Mary: Mother of God or Mother of Christ?
by Mike Oettle
THE spotlight falls once again on our Lord Jesus and his mother on 2 February, the festival of the Presentation in the Temple – or, if you prefer the older designation, the Purification of the Virgin Mary.
It’s as good a time as any to look into the old question of whether Mary should be called Mother of God or Mother of Christ, or, to use the Greek terms, Theotokos or Christotokos.[1]
This takes us back into the 5th century AD, when Nestorius, a famous preacher in Antioch, spent much of his time refuting the teachings of the Monophysites, who said that Christ had a single, divine nature and who accused Nestorius of denying that Jesus was God.
Nestorius (born in the late 4th century in Syria Euphratensis,[2] of Persian parents) said that Jesus was indeed God, but he also emphasised that He was in a very real way a man, and saw something of a moral “conjunction” or merging of wills, rather than an essential “union”. To call Mary the mother of God, he said, “was tantamount to declaring that the divine nature could be born of a woman, or that God could be three days old”.[3] He had a problem, though, in precisely defining the “conjunction” he spoke of.
The year 428 saw Nestorius appointed Bishop of Constantinople by the Emperor Theodosius II. It also found Nestorius under attack by Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, who had political motivations for disliking him. Cyril claimed that Nestorius was an Adoptionist (these people taught that Jesus was born entirely human but was adopted by God). His opportunity came at the Council of Ephesus, in 431, when Nestorius’s Syrian supporters (led by John, Bishop of Antioch) were late in arriving, and Cyril had Nestorius deposed. Moves by the Syrians to condemn Cyril and Bishop Memnon of Ephesus were overturned by delegates from Rome.
The upshot was that although the teaching that Mary was Mother of God became official in both the Eastern and the Western Church, the matter was never finally settled because it had been decided by an issue of petty politics. Not only was the doctrine generally repudiated among Protestants at the time of the Reformation, but in his own time Nestorius’s Syrian supporters did not accept his excommunication. A schismatic Nestorian Church emerged in Syria and Persia, and although it was expelled from Syria under imperial pressure, it established itself in Persia and Armenia and even reached to China (by way of Central Asia) by 625. It was persecuted under Muslim rule, but it still survives today in Iraq, the Central Asian states, Iran, India, Armenia and the Americas.
The pendulum did, however, swing back a little. Eutyches, who had been one of Nestorius’s chief opponents at Ephesus, was charged with heresy in 451, for teaching that Christ had only a divine nature, and condemned at the Council of Chalcedon.
These disputes also formed part of the process by which the Church arrived at a reasoned and balanced teaching of the nature of Jesus Christ and His role within the Trinity, but the debate was to continue for some years to come.
And what are we to believe about Mary? Since the Thirty-Nine Articles say nothing about her, Anglicans are free to choose – but my vote is for old Nestorius.
