A Rejection Built on a Shared Vocabulary, Read Differently

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.