A Church in Upheaval - The Council of Chalcedon in a History of Christianity in Egypt

A History of Christianity in Egypt
A Church in Upheaval - The Council of Chalcedon
No sooner had the Nestorian Heresy been dealt with at the First Council of Ephesus (431), the third such council to be held in a little over a century, than a new problem arose. Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, had preached that Jesus was not one being comprising the human and the divine, but two beings, one human, one divine, that shared the same body. Such belief was found to be contrary to Christian dogma, a statement echoed and reinforced by the Council of Ephesus. Furthermore, the Council of Ephesus, which had been held under Saint Cyril, Pope of Alexandria, affirmed that the Virgin Mary is the Theotokos, the "God-Bearer," or "Mother of God," titles that Nestorius and his followers had reservations about. They said that Mary only bore the human part of Jesus, and that the divine was imparted by Heaven after the birth. By calling Mary Theotokos was to believe that both human and divine were born in one being, which is the belief of much of Christianity still today. Such questions over small aspects of belief may seem academic to those of us living in the modern world, but it is these very arguments that created what modern Christians take for granted. The Council of Ephesus condemned and excommunicated Nestorius and labeled the belief as heretical, which indirectly led to the schism between the established Christian Church and the Christians in East Syria and Mesopotamia, and are now called the Syrian Orthodox, or Jacobite (after the sixth-century bishop Jacob Baradaeus), Church. The new problem was that the opposite belief had started, that of Jesus Christ as a single being in which human and divine were united, but that the human was subsumed and absorbed by the divine, instead of being in equal parts. This belief was labeled the Monophysitic Error (Mone Physis; one nature).