974) was the initiating Anglican figure. His meeting with Patriarch Athenagoras I at the Phanar in 1962 and his sustained commitment to Orthodox-Anglican theological reconciliation (including his visit to Moscow in 1962) established the framework. Ramsey’s The Gospel and the Catholic Church (1936; rev. 1956) remained the principal Anglican theological voice on apostolic succession throughout the period of the dialogue.

Archbishop Robert Runcie (Canterbury 1980–1991) carried Ramsey’s commitments forward; his 1988 visit to Moscow and sustained pastoral relationships with both Ecumenical and Moscow Patriarchates were institutional realities alongside the Commission’s work.

Henry Chadwick (1920–2008) — Regius Professor at both Oxford and Cambridge; Dean of Christ Church; Master of Peterhouse — was the most substantial Anglican theological voice on the Commission. His work on patristics, conciliar tradition, and the filioque question provided the Anglican side of several of the Commission’s principal theological positions. His East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church (Oxford, 2003) is his retrospective theological summa on the Anglican-Orthodox relationship.

Bishop Mark Dyer (1930–2014) — Bishop of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Anglican co-chair of the Commission 1989–2006 — carried the Anglican side of the Cyprus Agreed Statement to its 2006 adoption.

Archbishop Rowan Williams (Canterbury 2002–2012) — theologically the most substantial post-war Archbishop of Canterbury — engaged the Orthodox tradition with particular depth through his own theological work (On Christian Theology, 2000; Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, 2008) while his Lambeth-era challenges included navigating the 2003 V. Gene Robinson consecration crisis and the 2008 GAFCON response.

Archbishop Justin Welby (Canterbury 2013–2024) and Archbishop Sarah Mullally (Canterbury from 2025) have maintained Anglican-Orthodox institutional contact through the post-Cyprus period without substantial further statements. [∗]

3c. Within the Anglo-Catholic and evangelical Anglican traditions

The Anglo-Catholic tradition within the Anglican Communion has received Moscow, Dublin, and Cyprus as principally its own ecumenical work — the dialogue with the East expressing the Anglo-Catholic tradition’s inherent commitment to patristic and conciliar continuity. The Anglo-Catholic reception has nevertheless been marked by the same Anglican developments that shaped Orthodox response: Forward in Faith and the Society of the Holy Cross named the 1992 Church of England Act for the ordination of women as an ecclesial rupture; the subsequent Anglican Ordinariate (the Personal Ordinariates created by Anglicanorum Coetibus 2009) represents the most visible Anglo-Catholic response.

The evangelical Anglican tradition — particularly the older Anglican Evangelicalism of J.I. Packer, John Stott, and Alister McGrath — engaged the dialogue less centrally, though not dismissively; the evangelical reception was principally through GAFCON’s 2008 Jerusalem Declaration §13 on ecumenism, which affirms theological dialogue with other Christians while declining Anglican reception of what the GAFCON framework regards as departures from apostolic order.

3d. Within Anglican-Oriental Orthodox parallel work

A distinct but parallel Anglican-Oriental Orthodox dialogue (with the Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Syrian, and Malankara Orthodox Churches) has proceeded on different terms from the Anglican-Eastern-Orthodox dialogue. The 2017 Agreed Statement on the Holy Spirit between the Anglican Communion and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, signed at Dublin, represents the parallel convergence that the 1976 Moscow Statement had articulated between Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox.¹¹

3e. Within Roman Catholic reception

The Roman Catholic Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity has received the Moscow, Dublin, and Cyprus statements as theologically substantial. The 1995 PCPCU Clarification on the Filioque (Layer 5 document 05) cites Maximus the Confessor’s Letter to Marinus distinction explicitly — the same Maximian passage Dublin §45 had highlighted. The convergence between the Anglican-Orthodox and the Catholic-Orthodox on the filioque is structurally real; the ecclesial differences between Anglican and Catholic on other questions (papal primacy, Mariology) mean the convergences do not add to a composite reconciliation.

