We call her Theotokos because that’s what she is: the one who bore God in her womb. The word means “God-bearer” in Greek, sometimes translated “Mother of God.” But this isn’t primarily about Mary. It’s about Jesus.
When we say Mary is Theotokos, we’re making a statement about who her son is. The child she carried for nine months, nursed, and raised in Nazareth wasn’t just a good man who God later adopted or indwelt. He was, from the moment of conception, fully God and fully man in one Person. The divine Word, the second Person of the Trinity, took human flesh from Mary and became incarnate. That’s why she’s the Mother of God. Because the Person born of her is God.
This matters more than you might think.
What Happened at Ephesus
Back in 431 AD, a bishop named Nestorius started teaching that Mary should be called “Christotokos” (Christ-bearer) instead of Theotokos. Sounds like a minor distinction, right? But the Church recognized the danger immediately. Nestorius was dividing Christ into two persons, one divine, one human, loosely connected but not truly united. If Mary only bore the human person Jesus, then the Incarnation becomes something less than God himself taking on our flesh.
The Third Ecumenical Council met at Ephesus that year and affirmed Theotokos as the correct confession. Not because they wanted to elevate Mary to divine status. Because they needed to protect the truth about Christ. When you deny that Mary bore God, you end up denying that God truly became man. You split Christ in half.
The council wasn’t inventing something new. Christians had been calling Mary Theotokos for centuries. Ephesus simply defended what the Church had always believed against a teaching that threatened to unravel the Incarnation itself.
Why Southeast Texas Baptists Struggle With This
If you grew up Baptist or non-denominational around here, calling Mary the “Mother of God” probably sounds wrong. Maybe even blasphemous. God doesn’t have a mother, right? He’s eternal.
You’re not wrong about God’s eternality. The divine nature has no beginning. But here’s the thing: Mary didn’t give birth to a nature. She gave birth to a Person. And that Person is the eternal Son of God who took human nature from her. She’s the mother of Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is God. Therefore she’s the Mother of God.
Think about it this way. Your mother didn’t give birth to your body and then separately to your soul. She gave birth to you, a person with both body and soul. Same principle here, though infinitely more mysterious. Mary gave birth to the one Person of Christ, who possesses both divine and human natures without confusion or separation.
We’re not saying Mary existed before God or that she’s the source of the divine nature. We’re saying the Person she bore in Bethlehem is the same Person who created the universe. That’s the scandal and glory of the Incarnation. God didn’t just send a messenger or possess a human. He became human, taking flesh from a teenage girl in an occupied province of the Roman Empire.
Veneration, Not Worship
Here’s where we need to be clear. We honor Mary highly. We ask her prayers. We celebrate her feasts. But we don’t worship her. Worship belongs to God alone, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The distinction matters. When we venerate Mary or the saints, we’re honoring them as members of Christ’s Body who’ve run the race and finished well. We’re asking their prayers just like you’d ask your grandmother to pray for you. When we worship, we’re acknowledging God as God, the source of all being, the one to whom we owe everything, the only one worthy of adoration.
Some of your Baptist relatives won’t understand this distinction. That’s okay. It takes time. But we can’t abandon the title Theotokos just because it makes some people uncomfortable. It’s not optional. It’s how the Church confesses that Jesus Christ is one Person, fully God and fully man, the Word made flesh.
What This Means on Sunday Morning
When you come to Liturgy at St. Michael’s, you’ll hear Theotokos constantly. We sing it in hymns. The priest says it in prayers. It’s woven throughout our worship because our worship is Christological. Everything we do proclaims who Jesus is.
And here’s the beautiful thing: once you understand why we call Mary Theotokos, you start to see the Incarnation differently. God didn’t keep himself at arm’s length from human existence. He entered it at the most vulnerable point imaginable, as an embryo in a virgin’s womb, dependent on her yes, carried and nourished by her body. That’s how much he loved us. That’s how real the Incarnation is.
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware writes about this with such clarity in The Orthodox Way. If you’re wrestling with the Theotokos and want to go deeper, that book will help. But honestly, the best way to understand it is to keep showing up, keep praying, keep listening. The Church has been confessing this truth for two thousand years. It’ll grow on you.
When you call Mary the Theotokos, you’re not just honoring a saint. You’re confessing that the baby in the manger is the God who flung stars into space. You’re proclaiming that your salvation isn’t a legal fiction or a spiritual transaction but an actual union with the God who became what we are so we could become what he is. That’s the faith once delivered to the saints. That’s what we believe. That’s why we say it every time we gather.
