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046 | Mariology: Understanding the Theotokos
368 Plays4 years ago
Mariology is an often overlooked portion of Christian theology: the study of the doctrine of Mary, Mother of Jesus. In Protestant circles there can be some hesitancy to even engage with this doctrine, which can make for difficult conversations with Catholic friends. This episode breaks down some of the basics of Mariology, where they are found in the Bible, and what Luther actually believed about her. Hail Mary in the Bible: https://dioceseofbrooklyn.org/defending-your-faith/where-is-the-hail-mary-in-the-bible/ Martin Luther and the Queen of Heaven: https://lutheranreformation.org/theology/luthers-love-st-mary-queen-heaven/ What Catholics Really Believe by Ignatius Press Problems with Biblical Mariology: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2511&context=marian_studies
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Transcript
Introduction to Verity Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Mason-Heimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith, ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You don't have to settle for watered down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper, God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome back
Introduction to Mariology
00:00:31
Speaker
to Verity podcast friends. I had to take a little break to plan for our next four episodes because they're a little heavier topics. And we are starting back with one of those awesome topics, which is Mariology or the theology of Mary, the mother of Jesus. I get questions about this almost every Ask Anything Monday. So I thought, why not dive into it a little bit on here?
00:00:58
Speaker
This will be a shorter episode because, as most of you know, I am not Roman Catholic and I'm not Orthodox. So my Mariology is not going to be as robust as it would be if I were from one of those church traditions.
Bridging Protestant and Catholic Views on Mary
00:01:16
Speaker
So in this episode, we will just be talking about the general understanding of
00:01:22
Speaker
who Mary was and our response to her as held in the Catholic Church and to a degree in the Orthodox Church. The meaning or goal in doing this is to just increase understanding between Protestants and Catholics when it comes to a discussion of Mary. Because growing up Protestant in a highly Catholic area
00:01:48
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I frequently had assumptions myself about Mariology, but also I noticed that as I grew up alongside my Catholic friends, when we would have discussions about this, my assumptions are often proven wrong. And so
Research and Sources on Mariology
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I wanted to just dive into this a little bit and hopefully increase some of the understanding between my Catholic and Protestant listeners.
00:02:12
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Now, just because I'm covering this does not mean that I am completely on board with every single thing I'm sharing. But I do think it's important as always to go directly to our sources when we're talking about something. So in the event of a primarily Catholic theology, I'm going to go to Catholic sources. And so that's what I did in researching for this episode.
00:02:37
Speaker
So this whole episode is just talking about Mary. Who was she and how do we respond to her role as the mother of Jesus? Now, I think you all know who she is. There's no question there in who Mary was that she was the humble, most likely teenage mother of Jesus Christ.
00:02:58
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And I thought a really great starting point for us would be to actually read the passage where the angel visits Mary and we can read her response to that experience.
Reflection on Luke 1: Gabriel's Visit to Mary
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So I am reading in Luke one and I'm starting in verse 26, which says in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth to a Virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David.
00:03:27
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the Virgin's name was Mary. This is the Greek version of her Jewish name, which would have been Miriam. And he came to her and said, Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you. But she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son
00:03:52
Speaker
and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. And Mary said to the angel, How will this be, since I am a virgin? And the angel answered her, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called Holy, the Son of God.
00:04:20
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So later when we talk about the Hail Mary, you'll notice that this passage is the foundation of the Hail Mary prayer. But in simply reading it and looking at it in a straightforward way, I think we can already just
00:04:35
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be universally amazed at her response to the angel. She did not argue with the angel. In fact, she's often contrasted with Zechariah, who was a priest of the Lord, in that she accepted by faith what God was calling her to do instead of walking in doubt.
Mary vs. Zechariah's Faith
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Now, she had a question, how will this be? I'm a virgin.
00:05:05
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But she then goes on to say, let it be to me according to your word, which is not what Zechariah did. And so it's an interesting parallel that Luke did not by accident in this first chapter, starting with Zechariah, who is this man of authority and power and age, and this young woman who has no authority, power or wisdom and experience of age.
00:05:33
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and yet they each responded very differently to God's call. Now obviously God redeemed Zechariah's experience and John the Baptist came from his family and so it's still a beautiful story for Zechariah but it's a very interesting contrast that Luke gives us and it gives us a glimpse into the character of Mary. So I want to start with that because that's something that both Protestants and Catholics can appreciate.
