From what the Nestorians themselves claim, they agree with Nestorius. They venerate him (and other hated heretics like Theodore of Mopsuestia) for what they feel to be his right theology. So I find these ideas that maybe Nestorius wasn’t a ‘Nestorian’, and therefore it is wrong to call the Nestorians by that name to be very strange indeed. Again, listen to what they say that the video (I’ve posted it before; sorry, it’s the only thing I’ve been to find online translated into English by contemporary representatives of this church, rather than unofficial “fan sites” of varying quality). They say that Nestorius was concerned that calling St. Mary Theotokos would introduce confusion into the Holy Trinity by somehow making her the origin of Christ’s divinity, so therefore he was right in objecting that she was only the mother of his “human aspect” or whatever, and thus only mother of Christ. You can hear their confusion when the researcher says “nobody can tell me that when Christ was six years old, God was six years old”, as though the incarnation was the “beginning” of the Son. This is in direct contradiction with the original 325 wording of the Nicene Creed, which had been accepted by the East Syrians. Of the text that was later omitted in Constantinople in 381 (after the Nestorians had left the Church; so the version they had received like contained this), we read:
But those who say: ‘There was a time when he was not;’ and ‘He was not before he was made;’ and ‘He was made out of nothing,’ or ‘He is of another substance’ or ‘essence,’ or ‘The Son of God is created,’ or ‘changeable,’ or ‘alterable’—they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.
I don’t buy this whole rehabilitation of the Nestorians nonsense, as they are at variance with the Orthodox faith according to what they affirm as Nestorius’ right teaching (again, according to their own words, to remove the “well, Nestorius was maligned unfairly” idea; this is
the people who venerate him saying that he taught such a disjunction between Jesus the man and Christ the divine Savior, and that this disjunction is right because God cannot be six years old or some such stupidity). They’re heretics based on what they themselves affirm, plain and simple, regardless of what might have been on Jimkhong’s roommate’s prayer mat. (cf. Copts, it should be said, often make inappropriate use of Roman Catholic or Latin-influenced religious art in their churches; this does not mean that we believe as the Latins do.)
In the end, the last word as far as I will hear it goes to our father HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic, the staunch defender of Orthodoxy who says in his defense of the Creed of Nicaea (written sometime between 346 and 356 AD):
“Further, let every corporeal reference be banished on this subject; and transcending every imagination of sense, let us, with pure understanding and with mind alone, apprehend the genuine relation of son to father, and the Word’s proper relation towards God, and the unvarying likeness of the radiance towards the light: for as the words ‘Offspring’ and ‘Son’ bear, and are meant to bear, no human sense, but one suitable to God, in like manner when we hear the phrase ‘one in essence,’ let us not fall upon human senses, and imagine partitions and divisions of the Godhead, but as having our thoughts directed to things immaterial, let us preserve undivided the oneness of nature and the identity of light; for this is proper to a son as regards a father, and in this is shewn that God is truly Father of the Word.”
