Protestant Patriarch
A Protestant Patriarch? Is it possible that an Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople became a Calvinist by reading the Bible, came to wholeheartedly believe in the doctrines that drove the 16th century Reformation, taught and wrote about those things, and was killed for his beliefs? On this day, June 27, 1638, Patriarch Cyril (Lucaris) of Constantinople was strangled to death and his body thrown into the Bosporus Strait.
Cyril Lucaris (1572-1638), while serving as the Greek Patriarch of Alexandria and later ascending to the highest position in Orthodoxy to be the Patriarch of Constantinople, began to understand the authority and power of Holy Scripture. His biographer records many letters in which Cyril wrote about the unique and supreme authority of Holy Scripture. This led him to the central teaching of the Bible, justification by grace through faith alone with a robust understanding of election and predestination, and to the two sacraments of the gospel which are God’s instruments of God himself to those who receive the grace of the sacraments by faith. For the first and only time in history Orthodoxy had a Protestant Patriarch!
Something happens in someone who hears the message of the Scriptures - who reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests them. Anglicans say that the Holy Spirit accompanies the preaching and hearing of God’s Word, the power of God to transform lives (and society!). Speaking through the Prophet Isaiah, God tells us that the word that goes out will not return empty, but it will accomplish all that God purposes and succeed in the things for which he sent it (55:11). There are countless stories of people sitting in church pews, or picking up a Gideon Bible in a hotel room in a moment of boredom or desperation, or challenged by a friend to read the gospel of John, and while doing so, they discover the God whose story it tells. In his Homily on Scripture, Thomas Cranmer affirms the innate power of the Bible read and heard:
“The words of Holy Scripture be called words of everlasting life: for they be God’s instrument, ordained for the same purpose. They have power to convert through God’s promise and they be effectual through God’s assistance; and, being received in a faithful heart, they have ever an heavenly spiritual working in them.”
Cyril had an especially close relationship with the English reformers and his correspondence with the Archbishops of Canterbury is well documented. He sent several young Greeks to England to study, including Metrophanes Kritopoulos who later became Patriarch of Alexandria. Cyril presented King James I with an ancient Bible manuscript (Codex Alexandrinus, now in the British Library), and later he gifted William Laud (curiously, the first anti-Calvinist Archbishop of Canterbury) an ancient manuscript of the Pentateuch with an Arabic translation.
Cyril spent much of his life and ministry running from those who wanted him dead for his Protestant convictions. On March 16, 1672, at the Synod of Jerusalem meeting at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Cyril's teachings were condemned by the Greek Orthodox Church. Sola scriptura had its day in Orthodoxy, but in the end Scripture-subject-to-traditon became their rule.
Cyril Lucaris’ eighteen point “Eastern Confession of the Christian Faith,” originally written in Latin, was published in Geneva in 1629. It is a remarkable, succinct Protestant statement and very close to the Church of England’s Articles of Religion. His second Article states:
“We believe the Holy Scripture to be given by God, to have no other author but the Holy Spirit. This we ought undoubtedly to believe, for it is written. We have a more sure word of prophecy, to which you do well to take heed, as to light shining in a dark place. We believe the authority of the Holy Scripture to be above the authority of the Church. To be taught by the Holy Spirit is a far different thing from being taught by a man; for man may through ignorance err, deceive and be deceived, but the word of God neither deceives nor is deceived, nor can err, and is infallible and has eternal authority.”