Our Belief

One God — not three, and not one God appearing under three names. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are distinct Persons of one indivisible essence, equal in glory, without beginning and without end. The Church has never explained this and does not try to; it confesses it, and guards the confession against every attempt to make it simpler than it is.

“Almighty” renders Pantocrator — the One who holds all things together, not merely the One who could do anything. And everything that exists is His work, the unseen as much as the seen: the angels, and the soul of every person who has ever lived.

This is the line the council was called for. A son shares his father’s nature; a thing made is of some other nature than its maker. To say the Son is begotten, not created is to say He is God in the same sense the Father is God — begotten of the Father before all ages, eternally, not at some moment before the world began.

“Light of Light” is the image the fathers reached for when language ran out. You cannot have a light and not its radiance; neither comes after the other, and the two are one light. The Greek word the council settled on, homoousios — of one essence — is not in Scripture, and that was the objection to it at the time. It was chosen because every scriptural phrase the Arians were willing to sign, they signed while meaning the opposite.

The Church confesses that our Lord Jesus Christ is perfect in His divinity and perfect in His humanity; that He took flesh of the Virgin Mary and made it one with His divinity without mingling, without confusion and without alteration; and that His divinity parted from His humanity not for a single moment, nor the twinkling of an eye. Those words are not a summary written for a website. They are said aloud in the church before communion, at every Liturgy.

Because the One born of her is God the Word Himself, the Church calls the Virgin Mary Theotokos — the God-bearer, the Mother of God. The title is a statement about her Son before it is a statement about her, which is exactly why the Church fought for it.

A Roman magistrate’s name, in the middle of a creed. It is there because what the Church confesses happened at a datable hour, in a named province, under an official whose paperwork an empire kept — and not in the realm of ideas, where nothing can be checked and nothing is at stake.

He was crucified, died and was buried; on the third day He rose, and death was broken open from the inside. The Church keeps that day with fifty-five days of fasting before it and fifty days of standing prayer after — from Easter until Pentecost nobody in the church kneels, because those are not days for mourning.

The Holy Spirit is not a force the Church has the use of. He is the Lord and Giver of Life, worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son — the article Constantinople added in 381, for the reason Nicaea had added of one essence to the article on the Son.

He spoke in the prophets, which is why the Church reads the Old Testament and the New as one revelation, and why Scripture is never read on its own here. It is read inside the tradition that carried it — the Liturgy, the fathers, the councils, the icons on the walls. The Church that recognised which books are Scripture is the same Church that reads them, and the Coptic Orthodox canon keeps the books a later Western reckoning set aside.

Four marks, and the Creed asks for all four at once. One, because Christ has one body and not several. Holy, not because its members are, but because its Head is and its mysteries are. Catholic — universal — because it holds the whole faith, for everyone, everywhere, and not a local portion of it. Apostolic, because its bishops stand in unbroken succession from the Apostles and its faith is the Apostles’ faith rather than a later improvement on it.

For the Coptic Orthodox Church that succession runs through St. Mark the Evangelist, who brought the Gospel to Alexandria and was martyred there.

One baptism, not repeated, because a person is born once. It is given by three immersions in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, to infants as well as to adults; the newly baptised is anointed at once with the holy Myron and receives communion the same day. Baptism is the first of the Church’s seven mysteries — the others are Chrismation, Repentance and Confession, the Eucharist, Unction of the Sick, Matrimony and Priesthood.

And the Creed ends by naming where all of this is going: the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the coming age. Not the survival of a soul somewhere — the raising of the whole person, body and all.