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mitchellmckain

Mary, Mother Of God Is this title really appropriate?

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Is the title "mother of God" appropriate?I believe that the original controversy about calling Mary "the mother of God" becaome mired in the talk of the two natures of Christ and thus in the limitations of the antiquated metaphysics of the age. But we have another example to draw from in which a scientific understanding can be helpful and thus avoid the confusion of medieval metaphysics. This is the example of two kinds of parents that human beings can have: biological parents and the parents that raised them. From one set we have the biological inheritance, the DNA that makes us biologically human, and from the other we have the inheritance of mind which I believe is where our true humanity lies. It is my belief that by the first, we are bretheren to all the forms of life on this planet, and by the second we are the children of God for I believe that this inheritance of mind first comes from God.But to look at Mary's relationship to Jesus, I think we have to look deeper into these examples and understand on a theoretical level what it means to be a parent of someone. It does not mean to be their creator or designer for as living beings of free will they make their own choices and thus play a critical role in being responsible for who and what they are. But these choices only play a small role in this for living things are also radically open to their environment and many things in that environment contribute to what they become and parents are the most significant of these things. But if the parent is not the creator of their offspring, what is it that they do? They provide an inheritance of information and a nuturing environment in which this inheritance can be the basis of a process of growth.Each biological parent contributes half of a child's biological inheritance and the mother provides her womb as the nurturing environment in which the child's body can grow from a tiny seed or zygote. Between 20 and 23 weeks in this process, brain activity starts and the child begins its process of mental growth as well. The parents who raise the child provides the child's first most substantial portion of information via human communication by which that growth of the human mind of that child can make progress. They provide a safe and nurturing environment for both the childs body and mind so that the child can grow into an adult. Because both continue to grow there is no absolute clear cut way in which we can that one set of parents are exclusively responsible for the growth of just one aspect of the child, but we can say which has provided all or the vast majority of the information from which an aspect of the child has grown.Now what of Mary's relationship to Jesus? Clearly she provided the nurturing womb in which the infant Jesus grew and clearly she played the most important role in raising the child as well. The fact that Jesus was a carpenter like Joseph makes it clear that Joseph's role as a father in raising Jesus was also just as substantial as any father who raises a child. What we cannot say with too much clarity or certainty is whence came the biological inheritance for Jesus and speculation on the matter is not really worth the fights it is likely to engender because it doesn't really matter a great deal after all, for mostly it suffices to say that Jesus was biologically human. Personally I do not believe in the magical creation of human beings. I do not believe that the first chapters of Genesis is meant to be story of a necromancer god creating a golem of dust and a golem of flesh as our first human ancestors. Thus if I were to speculate, it would be most sensible in my mind to assume that the biological inheritance of Jesus had a human origin of some kind, there is even a Biblical basis for claiming this in the two geneologies attributed to Jesus.Thus we can see good reason for seeing Mary and Joseph as parents of the body and mind of Jesus, but what about Jesus as God and what about His spirit? One might be tempted to draw the conclusion from the knowlege that God is spirit, that the spirit of Jesus was only divine and not human. But this is heresy and condemned for good reason. If we as human beings are most essentially spirit then for Jesus to be fully human, Jesus must also be human in spirit, just as He was human in body and mind. Since I do not believe in a pre-existent human spirit given to human beings but in a human spirit that grows and becomes as a product of our choices, this would mean that in Jesus there is both the spirit that is God with Him from before His conception and the human spirit that grew in Him. This is not to say that the human and divine in Jesus are seperable in any ultimate sense because all that is human in Jesus in all its finitude and vulnerability is still an act of God and thus an expression of His divinity for it is by His infinitude and omnipotence that He could become fully human in this way.But does this mean that we can say that Mary is the mother of God? Well to answer that we should determine if Mary played a parental role of any kind in relationship to God? Mary may have contributed information that played a role in the growth and development of human body and mind of Jesus, but did she contribute information that played a role in the growth and development of Christ's divnity in any way. Clearly not! Chrisitians are not adoptionists that believe that Jesus became God and so since Jesus was always God then it is clear that Mary did not contribute to Christ's divinity in any way whatsoever. Thus it is absurd to call Mary the "mother of God". The relationship between Mary and God is one of Mary being the the child and God being the parent, however much Mary may have played a role of parent to Jesus in regards to His human body and mind. Thus Mary mother of Jesus remains a child of God and NEVER any kind of mother of God.There are logical difficulties here to be sure, for the following simple syllogism seems valid: Mary is the mother of Jesus.Jesus is God.Therefore Mary is the mother of God.But this is only the consequence of the deceptive simplicity of human language which makes statements that sound like absolutes when in reality they are no such thing. Mary is the mother of Jesus only in a certain sense even though this is the sense that is most typically used because the word typically refers to human relationships, but in another sense we know that Mary's father is God, and thus we see that there are different senses that make the two first statements of the syllogism incompatable so that the syllogism is not valid and its conclusion cannot be drawn.

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i can provide you all proof to prove that jesus is not god and i agree to the point that mary was the mother of jesus christ. But jesus christ is not god.If anyone intrested in this than i will post a new thread proving the point.

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