What about Mary? Protestants and Marian devotion

Christian Century, Dec 14, 2004 by Jason Byassee

WE MIGHT begin considering the place of Mary in devotion by noting some ways not to renew a discussion about her. We ought not speak as though all that matters about her is the virgin birth. This question, central in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 20th century, treats Mary herself as a side issue, a mere conduit for the one she bore. A second way not to proceed is to use Mary to say anew that which Protestants already say. For example, when Luther treated Mary he tended to depict her as a model for justification by grace alone--that is, as further evidence for what he already believed. If we are to attend to Mary anew, the effort should yield something fresh, something neglected in our own churches and lives.

The most important contribution of these recent reflections is to give fresh attention to the incarnation. The Council of Ephesus insisted that what Christians hold true about God is that God is not unwilling to get involved in the flesh mid blood of human life. The Christian God is enwombed. To say otherwise is to introduce some sort of split in the Son himself, to suggest that the man Jesus is born of Mary and the divinity is not (perhaps the divinity is added later or not at all). To call Mary theotokos is to safeguard the fleshiness of God, and so the entire saving work of God in Christ.

As the Catholic theologian Lawrence Cunningham puts it, there is an "almost outrageous particularity" about saying that God's presence in the world is localized in the womb of an unmarried teenage girl from Nazareth. Anyone can claim God as "almighty" or "omnipotent" or "omni scient" or whatever philosophical word we wish to append to him. To claim that God is enfleshed, that God has a birth and death date, that God is Jewish, is the scandal of particularity to which Christian faith is committed. Claims about Mary are ways to keep from smoothing out the scandal. As Luther said, "Mary suckled God, rocked God to sleep, prepared broth and soup for God." She also taught him the songs, stories and practices of the Jewish people whose messiah he would later claim to be. Similarly, Charles Wesley (as Methodist theologian Geoffrey Wainwright points out) praised God as one "who gave all things to be, what a wonder to see, him born of his creature and nursed on her knee." In Mary the church ties a string around its finger to remember the particularity of its claims about God. (John Henry Newman argued more than a century ago that the churches that had maintained strong doctrines on Mary are those that had not abandoned strong christological ones.)

Not surprisingly, this string has led Christians to focus in tense scrutiny on Mary in her own right. The early church assumed that to bear a sinless child she had to be sinless as well, and Roman Catholics codified this as dogma in the 19th century in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception--the claim that by a special work of God, Mary was spared any stain of original sin.

Protestants argue instead that it is Mary's ordinariness that keeps the incarnation scandalous, not her sinlessness. That God is born in the midst of a quite average life is the claim Mary safeguards.