A Contribution to a Renewal of Theology from Scripture
Jean Khoury
Summary: This article proposes that the Gospel of Luke, in its very Prologue, offers the Church a definition of the theologian anterior to and more fundamental than the later scholastic formula of fides quaerens intellectum. Luke identifies the guarantors of the apostolic tradition as those who “from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the Word” (Luke 1:2). Immediately thereafter, in the Annunciation narrative, Luke presents Mary as the concrete embodiment of this identity: the one who receives the Word in faith, conceives it, ponders it in her heart, and brings it to birth for the world. Reading the Prologue and the Infancy Narrative together, this article argues that Luke narrates rather than defines the theologian, and that he narrates him or her as a servant of the Word before being a speaker about God. Mary is thus not only the Mother of the Word Incarnate but, in a derived and spiritual sense, the mother of all servants of the Word — the mother of theologians, in the deepest and most Marian sense of that title. The article draws out the implications of this Lukan insight for a renewal of theological method rooted directly in Scripture, and specifically in Biblical Spiritual Theology, in continuity with Dei Verbum.
Introduction
Theology has long defined itself by the celebrated Anselmian formula, fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. This definition remains true and irreplaceable. Yet it is not the only one available to us, nor is it the most primitive. Before faith seeks to understand, faith must first receive; and before the theologian speaks, the theologian must first listen. It is precisely this anterior moment (the moment of reception, of listening, of becoming) that the Evangelist Luke places at the threshold of his Gospel, and that this article wishes to recover as a properly Lukan contribution to theological method.
The occasion for this reflection is a single, deceptively simple observation. In his Prologue, Luke describes the guarantors of the tradition he is about to hand on not merely as witnesses, but as “servants of the Word” (Luke 1:2). A few verses later, at the Annunciation, Mary describes herself in strikingly parallel terms: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord” (Luke 1:38). The juxtaposition is too close, and too deliberately placed, to be accidental. Luke does not offer an abstract definition of what it means to serve the Word; he shows us a person who does so, fully, from the first moment of the Gospel to the last. If this reading is sound, then Luke has bequeathed to the Church not only a Christology and a Mariology, but also, implicitly, a theological epistemology: to become a theologian, in the deepest and most spiritually integral sense of that word, is to become (as Mary became) a servant of the Word.
This article develops that thesis in four movements. First, it examines the Lukan Prologue and the precise meaning of the phrase “servants of the Word.” Second, it shows how Mary, in the Infancy Narrative and beyond, embodies this identity in its fullness, becoming thereby the archetype of the theologian understood in this primitive, Lukan sense. Third, it situates this Lukan insight alongside the Anselmian definition and alongside the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on Scripture as the soul of theology, showing the two definitions to be complementary rather than competing. Fourth, it draws out what such a rereading of theology asks of those who practise it today, particularly within a method of Biblical Spiritual Theology that seeks to renew theological reflection at its Scriptural root.
I. The Lukan Prologue: Becoming Servants of the Word
Luke opens his Gospel with a carefully composed literary prologue, unique among the Synoptics for its explicit reflection on method and sources: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.” (Luke 1:1–4)
The Greek phrase behind “servants of the word” is hypērētai genomenoi tou logou. Two elements of this expression deserve close attention. The first is the noun hypēretēs itself, which designates not a master but a subordinate minister — one who places himself entirely at the disposal of another, after the manner of a servant. The second, and more decisive, element is the participle genomenoi, “having become.” Luke does not say that the eyewitnesses simply were servants of the Word by nature or by office, as though this were a status conferred once for all; he says that they became such. The Greek verb ginomai carries within it the sense of a process, a transformation, a passage from one state to another. To be a servant of the Word, in Luke’s own vocabulary, is the term of a becoming, not merely the exercise of a function.
This is confirmed by the companion volume to the Gospel. In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke returns explicitly to this same vocabulary when he describes the Twelve resolving to devote themselves to the essential priorities of apostolic life:“But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” (Acts 6:4)
Here again, the diakonia tou logou, the ministry or service of the Word, stands as a definite, nameable reality — a service distinct from other forms of service in the community, and one that requires devotion, perseverance, and, implicitly, an interior formation. The eyewitnesses of Luke 1:2 and the apostles of Acts 6:4 belong to a single Lukan portrait: those charged with handing on divine revelation are first of all people who have been shaped, over time, into servants of that Word which precedes and exceeds them.
