Three Councils, Stopping Before Chalcedon

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.