Is this a Good Argument Against Marian Devotion?

[00:00:00]Mary, the mother of Jesus, is one of the most recognizable religious figures in the world. On every continent, you'll find shrines dedicated to her, each depicting her in ways that reflect both the culture of that place, while also tapping into other more perennial themes associated with the Blessed Virgin. Walk into just about any Catholic church, and you'll find images of Mary and often a side altar with candles burning beneath it. She's not just architecturally prominent, though. In terms of devotion, she features prominently in the religious lives of Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and people from other ancient Christian traditions.

[00:00:35]Protestants, however, are often outliers here. Though individual Protestants and Protestant denominations may vary in how they approach Mary, generally speaking, Mary features much less prominently in Protestant circles than elsewhere. Now, recently on this channel, I've embarked upon an extended series exploring the history and development of Marian doctrine and devotion. And right from the beginning, one of the questions I got asked a lot from many of my Protestant viewers is, "Why talk about Mary so much when the Bible hardly mentions her?"

[00:01:07]Now, at first glance, it can be pretty jarring to notice the gap between the relative importance given to Mary in scripture versus some of the these Christian traditions. So, in today's video, we'll explore that tension. We'll identify the good theological intuitions that such questions express, and we'll also show why it might not be as simple as first meets the eye to hopefully give some principles for making sense of all of this. By the way, if you're new to the channel, I'm Austin Suggs, and this is Gospel Simplicity, a place where we seek to find beauty, truth, and goodness in the Christian tradition. If you'd like to support the mission of this channel and continue the work of making non-polemical deep dives into church history, well, consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/gospelsimplicity.

[00:01:48]Let's begin by addressing the key claim of this question, the idea that the Bible has very little to say about Mary.

[00:01:54]While it It be possible to explore every mention of Mary in scripture. It is fair to say that, I mean, relatively speaking, Mary doesn't get a lot of airtime. If we were to read the Bible as literature, as a grand story, we could say that Mary is implicitly important in so far as she's the mother of the main character.

[00:02:12]But she's not explicitly thrust into the center of the narrative very often. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but this incongruence between Mary's implicit, like, structural importance to the story and the her lack of explicit coverage will be important later on as it provides, I think, an ideal environment for speculation and doctrinal development to really grow. But more on that later. For now, let me explain a bit more about what I mean regarding the idea that Mary doesn't feature as prominently in scripture as we might expect. By most accounts, the Gospel of Mark is our earliest of the four Gospels. In it, Mary is only mentioned by name once. And when she is, it's actually just a reference to Jesus' lineage. In Mark 6:3, the crowd is astonished at Jesus' teaching and says, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses, and Judas, and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?" In this one explicit reference to Mary in Mark, Mary is simply Jesus' mom. And that fact seems to provide the audience cause for confusion that this same Jesus, whose family they know and whose brothers and sisters they know, could be teaching in the way that he was.

[00:03:18]In one other passage in Mark, Mary is referenced, though not by name, but that passage does little to increase the place of Mary in the narrative. In fact, read at a surface level, it appears to do the opposite, making this more than just an argument from silence. In Mark 3:31-35, we find the following: "And his mother and his brothers came. And standing outside, they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, 'Your mother and your brothers are outside seeking you.'

[00:03:46]And he answered them, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother." Now, I've recently done an entire video on this passage, looking at how the church fathers interpreted it, and asking whether it constitutes like a rejection of Mary by Jesus. So, if you want a deep dive on that, I'll leave a link in the description for you to check it out. For now though, we can note that at the very least, in the context of Mark, this passage does little to increase Mary's perceived sense of importance. While we might assume that Mary's important for being the mother of Jesus, this episode in Mark appears to downplay the importance of family ties, which forces us to question that assumption. Since these two stories are the only references to Mary in Mark, we're not really given anything to counterbalance the notion that Mary, at least in Mark's telling, isn't that central to the story. At a service level, she's no more central to the story than his brothers and sisters, who are mentioned both times. We'll leave questions about who these brothers and sisters are and their implications for the dogma of Mary's perpetual virginity for another day. What's interesting about these observations from Mark for today is that they show us that the earliest Christian gospel writer felt he could tell the story of Jesus' life and his ministry with a barely a reference to his mother. Now, that's not to say Mary isn't important in general. When Matthew and Luke wrote their gospel accounts, they thought it was necessary to share the stories of Jesus' birth, and in these, Mary, quite naturally, features more prominently.

