Belief — The Ancient Church of the East

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle All 1 →

M Mar Thoma Darmo. Metropolitan of India for the Church of the East, he was deposed by Mar Shimun for opposing the reforms, travelled to Baghdad in 1968 at the invitation of the objecting clergy, and consecrated three bishops — restoring a hierarchy for the party that had none. He died in September 1969, little more than a year later. Everything this church has, it has through those consecrations. Domain the older calendar, and the right of the clergy in Iraq to be consultedStanding metropolitan of India who came to Baghdad and consecrated a hierarchy for the objecting clergy, and died a year later Meet them — context →

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum All 2 →

The shared center — held across the tradition

The old calendar is not a detail. The church keeps the Julian reckoning for the fixed feasts, so its Nativity falls on 7 January by the civil calendar. The reforms of 1964 that moved the Assyrian church to the Gregorian calendar and shortened the fasts are, in this church's account, exactly the kind of decision a patriarch living abroad should not have taken alone. Go deeper — context →

Held by most — broad, but not universal

Nothing doctrinal divides us from the Assyrian church. Both bodies confess the same christology, use the same Hudra and the same Anaphora of Addai and Mari, and ordain in the same East Syriac tradition. Reunification has been discussed formally since 2010; a joint declaration was reached in 2015, one patriarch abdicated in 2022 in the hope of speeding it, and the two churches are still separate. Go deeper — context →

Cosmos & Afterlife

how reality is built, and what follows death

The nature of reality

The same creation the Assyrian church confesses, counted on a different calendar.

After death

Resurrection and judgment.