The Charge of Nestorianism and a Reconciliation Eight Centuries Later

Opponents of the Church of the East read its refusal of Theotokos as evidence that it denies the one born of Mary is truly God, the charge of Nestorianism that has followed the church since the fifth century controversies surrounding Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, whose own teaching the church's theologians have long argued was itself misrepresented by his opponents. For centuries the accusation stood without any formal exchange capable of resolving it, since the Church of the East had separated from the imperial church of the Roman world and continued its life largely under Persian and later Islamic rule, outside the channels through which such disputes were ordinarily settled. That changed in 1994, when Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV signed a Common Christological Declaration stating that the two churches confess the same faith in the Son of God, expressed in different formulations shaped by their different theological and liturgical traditions, and explicitly recognising both Mother of Christ and Mother of God as legitimate ways of expressing that shared confession. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church records the declaration as part of a wider late twentieth century pattern of formal reconciliation between churches separated by christological disputes going back to the fifth century, addressing the title itself rather than merely setting the historical dispute aside unresolved.