It is this same vocabulary, and no other, that Luke places on Mary’s lips at the Annunciation, at the very threshold of the narrative that the Prologue has just introduced. The reader who has just been told that the tradition rests upon those who “became servants of the word” is, within a few verses, presented with a young woman of Nazareth who says of herself, using the cognate term doulē, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord” (Luke 1:38). Luke, a careful and deliberate literary craftsman, does not juxtapose these two passages by chance.
II. Mary, Embodiment and Mother of the Servants of the Word
1. The servant who receives the Word in faith
“And Mary said, ‘Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.’ And the angel departed from her.” (Luke 1:38)
Mary’s fiat is not a passive acquiescence but an active reception, the free correspondence of a creature’s will to the Word that is addressed to her. She does not simply hear a message and comply; she gives herself over, entirely, to what the Word asks of her, to the point of conceiving that Word in her own flesh. In this sense Mary does not merely resemble the eyewitnesses of the Prologue; she surpasses and grounds them, since in her the service of the Word is no longer only a matter of transmitting a message received from others, but of receiving the Word himself, the Logos, into her own body and history.
The Word of God is given to us first; it is addressed to us before anything else. Only afterwards are we called to receive it. This is why it must be placed above all else, granted absolute priority in our lives. The Word of God is living and active, and it directs and judges our existence. We are therefore called to profess, with our whole life, the absolute primacy of the Living Word of God.
It is self-evident that the theologian, more than anyone else, must make this the governing norm and rule of life. From this follows the fundamental theological method: Lectio Divina, i.e. listening to the Word of God and putting it into practice.
It is likewise self-evident that the bishop, under whose authority the theologian places himself, is called to embody in his own life this same unwavering fidelity to the Living Word, as the daily form and measure of his pastoral and ecclesial mission.
2. The blessedness of hearing and keeping
Luke returns to this theme deliberately later in the Gospel, in a scene often read as a direct commentary on Mary’s own identity. When a woman in the crowd cries out in praise of Jesus’ mother, Jesus responds with what has rightly been called a Marian beatitude: “But he said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!’” (Luke 11:28)
Read in isolation, this saying might appear to relativise Mary’s physical motherhood in favour of a more universal, spiritual discipleship open to all. Read within Luke’s wider narrative, however, it does something more precise: it identifies the criterion of true blessedness — hearing and keeping the Word — with the very thing Mary has already done supremely, from the first moment of the Annunciation. Luke had, after all, already applied to Mary almost identical language earlier in the Infancy Narrative, when Elizabeth exclaims: “And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.” (Luke 1:45)
Jesus’ later saying in Luke 11:28 does not correct or displace Elizabeth’s earlier beatitude in Luke 1:45; it universalises its criterion while confirming that Mary is its first and paradigmatic realisation. She is not set aside by the beatitude on hearing the Word; she is its origin and its measure.
3. The one who ponders the Word in her heart
Twice, at the two poles of the Infancy Narrative — the shepherds’ visit and the finding in the Temple — Luke pauses the narrative to note something of Mary’s interior life: “But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19) “And his mother treasured up all these things in her heart.” (Luke 2:51)
This double notice is Luke’s own description of what it looks like, concretely, to become a servant of the Word in the manner of the Prologue: not a single act of consent, but a sustained, contemplative dwelling with events and words whose meaning is not yet exhausted. Mary treasures (syntērei) and ponders (symballē in the heart) what she has received, holding it before God in a posture that later spiritual tradition will recognise as the very grammar of Lectio Divina — hearing, receiving, ruminating, and allowing the Word to bear fruit over time. She is, in this sense, the first exegete of the mystery of Christ, not because she analyses it academically, but because she lives with it contemplatively until its meaning ripens.
Read the Book: “Hearing the Living Word, The Gospel’s Grammar of Lectio Divina.” (Amazon USA – Amazon UK)
4. The good soil: Mary in the Parable of the Sower
There is a further Lukan text, easily overlooked in this connection, which in fact anchors the whole argument in Luke’s own explicit vocabulary. In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus himself supplies the interpretive key for what it means to receive the Word fruitfully: “As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.” (Luke 8:15)
The phrase Luke uses here, en kardia kalē kai agathē, “in an honest and good heart,” is not incidental vocabulary. It is the same word, kardia, heart, that Luke will use twice more, and nowhere more memorably, to describe Mary: she “treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19), and again, “his mother treasured up all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51). Luke does not merely tell us in the abstract what good soil looks like; a few chapters on either side of the parable, he has already shown us. Mary is the good soil of the parable narrated in advance — the heart that holds the Word fast, that does not let it be choked by thorns or scorched for lack of root, and that bears fruit, precisely, “with patience,” hypomonē, the very patience of a mother who ponders for thirty hidden years before the Word’s fruit is made manifest to the world.
