thatjoeguy:
When you say Mary only gave birth to the Man Jesus, when did the “man Jesus” as you state, become God. Did it happen when he was dedicated To God [Luke 2:21-28] when he was a 12 year old in the Temple [Lk 2: 41-50], when he was Baptized in the Jordan River [cf. Lk 3:21-22; MT 3: 13-17], did Christ Become God when the Father came to his aid by sending angels in the Temptations by Satan [cf. Mt 4:1-11], etc.
Mary gave birth to a Divine Person, as Christ is One Person. If as you state, Christ gave birth to only the Human person Jesus, then how to you reconcile his Divinity in the context of Trinitarian orthodoxy. If the Holy Trinity is rightly One God and 3 distinct Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then it was the 2nd Person of the Trinity who was Born of the Blessed Virgin Mary and that person [Christ], was Divine in Sustance and thus what you then say is Christ has both a True Divine Nature and True Human Nature, i.e. Christ is True God and True Man.
What you are stating was condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431 since it is not consistent with the Trinitarian Doctrine already formulated and it actuall distorts who Christ is.
Great post!
Many protestants don’t understand the Trinity. Just a few weeks a ago I was having a conversation with my mother in law,a methodist, and she did not believe that Christ existed until the annunciation. She learns all this from her weekly Bible study. What a mess!
I like what the late Blessed Fulton Sheen once said....
“It will be discovered that so called Christians who think they believe in the Divinity of Christ but do not believe in Mary as the Mother of God fall generally into four ancient heresies. They are Adoptionists, who believe that Christ was a mere man but after birth was adopted by God as His Son. Or they are Nestorians, who held that Mary gave birth to a man who had a close union with Divinity. Or they are Eutychians, who decided the human nature of Christ and hence made Mary merely, an instrument in a theophany. Or they are Docetists, holding that Christ’s nature was only a phantom or an appearance. Those who are offended at reverence paid Mary, if they will analyze their thoughts, will discover that they are holding a Docetist or some similar ancient error. Even if they profess the Divinity of Christ in His earthly existence, such people shrink from affirming that His human nature is glorified with Him at the right hand of the Father, where He makes intercession for us. As some no longer think Christ as God, so some no longer think of Christ as a glorified Man. If He is no longer Man, the relation of Mary to Him extends beyond Bethlehem and Calvary even to His Mystical Body the Church. No one, therefore, who thinks logically about Christ can understand such a question as: ‘Why do you speak so often of His Mother?’ “ (The World’s First Love, pg 71)
“When you say Mary only gave birth to the Man Jesus, when did the “man Jesus” as you state, become God.”
This is mincing words. Mary did not exist prior to the 2nd Person of the Trinity (God) plain and simple. Therefore Mary is not the mother of God. How you wish to explain His incarnation and birth is up to you. My whole point on the conversation was that Mary was only the vehicle which God used to bring Jesus into the world, that does not give her status to be prayed to and treated as a form of Deity.