Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Almsgiving is tied to the long fasting seasons, which are the longest kept anywhere in Christianity.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Anointing of the sick is kept as a mystery of the church, administered to the living faithful and not reserved to the dying.
The episcopate is held to run in unbroken succession from the apostles. This church's own line runs through Alexandria, from which its hierarchy was received.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Baptism is by threefold immersion and is followed at once by chrismation and communion.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Baptism, chrismation and first communion are given together in infancy, as in the Byzantine churches.
Canonical scripture of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which carries the wider Ge'ez canon it inherited from the Ethiopian Church.
Canonical scripture of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which carries the wider Ge'ez canon it inherited from the Ethiopian Church.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian and Syriac churches likewise ordain married parish priests while drawing their bishops from monasteries, and Egyptian desert monasticism is the ancestor of the whole Christian monastic tradition.
Kept as Genna on 29 Tahsas, January 7 of the civil calendar, in the Geez rite the Eritrean church shares with the Ethiopian.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The Coptic and other Oriental churches keep private confession to a priest, with the Coptic practice of a father of confession, a single priest to whom a person confesses habitually, and absolution before receiving the sacrament.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Chrismation is given with baptism in infancy, using myron consecrated by the patriarch, and is not a separate later rite.
The covenant theme runs unusually deep in Tewahedo Christianity. Every altar holds a tabot, a consecrated tablet standing for the tablets of the law, and the liturgy is not celebrated without one.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo, within the Oriental Orthodox family
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Prayers of exorcism belong to the baptismal rite, and the Coptic and Ethiopian churches maintain a living deliverance ministry outside it.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The Coptic and Ethiopian churches keep the longest fasts in Christendom, well over two hundred days a year of vegan abstinence, with nothing eaten until afternoon on fast days, and it is the laity who keep this and not only the clergy.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The funeral offices differ by order and by day, and prayer for the dead is offered at the Liturgy.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. A married man may be ordained deacon or presbyter but not bishop, and bishops are drawn from the monasteries.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The Coptic, Armenian and Syriac icon traditions are distinct schools with their own canons of proportion and colour, and are not branches of the Byzantine one.
Held in the terms of Ephesus in 431 and of Cyril of Alexandria, and deliberately not in the terms of Chalcedon. The doctrine is the same subject as in the Chalcedonian churches; the formula is not.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Infants are baptised and receive the full rite of initiation. Coptic custom sets the day at forty for a boy and eighty for a girl.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Each of these churches keeps a full daily office. The Coptic form, the Agpeya, has seven hours and a midnight prayer of three watches.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The marriage rite is a crowning, as in the Byzantine churches, with a distinct anointing of the couple in the Coptic form.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The night office is kept, most fully in the monasteries, and in the Coptic use it is the Midnight Prayer with its three watches.
The Tewahedo name of this church is the doctrine: tewahedo means made one, the union of divinity and humanity in the incarnate Christ in one nature, without confusion or separation. The formula is Cyril of Alexandria's. It is not the Eutychian teaching that Christ's humanity was absorbed into his divinity, which this church rejects as firmly as Chalcedon did.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Tonsure marks entry into the monastic life in the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian houses alike.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The monastic profession of these churches descends directly from the Egyptian desert and is the oldest continuous monastic observance in Christianity.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Sunday is kept as the day of the Resurrection. The Ethiopian and Eritrean churches additionally keep Saturday, which sets them apart from the rest of Christianity.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to Lalibela and to the desert monasteries of Egypt is a settled devotion across these churches.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Prayer follows a fixed daily cycle in each of these churches, the Coptic Agpeya, the Armenian Zhamagirk and the Ethiopian horologion, rather than a single common book.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The Coptic, Armenian, Syriac and Ethiopian churches keep the same seven mysteries, likewise baptising, chrismating and communicating infants in one service, each with its own rites and its own reckoning of the details.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Each of these churches has its own family of anaphoras, and the Ethiopian church uses more of them, fourteen in the received collection, than any other in Christendom.
Widened rather than duplicated: the Deggua is attributed by every source consulted to Saint Yared, a sixth century composer both the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches claim as their own shared founding musical figure, from before the two sees separated. The Eritrean church did not become autocephalous until 1993, and its Deggua tradition, including the three modes of chant Yared is credited with establishing, was never a separate composition from the Ethiopian church's own.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The epiclesis follows the institution narrative, as in the Byzantine rite.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The fraction is an extended rite here, with a fraction prayer that varies by season and by anaphora.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Each of the Oriental Orthodox churches keeps its own ancient liturgy in its own language, the Coptic of Saint Basil, the Armenian Badarak, the Ethiopian Qeddase, with a substantial fast required beforehand.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The institution narrative stands within the anaphora in each of these rites.
Affirmed at Ephesus in 431, the last of the councils this church receives, and carried through an unusually dense Marian liturgical cycle rather than through a later definition.
Confessed in the words of the creed of Nicaea and Constantinople, which this church receives with the first two ecumenical councils.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The Coptic, Armenian and Ethiopian churches keep their own iconographic styles and honour images in worship, though they were not party to the seventh council at which the East settled the question, having separated in the fifth century.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The Coptic and Ethiopian churches keep an unusually heavy Marian devotion, with monthly as well as annual feasts and widely reported apparitions such as Zeitoun in 1968, and honour their own martyrs, of whom the Coptic calendar counts very many.
Kept in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The evening office is kept daily, and in the Coptic use the Raising of Incense at Vespers precedes the Liturgy of the following morning.