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The Council of Ephesus decreed in 431 that Mary is “Theotokos”. Doesn’t that mean God-bearer, or the one who gives birth to God?

I suspect most Protestants would find Theotokos - Bearer of God - easier to understand as a concept and less susceptible to misinterpretation than ‘Mother of God’. FWIW.

I think you’re right.

The now dead theologian McQuarrie, A Scots Presbyterian, once wrote a nice article showing that when you think about it (as I tried to do in my previous post) "bearer" and "mother" are actually pretty muich the same. The thinking, it seems, has to be done over what we mean buy "mother."

But still, yeah, deipara = theotokos seems a little less troubling. But we ain't re-writing our Hail Mary's at this point.

The Council of Ephesus decreed in 431 that Mary is “Theotokos”. Doesn’t that mean God-bearer, or the one who gives birth to God?

Yes,Theotokos (Θεοτόκος, translit. Theotókos) is a compound of two Greek words, Θεός God and τόκος parturition, childbirth. Literally, this translates as God-bearer or the one who gives birth to God

In many traditions, Theotokos was translated from the Greek into the local liturgical language. The most prominent of these were Latin (Deipara, Dei genetrix and, as paraphrased, Mater Dei), Church Slavonic (Богородица translit. Bogoroditsa),

The term Mother of God has never been understood, or intended to be understood, as referring to Mary as Mother of God from eternity, that is, as Mother of God the Father, but only with reference to the birth of Jesus, that is, the Incarnation. This limitation in the meaning of Mother of God must be understood by the person employing the term. To make it explicit, it is sometimes translated Mother of God incarnate

However, those reading or hearing the English phrase Mother of God as a translation of a Greek text cannot — unless they know the Greek text in question, or obtain additional information — know whether the phrase is a literal translation of Μήτηρ Θεού or an imprecise rendering of Θεοτόκος or one its Latin equivalents or equivalents in other languages. Yet Luke 1:43 says "And whence [is] this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? "

I suspect most Protestants would find Theotokos - Bearer of God - easier to understand as a concept and less susceptible to misinterpretation than ‘Mother of God’. FWIW.

But it isn't misinterpreted -- no one in 2000 years has ever stated or insinuated or implied that Mary was anything but a creature. No one says that she was (very laughable) there at the time of creation -- she was NOT. Mary did NOT create God anymore than our mothers create our soul. We are beings of (as Iscool correctly put it) beings of flesh, spirit and soul -- and our mothers do not give us spirit or soul.

God the Son is begotten of God the Father "from all eternity" (if you believe in the Trinity -- Nograyzone, pardon!) but is born "in time" of Mary. Theotokos thus refers to the Incarnation, when the Second Person of the Holy Trinity took on human nature in addition to his pre-existing divine nature. We call Mary Theotokos to affirm the fullness of God's incarnation

The Council of Ephesus decreed, in opposition to those who denied Mary the title Theotokos ("the one who gives birth to God") but called her Christotokos ("the one who gives birth to Christ"), that Mary is Theotokos because her son Jesus is one person who is both God and man, divine and human. As Cyril of Alexandria wrote, "I am amazed that there are some who are entirely in doubt as to whether the holy Virgin should be called Theotokos or not. For if our Lord Jesus Christ is God, how is the holy Virgin who gave [Him] birth, not [Theotokos]?" (Epistle 1, to the monks of Egypt; PG 77:13B). Thus the significance of Theotokos lies more in what it says about Jesus than any declaration about Mary.

The use of Theotokos was formally affirmed at the Third Ecumenical Council held at Ephesus in 431. The competing view, advocated by Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople, was that Mary should be called Christotokos, meaning "Birth-giver of Christ," to restrict her role to the mother of Christ's humanity only and not his divine nature.

Nestorius' opponents, led by Cyril of Alexandria, viewed this as dividing Jesus into two distinct persons, the human who was Son of Mary, and the divine who was not. To them, this was unacceptable since by destroying the perfect union of the divine and human natures in Christ, it sabotaged the fullness of the Incarnation and, by extension, the salvation of humanity. The council accepted Cyril's reasoning, affirmed the title Theotokos for Mary, and anathematised Nestorius' view as heresy.

Explaining his rejection of Nestorius' preferred title for Mary (Christotokos), Cyril wrote: "Confessing the Word to be united with the flesh according to the hypostasis, we worship one Son and Lord, Jesus Christ. We do not divide him into parts and separate man and God as though they were united with each other [only] through a unity of dignity and authority... nor do we name separately Christ the Word from God, and in similar fashion, separately, another Christ from the woman, but we know only one Christ, the Word from God the Father with his own flesh... But we do not say that the Word from God dwelt as in an ordinary human born of the holy virgin... we understand that, when he became flesh, not in the same way as he is said to dwell among the saints do we distinguish the manner of the indwelling; but he was united by nature and not turned into flesh... There is, then, one Christ and Son and Lord, not with the sort of conjunction that a human being might have with God as in a unity of dignity or authority; for equality of honor does not unite natures. For Peter and John were equal to each other in honor, both of them being apostles and holy disciples, but the two were not one. Nor do we understand the manner of conjunction to be one of juxtaposition, for this is insufficient in regard to natural union.... Rather we reject the term 'conjunction' as being inadequate to express the union... [T]he holy virgin gave birth in the flesh to God united with the flesh according to hypostasis, for that reason we call her Theotokos... If anyone does not confess that Emmanuel is, in truth, God, and therefore that the holy virgin is Theotokos (for she bore in a fleshly manner the Word from God become flesh), let him be anathema." (Cyril's third letter to Nestorius)