The church that once stretched from Persia to China
Eastern Christianity is not one church but a cluster of families, and one of them, the Church of the East, once reached further than almost any other branch of the faith. From its heartland in Persian-ruled Assyria it planted dioceses as far away as India and China, long before Western missionaries arrived.
The term covers traditions that grew up in antiquity around the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. The largest is the Eastern Orthodox Church, with about 220 million members, followed by the Oriental Orthodox churches with around 60 million. Eastern Catholic churches, 16 to 18 million strong, keep their own liturgies while accepting the pope. There are even Eastern Protestant bodies, such as the small Ukrainian Lutheran Church, which formed in Galicia around 1926 and worships with the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom.
Splits in the East came early and for varied reasons. The Church of the East declared itself independent of churches in the Roman Empire in 424, before the Council of Ephesus, and so owed nothing to that council's decisions. The Oriental Orthodox parted after Chalcedon in 451, though separate patriarchates appeared only in 518 and 536. The break with Rome, conventionally dated to 1054 since the historian Edward Gibbon, was really a long drift with communion broken before and reunions attempted after.
The Church of the East's story is one of expansion and retreat. Recognised by Sassanid Persia, it became linked in the West with the teachings of Nestorius, a Patriarch of Constantinople condemned as a heretic, and was often called Nestorian, possibly unfairly. After surviving persecution in Persia, it flourished under the Abbasid Caliphate and grew again under the Mongols before declining from the 14th century. In the 16th century a dynastic quarrel divided it into the Chaldean Catholic Church, in communion with Rome, and the Assyrian Church of the East. Today its descendant churches count roughly 400,000 members.
Practices across these churches share a family resemblance. Five main liturgical rites are in use: Alexandrian, Armenian, Byzantine, East Syriac and West Syriac. In most, infants receive chrismation after baptism and can then take communion, and married men may be ordained priests. Many Orthodox believers dislike the label Eastern, preferring simply the Orthodox Church to stress a universal claim.
Source: Eastern Christianity
