The shared center — held across the tradition
Tewahedo — made one.
The word is Ge'ez for unified, and it is the church's name for itself. In Christ the divine and the human are one nature, one person, one will, without separation and without confusion. It is the same confession the Coptic and Armenian churches make, and the reason all of them refused Chalcedon.
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Held by most — broad, but not universal
The Ark of the Covenant is in Aksum.
The church holds that the original Ark, taken from Jerusalem by Menelik, son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba, rests in the chapel beside the church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. One monk guards it and never leaves the enclosure; no one else, including the patriarch, may see it. Every church in Ethiopia keeps a tabot, a consecrated replica of its tablets, and it is the tabot rather than the building that makes a church a church.
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