00:06:02
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that both of us should honor and should venerate, in a way, the humility and the willingness to follow God's call that Mary exemplify. So
Catholic Doctrines and Protestant Misconceptions
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with that in mind, I want to now look at the actual doctrine of the Virgin Mary and why there is such a split between Catholics and Protestants. Many Protestants, which
00:06:28
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It comes from the word protest, protestant. It comes from the Protestant Reformation when Luther, Zwingli, Calvin split from the Catholic church out of rejection of corruption in the church and corruption of certain doctrines. They split and formed their own churches. So Protestants today are non-Catholics.
00:06:54
Speaker
Many Protestants find the exaltation of Mary close to idolatry, clouding the view of Christ. Many Protestants who have had experience with Catholicism where there wasn't a lot of doctrinal explanation or the assumption was that Mary was the necessary mediator between us and Jesus instead of Jesus being the mediator between us and God.
00:07:22
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leaves Protestants extremely wary and hesitant to even engage with the idea of Mary as a person. To the point that I think many Protestants today don't know much about her at all, don't know the church history surrounding her, or the fact that many of the church fathers that we appreciate today actually venerated Mary themselves.
00:07:49
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On the other hand, many Catholics feel as if Protestants are misrepresenting the church's teaching on Mary and are unaware of what is actually taught about her, which is very frustrating when you're trying to have a conversation and one person is saying that you worship Mary when the church does not teach the worship of Mary. And so with this happening, you're going to have a lot of conflict and difficulty in those conversations between Protestants and Catholics.
00:08:18
Speaker
So I went to Catholic sources for what I'm going to be sharing with you. I have several Catholic commentaries and books that I personally own, and then I used about 10 different Catholic and Lutheran resources as I was writing this. And you'll see why I needed to see Lutheran resources when we get towards the end. Here are a couple things about Mary. Mary's title is Mother of God, but this title is subordinate to Christ.
00:08:48
Speaker
Mary as mother of God does not mean that she mothered the Trinity, and that is not what is taught by the Catholic Church. It's that she mothered Jesus. And her title in Greek is Theotokos. This means bearer of God, bearer of God. That word bearer came to be more explicitly said, mother of God.
00:09:14
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We're going to talk about the Council of Ephesus in a little bit, but at the Council of Ephesus in 431 Common Era, what happened was this name, Theotokos, mother of God, was hotly debated between two church fathers, Nestorius and Cyril. And Nestorius did not like the name mother of God because he believed that Jesus had two very distinct natures.
00:09:43
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human and divine, and he felt that calling Mary mother of God muddled those two natures, and so he rejected it. He would have preferred that she be called mother of Christ. In the end, Cyril won, his theologians, his theology won out at the Council of Ephesus, and so mother of God is what continued to be the name of Mary throughout the rest of church history.
00:10:09
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Another essential doctrine regarding Mary that is hard for a lot of Protestants to swallow is that she remained free from all sin. And the reason this is essential is because, and I'm quoting from an article here, for a person who is to bear God himself and contain the uncontainable, she must be free from all sin. She can't have sin, original sin, in order to be bearing God himself.
00:10:39
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And so this then leads to the doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception. So she was cleansed, this is what's taught, she was cleansed in anticipation of Christ as a direct act of God. She was saved from original sin by God in order to bear the Son. So when I was reading a couple different articles about her being free from sin, her Immaculate Conception, the way it was explained is that
00:11:08
Speaker
This was an act of God similar to how God cleanses us from our sin through Christ. But the difference is that we are cleansed from our sin after Christ, and she was cleansed from sin before Christ, again, in anticipation of Christ. And the one priest that I was reading
00:11:34
Speaker
talked about it as if there's a pit that was in the middle of a pathway and someone is walking down the pathway and they fall into the pit and a person pulls them out. That's the Christian experience for everybody else in Christendom. They fall into sin, they're in original sin, and God pulls them out through Christ. But with Mary, she's walking along the path and as she's about to fall into the pit of sin, God grabs her and pulls her away from it.
00:12:03
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And that's the idea that's being expressed here with Mary's Immaculate Conception. She was cleansed in anticipation of Christ by God so that she could bear the Son. Another important
Mary as Mediator and Veneration Practices
00:12:16
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doctrine of Mary is Mary as Mediator. And again, this is a tough one for a lot of Protestants.
00:12:22
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They say, well, why would Mary be our mediator? If we flip over to Hebrews, we can see that it says Christ is our mediator between us and God. So why would we need Mary? And so there are a lot of different reasons that are expressed regarding this. But one of the ways the Catholic Church presents this is that Christ actually authorized her as a mediator.
