Mary, Mother of God

CatholicExchange.com ^ | 12-31-06 | Marcellino D'Ambrosio, Ph.D.

[Salvation]

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Mary, Mother of God

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Marcellino D'Ambrosio

December 31, 2006

The mother of the Messiah has been called many things in the last 2000 years — the Virgin Mary, Our Lady, the Blessed Mother.  But call her "the Mother of God" and you'll see some Christians squirm.

This is nothing new.  One day in the early fifth century, a priest preached a stirring sermon in the presence of the patriarch of Constantinople.  His subject was the holy mother of Jesus.  The preacher continually referred to Mary as the "Theotokos" meaning "God-bearer" or mother of God.  This was no innovation — Christians had invoked Mary under this title for at least two hundred years.  Nevertheless, at the close of the sermon, the patriarch ascended the steps of the pulpit to correct the preacher.  We should call Mary the Mother of Christ, said Patriarch Nestorius, not the Mother of God.  She was the mother of His human nature, not the mother of His divinity.

His comment sparked a riot.  And the dispute rocked not only the congregation, but the entire empire.  Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt, immediately recognized that Nestorius's Marian theology was a symptom of a much deeper problem, a problem with the incarnation itself.  For to deny Mary the title "Mother of God" makes of Jesus a dichotomy, a split personality.  It would mean that God had not really embraced our humanity so as to become human.  Rather, the humanity of Christ is hermetically sealed off from the divinity, as if Jesus were two persons, as if human nature were so distasteful that God, in Christ, had to keep it at arm's distance.  It is OK, according to Nestorius, to say that in Jesus, God raised Lazarus, or multiplied the loaves, or walked on water.  But it is not OK to say that in Jesus God is born or that God died.

Cyril, aware that this was a challenge to the heart of our faith, demanded that an ecumenical council be called to settle the matter.  So in 431, the Council of Ephesus met under Cyril's leadership and solemnly proclaimed that Mary is indeed rightly to be honored as the Theotokos, the Mother of God.  It proclaimed that from the moment of His conception, God truly became man.  Of course Mary is a creature and could never be the origin of the eternal Trinity, God without beginning or end.  But the second person of the blessed Trinity chose to truly become man.  He did not just come and borrow a human body and drive it around for awhile, ascend back to heaven, and discard it like an old car.  No, at the moment of His conception in the womb of Mary, an amazing thing happened.  God the Son united Himself with a human nature forever.  Humanity and divinity were so closely bound together in Jesus, son of Mary, that they could never be separated again.  Everything that would be done by the son of Mary would be the act both of God and of man.  So indeed it would be right to say that a man raised Lazarus from the dead and commanded the wind and waves, that God was born that first Christmas day and that, on Good Friday, God died.

The Council of Ephesus, once confirmed by the pope, became the third ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, and its teaching in this matter is dogma, truth revealed by God which all are bound to accept.

So why does the Roman liturgy celebrate the Octave of Christmas as the Feast of Mary the Mother of God?  Because this paradoxical phrase strikes at the very heart of Christmas.  The songs we sing and the cards we write extol the babe of Bethlehem as Emmanuel, God-with-us.  He is so with us that after Gabriel's visit to the Virgin of Nazareth, the Divine Word can never again be divided from our humanity.  What God has joined, let no man separate.

Dr. D'Ambrosio studied under Avery Cardinal Dulles for his Ph.D. in historical theology and taught for many years at the University of Dallas. He now directs www.crossroadsinitiative.com, which offers Catholic resources for RCIA, adult faith formation, and teens, with a special emphasis on the Year of the Eucharist, the Theology of the Body, the early Church Fathers, and the sacrament of confirmation.

(This article originally appeared in Our Sunday Visitor and is used by permission of the author.)

[Salvation]

**Jesus was concieved by the Holy Spirit and I was taught Mary remained a Virgin her whole life never having marraige relations with Joseph.**

You are totally correct.

[Salvation]

Wow! We finally got around to discussing Nestorius. Thank you.

