Theotokos (Mother of God)

The title joins the Greek word for God to the verb for giving birth: the God-bearer, the one who gave birth to God. English service books usually render it "Mother of God" or "Birth-giver of God." The word was not invented in the fifth century; it had long been in devotional use among Christians, especially in Egypt, before any council ruled on it. The Church at Ephesus did not coin a title so much as defend a prayer the faithful were already praying.

Scripture itself speaks this way. When the Virgin, already carrying her Child, visits her kinswoman, Elizabeth cries out, "And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" (Luke 1:43). St. Paul writes that "God sent forth his Son, made of a woman" (Galatians 4:4). The logic is simple and staggering: the Child is one Person, and that Person is the Lord; therefore His mother is the mother of the Lord.

The crisis came when Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, began preaching against the title. Mary, he argued, bore the man Jesus, the temple in which God dwelt — call her mother of Christ, but not Mother of God, for God can have no mother. It sounded careful and pious. But St. Cyril of Alexandria saw what was at stake: if Mary did not give birth to God, then the child in the manger is not God — and the union of God and man in Christ splits into two sons loosely joined, leaving humanity saved by a man rather than by God.

The Third Ecumenical Council, meeting at Ephesus in 431, vindicated the title. No one, of course, claimed that Mary is the origin of the divine nature — the Son is eternal, without beginning, and His Godhead takes nothing from her. She is Theotokos because the One she conceived and bore is God the Son made flesh: mothers give birth to persons, not to natures. Twenty years later Chalcedon fixed the grammar permanently, confessing Christ "born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood."

Every Marian title in Orthodoxy is finally Christological, and Theotokos most of all: it is the shortest confession of the-incarnation the Church possesses. Whoever says "Mother of God" has already said that Jesus is God, that God has truly become man, and that the union began not at His baptism or His resurrection but in a womb. That is why St. Gregory the Theologian, half a century before Ephesus, could write: "If anyone does not believe that Holy Mary is the Mother of God, he is severed from the Godhead."

Because of her Son, the Church honors Mary above every other creature — the services call her more honorable than the cherubim — asks her prayers, and keeps her feasts from the Annunciation to her Dormition. This honor is veneration, not worship, which belongs to God alone. The Theotokos would have it no other way; her last recorded words in Scripture point past herself to her Son: "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it" (John 2:5).