Condemned by a Council His Own Church Never Received

More than a century after Theodore's death, the Second Council of Constantinople condemned him by name in 553, in the affair remembered as the Three Chapters controversy, retroactively anathematizing a teacher whose own writings had been read as broadly acceptable, and in some quarters celebrated, during his own lifetime. The "Nestorian" Church: A Lamentable Misnomer records that the Church of the East neither received this council nor accepted its condemnation, continuing to honor Theodore as Mpashqana precisely because the council that anathematized him belongs to a conciliar tradition the Church of the East had already separated from more than a century earlier, at the time of Ephesus in 431, and so carries no binding authority over it. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine situates the posthumous condemnation within a wider pattern in which later theological disputes reshaped how earlier, more ambiguous figures came to be read, Theodore's own writings interpreted retrospectively through controversies that arose only after his death. A father honored without reservation by one church and formally anathematized by another stands as one of the sharpest and most concrete markers of the division between the two conciliar traditions.