Connections between the adult Jesus and the baby in the manger aren’t easy to make. At first glance, the gospels don’t help much; whatever the gospel writers had in mind, producing complete biographies of Jesus wasn’t it. Mark omits Christmas altogether, and starts with Jesus getting baptized and launching his career. John has a short prelude and then does the same thing. Matthew and Luke give us the infancy narratives with a couple of sketchy references to childhood (flight into Egypt for Matthew, visit to the Temple in Luke) and that is pretty much it.
To make the connection between the baby Jesus and the man, you have to do something that often makes Protestants uncomfortable: study Mary. This late in the Christmas season, I haven’t yet written much about Mary. That is a characteristically Protestant and American failing. Throughout the Islamic, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic worlds, the Virgin Mary isn’t just a figure in a storybook. She’s the object of widespread popular devotion.
Much of this makes Protestants slightly queasy for both cultural and theological reasons. The folk piety of the Middle Ages combined Christian concepts with pre-Christian rituals and ideas. Christmas trees and Easter eggs had their origins in pagan customs and ceremonies; in many cases the old gods and spirits lived on, thinly veiled, as saints. We can see something like this today in Brazil and the Caribbean where African religious figures and ideas have been conflated with Catholic saints in various ways. The Virgin Mary, a powerful female figure associated with fertility, was a comfortable fit for many of the pre-Christian cults.
The traditional missionary strategy for Christianity was to assimilate as many features of traditional piety and culture as possible to the new religion. In addition, much of Europe was converted to Christianity from the top down. Kings and the nobility adopted the new faith, and it only slowly ‘trickled down’ to the illiterate commoners. By the time of the Reformation, a wide gap had opened up between the folk piety in the countryside and way that educated people understood their faith.
The Reformers stood for what they saw as an intellectually consistent Christian position and they wanted to bring all of cultural life under Biblical norms. They associated popular rites, shrines and customs with the ‘high places’ and ‘groves’ that reforming kings like Josiah sought to abolish in ancient Judea. At the same time, they argued that the Catholic belief that saints (and especially the Virgin Mary) could and would intercede on behalf of sinners was doctrinally wrong and a source of corruption in the church. It demeaned God, they believed, to suggest that intercession from Mary would change his mind. Is God’s compassion so limited, his wrath so blind, that he won’t show mercy unless the Virgin intercedes?
Surely not, said the Reformers and they promoted an individualistic faith in which each person stood alone before Christ. There was little room in this for the traditional veneration of the Virgin and to this day, Mary plays a very small part in the piety or the culture of the Protestant world.
Another aspect of the traditional Marian cult made Protestants nervous. The attention traditionally paid to Mary’s role not only detracted, Protestants thought, from the unique stature and work of Jesus; it also undercut the Protestant idea that salvation came through faith alone, with good works (deeds) having nothing to do with it. When Catholics celebrated Mary as the Second Eve whose obedience restored the relationship with God that the first Eve lost, Protestants heard this as a claim that human beings by their own will could overcome the effects of sin.
This is all very well, and I’m writing this blog to celebrate Christmas rather than to meddle in centuries-old theological quarrels, but I think the Protestant reaction against the excesses of medieval Mariolatry has gone too far–and the Christmas season seems like a good time to reflect on the theology, rather than the cult, of Mary.
The key to the classic understanding of who Mary is lies in ideas that the overwhelming majority of American Protestant churches share with the Catholics and the Orthodox. Specifically, these have to do with who Jesus was. 
Jesus is nothing if not paradoxical. On the one hand, he is the Second Person of the Trinity. But he is also a human being. How does this work? Like the Trinity itself it is a complicated idea that over the centuries has been described in very technical ways by theologians much better educated than me, but most Christians have held that Jesus has two natures combined in one person. He is fully divine, fully human — and still somehow just one person, one self. This idea was not formalized until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, but the implications for Mary were already clear enough that twenty years earlier she was proclaimed Theotokos at the Council of Ephesus.
