Armenians as Part of the (Oriental) Orthodox Family of Christian Churches

The Armenian Apostolic Church often stresses its unique history and autocephaly, its hierarchal independence from other churches. At the same time, the Church has always been connected to other parts of the Christian world, most notably the “family” of churches known as “Oriental Orthodox.” These churches share a basic theological understanding of who Jesus Christ is, known as Miaphysite Christology and grounded in the common rejection of the Council of Chalcedon. Yet each of the autocephalous Oriental Orthodox Churches—the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Coptic, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Indo-Malankaran, and Syriac Churches— are incredibly diverse.

While some of the churches have long and historic connections, for instance the Armenian and Syriac churches, it is a quite recent phenomenon that these diverse independent churches recognized themselves as part of a single family. In fact, the ecumenical encounter and the sense of a shared Orthodox and specifically Oriental Orthodox sensibility is often worked out in Diaspora.

This presentation explores the way the Armenian Apostolic Church fits into this broader Oriental Orthodox family of churches by looking at several examples from the Armenian diaspora in Europe. In addition to the “top-down” official ecumenical meetings of church hierarchs, the presentation will look at shared spirituality such as a common devotion to saints, the ways the teachings and booklets of other churches are used by Armenian Christians, and the day-to-day interactions between Christians of this family of Oriental Orthodox churches in diasporic settings. How, the presentation asks, does a sense of shared (Oriental) Orthodox Christianity shape the lives of Armenian Christian believers in the Diaspora?

Dr. Christopher Sheklian is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Radboud University in the Netherlands, part of the “Rewriting Global Orthodoxy Project” in the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religion. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2017 with his dissertation, “Theology and the Community: The Armenian Minority, Tradition, and Secularism in Turkey.” From 2018-2020, Dr. Sheklian served as the Director of the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center at the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America. He has been a Manoogian Post-Doctoral Fellow in Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan, an Adjunct Professor at St. Nersess Armenian Seminary, and has published work on liturgy and law in the lives of religious minorities. Currently, he is working on a monograph entitled Liturgical Rights: Armenian Religious Minority Belonging in Turkey.