By virtue of my heritage, I am profoundly interested in, and an adherent to, Reformed theology. By virtue of the scholarly interests of a former professor of mine, I am also interested in the theology and history of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Being in school has not afforded me a lot of extra time to do any reading on the subject, but whenever I get an opportunity to do so, I take it.

There are a number of reasons for my interest in the Orthodox tradition, but one of the main reasons is because of the vast, unexplored (in the West, anyway) history that separates our traditions:

For the past fifteen hundred years, the Latin and Greek traditions in the community of Christians have had disparate histories, with widely contrasting experiences to separate and complicate their relations. The formal schism between Rome and Constantinople...is only an outward sign of the deeper schism in the soul of Christendom. Since the seventh century, Byzantine Christianity had to exist first as the state of a beleaguered fortress-Empire and then as the religion of a persecuted minority under the Crescent scimitar. It bears the scars of the ruin it suffered at the hands of Crusaders and Turks alike. For ten centuries it survived without the kind of academic institutions which helped raise the West from barbarism. It lived more by its liturgy than its literature, more by the lex orandi, lex credendi than by the genius of its doctors.

Small wonder, then, that the images of Eastern Christianity in Western manuals of church history are usually uncomprehending--with their phrases about 'theological stagnation,' 'arrested development,' 'traditionalism.' Small wonder, too, that the sporadic efforts at rapprochement between East and West have been so volatile--and so unfamiliar to the generality of Western Christians. Now that the modern ecumenical movement has put Orthodox and Protestant theologians back into dialogue, this ignorance of ours about their history is worse than embarrassing. It turns our conversation into cross-talk.

Even though I am very familiar with the contours of the history of the Church, I remain only vaguely familiar with the history of the Eastern Church. As a result, I often grab on to opportunities to learn more about it. But I am also always interested in learning more of the history of the Calvinist tradition, and in the figure of Cyril Lucaris, I am able to explore the history of both of these traditions as they interacted with each other in a very unique way in the seventeenth century:

One of the most noteworthy chapters in this strange history has to do with the century-long, backstage parley that went on between various Protestants and Greeks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many Protestants, uneasy about their breach with the Christian past, saw in Orthodoxy a sounder link than Rome with the church catholic. At least a few Orthodox leaders saw in Protestantism not only an authentic reformatory impulse, but also an ally against the aggressions of Counter-Reformation Rome. The most dramatic episode in this chapter was the brief flowering of Cyril Lucaris, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (1620-1638, intermittently), educator, statesman, and Calvinist theologian.

Listening to an Orthodox podcast once, I recall the two men hosting the program stating that they found in Reformed tradition one of the richest expressions of theology in the Protestant traditions. With that said, although I was quite surprised to hear about Lucaris' efforts to introduce Calvinist theology to the Orthodox tradition and am aware that there are some significant theological differences in the respective traditions, there is, it would seem, some sort of commonalities that would foster this sort of interaction.