A protestant as I am, I privately profusely protested when my Professor placidly presented his case for why Mary is the mother of God. He is not Roman Catholic. With calmness and candor, he clarified the consequences of things being otherwise.
It was my first year at Seminary and I was studying Systematic Theology one which, at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, as taught by Dr Vidu Adonis, is strongly Trinitarian.
At the same time, I was doing the Church to the Reformation in which we briefly explored the early Trinitarian and Christological Controversies.
Up until then, the name Nestorius did not nestle up against me. With my peers, I did not, after perusing through his letter to Cyril the Patriarch of Alexandria, see why the early Church pronounced his views heretic. Nestorius was then the Patriarch of the great Constantinople in the Fifth Century AD.
Nestorius insisted that Mary is not the Mother (or Bearer) of God. “Does God have a mother?” he scornfully quipped, scoffingly adding; “a Greek without reproach introducing mothers to the gods!”
I can see you nodding in agreement, O Protestant. But watch your head and heart, brother and sister, lest you find yourself agreeing with a heretic.
Splitting Hairs?
You may be wondering why it even matters at all whether Mary is the mother of God or not. Is this not trivial, a quibbling and squabbling over flimsy affairs?
Cyril certainly did not consider it so.
The early Church insisted that God had to be a certain way, to do the sort of things He did, to save us the way He did.
At the heart of the early Trinitarian and Christological controversies lay a simple question: did God come down to save us, or did He send someone from among us to lead the way for our ascension to Him?
In other words, the answer as to whether Mary is the mother of God determines whether we can be saved. The identity of Christ determines our salvation.
You and I need to respond to Jesus’ poignant question: ‘who do you say I am?’ (Mark 8:29).
And it shall not suffice to say ‘You are one Person with two natures, divine and human.’ For, the question then is, ‘who am I, I who has two natures?’
We have to wonder, is Jesus a man like us indwelt by God? Is He a result of the combination of the two natures? Or is He the eternal Son of God who for us and our salvation became Man without ceasing to be God?
Kenneth Hagin seems to favour the first option. Consider, for example, his statements in “The Word of Faith 13, 12 (December 1980):14:
‘Every man who has been born again is an incarnation, and Christianity is a miracle. The believer is as much an incarnation as was Jesus of Nazareth.’
What Hagin thinks is that an incarnation is nothing more than God dwelling in a believer. Nestorius and his teacher Theodore of Mopsuestia held to the same idea. Jesus was no more than a man who was ‘graced’ by God the Word and so united to Him that they constituted ‘one person.’ To Theodore and Nestorius, the incarnation was an indwelling.
But the Church condemned Nestorius as a heretic, as it would Hagin.
Next, we need to consider if Jesus is a product of the two natures. Did the divine nature combine with the human to produce the one Person we call Jesus?
Eutychus, a 5th-century Alexandrian Monk, and Apollinaris, a 4th-century bishop of Laodicea thought so.
Eutychian Monophysitism held that Jesus’ human nature dissolved into His divinity like a drop of wine into the sea. What remained was not two natures, but one. The Church rejected this position as heretical.
Appolinarianism, on the other hand, held that God the Son, the divine Logos, came into the human body, and existed in it as the mind of the man Jesus. Grace Lubega in The Man from Above devotional similarly teaches that:
When the bible says that he became flesh, and did tabernacle among us, fixed his tent of flesh on earth, it means that he got a body and entered it.
Let’s say the early Church found this heretical too, and condemned it, insisting that Jesus was true God and true Man, and He could not be true Man unless He had a human mind, will, and body as men do.
Why Mary is the Mother of God
Over time, I came to appreciate why we must confess Mary as Mother of God. Make no mistake about it; our view of the incarnation shapes our understanding of salvation. The early controversies about the nature of Christ were in effect about who God is and how He redeems us.
The Bible states that the sending of the only-begotten Son was God’s way of demonstrating His love for the world (John 3:16).
But if the Father sent the Son, then it at least implies two things: one, for the Son to be sent He had to have preexisted from the foundation of the world. The second implication is that the same Person who eternally existed with the Father has now in time come to us.
The same Logos was begotten twice: once eternally by the Father as the Son of God, and then again, in time, by Mary as the Son of Man.
In other words, the Jesus that the disciples saw was the same preexisting Logos, now living as Man.
But if this is true, then Jesus is not what we get after combining the divine and human natures. If He were, then He would not have existed before that combination.
Neither is He merely the mind in a human body as Apollinaris (and Lubega by logical extension) suggests, since, as we saw, He would not then be genuinely human.
What this means is that the one who is born of Mary is none other than God.
As Protestants, we must forget Nestorius’ scoffing and consider that Mary birthed and nurtured God. Why else would Elizabeth exclaim: ‘why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?’ (Luke 1:43).
Now, one can raise a legitimate question as to whether calling Mary ‘the mother of God’ does not mean that God has a beginning.
The classical answer is ‘not so.’ Christianity claims that Mary conceived God in His humanity. She gave birth to God in as much as the human nature she birthed belongs to none other than the Creator. As a result, God weeps as a man does. He sleeps, walks, grows, tires as a man, to the extent that the One who dies on the cross is God, in His humanity.
If it was not God who did all this, then it was not God who saved us, but a mere man who happened to know God. In that case, that man, not God, loves us supremely, since ‘greater love has no one than this than to lay down one’s life for his friends’ (John 15:13).
If it was not God who laid down His life for us, if a man died in the stead of God, then that man deserves our worship and obedience, rather than God.
It matters whether it was God sucking on the breasts of Mary because only then is He God-with-us, Immanuel. Only then is He truly Jesus, the One who saves His people from their sins (Matthew 1:21).
To say Mary is the mother of God is not to exalt Mary as Roman Catholicism does, but to state that God indeed became like us, suffered and died for us, in His humanity, for our redemption.
It is to hold that it was the same begotten Son of God is born of Mary in time. For He who eternally lived as God was the same born in time as the Son of Man for us and our redemption.
Thus, Mary is the mother of none other than God.
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