Woman and Serpent – Take 2 (3)

David: I can see how sinlessness could have facilitated Mary’s “Let it be”, but even sinners with tainted wills can do God’s will.  As God said to Cain, “Sin is crouching at your door; … but you must master it.”  (Gen. 4:6.)  Jesus’ lineage is full of sinners who said yes to God at crucial moments: Abraham heeded God’s call (Gen. 12:1-4); Rahab the pagan harlot hid the Hebrew spies (Jos. 2); David the sometime adulterer was, in spite of his sin, a “man after God’s own heart” (Acts 13:22); and so on.

Dwight: Of course sinners can choose to do God’s will, but the underlying point is that Mary’s will also needed to be totally free because it was the human will which Jesus was going to take to himself. For her will to be totally free Mary had to have been preserved from the stain of original sin. When did this fully graced condition begin? It could only have begun at the beginning of Mary’s life. As we came to understand better just exactly when human life begins, it became clear that this “all holiness” began at her conception.

But you make a fair point when you ask how far logic can take us. You ask, “how can we know?” You are right that we are helpless on our own to fathom such mysteries. Left to our own devices, we end up chasing our own hypothetical theories. To avoid such quicksand of private interpretation, we turn to the Church to understand the mysteries of redemption. So St Paul writes, “His [God’s] intent is that now, through the Church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known…” (Eph. 3:10)

David: Before asking what the Church finds implicit in the Scriptures, the Evangelical bumps into a few explicit things: If Mary was conceived without sin and if she thereafter unfailingly avoided actual sin, these were things that no one, not even Mary, could have known without supernatural revelation, so when and to whom was it revealed that Mary was sinless?  The Apostles taught the generality that all humans have sinned (Rom. 3:9, 10, 23; Rom. 5:12, 18; 1 Cor. 15:22; Gal. 3:22; Eph. 2:3), and when they wanted to teach that someone—namely, Jesus Christ—is sinless, they knew how to do it; and we can line up their “Bible proof texts” for Jesus’ sinlessness. (Matt. 27:4,19; Luke 23:41, 47;John 8:46; 2 Cor. 5:21; Heb. 4:15; Heb. 7:26; 1 Pet. 2:22; 1 John 3:5.) The New Testament writers made no such case for Mary.

Someone who believes in Mary’s sinlessness might take care to exempt her from blanket statements about human sin,

but Paul did not bother to do so, even when writing to her home town of Ephesus (see Eph. 2:3), and Mary’s own adopted son John implied no exemption for her when he wrote, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us….  If we claim we have not sinned, we make [God] out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.”  (1 John 1:8, 10.)  Moreover, Paul said that “death came to all men, because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12), and Mary herself indicated that she was one of those who need a “Savior” (Luke 1:47).  For the sake of argument, however, I’ll concede that even a non-sinner might have been graciously kept from sin only in view of the Savior’s merits; still, at least in general it’s actual sinners who need a Savior.  Thus, the Scriptures teach a generality of human sinfulness that tends against Mary’s sinlessness.  An exception would be possible, but I would expect that exception to be founded on at least some pretty strong implications.  And as I’ve already explained, the implications you find in Gabriel’s “full of grace” and in the Eve-Mary parallel seem very weak to me.

Dwight: Why did Paul and the gospel writers not acknowledge Mary’s sinlessness? Two reasons: First, the church rightly needed to discern who Jesus really was, and only after they refined his true status could they go on to reflect on the stature of Mary. Second, by the very nature of her perfection, Mary was humble and hidden. Like all really holy people, she didn’t stand out. If she was totally natural, then she didn’t stand out, because what is natural is not unusual. I believe that if we had met Mary, she would have seemed like just another Jewish matron—perhaps with a special indefinable sweetness, or an intense quality of love and interest in others.

