The Protestant World and Mariology

Extract

In various parts of the Protestant world a re-examination of the question of Mariology has been entered upon. Now that we are in sincere dialogue with Rome, and Protestantism and Orthodoxy are united in fellowship in the World Council of Churches, it has become incumbent on Protestants to cease to be merely negative to the Mother of our Lord. Simply because our Roman Catholic brethren hold doctrines about her that Protestants do not appreciate does not mean that the Virgin Mary should have no theological significance for the Churches of the Reformation. Ten years ago an article from my pen, entitled ‘The Virgin and the Old Testament’, appeared in The Reformed Theological Review (of Australia), Vol. XII, No. 1. That article was occasioned by an uneasy reaction to a reading of the section entitled ‘Mariology’ in Ways of Worship, being the Report of a Theological Commission of Faith and Order in preparation for the Lund Conference of 1952. I acknowledge my indebtedness now to my former article, and thank the editor of the RTR for permitting me to expand it here.

The Protestant has to satisfy himself that any doctrine he holds is securely rooted in Scripture. For the early Church ‘Scripture’ meant only the Old Testament. And to it the Church undoubtedly turned as it sought to understand the place of the Virgin Mary in the Gospel it was preaching to Jews and Gentiles alike, and thus to understand her relationship to her Saviour Son.