Theotokos can be translated into English several ways: the most common is “Mother of God” and a very large majority of Christians around the world considers Mary to be. literally, the Mother of God. Since Jesus’ two natures are combined in one person, she must be considered not only the mother of his ‘human side’; she is the mother of the whole person. God’s love knows no bounds; his decision to enter history was so unlimited, so unconditional and so total that God became the son of a human woman.
I want to stress that this is not a point of theology that divides Protestants and Catholics. Martin Luther, John Calvin and Charles Wesley all subscribed to the concepts laid down at Ephesus and Chalcedon; contemporary Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians and many others adhere to churches and traditions that consider these ideas to be basic parts of the Christian faith. (Mormons and Unitarians do not; most evangelicals and Pentecostals do.)
The question I’d like to suggest for readers here towards the end of the Christmas season is this: what respect and honor is due to the Mother of God? To sharpen it a bit, remember that Christians believe that Jesus perfectly fulfilled the law of Moses, not just ritualistically or to external appearances but sincerely and from the heart. The ten commandments sum up that law; the fifth commandment tells us to “Honor your mother and father.” Christians believe that Jesus honored his Father by a life of perfect obedience all the way to the cross. What honor do we think he paid to his mother? How exalted is she in heaven? What good thing would he withhold from her? What honor should we, his brothers and sisters by adoption, pay to the mother of our savior and lord?
I am not suggesting that Southern Baptists start chartering planes for pilgrimages to Lourdes or holding Wednesday-night rosary sessions. And it’s clear to me (as indeed it is to most Catholics and Orthodox) that a large part of honoring Mary is to do your best to follow her son. Yet sometime during the Christmas season, it might be worthwhile for Protestants to ask themselves how they propose to honor the Mother of God this year.
If Marian doctrine originates in our attempts to come to grips with the nature of Jesus, our understanding of Jesus will deepen if we study her. Protestants especially can usefully spend some time thinking about the woman who became the Mother of God, and looking at some of the ways she seems to have left her mark on Jesus.
The passionate concern for the poor that shaped much of his ministry can already be seen in her response to the angel Gabriel as reported by Luke. Giving thanks to God, she says of him that
He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
This is not a bad description of what Jesus did as an adult. The empathy for social outsiders, the refusal to be fooled or intimidated by wealth and social position, the radical intolerance for the abuse of privilege — they all seem prefigured in the words of his mother.
Another way in which Jesus was unusual for his time was his willingness to engage in serious intellectual and moral conversation with independent and unconventional women. The ‘woman of Samaria’ who interrogated him about the water of life, Mary Magdalene, the Martha and Mary who were clearly his close friends, the woman ‘taken in adultery’ whose stoning he prevented: Jesus is comfortable and relaxed with many of the women he meets, jokes with them, and treats them with serious respect.
Down through the ages, Christian civilization has often treated women badly, yet visitors from other great world civilizations have often remarked on the (relative) freedom and equality that women enjoyed in the Christian world. The cult of the Virgin played some part in this; the medieval concept of the courteous and chivalrous knight was often associated with Marian piety (and sometimes with ideals of courtly love which had very little to do with Christian ethics).
I like to think that there is something more: Jesus was the son of a strong and independent woman. Steeped in the ethical traditions of Judaism, she was passionate about justice and willing to stake everything on her sense of God’s call. She had a soft spot for social outcasts — after all she was once in the position of being an unmarried, pregnant woman in a censorious and traditional society. She was thoughtful and meditative, but capable of swift and decisive action when the time came.
She was unflinching and courageous. She followed Jesus to the cross and watched her son die; her loving glance would have been one of the few comforts he had during that final torment. She was ready to respond to the unexpected, to have her life wrenched out of a comfortable and traditional groove when God showed her that he had something else in mind.
This is the kind of woman that God chose to raise Jesus. She put a lot of herself in her son, leaving an imprint on his character that is visible from a distance of 2000 years. And she didn’t just mark him. She marked, marks us. Our civilization for better or worse has been shaped through its complicated, many-sided encounter with the man she raised and the faith that grew up around him. We are all sons and daughters of Mary today, whether we acknowledge it or not.
