I have a question:
Of all the Protestant denominations, why does the Orthodox Church seem to have more affinity for Anglicans than all others? The Anglican church seems to have deviated further from Orthodox values than any other mainstream denomination. They even elect homosexual "bishops." So, I am confused as to why we Orthodox seem to profess more kinship with Anglicans than other Protestant denominations - especially since the Anglican church was essentially founded upon the sin of divorce. All I can surmise is that the Anglicans are at least sacramental, but the Lutherans are too. And I personally have more respect for those that deny the sacraments than for those who profess to validate the sacraments while teaching demonic heresies. Can you guys help me understand? Forgive my ignorance.
Selam
I was going to respond to this last night, but I thought that anything that I had to say had already been said.
But that's never stopped me before, nor will it in this case. My own personal reason for having been an ardent Anglicanophile (until recently) was that I saw High Church (and conservative) Anglicanism as sort of the closest denomination of Western Christianity closest to us, and a close friend of mine and a visit or two to Washington D.C.'s Saint Paul on K Street really hit that notion of mine home. It seemed like a match made in Heaven, it did; they don't have the idea of One Bishop to Rule Them All, they retained the old Sarum Rite, they believe that the consecrated host was truly the Body and Blood of Christ without trying to prove it logically and stating that is a Sacred Mystery like we say, what wasn't there to love (It didn't help that at the time, I loved reading about the English Civil War and my Britanophilia grew stronger as I tried to get in-touch with my Northern Irish roots because I resented being simply known as "the Greek" and nothing more)? Plus, the book written about the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom in London that the dean of the Cathedral gave me really showed me that traditionally, Anglicanism was Orthodoxy's strongest ally. It wasn't the Church of England sending in Jesuits to convert our folk to Catholicism by coercion or force, nor was it the Church of England that sent in embassadors to try to gain the ear of His All Holiness in order for him to change our theology so that it would be more pleasing in their Church's eyes like the Lutherans and Calvinists tried to do. Hey, they even let us open a church in London and gave us our own college at Oxford (called rather imaginatively, "the Greek College of Oxford"). I also read in a book I found on Google that Protestants zealously tried to convert Greek immigrants without a church in the area to their own sect, whereas the Anglicans of these United States actually played it rather cool and tried no such thing. The Anglican Church truly seemed to be made up of nice people, friendly people.
But then of course, well Anglo-Catholics don't make up the entire Anglican Communion, and Latitudinarianism gave us all the variations of Anglicanism that we see today. The bishops decreed that the faithful without churches in the Great Plains could no longer attend Episcopalian churches as substitutes, and the love between our Churches became unrequited.
Also, I do not think that we can simply chalk up the birth of the Church of England to a divorce. The divorce was simply the casus belli for the King of England to assert his dominance over the Church
in England, much like the King of France had done with the phenomenon known as Gallicanism. When the Pope of Rome was afraid to grant him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon because the backlash from Iberia might be too much for the Church (and possibly Western Europe as a whole) to handle, well Henry formed the Church
of England as a response. England's journey into Protestantism wasn't a convenient excuse for Henry, as there had been Reformers in England and Scotland alike (I know that there's a site at the University of Saint Andrews where a Reformer was burned at the stake before the foundation of the Church of England, and the Lollards were considered proto-Protestants), so again, Protestantism in England doesn't owe its creation to the divorce between King Henry VIII Tudor and Catherine d'Aragon. Simple nitpick, though, religion always seems to be a complicated issue, and if you can sum up an event and all that means in a sentence, I personally believe that it might not all be true.