00:12:45
Speaker
Christ is exercising his mediation. He's the one who's still the primary mediator, but he uses Mary as a means of mediation. So he's still the one who's the chief mediator, but he's basically delegated some of that mediation to Mary. And Mary, this is another point in our doctrine of Mary. Mary is the chief of all the saints. So she prays for Christians on earth. She is praying for
00:13:14
Speaker
believers on earth, and part of her job, if you will, because of her love towards her son, is to pray for the children of God, the church, and mediate for Christ. The final point I want to bring up about Mary, and this will help you the most in your conversations with Catholic friends, and if you're Catholic,
00:13:36
Speaker
Perhaps as you're talking to Protestants, this may be a starting point, is the fact that Mary is not worshipped. She is not to be worshipped. This is not taught by the Catholic Church that you should be worshipping Mary. Mary is venerated, so she's respected. She's seen as
00:13:56
Speaker
basically the greatest of the saints. She is the mother of Christ in that she was favored by God for that role. And because of that, she is greatly respected, but she is not to be worshipped. Now, is it true that Mary's veneration has turned to worship in certain Catholic circles? Yes.
00:14:18
Speaker
especially in places where we see syncretism happening, where Catholicism gets melded with other religions, sometimes native religions, and it turns into a form of goddess worship, definitely this is a problem. But if you go back to what the Vatican is actually teaching, it's not teaching a worship of Mary, or at least everything that I read and have read and have heard from the Catholics who I'm in community with,
00:14:46
Speaker
This is the case. She's not to be worshipped. She's to be venerated. I think all of us have been at a women's conference where we were told, you are a beautiful daughter of the Most High King. And it's true, but it's not the whole truth. The beauty of being God's daughter has some backstory and it's left out in a lot of messages preached to women. So if you're tired of hearing the watered down Christian teaching and you're hungry for a deeper spiritual life, I have something for you.
00:15:16
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is my brand new book, Stop Calling Me Beautiful, Finding Soul Deep Strength in a Skin Deep World. Stop Calling Me Beautiful is a book about going deeper with God. I'm going to talk about pursuing the truth of who God is and who we are in relationship to Him, how to study scripture, how legalism, shallow theology, and false teaching keep us from living boldly as a woman of the word. I'm so excited to put this book in your hands.
00:15:43
Speaker
You can grab your copy on Amazon or for more information, head to my website, FeliciaMasonHeimer.com and click the book tab. You might be asking, why would we venerate her in the first place? And so this is a kind of a pivotal piece that goes back to John 19 when Jesus is on the cross. When Christ is hanging on the cross, he turns to John and says, behold, this is your mother.
00:16:10
Speaker
And after having Mary look at John, he says, this is your son. And so the church believes that this isn't just a one time thing. It wasn't just Jesus loved his mother and he loved John and he wanted them to, you know, be taken care of. This is an encouragement to the whole church to develop a relationship with Mary. This is a command to Jesus' mother and John as reflective of the whole church's responsibility.
00:16:39
Speaker
And I'll have sources for this in the show notes on the blog. So basically, if when Jesus turns to Mary and he says, this is your son, in terms of John, this is your mother, this was a model or a setup for how the rest of the church going forward was to view Mary. They were to see her as their spiritual mother and they were to venerate her. One of the interesting things about Mary that I actually learned when I was doing research for this episode
00:17:09
Speaker
is that she is largely seen as a parallel to Eve, and almost the reversal of what Eve did in the garden. And this is a quote from one of my sources, which says, just as the woman by consent of her free will, abandoned her God in sin and brought death upon the world,
00:17:33
Speaker
So too would woman, by consent of her free will, embrace her God and usher eternal life into the world, making salvation possible for all men." I never recognized that parallel until researching this episode, and I was just blown away by that incredible reversal right in the beginning of the Gospels, right in Luke 1. We see this laid out. How cool is that?
00:18:00
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And I think this particular piece is one example of where Protestants would do well to pay more attention to Mary.
Protestant Reactions to Catholic Mariology
00:18:09
Speaker
Because in our fear of anything Catholic, which really does happen in a lot of more fundamental churches, there's a fear of anything that seems slightly Catholic, has ritual or liturgy or iconography, you know, meditation.
00:18:28
Speaker
scripted prayers, anything like that, which a lot of this aversion to those things comes from Puritanism, which is a very extreme version of Christianity. And so perhaps we'll get into this more when we do our contemplative prayer episode. But one of the things I think we can take away from this incredible parallel of Mary and Eve is that as Protestants, we need to be careful not to create a reactive Mariology.
