“Hilf du, Sankt Anna!” | Dan Peterson

Eric Metaxas is an author for whom I have great admiration, and I’ve recently commenced reading his biography of Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World.  Here’s a passage from that book that I thought some might find interesting.  It describes popular attitudes toward the Father and the Son in the early 1500s, just prior to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation:

God the Father and Jesus the Son were both principally thought of as fierce judges.  So the role of comforter fell to Mary, the human one who understood us and our trials, the soft mother full of grace who could protect her beloved child from harsh and unyielding men.  Although Christian doctrine had always clearly taught that Jesus himself had been fully human, and could therefore understand and sympathize with our trials and sufferings and temptations, the reality of church life at this point in history was that this part of Jesus had mostly been ignored, so that he was now thought of as every bit as distant and remote and terrible as God the Father ever had been.  So only Mary, his entirely human mother, could comfort us.  And not only that, but she could appeal to her harsh and perhaps indifferent son as only a dear mother could.  Similarly,

Article source: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2019/08/hilf-du-sankt-anna.html