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4. Who Declined and Why — the Conditions of Reception

The Anglican developments named

Three successive Anglican developments have been named, from the Orthodox side, as conditions affecting the reception of the dialogue:

The ordination of women to the priesthood — The Episcopal Church (USA) General Convention at Minneapolis in September 1976 adopted a canon admitting women to the priesthood; the first women priests were ordained in 1977. The Anglican Church of Canada followed in 1976; the Church of England adopted the 1992 Act permitting ordination of women as priests and ordained its first women priests in 1994. Other Anglican provinces have adopted similar provisions at various dates across the 1970s–2010s; some (Nigeria, most of GAFCON, some Global South provinces) have not.

The ordination of women to the episcopate — Barbara Clementine Harris was consecrated bishop of Massachusetts (suffragan) on 11 February 1989 at Boston as the Anglican Communion’s first woman bishop. Subsequent consecrations have occurred across a growing number of Anglican provinces. The Church of England adopted the Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure in 2014; the first woman bishop of the Church of England, Libby Lane, was consecrated on 26 January 2015.

The 2003 consecration of V. Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire (an openly non-celibate gay man) at the TEC General Convention and his subsequent consecration on 2 November 2003 was named in successive Orthodox statements as producing a further condition of reception. The 2004 Dromantine Communiqué of the Anglican Primates and the 2008 Lambeth Conference addressed the resulting ecclesial pressure within the Anglican Communion itself.

The Orthodox theological position

The Orthodox tradition’s position on each of these developments is not uniform but is substantially consistent across the autocephalous Orthodox Churches: that the apostolic tradition as the Orthodox Church has received it does not admit the ordination of women to the priesthood or the episcopate; and that the non-celibate homosexual episcopate is outside the boundary of ecclesial reception the Orthodox tradition can extend.

The Orthodox tradition does not engage these questions as topics within dialogue but as conditions upon which continuing dialogue is possible. The 1992 Cyprus Statement, the 2006 Cyprus Agreed Statement’s explicit treatment, and subsequent official Orthodox communiqués hold this position consistently.

The Anglican response

The Anglican Communion has not repudiated any of these developments; successive Lambeth Conferences (1998, 2008, 2022), while naming the pastoral and ecumenical costs of the developments, have maintained the provincial autonomy that has permitted them. The GAFCON trajectory represents a parallel Anglican response — internal to the Communion — that has developed its own theological position on the developments.

The dialogue’s continuation after 2006

After the 2006 Cyprus Agreed Statement the Commission has continued to meet. Its subsequent communiqués (2009, 2015, and subsequent) have engaged various topics — human dignity; creation; pastoral ministry — without producing a further major agreed statement. The 2020–2022 period saw pandemic disruption; the 2022 invasion of Ukraine has produced further strain on Russian Orthodox participation specifically.

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5. What This Dialogue Did Not Settle

The reception of the filioque concurrence

The Moscow 1976 Anglican concurrence that the filioque should be omitted from the Nicene Creed has been unevenly received by the Anglican provinces. Some provinces (TEC, Canada, New Zealand) have reception procedures in place; others retain the filioque in all contexts; the Church of England’s 2000 Common Worship retains the filioque with a reference to the Moscow Statement in the notes. The concurrence is real but has not produced Anglican-Communion-wide liturgical change.

Anglican orders from the Orthodox perspective

The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s 1922 determination under Patriarch Meletios IV recognised Anglican ordinations as “having the same value as those of the Roman, Old Catholic, and Armenian Churches” — a determination cautiously affirming Anglican orders within specific theological limits. The status of that 1922 determination after 1976 and subsequent Anglican developments is not a topic the Commission has re-engaged. The question of whether Anglican orders as the Orthodox tradition can receive them have been affected by the women’s-ordination developments is not a matter the Cyprus Agreed Statement undertook to resolve.

The question of Orthodox reception of Anglican communions

The practical question of whether Orthodox and Anglican can communicate from one another’s altars has not been addressed by any of the agreed statements. The Anglican-Orthodox relationship has been substantively theological and pastoral without producing the eucharistic sharing that CCM, Porvoo, and the Leuenberg successors have established within other bilateral frameworks.

