This book proposes that one fruitful approach to the theology of Mary, historically the mother of Jesus, called in faith the Theotokos or God-bearer, is to envision her as a concrete woman of our history who walked with the Spirit."
Elizabeth A. Johnson from Truly Our Sister
IN AN E-MAIL INTERVIEW of the theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson by Clint A. Schenekloth, a Lutheran pastor, the Magnificat came up. But there's a lot more to come before then.
Clint: If I am reading you correctly, it is not necessary to understand the virgin birth as parthenogenesis in order to confess the virgin birth of faith. Rather virginity has to do with the independence for the woman, and is related to Mary's free assent to the work of the Spirit in making her the Theotokos. Is that correct?
I will break in to note one thing, the common resort to parthenogenesis to describe the conception of Jesus makes a big mistake because parthenogeneis always results in an offspring who is the same gender as the mother in species which have the XY chromosomal form of reproduction. I believe it has never been observed to. Whatever the story of the conception of Jesus in Luke and Matthew is, it is not nearly a conventional description of the biological phenomenon of parthenogenesis.
Elizabeth: I'm not sure you hit the nail on the head with this one, though what you say does reflect some of the aspects of what I think. Basically, the virginal conception (which is different from the virgin birth) is a christological truth, not a doctrine about Mary. In Scripture, as I try to show on pp. 251-254, the Spirit's overshadowing Mary signals that God is doing a new thing here. God is taking the initiative. As in Gen. 1 when the Spirit moves over the chaotic waters and in Exodus with the cloud and pillar of fire leading the people and in the transfiguration scene in the gospels, the words used by Luke point to the creative presence and action of God doing a new thing in the world. The conception of Jesus told in this language means that who Christ is cannot be traced to the efforts of human beings alone. His origin is in God. He comes to us as a gift of God, at the Creator Spirit's own initiative. It's kind of like sola gratia in a different setting.
As you note, women today also read the scene as a marvelous story of how God and a woman can bring about the Messiah, without the help of men, which symbolized both women's spiritual empowerment and also a critique of patriarchal power. This is a great gain toward understanding the propoer relationships among human beings.
But the heart of the text is theological, saying a truth about Christ.
And here I'll break in to note that what she says about there being no men involved in the birth of Jesus mirrors a point that Sojourner Truth made at a suffrage meeting when they were being harassed by men,
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it. The men better let them.
Clint: I'd like to hit the nail on the head with this one, so we'll try a second time (and point taken, the virginial conception is a different issue than the virgin birth). I'm not quite sure, given the context of its usage, what Carsten Colpe means when he insists that the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary is "the opposite of human creation" (253). I understand that it is different, by why opposite? To ask it another way, you emphasize that God is not a sexual partner but a creative power in the beginning of Jesus, but why is God's being a creative power set in opposition to the procreative understanding traditionally ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the virginal conception? Of we could point out that might be obvious - God is present and "creative" in may situations, and God's Spirit is with us, empowering and protecting in many situations as well. But humans, at least a vast majority of the time, only experience the procreativeness of God through childbearing when there is sexual intercourse involved (or the technologized versions of the same). So what about Mary?
Elizabeth: Regarding the creative action of God and procreation: As I point out on pp. 227-233, thinkers from the second century on have put forth at least four interpretations namely that the child was conceived by Mary and Joseph having sexual relations, or that an unknown man seduced her, or that she was raped by the Roman soldier Panthera, or that this was a biological miracle. This last became the teaching of the church. Even here, however, no mechanism is ever described. Given that the Holy Spirit is the creative agent and given that there is a tradition of considering the Spirit in feminine imagery, it is too naive to posit the Spirit as the male sexual partner of Mary.
My fundamental position about the historical root of the virginal conception agrees with the biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer: "What really happened? We'll never know." Since the popular imagination has slipped into the idea that God acted as the male sexual partner in this conception, I spend a lot of energy deconstructing this notion.
This does not mean that God could not have done so. There is no opposition between the creative action of God and procreation, in priciple. My point is, though, that such is not the theological heart of the Christian belief: "Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary."
I have said that I have no great emotional attachment to the story of The Virgin Birth of Jesus but I have also said that there is no way that we can ever know if the angel Gabriel came and told her that she was going to have a baby by the action of the Holy Ghost even though she was a virgin. Before I became too wrapped up with the anti-religious babble of Richard Dawkins - I'd been an opponent of his evo-psy since the late 1970s - I answered his claim that the question of the Virgin Birth could be solved with science by pointing out he made essentially the same mistake he did, over and over again, in his claims about evo-psy, that the absolutely necessary evidence to study the question scientifically was not and almost certainly never would be available, the resolvable and identifiable biological remains of Jesus, Mary and whoever his natural father might have been. If he had a super-natural father, that crucial piece of evidence would never be had so the great champion of science did nothing but prove, again, that he really had very little conception of what the requirements to do science are. Since then I found out that he seldom bothered to make observations, preferring to do his "science" from his writing table instead of in the field. Yet he was probably one of the most influential writers on biology for the past forty five or so years.
