Christianity 101

As a cradle Roman Catholic I had every reason to think I understood the history of the Church after years of sitting through readings of every single book of the Bible. But when the Coptic Orthodox churches in Egypt started going up in smoke last year, it was the first I'd heard that Egyptians hadn't skipped right from building temples to Amun and Ra to memorizing the Koran. The Christian Copts—an ancient Egyptian word that went through many iterations before it emerged as meaning, simply, "Egyptian"—had been more dominant in the country until the Arab conquest than the Muslims are now.  But trying to find out who they were led me deep into a very dark and confusing church history that left me with more questions than before.

Enter Father Youannes Tawfik.

I found Fr. Youannes when I was googling "Copts," "Coptic Christianity," "Orthodox Christianity," and a dozen other terms that popped up in the searches (forbidding terms like "Aryan heresy" and "Islamic apostasy"). Under a listing for Coptic churches in the United States was a link to the web site for Fr. Youannes' church in St. Paul, Minnesota: St. Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church.

Egyptian Copts in Minnesota?

Fr. Youannes has been the priest at St. Mary's for 13 years, helping it grow to a population of 200 families. And a patient man he is, drawing a diagram for me of 2,000 years of church history from the first Christians in Jerusalem through the spread of the religion and the ecumenical councils that bound the five patriarchates...and then led to their rapidly accelerating disagreements starting as early as the first ecumenical council at Nicea in 325. He recited for me the Orthodox profession of faith, which I recognized as the Nicene Creed I grew up reciting at every Mass. But as we recited together he stopped where I continued on at the part identifying the Holy Spirit as proceeding "from the Father and the Son."

Over that, essentially, the Christian world broke apart.

Above: Fr. Youannes' diagram of the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox
churches after the schism from Rome in 451.

I knew that there were points of religious doctrine that church leaders wrestled over in the dim past, but I didn't appreciate how ugly the fight became. Who cares if Jesus had two natures or one? Didn't his message speak for itself?

(I could've gotten torched for that.)

Of course power and empire figured big into the evolution of Christianity over the years, and Christian teaching and values brought little restraint to the slaughter that came to dominate the story. All this sounded pretty familiar. What excellent background for approaching the explosive nature of religion in Egypt today!