ABSTRACT
Contact between the post-Reformation Church of England and eastern Orthodox Churches can be traced back to the seventeenth century. In the mid nineteenth century, however, William Palmer, a deacon in the Church of England, a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a keen Tractarian, explored the possibility of conversion to orthodoxy following a series of visits to Greece and Russia. Palmer approached both the Greek and Russian Churches about the mechanism whereby he might convert. The Greek Orthodox Church’s response was that he would need to be baptised, the Russian that he would need to be received by laying on of hands, but not by re-baptism.1 These contradictory responses led Palmer to make a study of the issue, published in Greek in 1852 and English in 1853, which in turn led Greek and Russian scholars and hierarchs to examine the issue. The Greek response to Palmer about the more generous Russian response was that the Russian Church was willing to apply economy which, in this instance, the Greek Church was not.2 Palmer elicited a letter from the Ecumenical Patriarch, Anthimos IV, stating ‘There is only one Baptism. If the Russians allow any other, we know nothing of that and do not recognize it. Our church knows only one Baptism, and that without any detraction, addition or change whatever’.3 A Russian counter-response by Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow assumed a clearly Augustinian position when he stated that ‘Surely the efficacy of Baptism is in the name of the Trinity and in the sacramental grace given to it by the action of its founder, Christ the Lord’.4
