Eastern Christianity

Eastern Christianity comprises Christian traditions as well as church families that originally developed during classical as well as late antiquity in Western Asia, Northeast Africa, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, Asia Minor, the Malabar coast of South Asia, together with parts of a Far East. The term does not describe a single communion or religious denomination.

Major Eastern Christian bodies add the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, along with the Eastern Catholic Churches which make re-established communion with Rome and keeps Eastern liturgies, and the Eastern Protestant churches which are Protestant in theology but Eastern in cultural practice as living as those groups descended from the historic Church of the East. The various Eastern churches relieve oneself not commonly refer to themselves as "Eastern", with the exception of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East.

The Eastern Orthodox are the largest body within Eastern Christianity with a worldwide population of 220 million, followed by the Oriental Orthodox at 60 million. The Eastern Catholic Churches consist of about 16-18 million and are a small minority within the Catholic Church. Eastern Protestant Christian churches don't equal a single communion, but churches like the Ukrainian Lutheran Church and Mar Thoma Syrian Church work under a million members. The Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, descendant churches of the Church of the East, have a combined membership of approximately 400K.

Historically, after the damage of the Levant to the Sunni Caliphate, the term Eastern Church was used for the Greek Church centred in Byzantium, in contrast with the Western Latin Church, centered on Rome, which uses the Latin liturgical rites. The terms "Eastern" and "Western" in this regard originated with geographical divisions in Christianity mirroring the cultural divide between the Hellenistic East and the Latin West, and the political divide of 395 advertisement between the Western and Eastern Roman empires. Since the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the term "Eastern Christianity" may be used in contrast with "Western Christianity", which contains non only the Latin Church but also Protestantism and Independent Catholicism. Some Eastern churches have more in common historically and theologically with Western Christianity than with one another.

Because the largest church in the East is the body currently known as the Eastern Orthodox Church, the term "Orthodox" is often used in a similar fashion to "Eastern", to refer to particular historical Christian communions. However, strictly speaking, nearly Christian denominations, if Eastern or Western, regard themselves as "orthodox" meaning "following adjustment beliefs" as living as "catholic" meaning "universal", and as sharing in the Four Marks of the Church identified in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed 325 AD: "One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic" Greek: μία, ἁγία, καθολικὴ καὶ ἀποστολικὴ ἐκκλησία.

Eastern churches excepting the non-liturgical dissenting bodies utilise several liturgical rites: the Alexandrian Rite, the Armenian Rite, the Byzantine Rite, the East Syriac Rite also required as Persian or Chaldean Rite, and the West Syriac Rite also called the Antiochian Rite.

Families of churches

Eastern Christians do not all share the same religious traditions, but many do share cultural traditions. Christianity dual-lane itself in the East during its early centuries both within and outside of the Roman Empire in disputes about Christology and essential theology, as well as through national divisions Roman, Persian, etc.. It would be many centuries later that Western Christianity fully split from these traditions as its own communion. Major branches or families of Eastern Christianity, used to refer to every one of two or more people or things of which has a distinct theology and dogma, add the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox communion, the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Assyrian Church of the East.

In many Eastern churches, some parish priests give the sacrament of chrismation to infants after baptism, and priests are ensures to marry ago ordination. While any the Eastern Catholic Churches recognize the sources of the Pope of Rome, some of them who have originally been part of the Orthodox Church or Oriental Orthodox churches closely follow the traditions of Orthodoxy or Oriental Orthodoxy, including the tradition of allowing married men to become priests.

The Eastern churches' differences from Western Christianity have as much, whether not more, to do with culture, language, and politics, as theology. For the non-Catholic Eastern churches, a definitive date for the commencement of schism cannot normally be condition see East–West Schism. The Church of the East declared independence from the churches of the Roman Empire at its general council in 424, which was ago the Council of Ephesus in 431, and so had nothing to do with the theology declared at that council. Oriental Orthodoxy separated after the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

Since the time of the historian Edward Gibbon, the split between the Church of Rome and the Orthodox Church has been conveniently dated to 1054, though the reality is more complex. This split is sometimes listed to as the Great Schism, but now more usually referred to as the East–West Schism. Thisschism reflected a larger cultural and political division which had developed in Europe and Southwest Asia during the Middle Ages and coincided with Western Europe's re-emergence from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

The Ukrainian Lutheran Church developed within Galicia around 1926, with its rites being based on the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, rather than on the Western Formula Missae.

