Mary for Protestants

An article from the Christian Century on the resurgence of interest in Mary and Marian devotions among Protestant theologians.

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 and 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 “omniscient” 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.)

Also don’t miss this dissenting view from Latin American Protestant Enrique Gonzales.

On a related note, see this post from Get Religion on a Methodist church introducing a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe into its worship.