Yaldat Msiha and the Refusal of a Council's Word

The Church of the East confesses Mary as Yaldat Msiha, Mother of Christ, and has never adopted the title Theotokos, God bearer, that the Council of Ephesus defined as proper in 431. The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity records that the community did not receive Ephesus at all, so the title it declined to add was never a council it accepted as binding on its own liturgy or catechesis in the first place. The reasoning behind the preference is theological rather than merely a historical accident: Mother of Christ keeps the two natures, divine and human, distinct in the very grammar of the title, naming what was born of her without collapsing the human birth into a claim that God as God was born, a distinction the church's East Syriac theologians held necessary to state clearly rather than leave implicit. The community's own answer to critics is that it honours Mary fully as the mother of the one Christ who is both God and man, so the dispute concerns the wording judged safest for stating an incarnation both sides otherwise confess, not whether Mary is honoured as the mother of the one born of her. Read on its own terms rather than through the accusation levelled against it, the title is a considered theological choice rather than an evasion.