Lately on Twitter, there’s been a resurgence of Christological heresy because some Roman Catholics have been posting some weird stuff on the Virgin Mary. But in their zeal to oppose anything which may in any way be remotely adjacent to Catholic theology, hoards of (certain) Baptists are, yet again, outing themselves as Nestorians. Nestorians, famously, separate Christ’s divinity and humanity in such a way that we end up with two persons.1 And in the current Twitter feuds, certain Baptists are refusing to call Mary the mother of God because she has not created God. But, as we all know, mothers are mothers of persons, not natures, and if Christ is God, and Mary is his mother, Mary is the mother of God. If you deny this, you deny the hypostatic union.
One weird thing I’ve come across, however, is when the more subtle of these people say that we shouldn’t call Mary ‘the mother of God’ but should, rather, use the Greek derived term theotokos, because it is, somehow, less ‘confusing.’ But that is just obfuscation. If ‘mother of God’ is confusing, why is it not confusing if we say it in Greek? Could it just be that these people actually don’t know that the Greek term literally means the same thing, and even makes it more radical?
The English term ‘mother,’ and its Greek and Latin equivalents mḗtēr and māter, can mean both birth mother and the person who raises you (but doesn’t give birth). You can talk about an adoptive mother but not an adoptive begetter. Theotokos, however, is much more radical. It is often translated ‘God-bearer,’ and that is a fine translation. Being born literally means that the one who gave birth to you was bearing you. But I think there is a more accurate translation, which shows why the aversion of ‘mother of God’ is not just bad theology but bad language. Theós means God, while tókos (‘childbirth, offspring’) derives from tíktō, ‘I beget.’ Theotokos, then, literally means ‘God-begetter.’
So no, affirm that Mary is the mother of God, the one who begets God. Or else, you deny the hypostatic union.