The multilateral dimensions

The Commission is bilateral; it has not addressed the relationship of Anglican-Orthodox convergence to the broader multilateral ecumenical movement (WCC; Catholic-Orthodox bilaterals; Oriental Orthodox parallel work). The convergences and divergences have been tracked in the respective sending churches’ offices rather than in a single institutional instrument.

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6. The Dialogue’s Present Phase

The Commission continues

The Commission meets periodically; its 2020s plenaries have addressed the pandemic’s pastoral implications, the question of Christian cooperation in a secularising world, and preliminary work on a possible agreed statement on pastoral ministry. No major agreed statement has appeared since Cyprus 2006. [∗]

The post-2022 condition

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and Patriarch Kirill’s theological endorsement of it have produced a condition the Anglican Communion has named publicly: several Anglican provinces (Church of England, TEC, Anglican Church of Canada) have suspended institutional contact with the Moscow Patriarchate specifically while maintaining contact with the Ecumenical Patriarchate and with Orthodox Churches that have not endorsed the war. The Moscow Patriarchate’s continued participation in the Anglican-Orthodox Commission has been attenuated in the subsequent period.

The parallel Anglican-Oriental Orthodox work

The Anglican-Oriental Orthodox dialogue — producing the 2017 Agreed Statement on the Holy Spirit and continuing theological work — has been structurally less affected by the conditions affecting the Anglican-Eastern-Orthodox conversation. The Oriental Orthodox Churches have not adopted the Eastern Orthodox conciliar tradition on the seven ecumenical councils (they receive only the first three), and their relationship with the Anglican Communion proceeds on distinct terms.

The Anglican Communion’s internal life

Since the 2022 Lambeth Conference’s Lambeth Calls and subsequent developments, the Anglican Communion’s own internal conversations on questions of sexuality and ordination have continued without resolution. The 2024 elevation of the next Archbishop of Canterbury under the present circumstances has raised questions the dialogue cannot directly address. [∗]

What the dialogue is now

The Anglican-Orthodox dialogue in its present form is continuing at a reduced tempo, on terms that the 2006 Cyprus Agreed Statement made explicit. The substantive theological agreements of Moscow 1976 and Dublin 1984 remain as ecumenical resources for both traditions; the subsequent questions that shape reception are, for the foreseeable future, Anglican ones in the first instance. When and how the dialogue might reach a further substantial agreed statement is a question the current decade has not answered.

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7. For Further Study

Primary texts

• The Moscow Agreed Statement (1976), published as Anglican–Orthodox Dialogue: The Moscow Statement Agreed by the Anglican–Orthodox Joint Doctrinal Commission, ed. Kallistos Ware and Colin Davey (London: SPCK, 1977)
• The Dublin Agreed Statement (1984), published as Anglican–Orthodox Dialogue: The Dublin Agreed Statement, 1984 (London: SPCK, 1984; St Vladimir’s Seminary Press ISBN 978-0-88141-047-1)
• The Cyprus Statement of the 1989–1990 Inter-Anglican/Orthodox Consultation (1992)
• The Cyprus Agreed Statement: The Church of the Triune God (2006), published by the Anglican Communion Office
• Agreed Statement on the Holy Spirit (Anglican-Oriental Orthodox International Commission, 2017)

Historical and theological treatments

• Colin Davey, Pioneers for Unity: Metropolitan Germanos of Thyateira (1883–1970) and the Origins of the Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue (Richmond: Council on Foreign Relations of the Church of England, 1987)
• Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church (London: Penguin, 1963; rev. eds. 1993, 2015) — the standard introduction
• Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979; rev. 1995)
• Henry Chadwick, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
• Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London: Longmans, 1936; Seabury Press, 1980 repr.)
• Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (London: Continuum, 2008) — adjacent theological reflection on Orthodox-Western encounter

Scholarly studies of specific agreements

• The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit (Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, 1995) — the parallel Roman Catholic work citing Moscow and Dublin
• A. Denaux, “The Cyprus Agreed Statement: An Anglican–Orthodox Ecclesiological Document,” Louvain Studies 32 (2007–2008), 299–322
• Mary Tanner, “Moscow to Cyprus: Three Decades of Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue,” Anglican Theological Review (various issues, 2007–2010) [∗]

