A way forward on the subject of Mary?

The following lines are excerpts from Peter Hocken’s book: ‘The Strategy of the Spirit?’, where he reflects on the meaning of the worldwide renewal and revival being brought about by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit both in the historic churches and in modern movements. I quote from a chapter titled, ‘Mary, Mother of Jesus’. The subject headings are sometimes my own, but based on the quotes

What is Necessary for Progress

I shall not attempt a full presentation of Catholic faith concerning Mary, nor will I attempt to examine all Protestant objections.
My more limited goal is to approach this difficult topic, so as to help move us beyond a Catholic triumphalism that is indifferent to Protestant sensitivities and an evangelical indignation that dismisses Marian piety as simply the survival or infiltration of paganism.

To seek agreement when there is widespread outrage and disdain is quite unrealistic.
To seek to move a few steps towards each other is possible. Those few steps will then show us how to take a few more.

For there to be progress on this issue, there has to be a listening to each other and a willingness to ask the Holy Spirit for light on what is valid and authentic in the witness or the complaint of the other party.

It is not sufficient to do what both sides have customarily done: to evaluate the other from our present standpoint, assuming our side is totally in the right and the other is totally in the wrong.

Movement on this matter and other issues in contention is important if there is to be growing co-operation and respect rather than increasing confrontation and suspicion.

The person and subject of Mary is a particular instance of the challenges. In fact, not only are the difficulties greater concerning Mary, but the challenges that each side poses to the other are greater too.
This is to say that the great differences represent differing strengths and different weaknesses, and that there is in the differences a significant challenge of the Holy Spirit from each side to the other.

Mary As Symbol

It has been remarked by a number of theologians, especially by Karl Barth (1886-1967) that Mary is symbolic of Roman Catholicism as a whole. (and that)

Differences concerning her are symptomatic of all Catholic-Protestant disagreement.

In particular, Mary is a symbol of human co-operation with God’s redemptive work: She who said, ‘Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word’ (Luke 1:38),

Mary co-operates with God by faith and so conceives the eternal Word in her womb.

Catholic doctrine affirms the necessity of human co-operation that nonetheless, is only possible with God’s grace.

Protestant teaching, especially of the more evangelical type, is very suspicious of affirming any human co-operation; lest there be any ‘Jesus plus’ understanding of salvation, or any claim to human achievement and merit.

In this sense the solus Christus (Christ alone) of classical Protestantism is one with sola Scriptura (the Bible alone) and sola fide (faith alone). 

By contrast, the Catholic tradition instinctively says ‘and … and’ where the Protestant says ‘either … or’. 

So the Catholic says, ‘Christ and the Church’, ‘Jesus and Mary and ‘Christ and us’, along with ‘Scripture and Tradition’ and ‘Faith and Works’.

In fact, Catholic teaching does not affirm the equality of both poles in these twosomes:

• We are saved by Christ alone, but the saved have to co-operate;
• Scripture alone is inspired by the Holy Spirit, but it is handed down to us, i.e. ‘traditioned’ by and within the framework of the Church;
• We are saved through faith, which has to bear fruit in works.

However, in practice, the Catholic danger, particularly at the level of popular attitudes, is to put the two poles on the same level, and not to grasp sufficiently the total dependence of the second on the first:

• of all believers, including Mary, on Christ,
• of Tradition on Scripture, and
• of works upon faith.

The issues at stake are enormous:

• Threaten the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, the uniqueness of the Scriptures, and the uniqueness of faith, and the very sources of Christian life are endangered.
• On the other hand, to remove human co-operation, to deny a significant role to Tradition in relation to the Scriptures and their understanding, and to devalue the performance of works of righteousness, risks making the uniqueness of Christ, of the Bible and of faith inoperative.

From the Protestant angle, Mary is the biggest threat to the uniqueness of Jesus as mediator and Saviour.
But from the Catholic side, she is the link with Jesus that earths him in our world, and she is the first-fruits of faith that shows the fullest fruit of Jesus, of the Scriptures and of faith.

