She is qualifiedly Mother of God, and not the Queen of Heaven. And certainly not the Spouse of the Holy Spirit.
First posted August 4, 2024; appendix added November 15, 2024.
The standard syllogism used to establish that Mary is Mother of God runs this way:
Mary is mother of Jesus.
Jesus is God.
Therefore, Mary is mother of God.
What could be simpler and more obvious? Clearly, if you deny Mary the title “Mother of God,” you deny that Jesus is God! So goes the standard Catholic line.
I propose a reductio ad absurdum (1):
Whoever is mother of a person precedes him in time.
Mary is mother of God.
Therefore, Mary preceded God in time.
Here’s another (2):
By having sexual relations (or by insemination, anyway), a person’s mother brings him into being.
Mary is mother of God.
Therefore, by having sexual relations (or by insemination), Mary brought God into being.
For those lacking in logical training, a reductio ad absurdum attempts to show that a certain claim (here, that Mary is mother of God) is “absurd” by showing, through another argument, that the claim has unavoidable logical consequences that are themselves more obviously absurd.
Having argued with Catholics many times about such things,1 I know what the responses are. After the chest-beating self-righteous accusations of heresy and not believing that Jesus is God, the more reasonable Catholics will concede that it was not, exactly, an ordinary pregnancy. To that I respond, indeed, and therefore she was no ordinary mother. Does this have no consequences at all?
We do all agree (right? right?) that Mary did not precede God (the Son) in time nor bring him into being. Indeed, matters are quite the reverse: Mary bore her own creator when he came to live among us; and he existed from eternity, as she did not. But it is implied by the common notion of “mother” that a woman in some sense brings her child into being. We must not quibble about the sense, either, because regardless of the word’s proper definition, it is perfectly obvious and a very important point to admit that Mary did not bring God into being in the way that our own mothers brought us into being.
Here’s one more reductio (3):
A mother (in the ordinary sense) is the same ontological type of person as her son.
Her son is God.
Therefore, Mary is the same ontological type as her son, i.e., she is a goddess.
Again, this is not a straw man; I’m not accusing Catholics of believing this. They deny believing it. I say, rather, that the Catholic position is logically committed to the conclusion, whether they like it or not. Put differently, how can a supposed mother of God be anything other than a goddess? If she’s not a goddess, how would that work, exactly? A fully human woman is mother of God himself? Against this, the Orthodox adherents I have spoken to distance themselves from Catholic extremes when I raise these points. The Orthodox I have spoken to say that Mary was called “Mother of God” not to specifically honor her, but more specifically to avoid the heresy of Nestorianism, i.e., that there were two persons present in Jesus of Nazareth, one human and one divine. Nestorius maintained that Mary was mother of the human person of Jesus, but not the divine person. It was the purpose of the 431 A.D. Council of Ephesus to reject that two-persons view, and to maintain that there were two natures (divine and human) in one person; and that is very reasonable, and I do not reject this.
But, while huffing that they would never say Mary is a goddess, Catholics in fact embrace all the other consequences that would follow from the conclusion that she is of the same ontological type as her son. It’s remarkable if you look at it. I can list no fewer than seven:
- Mary is Mother of God.
- She is Queen of Heaven.2
- She is Spouse (or Wife) of the Holy Spirit; this is a later Catholic invention.
- Like Jesus, she was wholly without sin from birth: the Immaculate Conception.
- Like Jesus, she rose to Heaven directly and never died: the Assumption of Mary.3
- We pray to her for forgiveness of sins; she redeems us from our sins; she is called the Redemptrix or Co-Redemptrix.4
- There is a special sort of honor accorded her above every other human, including Enoch, Job, Moses, David, Elijah, Elisha, Hezekiah, John the Baptist,5 and all of the Apostles: hyper-dulia. But never “worship” (latria). Of course, of course!
Suppose there were some name that appeared in the Old Testament, and of this name, it was said she is Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Spouse of the Spirit, without sin, rose to Heaven, that we should pray to her for forgiveness of our sins, and that she is honored above all human beings. You’d assume that name referred to a goddess, wouldn’t you? Indeed, it would be natural to suppose she was queen of the gods.
Let me give you two more reductios that will, I hope, bring home these points. Here is (4):
Mary is mother of Jesus.
Jesus is God.
Therefore, God is the Child (or Son) of Mary.
Well? Still comfy? In fact, Catholics do call Jesus (using that name in particular) the Child of Mary. That’s an eighth way they have of honoring Mary. This might seem appropriate as you gaze upon an icon of “Madonna and Child,” with a young Mary and an infant Jesus. But, curiously, for some reason, you will never find Catholics saying that God is the Child of Mary. Why not? It follows just as well (or poorly) as all the other conclusions. When will the Pope make an ex cathedra declaration that God is the Child of Mary?
We can draw one more rather, um, surprising reductio (5):
Mary is mother of God.
God is creator of all human beings and father of all his spiritual children—we who are children of God.
Therefore, Mary is her own grandmother.