[00:05:22]While John's gospel, like Mark's, lacks an infancy narrative, we do get a unique story of Jesus responding to Mary's request for a miracle at the wedding in Cana. Then there is Jesus' famous line to the Apostle John, "Behold your mother," which is also only found in John's gospel. So, there's some interesting things going on there. The point though in saying that Mark is the earliest gospel and speaks very little of Mary isn't like to cast doubt on the other gospels or say that Mark is somehow more important. I'm merely pointing out that for Mark, the story of Jesus really doesn't require that much to be said about Mary, and I think that's significant. We see some We see something similar with the Apostle Paul's writings. Famously, Paul never mentions Mary by name and only once references her in all of his letters. That sole reference comes in his letter to the Galatians, wherein he writes, "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of woman, born under the law to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons." Now, while commentators throughout the ages have delved this one reference to Mary in Paul's letters about as deeply as you can, like squeezing all the juice out of this orange, there's really just not a lot to go off of here. Trying to reconstruct Paul's Mariology from a lone verse is almost impossible. What Paul thought of Mary remains a mystery to us, but it's fair to say that Paul, a bit like Mark, felt he could tell the story of the gospel while barely mentioning Mary. While Marian theology would pick up steam in the centuries following the writing of the New Testament, the two non-canonical Christian works that we can date with some confidence to the first century, the Didache and First Clement, both failed to mention Mary at all. So, when Protestants get uneasy about the emphasis on Mary today versus in scripture or even in the first century, they've got a point.

[00:07:09]So, let's now think about the implications of the fact that for several of our earliest Christian witnesses, including those who wrote inspired scripture, the story of Jesus could be told with Mary playing little to no role.

[00:07:21]One implication of this would seem to be that, at the very least, we can't fault someone for not having a robust Marian devotion or making Marian theology the center of their thinking. Now, here I want to distinguish between actively rejecting something and simply choosing not to emphasize something in your personal walk. To conclude that we should never speak about Mary or reject the idea of Marian devotion wholesale on the basis that Mark, Paul, Clement, and the writer of the Didache didn't seem overly concerned about it would be wrong. Generally speaking, Christian theology frowns upon pitting biblical authors against one another, so we shouldn't, for instance, reject the beauty of the Magnificat because Mark doesn't have it. We don't want to make this Luke versus Mark. However, I do think it's fair to say that the biblical witness itself shows that one can approach the story of Jesus with more or less emphasis upon Mary. And I don't think we should call Mark or Paul impious for not reflecting more on Mary's role. So too today, if a Christian chooses to meditate daily on the Magnificat, great. If they're more focused on the Sermon on the Mount, also great. The fact that we have four Gospels in the first place is a good reminder that a certain level of diversity is welcome within our theology and practice. At the ground level, I think you'll find that even within traditions that have a higher Mariology, individual adherents of that tradition will vary widely in the emphasis that they place upon Mary. For instance, in the Catholic Church, no one is going to force you to pray the Rosary, at least they shouldn't. Some people will pray it every day and some people will never pray it, and at least, in my view, a Catholic really shouldn't tell another Catholic they're a bad Catholic for not praying the Rosary. That could go with other devotions to Mary in other traditions.

[00:09:02]However, this does get a bit more complicated than a simple approach of, "Hey, whatever floats your boat." or "Different strokes for different folks."

[00:09:09]And that's at least in part because certain beliefs about Mary have been made mandatory.

[00:09:14]We'll talk about that more some other time, but when Protestants worry about overemphasizing Mary, they usually don't have in mind the idea that some people simply meditate on the Magnificat too much. That could just be a perfectly natural form of preference. Furthermore, they're not arguing for Mark over against Luke. Instead, the key worry here, I think, is that any sense of proportion has has lost. That the mind of the biblical authors has been eclipsed by a tradition that's gone off the rails and made mountains out of molehills.

[00:09:43]While this isn't the video to litigate the validity of each Marian dogma or devotion, I do think that we can look at some of the principles behind this idea and this concern about proportionality.

[00:09:53]We've recognized that generally speaking, the Bible says a less about Mary than we might expect given her prominence in many traditions today.

[00:10:00]However, I think we can recognize that theology is not just like a crass matter of tallying up references saying, "Whoever is mentioned the most is the most important." If we followed that logic, we'd be forced to say that King Saul is 21 times more important than Mary because he's mentioned by name 400 times and Mary's mentioned by name 19 times.