The Way Forward

The only way that progress can be made is to enter more deeply into the mystery of the dealings of our infinite God who makes covenants with finite humans.
The concept of a covenant between God and human beings cannot be easily assimilated by anyone who grasps who God is. Yet such a covenant elevates God’s ‘partners’ to a new dignity beyond anything that can be imagined or deserved, even in the Old Testament. This generosity and kindness of the Lord God in some way reaches its climax in the message of the archangel Gabriel to the Virgin of Nazareth.

This way of progress requires the constant and vigilant maintenance of two apparent opposites:

• the transcendent uniqueness of the absolute and sovereign God; and
• the real participation in God’s eternal life that the Father offers freely to humans.

The divine activity and the human response remain on two quite different levels, of which the lower always remains totally subject to, and derivative from the higher.

From this angle, the Catholic affirmation of God plus is absolutely correct, for God’s plus is:

• the whole creation, and
• the whole redemption that cleanses and raises the whole creation to the glory of the new heavens and the new earth

But this Catholic affirmation always requires the Protestant protest that guards against every blurring of the line between:

• the Creator and the creature,
• the inspired Word of God and all other writings, and
• between the divine gift of faith and all other virtues.

Without this protest, Church life can slide into:

• ‘Jesus and the Church’,
• ‘Scripture and Tradition’,
• faith and works,
• Jesus and Mary,

where the totally subordinate character of the second element is blurred or forgotten.

The Challenge to those from Protestant traditions

• Centres on doing justice to the biblical data concerning Mary.
• “For he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. (Lk.1:48-49)
• Questions to ponder:
  Will you be among those of all generations who will call Mary blessed?
  To what extent do they recognize the ‘great things’ that the Lord had done for her (Luke 1:49) on account of which she would be called the blessed Virgin Mary?
• How is it that all the ancient Churches of East and West, not simply the Roman Catholic Church, but also the Orthodox Churches in communion with Constantinople and all the smaller Oriental Orthodox Churches of Armenia, Iraq and India, as well as the Copts of Egypt and Ethiopia, give high honour to Mary?
  If this witness came only from one or two old traditions, then it might be plausible that their doctrine had departed from the gospel or become unbalanced. But that all the ancient Churches, even those largely cut off for centuries from the rest, should have deviated in the same way seems highly implausible. These are mostly highly conservative bodies, that have fought to survive through many centuries of trial and suffering, often as minorities in the midst of Islam. There has been then for three-quarters of the Church’s history a consensus that Mary’s role in salvation history is of unique and lasting significance, and that she is worthy of honour as the most blessed of all creatures.

Arguments of this type will only have any persuasive power if Protestant Christians can be helped to see that there is a biblical basis and foundation for the honouring of Mary that is common to all these ancient Christian traditions. Here the witness of the ancient Churches of the East is particularly important, because as ‘fellow-Easterners’, mostly from similar Semitic cultures less influenced by Western history, they tend to be closer in their forms of thinking and of interpretation to the world of the Bible and its authors. This perspective forces us to face the question: how much of Protestant objections to the honouring of Mary as ‘unbiblical’ come from modern Western ways of reading the Bible that miss much of the richness of ancient Semitic thought?

It also makes Roman Catholics ask how much of Catholic piety in the West reflects patterns of Western thought and culture (individualism, rationalism, romanticism) that are equally foreign to the thought-world of the Scriptures.

Contemplation and Mary

• The Christian traditions that honour Mary are those that have developed forms of contemplative life, especially the monastic calling.
• The deep respect and veneration for Mary that characterized the patristic era came from prolonged reflection on the marvel of the Incarnation, and what it means that the eternal Son of God was born of the virgin, drew life and sustenance from her, and became man in the family of Joseph of the tribe of Judah.
• “For Catholics Mary is a person whom they love, but for Protestants Mary is a doctrine that they deny.”
• It is the life of contemplation that produces a depth of appropriation of faith that moves from texts and doctrines to persons.
• It is part of the challenge to Protestants to make place for a more contemplative dimension to temper activism.
• Luke’s Gospel presents Mary as the exemplar for this reflective wonderment at the great and mysterious workings of the Lord: ‘But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart’ (2:19), and ‘and his mother kept all these things in her heart’ (2:51).
  