This follows perfectly well from the Catholic style of reasoning on such matters. If you’re allowed to draw inferences while ignoring special (indeed, utterly and necessarily unique) uses of “mother” and “father,” then you’re committed to the conclusion that Mary is her own grandma. Do not complain that this is absurd. Of course it’s absurd. The whole point is that it’s absurd. The point, moreover, is that Catholics have no way to avoid the conclusion without saying, “Well, you’re just using ‘mother’ or ‘father’ in a special way, so the argument commits an informal fallacy of ambiguity, namely, that of equivocation. Look it up!” Yes, well spotted, my casuistic friend, these words are used in a special sense. Maybe now you can understand why I say your equally equivocal syllogisms do not follow either.
This should make it clear how Protestants ought to respond to the original syllogism: the conclusion does not follow because ‘mother’ is not used in its ordinary, full-blooded sense in the case of Mary and Jesus. That said, I am actually comfortable saying that Mary is Mother of God (I prefer Theotokos, God-bearer), but only if we are prepared to say that this is a term of courtesy as far as she is concerned, and only if the term is introduced only to dignify Christ, not Mary. If we take this step, as Lutherans and Anglicans do, we should strictly deny the further conclusions that Catholics draw.
Appendix: The proper solutions to the five reductios
Added November 15, 2024
I did not really want to leave you hanging, if you found the five reductios bothersome but did not know how best to think about them. So let us go through them again with a view of removing whatever remaining sense of paradox they might have.
Reductio (1):
Whoever is mother of a person precedes him in time.
Mary is mother of God.
Therefore, Mary preceded God in time.
The proper approach here is to reject the first sentence, as it does not apply in this one case. A little examination makes it obvious that this is the correct approach. While this is true of ordinary human pregnancies, Mary’s was no ordinary human pregnancy. God the Son was “made flesh” or “incarnate” upon his incarnation; in this act, he took on a human nature. This was utterly unique, and in this one case in which it was true, the first premise failed to be true.
This supports the (in retrospect, quite modest) conclusion of my little essay, namely, that Mary is “mother of God” only in a very special, non-ordinary sense: she did not precede him in existence.
Reductio (2) has a similar solution:
By having sexual relations (or by insemination, anyway), a person’s mother brings him into being.
Mary is mother of God.
Therefore, by having sexual relations (or by insemination), Mary brought God into being.
Again, we should reject the first premise, for reasons similar to the foregoing. In the incarnation, God the Son was not brought into being, because he pre-existed his incarnation. Still, it might be said that his human nature was “brought into being”; but Jesus, the Man-God, is not identical to his human nature, so we cannot say that Mary brought him into being.
Again, Mary is “mother of God” only in a very unusual sense: she did not bring him into existence in the ordinary way of human beings.
Here is reductio (3):
A mother (in the ordinary sense) is the same ontological type of person as her son.
Her son is God.
Therefore, Mary is the same ontological type as her son, i.e., she is a goddess.
As with (1) and (2), we here reject the first premise, as not applying to the case in question. But the challenge comes in when we explain why it is false. Orthodox Christology (after the Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451) has it that Jesus did indeed have a fully human nature, even while having a fully divine nature, united in one person. In the ordinary case of the biological and ontological relationship between mother and son, they are of the same ontological type. But insofar as Mary’s son also has a divine nature, while she does not (right? right?), it follows that she is not of the same ontological type of person as he whom we call, dignifying her, “her son.”
Once again, this entails that Mary is a “mother of God” only in a sense in which she is not of the same ontological type.
Here is reductio (4):
Mary is mother of Jesus.
Jesus is God.
Therefore, God is the Child (or Son) of Mary.
This might or might not be regarded as a reductio at all. Some might be perfectly prepared to embrace the conclusion. But because the formulation, “God is the Son of Mary,” is less familiar, it is certainly more jarring. This simply makes it very clear that “mother of God” is used in a special case.
And reductio (5):
Mary is mother of God.
God is creator of all human beings and father of all his spiritual children—we who are children of God.
Therefore, Mary is her own grandmother.
Unlike the other arguments, everyone can recognize why the conclusion does not follow: it commits the fallacy of ambiguity, i.e., it uses the same, or semantically connected, terms in very different senses. (A valid argument must use the same terms in the same sense.) We can see that “mother” and “father” and “grandmother” are used, in fact, in three different ways. Mary is “mother of God” in an utterly unique way. God is the “father” of us all insofar as he created us and insofar as we Christians, his faithful adherents, are adopted by him. Finally, “grandmother” is used in the perfectly ordinary sense, which is ridiculous to apply in the present case. I made this reductio not exactly to be clever but simply to make it abundantly clear that, if we ignore the senses in which key terms, like “mother,” are employed, then we can draw absurd conclusions indeed.
Footnotes
- Being more properly skeptical or less dogmatic, Orthodox believers seem to be more reticent and less extreme about such matters.[↩]
- This is strictly speculation. Perhaps Mary actually bears that title in Heaven, we do not seem to be able to rule it out; but the only times that the title is used in scripture is to refer to an ancient Near East fertility goddess, presumably Asherah, Astarte, or Ishtar, often identified with Aphrodite and Isis; see Jeremiah 7:18 and 44:17-19, 25.[↩]
- This was also true, in the Bible record, of Enoch and Elijah; but there is no evidence of Mary rising deathlessly to Heaven in either the NT or the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, some of whom would have known her personally.[↩]
- Catholics can add all they like that such prayers constitute intercession, but what I have written under this head is what they believe.[↩]
- “Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” Matthew 11:11.[↩]
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