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<\/a><\/div>\nTill his death, too, in many ways. As far as I know, he (along with virtually all early Protestant leaders) never ceased believing in Mary\u2019s perpetual virginity, or the propriety of calling her\u00a0Mother of God<\/i>\u00a0(Theotokos<\/i>\u00a0or\u00a0Mater Dei<\/i>). He held even later in life a modified version of what Catholics believe in the Immaculate Conception: that Mary was purged of original sin and was sinless at the birth of Christ and after. I have called this view, \u201cImmaculate Purification.\u201d It is like ours insofar as she was freed from original sin by God\u2019s grace at some point; different in that it was not at her conception. The early Luther (as late as 1527 for sure and possibly later) even believed the latter.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think he ever denied that Mary\u2019s Assumption was a perfectly permissible belief, either, though never required in his circles. All of that is far more \u201cMarian\u201d than (I\u2019d venture to guess) maybe 95% of Lutherans today. A lot closer in spirit to us than to y\u2019all, I dare say . . . \u00a0<\/i> \u00a0<\/i> It involves reason, yes (as virtually all theology that I know of, does), but not without biblical argumentation.<\/p>\n He couldn\u2019t have ever sinned, being God, and (even in His human nature) because of the Hypostatic Union. He was impeccable.<\/p>\n He certainly lived a sinless life. But he also needed to be without original sin as inherited from Adam.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n He couldn\u2019t possibly have had original sin, either, since that was from the fall and rebellion of created human beings, of whom He was not one.<\/p>\n This is not Catholic reasoning (with all due respect). Theologian Ludwig Ott explains, in\u00a0Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma<\/i>:<\/p>\n As original sin is propagated by natural generation, and since Christ entered life in a supernatural manner through conception by the Holy Ghost (Mt. 1:18 et seq.; Luke 1:26 et seq.) it follows that He was not subject to the general law of original sin.<\/p>\n The Fathers and the theologians infer Christ\u2019s freedom fro original sin from the Hypostatic Union, which being a most intimate connection with God, excludes the condition of separation from God implied by original sin. (p. 168)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This being the case, Mary\u2019s state vis-a-vis original sin was irrelevant insofar as Jesus Christ was concerned. She didn\u2019t\u00a0have<\/i>\u00a0to\u00a0necessarily<\/i>\u00a0be conceived immaculately, either for His sake or her own, as the Mother of God. Catholics believe that God performed this miracle because it was \u201cfitting\u201d or \u201cappropriate\u201d. Hence, if one reads the dogmatic proclamation of 1854 (Ineffabilis Deus<\/i>), there is no trace of language about the Immaculate Conception being any kind of necessity in order for Christ to be sinless.<\/p>\n Mary\u2019s being immaculate had more to do with the analogy to Eve. Mary was the second Eve, who said yes to God rather than no. She was restored to the state that an unfallen Eve would have remained in. Hence the fathers had a prominent motif of \u201csecond Eve\u201d or \u201cthe new Eve.\u201d The immaculate Eve rebelled against God and fell. The immaculate Mary said yes to God at the Annunciation and thus helped bring about the incarnation, leading to Christ\u2019s atonement and redemption: that reversed the curse of the fall.<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t follow, either. Jesus Christ certainly suffered bodily, and He was without original or actual sin, and not fallen. He suffered in many ways before His passion; for example, in the Garden of Gethsemane, His betrayal by Judas, His lamenting over the sinfulness of Jerusalem; weeping over the dead Lazarus, even though He was about to raise Him, being misunderstood by Pharisees and scribes, etc.<\/p>\n Mary\u2019s not having pains in childbirth isn\u2019t due to that, but because it was an entirely miraculous childbirth and in accord with all the physical aspects of perpetual virginity (non-violation of the hymen in any fashion whatever). In other words, it followed from the nature of the Virgin Birth.<\/p>\n There is that connection, yes. But again, Jesus lacked original sin, and was God, and He died. Most Catholics believe that Mary also died, by analogy to Jesus. But it is not required belief. She may have died; maybe not. I personally believe she did, because the analogy makes perfect sense to me, and she always sought to be like her Son. The dogmatic declaration in 1950 doesn\u2019t say whether she died. It says, \u201cthe ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory\u201d.<\/p>\n Nor would an Assumption to heaven (to be technical, but accurate, I think)\u00a0necessarily<\/i>\u00a0follow from the absence of original sin, since if human beings hadn\u2019t fallen, the result would have been immortality (no death), rather than Assumption.