Mary Confessed as Mother of Christ Rather Than Mother of God

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.

Opponents of the Church of the East read its refusal of Theotokos as evidence that it denies the one born of Mary is truly God, the charge of Nestorianism that has followed the church since the fifth century controversies surrounding Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, whose own teaching the church's theologians have long argued was itself misrepresented by his opponents. For centuries the accusation stood without any formal exchange capable of resolving it, since the Church of the East had separated from the imperial church of the Roman world and continued its life largely under Persian and later Islamic rule, outside the channels through which such disputes were ordinarily settled. That changed in 1994, when Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV signed a Common Christological Declaration stating that the two churches confess the same faith in the Son of God, expressed in different formulations shaped by their different theological and liturgical traditions, and explicitly recognising both Mother of Christ and Mother of God as legitimate ways of expressing that shared confession. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church records the declaration as part of a wider late twentieth century pattern of formal reconciliation between churches separated by christological disputes going back to the fifth century, addressing the title itself rather than merely setting the historical dispute aside unresolved.