Mary, Bearer of Life
By Christopher Cocksworth
SCM Press, 216 pages, $29.99
Christopher Cocksworth begins his exploration of Mary’s place in the Christian faith with a visit to Dresden’s Frauenkirche — or Church of Our Lady — during a tour of Reformation sites. The Baroque structure, painstakingly rebuilt after Allied bombing in 1945, was originally erected by the city’s burghers as a sign of their steadfast Protestantism after the local prince became a Catholic. It has no trace of Marian imagery.
“Where is she?” the former Bishop of Coventry and current dean of St. George’s, Windsor, wondered. “Mary’s absence in the Frauenkirche symbolized a sense that had been growing in me about my own life and heart, and about the theological and spiritual tradition that had shaped and mothered me, and to which I owed so much.”
This wide-ranging, reflective book traces his grappling with Mary’s place within his evangelical tradition, as well as respectful engagement with numerous contemporary Catholic theologians. A surprising but fruitful addition are insights he has gained through ecumenical work with Oriental Orthodox churches in his long tenure as chair of faith and order for the Church of England’s General Synod.
Mary, Bearer of Life has five sections, each titled for a description of Mary’s place in the economy of salvation: Chosen, Called, Redeemed, Fulfilled, Loved. Careful exegesis of New Testament texts about Mary takes center stage in each section, often illuminated by the devotional poetry of Ephrem the Syrian and Gregory of Narek, a 10th-century Armenian monk who deeply shaped his church’s theological tradition. Fittingly for a work so focused on Mary’s practice of discipleship, each section ends with an open-handed exploration of a related theme in contemporary ethics. Abortion, education, nuclear weapons, and the environment are considered in turn.
Cocksworth’s treatment of the Annunciation explores the concept of Mary being “full of grace,” carefully balancing a Reformed emphasis on grace as God’s unmerited gift, while also seeing Mary as a unique recipient of God’s favor. “The impossibility of responding to God in fulness of faith and openness of obedience had been made possible by the God of grace who had favor on Mary and filled her with ‘the gift of God.’ Mary consented to the gift of life,” he writes.
He draws out an emphasis on Mary’s scandalous poverty shared by both Ephrem and Martin Luther to emphasize the surprising nature of God’s choice. Yet he does not discard a key aspect of the doctrine of the immaculate conception, that God could well have been working in her life long before to prepare her to commit her spirit and body to his purposes. He acknowledges Luther’s belief in Mary’s sinlessness, and finds Ephrem’s nuanced focus on Mary’s freedom from sin’s captivity, the absence in her of “a love of sinning,” especially helpful.
He later probes Mary’s influence on Jesus’ spiritual development and teaching, including a rich and imaginative exploration of Mary as the model of the Beatitudes. Engaging with texts by contemporary feminist philosophers and theologians, he proposes Mary’s grief at the passion and death of her son as a model of “maternal thinking,” which recognizes the vulnerability of life and responds with compassion, a valuable insight for these days of escalating violence.
A meditation on Mary’s presence among the company of disciples in the Upper Room in Acts 1 launches a chastened but substantial account of Mary as a model of the Church. Cocksworth spots a resonance between Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s definition of the Church as “nothing but that piece of humanity in which Christ has taken form” and the treatment of Mary as “the holy bearer of God … the foundation of faith laid without hands” in the poetry of Gregory of Narek. Mary’s faithfulness, evangelistic zeal, and receptiveness to the Spirit, he adds, express the foundational common actions of the Church.
Cocksworth has clearly “inwardly digested” his subject, in the famous collect’s words, and the work shows many signs of probing introspection and prayer. He has sought Mary in forgotten chapters of his tradition, and listened patiently and charitably to perspectives that must have seemed jarring at first. He helps Christian brothers and sisters converse across spans of time and Church divisions, finding common themes in the most unlikely places.
This is receptive ecumenism at its very best. Cocksworth helps all of us to “Behold our Mother” in fresh and inviting ways, showing us how encountering Mary more deeply will draw all Christians closer to her Son and to one another.