00:18:58
Speaker
a reactive Mariology. So we look at abuses of Mariology in liturgical traditions and we run the complete opposite way to the point that we completely miss the significance of who Mary was in Scripture and what she accomplished and what she did. So let's circle back around to Theotokos and the Council of Ephesus.
Council of Ephesus and 'Theotokos' Debate
00:19:22
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So in Ephesus in 431, so pretty early in the church,
00:19:28
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There was a council held to settle several different debates, most of them around the nature of Jesus and what he was. Was he human and divine to what degree? What did it look like? And so I'm going to read to you from a book called Know the Creeds and Councils by Justin Holcomb, where he talks about this. He says,
00:19:49
Speaker
Nestorius came to the center of theological controversy when, after arriving at Constantinople, he was asked to comment on whether it was fitting to call Jesus' mother Mary Theotokos, or Mother of God. For Nestorius, who wanted to keep the two natures of Christ separate, this was a difficult assertion to make. While he maintained that Mary did indeed give birth to Christ, Nestorius thought it was inappropriate to speak of Mary as being the Mother of God when she bore the child Jesus.
00:20:18
Speaker
God is eternal, and any attempt to say that God was born of Mary seemed to Nestorius to be closet Arianism, since Arianism taught that there was a time when the Son of God did not exist. Side note, Arianism is a heresy, and it was a huge deal in the early church, so there was a lot of debate and many councils were gathered just to refute Arianism. Nestorius said that he could affirm Theotokos if
00:20:47
Speaker
Anthropotokos, mother of man, was added to her title, but he considered Christotokos, mother of Christ, the most fitting title, because God cannot have a mother and no creature could have engendered the Godhead, Mary bore a man, the vehicle of divinity, but not God. So Cyril did not agree with this.
00:21:07
Speaker
And when he saw that Nestorius had dismissed Theotokos, he got into a hot debate with Nestorius via letters until they finally called the First Council of Ephesus, and this is where the conflict was ultimately voted on and resolved. But one of the things that is important to know, and this is how church history and context are so intriguing,
00:21:30
Speaker
is that the council was originally supposed to take place in Constantinople, but the sister of the emperor, Pulcaria, moved it to Ephesus, and Pulcaria was a longtime enemy of Nestorius. She also knew that Ephesus was the site of a thriving shrine to marry. This is according to Justin Holcomb.
00:21:51
Speaker
So the people at Ephesus would have been in favor of this idea of the mother of God and definitely would not have supported Nestorius, which could have an impact on the council at Ephesus. And it's very possible that that was a big part in why Nestorius was exiled and Cyril's theology was the one that the church rallied around. Another thing that is interesting, and I would be curious to know a little bit of what
00:22:20
Speaker
impact this had is that Ephesus is also the location of a former temple to Artemis. And this enormous temple to a goddess was familiar to the culture there only a few hundred years prior when the early church was taking root. And so to have a massive shrine to Mary in the exact same city does make you wonder, was there clarity on the nature of Mary and who she was in contrast to these Greek gods?
00:22:50
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And so I always
Luther's View on Mary
00:22:51
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come back to when it comes to Maryology, clarity is so necessary. What are we saying about her? How are we treating her? How are we viewing her? And is Christ still supreme? That is always the question. Now, I want to kind of conclude with a little bit from Martin Luther about Mary, because oftentimes Protestants who really point back in their heritage to Luther and to his split from the Catholic Church
00:23:19
Speaker
will take people like Luther and hold them up as those who completely rejected Catholic theology. But in reality, Luther actually had a very high view of Mary, and I'm going to read a little bit of what he had to say about her. Luther had a respect for her. He didn't want to give her an idolatrous devotion, but he also said she had a unique place in the whole of mankind among which she had no equal. He also said
00:23:48
Speaker
She does not say men shall speak all manner of good of her, praise her virtues, exalt her virginity or her humility, or sing of what she has done. But for this one thing alone that God regarded her, will men call her blessed? She lays claim to nothing and counts only him as great." And so it's her humility that Luther was especially admiring and exalting, and what led him to say, Queen of Heaven is a true enough name.
00:24:16
Speaker
He actually said that Queen of Heaven really is a true enough name for Mary, but he did warn against seeing her as something more than she was or giving her divine attributes equal to Christ. Some people would even begin to treat her as what's called a co-redemptrix, that Christ could not have accomplished salvation without Mary and that she is absolutely necessary to the salvation process.
00:24:43
Speaker
He was concerned people would pray and flee to her rather than to God. And I think that's still the concern today. And I would say most Orthodox Catholics would probably agree that there is a concern that Christ needs to be upmost and first, even as you ask Mary to pray for you. Luther also had some things to say about Mary and her relationship to God.
