JEK@NIHCU (James Kiefer) (01/16/90)
Often disputes are caused less by disagreement on points of fact than by the use of a term in two different senses without the disputants' realizing it. Thus, we had a brisk exchange a while back over the posting of a statement something like, "A majority of those who abort are Christians," which was intended by the poster to mean, "More than 50% of all women who seek abortions would check the first blank on a questionaire that read Religion: [ ] Christian [ ] Jewish [ ] Moslem [ ] Atheist [ ] Other," but was taken by many readers to mean, "Over 90% of all physicians who perform abortions are devout, church-going born-again types who divide their time between praying, Bible-reading, and ripping little babies limb from limb." Once a few terms (like "majority" and "who abort" and "Christians") were defined, the uproar died down immediately. More recently, we had a dispute about whether a given statement was a "Christian statement," by which some parties meant a statement that a Christian could make, and others a statement that ONLY a Christian could make. Once again, things got a little calmer when it became clear what the disputants meant. Many Christians who are not accustomed to the term "Mother of God" are uneasy when they hear it, since they reason somewhat as follows: "When we say that John and Susan are the parents of George, we mean that they are jointly the cause of George's existence and that his being is derived from theirs, that they existed at a time before he began to exist, and that they are in some sense his superiors. Now God has no superiors, and no beginning in time, and his being is not derived from or caused by anyone else. Therefore God cannot have a parent, and speak of the Mother of God is to turn Christianity into something like Greek polytheism, in which Aphrodite is the Mother of Eros, or Alcmena the mother of Heracles." It is therefore necessary to state clearly what the phrase "Mother of God" means. Nestorius taught that Christ was not one person, but two: the man Jesus and the Divine Son of God, both in the same body. He taught that the man Jesus was holy and sinless, and that therefore the Divine Son dwelt in his heart, but not in a way different in principle from that in which God may be said to dwell in the heart of any good man, only more so in Jesus, because he was an especially good man. (Okay, so his position was a little more subtle than that. I am giving you the Reader's Digest version.) Nestorius's opponents saw that this undermined the whole basis of Christian faith, that it turned Jesus into a man completely guided by God, but nothing more. They looked for a formula that would express the Christian doctrine about Christ in such a way as to exclude the position of Nestorius and his followers, and settled on two turns of phrase. The first was, "Christ is one person." The second, perhaps adopted because it was felt that a Nestorian might agree to use the first, but interpret it in his own way, was, "The Virgin Mary is the Mother of God." By this we understand that it is one and the same Person who is both God and Man, that He Who was confined in the womb of the Virgin Mary for nine months is the same as He Who fills heaven and earth, that He Who derived His first nourishment from her body is He Who is the Living Bread that gives life to the world, that He Whom she held in her arms when His neck was not strong enough for Him to lift His head and gaze around Him is He Whose hand flipped the galaxies through space like so many frisbees. Between God and man, between the Infinite and the finite, between the Creator and the created, there is a vast abyss. It is bridged only by Him Who is in Himself both God and man. And if He is not truly one, if the voice that says "I" through His lips is sometimes God and sometimes man, but not both, if He Who calls Mary His creature is a different person from Him Who calls her His mother, then the bridge is still unbuilt, the gulf between God and man remains, and out faith is in vain. And this is what Christians have meant by calling Mary the Mother of God. On the other hand, I can understand why the formula causes aversion and bewilderment to those who do not know its background. They think it means that the Divine Essence was somehow derived from the Human Essence of Mary, that Deity evolved out of Humanity. And this they are right to repudiate. Perhaps a new formulation of the doctrine is called for, one that would be less open to misunderstanding. Mary the Surrogate Mother of God? Or would that simply create new difficulties? Yours, James Kiefer