<\/p>\n The Assumption signified Mary being the first or among the first human beings to receive her resurrection body, due to the finished work of her Son Jesus on the cross. What better or more appropriate person to obtain that honor?<\/p>\n This is a better description because it is saying that we are utilizing the Bible also in our theological thinking. All Christian traditions apply reason to theology, or else they don\u2019t do theology, period. They would have to sit on a mountaintop and ponder their belly button or become a Quaker, with his \u201cinner light\u201d \u2014 if not. We\u2019re no different from anyone else in that fundamental sense. It\u2019s only relative: how much reason is applied or valued in the overall scheme of things.<\/p>\n So you guys say we place it too high; we say you place it too low. Fundamentalist types place it way lower than you do. I happen to like reason, myself. I think it\u2019s pretty cool. The Bible says that Paul reasoned and argued with Jews and Greeks alike. Jesus did it. Paul does it all through his letters. Melanchthon and Chemnitz and all the other great Lutheran theologians did. Even Luther occasionally lapsed and descended into reason (joke<\/i>, folks!). We\u2019re called to love God with our minds, etc. Reason cannot be separated.<\/p>\n That\u2019s right. People manage to believe all kinds of things., in various and sundry combinations: consistently and inconsistently in varying degrees.<\/p>\n Yep. Heinrich Bullinger made a very explicit statement of belief in the Assumption, and he was Reformed.<\/p>\n The only\u00a0infallible<\/i>\u00a0authority, according to classic\u00a0sola Scriptura<\/i>\u00a0rule of faith . . . It is the authority for us, too, but we don\u2019t pit it against authoritative tradition or Church, because the Bible itself doesn\u2019t do that and upholds those things, too. Therefore, to do so would be to not accept scriptural authority in its fullness and widest scope.<\/p>\n We contend that all Catholic doctrines (including even the dreaded Marian ones) are present in Scripture, explicitly, implicitly, or clearly able to be deduced from either sort of evidence (material sufficiency).<\/p>\n There are different levels of such evidence. The Virgin Birth has but a few support passages. Original sin also has only a few. Yet both are firmly believed by Christians of all stripes. Original sin isn\u2019t even mentioned in the Nicene Creed, and Cardinal Newman noted that there was far more support for purgatory in the fathers than for original sin.<\/p>\n Other things have to be (mostly or largely) deduced. Under this category would come things like the Two Natures of Christ. It\u2019s in Scripture, assuredly, but has to be \u201cteased\u201d out of it by an examination of many passages together. Even the Holy Trinity is mostly of that nature. I have papers giving many hundreds of biblical proofs for the Trinity, but they are not always evident at first glance. As a result, Christology developed in the early Church for about 600 years: with orthodoxy having to deal with (and condemn) Arianism, Gnosticism, Sabellianism (or modal monarchianism), Monophysitism, Nestorianism, and Monotheletism, each in turn.<\/p>\n Other things are\u00a0totally<\/i>\u00a0absent in Scripture, yet believed by Protestants, who claim to be \u201cScripture Alone\u201d (as infallible authority). The canon of the Bible is the best and most undeniable example of that. Protestants are forced to accept a \u201cfallible list of infallible books\u201d \u2014 as R. C. Sproul has candidly admitted. And they have to rely on the (Catholic) Church authority that proclaimed the canon (minus the deuterocanon).\u00a0Sola Scriptura<\/i>\u00a0is another. It\u2019s found nowhere in Scripture.<\/p>\n I just finished a book about this:\u00a0100 Biblical Arguments Against Sola Scriptura<\/i>\u00a0(and it is to be published by Catholic Answers, so it\u2019s not merely self-published). Nowhere does it say in Holy Scripture that the Bible only is the infallible guide and rule of faith, to the exclusion of an infallible Church or infallible apostolic tradition (which is precisely what the Protestant contention is). And the Bible contradicts it all over the place. But that doesn\u2019t stop Protestants from believing it and basing their entire system of authority and method of theology on it: castles made of sand, like the old Jimi Hendrix song . . .<\/p>\n Denominations are nowhere found in the New Testament, which everywhere refers to one Church with one solid set of beliefs, that are non-negotiable. This is beyond all dispute. Many Protestant thinkers readily concede this, and lament it. Yet all Protestants live with the tension of the very existence of denominations being dead-set against what the Bible teaches about ecclesiastical authority and belief-systems of theological truth. Doesn\u2019t stop \u2018em . . . There is no choice.\u00a0Sola Scriptura<\/i>\u00a0and the enshrinement of a circular private judgment made all that inevitable, and there is no way to eliminate it by Protestant principles, which are severely flawed from the outset, and far too unbiblical.