So probably my most favorite season is the season of Christmas. I think as a pastor, I certainly love all of the Christmas hymns and carols, the rich incarnation theology, meditating on the fact that God the sun became man for us and for our salvation.

This is a great mystery that highlights the love of God.

And at the heart of the incarnation was a debate,

a question about how to refer to Mary.

Is Mary the mother of God?

Okay, so the theological or the technical phrase that's used for this, we sometimes refer to

Mary as the godbearer, or in Greek the the teotocos. I think that's how the Greeks say it. So if you want to say it right, you've got to say Teotokos. Don't say Theodocus, which is how I used to say it. Sort of sounds like a transformer or something like that. Teotokos is what you want to say. And that just means Godbearer, that Mary bore God the Son.

Others who were labeled as heretics referred to Mary as the Christ bearer, the Christo Tocos.

And that was seen as a great heresy.

And so people wonder, you know, sometimes this conversation will come up in the context of, you know, friends gathering together to drink eggnog or something like that, or maybe on social media. And they wonder, well, how should we refer to Mary? And somebody says, the mother of God. And people say, no, how could you say that? She's the mother of Christ. Well, this is something that was actually settled by the early church. And there are a number of quotes that we could look at. The early church father, Gregory Nazianzus, wrote to Clodonius

against Apollinaris, an early heretic. Here's what he said. If anyone does not believe that Holy Mary

is the mother of God, he is severed from the godhead. If anyone should assert that he passed through the Virgin as

through a channel and was not at once divinely and humanly formed in her, divinely because without the

intervention of a man, humanly because in accordance with the laws of gestation, he is in like manner

godless. If any assert that the manhood was formed and

afterward was clothed with the godhead, he too is to be condemned. Similarly, the father

Cyril of Alexandria wrote to the heretic Nestorius, if anyone does not confess that Emmanuel is God in truth, and therefore

the Holy Virgin is Theotokos, for she bore in the flesh, the word of God become flesh. Let him be

anathema. In order to understand this crucial doctrine and the reason it was treated as a litmus test for orthodoxy,

we need to unpack the how and the why behind it.

First, it's important we understand that Mary is not the God-bearer in the sense that Jesus took his divine nature from her.

He is the eternal son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds.

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