This reading is confirmed almost immediately by Luke himself. In the very next scene, when Jesus is told that his mother and brothers are standing outside, he responds: “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” (Luke 8:21)
Luke places this saying in direct narrative proximity to the Parable of the Sower for a reason: Jesus is not distancing himself from his mother but naming, in her, the very thing the parable has just described. She who hears and keeps (2:19, 2:51), who is later called blessed for precisely this (11:28), is here identified, in Luke’s own carefully chosen vocabulary, as the good soil in which the Word takes root, matures, and bears fruit. The theologian, on this Lukan reading, is not first a cultivator of arguments but a cultivator of the heart — one who labours, as Mary labours, to become good and honest soil, so that the Word sown may not merely be heard but may truly bear fruit in a life.
Read: Mary and the Parable of the Sower
5. The mother of the servants of the Word
If Mary is, in Luke’s narrative logic, the supreme embodiment of the one who becomes servant of the Word, she is also, by a natural extension that the Lukan double work invites, its mother in a spiritual sense. The Gospel opens with Mary conceiving the Word in her womb through faith, beleiving for Zachariah and Elisabeth and for all of us; the Acts of the Apostles, Luke’s second volume, opens with Mary present at prayer among the nascent Church as it awaits the Spirit who will send it forth to be, in its turn, witnesses and servants of that same Word to the ends of the earth (cf. Acts 1:8, 1:14). The community that will be described in Acts 6:4 as devoted to “the ministry of the word” is a community that Luke has already shown us gathered around Mary in prayer. She who conceived the Word first in faith stands, in Luke’s narrative architecture, at the origin of the Church’s own becoming servant of that same Word. In this precise and carefully grounded sense, Mary is not only the embodiment of the servant of the Word; she is, spiritually, the mother of all who will likewise become servants of the Word — the mother, therefore, of theologians rightly understood.
III. Toward a Lukan Definition of the Theologian
The classical Anselmian definition of theology, fides quaerens intellectum, remains a permanent acquisition of the Christian tradition. It expresses accurately the movement by which faith, once given, seeks to understand more deeply what it already believes, and it has rightly governed centuries of rigorous theological reflection. What Luke offers is not a rival definition but an anterior one, situated one step further back in the order of theological existence. Before faith can seek to understand, it must first have received; and reception, in Luke’s own vocabulary, takes the precise form of becoming a servant of the Word.
One may therefore propose, as a properly Lukan formulation, complementary to Anselm’s: the theologian is one who becomes a servant of the Word — receiving it in faith, treasuring and pondering it in the heart, keeping it in a life of obedience, and only then, and on that basis, transmitting it faithfully to others. Luke does not offer this as an abstract definition; characteristically, he narrates it. He does not tell us what a servant of the Word is in the manner of a treatise; he shows us Mary. This is itself theologically significant: for Luke, one does not first define discipleship and then illustrate it with an example; one recognises discipleship by attending to the concrete, narrated life of the one who embodies it most fully.
This Lukan intuition finds a notable resonance in the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the place of Scripture in theology. Dei Verbum insists that access to Christ through the Scriptures is not merely one theological resource among others, but the very soul of the discipline: “The study of the sacred page should be the very soul of sacred theology.” (Dei Verbum, 24) and, a paragraph later, in a phrase drawn from Saint Jerome: “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” (Dei Verbum, 25, citing St Jerome)
The Council does not say that Scripture provides theology with useful material or convenient proof-texts; it says that Scripture is theology’s soul, its interior animating principle. This is, in conciliar language, precisely what Luke had already narrated in the person of Mary: a theology whose very life-principle is not the mastery of a text from outside it, but a sustained, faith-filled indwelling of the Word from within, of the kind Mary practises when she “treasures” and “ponders” what she has received.
It is worth noting, finally, that later spiritual and theological tradition has repeatedly reached for language close to this Lukan intuition, even where a precise citation proves elusive. Saint Augustine’s celebrated remark that Mary “conceived Christ first in her heart by faith before she conceived him in her womb” (attributed within the Augustinian tradition, echoing Sermon 215) captures exactly the priority Luke narrates: reception in faith precedes and grounds every subsequent fruitfulness. Twentieth-century theology, for its part, has insisted with particular force that theological speech must be preceded by a contemplative listening to the Word of God, a conviction associated above all with the school of thought inaugurated by Hans Urs von Balthasar, even if the precise formulation sometimes attributed to him in circulation — ‘the first act of theology is not speaking about God but listening to the Word of God’ — cannot be located verbatim in his published corpus and should be treated as a faithful paraphrase of his theological vision rather than a direct citation. What matters for our purposes is not the precision of that particular sentence, but the underlying conviction it expresses, a conviction that is, in fact, considerably older than Balthasar and considerably more precisely grounded: it is Luke’s own, articulated already in his Prologue and narrated in full in the person of Mary.
