Frank Leslie Cross

1900-1968. Anglican scholar and editor. Born in Devon and educated at Bournemouth School, he was elected to a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. After serving in World War I, he studied at Oxford and London and in Germany, part of the time under Rudolf Otto. He was appointed to the staff of Ripon Hall, Oxford, and was ordained (1925-26), his affiliations being modernist and Anglo-Catholic. By 1934-35 he was an established university lecturer in the philosophy of religion and in comparative religion. His overriding interests were the relations of science to religion, and the history of Christian thought, especially patristics. He was elected to the Lady Margaret professorship of divinity at Oxford in 1944. Cross is remembered for the breadth and accuracy of his scholarship. He was editor from 1941 of the Lexicon of Patristic Greek, and in later years conceived and edited the monumental Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (1957).