EOTC Lessons – English Version

As is with all Oriental Orthodox Churches the teachings of the Church is founded on the Apostles experience of the Lord Jesus Christ as the Creator and Saviour of the World.

The first three ecumenical councils Nicaea 325, Constantinople 381, and Epheus 431 which confessed the Son of God as being of substance with the Father and condemned Arius' formula are accepted by the Ethiopian orthodox Church, but the Church refuses to accept the Council or Chalcedon 451 presided by Pope Leo I which teaches the formula of the "two natures" against that of "one nature" the teaching of St. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria. The Ethiopian Church holds that there were, two natures before incarnation, but only one after the union. The human nature was not dissolved in the Divine as Eutyches taught. But rather, the Divine made the human nature immediately its own. The word and the human constitute one nature, and union is established without confusion and without division. The Church rejects the idea of Eutyches, the monophysite who taught a confusion against the union of the human by the Divine, which was regarded by (Dyophysite) theologians to be the same with teaching of the Ethiopian Church and its sister Churches, which was done without investigation and hence ignorance because Eutryches' condemnation by St. Dioscorus is an evidence to the point. One can see that the words, "dysophysite" and "monophysite" as fitting to play a great role not between the oriental Churches which have nothing to do with such phrases but between the Caldedonian and Eutyches himsel