<\/p>\n Now, all that was my roundabout way of addressing the criticism that our Marian doctrines are supposedly not \u201cin\u201d the Bible. They certainly are: just not (usually) explicitly, or sometimes (as in the Assumption) not implicitly, either, and able only to be deduced from other things. But this shouldn\u2019t pose any problem for the Protestant (unless we adopt double standards) because, as I\u2019ve shown, they believe many things that are only infrequently indicated in the Bible or not at all. Neither the canon issue nor the denominational scandal ever seem to cause any Protestants to reject their own system.<\/p>\n So that is one reply: we reject the double standard whereby you guys believe all that (and other things, too) with small or no biblical support, while at the same time demanding hyper-biblical-support for every one of our doctrines, as if we don\u2019t have it and you\u00a0do\u00a0<\/i>for absolutely everything you believe and even make a \u201cpillar\u201d of your system.<\/p>\n The second answer is that explicit support is not required anyway, because the Bible never teaches that: that every doctrine must be explicitly indicated in the Bible and nowhere else. If we are fully \u201cbiblical\u201d that notion is completely absent. So why follow it? Well, because it is an entrenched, arbitrary tradition of man, is what it amounts to.<\/p>\n That said, I contend that there is more than enough biblical support for every Marian doctrine, so that no one can accuse any of it of being \u201cunbiblical\u201d or \u201cextrabiblical\u201d or contradictory to what is in the Bible. I will demonstrate this as I proceed, because I have made biblical arguments for all of it. And I think they are pretty solid and can withstand scrutiny.<\/p>\n I (and other Catholics) have made four distinct biblical arguments for the Immaculate Conception (or at least fundamental aspects of it). The first launches off of Luke 1:28: \u201cfull of grace\u201d or (less literally) \u201chighly favored\u201d (kecharitomene<\/i>\u00a0in Greek) and the implications of that in light of the fact that the Bible (esp. Paul) makes grace directly the antithesis and \u201covercomer\u201d of sin. This argument supports Mary\u2019s sinlessness, but not (directly or explicitly) her Immaculate Conception, which takes it a step further, and involved theological reasoning and speculation. Actual sinlessness is a key part of the belief, but not the entirety of it. Here are my papers where I delve into this biblical argument:<\/p>\n A Straightforward Biblical Argument For the Sinlessness of Mary<\/p>\n Luke 1:28 (Full of Grace) and the Immaculate Conception: Linguistic and Exegetical Considerations<\/p>\n The second is an analogical and \u201cplausibility\u201d argument that is less strong but still worthy of serious consideration, I submit. This one shows that God has specifically graced or blessed certain of his saints and servants from conception or from the womb. This is only in my book about Mary, so I\u2019ll summarize it:<\/p>\n Neither the notion nor the fact of a sinless created being is impossible. The angels (excepting the fallen ones, or demons) are sinless and always have been. They never sinned. They never rebelled against God. They\u2019re creatures as we are, with a free will to sin or not sin. Adam and Eve were originally sinless and could have remained so had they not rebelled against God\u2019s commands.<\/p>\n We contend that the Immaculate Conception is a completely plausible act of God, and most fitting and proper and should not be at all \u201csurprising,\u201d in light of several analogous variables in Scripture.<\/p>\n Another biblical argument can be made from the \u201cproximity to God\u201d: in other words, \u201cthe closer one gets to God, the more holy one must be.\u201d I developed this at some length in my first book,\u00a0A Biblical Defense of Catholicism<\/i><\/a>\u00a0(pp. 178-185). The presence of God imparts holiness (Deuteronomy 7:6; 26:19; Jeremiah 2:3). The temple site was sacred and holy (Isaiah 11:9; 56:7; 64:10), and the Holy of Holies where God was specially present above the ark of the covenant (Exodus 25:22), was the holiest place of all within the temple. When we are ultimately with God in heaven, sin is abolished once and for all (1 John 3:3-9; Revelation 14:5; 21:27).<\/p>\n Now, the challenge at this point is to show how and why one would posit the Immaculate Conception, based on the biblical data alone. Is it possible to do that? Can some semblance of an argument be made from the Bible: if not directly (as we grant), at least from analogy, plausibility, and indirect deduction? I think so.