The Blessed Virgin, the Theotokos: The Bodily Autonomy of Women and a Post-Christian World

The rising cultural tide of a post-Christian world pushes against the shoreline of history. People once forced into the small inlets and coves eventually find themselves along the wide beaches of the peninsula. The wind carries their once silenced stories, and they crash loudly against the shore. Through strife and struggle, women have propitiated the Fates, having now been granted the gift of witness for their skill and wisdom no longer limited to the home. The maintenance of women’s domestication in Western countries stood the test of millennia, through limitations in career opportunity, education, political engagement, healthcare, and religious moralisation, women have been forced to experience a world that objectifies their physical nature and reduces their value to mere biological mechanisms. The peculiarity of this phenomenon stands in stark contrast to the matriarchal societies of many early civilisations, where women were once deified for their fertility; within them was found something great enough to overcome man’s mortality. As Will Durant writes so beautifully, “[The Cretan] sees in her the basic fact of nature—that man’s greatest enemy, death, is overcome by women’s mysterious power, reproduction; and he identifies this power with deity.”[1] The Christian imagination includes these ancient associations of bodily power, but it alters the recognition as it is seen through a morally predetermined outlook.  Throughout many cultures, the defining characteristic of women is placed on physical contributions. The high churches of Christendom, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism have propelled this emphasis forward in their theology and church doctrine that view the feminine nature as first existing to be used by the other.

             On one side, Catholicism venerates Mary for her virginity and her own immaculate conception, believing that even she herself was conceived through divine intervention so that she would be free from the taint of original sin. Then there is Orthodoxy, which venerates her as the Theotokos—the God-bearer for humanity. In the Theotokion, the hymn of the Theotokos, it is sung that Mary’s womb grew as spacious as the heavens because in it she carried her Creator. However poetic this framing may be, it still reduces Mary’s role purely to a physical act. Her virginity and her pregnancy were neither unique traits nor experiences she alone partook in, and neither were they aspects of herself that separated her from the other women in her community. Yet, she was set apart by God and chosen by him to become the ark of the new covenant. Theology shapes culture, from the old parish courtyard to the wooden church pews; the framing that is posited regarding the role women play in divine acts informs the lens they’re seen through in the world.

            Here, the ontological framing of a woman’s body—and who has a right to it—has arguably been shaped by millennium-old theological perspectives held by the high churches, and the movements that followed them. The oversimplification of Mary’s role in Christ’s incarnation appears with seemingly subtle influences amongst Christian movements (such as in purity culture) where a woman’s fulfilling worth comes from retaining virginity until she has children, often being seen as her highest calling. The perspective of Mary in either of the high churches’ theologies is one example of women being viewed through their physical nature before an intellectual or personal nature is given attention. In Luke 7, the story is told of the woman who comes and washes Jesus’ feet with her hair and with perfume. She asks Jesus for forgiveness through a physical act; her intellect is overlooked. When men came to Jesus either to ask for healing or forgiveness, Jesus engaged with them through speaking to their personhood first. When the bleeding woman comes to Jesus (as found in the synoptic gospels), she receives healing by touching his cloak before speaking to him. These instances reflect the cultural norms of the time. Simply due to the way the bible is elevated in Christianity, the messages they share regarding how women are engaged with carry throughout history. The dichotomy of the virgin and the whore, holy vessel and sinful flesh, is Christendom’s social configurations for the predisposed presets of the female life. Popular motifs found in today’s culture, such as ‘my body, my choice,’ show women are pushing against the rigid frameworks placed on them. Through women’s rights movements, the modern woman has retained the highest level of egalitarian autonomy than ever before in Christendom, yet not without resistance. ‘Feminist’ is still an insult for some, and more perspective is still needed to understand how theology impacts everyday culture.

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[1] Will Durant, 1939, The Life of Greece, p. 13

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© Michaela Novak, 2026. This article is a part of a series in collaboration with the FTN (Feminist Theology Network). FTN social media: https://www.instagram.com/feministtheologynetwork/ and @feministtheology.bsky.social

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: Provided by the author