Woman and Serpent – Take 2 (2)

David: It’s right that you distinguish grace and merit, but you fail to carry that distinction through:  No matter how complete, perfect, and enduring was this grace that Mary received—make it as unique as you like—by its nature, that superlative grace was grace, and was therefore evidence of God’s generosity (as indeed Mary saw it to be; see Luke 1:48-53) and not of Mary’s being somehow special.  In your view, though, because Mary was “full of grace”, she had never had to repent of sin.  Her recitations of the penitential Psalms would have been hypothetical.  Any sacrifices and offerings for sin that she had made under the Law of Moses would have been superfluous.  She never had to “mortify the flesh”, and if she underwent sanctification, it would have been nothing like that process as we experience it.  She was not one of us.

Dwight: Mary didn’t receive grace because she was special; she was special because she received grace. Mary was most certainly “one of us”. That’s why we praise God when we see what he has done in her life. Mary was simply given the wholeness that is the destiny of all believers. We are all called to perfection. (Matt. 5:48, 19:21; 2 Cor. 7:1; James 1:4; I John 3:9)  In fact, we were predestined in Christ to be “holy and blameless.” (Eph.1:4)  Mary is simply the first Christian to be brought to that total perfection in Christ Jesus. As the Protestant theologian John de Satge writes,

The Immaculate Conception of Mary gives the clue to understanding her particular place among her son’s people. She is “the first Christian, the first of the redeemed, the first of our flawed human race to have received the fullness of redemption. From first to last—in Catholic dogma, from Immaculate Conception to Assumption—she was a human being transformed by the grace of God into what, in the divine purpose, she was intended to be.”

This graced wholeness means that Mary was in a fulfilled creature-creator relationship with God. As such Mary was natural. From this perspective it is everybody else—twisted by original sin—who are distorted and un-natural. This is vital to understand: in her fully natural state, Mary was all that every woman was created to be. We say Mary was sinless, but that is really a negative definition. It is better to understand Mary’s perfection as wholeness. Mary then, was not a goddess but a woman preserved in all her primal innocence, as fresh and natural as Eve. This is why the Christians of the first and second centuries taught that Mary was a perpetual virgin, and why the first Christian theologians—Justin Martyr and Irenaeus—referred to Mary as the “second Eve.” Their teaching is based on the prophecy of Genesis 3:15, where the offspring of a woman will conquer the serpent, and Revelation 12, where that woman is revealed as Mary. They saw that, in Mary, God had given humanity a second chance.

David: A Mary with restored full humanity certainly feels less objectionable than a Mary who is a demi-goddess.  However, this argument based on the Eve-Mary parallel implicates our prior discussions about poetry becoming dogma.  First of all, why assume that Eve was a virgin when she was tempted and fell?  On the very first day of Adam and Eve’s existence, God told them to “be fruitful” (Gen. 1:28); and the Biblical teaching about man and wife becoming “one flesh” (Gen. 2:24) precedes the Fall.  Thus, if the Mary-Eve parallel depends on their both being virgins, the parallel is problematic.

Dwight: You’re going all literal on me again. We are simply saying that in her first created state Mary, like Eve, was innocent and pure in the widest definition of the term.

David: If linking Eve and Mary depends on their both being virgins, then for me it’s in doubt.  But even if they are both presumed to be virgins, inferring Mary’s sinlessness from unfallen Eve’s is still quite a stretch.  It was a fallen angel who tempted Eve, but Mary’s messenger Gabriel was unfallen, so the Eve-Mary comparison includes that unpoetical asymmetry.  Poetically speaking, wouldn’t it be more pleasing to have a symmetrical comparison (a chiasmus, perhaps?)–In Eden a fallen angel (Satan) leads an unfallen woman (Eve) from righteousness into disobedience, but in Nazareth an unfallen angel (Gabriel) leads a fallen woman (Mary) from unrighteousness into obedience.  It’s more symmetrical and better poetry that way, but of course I can’t let my poetical judgments drive my doctrine.  My point is simply that the Eve-Mary comparison is unreliable to teach us a doctrine (e.g., Mary’s supposed sinlessness); we have to know the doctrine already, and then see it (or not) in the comparison.

Dwight: This Biblically-based comparison isn’t proof for the Immaculate Conception. It is part of the whole belief and practice of the early Church regarding Mary. As we’ve already seen the belief that Mary was sinless was formulated very early. As the Church came to a fuller understanding of the incarnation in the early fourth century, she also matured into a fuller understanding of the extent of Mary’s grace-filled wholeness. As theologians reflected on the incarnation, they came to realize that if Jesus was free from sin, and if he really took Mary’s humanity, then Mary had to have been preserved from the stain of original sin.

Saint Augustine sums up their view,

[W]ith the exception of the holy Virgin Mary, in whose case, out of respect for the Lord, I do not wish there to be any further question as far as sin is concerned, since how can we know what great abundance of grace was conferred on her to conquer sin in every way, seeing that she merited to conceive and bear him who certainly had no sin at all.

For logical reasons we believe that Mary was blessed with this fullness of grace from the first moment of her life. Some theologians in the Catholic and Orthodox churches have debated when this fullness of God’s grace touched Mary’s life, but none has denied that she enjoyed this wholeness. Mary’s full and wholly graced humanity has been praised by the vast majority of Christians–Eastern and Western—down through the ages. Many Anglicans believe in the supernaturally graced humanity of Mary,

and Martin Luther wrote, “It is a sweet and pious belief that the infusion of Mary’s soul was effected without original sin; so that in the very infusion of her soul she was also purified from original sin and adorned with God’s gifts.… [T]hus from the first moment she began to live she was free from all sin.”

To be fair, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as defined in 1854 is not fully articulated in these passages. However, the early church texts as well as Luther’s words, are in complete harmony with the more precise doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, on the other hand, the typical modern Evangelical view is totally out of synch with the predominant thrust of Christian doctrine in this matter.

David:  You make two points to which I’d like to respond now: As for the early Church’s consensus, the idea that Mary is sinless is admittedly an ancient and widely held belief, though not a unanimously held belief.  Most notably, Origen (185-254) observed that if Mary had not sinned, then “Jesus did not die for her sins”, which (he suggested) could not be “if ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’” (quoting Rom. 3:23).

Dwight: Even Origen referred to Mary as “all holy”.

It’s just that he considered her perfection to be something she grew into, rather than being granted at conception.

David:  As for the “logic” of the doctrine, I’ll just say that it is not obvious to me.  It was the Virgin Birth that assured the sinlessness of Jesus by sparing Him the transmission of sin from a human father,

and any further theories about how Mary’s nature would have affected Jesus’ nature are just that: theories.

Dwight: There are two matters that are logical here. Although Jesus was spared original sin because he was not generated in a natural way, he would still have been “infected” by original sin as he assumed Mary’s human flesh. If he really took Mary’s flesh as we both agree, then Mary needed to be preserved from original sin.

David: By your reasoning, Mary would have been “infected” by original sin as she assumed Anna’s flesh, unless Anna had been preserved from original sin as well—and so on, through her ancestry.

Dwight: We could chase our tails on this one for a long time. Let me point out another logical reason why Mary needed to have been preserved from the stain of original sin. One of the effects of original sin is that our will is tainted. Original sin causes us to choose wrongly. In order for Mary’s “yes” to God to have been valid it needed to be a totally free choice. So Mary had to be preserved from that stain of original sin that would have biased her choice. Continue Reading