I accept your point that the implications of two Biblical references are not proof of a dogma. As you’ve observed at the beginning of the chapter, Catholics do not rely on Scripture alone for the development of doctrine. Jesus said he had many things to teach, but that he couldn’t reveal them because the disciples couldn’t cope with it all. Instead, the Holy Spirit would come and lead them into all Truth. (John 16:3, 12.) At Pentecost the Holy Spirit inspired the apostolic Church, and now the Church is the very pillar and foundation of truth. (I Timothy 3:15.) We therefore submit our own theories to the dynamic and living tradition of the Church. For two thousand years the best Christian minds have been reflecting, praying, and debating these issues, guided by the promised Holy Spirit.  One might be able to formulate other theories, but we believe that the consensus of the Church in this matter is the right one.

David: It’s not just any tradition to which Christians adhere; it’s Apostolic tradition.  Jesus particularly condemned teachers who confused mere human tradition with authentic, divine doctrine (Matt. 15:3-8 = Mark 7:6-13), and the Apostles made the same distinction (Col. 2:8; Titus 1:14; 1 Pet. 1:18).  The Church is the “pillar and foundation of the truth” when it faithfully perpetuates what the Apostles taught (and, arguably, what the Apostles’ teaching implies); the Church is not a perpetual revelation machine.  The “faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3) consists of what the Apostles wrote and taught.  Other ideas—even if generations of Christians have thought those ideas fitting or sweet—are simply not part of what was “once for all entrusted”.  I think you agree with me, at least in principle, if not in application.

Dwight: We have a larger understanding of apostolicity than you do, but basically I agree with what you say.  We agree that there can be no new revelation. But it is also true that the Church comes into a fuller and fuller understanding of the “faith once entrusted to the saints” over the course of time. (CCC, para.66.)

David: Then the question is whether a given doctrine that is not explicit in the Bible (here, the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception) is a legitimate development in the understanding of the Apostolic “faith once entrusted” or is, instead, a novelty.  This “development vs. novelty” distinction is implicated in much of the debate about Catholic and Protestant differences.  In that debate, the greatest difficulty of the Protestant is, fittingly, catholicity: The opponent of Roman Catholicism has the most difficulty when he opposes doctrine that can be shown to be truly catholic–that is, world-wide or universal—doctrines that (in the famous fifth -century formula of St. Vincent of Lerins) have been believed “everywhere, always, by everyone”.  Only the most audacious Protestant can easily shrug off the fact that all recorded Christian opinion on a given issue goes against him until, say, the sixteenth  century.

However, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception makes the Protestant debater breathe easy, since it is probably the least “catholic” and most novel of the Catholic dogmas.   Third century theologians like Origen and Tertullian considered Mary to be a sinner, so that even the doctrine of her mere sinlessness lacks catholicity.

Dwight: You mustn’t confuse catholicity with unanimity. Vincent of Lerins’s statement is excellent as a sound bite, but catholicity means consensus–not unanimous consent.

David: The particular doctrine of the Immaculate Conception—i.e., that her sinlessness began at her very conception—is even more awkward.  Against the Immaculate Conception per se we can line up great popes like Innocent III (d. 417), Leo I (d. 461), and Gregory I (d. 604), along with esteemed theologians no less than Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), and “the angelic doctor” Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274),

who all, while they thought Mary sinless, nonetheless affirmatively opposed the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception

—at least, as they understood it.  The doctrine was clearly not known and affirmed by them.

Luther (himself admittedly a devotee of Mary) was unduly generous to call this un-catholic and un-Scriptural doctrine “a sweet and pious belief”.  However, if Luther was right, then the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is at most a permissible opinion.  It is quite another thing to say, as the Catholic Church says, that the Immaculate Conception is a cardinal Christian doctrine, so that (according to the Pope who defined the dogma) someone who denies the Immaculate Conception should know—

that he is condemned by his own judgment; that he has suffered shipwreck in the faith; that he has separated from the unity of the Church; and that, furthermore, by his own action he incurs the penalties established by law if he should dare to express in words or writing or by any other outward means the errors he think in his heart.

Even making allowances for Pope Pius IX’s nineteenth-century rhetoric to be, well, more emphatic than we might employ in our more ecumenical era, this dogmatic assertion is all out of proportion.  If even Thomas Aquinas, surely the preeminent Catholic theologian, could fail to see this doctrine at least implied in what the Apostles wrote or taught, then it is hard to see how this doctrine could be Biblical, or catholic, or Apostolic. Continue Reading