Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century

Church History, Sept, 2005 by Rachel Fulton

Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century. By Beth Kreitzer. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xiv 239 pp. $55.00 cloth.

How do you dismantle a devotion, particularly one that has energized a culture for the better part of a thousand years? In Henry Adams's famous words: "All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres." How, then, Adams mused, was it possible that the artists of his day could no longer sense the great power of the Virgin, she who had once "acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt" (The Education of Henry Adams [1906], chap. 25)? Even now, a century after Adams, one has the nagging sense that it must not have been easy, removing the Queen of Heaven from her devotional throne.

And yet, as Beth Kreitzer herself perceptively notes (3), Adams's question is not one that historians of the early modern period have tended to take up. Indeed, the more pressing question for most such scholars has typically been not how Mary lost her place at the center of the European Christian tradition but, rather, how she came to be there at all when (as is often pointed out) the principal sources for her role in that tradition, namely, the Gospels, say next to nothing about her other than how she became pregnant (Luke 1:26-38) and where and when she gave birth (Luke 2:1-20). For most modern academic readers, there is arguably little here to suggest that Mary, albeit chosen among women to be the only Mother of God, was anything other than a humble, potentially even still sinful, woman, like Eve, to whom it would be shameful, a "foolish craziness," actually to pray (34). Nevertheless, as Adams himself soon realized as he stood before the magnificence of Chartres, this is not the way in which Mary had been imagined for hundreds of years.

What had happened? The short answer is, of course, Martin Luther. But how? How had Martin Luther and his immediate followers been able to convince their parishioners no longer to address their prayers to the Virgin Mother of God? There is a temptation to assume that because they succeeded, their task was a relatively easy one, and so, once again, that the real mystery lay in the original construction of the cult. Readers of Reforming Mary will soon realize that this was not the case. As Kreitzer's intelligently crafted and solidly researched study of the Lutheran sermons preached and published in the first century of the reform so expertly shows, that we now begin our studies of Mary with surveys of the sparse New Testament mentions of her is as much a product of the preachers' emphasis on sola scriptura as it is of their desire to purify Marian devotion of what they saw as the accretions of papal and monastic "excess." How they accomplished this massive restructuring is the real subject of this book.

On the surface, the process was a relatively modest one: preach the texts pertaining to Mary (that is, only those New Testament passages noted above) read in the churches on the days that had once been observed as her particular feasts (the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Purification) and point out how much like us, sinners all, she actually was (41). And yet, as already noted, the repercussions were immense. What Kreitzer enables us to see is how, step-by- scriptural step, the Lutheran preachers shifted their imagining of Mary away from that of their devoted forebears, so that (for example) the angel's greeting, "Ave, Maria, gratia plena," might no longer be spoken as a prayerful address, but rather simply as an indication that Mary was "enjoying favor, full of charm, [or] pleasing" to God (32).

Other adjustments were equally striking: the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) no longer sung in praise of Mary but read rather as a lesson from Mary about how humble Christians should be when they pray; Simeon's sword (Luke 2:34-35) read as a prophecy not of the suffering that Mary herself would endure at her son's death, but rather that of the church as a whole, of which she is but a single member; Mary's anxiety over her son's absence on the trip to Jerusalem (Luke 2:41-52) taken as an opportunity to reflect both on Mary's weakness in doubting what he was about and on the responsibilities parents have in raising their children to be good members of Christian society. Devotionally, however, surely the most unsettling change was that made in the interpretation of Mary's request at the Marriage of Cana: "They have no wine" (John 2:3). Whereas some preachers were willing to see Mary as a "model for faithful and continual prayer" (107), others rejected her intervention outright as an overstepping of her maternal authority and thereby explained the hardness of Christ's response: "Woman, what do I have to do with you?" (John 2:4). As Christoph Vischer (d. 1597) explained: "The Lord Christ wanted especially to prevent and curb the abominable, blasphemous, and superstitious custom of the papists, that we [should] not call on nor turn to the holy Virgin Mother... and look for more comfort from [her] than from Christ himself, the fountain of all grace" (106).