ChristianWeek

Several Protestant theologians have written books about Mary recently. Why the resurgence of interest in Mary among evangelicals?

Good question. The Reformation is not over, but it’s increasingly being cast in a non-polemical light. That’s a good thing.

Since the Second Vatican council, Roman Catholics have consistently been open to dialogue. Lumen Gentium chapter 8, which was the council’s document on Mary, says “we want Mary to be a focus of unity and not division.” The bishops don’t deny any previous church teaching on Mary, but they want to ground it in the Bible and the church fathers and state it in a way that is ecumenically sensitive. This is picked up in writings by popes Paul VI and John Paul II. So that openness is there, both generally and with Mary in particular.

Another development, particularly in North America, is what Timothy George has called “the ecumenism of the trenches.” Without denying serious theological difficulties, Protestants and Catholics are increasingly finding they have a lot in common on social issues. It’s overcome misunderstanding and prejudice on both sides, and allowed really frank and non-threatening conversations to take place.

Then we have the witness of John Paul II, who was the most evangelical friendly pope ever. He was at the same time the most Marian pope in the last 50 years. He stands right alongside Pius IX and Pius XII, who defined doctrines of immaculate conception and bodily assumption, respectively. That witness is important.

You also have a growing number of young theologians who want to become critical of their own cultural situated-ness, and do so by returning to the history of interpretation of Scripture. So they start reading the Church Fathers primarily, also the medievals. And you can’t read the fathers without reading about Mary.

Why is it important for evangelicals to recover a theology of Mary?

It’s important because we have a high Christology. We confess with the ancient Church that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, two natures in one person. We are Trinitarian Christians and we believe that God took on a human nature. That’s where thinking about Mary starts. It’s a lacuna in a our own theological thinking to say all these things about Jesus, and then to say nothing about Mary—except maybe grudgingly admitting that she’s the Mother of God and saying as little about her as possible unless it’s Christmas.

You describe Mary as an ideal disciple. Why do you say this?

That’s how Luke presents her. In the annunciation she responds to God in faith and is contrasted with Zachariah who doesn’t. Mary’s question “how can this be since I’m a virgin?” assumes that what the angel is telling her is the truth. She responds in faith and then asks, “How are you going to pull this off?”

When we move to the birth narrative, everyone is talking about the wondrous events and then seemingly forgets about them, only Mary keeps and ponders them. When Jesus is eight days old and receives the blessing of Simeon at the temple, Mary becomes the personification of Israel. From Ezekiel, Simeon draws on the image of a sword and judgment passing through the land that will expose the thoughts of many and pass through Mary’s soul too.

Mary has no guarantee that just because she’s the mother of God, she’s in His Kingdom. Her presence at Pentecost in Acts 14 indicates that she is, but it’s because she persevered. Because she persevered she is one of the founding foremothers of the church.

There is nothing in what I’ve just said that is incompatible with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception—that Mary was born without sin. My problem with the dogma is that it’s simply not in the Bible. It’s tied to an Augustinian doctrine of original sin that has not been accepted by the universal Church as the right one.

But we need to hang on to an important core of the Immaculate Conception: Grace is active in Mary’s life right from the beginning—we might even say before its beginning. The triune God’s choice to have this woman as the mother of the Son is simultaneous with the choice to become incarnate. Those are truths that I want to preserve even though I can’t affirm the dogma as a whole.

What is the importance of the Theotokos in church tradition?

I think Theotokos—which is loosely translated Mother of God, and better translated “The one who carries the one who is God”—is absolutely vital because it says something profoundly true about Jesus. Theotokos is really a one word shorthand to get to the core of the identity of Jesus that took 431 years, up to the council of Ephesus, to work out. He is not a creature. He is not less than God or other than God, but God the Son. This rules out the ancient Arian heresy.

At the same time, he’s human and he has a mother. Theotokos rules out the old Gnostic tradition that sees Mary as a tube through which Jesus passed uncontaminated. It also rules out an understanding of Jesus that presents him as a kind divine person sharing the body of a human. How this is possible is never worked out in church tradition. The Chalcedonian definition is quite deliberately negative on that point. We know how that doesn’t work, but can’t explain how it does.

There are all kinds of issues of piety around the word Theotokos that are cause for concern, not just for Protestants, but for all Christians. But none of that means that we get to get rid of it, because it says something profoundly true about Jesus that we lose if we treat it as dispensable. The solution—and here I think Cardinal Newman is right—is to keep the vocabulary and fix pious misunderstandings of the vocabulary when and where they arise.

What is the role of tradition in future evangelical theology? Why is it important now to go back to the early church fathers?

It’s important now because younger generations of evangelical theologians have been made very aware of their own cultural situated-ness when reading the biblical text. We come to the Bible with our own baggage, which invariably influences what we think the text says. The best way to guard against any negative influence that might have on our reading is to read in conversation with the generation of Christians who’ve read before us. I’m not advocating tradition with a capital T as a second source of revelation where Scripture is silent. I’m simply saying that tradition teaches us how to read the Bible. We discipline our reading by submitting to previous generations of master-readers.

Why did you say that Mary has become more mysterious to you after your study?

As I was working on the last three chapters of the book, I realized that somewhere along the line I had stopped writing about Mary and started writing about Jesus. That’s the point. Right thinking about Mary is intended to foster right thinking about Jesus and grows out of right thinking about Jesus. The sense in which Mary is more mysterious is not that she’s become a separate theological category. As I think about her, I think more about Jesus. She almost becomes iconic—she is someone to look through to have a better grasp of her son. She is not someone who consumes my gaze; she is someone who directs it. And she always directs it to Jesus.

How has this study informed your worship?

My worship has become much more sacramental in the sense that worship is less and less about taking me out of this world and more and more about discerning signs of God’s presence in the things God has made—particularly the intense signs of wine, bread and water. I have a more affective grasp on the love of God displayed in the incarnation. I got it intellectually before I wrote the book. That hasn’t changed, but it’s more than just an intellectual thing that I find hard to express in words.

Tim Perry is Associate Professor of Theology at Providence College. He is the author of Mary for Evangelicals: Toward an Understanding of the Mother of Our Lord (IVP) and Blessed is She: Living Lent With Mary (Morehouse). He and his family live in Otterburne, Manitoba.