Theology: What Mary Means to Protestants

Next to papal infallibility, the biggest barrier to Catholic-Protestant unity is the humble Jewish girl who gave birth to Jesus of Nazareth. By popular piety and papal decree, Roman Catholics have gradually elevated Mary to the queen of heaven, born free of sin and assumed bodily into heaven. Marian “maximalists” even yearn for the day when a Pope will promulgate new dogmas that in union with her son she is redemptress of the human race and mediatrix of God’s grace to men. For centuries, Protestants have reacted by condemning Catholic “Mariolatry” as paganism and ignoring the Virgin as much as they decently could.

“The Elect Instrument.” Protestant laymen still generally feel this way but, says Lutheran Theologian Joseph Sittler of the University of Chicago Divinity School, “there is new thinking on the part of Protestant scholars about Mariology.” In the latest issue of The Journal of Religion, Princeton’s W. Paul Jones, a Methodist, points out that “Mary stands at the very inception of Christian revelation as sign and representative of the human context in which the Christ-event is received, then and now.” In the interdenominational Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Harvard’s Heiko Oberman, a Dutch Reformed pastor, warns Protestants against a totally negative “Marian minimalism.” He argues that there is Scriptural warrant for revering Mary as “the elect instrument of God’s work of redemption” and as “the prototype of the faithful.”

The new Protestant interest in Mary stems from both ecumenism and a closer reading of church history. Just as Roman Catholics within recent years have been rediscovering Scripture, Protestants have begun to study how their understanding of the Bible has been colored and modified by the churches’ tradition of interpretation. Protestant scholars note that the 16th century reformers, even as they condemned Roman excesses, had a devotion to Mary that their spiritual descendants have lost. Some of Luther’s finest sermons treat of Mary as the mother of God, and Calvin wrote: “We cannot celebrate the blessing given us in Christ without commemorating at the same time how high an honor God has granted to Mary when he chose to make her the mother of his only son.”

Flesh of Our Flesh. Lutheran Jaroslav Pelikan of Yale believes the time is long past when Protestants could content themselves with sneering at Catholic Marian idolatry. Now, any criticism of Roman doctrine must be “accompanied by a positive discussion of the mother of our Lord as viewed from a Biblical and evangelical perspective.” Pelikan argues that Mary cannot be ignored because she is the “warrant for the Christian declaration that our Lord was a true man, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.” She also has a significance for the church: “the brief description of her career in the New Testament is a summary of the Christian life in its elations and in its depressions.” Dr. Albert Outler of Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, a Methodist observer at the Vatican Council, agrees that “we’ve got to take seriously the whole idea of the maternal dimension of Christianity. Protestantism has stressed to an almost exclusive degree the paternal and fraternal dimensions of religion.”

Non-Catholic scholars point out that any Protestant Mariology would have to be subordinated to the doctrine of Christ and closely tied to the New Testament witness. Thus the emerging Protestant interpretation of Mary is considerably more modest than her exalted place in Catholic teaching. Nonetheless, says Chicago’s Sittler, Mary may be “a center from which we could penetrate one another’s thoughts,” since Rome is in the midst of a Marian reconsideration all its own. Recent Popes have warned against excessive devotion to Mary that obscures the uniqueness of Christ, and many Catholic thinkers are earnestly seeking to relate their church’s Marian doctrines to Biblical theology. And in one of the key votes of the Vatican Council’s second session, the bishops voted to reject a separate schema on Mary and instead incorporate it into a schema on the church.