The Challenge to the Roman Catholic Church

• The heart of the challenge to the Catholic Church is to be Christocentric, biblical and life-giving.
• Several Catholic leaders, including Cardinal Suenens, have acknowledged that many Catholics have been sacramentalised but not evangelised.
• A corollary of this lack is that many have been taught and recommended patterns of piety and devotion that have not been grounded in a grasp of the gospel.
• The currents of renewal following Vatican II have been rediscovering this priority of explicit evangelization, and see clearly that the gospel of salvation is the foundation of all Christian life.
• This rediscovery then points to the problematic character of the promotion of Marian devotions among those who have never been properly evangelized.
• This challenge to reorder Church priorities has major implications for popular piety in the Catholic Church.

The Hiddenness of Mary

• When we seek a renewal of Church life through a deeper rooting in the Scriptures, we will have to pay attention to all the biblical data concerning the person and role of Mary.
• There is a challenge here that comes from the relative infrequency of direct mention of the Lord’s mother, but that is offset by her presence at key moments in the unfolding of God’s work of salvation through her Son.
• This combination of infrequency and important moments has to be taken seriously. It points both to her significance and her reticence.
• The reticence means that her significance is not blazoned forth; her significance is ‘suggested’ rather than ‘proved’ or ‘demonstrated’.
• In other words, there is a hiddenness about Mary’s role in the New Testament that is not always noticed by Protestant dismissal or by Catholic enthusiasm.
• This hiddenness is typified by the narrative of the miracle at Cana that illustrates the discretion of Mary: she simply says to her son ‘They have no wine’ and does not try to tell him what to do, and says to the servants ‘Do whatever he tells you’. These words are full of faith, full of faith in Jesus, but they are delicate and not intrusive.
• The hiddenness of Mary is also illustrated in her role at the foot of the cross.
  ‘When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, ”Woman, behold, your son!” Then he said to the disciple, ”Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home (John 19:26-27).
• Since John presents fewer episodes than the ‘synoptics’, and chooses those he includes for their significance for salvation, it is highly improbable that Jesus is merely making domestic arrangements for his mother after his death.
• There is a wealth of meaning hidden in these verses, suggested particularly by the words ‘that hour’ that in John refer to the Passover of Jesus to the Father
  John 13:1 It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father.
• Catholics have come to understand them in terms of the spiritual motherhood of Mary in relation to all disciples of her Son, yet the allusiveness of such texts remains important.
• Important progress will be made when Catholics and evangelicals can together reflect, with reverence and without fear, on these and other passages, bringing simply a desire to hear and penetrate the Word of God, that cannot be encapsulated in merely human categories.
• The biblical renewal of the Catholic Church calls for a more thoroughly biblical form of honouring Mary. This biblical reflection needs to learn how to respect this hiddenness or discretion of Mary in the New Testament, while telling forth the glories of the Lord in his servants.
• This hiddenness is not properly respected in the kind of deductive Catholic Mariology that is based on human logic and focused on Mary and her privileges in separation from the biblical context. 
• Here we can sense a tension within Catholicism between the more restrained and contemplative reflection on Mary in the monasteries and the more exuberant and demonstrative Marian piety of the masses.
  

Increased Sensitivity Towards One Another

• Part of the process of meeting and sharing with each other is that we begin to learn what spirit and what love animate their faith and their practice. Such knowledge leads to respect and sensitivity.
• In turn, this respect and sensitivity have to lead to modifications in forms of behaviour (on both sides) that cause shock and scandal.
• There is something shocking and scandalous in our indifference to the disturbance each side arouses in the other. 
• The deepest scandal is that we are indifferent to the deepest sensitivities of brothers and sisters who love Jesus Christ and seek to be open to the movement of the Holy Spirit.
• We have to listen to each other’s hearts. We do not have to agree with everything the other holds. But we do have to listen; we have to sense what committed Christians of other traditions find offensive in ours.
• Do some Catholic expressions offend against the biblical witness concerning the uniqueness of our Lord Jesus Christ?
• Do some Protestant utterances manifest irreverence for the mysterious and gracious workings of the Lord in the Incarnation?
• It is only as such sensitivity grows that we will acquire the love and the sympathy that can bridge the abyss of misunderstanding and disdain that remain a grave scandal to non-Christians.
• The growth of this respect and sensitivity is essential if the relatively recent forms of sharing and co-operation are to have any real chance of long-term survival.