Living
Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Volume 12, Number 1
Pentecost 2007
Hispanic-Latino Theology and Ministry
Mary,
Mother of God: A Confessional and Patristic Reading from a Hispanic Pastor
by
Padre Antonio Cabello
My
interest in and understanding of the Mother of God comes from an outreach
perspective. Let me explain: I have been
a missionary to Hispanic communities for the last eleven years, both as a
mission developer for the ELCA’s Division of Outreach and now as a parish
pastor. A missionary needs to understand
his context and to find points of connection and understanding with the people
he is trying to reach. This has been my
emphasis as I seek to bring more diversity into this church. I have used three resources in this task: our
Luth-eran heritage, the patristic teachings and the
background of the people we try to reach in our ministry.
A
Reading of Mary by Our Liturgical Tradition
One
way to understand Mary, Mother of God, comes from a liturgical understanding of
her in our tradition. We often sing and
pray, unaware of the theological implications of these acts. A sampling of liturgical feasts in the
Lutheran Book of Worship and previous Lutheran liturgical books will
demonstrate how these festivals are given a
Christological emphasis. For example: February 2nd, Our Lady of Candlemas (Nuestra Señora de Candelaria) in the
Roman Catholic calendar, is The Presentation of Our Lord. August 15th, the Dormition
of the Virgin Mary, or the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, becomes Mary,
the Mother of our Lord in the LBW. The
change of emphasis is notable. In both cases the same feast is observed, but with
a Christological emphasis. In other words, as Lutherans, we celebrate
the Mother of God, but always with the Child, Our Lord Jesus Christ.
When
Christians reflect about Mary, Mother of God, one point of departure is their
liturgical experience. This is the
perspective of Mother Basilea Schlink,
a Lutheran nun from Germany, as presented in her book Mary, The Way of the Mother of the Lord. Others from various Catholic persuasions,
like Father Alexander Schmeman, a Russian Orthodox
theologian, reflect about the Mother of God following the same approach. Vespers in these traditions reflect the Magnificat as a proclamation of the faith at the close of
the day. Our own Lutheran tradition has
always included this reflection about God’s acts as described by the Mother of
God.
Very
little of the original emphasis, especially in the case of the feast of the
Presentation of Our Lord, is apparent in the Lutheran Book of Worship, or the
“green book” as we call it. But if we go
back in time to the red book or the black book from either our German or
Swedish Lutheran traditions, hymn options for this particular feast increase
from one to five.
It
seems to me that at some time, the wisdom of the team for the selection of
hymns wanted to become so American in the process of acculturation that they
forgot that the backbone of theology is worship. We sing and pray what we believe and
proclaim. It is sad to report that in
the planning of the new red book, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, dialogue and
awareness regarding this topic again fell by the wayside. An inquiry was made as to the possibility of
including a Mexican American Marian feast: that of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The expert team of liturgists working on the
Evangelical Lutheran Worship project admitted that they had never thought about
Lutherans celebrating this feast.
There
is no end to liturgists and theologians doing theology from the ivory
tower. If they will dare to go outside
their Chicago office to any Lutheran Mexican American parish in the Metropolitan
Chicago Synod on December 12th, they will find strong attendance at worship,
rivaling the turnout for Santa Lucia on December 13th in the first parish that
I served, many years ago. The team of liturgical experts do not reflect the practice of
our congregations, whom they assume they serve.
In
this author’s view, one of the failures of our recent liturgical endeavors is
that our tradition, instead of widening with time, seems to be narrowing. We are not advocating the neglect of recent
developments in liturgical music. To the
contrary, a tradition like ours is all for the development and growth of
diverse practice. We should always
include new developments in music styles and forms, but we should always keep
the integrity of the themes or theology so as to assure the expression of the
liturgical tradition of the catholic faith.
We can observe that Rap or Hip-Hop music communicates to some members of
our congregations better than chanting.
The church should be all for Rap and Hip-Hop as long as this musical
form reflects the theological themes that the church has always celebrated.
Have
theologians such as Eric W. Gritsch (The Views of
Luther and Lutheranism on the Veneration of Mary), John Frederick Johnson (Mary
and the Saints in Contemporary Lutheran Worship) or Maxwell E. Johnson (The
Virgin of Guadalupe: Theological Reflections of an Anglo-Lutheran Liturgist)
labored in vain? It would seem so, if we
do not consider their contribution in our theological discourse and liturgical
practice. The easy way out is to say
that their views on Mary the Mother of God are too Catholic for us. I believe the reformers would take issue with
that, especially if the Athanasian Creed continues to
be one of the three creeds that we confess as a church.