I grew up in the Episcopal Church where one of the favorite hymns was “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones,” often sung on All Saints’ Day (November 1). I was an adult before I realized that one of the stanzas invokes the Virgin Mary:
O higher than the cherubim,
More glorious than the seraphim,
Lead their praises, Alleluia!
Thou Bearer of the eternal Word,
Most gracious, magnify the Lord,
Alleluia! Alleluia
“All generations,” she marveled to the angel while accepting God’s request to bear his son, “shall call me blessed.” For two thousand years they have; God blessed her and through her, he continues to bless us all.
Happy tenth day of Christmas!
“When Catholics celebrated Mary as the Second Eve whose obedience restored the relationship with God that the first Eve lost, Protestants heard this as a claim that human beings by their own will could overcome the effects of sin.” (Walter Russell Mead)
In his recent post entitled “How to Get Smart in 2012,” Professor Mead provided a list of 10 books and periodicals that he suggests will help his readers become even smarter than they already are in the new year. In item 6 on his list, Professor Mead recommends,
“Read all the John Milton you can. Start this Christmas season with his magnificent Nativity Ode, then sample his shorter poems. Go on at least to Paradise Lost and the greatest work against censorship ever written, the Areopagitica. It won’t be easy but it will make you smart.”
Milton was a radical Protestant who detested the Roman Church and was embittered by his support for the losing side of a civil war. He was blind, divorced and brilliant.
Anyone who reads “Paradise Lost” will quickly be disabused of the notion that Mary was the “second Eve” in anything but name only; the two women could not be more dissimilar.
The Mary of the Bible practically defines the word “holy.” The Eve of “Paradise Lost” was a vixen so luscious that neither Adam, Satan (disguised as a serpent) nor the archangel Raphael could resist her. In fact, upon reading the epic it quickly becomes apparent that her creator (Milton) was unable to resist her charms either.
Eschewing tradition, Milton makes plain that Adam and Eve engaged in sexual liaisons prior to their fall (and if the Christian world is to be believed, our fall as well). In the poem, Satan witnesses Adam and Eve making love which induces in him tremendous jealousy and envy.
Milton strongly implies that when Eve, induced by Satan, succumbed to temptation, it wasn’t just the forbidden fruit that she sampled. There is a strong implication that Eve, and her “irresistible golden locks” (to use Milton’s phrase), engaged in sexual intercourse with Satan.
Various Gnostic traditions suggest that “sin” was the offspring of Eve’s union with Satan. In the Midrash, the Rabbis relate the suggestion that Cain was the offspring of Eve’s sexual encounter with Satan although in this tradition, the fallen angel in question was called “Sammael.”
There is even a New Testament hint of this story. In John 3.11-12 John distinguishes the “children of God” from the “children of the devil.” During the Renaissance this New Testament sentence was understood literally as opposed to figuratively and it spawned many variants. For example in his 1627 story “The Locusts” Phineas Fletcher makes “sin” the daughter of Satan by Eve and depicts her as half woman and half serpent; there are several other examples.
If Milton is to be believed (and after all, Professor Mead says that reading him makes us smart), then the lascivious Eve has far more in common with Mary Magdalene than with Mary, the mother of Jesus.
I am liking the series, Prof. Mead. I also appreciate that you’re doing the whole of Christmas.
I got a lot out of the previous installment on the Magi, especially the 2nd half. As a Marian myself, I learned much from this installment as well, again, especially in the 2nd half. (If you ever republish the series, you might want to consider starting these in the middle and leaving out or drastically shortening the preambles.)
Wig Wag, I can’t quarrel with your reading of Milton (whom I’ve only read very lightly), but I think you may be missing the point of “Second Eve.” It doesn’t mean Eve the Second, chip off the old block, but rather the opposite. It means Eve utterly reversed and transformed: disobedience vs. obedience, bringer of original sin vs. bearer of redemption, etc. etc. That said, Milton is way over the top and awfully hard on the poor gal. Sheesh.
