The Blessed Virgin Mary

Tim Perry, Daniel Kendall

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781467437561
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Marian Theology

This volume provides a concise, nontechnical historical introduction to the church's thinking about Mary, the mother of Jesus. The first part of the book sketches the development of Marian thought from the second century to the twentieth century. The second part contains an annotated bibliography of the most important and accessible English-language works on Mary.Tim Perry, an evangelical Anglican priest, and Daniel Kendall, a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest, have joined across the Reformation divide to provide an irenic, balanced volume for students and general readers interested in this most remarkable woman and the ways in which she has shaped Christian thought.

I. THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF MARIAN DOCTRINE AND DEVOTION

1. The Fathers of the Church

The Pre-Nicene Fathers

In the outline of this book, it may appear to some readers that a disproportionate amount of space is devoted to the first five centuries of Christian thought on the subject. This approach, however, is deliberate. First, the Fathers are the heritage of the undivided Church. They teach all Christians, in both method and content, how to wrestle with the primary data of the Church’s teaching, Holy Scripture. It is especially important for Christians who have come to disagree over substantial points of doctrine and devotion — and Mary is obviously one of these — to join at the feet of these early masters and learn together from them. The second reason is more complex. In Tim’s research, he has found it common among modern theologians, both devotees and critics, to cite medieval theologians for a great deal of Marian teaching. It will become clear in later sections of this essay that this emphasis is legitimate; nevertheless, it lacks important nuance. For while medieval thinkers did clarify, deepen, and add intricate detail to previous mariological teaching, they did not innovate. The outline of Mariology — including matters on which Christians are divided — is found in the Fathers. Therefore, they merit greater attention.

We begin with Saint Ignatius of Antioch (d. c. 110), an early Christian bishop and martyr. Like all Apostolic Fathers, Ignatius writes not as a theologian, but as a pastor concerned with the spiritual health of the congregations who may be subject to false teaching. He writes while a prisoner en route to Rome and to martyrdom. If we are to read his remarks about Mary rightly, we need to keep the contexts of pastoral care and persecution firmly in view.

For Ignatius, Mary is first of all the guarantor of the union of divinity and humanity in Jesus’ person. Thus, he affirms against those whom he believes to be false teachers that the “one physician” is “both from Mary and God” (Ephesians 7.2).¹ As the guarantor of his humanity, she is also, secondly, a sign of the reality of his suffering: “our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived by Mary according to the plan of God; he was from the seed of David, but also from the Holy Spirit. He was born and baptized, that he might cleanse the water by his suffering” (Ephesians 18.2).² The strongest statement is found in the letter to the Trallians, again in the context of rejecting false teaching (note the repetition of the word “truly,” Greek alethos). “And so be deaf when someone speaks to you apart from Jesus Christ, who was from the race of David and from Mary, who was truly born, both ate and drank, was truly persecuted at the time of Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died. . . . He was also truly raised from the dead, his father having raised him” (Trallians 9.1-2). Finally, the letter to the Smyrneans makes a very similar declaration, but adds a new detail: Christ was “truly born from a virgin” (Smyrneans 1.1). Although Ignatius reveals little about the mind of the early Church, he yields information of tremendous importance. Mary is the key to the real humanity of Jesus. As really human, Jesus was baptized for us, suffered for us, died for us, and was raised to life for us. It is significant that while Ignatius affirms Mary’s virginity at the time of Jesus’ birth, it is not that miracle that assumes the foreground in his remarks. It is, rather, the miracle of the Incarnation: the one whom he describes as “our God” greets us, teaches us, and redeems us as one of us, as a human being. The close link between the motherhood of Mary, the humanity of Jesus, and the reality of salvation is one that will recur throughout the Fathers.

