Why You Can’t Deny That Mary Is the Mother of God

Many Protestants view Catholic devotion to Mary as borderline idolatrous. But if you dig deeper into the Church’s teachings on the Blessed Mother, you’ll discover that they actually protect our beliefs about Christ.

As an example, let’s examine our belief that Mary is the Mother of God, an idea many non-Catholic Christians reject.

To be clear, the Catholic Church doesn’t teach that Our Lady gave birth to God in the sense that she preceded God or is greater than Him. Rather, she is His Mother because Christ is one divine person with two natures. Mary didn’t give Jesus His divinity — only His humanity — but that human nature was assumed by a divine person.

Reject this belief and you start to see the Christological doctrines crumble. We see this firsthand in Protestant Walter Martin’s “Kingdom of the Cults.” First published in 1965, this classic has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and influenced the theology of many Protestants.

In denying Mary as Mother of God, Martin ends up denying Jesus’ eternal sonship, saying that such a teaching is not present in Scripture. He asserts that sonship applies to situations involving time, change, and humanity so, therefore, Jesus’ divine sonship in relation to God the Father is a Catholic invention. To Martin, Jesus became a son when He took on flesh.

Martin not only lost Mary, he lost Jesus, positing a Lord and Savior that many Protestants wouldn’t recognize. To be fair, many non-Catholic Christians reject our Marian beliefs but have not thought out the logical consequences of doing so.

Martin goes further, noting that he doesn’t see God the Father referred to as the Eternal Father anywhere in the Bible. Now he becomes confused about who God is. Of course, this affects his understanding of the relations between the Persons of the Holy Trinity.

If you care about preserving the truth about Jesus, then embrace the truths about His mother. The dogmas and doctrines surrounding her protect a most central belief of our Christian faith — the nature of God Himself. Far from exalting Mary to God, our devotion only makes us know and love God as He has revealed Himself.