00:25:07
Speaker
In his book, On the Councils and the Church, written in 1539, he said, God did not derive his divinity from Mary, but it does not follow that it is therefore wrong to say that God was born of Mary, that God is Mary's son, and that Mary is God's mother. She is the true mother of God and bearer of God. Mary suckled God, rocked God to sleep, prepared broth and soup for God, for God and man are one person, one Christ, one son, one Jesus, not two Christs, just as your son is not two sons.
00:25:35
Speaker
even though he has two natures, body and soul, the body from you, the soul from God alone." So, Luther here is actually going up against the doctrine that Nestorius was teaching. He's upholding Cyril's doctrine of the Theotokos, and he's saying, yes, Jesus had two natures, but he wasn't two separate Christs, and therefore we can say that Mary was the mother of God.
00:25:59
Speaker
still he did condemn any practice that implied Mary was equal to God or anything that took away from Christ's sufficiency, but this is still the official teaching of the Catholic Church. So what Luther basically was getting at was
00:26:16
Speaker
If you're strong enough in faith to engage with Mary, to understand her, to venerate her, the way that, you know, scripture shows us her and her reality and her humility in the glory that God gave her, then absolutely do that. He said, whoever possesses a good, firm faith says the Hail Mary without danger, and whoever is weak in faith can utter no Hail Mary without danger to his salvation. So what he's
Hail Mary Prayer's Biblical Roots
00:26:42
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saying, and this was in a sermon in 1523,
00:26:45
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is that those who are strong in faith can say the Hail Mary without thinking that Mary is saving them herself instead of just asking her to pray. But those who are weak in faith will often mix up the role of Mary with the role of Christ and therefore endanger their understanding of their salvation. And so once again, that brings us back to the need for clarity in our Maryology.
00:27:11
Speaker
So the very last thing I wanted to talk about is the Hail Mary and I wanted to read it to you and then talk about the verses from which it is sourced and why it's written the way it's written. So the prayer goes like this. Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
00:27:40
Speaker
So some of this you may remember from when we read Luke 1 at the beginning of this episode. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you is directly from Luke 1.28 when Gabriel gives Mary this greeting. Then in Luke 1.41, we see Elizabeth respond to Mary saying, blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. So this is a saying inspired by the Holy Spirit from Elizabeth proclaiming
00:28:09
Speaker
that Mary is the most blessed of all women. Then in Luke 143, we see it say, why is this granted me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? This is again, Elizabeth talking. And I'm quoting here from the diocese of Brooklyn, which says, Mary is the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the second person of the Holy Trinity. Since Jesus is God, this makes her the mother of God.
00:28:37
Speaker
She is the mother of the God-Man, Jesus, not the mother of the Trinity. St. James tells Christians to pray for one another. All the baptized are members of the body of Christ, and therefore it is right to pray for other members of the body. James goes on to say that the prayers of the righteous have great power. What human other than Jesus is more righteous than the blessed mother? Though she is in heaven, she still hears the prayers of her children on earth and intercedes for them. And so this explains the latter half of
00:29:04
Speaker
the final portion of the Hail Mary which says pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Now we could do a whole episode on the concept of saints praying for those on earth, but I do want to say as far as saints praying for people on earth, I absolutely think that Christians in heaven can pray for those on earth. To me, scripturally, it makes no sense why they wouldn't. They are believers in Christ who are in the presence of God and can intercede for those on earth. It does not mean that
00:29:33
Speaker
Jesus is less of an intercessor or less of a mediator, but simply that those who have gone to be with the Lord until we join them are praying for those on earth. And so in this context, Mary praying for those on earth and in the Catholic view, the greatest of all the saints would make sense that you're appealing for her to pray for you as you are also praying to Christ.
00:30:00
Speaker
And so that is where the Hail Mary comes from, scripturally. And James 5 16 is a source that was mentioned here, which says, therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. And so that's the concept that's behind the asking of Mary to pray for those who are alive on earth. Once again, I am not Catholic.
00:30:27
Speaker
So obviously there are doctrines that I don't completely agree with within the church, but I also think that as a Protestant, it's important to engage with these topics, dig into them a little bit, understand as much as we can so that we can have some understanding between and in our relationships with Catholics and Protestants alike, and also to increase our appreciation for Mary and what she did and who she was. Because regardless of the denomination that you're in,
00:30:54
Speaker
I really think that there is so much to learn from this humble teenage girl who took on the greatest mission in the history of the world.