For an alternate view, the Anchoress had a post a few of years back, O Eve! Reconciled! It contained a beautiful poem and song (at the second link below and well worth a listen) in which Mary comforts and encourages Eve:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theanchoress/2008/12/29/o-eve-reconciled/
http://franklarocca.com/oeve3w.html
That seems more theologically on track than Milton’s version! He’s got issues.
If your suggestion Xpat is that Eve is Mary’s troublesome doppelganger rather than “the second Eve” I might be able to buy that.
Milton was very learned and well-read. There is every reason to believe that his Eve was based, at least in part, on Homer’s Helen.
Whatever one thinks of the rightful place of Mary in the Christian hierarchy I think everyone would agree that Mary was no Helen.
WRM, Yule Blog 2011-2012 has certainly celebrated Christmas season (sans theological contention/quarrel); continuing in that vein, honoring Mother of God implies comprehension of Marian doctrine and its value to Christian faith – “our civilization for better or worse has been shaped through its complicated, many-sided encounter with the man she raised and the faith that grew up around him.”
WRM- Do you classify Mormons as Christians? If so please provide your definition of a Christian.
Just trying to be noodge( please bare with me) – My bible never says 3 wise men.
WRM, reflecting on your essay and its stated purpose (avoiding theological renderings and disputes), I come away with a committed Christian attempting to actuate in both secular and sectarian readers a sense of the Mother of the Redeemer and of the Christians.
WRM, I sense that you are in “The Mother of Meaning” revealing through ViaMeadia the Christian understanding of the extent of Mary’s faith and infinite dignity/good.
Your Yule Blogs have enriched me – happy tenth day of Christmas.
I think many people don’t appreciate the importance of women in Jesus’s earthly life, and in early Christianity, as recorded in the New Testament.
Women weren’t chosen as missionaries because in that era, traipsing the landscape alone would be dangerous. But in every other way, including financial, they enabled and abetted Jesus and his mission. As WRM says, he treated them with serious respect. In no situation did he treat them as lesser beings.
He appreciated the vital role that women played as mothers, as pillars of the home, as stabilizers and, indeed, creators of a culture. He inveighed men against lusting for other women and forbid to divorce their wives except for sexual misbehavior.
The Roman Emperor Julian (361-363) persecuted Christians and tried to reconvert the empire to paganism. But he admitted, “No Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans [Christians] feed not only their poor but ours.” Whose hands prepared the food?
Jesus always knew, and knows, the importance of women.
As an Orthodox Christian I had a similar surprise upon a visit with some in-laws to a Lutheran Church one Sunday, on which they sang “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones.” When we got to the stanza that you quote above, it was quite clear to me that the stanza was but a poetic, metered translation of the most frequently heard Orthodox hymn to the Theotokos (read at the end of Vespers, chanted between the verses of the Magnificat during Matins and during the commemoration of the Virgin during the Divine Liturgy, and in many other places):
“More honorable than the Cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim. Without defilement you gave birth to God the Word. True Theotokos, we magnify you.”
After that encounter, my interest was piqued, and, after a bit of research, I discovered out that the author of “Ye Watchers,” Athelstan Riley, had actually been something of an enthusiast for Eastern Christianity and had in fact made a journey to Mt. Athos, which he documented in his book, _Athos, or The Mountain of the Monks_ (1887).
By the by, while I am obviously in favor of giving Mary her due, “Ye Watchers” is probably not the best argument for an abiding precedence of Marian tradition within Protestantism, seeing as how it was only written in 1906 by an Anglo-Catholic with some Eastern proclivities. And, as your story attests, most people have no idea what is meant by the stanza, and I dare say that many Protestants, if they were to understand, would demand it removed from their hymnals.
One of my professors once commented that just as Mary endured disgrace because of her unusual out-of-wedlock pregnancy, Jesus endured disgrace because of His torture and death on the cross. And similar to how Mary’s suffering of dishonor led to blessing for us, Jesus’s suffering of death led to our salvation. God turned their shame into honor, “exalt[ing] the humble and meek.”
We, members of the “all generations” Mary mentions, can call her blessed, even as we focus our primary attention on blessing the name of her Son.
Link broken on subsequent post in this series. The one up.