First Things has a redesign – looks sharp.

Now online, an excellent article from the new issue by Timothy George on "Evangelicals and the Mother of God."

Mary’s significance for Luther is twofold. Mary is the person and place where God has chosen to enter most deeply into the human story. And Mary is also the one who hears the Word of God-fides ex auditu, the one who responds in faith and thus is justified by faith alone. Mary was a disciple before she was a mother, for had she not believed, she would not have conceived. Mary is the object of God’s gracious predestination, and this divine choice is the source of both her blessedness and her fertility. At this point Barth is fully in line with the Reformation message when he declares (against Rudolph Bultmann) that redemption is wrought by Christ “outside of us, without us, and even against us” and yet, because this is true, also for us and even in us. As the embodiment of sola gratia and sola fide, Mary should be highly extolled in evangelical theology and worship.

So why is this not the case? Why do evangelicals remember the Reformation critique of Marian excess but not the positive appraisal of Mary’s indispensable role in God’s salvific work? One element is the pruning effect of the scriptural principle. Luther closed his commentary on the Magnificat with a prayer of intercession addressed to the Virgin Mary. But already in Zwingli’s Sixty-Seven Articles of 1523, it was claimed that, because Christ is our only mediator, no mediators other than Christ are needed beyond this life. Luther too gave up Marian intercession when he could find no explicit scriptural warrant for it in the Bible.

Beyond the theological constraints of a biblical religion, however, there was also what might be called an ecclesiological hardening of the arteries within the Protestant and evangelical traditions. To be an evangelical meant not to be a Roman Catholic. To worship Jesus meant not to honor Mary, even if such honor were biblically grounded and liturgically chaste.

Catholic News Agency has a helpful redesign as well.