The Three Ecumenical Councils as the Complete Dogmatic Deposit

The churches of Oriental Orthodoxy, the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India, accept only the first three ecumenical councils as carrying full, binding dogmatic authority: Nicaea I in 325, which condemned Arianism and produced the earliest Nicene Creed; Constantinople I in 381, which completed that creed and affirmed the Holy Spirit's divinity; and Ephesus in 431, which upheld Mary's title as Theotokos, God bearer, against Nestorius. What these churches do not accept is the fourth council, Chalcedon in 451, whose definition of Christ as one person known in two natures they judge too close to the Nestorian division into two subjects that Ephesus had already condemned. For Oriental Orthodoxy, the three councils it does accept were sufficient to settle the essential questions of Trinity and incarnation, and nothing after Ephesus was needed to complete that settlement, a conviction that sets the size of its accepted council list well below the seven held by Eastern Orthodoxy and the twenty-one Rome eventually came to count. Together these six church bodies form one of the major branches of world Christianity, distinct in council list and in Christological formula from both Eastern Orthodoxy and Rome, with communities spanning Northeast Africa, the Levant, the Caucasus and South India.

Rejecting Chalcedon did not mean rejecting the substance of what Chalcedon was trying to protect. Oriental Orthodox theology affirms, as strongly as Chalcedonian Christianity does, that Christ is fully God and fully human, one subject rather than two. What it rejects is Chalcedon's specific formula of two natures after the union, preferring instead the language associated with Cyril of Alexandria, one incarnate nature of God the Word, a position generally described today as miaphysite. To Oriental Orthodox ears, speaking of two natures after the incarnation sounded like reopening the very division into two persons that Ephesus had already condemned in Nestorius, so accepting Chalcedon's language felt like undoing the work the third council had just finished. Centuries of mutual suspicion followed, with each side at times accusing the other of theological error it did not actually hold, Chalcedonians calling Oriental Orthodox churches monophysite in a sense implying Christ's humanity was erased, and Oriental Orthodox writers reading Chalcedon as a return to Nestorius. Formal theological dialogues between Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox and Catholic representatives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have increasingly concluded that the two sides were affirming the same faith in different technical vocabularies, though the historic institutional separation, and the different councils each communion recognizes, remains unresolved.