Oriental Orthodox Churches
Oriental Orthodoxy refers to the churches of Eastern Christian tradition that keep the faith of the first three Ecumenical Councils of the undivided Church: the First Council of Nicaea (AD 325), the First Council of Constantinople (381) and the Council of Ephesus (431), and rejected the dogmatic definitions of the Council of Chalcedon (451). Hence, these churches are also called Old Oriental Churches.
Oriental Orthodoxy developed in reaction to Chalcedon on the eastern limit of the Byzantine Empire and in Egypt and Syria. In those locations, there are now also Orthodox Patriarchs, but the rivalry between the two has largely vanished in the centuries since schism.
The following Oriental Orthodox churches are autocephalous and in full communion:
- Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church
- Syriac Orthodox Church
- Jacobite Syrian Church
- Indian Orthodox Church
- Coptic Orthodox Church
- British Orthodox Church
- French Coptic Orthodox Church
- Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church
- Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church
Read more about this topic: Eastern Christianity
Famous quotes containing the words oriental, orthodox and/or churches:
“Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.”
—William Barrett (b. 1913)
“All orthodox opinion—that is, today, “revolutionary” opinion either of the pure or the impure variety—is anti-man.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas trees.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)