“The Definition of the Synod at Chalcedon.” A ὅρος was a boundary stone marking the edge of a field. The councils used the word for a doctrinal definition, which sets limits within which the church confesses Christ. The Definition does not explain how Christ is God and man; it fences off the ways of getting it wrong.

The Definition of Chalcedon, AD 451, in Greek, Latin and English

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Reformed reception

Reformed reception

How the Reformation confessions took up Chalcedon’s language. Tap an underlined phrase to see the words of the Definition behind it; tap a word in the Definition to find the confessions that echo it.

Definition: Greek and Latin as printed in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 2 (1877), with Schaff’s English. The Greek follows ἐν δύο φύσεσιν, with the variant ἐκ δύο φύσεων in brackets. Alignment and parsing are by sense and were prepared for this page.

New Testament: Greek from the SBL Greek New Testament (CC BY 4.0) with lemmas from MorphGNT (CC BY-SA); Latin from the Vulgate and English from the King James Version (public domain). Counts are occurrences of the lemma in the SBLGNT; for the article, pronouns, prepositions and particles they are from the Nestle 1904 text via Macula Greek (CC BY 4.0).

Lexicons: Abbott-Smith, Manual Greek Lexicon of the NT (1922; public domain, digital edition by the Abbott-Smith project); Liddell–Scott–Jones (9th ed., 1940) and Lewis & Short (1879) from the Perseus Digital Library’s TEI editions (CC BY-SA 4.0), cached in the page and shortened; each LSJ entry links to the full text on Logeion.

Confessions: Thirty-nine Articles (1563/1571), Belgic Confession (English as in Schaff, vol. 3), Westminster Confession and Larger Catechism (1647–48); Second Helvetic Confession in Bullinger’s Latin from Schaff, vol. 3, with an English translation prepared for this page.