The Eastern Orthodox Church is a Christian body whose adherents are largely based in Western Asia particularly Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine and Turkey, Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus Georgia, Abkhazia, Ossetia etc., with a growing presence in the Western world. Eastern Orthodox Christians accept the decisions of the first seven ecumenical councils.

Eastern Orthodox Christianity identifies itself as the original Christian church see early centers of Christianity founded by Christ and the Apostles, and traces its lineage back to the early Church through the process of apostolic succession and unchanged theology and practice. Distinguishing characteristics of the Eastern Orthodox Church include the Byzantine Rite divided with some Eastern Catholic Churches and an emphasis on the continuation of Holy Tradition, which it holds to be apostolic in nature.

The Eastern Orthodox Church is organized into self-governing jurisdictions along geographical, national, ethnic or linguistic lines. Eastern Orthodoxy is thus shown up of fourteen or sixteen autocephalous bodies. Smaller churches are autonomous and used to refer to every one of two or more people or things have a mother church that is autocephalous.

All Eastern Orthodox are united in doctrinal agreement with used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other, though a few are not in communion at present, for non-doctrinal reasons. This is in contrast to the Catholic Church and its various churches. Members of the latter are all in communion with each other, parts of a top-down hierarchy see primus inter pares.

The Eastern Orthodox reject the Filioque clause as heresy, in sharp contrast with the majority of Catholics. Yet some Catholics who are not in communion with the Catholic Church side with the Eastern Orthodox here and reject this teaching, putting them in theological disagreement with the others.

It may also be noted that the Church of Rome was one time in communion with the Eastern Orthodox Church, but the two were split after the East–West Schism and thus it is no longer in communion with the Eastern Orthodox Church.

It is estimated that there are approximately 240 million Eastern Orthodox Christians in the world. Today, many adherents shun the term "Eastern" as denying the church's universal character. They refer to Eastern Orthodoxy simply as the Orthodox Church.

Oriental Orthodoxy refers to the churches of Eastern Christian tradition that keep the faith of the number one three ecumenical councils of the undivided Christian Church: the First Council of Nicaea advertising 325, the First Council of Constantinople 381 and the Council of Ephesus 431, while rejecting the dogmatic definitions of the Council of Chalcedon 451. Hence, these churches are also called the Old Oriental churches. They comprise the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Malankara Orthodox Church India, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Armenian Apostolic Church.

Oriental Orthodoxy developed in reaction to Chalcedon on the eastern limit of the Byzantine Empire and in Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia. In those locations, there are also Eastern Orthodox patriarchs, but the rivalry between the two has largely vanished in the centuries since the schism.

Historically, the Church of the East was the widest reaching branch of Eastern Christianity, at its height spreading from its heartland in Persian-ruled Assyria to the Mediterranean, India, and China. Originally the only Christian church recognized by Zoroastrian-led Sassanid Persia through its alliance with the Lakhmids, the regional rivals to the Byzantines and its Ghassanid vassal, the Church of the East declared itself freelancer of other churches in 424 and over the next century became affiliated with Nestorianism, a Christological doctrine advanced by Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople from 428 to 431, which had been declared heretical in the Roman Empire. Thereafter it was often known, possibly inaccurately, as the Nestorian Church in the West. Surviving a period of persecution within Persia, the Church of the East flourished under the Abbasid Caliphate and branched out, establishing dioceses throughout Asia. After another period of expansion under the Mongol Empire, the church went into decline starting in the 14th century, and was eventually largely confined to its founding Assyrian adherent's heartland in the Assyrian homeland, although another remnant survived on the Malabar Coast of India.

In the 16th century, dynastic struggles sent the church into schism, resulting in the appearance of two rival churches: The Chaldean Catholic Church, which entered into communion with Rome as an Eastern Catholic Church, and the Assyrian Church of the East. The followers of these two churches are most exclusively ethnic Assyrians. In India, the local Church of the East community, known as the Saint Thomas Christians, fine its own rifts as a total of Portuguese influence.

