Why Christians Call Mary Theotokos (Part 2)

by on May 19, 2025 | Comment

The great Cappadocian theologian Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329–c. 90) had addressed the same concerns expressed by the Nestorians decades before proclaiming:

If anyone does not believe that holy Mary is Theotokos, he is severed from the Godhead. If any one should assert that he passed through the Virgin as through a channel,1 and was not at once divinely and humanly formed in her (divinely, because without the intervention of a man; humanly, because in accordance with the laws of gestation), he is in like manner godless. If any assert that the manhood was formed, and that afterwards God insinuated himself into the manhood, he is to be 180 condemned. For this is not a generation of God, but a shirking of A generation. If any introduce the notion of two sons, one of God the Father, the other of the mother, and discredits the unity and identity, may he lose his part in the adoption promised to those who believe aright. For God and man are two natures, as also soul and body are; but there are not two Sons or two Gods. For neither in this life are there two manhoods; though Paul speaks in some such language of the inner and the outer man. And (if I am to speak concisely) the Saviour is made of elements which are distinct from one another (for the invisible is not the same as the visible, nor the timeless as that which is subject to time), yet he is not two. God forbid! For both are one by the combination, the Deity being made man and the manhood deified, or however one should express it. And I say different elements, because it B is the reverse of what is the case in the Trinity; for there we acknowledge different Persons so as not to confound the Hypostases; but not different elements, for the Three are one and the same in Godhead.2

The orthodox criticized Nestorius and his followers for denying the personal union of the two natures of Christ and of making Christ, were it possible, into two persons. The ecumenical Council of Ephesus (AD 431) condemned Nestorius and his followers for this error. Indeed, the Nestorian heresy is one of the great heresies against our “undoubted holy catholic faith” as we say in Heidelberg Catechism 22. In Belgic Confession article 19 we confess, “We believe that by being thus conceived the person of the Son has been inseparably united and joined together with human nature, in such a way that there are not two Sons of God, nor two persons, but two natures united in a single person, with each nature retaining its own distinct properties.”

The other great heresy of this period, however, was the opposite of Nestorius’. Eutyches (c. 378–454) was Abbot of a monastery in Constantinople. He was so enraged by Nestorius’ teaching that he began to teach that there are not really two natures in the one person of Christ but only one nature. This is the monophysite heresy (mono = one, physis = nature).3

Because of his errors Eutyches was removed from his position by the Archbishop of Alexandria, but Eutyches appealed to Leo I (†461), Bishop of Rome. On June 13, 449, Leo responded to Flavian in what became a famous letter known as the Tome and he denounced Eutyches’ doctrine. He complained that Eutyches did not even understand the Apostles’ Creed: “He might at least have listened attentively to that general and uniform confession, whereby the whole body of the faithful confess that they believe in GOD the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. By which three statements the devices of almost all heretics are overthrown.”4

In other words, insofar as Christ, by the mysterious operation of the Holy Spirit, took his humanity from the virgin, he is born of the Virgin Mary but insofar as he is the co-eternal, consubstantial second person of the Trinity, he is the eternally and only begotten Son of God.5

Leo’s Tome was an important source for the Definition produced by and adopted at the Council of Chalcedon two years later. In the fifth session of the Council, October 22, 451, “the deacon Asclepiades of Constantinople read a doctrinal formula, which had been unanimously approved on the previous day.”6 Apparently, however, that formula (not recorded for us) was a bit vague and objections were raised. “Bishop John of Germanicia declared that this formula was not good, and that it must be improved. Anatolius replied, asking ‘whether it had not yesterday given universal satisfaction,’ which produced the acclamation: ‘It is excellent, and contains the Catholic faith. Away with the Nestorians! The expression θεοτόκος must be received into the creed.’”7 For their part, the Western Bishops demanded that Leo’s Tome be agreed to or they would leave and hold their own council. Some of the Bishops charged John of Germanicia with Nestorianism.8 Others complained that those who criticized Leo’s Tome, were Eutychians.9 As often happens in these cases, a committee was appointed and they returned with what we know as the Definition of Chalcedon affirming Cyril’s critique of Nestorius and Leo’s rejection of Eutyches, and confessing Christ was “born of the Virgin Mary, the God-bearer” (theotokos).10

