The Council of Chalcedon

The Oriental Orthodox churches rejected the definition of 451 and date their separate existence from this council.

The Chalcedonian definition of two natures in one person is the Christology the Church of England receives and teaches.

Reformed churches receive the definition, and the insistence that the two natures remain unconfused is worked hard in the Reformed account of the Lord Supper.

Eastern Orthodoxy receives Chalcedon as the fourth ecumenical council and its definition of two natures in one person as the measure of orthodox Christology.

Constantinople receives Chalcedon as the fourth council, and the twenty-eighth canon of that council is the ground of the see rank in the Orthodox order of precedence.

The Greek church receives Chalcedon as the fourth of the seven councils.

The Lutheran confessions receive the Chalcedonian definition and build their teaching on the communication of attributes upon it.

The Maronite church is Chalcedonian and has been in communion with Rome without interruption since the twelfth century.

Received in the Westminster tradition as the settled statement of how the two natures are joined in the one person of the Mediator.

The Russian church receives Chalcedon as the fourth of the seven councils.

The Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala are divided by the question. Their successor churches sit on both sides of Chalcedon, some in communion with Rome, some with the Oriental Orthodox, so the community as a whole holds no single position on it.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church receives Chalcedon with the whole Byzantine inheritance, and with the later Roman councils besides.

The Armenian church did not attend, being at war in the year the council met, and formally refused its definition at Dvin in the following century.

The Coptic church refuses the Chalcedonian definition and dates its separate life from that refusal, holding that two natures confessed after the union divide the one incarnate Word.

The Eritrean church holds the Tewahedo Christology of its Ethiopian mother church and refuses the Chalcedonian definition with it.

The Tewahedo name of the church is itself the position: one made nature, against the two natures the council defined.

Oriental Orthodoxy refuses the Chalcedonian definition, holding that it divides the one incarnate nature of the Word, and dates its separation from the imperial church to that refusal.

The Church of the East was not represented and does not number Chalcedon among its councils, yet its own Christology confesses two natures in Christ in terms a reader would recognise as close to the definition it never received.

The definition issued by the council of 451.

Received as the fourth ecumenical council.

Received as the fourth ecumenical council.

Chalcedon settled the Christological question Ephesus had opened, and both councils are dividing lines for churches that did not receive them.