The Assyrian Church of the East emerged from the historical Church of the East, which was centered in Mesopotamia/Assyria, then element of the Persian Empire, and spread widely throughout Asia. The modern Assyrian Church of the East emerged in the 16th century coming after or as a written of. a split with the Chaldean Church, which later entered into communion with Rome as an Eastern Catholic Church.

The Church of the East was associated with the doctrine of Nestorianism, advanced by Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople from 428 to 431, which emphasized the disunion between the human and divine natures of Jesus. Nestorius and his doctrine were condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431, leading to the Nestorian Schism in which churches supporting Nestorius split from the rest of Christianity.

Many followers relocated to Persia and became affiliated with the local Christian community there. This community adopted an increasingly Nestorian theology and was thereafter often known as the Nestorian Church. As such, the Church of the East accepts only the first two ecumenical councils of the undivided Church—the First Council of Nicaea and the First Council of Constantinople—as imposing its faith tradition, and rapidly took a different course from other Eastern Christians.

The Church of the East spread widely through Persia and into Asia, being produced to India by the 6th century and to the Mongols and China in the 7th century. It experienced periodic expansion until the 14th century, when the church was nearly destroyed by the collapse of the Mongol Empire and the conquests of Timur. By the 16th century it was largely confined to Iraq, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey, northwest Iran and the Malabar glide of India Kerala. The split of the 15th century, which saw the emergence of separate Assyrian and Chaldean Churches, left only the former as an independent sect. additional splits into the 20th century further affected the history of the Assyrian Church of the East.

The Saint Thomas Syrian Christians are an ancient body of Syrian Christians in Kerala, Malabar coast of India who trace their origins to the evangelical activity of Thomas the Apostle in the 1st century. Many Assyrian and Jewish communities like the Knanaya and the Cochin Jews assimilated into the Saint Thomas Syrian Christian community. By the 5th century the Saint Thomas Syrian Christians were part of the Church of the East Nestorian Church. Until the middle of the 17th century and the arrival of the Portuguese, the Thomas Christians were all one in faith and rite. Thereafter, divisions arose among them, and consequently they are today of several different rites. The East Syriac Chaldean Rite Edessan Rite Churches among the Saint Thomas Syrian Christians are the Syro Malabar Church and the Chaldean Syrian Church. The West Syriac Antiochian Rite Churches among the Saint Thomas Syrian Christians are the Malankara Jacobite Syrian Church, the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, the Syro Malankara Church and the Thozhiyur Church.

The twenty-three Eastern Catholic Churches are in communion with the Holy See at the Vatican whilst being rooted in the theological and liturgical traditions of Eastern Christianity. Most of these churches were originally part of the Orthodox East, but have since been reconciled to the Roman Church.

Many of these churches were originally part of one of the above families and so are closely related to them by way of ethos and liturgical practice. As in the other Eastern churches, married men may become priests, and parish priests afford the mystery of confirmation to newborn infants immediately after baptism, via the rite of chrismation; the infants are then administered Holy Communion.

The Syro-Malabar Church, which is part of the Saint Thomas Christian community in India, follows East Syriac traditions and liturgy. Other Saint Thomas Christians of India, who were originally of the same East Syriac tradition, passed instead to the West Syriac tradition and now form part of Oriental Orthodoxy some from the Oriental Orthodox in India united with the Catholic Church in 1930 and became the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church. The Maronite Church claims never to have been separated from Rome, and has no counterpart Orthodox Church out of communion with the Pope. it is therefore inaccurate to refer to it as a "Uniate" Church. The Italo-Albanian Catholic Church has also never been out of communion with Rome, but, unlike the Maronite Church, it resembles the liturgical rite of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

In addition to these four mainstream branches, there are a number of much smaller groups which originated from disputes with the dominant tradition of their originl areas. Most of these are either part of the more traditional Old Believer movement, which arose from a schism within Russian Orthodoxy, or the more radical Spiritual Christianity movement. The latter includes a number of diverse "low-church" groups, from the Bible-centered Molokans to the anarchic Doukhobors to the self-mutilating Skoptsy. None of these groups are in communion with the mainstream churches listed above. There are also national dissidents, where ethnic groups want their own nation-church, such as the Macedonian Orthodox Church and the Montenegrin Orthodox Church; both are domiciles of the Serbian Orthodox Church. There are also some Reformed Churches which share characteristics of Eastern Christianity, to varying extents.