The Orthodox pneumatological tradition

• John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985)
• John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness (London: T&T Clark, 2006)
• Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London: James Clarke, 1957)
• Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vols. 1–6, trans. Ioan Ioniță and Robert Barringer (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994–2013)

On the ordination-of-women question within the dialogue’s context

• Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, “Man, Woman, and the Priesthood of Christ,” in Women and the Priesthood, ed. Thomas Hopko (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983) — the principal Orthodox scholarly statement of the period
• Kevin Giles, Patterns of Ministry Among the First Christians (North Ryde: Collins Dove, 1989)
• Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) — Anglican systematic theology on ordination-anthropology questions

Primary sources on the Anglican developments named

• ECUSA General Convention Blue Book and Journal of the General Convention for 1976, 1988, 2003 (ordination decisions and consecrations)
• Church of England Priests (Ordination of Women) Measure 1993 and Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure 2014
• The Jerusalem Declaration (GAFCON, 2008), §§13

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Notes

Footnotes

1. The 1964 Third Pan-Orthodox Conference at Rhodes was convened by Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I; its decisions set in motion the separate but parallel Orthodox-Anglican, Orthodox-Old Catholic, Orthodox-Roman Catholic, and Orthodox-Lutheran theological dialogues that have characterised the Orthodox ecumenical movement since. ↩

2. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia (Timothy Ware, 1934–2022) served on the Anglican-Orthodox Joint Doctrinal Commission across its successive phases. His obituaries and scholarly biographies trace his sustained contribution. ↩

3. The 1989–1990 Inter-Anglican/Orthodox Consultations at Cyprus addressed the question of women’s ordination directly, following the 1988 Lambeth Conference Resolution 1. The 1992 Cyprus Statement is the formal product of that work. [∗] ↩

4. The Cyprus Agreed Statement: The Church of the Triune God was adopted at the Cyprus plenary in 2006 and subsequently published by the Anglican Communion Office (ISBN 978-0-9566596-9-9, with the ISBN reflecting the later publication of a revised edition). Metropolitan John of Pergamon and Bishop Mark Dyer were the sixteen-year co-chairs who carried the work. ↩

5. Moscow Agreed Statement §§1–8. The full text is printed in Ware and Davey, eds. (SPCK, 1977), with the Anglican and Orthodox delegations’ papers collected in the same volume. ↩

6. Moscow Agreed Statement §§19–22. The Anglican concurrence on the creedal filioque is the most substantive confessional movement the dialogue produced. ↩

7. Dublin Agreed Statement §§1–20, synthesised. ↩

8. Dublin Agreed Statement §45. Maximus the Confessor’s Letter to Marinus (PG 91:133–137) is the patristic source. The distinction between ἐκπορεύεσθαι (the Spirit’s procession from the Father alone) and ἔκφανσις / ἐκφαίνεσθαι (the Spirit’s “shining forth” or manifestation from Father and Son in the economy) has been the principal patristic resource for both the Anglican-Orthodox and the Catholic-Orthodox work on the filioque question. ↩

9. Cyprus Agreed Statement: The Church of the Triune God (2006), synthesised from the section on Christian anthropology and ordained ministry. ↩

10. Zizioulas’s co-chairmanship of the Commission (1989–2006) ran alongside his ongoing academic and ecclesial work; his theological voice on the dialogue is distinct from his broader systematic theology but continuous with it. ↩

11. The 2017 Agreed Statement on the Holy Spirit between the Anglican Communion and the Oriental Orthodox Churches was signed at Dublin. The Oriental Orthodox communion (comprising the Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Armenian, Syrian, and Malankara Orthodox Churches and their diaspora) receives the first three Ecumenical Councils and not Chalcedon (451) as authoritative; the Oriental Orthodox theological tradition is distinct from and should not be confused with the Eastern Orthodox tradition that is the partner in the Moscow-Dublin-Cyprus dialogue. ↩