After Chalcedon: Schism, Identity, and Modern Reunion Dialogues
As taught in the Oriental Orthodox tradition
How the post-Chalcedon schism shaped Oriental Orthodox identity and modern reunion.
When the Council of Chalcedon met in 451, it intended to settle the long quarrel over how to speak of the one Christ who is fully God and fully human. Instead it fractured the Christian East. The churches now gathered under the name Oriental Orthodox — the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Malankara communions — did not accept Chalcedon's definition that Christ is acknowledged "in two natures." They held, and still hold, that this language threatened the single, undivided subject confessed at Ephesus in 431.
By the end of this lesson
- Explain why the Council of Chalcedon (451) fractured the Christian East and which churches make up the Oriental Orthodox family.
- Define the miaphysite formula 'one incarnate nature of God the Word' and distinguish it accurately from the monophysitism of Eutyches.
- Trace the doctrinal line from Cyril of Alexandria and the Council of Ephesus (431) through Severus of Antioch to the non-Chalcedonian churches.
- Show how the same letters of Cyril were read by both sides, so that 'one faith' could be argued to underlie two competing formulae.
- Summarise the modern reunion dialogues — the unofficial consultations, the 1989 and 1990 Joint Commission statements, and the Coptic-Roman declaration of 1973 — and state their limits.
- Articulate, without flattening, where Oriental Orthodoxy still differs from the Chalcedonian churches and why full communion has not been restored.
Scripture
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