[00:10:21]In case you're tempted to bite that bullet and say, "No, Saul really is 21 times more important than Mary."

[00:10:25]Clearly, the logic is going to fail if we were forced then to say Saul is four times more important than the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, who was referenced if at the most like generous estimate 100 times.

[00:10:41]And furthermore, when we shift to Paul, I don't think we should put too much weight on Paul's lack of reference to Mary because once again, if we carried that out consistently as a methodology, we'd land in unfortunate places like saying none of Jesus' miracles mattered because Paul doesn't mention them. Ditto with many events of Jesus' ministry that are recorded in the Gospels but are lacking in Paul. The fact is Paul has different emphases and if Paul referencing something or someone is the litmus test of what does and doesn't matter, then our theology is going to get kind of twisted into knots.

[00:11:12]Okay, hopefully that's enough to say that the quantity of reference isn't the end all be all. Instead, we should be thinking about the quality of references. And I don't mean whether the given sentences are more poetic or not.

[00:11:23]I mean like the structural weight they hold in the story. And here's where Mary gets really interesting. If you read the Bible as a unified story with Christ at the center, then Mary is right near the heart of the story. Her yes to the angel Gabriel is much more structurally significant than say, Jonah responding yes when God asks if he's angry at a plant. While all scripture is God-breathed, I think it's fair to say that certain parts are more central to the narrative, and Mary shows up on the scene at the most pivotal moment of all, the incarnation.

[00:11:55]Now, some might argue, why not emphasize Joseph or John the Baptist in the same way? They're right around the center of the story, and even in the case of John the Baptist, Jesus says, "Of men born from women, none is greater than he."

[00:12:07]So, surely they're structurally important, too. And here I think we can say two things. First, one could simply argue that Mary is more important on the basis of her unique biological connection with Jesus. However, we did see that the Gospels seek to downplay that role of biology a little bit. While we could argue for unique holiness in Mary, and I don't think that would be altogether unfruitful, I do think it's fair to say that there's something unique in having a prominent female figure within the Christian religious landscape that fills a certain gap, a certain longing in the human connection with the faith. Put differently, Mary meets a maternal need in the Christian faith. That's not to say Mary's role is purely a byproduct of humans projecting their needs into the story, but it is to recognize, however, that there's certainly an element of alignment with natural popular piety that Mary has that say, John the Baptist or Joseph don't have in the same degree.

[00:13:02]This connects with what I said earlier about Mary presenting an optimal case for speculation and development because there's a mismatch between how often she's referenced and how implicitly important she is in the story, and I think we could return to that here and add that she also meets a felt need, that her role kind of aligns with a certain desire in the human heart in its religious aspect.

[00:13:24]If if can say it like that. I think more importantly, could say that there's a historical element at play and that is as the Christian tradition ruminated and thought and reflected on the nature of Christ in the early centuries of the church, they naturally gave extra thought to Mary. To think of one often led to thinking of the other and then that kind of becomes cemented in a form of doing theology where you think about them in tandem. We can see this most clearly with the idea that Mary is the mother of God. This is a title that Mary picks up formally in the 5th century at the Council of Ephesus. As Christological controversies over the nature of Jesus raged, they soon began to encompass Mary as well. When it was asked whether Jesus is fully God and fully man in one person and the answer given was yes, then the implication was, well, if Jesus is God and Mary is the mother of Jesus, then Mary is the mother of God. That's just a pretty straightforward syllogism even if people might want to quibble about equivocation. That was pretty much shut down and this syllogism stood. Here's the thing. Once you get that ball rolling, it becomes all but impossible not to marvel at what it would be to be the mother of Jesus who is himself God in the flesh. And as we'll see in later videos in this series, Marian doctrine and devotion really takes off after the doctrine of Mary as mother of God is solidified in the early 5th century. I mean, think about it. Like without being crass, what a marvelous mystery it is to think that Mary carried God in her womb. She nursed God at her breast. That is a level of intimacy with God that is almost unfathomable. So, of course, in time people reflected more and more on this and grew to have greater and greater appreciation for Mary. I mean, people like literally moved into caves and thought about this for the rest of their life. If you did that, that would lead you to thinking a whole lot about it and really beginning to marvel at it and beginning to appreciate Mary even more. I think that's kind of just natural. And the fact that scripture doesn't actually say much about Mary in the end in this kind of paradoxical way makes it easier to say more about her, at least in so far as you make the boundaries simply don't contradict scripture.