Practical Conclusions
1. Daily Lectio Divina as a necessity, not an option. This is, in truth, where the whole of the foregoing argument comes to rest, and it deserves to be stated without qualification. If Luke’s Prologue teaches that the guarantors of the tradition became servants of the Word, and if Mary is that becoming narrated in full — receiving the Word in faith (1:38), proving to be its good and honest soil (8:15), hearing it and doing it (8:21), treasuring and pondering it in her heart until it bears fruit “with patience” (2:19, 2:51) — then the concrete, daily practice by which the theologian, and indeed every disciple, actually becomes such soil can no longer be regarded as one pious exercise among others. It is a necessity. Lectio Divina is precisely this: the space and time in which the Word ceases to be an object of study from outside and becomes, today, a Living Word truly met and received into the heart. It is not a substitute for the Liturgy of the Word but its proper extension into the hours of the day that are not the Mass — the same Word proclaimed at the altar, held fast, chewed over, and allowed to ripen in silence, precisely as Mary held fast, in her heart, the words and events she had already received at the Liturgy’s own source, the Word made flesh. For this reason, Lectio Divina should be practised daily, and it should be practised, deliberately and explicitly, with Mary’s heart and in her: asking her, the good soil in whom the Word has already borne perfect fruit, to receive the Word for us and in us, and to lend us, day by day, something of the honest and good heart that held it fast without loss. Whoever undertakes theological study or teaching should, following this same Lukan pattern, treat this daily practice — not occasional or merely academic contact with the sacred page — as the necessary soil out of which alone sound theological speech can later grow. The order matters: becoming precedes speaking, and becoming is renewed, concretely, each day, in this contemplative meeting with the Word.
2. Mary as pedagogical model for theologians. Formation programmes in spiritual theology, and more broadly in seminary and religious formation, would do well to propose Mary explicitly, and not only implicitly, as the concrete pattern of the theologian’s vocation: one who hears, believes, treasures, ponders, and only then brings the Word to birth for others.
3. Scripture as soul, not resource. In continuity with Dei Verbum 24, theological method should treat direct, sustained engagement with the biblical text not as a preliminary stage to be passed through en route to system, but as the permanent, animating soul of theological work at every stage, including the most speculative.
4. Vigilance in citation. Because theological writing so easily borrows striking formulations attributed to great authors, this study itself illustrates the necessary discipline of verifying sources before quoting them as verbatim citations, distinguishing carefully between an author’s authentic words and a faithful paraphrase of his thought.
5. Renewal of theological method from Scripture. Read in this light, Luke invites a genuine ressourcement of theological method: not the abandonment of the Anselmian tradition, but its rooting more visibly and more consciously in the anterior, Scriptural, and Marian moment of becoming a servant of the Word — which is to say, a renewal of theology understood as Biblical Spiritual Theology.
Conclusion
Luke, in the space of a single Prologue and a single Infancy Narrative, has bequeathed to the Church far more than a literary preface and a beautiful account of the Annunciation. He has narrated, in the concrete figure of Mary, what it means to become a servant of the Word: to receive it in faith, to treasure and ponder it in the heart, to keep it in a life of loving obedience, and, on that basis alone, to transmit it faithfully to others. This is not a rival to the classical definition of theology as faith seeking understanding; it is that definition’s Scriptural root and precondition. Mary, the supreme embodiment of the servant of the Word, is thereby also, in a true and spiritually fruitful sense, the mother of all who will become servants of that same Word after her — the mother, that is, of theologians rightly understood. To renew theology from Scripture, and specifically from Luke, is therefore to return, again and again, to her school: to learn from her how one becomes, above all when speaking of God, a servant of his Word.
Bibliography
The Holy Bible, Luke 1:1–4; 1:38; 1:45; 2:19; 2:51; 8:15; 8:21; 10:38–42; 11:27–28; Acts 1:8, 1:14; 6:4.
Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum (1965), nn. 24–25.
Augustine of Hippo, Sermones, 215 (traditional attribution: ‘Mary conceived Christ first in her heart by faith before she conceived him in her womb’).
Balthasar, Hans Urs von, First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1986 (German original, 1968).
Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, Prooemium (for the classical formula fides quaerens intellectum).
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