Woman and Serpent – Take 2 (6)

David: Ouch!  No fair, putting Mary between me and Athanasius!  He should certainly be a hero to anyone who confesses Jesus Christ as God the Son, and I have to acknowledge that I’m out of step with Athanasius when it comes to Mary.  As I understand it, Athanasius is not known to have expressly taught Mary’s sinlessness; but he did of course affirm the Virgin Birth and Mary’s title Theotokos, and also—more problematic for me–taught Mary’s perpetual virginity, compared and contrasted her to Eve, saw her as the “Ark” of the New Covenant, and acknowledged her to be greater than any other created being.  About Mary, I’m plainly on a different wave-length from Athanasius and others like him, whom I’d otherwise like to count as kindred spirits.

In my defense, I’ll simply say that I do give great deference to Athanasius as an expounder of the Scriptures, which abundantly support his theology and Christology.  His Christological opponents may have believed he mis-interpreted the Bible, but it was quite clear that he was interpreting the Bible.  Where I part company with him is where he seems to cease repeating and expounding the Apostolic message and to begin elaborating and extrapolating, and perpetuating human reflections.

Dwight: There is much more to be said on this topic of the development of doctrine, and I hope our Catholic readers will consider your very honest objections to what seems to you like Catholic high-handedness in this matter. For there to be any progress towards unity in the body of Christ, I believe Evangelicals will have to honestly strive to understand and accept certain Catholic dogmas, but Catholics will have to reconsider how they handle doctrine and struggle to re-formulate their beliefs in ways that non-Catholic Christians can understand and accept.

Your basic stumbling block seems to be the fact that the Catholic Church felt it necessary to define as essential dogma a belief that is not explicit in either Scripture or early Tradition. I actually have a lot of sympathy for your position. For some time, as an Anglican, I took your view. I regarded the Immaculate Conception as a pious opinion and wished the Catholic Church had left it that way. In fact, even after I accepted the dogma myself as a Catholic, I still wished the Church had left it in the realm of pious speculation.

However, the longer I am a Catholic, the more I come to understand how holistic Catholic doctrine is. Every element is interwoven with all the others to present a unified whole, and the doctrines of the faith are integrated into the devotional life of the Church. Pius IX’s stern words indicate our belief that to deny one defined dogma is to begin unraveling the whole tapestry of orthodox faith. In other chapters I will explain further why I think this particular dogma has come to be seen as an essential part of the faith, but suffice it to say that a widespread awareness developed in the whole of the Catholic Church that the time was right for this doctrine to be defined. As an indicator of this consensus, before Pope Pius IX defined this dogma he consulted with all the worlds’ bishops, who in turn consulted with all their priests and people. Only four out of more than 600 bishops worldwide thought the dogma should not be defined. You may think they were the right ones, but I doubt it, since all four then submitted to the mind of the church.

David: Only four bishops opposed it, it’s true; but fifty-two bishops thought defining the doctrine to be not expedient or opportune.

Naturally I agree with that minority of Catholic bishops on that score, and with your former Anglican self.  I appreciate your sympathy for the Evangelical critique, and I wish I could imagine a way forward.  It’s difficult, because the Catholic position is now set in concrete—defined as dogma by infallible papal decree—and it would appear that all of the sympathy, humility, and goodwill of Catholics can’t change that.  We can agree to disagree, but this leaves us in disunity.  Apart from a total unraveling of Catholic notions of authority in the Church, the only way toward unity is for Evangelicals to accept the Catholic position.  Should we consider doing so?  I can’t see it.

If the Apostles finished their ministries without teaching on Mary’s sinlessness; if Origen, Tertullian, and the early Church got by without unanimity on Mary’s sinlessness; if all of medieval Catholicism got by without a definition of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; and if Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism largely agree in resisting the definition of this doctrine—in view of all that, I have to hope against hope that the Roman Catholic Church will somehow find a way to un-define this dogma, and leave this issue up to private conscience.