I have to say I do like the story, especially as someone like Elizabeth Johnson goes over and thinks over it. I love the Magnificat, probably the best Canticle in the Bible, certainly one which has generated perhaps more really good music than any of the others. I believe what it says because I choose to believe in its radical, leveling view of reality in terms of equal justice, the kid of justice that secularism and human governments don't bring. As I've pointed out, that's directly in opposition to the natural selection which is Dawkins' creator god substitute.
CLINT: Proclamation and preaching are important and integral loci of the Lutheran tradition. When I read your book [Truly Our Sister: A theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints] and then note the placement of the Magnificat the beginning of Luke, it is my sense that Mary is one of the first preachers in the gospels, and certainly the first female preacher. Can you say more about what this means for the ecclesiology of the church as it relates to gender?
ELIZABETH A Johnson: The implications of the Magnificat for women in the church are many (271–274) [referring to the pages in her book, it's an e-mail interview]. Fundamentally, these words signal that the lowly will be lifted up.
In so far as women have not functioned or been treated equally in the churches, either in theory or practice, they count among the lowly (though thankfully that is beginning to change). The Magnificat urges even greater efforts in this regard, in light of God’s design revealed in this song.
CLINT: From an interpretive/theological perspective, is there a difference between preaching (say the preaching that goes on in Acts, for example) and prophetic singing (the songs sung by Hannah, Mary, etc.)? How does this relate to the ordination practices of our churches?
ELIZABETH: Obviously, there are differences among the churches here. I also draw attention to the feminist critique I made of Luke-Acts on pp. 213–216 and 301–302, in view of which Luke is not a reliable historical guide to what women did and how they preached in the early decades of the church. Luke had a different agenda. But women did preach in an apostolic way, even though he did not see fit to record this. So in truth, I do not see any direct connection to the ordination practices of the churches.
CLINT: My question here has more to do with the fact that Mary speaks/sings the Magnificat than it does with the actual content of what she speaks forth (as important as that content is). If we look at the text from a rhetorical perspective, it is a song and sermon placed very early in the Gospel of Luke, and placed on the lips of Mary. If we take Luther’s observation to heart, that “she sang it not for herself alone but for all of us, to sing it after her,” should we not say, and encourage the church to practice, the continued singing of this song not by a solo female voice with male priestly accompaniment, but rather with the full voice of the choir summoned forth by God to preach the gospel?
ELIZABETH: I agree—the Magnificat is a song for the whole church to sing.
I will speak up for Luke who was certainly not close to a feminist but who, for example, showed the Women of Jerusalem as faithfully and sorrowfully accompanying Jesus as he was going to his death instead of running away like the men did. And he did give Mary more lines, not to mention Elizabeth, than in the other Gospels. I think her critique is probably more relevant to Acts, which the author of Luke probably wrote as well.
I have always had a bit of unease with the idea of the trinity though I've read quite a lot about that theological idea and am more comfortable with it now than I used to be. Part of what makes me more comfortable with it is exactly what Elizabeth Johnson says about the virginal conception of Jesus, "We'll never know." I like the idea that God acts decisively in the midst of our physical reality, our lives in such a radical way as to be incarnated in the person of a human being, Jesus, who is also more than merely human as he is fully human. I especially like the idea that with him all of physical reality is transformed - or, perhaps, that with his life and resurrection human beings can conceive of that transformation - and that we are all on our way to be more than merely physical beings in a physical world, while being that, as well. I especially like the idea that these things surpass our ability to understand them. I think that's in no small part because the human act of understanding is tied up so intimately with our experience of material existence and human thinking about mathematical objects so it would be absurd to think we could use understanding to become fully familiar with something partially, perhaps mostly outside of both our experience of physical reality or the manipulation of numbers and abstract lines and planes and points on those. These questions are a bit more complex than the axioms of math or our observations of the movements and combinations of objects.
As to who actually sings The Song of Mary, you have to take into account the practice of only allowing males, men and boys, to sing it in church for so many centuries. While it is certainly a song that has meaning for everyone, I'd like there to be a whole slew of good to great settings for Women's voices, Women and girls as well as those which would have been composed with the idea that it was men or men and boys or, as in one of my favorite English settings by George Dyson, for boys, mostly younger than Mary would have been. And I'd like a lot of those settings to be composed by Women as well as men.
I'm going to be dipping into some of the text of the series I did a number of years back where I posted one or more musical settings of the Magnificat during let almost every day of Advent. I still am offline at home so it might be hit or miss and I will be concentrating most but not exclusively on living vernacular translations of it - I WILL NOT BE POSTING THE APPALLING ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF BACH'S SETTING OF THE LATIN TEXT BECAUSE IT IS A MUSICAL AND TEXTUAL ABOMINATION. I will probably not post some of the pop style versions. While those might mean something to some people, the show-biz style and format is something I can't imagine will lead anyone to the meaning of those. I don't think they have the musical integrity of the songs of some of the more sincere blues or country musicians. I wonder what someone like Dolly Parton might have done for a setting of it. I'll bet it would be worth hearing. Having had that thought, I can think of a whole list of Women I'll bet could do a good job of that.
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