Reddit reviews Mary for Evangelicals: Toward an Understanding of the Mother of Our Lord

Luther preached that a Christian with a weak conscience could pray the first half of the Hail Mary, up until you ask her to pray for you, and a Christian with a strong conscience could pray the whole thing. He personally never abandoned his Marian piety, though he admitted that in some people, and if required, it can lead to idolatry and other "superstitions" (his favorite word).

Like Luther, I really think it's quite an individual thing. Can you hold the distinction in your mind between veneration and worship while you're doing it? If not, then you shouldn't. If so, then you could consider it.

I found the book Mary for Evangelicals really helpful. Despite not being evangelicals, we should want to honor the Scriptures, and this book examines the history of Marian doctrine and how far it should go. (According to the author, it can actually go surprisingly far.)

Catholic attitudes toward Mary was perhaps the most difficult thing for me to come to terms with when I was being received into the Church. So much so, in fact, that I asked my pastor to divert our regular course of instruction to spend an entire session just on Mary.

But that didn't do it, of course. What really helped was this book, "Mary for Evangelicals: Toward an Understanding of the Mother of Our Lord"; and also Luther's own devotion to the Mother of God. (I was a Lutheran before being received into the Catholic Church.)

My experience as a Lutheran was that I had a kind of knee-jerk reaction to anything that smacked--or even smelled like--idolatry. Anything that I felt might divert my eyes from Christ was to be distrusted if not dismissed.

But a proper understanding of the true devotion to Mary, Christ's mother and ours, leads not away from Christ but toward him. Mary ever points to her son, always leads poor sinners to him. Never to herself "Do whatever he tells you..." is what she tells us.

We must remember that if Christ is our King, then Mary is the Queen Mother, who lives to intercede for us with the King, even as Bathsheba did--as well as all the queens of Israel--with her son.

These are not mere extrapolations from Scripture; this is taking the Scriptures at face value. Jesus is the Messiah--the anointed one of Israel. If that is so, and if Christ has a mother, than she is Queen. How can it not be. If she is queen, than she is the queen of Israel--no less than Bathsheba was. And in fact more than Bathsheba because her son's throne is eternal.

God is not the God of the dead but of the living. As Christ lives, so Mary lives. So do all the saints live who lived in Christ.

This isn't a question of titles. We call judges "your honor" and "the honorable" whether they're honorable or not. We call Mary the Mother of God because she is the mother of God. We call her Queen of Heaven because she is the queen of heaven. And, finally, we call her "Mother of all the Faithful" (or "Mother of all the Living") because she is the mother of us all--the mother of the beloved disciple par excellence.