[Salvation]

**And so the "Mother of God" sinks slowly in the west, and we say a wistful, "Farewell," to the topic of the thread.**

I'm close to being gone here.

[Blogger]

Not even going to address that characterization.

[bornacatholic]

I work with a an evangelical protestant. We often speak about Scripture. He confesses to me most of the protestants he knows do not go to church or read the Bible.

He himself skipped his Sunday service so he could work on Sunday and make some extra money for Christmas presents.

The myths about protestants reading and knowing and loving scripture are just that - myths.

When I speak with them about Scripture I realise I know Scripture 100 x's better than they do. The very LAST thing a protestant wants to confront is a Catholic who knows scripture. Every time I get in a conversation with one and they realise I know Scripture, the conversation ends. And I am not the one who ends it.

The same holds true every time some JW comes to my door. I ALWAYS invite them inside and I begin speaking to them about Scripture. After about 10 mins, they say they have to go. I ask them to send one of their teachers back to speak with me and they promise they will.....they never come back and they never send their teachers...

BTW, most protestants don't understand Jesus is God and man

[trisham]

Mary, Mother of God bump.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I must say your post surprised me, because (closing my eyes here for a minute in concentration, trying to recall) I can't remember ever seeing a statue of Mary on an altar... not since I was a child.

You must understand that for the past 40 years, Catholic sanctuaries have been stripped and simplified in a process of iconoclasm (some of us call it "wreckovation") the like of which has scarcely been seen since the brute liturgical vandalism of, say, 1540-1580 in England.

Thousands of altars have been ripped out which portrayed, not only Mary, but as much of the court of heaven as the 19th century congregation could afford: cherubim and seraphim, patriarchs and prophets, apostles, confessors, virgins and martyrs, as thick as the roses on a wedding cake, tier on tier, the spiritual ancestry of every Catholic anthracite miner and laundress, boy and girl, our heaven-on-Kosciusko-Street, our family.

And now? A wood table! That's it! Empty rafters with lights and loudspeakers! Christ as abandoned as He was at Gethsemane. Buddy, we're all puritans now.

[eastsider]

Wow! We finally got around to discussing Nestorius. Thank you.

You're too funny, Salvation : )

Marcellino D'Ambrosio (there's a name for you!) summarizes the Nestorian heresy in a way that really highlights its internal inconsistency:

It is OK, according to Nestorius, to say that in Jesus, God raised Lazarus, or multiplied the loaves, or walked on water. But it is not OK to say that in Jesus God is born or that God died.

One the one hand, if God in Jesus did not die on the cross, then He was not truly human. If God in Jesus were not truly human, then there is no more merit in Jesus' death than in the deaths of the thieves with whom he was crucified. Neither is there forgiveness of sin nor resurrection of the dead. Our faith is in vain (cf 1Cor15:14).

On the other hand, if God in Jesus did die on the cross, then He was truly human, born of a woman, Mary, His mother.

[redgolum]

The same holds true every time some JW comes to my door. I ALWAYS invite them inside and I begin speaking to them about Scripture. After about 10 mins, they say they have to go. I ask them to send one of their teachers back to speak with me and they promise they will.....they never come back and they never send their teachers...

LOL! My Mom used to have a Bible study group that would meet at home. One day, a bunch of JW's showed up, and ran into the most dangerous force on the planet, the Lutheran Altar Guild. After 10 minutes they left running, and haven't been back to see my parents yet! My pastor felt sorry for them.

Anyway, back to the thread. You are painting with a pretty broad brush there. Many "Evangelicals" (I really hate that term) have a theology a mile wide and an inch deep. Many Catholics do also. The sad thing is that most Christians in the US don't know what or why they believe what they do. The great thing about the FR religion forum is that there is a large number of those who DO know what they believe, and will explain it.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Every doctrine about Mary is implicit in, and a support for, an essential doctrine about Christ.

Thing is, there have been hundreds, maybe thousands of Great Men of a type that, when they entered a room, people would look around and say, "Who is he?"