The term theotokos or Mother of God should not trouble us. The person in the womb of the virgin was the God-Man. We cannot deny theotokos without becoming Nestorians. Remember that at Chalcedon the church qualified the sense in which Mary is theotokos by adding the phrase, according to the Humanity. No orthodox person ever intended to suggest that the deity of Christ was generated by or even in the womb of a virgin. Rather, against the Eutychians and the Nestorians, the orthodox confess and affirm, in the Definition of Chalcedon, that Christ is one person and is to be “acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably.”

This is why the great Reformed theologian Francis Turretin four times defended the expressions theotokos and “Mother of God:”

Although the blessed virgin was truly “highly favored” (kecharitōmenē), loved and chosen by God above other women that she might conceive and bring forth the Son of God and may truly be called “mother of God” (theotokos), still that distinguished and evidently singular privilege by which she was raised to the highest degree of happiness did not hinder her from being conceived and born after the common manner of other mortals—in and with original sin.11

Thus Mary can truly be called theotokos or “mother of God,” if the word “God” is taken concretely for the total personality of Christ consisting of the person of the Logos (Logou) and the human nature (in which sense she is called “the mother of the Lord,” Lk. 1:43), but not precisely and abstractly in respect of the deity.12

Mary is rightly called the Mother of God (theotokos) in the concrete and specifically because she brought forth him who is also God, but not in the abstract and reduplicatively as God. 13

The title Mother of God given to the virgin was perverted by superstitious men into an occasion of idolatry, as Paul Sarpi observes.14

Lest anyone think that Turretin’s affirmations are unusual or were not adopted by the Dutch Reformed, Geerhardus Vos also defended these expressions:

It must in fact be said: Mary gave birth to God (according to His human nature); that is to say, the subject, who is God, has undergone the process of being born by the Virgin Mary. When the Nestorians did not admit this but wished to speak of the χριστότοκος, their heresy is fully expressed in this contrast. For them, the Christ is something other than the Logos-God; the former is the abstraction of human and divine persons taken together. For us, the person of Christ is the same as the person of the Logos.15

It is useful to review this old controversy because by reviewing it we learn the boundary markers of Christian orthodoxy and we have the opportunity to think through our language about the Savior and reconnect with our ancient family members who worked through questions that have resurfaced in our time. We are not alone. We are part of a great and wonderful ecumenical faith and church. We are not reinventing the doctrinal and liturgical wheel as much as we are learning again what the wheel is and why it was formed in the first place.

Notes

  1. This was the view of the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century and remains the view of not a few American evangelicals. On this see the following: R. Scott Clark, Christ Did Not Change But The Water Did. Idem, Born of a Woman: Against the Star Trek Christology.
  2. Stevenson and Kidd, eds., ibid., 88–89.
  3. The adjective mis was discussed at Chalcedon and rejected. See Charles Joseph Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church, trans. Edward Hayes Plumptre, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1883), 347. While we are at it, the reader should also beware of a version of this error known as the miaphysite Christology since mia is another Greek word for one and physis still means nature.
  4. Leo the Great, “Letters,” in Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, vol. 12a, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1895), 39.
  5. Ibid., 39.
  6. Hefele, A History of the Councils, 3.342.
  7. Hefele, ibid., 3.343.
  8. Hefele, ibid., 3.343.
  9. Hefele, ibid., 3.345.
  10. Hefele, ibid., 3.348.
  11. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 9.10.21, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. George Musgrave Giger, vol. 1–2 (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1992–1997), 635–310.
  12. Turretin, ibid., 13.5.18.
  13. Turretin, ibid., 13.7.11.
  14. Turretin, ibid., 13.7.12.
  15. Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. and trans. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., vol. 3 (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012–2016), 60–61.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

Part One

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  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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