[metmom]

As someone pointed out upthread, the Holy Spirit is God as well as the Father.

By saying *mother of God*, it makes no distinction between the different members of the Trinity.

The excuse of using the term as a means of correcting erroneous teaching about Jesus isn’t a very effective one.

If there was erroneous teaching about the divinity of Jesus which needed correction, the better method would have been to address the teaching itself rather than renaming Mary, which is no more than treating a symptom at best, while leaving the illness uncured. The problem is that it doesn’t inherently lead to better teaching about Jesus. It opens the door wide to yet more erroneous teaching, and that concerning Mary. It solves nothing.

Renaming Mary as the *mother of God* is not an improvement as it really says a different thing than *mother of Jesus* argument about His divinity notwithstanding.

By that weak argument, of saying that.....

Mary is the mother of Jesus.
Jesus is God.
Therefore, Mary is the mother of God.

Then one could argue that....

Mary is the mother of God.
The Holy Spirit is God.
Therefore, Mary is the mother of the Holy Spirit.

and likewise.....

Mary is the mother of God.
The father is God.
Therefore, Mary is the mother of the Father.

If the Holy Spirit thought that naming Mary as the mother of God would ensure that correct teaching about Jesus, that it would be the result, surely He would have used the term in the first place.

I see no reason to *correct* the work of the Holy Spirit, as if what He did was lacking or inadequate, which is what whoever made that decision is saying.

[smvoice]

ANOTHER great post regarding Mary! WHO can argue with this and walk away with a straight face?!

[CynicalBear]

>> I see no reason to *correct* the work of the Holy Spirit, as if what He did was lacking or inadequate, which is what whoever made that decision is saying.<<

I agree. And to think the Holy Spirit forgot to define Mary’s role in our salvation as Catholics see it is beyond comprehension.

[Mrs. Don-o]

You have a verbal argument there which adds up only if one ignores the fact that sometimes we use the word "God" to mean the Godhead, the Trinity, and sometimes we use "God" to mean, for instance the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit as distinct Persons.

For instance, we say without hesitation that Jesus is the Son of God. But --- though the Trinity is God --- we don't mean He's the "son of the Trinity." He's the Son of the Father.

Likewise, although we say that Jesus is the Son of God, we don't mean He's the Son of the Holy Spirit. We can't say:

Jesus is the Son of God.

The Holy Spirit is God.

Therefore, Jesus is the Son of the Holy Spirit.

Keeping that in mind, we can say that Mary is the Mother of God only in this sense: that she gave birth to a particular, individual Person, a baby known as Jesus Christ, and that Person is God.

There are other, heretical, senses which must be excluded: that she be erroneously thought to be the Mother of the Trinity; or that she be thought to be older than God (!); that she be though to be the mother of the Father or of the Holy Spirit; or that she be thought the creator of the Creator, or the ultimate source of Being; or that she be thought to take precedence over her Son in all things, by virtue of supposedly being before Him. All that would be false and heretical.

Almost any doctrine of the Faith can be understood in its true sense, or misunderstood in some heretical sense.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain the true sense.

I think it's important because Mary did not give birth to a "nature", but to a person. It's like this: say you're Jane Jones and you marry Sam Smith, and you have a child. You are not just the mother of half of him, the Jones part of him: you are his mother, plain and simple: because you gave him birth.

Putting it in this way is necessary to protect and emphasize the indivisible Personhood of Christ, which is the whole point of this doctrine.