Early Christian leaders, it seems, hewed closely to the witness of the New Testament (such as they had it) in saying very little about the Lord’s mother. The same is not true for the popular Christian imagination, where the paucity of biblical material provided fertile ground for legends to grow.³ The Protevangelium of James (c. 150) provides a window into the early Christian imagination. The “protagonist” in this story is not Mary as much as it is her purity. The story’s conflict revolves around challenges to its maintenance. Mary is conceived miraculously, in a manner similar to John the Baptist, her parents well aware that she has been called to a unique vocation (1-5).⁴ Thereafter, her mother Anna preserves Mary’s purity by raising her in a nearly sealed bedroom-sanctuary through which nothing “common or unclean” is permitted to pass (6). From the ages of two to twelve, Mary continues her rarefied life in the Temple (7-8) where, in a manner similar to Elijah in the wilderness, she receives “food from the hand of an angel” (8.1). At the onset of puberty, her Temple haven becomes a new threat to her purity. To maintain both the Temple and Mary from impurity, Mary is “married” to Joseph, an aged widower, and moved to his home (8-13). There, the Annunciation takes place (11). Now pregnant, the challenge to Mary’s purity is obvious and overcome only through the judgments of a priest and Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth (12), and a public trial of both Mary and Joseph (13-16). The final test is the child’s delivery (17-20). The actual delivery is unobserved because it is veiled by God’s glory (19.2). Nevertheless, through the story of the skeptical Salome, readers are informed that Mary has remained a virgin even here (19.2; 20.4).⁵ This presentation of Mary as a near goddess figure did not fare well in the West, where it was harshly condemned by Jerome (see below). In the East, however, it proved to be especially popular. Its explanation of Jesus’ siblings as Joseph’s sons and daughters from his first marriage is accepted by the Orthodox family of churches to this day. Whatever the anonymous author hoped to achieve in his tale, he did not invent it. The popularity of his work suggests that he was drawing on streams of popular piety from the early second century.⁶ Its influence on later generations of theologians will become evident shortly.

Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 140–c. 202) draws upon a theme first enunciated by Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165) to highlight the unique place of Mary in Christian understandings of salvation.⁷ Irenaeus’s understanding of salvation draws heavily on Paul (cf. Romans 5; 1 Cor. 15) and is usually summarized in the word recapitulation.⁸ Both Adam and Christ are understood to represent the human race. But where Adam disobeys and leads the race into sin and death, Jesus obeys, thereby rescuing the race and restoring life. Human beings may, because of Christ, recover their destiny and grow into the perfection for which they were originally intended. All creation will be regathered under one head (cf. Phil. 1:22; Col. 1:20). If Adam and Christ in this schema are to be juxtaposed, then in an analogous way, Mary is the new Eve who undoes the sin of the first. Both are understood to be married yet virgins, but where Eve’s disobedience had led to slavery for the entire race, Mary’s obedience — her agreement with Gabriel’s announcement — brought freedom.⁹ In fact, in a later passage, Irenaeus will go on to call Mary the “cause of salvation,” over against Eve, who is the “cause of death.” Mary is now Eve’s “patroness.”¹⁰ Mary is no mere passive instrument in Irenaeus’s thought. She actively, if subordinately, assists Christ in the accomplishment of salvation. She is “that pure womb which regenerates men unto God, and which he [Jesus] himself made pure.”¹¹ This exalted language clearly exceeds the restraint of both Ignatius and the New Testament. Therefore, finally, two further observations need to be made. First, and more important, Irenaeus does not perceive or present himself as an innovator or developer of the apostolic witness. He contends vigorously against the Gnostics that where they innovate, he stands in the tradition of the Apostles, having been trained by their first students.¹² Second, Mary is not so elevated as to be immune to fault.¹³

It is this latter point that is developed by Irenaeus’s rough contemporary, the Latin Father Tertullian (c. 155–c. 220). Indeed, the cranky North African apologist and theologian is an exception to the now established trend toward greater Marian exaltation. This is seen in four ways. First, where both Justin and Irenaeus contrast Mary’s obedience with Eve’s disobedience when enunciating the new Eve motif, Tertullian appears to downplay the women’s activity, highlighting instead the contents and sources of their respective angelic messages: Mary believed God’s truth; Eve, the Devil’s lie.¹⁴ Second, while Tertullian defends Mary’s virginity as a matter of biblical record,¹⁵ it is the reality of her motherhood — and consequently the reality of her Son’s humanity — that receives more attention.¹⁶ Third, Tertullian does not shy away from including Mary among Jesus’ opponents prior to the resurrection¹⁷ and from indicting her as an example of unbelief.¹⁸ Fourth, Tertullian explicitly denies Mary’s in partu and post partum virginity, both for the sake of the humanity of Jesus. Though Mary’s womb was not penetrated by a father’s semen when Jesus was conceived, it was in fact opened by a male, namely, her Son in the act of being born.¹⁹ Jesus, truly human, was truly born. As for the latter, over against Gnostics who seemed to think that Jesus’ rejection of his family (cf. Mark 3:31-35) was an assertion of his inhumanity, Tertullian avers that the text’s reference to “brothers” means just that: Mary and Joseph had other children, each every bit as human as their eldest brother.²⁰

