Who Jesus Christ is
We believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the only-begotten Son of God, his eternal Word who was with God and was God, and that he became a human being in history: born of the Virgin Mary, he lived in Galilee and Judea, taught and healed, was crucified in Jerusalem, and rose from the dead on the third day.
For us Christ is not one prophet among prophets, nor one teacher among teachers. He is God himself come to us. This is the root of the whole faith: that God did not remain far off, but entered our life and our death.
Terms
- The Word (Logos)الكلمة (اللوغوس)
- The eternal Son of God: “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1).
- Christ / Messiahالمسيح
- The Anointed One, the awaited one whom God promised through the prophets.
The Holy Trinity
We believe in one God, not in three gods. This one God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit: one essence in three hypostases.
A hypostasis is not a mask or an aspect of a single God, but a real and distinct reality: the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Spirit. Yet they are one God in love, in will and in work, undivided and unpartitioned.
This is not fully graspable by reason, and we are not asked to comprehend it but to worship. What we say about God we say within the limits of our language, and God is beyond everything said of him.
Terms
- One essence (ousia)جوهر واحد
- That by which God is one God — the term affirmed at Nicaea in 325.
- Three hypostasesثلاثة أقانيم
- Father, Son and Holy Spirit — distinct, yet not separate.
The Incarnation
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). This is the Incarnation: that the Son of God took our human nature whole — body, soul and mind — from the Virgin Mary by the working of the Holy Spirit, without ceasing to be God.
Christ is therefore fully God and fully human. He hungered, thirsted, grew weary, wept and truly died — not in appearance only. And so we say that God knew from within what it is for a human being to be human.
Mary is called in the Church “Mother of God”, not because she is the source of the divinity, but because the one born of her is the Son of God himself. The Council of Ephesus affirmed that title in 431.
Terms
- Incarnationالتجسّد
- The Son of God's taking of human nature.
- Theotokosوالدة الإله
- The title of the Virgin Mary — in substance a confession about who was born of her.
The Cross and the Resurrection
Christ was crucified in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate; he died and was buried. His death was not a misfortune that overtook him but a free self-giving: “Greater love has no one than this.”
On the third day he rose from the dead. For us the Resurrection is not a symbolic teaching but the event on which everything rests: “And if Christ has not been raised, our faith is empty” (1 Corinthians 15:17).
By the Cross and the Resurrection together, death was defeated. This is why Pascha — the feast of the Resurrection — is the greatest feast of the year in all the churches of the East, and its night the longest and most radiant night of prayer.
Salvation and deification
For us salvation is wider than the forgiveness of sins, though forgiveness is within it. Salvation is the healing of the human being and his restoration to communion with God.
The Fathers of the East summed this up in a daring phrase: “God became man so that man might become god” — that is, might share in the divine life by grace, not become God by nature. This is called *theosis*, deification.
This difference of emphasis marks Eastern theology. The Latin West spoke most of sin, ransom and justice; the East spoke most of sickness, healing, life and light.
Terms
- Theosis / deificationالتأله
- Sharing in the divine life by grace (2 Peter 1:4).
The Church
We believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. One, because Christ is one; catholic, because she is for all people in every place; holy not by the holiness of her members but by the One who dwells in her; and apostolic because she is joined to the apostles in an unbroken continuity.
The Church is not a building nor an administration, but the community of the baptised gathered around the Eucharist. Hence the Eastern saying that the Church becomes visible wherever the Liturgy is celebrated.
In the East this Church has been kept through the hardest conditions: under Roman persecution, under centuries of non-Christian rule, and through genocide and displacement. And it has remained.
The Mysteries
In the East these are called *mysteries* rather than only sacraments, because they are God's hidden work in visible things: water, oil, bread, wine, a hand laid on.
They are seven: baptism, chrismation, the Eucharist, repentance and confession, the anointing of the sick, marriage, and ordination.
One mark of the East is that an infant is baptised, chrismated and given communion in a single rite, not separated as in the West. The child is a full member of the Church from the day of baptism.
Terms
- Baptismالمعمودية
- New birth by water and the Spirit, by which one becomes a member of the Church.
- Chrismationالميرون
- Anointing with holy oil: the gift of the Holy Spirit.
- The Eucharistالإفخارستيا
- The Body and Blood of the Lord in bread and wine — the centre of the Church's whole life.
How this faith is lived
In the East faith is not an opinion held but a life lived, through a whole year of prayer, fasting and feast.
The Divine Liturgy is the centre of everything — longer in the East and more fully sung, in languages the churches have carried for centuries. Fasting is extensive and central: the Great Fast before Pascha, the Nativity Fast, the Apostles' Fast, the Fast of the Mother of God, and Wednesdays and Fridays. Fasting in the East means abstaining from animal food, a training of the body alongside prayer and almsgiving.
With all this, the Lord's Prayer is said in every home, prayer is offered at the hours of day and night, and the Psalms are read more than any other book.
The Mother of God, the saints and the icons
We honour the Virgin Mary above all the saints, and we ask her intercession and theirs. We draw a decisive distinction between veneration and worship: worship belongs to God alone, while veneration is given to those whom God has loved and sanctified.
To ask for intercession is not to worship the saint, any more than asking your brother to pray for you is worship of him. The saints are alive in God, and the Church is one on earth and in heaven.
An icon is not an idol but a witness to the Incarnation: because God became visible, he can be depicted. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 affirmed the veneration of icons with that same distinction — the honour passes to the one the icon represents; it does not stop at wood and colour.