Mary deserves Protestants’ praise

It’s Mary’s annual moment, as songs, cards, pageants and displays again portray the mother of Jesus. But during the rest of the year, Protestants join more secular Americans in ignoring her, which is lamented by Timothy George, dean of the Baptist divinity school at Alabama’s Samford University.

Writing in the current Christianity Today magazine, George regrets that fellow conservative Protestants "have an almost instinctive distrust of Mary" and are "afraid to praise and esteem Mary for her full worth."

Protestants are wary because they vigorously contend that Roman Catholic doctrinal and devotional concepts on Jesus’ mother lack support in the Bible. The Protestant slogan is that "Scripture alone" is the source of Christian teaching.

Protestants thus reject the Catholic dogmas about Mary’s immaculate conception (freedom from original sin at birth), lifelong or "perpetual" virginity and bodily assumption into heaven upon death. Protestants also oppose prayers to Mary and what George calls "extreme devotion" directed to her.

Mary should not be "an object of devotion by herself, in isolation from her son," George believes. "We need not go through Mary in order to get to Jesus" but instead should honor her by following her own example of honoring her son.

George commends Eastern Orthodoxy for never depicting Mary alone in artwork but always with Jesus, and often with apostles and saints.

He’s grateful that Catholicism hasn’t defined as dogma the popular beliefs in Mary as the mediator between humanity and her son or as the co-redeemer with him, which George believes would wreck ecumenical hopes.

On the other hand, George insists that the Scripture-alone principle means fellow conservative Protestants must rethink their attitudes.

"Evangelicals often say less about Mary than the New Testament does," he says. She’s rarely mentioned in Protestant worship except for Advent sermons and the annual Sunday School Christmas play.

How does George define strictly biblical treatment of Mary?

First, the Protestant Reformers praised Mary as the humble and faithful "handmaiden of the Lord." As George puts it, "Had she not believed, she would not have conceived." Her abiding faith was conveyed to her son and has set an example for all believers since.

The Reformers favored the "Ave Maria" ("Hail Mary"), not as a prayer to Mary but as appropriate biblical honor. George says many Catholic versions in those days didn’t include the non-biblical phrase that Protestants rejected: "pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death."

He believes Protestants should interpret Mary as a link between the Old and New Testaments. Besides her biblical genealogy, he sees her as the Old Testament "Daughter of Zion" (Micah 4:10, Jeremiah 4:31), the mother in pain of childbirth who represents the redeemed people of Israel. And she might be the pregnant woman symbolically pursued by a dragon in Revelation 12:1-5.

Conservative Protestants emphasize that Mary giving birth while a virgin was a miracle that undergirds Jesus’ divinity. But George says Mary equally underscores the orthodox doctrine that Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine.

Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians label Mary the "mother of God" ("theotokos" in Greek). George says that title was useful in defeating early heresies but agrees with the Reformer John Calvin that it’s misleading and perhaps inappropriate.

He prefers the wording of Yale University’s Jaroslav Pelikan, a Protestant convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, who calls Mary "the one who gave birth to the one who is God."

The Bible portrays Mary not only at the birth of Jesus but the birth of the church. She was part of the small group that remained steadfast at the cross when male apostles fled in fear, and was among the first believers visited by the risen Jesus in the upper room.

George calls Mary "the embodiment of grace alone and faith alone," other Protestant slogans meaning that people are never saved because of their good deeds but only through their faith.