<\/p>\n It\u2019s fairly easy to find examples of holy people who have been sanctified or made righteous from the womb, and even (in terms of God\u2019s foreordination or predestination) from before they were ever conceived. The Bible does refer to holiness being imparted even before birth; indeed, even before conception. Samson was one such person (Jud 16:17). So were Isaiah and Job:<\/p>\n Isaiah 49:1, 5<\/b>\u00a0(RSV) . . . The LORD called me from the womb, . . . [5] And now the LORD says, who formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the eyes of the LORD, and my God has become my strength \u2013<\/p>\n Job 31:15, 18<\/b>\u00a0Did not he who made me in the womb make him? And did not one fashion us in the womb? . . . (for from his youth I reared him as a father, and from his mother\u2019s womb I guided him);<\/p><\/blockquote>\n We also observe in Sacred Scripture that God has plans for His servants from even before they were conceived (God being out of time in the first place): e.g., Psalm 139:13-16. Thus, the idea that a person is somehow spiritually formed and molded by God and called from the very time of their conception (and before) is an explicit biblical concept. But we can produce even more than that: having to do also with holiness. The prophet Jeremiah reported the Lord\u2019s revelation to him:<\/p>\n Jeremiah 1:5<\/b>\u00a0\u201cBefore I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.\u201d (KJV: \u201csanctified thee\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cConsecrated\u201d or \u201csanctified\u201d in Jeremiah 1:5 is the Hebrew word\u00a0quadash<\/i>\u00a0(Strong\u2019s word #6942). According to Gesenius\u2019\u00a0Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon of the Old Testament<\/i>\u00a0(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1979 reprint, p. 725), in this instance it meant \u201cto declare any one holy.\u201d<\/p>\n Jeremiah was thus consecrated or sanctified from the womb; possibly from conception (the text is somewhat vague as to the exact time). This is fairly analogous to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. It approximates it. We know Jeremiah was a very holy man. Was he\u00a0sinless<\/i>, though? Perhaps he was. I don\u2019t recall reading accounts of Jeremiah sinning. The retort at this point might be that there is a lack of such a notion in the New Testament. But that\u2019s not true. We have the example of John the Baptist:<\/p>\n Luke 1:15<\/b>\u00a0for he will be great before the Lord, and he shall drink no wine nor strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother\u2019s womb.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Luke 1:41, 44<\/b>\u00a0And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. . . For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy.<\/p>\n We know that John the Baptist was also a very holy man. Was he sinless? We can\u2019t know that for sure from the biblical data. I don\u2019t recall any mention of a sin from John the Baptist, in Scripture. Lastly, St. Paul refers to being called before he was born:<\/p>\n Galatians 1:15<\/b>\u00a0. . . he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Therefore, by analogy and plausibility, based on many biblical cross-references, we can and may conclude that it is \u201cbiblical\u201d and reasonable to believe in faith that Mary was immaculately conceived. Nothing in the Bible\u00a0contradicts<\/i>\u00a0this belief. And there is much that suggests various elements of it, as we have seen. It does require\u00a0faith<\/i>, of course, but based on the biblical data alone it is not an unreasonable or \u201cunbiblical\u201d belief at all.<\/p>\n If God calls and predestines people for a specific purpose from all eternity, from before they were ever born, as David states and as Jeremiah strongly implies, then what\u00a0inherent<\/i>\u00a0difficulty is there in His sanctifying a very important person in salvation history, centrally involved in the Incarnation, from conception?<\/p>\n The possibility simply can\u2019t be ruled out. And if God can call Jeremiah and John the Baptist from the womb and (possibly) from conception, why not Mary as well? The one case is no less plausible than the other, and so we\u00a0believe<\/i>\u00a0it, by analogy.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not foreign to biblical thinking, and makes perfect sense. According to the Catholic Church, God restored to Mary the innocence of Eve before the Fall, and filled her with grace, in order to prepare her for her unspeakably sublime, sanctified task as the Mother of God the Son. Why should He\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0do so?<\/p>\n The third biblical argument is the answer to the objection of the passage \u201call have sinned . . .\u201d This is simply a matter of the nature of biblical language, and is easily disposed of:<\/p>\n \u201cAll Have Sinned . . . \u201d (Mary?)<\/p>\n The fourth is the patristic and biblical analogy of Mary and the ark of the covenant, based on several parallels (typology):<\/p>\n Biblical Evidence for the Patristic Analogy of Mary as the Ark of the (New) Covenant<\/p>\n
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\nWell,\u00a0conceived<\/i>\u00a0without original sin, to be precise. Hence the use of \u201cconception.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nFair and ecumenical statement. Thanks!<\/p>\n