Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia (Timothy
Ware) was the Spalding Lecturer in Eastern
Orthodox Studies at Oxford University for thirty-five years until his
retirement four years ago. Educated at Westminster School in London and at
Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a double first in classics and then
studied theology, he joined the Orthodox Church in 1958. He studied at
Princeton University on a graduate fellowship and went on to earn a D.Phil.
from Oxford in 1965, the same year he was ordained a deacon and given the new
name of Kallistos. In 1966, the year he joined the Oxford faculty of theology,
he was ordained to the priesthood. He took monastic vows at the Monastery of
St. John the Theologian in Patmos, Greece, and remains a member of that
community. After founding the Greek Orthodox Parish of the Holy Trinity in
Oxford, Bishop Kallistos was promoted to the rank of archimandrite. In 1970, he
was named a fellow of Pembroke College. In 1982, he was consecrated titular
Bishop of Diokleia, the first Englishman to become a bishop within the Orthodox
Church since the eleventh century, and appointed one of the assistant bishops
of the Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain under the Ecumenical
Patriarchate of Constantinople. In 2007, he was elevated to titular Metropolitan
of Diokleia. He served as chair of the board of Oxford’s theology faculty from
1992 to 1994. Long active in the work of Christian unity, Bishop Kallistos was
a member of the Anglican-Orthodox Joint Doctrinal Discussions for eleven years,
and for much of that period, he served as the Orthodox theological secretary to
the commission. He also has served as the Orthodox co-chair of the Preparatory
Commission for the Orthodox-Methodist Theological Dialogue. A moderator of the
Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin, he is a vice president of the
Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius and serves as a member of the editorial
committee of the fellowship’s journal, Sobornost. He was formerly an editor
of the Eastern Church
Review. In addition to publishing articles in
scholarly journals, Bishop Kallistos is the co-translator of two Orthodox
service books and of The
Philokalia, a collection of texts written
between the fourth and fifteenth centuries by Orthodox spiritual masters. He is
the author of eight books, including The Orthodox Church (1963; revised
edition 1993), a work considered throughout the English-speaking world as the
standard introduction to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Two of a projected six
volumes of his collected works have been published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, The Inner Kingdom (2000) and In
the Image of Trinity (2006).