Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I N THEO LO G Y
2014
BY
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Theotokos Lecture Series
T
hrough the gracious gift of an anonymous donor,
Marquette Universitys Department of Theology has
inaugurated this lecture series dedicated to Mary, the
Mother of Jesus. Theotokos means God-Bearer or Mother of
God and is the time-honored name originally bestowed by the
Council of Ephesus in 431 on the Blessed Virgin because of
her motherhood of Jesus. Through the centuries, the Church
has regarded her divine motherhood as the greatest of Marys
attributes the source of all her other honors, and recalls this
fact by celebrating the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God
each year on January 1. The department hopes that this annual
lecture on various theological topics will enhance our service to
the Church and its witness to the world under the patronage
of Mary, Mother of the Church and Queen of Peace.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RACHEL FULTON BROWN
R
achel Fulton Brown is Associate Professor of
History at the University of Chicago where,
since 1994, she has taught courses on Mary,
animals in the Middle Ages, the trivium, Tolkien, and
the history of European civilization. She is the author
of From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the
Virgin Mary, 800-1200 (Columbia University Press,
2002) and the co-editor with Bruce Holsinger of His-
tory in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the
Matter of Person (Columbia University Press, 2007).
She wrote her first paper on the medieval devotion
to the Virgin Mary as an undergraduate at Rice Uni-
versity where she majored in History and Religious
Studies, and she culminated her doctoral work at Co-
lumbia University on the Marian exegesis of the Song
of Songs. As much as she would like to write on topics
other than Mary, the Virgin keeps drawing her back.
T
here are two things that almost everyone knows
about the Virgin Mary: one, she was the mother of
Jesus, whom Christians worship as the LORD; and
two, the only place that she appears in Scripture is the New
Testament, and even there only rarely. Almost never in mod-
ern discussions, whether Catholic, Protestant, or secular, is
this purported absence of Mary from the Scriptures called
into question. As Kevin Hart put it matter-of-factly in his
2012 lecture for this same series, however much the doctrines
of the Immaculate Conception or the Virgin Birth point (or
not) to critical Christological mysteries, it must be conced-
ed that biblical images of Mary are few and far between, and
when they occur they may be memorable but they are also
fleeting.2 In her recent monumental study of the image of
Mary as Mother of God, Miri Rubin avers that it was this
very absence of Mary from Scripture that first sparked her
interest in Mary as a phenomenon. How, she says she asked
tion to the scholarship and issues, see Sarah Jane Boss, ed., Mary:
The Complete Resource (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
On the origins of the devotion, see also Chris Maunder, ed.,
Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Burns & Oates,
2008).
6 I am currently at work on a book-length study of the history
and significance of the Marian office. As yet, there is no single
study that deals in depth with this development. For introduc-
tion, see Rebecca A. Baltzer, The Little Office of the Virgin and
Marys Role at Paris, in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle
Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments,
Hagiography, ed. by Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 463-84.
7 For this version of the Marian office, see The Little Office of
the Blessed Virgin Mary in Latin and English (London: Baronius
Press, 2007). One of the great challenges of studying the Mari-
10 The Theotokos Lecture in Theology
of the beast of burden, the store-room, the court, the tower, the
castle, the battle-line, the people, the kingdom, the priesthood.
Objection 1
speak about her all the time; one or the other tradition of
reading must be at fault. Pick up almost any modern (that is,
post-Enlightenment) commentary on the Scriptures and the
answer is clear: whatever mysteries the pre-modern Christian
commentators believed they found referring to Mary in the
Old Testament were solely the product of pious superstition
(a.k.a. allegory).13 Of course there is no mention of Mary the
mother of the LORD Jesus Christ in the Old Testament: the
Christians made her up, if not out of whole cloth, then cut-
and-pasted from tendentious readings of a few choice proph-
ecies, Isaiah 7:14 as cited in Matthew 1:23 most prominent
among them. To be sure, it is unlikely that even the most stal-
wart historical-critical account of the Scriptures would put it
quite so bluntly, but try finding a modern translation of the
Bible that does not simply take it as read that the pre-modern
tradition of reading was wrong (that is, prone to taking the
Old Testament texts out of the context in which they were
originally intended to be read, as well as reading them in a
way that no one prior to the evangelists or the early Chris-
tian exegetes had read them). We are confidently told by the
translators that Isaiah never predicted anything about the
Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus, the Son of God, only a
Objection 2
her virtues; and in the fifth her spiritual and corporeal beauty. In
the sixth book, he explains Marys titles (mother, beloved, sister,
daughter, bride, virgin, queen, and so forth). The remaining six
books show how Mary appears in Scripture under all the made
things of creation: heavenly (book seven), earthly (book eight),
watery (book nine), crafted or built (book ten), fortified or nau-
tical (book eleven), and horticultural, including flowers and trees
(book twelve).
20Richard, De laudibus, bk. 12, c. 7, paragraph 4, nr. 7, p. 832.
21Richard, De laudibus, bk. 4, c. 31, nr. 3, pp. 257-58, on the
wisdom of Mary.
22Richard, De laudibus, bk. 4, c. 31, nr. 5, p. 258.
brown Mary in the Scriptures: The Unexpurgated Tradition 19
Objection 3
On the contrary
bodily into heaven to sit beside her Son and reign as Queen,
never seemed to me a challenge to the Divinity to be quashed
by misogynistic clerics nor a way of making other women feel
inferior for her virginal maternity (Marina Warners princi-
pal contention in her oft-cited Alone of All Her Sex).33 But
what then was she? This is the question that the tradition of
exegesis according to which Mary is everywhere in Scripture
obliges us to ask. Perhaps it is time to consider what else she
might be, other than simply the virginal mother of the God-
man Jesus.
As Sor Mara de greda put it in her Mstica ciudad de Dios
(first published 1670), Mary was the most perfect mirror and
image of God after her Son. Far from being a reproach to all
other women in her virginal maternity, Mary was their ex-
emplar as the most perfect creature ever created by God, the
model for all human beings of what they had been before the
Fall and what they could become through imitation of her
and her Son. Even more important, however, was Marys re-
lationship to the Divinity. As Sor Mara explained, God fash-
ioned Mary for himself as his habitation and placed her in this
world as a Mirror of the Divinity and as the special Media-
trix of mortals, as a holy city having the glory of God (Rev-
elation 21:11) of which great and glorious things are said
(Psalm 86 [87]:3).34 In this holy city the Lamb shone forth
Mary was the tabernacle, the city, the ark, the one contain-
ing the light of the Lamb and the true bread of heaven. She
was the temple gilded inside and out with the purest gold of
the Divinity (3 Kings 6:30) so as to bear the presence of the
LORD, while her entire being was an intellectual and ani-
mated heaven, and in Her was summarized the divine glory
I answer
Reply to Objections
2009
The Virgin of Guadalupe in Ecumenical Context
One Lutherans Perspective
Maxwell E. Johnson
2010
Mary at the Cross, East & West
Maternal Compassion & Affective Piety in the Earliest Life of the
Virgin & the High Middle Ages
Stephen Shoemaker
2011
Predestination, Sola Gratia, & Marys Immaculate Conception
An Ecumenical Reading of a (Still) Church-Dividing Doctrine
Edward T. Oakes, SJ
2012
Contemplation and Concretion
Four Marian Lyrics
Kevin Hart
2013
Mary as Omnipotent by Grace
An Exposition
Francesca Aran Murphy
2014
Mary in the Scriptures
The Unexpurgated Tradition
Rachel Fulton Brown