On this point, a stronger contrast cannot be found than the Alexandrian theologian, Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215), who affirms Mary’s perpetual virginity as a biblical fact and as theologically significant. In Stromata 7.16, he alludes to the Protevangelium of James and quotes another apocryphal document, Pseudo-Ezekiel, as though they are Scripture — showing that the NT canon was not yet set at the beginning of the third century. In the same passage, Mary is presented as a model of the Scriptures which remain pure and yet give birth to truth, while in Instructor 1.6 Mary is a model of the Church, whose faith is intact and yet who brings forth many children. We thus detect an important shift in emphasis. Where the earliest Christian Fathers — while affirming Mary’s virginity and the miracle of Christ’s conception — tended to focus on the reality of Mary’s motherhood as a sign of the humanity of Christ, in third-century Alexandria, Mary’s virginity had come to be seen as having a theological significance in its own right.

This is confirmed when we consider Origen (c. 185–c. 253), who while maintaining the Mary-Eve typology and stressing the reality of Christ’s humanity, appears to have devoted more time to Mary’s virginity. In part, this is apologetic — thus, against the pagan critic Celsus, Origen defends the virginal conception of Jesus and Mary’s ante partum virginity.²¹ But it is also a matter of biblical exegesis²² and acceptance of received, nonbiblical tradition. One remark is worth quoting in full:

Some say, basing it on a tradition in the Gospel according to Peter, as it is entitled, or “The Book of James,” [i.e., the Protevangelium] that the brethren of Jesus were sons of Joseph by a former wife, whom he married before Mary. Now those who say so wish to preserve the honour of Mary in virginity to the end, so that the body of hers which was appointed to minister to the Word . . . might not know intercourse with a man after that the Holy Ghost came into her and the power from on high over shadowed her. And I think it in harmony with reason that Jesus was the first-fruit among men of the purity which consists in chastity and Mary among women. . . .²³

These words are noteworthy for two reasons. First, the post partum virginity of Mary, as narrated in the Protevangelium of James, is defended not because the document is regarded as Scripture but because it is fitting, or in accordance with reason, that consecrated women have their own model of chastity. Second, where the intent of the author of the Protevangelium highlighted Mary’s purity as a means of elevating Mary above humanity, Origen now appeals to it as an example of Christian asceticism worthy of emulation.²⁴

It is fitting that Origen leaves us with a puzzle that is, given what textual evidence we now have, irresolvable. According to the early Church historian Socrates Scholasticus, Origen defended the term Theotokos (God-bearer or Mother of God) in a commentary on Romans a full two centuries before the Council of Ephesus defined the term and a full century before the earliest undisputed use of the word.²⁵ Sadly, the surviving versions of Origen’s commentary do not contain the reference. Socrates’ remark is an intriguing tidbit that certainly coheres with what we know about Origen’s own Marian thought as well as that of Alexandrian Christianity’s in general. It cannot be confirmed.

Whether Origen used the term or not, Theotokos was widely used by the time of Athanasius (c. 295-373). Its meaning was sufficiently clear that it could be used as a theological shorthand to defend a particular understanding of the Incarnation. Holy Scripture, says Athanasius, “contains a double account of the Saviour; that He was ever God, and is the Son, being the Father’s Word and Radiance and Wisdom; and that afterwards for us He took flesh of a Virgin, Mary Bearer of God [theotokou], and was made man.”²⁶ The one Savior is both God from all eternity and a human being, born of Mary. In Athanasius’s theological writings, Theotokos language always arises in this Christological context and retains this Christological focus.²⁷ Further, in his Letter to Epictetus, a defense of the Nicene faith against neo-Docetists, Mary functions as she did for Ignatius some three centuries before: her full humanity is a guarantee of Christ’s humanity.²⁸ Rather than appealing to Scripture, however, Athanasius accuses his opponents of rendering “the commemoration and work of Mary . . . superfluous,”²⁹ thereby according church practice some sort of canonical status in determining correct theology.

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