Theotokos

“And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”

— Luke 1:43 (ESV)

Theotokos (Greek for “God-bearer,” traditionally rendered “Mother of God”) is the title the church settled on for Mary, affirming that the child she bore was, from conception, God the Son himself and not merely a man later joined to God.¹ The title is a claim about Christ’s own person, not an honor paid to Mary.¹ Nestorius rejected it for Christotokos (“Christ-bearer”); the Council of Ephesus (431) and Council of Chalcedon (451) affirmed it as guarding the hypostatic union.²

Confessional Definition

The question Theotokos answers, whether the man born of Mary is one person or two, was settled for the whole church centuries before the Reformation. The Council of Chalcedon’s own Definition of Faith, in AD 451, confesses:

“One and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ; the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in Manhood; truly God, and truly Man… in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of Mary the Virgin Mother of God according to the Manhood. He is one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, existing in two natures without mixture, without change, without division, without separation; the diversity of the two natures not being at all destroyed by their union, but the peculiar properties of each nature being preserved, and concurring to one person and one subsistence.”³

Bavinck ties the title directly to that Definition’s own four negatives: Chalcedon “correctly pronounced that the union of the divine and the human nature in Christ was without division and without separation,” while insisting “with equal firmness that the union was without change and without confusion. Mary is thus properly called ‘mother of God’ (θεοτοκος).”⁴

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not use the word Theotokos, but its own Christology chapter states the same doctrine the title protects: the Son of God “did… take upon him man’s nature… so that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion; which person is very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and man.”⁵

Biblical Basis

When the pregnant Mary visited her relative Elizabeth, Elizabeth exclaimed, “why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43), addressing the child Mary had only just conceived as “my Lord.” Gill treats this greeting as evidence for the personal union of Christ’s two natures already at conception, not merely at birth: he dates “the union of the two natures, divine and human, in the person of the Son of God” to “the article of conception,” citing this same verse.⁶ Paul names the same person both God’s Son and one born of a woman in a single sentence: “God sent forth his Son, born of woman” (Gal. 4:4).

Historical Development

Theotokos was already a common way of referring to Mary in the church well before it became controversial.² The dispute broke out in the fifth century between two schools of Christological thought, one centered in Antioch and one in Alexandria.² Nestorius, trained at Antioch and serving as patriarch of Constantinople, argued that “the eternal God, who is without beginning and without end, could not have spent nine months in a woman’s womb and been born,” and preferred Christotokos (“Christ-bearer”) as a term he thought “embraced both aspects of the nature of Christ.”⁷ Some of his allies went further and wanted Mary called Anthropotokos (“Bearer of Man”) outright, reasoning that “a human could not give birth to anything but a human.”⁷

Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, answered that the logic behind Christotokos, let alone Anthropotokos, could not be squared with Scripture’s own way of speaking of ordinary birth:

“I am amazed that there are some who are extremely doubtful whether the holy Virgin should be called Mother of God or not. For if our Lord Jesus Christ is God, then surely the holy Virgin who gave him birth must be God’s mother…. [M]others of ordinary people… are said to give birth, not to a part of a person but to the whole person, consisting of soul and body.”⁸

The Council of Ephesus sided with Cyril in 431 and affirmed Theotokos.⁹ The Council of Chalcedon reaffirmed the title in its own Definition of Faith in 451.³

Opposing Views

Nestorianism rejects Theotokos for Christotokos, holding that the eternal Son and the man born of Mary remained joined only by a moral union rather than one person, so that Mary bore the man but not, properly, God himself.

Roman Catholic Mariology accepts Theotokos but builds substantially beyond it. Hodge, no friend of the later development, still traces its starting point to Ephesus’s ruling: in the years following the council, “the deification of the Virgin Mary in the Church of Rome was a slow process,” moving from the assertion of Mary’s perpetual virginity, to a supernatural birth as well as conception, to feasts, shrines, and invocations addressed to her directly, including a “Psalter of the Virgin” that applies to Mary language the Psalms address to God alone.¹⁰ Reformed theology holds the title itself is warranted while rejecting everything built onto it afterward: the same predication Scripture already applies to Christ from either of his two natures, calling him “the Son of man” when speaking of his deity filling all things, or “God” when speaking of his birth, is what justifies calling Mary “Mother of God” without implying any of Rome’s later claims about her.¹¹

Objections and Responses

Calling Mary “Mother of God” makes a creature the source of deity. Hodge answers that the title is “proper and according to the analogy of Scripture”: the Virgin was the mother of Christ, and Christ is God manifest in the flesh, so calling her the mother of God no more implies she is the source of his deity than calling him the Son of Man denies that deity.¹¹ Hodge dates the title’s origin to the Nestorian controversy itself: it was “rendered rather as a vindication of the divinity of Christ, than as an exaltation of the glory of the Blessed Virgin,” answering Nestorius’s suggestion that the Logos merely inhabited a separate human person, not proposing any new honor for Mary.¹

If the title is proper, why did the Reformers not build on it the way Rome did? Hodge does not treat the title’s later history as proof that the title itself was unsafe to affirm. He grants that Ephesus’s decision “tended to increase the superstitious reverence for the Virgin” among people who took it as “tantamount to a declaration of divinity,” but locates the error in what was added afterward: invocations, shrines, and a “Psalter of the Virgin” that Scripture never authorized, not in the council’s own ruling about Christ’s person.¹¹

Related Doctrines

References

Charles Hodge, “Chapter XIX. The Law,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 283. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 8, “Truly God and Truly Man,” 80. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 118-119. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 5, chap. 1. ↩
Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 81. ↩ ↩²
Cyril of Alexandria, Letter 1 to the Monks of Egypt, in The Later Christian Fathers, ed. and trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 252, quoted in Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 81. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 400. ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume III, 283-285. ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume III, 284. ↩ ↩² ↩³