In his essay “The Presence of Mary in the Mystery of the Church” (found in the book Mary: 
Mother of God, edited by Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson), Lutheran theologian David Yeago argues for a re-appropriation by Protestants of Mary’s role as both paradigm or prototype in the life of faith and discipleship and as an active agent in the formation of our faith.
Mary, Yeago says, is the “paradigm of the existence-in-faith of the people of God”:
It is, of course, in the dying and rising of Jesus Christ that this form is redemptively constituted; it is to his image, not Mary’s, that we are to be conformed in our salvation. Mary’s paradigmatic role is different in kind from that of her Son: she is not the Redeemer but the prototype of the redeemed; she is not the one in whom we participate but the paradigm of that participation. Jesus the Messiah in his dying and rising is alone the forma formans, the form-giving form, the one in whom all things hang together (Col. 1:17) and around whose crucified and risen person the whole creation is to be blessedly configured. Mary by contrast ist he forma formata, the form taht has received formation, the prototype precisely of those who are not the Savior, but cling to him by faith, and on the way of faith’s pilgrimage endure the protracted inscription of his image on their being. (pp. 72-3)
And then in a footnote to this passage:
This suggest that it is not an adequate account of Christ’s redemptive work to view him as a sort of productive prototype of our own authentic existence in faith, as many modernist theologies have done. An adequate doctrine of atonement requires recognition that Christ has acted and suffered in our place in such a way that he does and endures pro nobis [for us] what we could not do or endure for ourselves.
As Yeago says, many Protestants will go this far, cheerfully agreeing with St. Luke’s characterization of Mary as “she who believed” (cf. Lk. 1:45). More disconcerting to Protestants is the notion that Mary is an “active agent of the formation of the church and the believer” (p. 74). The way to think about this is that Mary speaks to us, addresses us with her word.
How does she do this? Preeminently in her great song the Magnificat (Lk. 1:46-55):
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, 
For he has looked with favour on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessèd:
The Almighty has done great things for me
and holy is his name.
He has mercy on those who fear him,
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant, Israel,
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
The promise he made to our forebears,
to Abraham and his children for ever.
This song, Yeago says, is both thanksgiving and proclamation, and constitutes Mary’s word to us within the word of the scriptural witness. He points to Martin Luther’s designation of Mary as the church’s “teacher of praise and thanksgiving.” He quotes Luther:
The dear Virgin is occupied with no insignificant thoughts; they come from the first commandment, “You should fear and love God,” and she sums up the way God rules in one short text, a joyful song for all the lowly. She is a good painter and singer; she sketches God well and sings of him better than anyone, for she names God the one who helps the lowly and crushes all that is great and proud. This song lacks nothing; it is well sung, and needs only people who can say yes to it and wait. But such people are few.
Yeago continues:
Understood in these terms, Mary’s “motherhood” of the church consists in the speaking of a word for the church and all the faithful to hear. Mary’s word in the Magnificat opens the chorus of Christian praise, and provides the church and all the faithful with the essential words for praise. At the same time, her words of praise are necessarily also words of instruction: she teaches us to see in the coming of her Son the mercy and might of the God of Israel. Just as a mother teaches her children by precept and example the ways of the family, and prepares them to live well in the surrounding human community, so Mary teaches the church and all the faithful the ways of God’s household and forms them so that they may live well in the environment of his inbreaking reign in Jesus Christ. (p. 78)
He ends with some suggestions for how contemporary Protestants might recover an awareness of Mary’s presence in the church’s life. First, we should celebrate those feasts where Mary has a specific role such as the Annunciation, the Visitation andd the Presentation (obviously most Protestants are not prepared to celebrate the Assumption or the Immaculate Conception). Secondly, we should sing and pray the Magnificat. It’s the NT canticle which is traditionally used at Evening Prayer, so this would be a matter of course for those who pray some form of the Daily Office. And lastly, when we do sing the Magnificat, we should’t “de-gender” it; he suggests the Greek doule might be rendered “slave-woman” rather than “servant,” so as not to lose its identification with “the specific Jewish woman Mary, whom God’s election and promise have set in the midst of the church as the prototype of the church’s faith and prophecy — and therefore as the archsinger of the praise of God’s mercy in Christ” (p. 79).
A Thinking Reed 
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