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"Mother of God says that God has a mother as opposed to JESUS having a mother."

This is where the misapprehension lies. There is nothing in "Mother of God" that's opposed to "Mother of Jesus."

Like good judges, we should take care to look into the legislative history. You with me on this?

The term "Mother of God" came out of the Council Ephesus (431 AD)specifically to uphold he Biblical rtuth about Jesus and refute the Nestorian heresy. Jesus possesses fully the nature of God and the nature of man: we can describe Him as true God and true man.

He has a human body and a human soul. With His brain He thought just as other humans think. With his will and His emotions he desired, and chose, and loved and felt just as other humans do. Scripture says that He is human, like us in all things, except sin.

That is His human nature. Because He is a Divine Person,the Eternally existing Word and Son of the Father, equal to the Father and the Spirit in all things, He also has a divine nature. He is One Divine Person with two natures.

If Jesus was two different persons, then the Incarnation didn't happen. OK. No controversy so far, I hope.

Nestorius did not get it. He believed that Jesus Christ was "part" man. He believed that that Mary gave birth to Jesus, a being who was not-quite-human, separate from the divine Logos (a different person) but sort of possessed by Him. Nestorius thought Jesus did not have a human soul, so that in a sense he was a puppet. He was only wearing a "human costume," He was pretending to be human.

Nestorius didn't seem to grasp that in the absence of a human soul, Jesus would be a simulacrum, a zombie, in Hebrew terms a golem, less than human. This denies the reality of the Incarnation.

It was Nestorius who proposed that the long-used title for Mary, Theotokos ("God-bearer") --- derived from Elizabeth's greeting ("Who am I that the mother of my LORD should come to me?") --- was wrong, because the "man" Mary bore was neither really Man nor really God. It was Nestorius who proposed to substitute an innovation, a term he had coined, Christotokos, Christ-bearer.

The Council found him wrong because they saw that this was a rejection of the Incarnation, the fact that there is one Divine Person who possesses two complete natures, and that Jesus does indeed have a human soul (with human intellect and will) as well as the Divine attributes of infinite intellect and will.

Since any mother gives birth to a person (and not just a "nature,") Mary is the mother of the Person Jesus Christ, God and man.

It means she carried Him, Jesus Christ our God, in her womb and gave birth to Him. It does NOT mean she is "older than God" or some sort of Mothergod or goddess, or the "Source of the godhead" or "Mrs. Trinity" or that she somehow parthenogenically generated divine qualities or any such nonsense.

Just Google "Council of Ephesus," and you will see the legislative history. The whole intent of the title "Theotokos" is to safeguard the Biblical fact that Jesus is one Person with two complete natures.

However the title *mother of GOD* does not even address Jesus so it in no way corrects any heresies about His nature.

All it does is compound further error.

If there was a problem with people's understanding of the nature of Jesus, the correct response would have been correcting it with Scripture in which there is PLENTY of material to use.

Changing Mary's title from Mother of Jesus to Mother of God does nothing to correct errant teaching about Jesus' nature and does everything to introduce errant teaching about who Mary is and the nature of God.

Whether Nestorius taught anything contrary to a fully orthodox view of the incarnation as understood by Chalcedon is a subject of vigorous debate. There is explicit evidence, for example, that he did not oppose, in principle, the term "God-bearer" (theotokus), but he worried that if presented unqualified it would lead to wrong conclusions:

Seemingly oblivious to the trouble brewing, Nestorius wrote a third time to Celestinein November, saying he was not opposed to the use of Theotokos, “unless it should advance to the confusion of natures in the manner of the madness of Apollinaris or Arius.Nonetheless, I have no doubt that the term Theotokos is inferior to the term Christotokos” (DelCogliano 2005). It is clear from this and other comments of Nestorius that he was not entirely opposed to the use of Theotokos, but “he refuses to use it by itself, as Cyril constantly did, without adequate qualification” (Anastos 1962, 122).

See: http://www.academia.edu/2248412/Nestorius_did_not_intend_to_argue_that_Christ_had_a_dual_nature_but_that_view_became_labeled_Nestorianism_PRO_

In fact, the above article makes a good case that the accusations against Nestorius were based largely on terminological confusion rooted in Greek ontology, that Nestorius was in fact fully orthodox, even up to the measure of Chalcedon. Nestorius' view preserved both the unity of Jesus as a person, thus human will, intellect, soul, but also provided for avoiding confusion of the two natures, a critical component of the Chalcedon formulation, thus making it possible and reasonable to discuss Mary as standing in a generative relationship to Jesus but not to God.

If you peel back the polemic intensity we all experience on these pages, I think you will find it is this Chalcedonian aversion to confusion of the two natures that drives the objection to the expression "Mother of God." Which expression of course was and is one possible way to understand "theotokus," but more compatible with sound doctrine is to render it as "God-bearer." By this means we can avoid the confusion that results when Mary seems by words to be placed in a generative relationship to God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, through an unwholesome lumping together of all the persons under the heading of "God," without, as Nestorius would implore us, adding helpful qualifications.

Peace,

SR

Fast Mary