Thus the Council of Ephesus, bizarre as its insistence on theotokos might seem if you take it as an exercise in propositional theology, becomes a perfect example of my contention that the Councils were doing theology by way of images. “Mother of God” isn’t a definition that gives us answers to our questions; it’s a sudden illumination of the fact that in Mary, the images of Son, Word, God, Man and Womb all come together in a new coincidence of opposites. And if you take that paradoxical picture as a seamless whole, you absolve yourself from having to water down any of those images. Precisely because you’re not trying to wring some plausible answer out of their apparent contradiction, they free you to arrive at a clearer view of the real question about the Word made flesh. And that question – as I’ve said many times already and will continue to say again and again – is simply this: Who is this Jesus in whom we believe?
The Fingerprints of God: Tracking the Divine Suspect through a History of Images page 101 – Robert Farrar Capon
Beyond Contradiction 