But when people saw and heard Jesus even just a little bit, they'd turn to each other and say, perplexed, "WHAT is he?"

Before the great Christological discussions of the first centuries of Christianity, we didn't even have a vocabulary. Words like "person" and "nature" and "being" and "essence" and "spirit" and "flesh" and "beget" and "father" and "mother"--- and their equivalents in, mostly, Greek --- didn't carry enough precision to express what we needed to say about this singularity, this unprecedented event, this God-Man, this Person.

People thought and prayed about this a lot, searched Scripture and crafted new words and put together a whole new philosophy of "the person." This is the "Christian anthropology" which has been going on for millennia. It's not something you can find on a refrigerator magnet.

[bornacatholic]

Brother, you know you are excised from that generalisation :)

However, it has been a fact of my life that EVERY time I have spoken about Jesus and Scripture with any protestant of any stripe, they quit the dialogue once they realise I know Scripture.

And I am on my best behavior ...:)

What makes every protestant quit the dialogue is my, (admittedly, stolen) exegesis on John Six and the Real Presence in the Eucharist. If one takes Jesus to be speaking symbolically or metaphorically about eating His Body and drinking His blood, once is forced to conclude He was saying the way to eternal life is to assault or persecute Him.

[Mad Dawg]

There is a rule in FR that one does not bring arguments from one thread to another.

Let's unite around that rule...

Only if I get to keep my bitterness, envy, strife, discord, and general nastiness.

[Mad Dawg]

I personally am sorry if you've been called a heretic. (However, I do have this new heat treatment I'd like for you to try out. It involves a stake ...)

I think orthodoxy in speech and in sort of conscious mental processing is hard enough to attain. As far as orthodoxy deep down inside, it's gotta be a gift. In my former life in the pulpit, my lips may have been saying "Grace, grace, grace," but my heart was saying "works, works, works," and I would venture to guess that nearly every sin after one makes one's more or less adult commitment to Jesus involves forgetting (a) that GOD loves you; and (b)that God LOVES you; and (c) that God loves YOU!

By which I mean to say that while I have no problem with somebody saying "that argument seems heretical", if somebody says "You're a heretic," I'm just going to say, "I already copped to that and have thrown myself on the mercy of the court."
And then I'm going to punch them in the eye.
No. wait.

I'm willing to play nice, but folks have to be willing to listen to what you actually say rather than what they want to think you said.

Oy, is THAT ever a learned skill! I often think of conversation beinglike artillery must have been in the old days. You know: you fire, and then somebody says where they think your shell landed, so you adjust and fire again. It's not easy.

[Blogger]

I personally am sorry if you've been called a heretic. (However, I do have this new heat treatment I'd like for you to try out. It involves a stake ...)
Not sure you really want that. It's been tried before, but the effects were not as they were intended to be.

[Mad Dawg]

I wonder how much useful can be learned from generalizations about such a varied and diverse group as "Protestants". And, truth be told, I wonder how many who call themselves Catholic believe the main tenets of the Faith. In any event, as the old saw has it, it's not how many times you've been through the Torah, but how many times the Torah has been through you.

Blogger is fortunate in that he has managed to avoid interaction with me before. He strikes me as smart and earnest and a lover of the Lord. I have no hope of dazzling him with any pretended brilliance. If I can be clear and have a sense that he understood what I was saying and I understood what he was saying, I'll be content with the interaction. I see how a purportedly reasonable and pious person can think what he seems to think. If he can see that about what we say about our Lady, that'll be a good thing.

[Mad Dawg]

Yeah, making martyrs always backfires. Bummer. It was such a NICE stake too ....

[Blogger]

I know some papal edicts you can burn on it ;)

[Mad Dawg]

Okay, you bring the edicts, I'll bring that scrap paper from the Wittenburg chapel door. Oooh ... Kindling!

[bornacatholic]

LOL Thanks for putting those words in my mouth, brother.

Your afflatic abilities are impressive :)

[bornacatholic]

Brother, MD. What, exactly, is your point?

It appears you find me nettlesome.