Three People You Might Know It is a quarter past three in the morning in a hospital ward. A daughter wants the doctors to try everything to save her elderly father. Her brother insists their father never wanted machines to keep him alive. Neither is trying to be cruel; both are frightened, and both love him. Soon, they must make a decision, and one of them will carry the weight of it forever.

جميع الاقتباسات الكتابية مأخوذة من ترجمة سميث وفانديك، ما لم يُذكر غير ذلك.

All Scripture quotations are from the New International Version (NIV) unless otherwise noted.

A reflection from a Coptic Orthodox Christian perspective

تأمّل من منظور مسيحي قبطي أرثوذكسي

المقال العاشر: الهرطقات الحديثة — أخطاء قديمة في أثواب جديدة

The modern era, from the nineteenth century to today, has brought rapid change: the rise of scientific rationalism following the Enlightenment, new religious movements founded in nineteenth-century America, twentieth-century mass media and globalisation, and a modern world where people of many faiths now live and work side by side more closely than ever before.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought the Protestant Reformation, beginning with Martin Luther's public challenges to certain Catholic practices in 1517, and spreading rapidly with the help of the newly invented printing press. This period produced deep and lasting divisions within Western Christianity, and it is important to be precise about what this article does and does not address.

By the high medieval period (roughly the eleventh to thirteenth centuries), Christianity was deeply woven into the life of Western Europe. The Church had well-developed structures of bishops, monasteries, universities, and sacramental life. Yet this same period also saw the rise of movements that, in different ways, challenged core Christian teaching about creation, the sacraments, and the authority of the Church.

The eighth and ninth centuries (roughly AD 700–900) brought a controversy that shook the Byzantine Church for over a hundred years, in two separate waves. The Byzantine Empire faced serious military and political pressure during this period, including from the rapidly expanding world of Islam, which strongly rejected religious imagery. Some in the Byzantine world came to believe that the Empire's troubles were a sign of God's displeasure at what they saw as idol worship — the veneration of icons, the painted images of Christ, Mary, and the saints widely used in worship.

بحلول القرنين السادس والسابع (تقريباً من ٥٠٠ إلى ٧٠٠ ميلادية)، كانت الكنيسة قد أمضت قرابة مائتي عام في محاولة صياغة وصف دقيق لاتحاد طبيعتي المسيح الإلهية والبشرية دون الوقوع في الخطأ من أي الجانبين. كان مجمع خلقيدونية (٤٥١ م)، الذي عُقد قبل هذه الفترة بقليل، قد أصدر تعريفاً واسع الانتشار لهذا الاتحاد — ولكنه لم يُلقَ نفس القبول في كل مكان. فالكنائس في مصر، وسوريا، وأرمينيا، وأماكن أخرى في الشرق لم تقبل صياغته الدقيقة، في حين قبلته الكنيسة البيزنطية الأوسع، مما أدى إلى انقسام دائم لا يزال مستمراً بشكله المؤسسي حتى يومنا هذا.

By the sixth and seventh centuries (roughly AD 500–700), the Church had spent almost two hundred years working out how to describe the union of Christ's divine and human natures without falling into error on either side. The Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), held just before this period, had produced a widely used definition of this union — but it was not received in the same way everywhere. Churches in Egypt, Syria, Armenia, and elsewhere in the East did not accept its exact wording, while the wider Byzantine Church did, leading to a lasting division that continues, in institutional form, to this day.