A
Abraham Malpan.
A Syriac teacher at the Kottayam seminary who had read the reformers and worked alongside Church Missionary Society missionaries, he revised the Qurbana in the 1830s, celebrated it in Malayalam, and in 1837 publicly discredited a pilgrimage image. He was removed from the seminary. His nephew was consecrated metropolitan at Mardin in 1842, and the reform had a bishop.
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The shared center — held across the tradition
Reformed, and still Eastern.
The church kept the West Syriac liturgy, the threefold ministry of bishop, priest and deacon, the church year and the fasts, and changed the theology inside them. It calls itself Reformed Oriental and is in full communion with the Anglican churches and with the Church of South India, not with any Oriental Orthodox church.
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No prayers to the saints, and none for the dead.
Abraham Malpan cut the invocation of saints, prayers for the departed and the offering of the Qurbana for the dead out of the liturgy, on the ground that scripture does not authorise them. Everything else in the service he left standing. It remains the sharpest doctrinal difference between this church and the Malankara churches it came from.
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Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
Created and given; the reform stripped the mediators without stripping the sacraments.
After death
Resurrection and judgment; the church does not pray for the dead, which was one of the reform's sharpest breaks.