An
Inclusive Doctrine of the Saints Includes Mary, the Mother of God
The
confessions of the church teach that our relationship to the whole church
includes not only the living but also those designated by the church as saints,
apostles and confessors. Luther included
all the Marian feasts as Christological feasts, giving a relationship close to
the original understanding that there is not doctrine about the Mother of God
without the Son. In his article about
the saints, Dr. Arthur Carl Piepkorn develops a solid
understanding not only for a beautiful hagi-ology but
also opens our eyes to see a doctrine about Mary, the Mother of God. Dr. Piepkorn
developed this further in his article “Mary as Typos Ecclesia.” We know that the Reformation was not about questioning the
veneration of Mary but about grace and salvation. It is not without reason that
Dr. Gritsch wrote that Martin Luther encouraged the
reformers to continue to pray in a devotional way to Mary even at the end of
his life. Some researchers in Luther’s
theology suggest a deviance or a development awayfrom
this practice -- however through the evidence of silence this concept is hard
to support, given the
iconography, liturgy and Marian sermons written by the
reformer. It is always the case that
researchers incorporate elements of silence for the strength of an argument
when their own bias goes in different direction. As Justo
Gonzalez expressed: the theology of being suspicious is necessary.
I
would like to suggest a bold statement: Lutheran doctrine about Jesus Christ is
so strong that veneration to the Mother of God only adds to the glory and place
already given to the second person of the Trinity.
Mother
Basilea Schlink (sister of
Edmund Schlink) is the founder of the Evangelical
Sisterhood of Mary, a Lutheran monastic movement that involves both women and
men. In her book Mary, Mother of God
Mother Schlink states that the lack of veneration to
the Virgin Mary in her own life prompted her to “call her Blessed every day” as
her acknowledgment of how poor her life had been in this regard. We as a church should also acknowledge this sad reality. As we come to terms with issues such as
justification by faith, issues regarding the Mother of God need to be addressed
in an ecumenical and practical way.
What
the Creed Says about Mary Mother of God
The
Concordia Triglotta states not only the confessional
tradition of the Lutheran church, but also what it is the patristic support or
backing for the
Christological statement. It was a smart
idea to provide an appendix at the time of the apologetic controversy to
substantiate the Reformers’ continuous understanding of the Catholic Faith. (c.f. Catalogue of Testimonies both of Scriptures and
Orthodox Antiquity). This appendix is seldom used in any theological debate and
yet it has been a point of reference as to how the reformers did theology. This
short appendix reflects a desire not only to endorse the catholic teaching of
the fathers of antiquity, but also the intention to do theology and understand
tradition as a dialog with the past and the present. I wish to apply this methodology to my
thoughts about Mary, Mother of God.
The
first element comes from the creed’s phrase “was incarnated by the Holy Spirit
of the Virgin Mary.” Somewhere in our
understanding of this mystery of faith in our tradition we have created an
emphasis on the role of God’s Holy Spirit making the incarnation happen without
noticing “of the Virgin Mary.” But then
I read the
Latin translation in the Concordia Triglotta: in the
margin was “ex Maria virginie.” This was a
preposition that I knew quite well from my first class of Greek when I was
sixteen years old. As a devoted student I looked for my Greek version of the
creed and it was “ek” — it was not the casual “of” or “de
la”, but it was “ek”. I remembered the circle with the arrow
coming out of it and the explanation of this preposition. Some people would
argue that this may be an attempt to create theology out of a preposition. We
should notice that this preposition is in nothing less than the Creed which is
the essense of the mind of the early church conveying
the right understanding of the faith once delivered to the apostles. When we look closely at the Nicene Creed, we
see this preposition was added. My first teacher of Greek took an apple from
his lunch bag and with a knife cut a perfect triangle to the center of the
apple to explain that this seed is “EK” from the apple. (a.
ex Patre; b. ex Maria virgine;
c. ex Patre Filioque procedit.) The
first two refer to the origin of the Son of God from the Father and from the
Virgin Mary; the last one is in reference to the Filioque
clause which describes the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son).
We
should give the credit to the Nicene fathers that they did not spend a mere
week discussing and putting together this creed, but it took more than 318
bishops about two months to agree on the final product of this confession of
faith, in order to settle at least ten years of debates about the Divinity and
the Humanity of the Son of God. We need to consider that many times our English
or Spanish translations do not make the fathers’ intentions clear. When we
consider the original Greek version that most of the fathers of the church
wrote in, the same preposition “ex” appears.
Mary’s
acknowledgment, praise, and veneration were encouraged by the early church
fathers as a way to describe how God had become flesh in Jesus Christ. Hymns, iconography, poems and legends in
praise of her came from the middle east, from Syria
all the way to Spain. (Saint Ephrem said, “If the womb holds back the child, then both
mother and child will die; may my mouth, Lord, not hold back my faith with the
result that one perish and the other be quenched, the two of them perishing,
each because of the other.”)
We
believe that church, the Bible and the creeds are expressions of God’s love to
the world. We dare to say that the creeds are the TRIA SYMBOLA Catholic seu Oecumenica of our
church. They are not an option or an
opinion but the right understanding of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. How
can we express this presence of the Virgin Mary in our contemporary contexts?
This
approach to the theology of the incarnation, acknowledging the presence of
Mary, is another way that our theology articulates the organic and down to
earth reality, the explanation “in, with, and under,” and becomes a reality
when we praise and venerate the Mother of God.
Padre Antonio Cabello
Iglesia San Esteban Martir, ELCA
cabellofamilia@msn.com