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Coptic Christians

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Coptic Christians are in the news again, as targets of violence in Egypt.

I'll just use today's post as a convenient format for leaving interested readers three links to sources for reading up on the history of the Copts.

First, a basic encyclopedic discussion:

http://www.copticchurch.net/topics/patrology/schoolofalex/I-Intro/chapter1.html

Second, an admiring account of Coptic Christianity as the vessel that has preserved the Christian faith "in its earliest and purest form."

http://www.coptic.net/articles/CoptsThroughTheAges.txt

Finally, a discussion (by an evangelical-Protestant source) of a key distinction between Coptic Christianity and western Protestant Christianity.

https://www.gotquestions.org/Coptic-Christianity.html

That key distinction is: Miaphysitism. "Belief in mixed nature."

Whereas the Chalcedon Creed of AD 451 declared that Christ was and is one person with two natures, both fully human and fully divine, the Copts, who did not participate at Chalcedon, have always taken Christ to be one person of one nature, a mixture of the human and the divine.

I find this point in the history of dogma intriguing, although I should now say (if only so no one can object that it went unsaid!) that the killing of Copts for being Copts is barbarous and repellent whatever their dogma was in 451 or is now and whether one thinks it (or the Chalcedonian view, or both) profound and pure, heretical and base, or mythological and silly.




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