[00:15:29]In essence, the biblical authors give us a glimpse of Mary. They place her at the turning point of the entire story and offer some tantalizing, rich passages like the Magnificat or Revelation 12, while still allowing ample space to fill in the gaps, as many people would with hagiographical works that sought to tell the story of the rest of Mary's life, like the Protoevangelium of James and other works that did so in more or less orthodox ways, but it gave lots of room to kind of run wild with this, right?

[00:15:56]But it's not just like filling in the details of her story, like giving us kind of background details that scripture doesn't give. It's the theology of who she is that also has plenty of space to breathe because of the minimal, but weighty accounts that were given of her. And this brings us to an important methodological difference between various approaches to Marian theology. Some people want to say no more than scripture says about Mary. If you do this and you're keen to stick to just the literal meaning, you don't get too far. You don't have a lot of material to work with. If you're willing to lean in tight to typology, you can get a good deal further, but again, there's still only so much material to work with. Other people, however, have a little different approach, and they want to take the scriptures as the starting point for reflection, like a launch pad for speculation, and then say, "As long as we don't contradict scripture along the way, we're safe." And because so little is said about Mary, it can actually be kind of hard to contradict scripture. At times, this can lead to a certain Marian maximalism that makes Protestants a little queasy. I myself have critiqued a famous piece of Marian devotional literature from St. Louis de Montfort that takes a more maximalist approach. I'll link that in the description. There's a certain school of thought that says, "Well, as long as we make a distinction between latria, the worship due only to God, and dulia, the honor given to creatures, we can say and do just about anything, all the way up to calling Mary a quasi incarnation of the Holy Spirit or almost a fourth member of the Trinity, as St. Maximilian Kolbe did. After all, scripture never says that's not the case. And as long as we insist that what we're doing isn't latria, then we're safe to do as we please.

[00:17:32]But personally, I'm thankful that such approaches are largely going out of style. While the 19th century is sometimes referred to as the Marian century, the latter part of the 20th century and certainly the 21st century have seen more cautious approach to Marian doctrine and devotion that attempts to stick closer to not only the words of scripture, but the emphasis of scripture as well, while also being ecumenically sensitive. This can be seen well, I think, in Magister's document from the Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Mater Populi Fidelis. I did a video on that, too. But that document rejected the use of the titles Co-redemptrix and Mediatrix of all graces for Mary. In the prefatory note to that document, Cardinal Fernandez says that Marian theology shouldn't be from tradition alone, but scripture as well, and its general shape should be inspired by the gospel. One of the main themes of that document was rejecting titles that need so much explanation that they become unhelpful.

[00:18:26]And all of this serves to kind of put the brakes on a little bit and refocus Marian theology in a way that I think is quite helpful.

[00:18:34]So, where do we go from here?

[00:18:36]While I'm grateful for some of the caution shown in more recent approaches to Mariology, I respect the fact that many people will feel like this is just a too little, too late. And in part, I would agree. I would much prefer if certain Marian dogmas hadn't been made dogmas, but we're working with what we got these days in terms of ecumenical theology. As far as looking to the future and like what we do now, I think it's a good point that these comments are bringing up as far as there's a danger of losing sight of any proportionality and allowing Mary to overshadow Christ, and we should be aware of that. While it's not a zero-sum game, and Marian devotion should lead to greater love for Christ, I do think it's possible for bad Marian devotion and doctrine to lead away from Christ. In fact, that's like what makes it bad. Within this context, the silence of some biblical authors on Mary should serve as a subtle prodding and reminder to those that want to go overboard in the direction of excess. While the richness of other passages within scripture, coupled with centuries of reflection from the greatest minds in our tradition, should serve as a subtle prodding and reminder to those that want to go overboard in the direction of deficiency or lack of reverence given to Mary.

[00:19:42]Between those extremes, however, there is like a whole lot of room for diversity. In other words, the people who ask, "Why are we talking so much about Mary?" are adding something valuable to the discussion. So too, however, are those who ask, "Why are you talking about Mary so little?" Once again, this is a place in which having more voices at the theological table benefits all of us if we have ears to listen to the insights of our brothers and sisters. And that that listening to one another, that learning together, is what makes ecumenical theology so fun and exciting for me. And I hope it does for you as well.