The Fourth Lesson: What we talk about when we talk about Mary

This series takes an appreciative look back on the Lutheran theological tradition, and unpacks lessons learned from it that helped shape the author’s embrace of Catholicism.

Lutherans have retained a liturgical year that includes commemorations and festivals related not only to the life of Christ, but to the lives of saints both biblical and historical. Becoming Lutheran, therefore, meant overcoming the Protestant allergy toward celebrating the particular activities of God in the lives and deeds of particular Christian heroes. Lutherans do not seek the intercessions of the saints, rarely have votive candles, and almost never have publicly displayed icons, but even so there is a form of veneration found within the calendrical commemoration. For Martin Luther in particular, this included the Blessed Virgin Mary. The central and non-negotiable orthodox confession about the Virgin Mary is that she is the

Durer's Madonna and Child with a Half Pear

Theotokos: the God-bearer (a literal translation from the Greek) or Mother of God (a Latinate paraphrase). As many will know, this title is found throughout the ancient liturgies of the church, but was struck from the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom in 428 by the Patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius. On the basis of his objection to a complete identification of the human Jesus with God the Son, Nestorius denied that Mary truly held the fullness of God in her womb and gave birth to God himself. He believed, rather, that within Christ there was a distinction between two actors: The divine Logos or Second Person of the Trinity, and the human Jesus; there two were united by a common identity, the Christ, and acted in concert, but the individual natures were distinguished not just as abstract intellectual concepts but as concrete subjects in perfect harmony. Thus, Mary was the mother of Jesus (the human reality) and of their common identity (the Christ), but not of God the Son. Against this, the orthodox church father Cyril of Alexandria and the Council of Ephesus insisted that Christ is one, undivided person, asserting the total identity of Jesus with God the Son, the eternal Word. Thus, by an iron law of transference the Virgin Mary is, and is to be venerated as, the Mother of God. The appeals for the intercession of the Theotokos in the Divine Liturgy were restored and the Marian cult developed in new and vigorous ways. However skeptical Lutherans are about appeals for saintly intercession or the extremes of Catholic and Orthodox Marian piety, the Christo-logic on display at Ephesus is exemplary by Lutheran standards. Confessions about the Virgin Mary are, ultimately, confessions about Christ. Further, it is exemplary of the way all of theology works as an organic body, wherein one confession influences another. This, too, is typical of Lutheran Eucharistic theology. Lutheran opposition to Calvinistic “spiritual” interpretations of the Eucharistic presence are grounded in the same Christology of union, which asserts that Christ’s personal identity is an indivisible unity entailing both the totality of his divinity and the totality of his humanity, such there can be no full presence of Christ’s spirit (or divinity) apart from his human body. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the confession that Mary is the Mother of God are deeply related, and both reflect an orthodox understanding of the union of divinity and humanity in Christ. In the larger body of theology, the Gospel of the crucified God is the heart, and the Eucharist very close to it (say, the stomach), while the confession of Mary as Theotokos is something like a rib or part of the breastplate, protecting the integrity of that Evangelical center. For Lutherans, however, this often means that the hyper-veneration of the Blessed Virgin in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions falls outside the scope of properly conceived Marian dogma. What, after all, could the Immaculate Conception or Bodily Assumption of Mary possibly say about Christ? How do petitions for saintly intercession relate at all to Christ’s exclusive work as mediator, and how can such intercessions even possibly be heard? And how do Marian prayers that speak of her as herself the source of protection, help, or life do anything but obscure the Christocentricity that should be at the heart of Christianity?

I cannot pretend to defend every last aspect of Marian piety, and this appreciative look back on Lutheranism is not the place to do so. Moreover, Catholics can affirm that these are valid questions that should be asked by faithful Catholics seeking proper catechesis, and should be kept in mind by the Church’s hierarchy when evaluating much of popular, lay devotion to Our Lady. However, I will say this much: The practice of seeking the intercessions of any of the saints, and the official doctrines surrounding the Virgin in particularly, are not mere ritual detritus accumulated during centuries of negligence, but were an organic part of the early development of essential Christian doctrines, including the incarnation, the afterlife, and ultimate human destiny.

First and foremost, if the purpose of creaturely existence is partaking in the same divine nature shared by the Three Persons of the Trinity, then those who have already undergone theosis are in every position to hear prayers and exercise patronage within the church. It is not only immortality that the divine nature conveys, but the reflected glory of the creator and a share in God’s own omniscience. This is part of the continued charism of members of the body of Christ, given grace in order to mutually build up the Church. There saints are not given thrones in heaven without purpose; thrones suggest continued governance and patronage. If all human beings are meant to be living sacraments that both receive and convey the divine energies, then that is what the saints have been made, and that is what the Blessed Virgin was made when she received the totality of the Son of God when she offered her fiat. Her assumption, then, is a picture of the total receptivity of one creature to the life of the Creator, such that she was transfigured by receiving the glory of God that shines forth from her Son. The doctrine of saintly intercession and patronage, therefore, is nothing less than an icon of our collective human destiny in that great eschatological polis, the City of God.

When Catholics and Orthodox lose sight of the intimate connection between the intercession and patronage of the saints and the doctrines of deification and the mutual charisms of service in the Church, then that is when the cult of the saints is indeed in danger of devolving into a folk religion that lacks the all-important Christocentric focus. We must therefore always keep in mind that the Church’s Marian doctrines and practices are meant to gesture, tenderly, to Christ and his work, just as we always see her doing in icons of the Theotokos and Child. That, too, is a lesson Lutheranism taught me.