Audio only:
Joe explains how Trent changed his mind on what is the most important aspect of Mary’s Immaculate Conception and her lifelong sinlessness.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Hesschmeyer In February, 2024, Mark’s one of the greatest tragedies to befall mankind. I was wrong about something and worse, Trent Horn was right. Now, for context here, Trent Horn and I and some other people we’re doing a two day brainstorming retreat, and one of the topics that arose was the idea of Mary’s Sinlessness and why we believe in that as Catholics and Trent made an argument for Mary’s Sinlessness that I’d never heard before and one that I initially dismissed as a stretch, which I’ve now come to see as profoundly true. Now, before I explain why I want to give at least a quick word of gratitude to all of my supporters, all of our supporters, really over@shamelessjoe.com. Now, we recently got a chance to meet some of you at the Catholic Answers Conference, which was incredibly cool. Now we’re also working on new show notes or Joe Notes that lay out the sources that I quote from or cite and summarize the main points and episodes you can get access to those as well as exclusive question and answer live streams each week for as little as $5 a month.
And just so you know, your direct support is what keeps this channel sponsor free and the quality high. So we hope to see you over there, shameless joe.com. Okay, now I’m back to the dark day in question. I should be very clear again, Trent and I didn’t disagree that Mary was without sin. We agree on that. The question was why? Because if you’d asked me before, why is Mary without sin, my usual answer would be to look at the way scripture seems to present Mary as the arc of the new covenant through a mode of analysis that we sometimes call Mary and Typology. Let explain what this means. Go back and look at Old Testament passages like Second Samuel chapter six. There we’re told that David arose and went to move the Ark of the Covenant through Judea to bring it to his new capital Jerusalem.
They’re traveling with the ark amid the hill country of Judah and David and all the house of Israel were making Mary before the Lord with all their might, but they end up stalled in the hill country of Judea for three months leading David to ask how can the ark of the Lord come to me after three months, they may get back to Jerusalem and David dances before the ark were in a priestly effort. Now, I want to compare that Old Testament event to something that happens in the New Testament, namely St. Luke’s account of the visitation in Luke one. You’ll notice it begins by telling us that Mary arose and went and where does she go? Well, she goes to the hill country of Judah, of course, and the unborn John the Baptist, the son of Zacharia. The priest dances in his mother’s womb in the presence of the unborn Jesus and Mary stays there for three months before returning home.
But while she’s there, her cousin Elizabeth asks her a question that echoes King David’s. And why is this granted me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Now, it seems to me those are not just coincidences. The language is the same, the location is the same, the duration is the same, both involve singing and dancing, and the two questions seem to be obviously connected. But while David asked, but the ark of the Lord, Elizabeth now asks about the mother of my Lord. So it seems to me the best reading of this passage is that Luke is showing us that Mary is the ark of the new covenant, and that makes sense. After all, the original arc was the place of God’s presence. We’re told that God is enthroned upon the cherubim in the Ark, and now God has done something greater. He has been made flesh in the womb of Mary.
So it doesn’t seem coincidental to me that for instance, in Revelation 11 and 12, John says that he sees the Ark of the Covenant in heaven and then immediately begins describing how he sees the mother of Jesus. But if Mary is the new Ark, it makes sense that she’s completely pure and without sin. After all, the original arc was so holy that when USA touched it, he was struck dead on the spot. That’s why they get stuck in the hill country of Judea for three months. But the incarnation is greater than the divine presence in the original arc of the covenant. So the sinlessness of Mary seems to make sense, seems to follow. So that approach made sense to me before actually still makes sense to me, and it seems to match up with some of the early Christian descriptions of Mary, for instance, as the New Eve.
But Trent went in an entirely different direction drawing on the work of Dr. Jack Mulder. He argued that the immaculate conception of Mary was actually essential in securing Mary’s free consent to the incarnation of Jesus. In other words, it was important that Mary be without sin so she could give a free and uncoerced yes to God when the angel Gabriel enunciated to her telling her that she was to be the mother of our Lord. Now, as I say, when Trent originally laid out this argument, I found it unconvincing, but a few things have happened since then that have changed my mind. First was Trent pointed me to the catechism of the Catholic church, which says in paragraph four 90 that in order for Mary to be able to give the freest cent of her faith to the announcement of her vocation, it was necessary that she be wholly born by God’s grace.
And this idea is linked in the next paragraph to the immaculate conception. Now, that could just mean that it was divine grace that gave Mary the strength to say yes, to say, behold, I’m the handmade of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word. But I had to admit that this gave some more weight to Trent’s argument. Then a few weeks later, a second thing happened. I was involved in an inquiry session for people with questions about the Catholic faith, and a young woman asked me about the immaculate conception. I answered her argument in the way I ordinarily would, and she didn’t seem convinced. I pause and then say, I recently heard another argument from Mary’s Sinlessness. I’ll let you decide for yourself what you think of it. I laid out the argument to her and it was like a complete light bulb moment for her.
She immediately resonated with it and it seemed to convince her, and that was a moment for me. I realized that I hadn’t been considering Mary’s situation from a woman’s perspective at all. After all, think of some of the news stories that came out from things like the Me Too movement. Many of these were cases in which men like Harvey Weinstein or Louis Cck made unwanted sexual advances to women. But the allegations weren’t usually that the women had said no. The allegations were that the women didn’t feel free to say no. So they said yes, but they said yes under duress because they were aware of this enormous power imbalance between themselves and these powerful celebrities. So maybe if you want, you can think of it in a different context. You could imagine a stranger pointing a gun at you and asking politely to kindly donate to their personal wellness fund.
In that situation, do you really feel free to say no? Is that charity or a stickup? So imagine that instead of marrying you have the angel Gabriel approaching a sinful woman, someone deeply aware that God could justly damn her at any moment. How free does she feel to object to God’s plan to bring his son into the world through her maternity? After all, the threat posed by the prospect of eternal damnation is equal to the strongest imaginable threat. That’s at the heart of Dr. Muller’s argument. As I understand it, the relationship that obtained between it’s between Mary as mother of Christ and God’s role as father to Christ necessitates a consent free from any coercion on the part of Mary and Mary’s freedom would’ve been unavoidably compromised by sin. We can think about that in several different ways because first of all, sin including original sin, darkens the soul in such a way that we don’t want the good things that God wants for us, this is one of the reasons we need divine grace.
Without the aid of grace, we don’t choose God. As Jesus says in John six, no one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him. So all of us need divine grace, and that’s actually true of Mary as well. She’s full of grace for her to be able to say yes, she had to be holy born by God’s grace. I mention this because sometimes people object to the immaculate conception thinking that it means Mary didn’t need a savior, but that’s not the case. Rather, it’s a God predestined Mary in this special way to be saved by grace from the first moment of her conception. You can save somebody from a car accident by pulling them from the wreckage, but be better to keep them from crashing in the first place. In both cases, you’re saving them. In Mary’s case, God’s doing the second one.
He’s saving her before she falls. So Mary’s still only able to say yes to Gabriel because as Gabriel reminds her, she’s full of grace. But it’s important to understand that God’s grace is not about overpowering our free will. It’s about liberating our free will from its enslavement to sin. Think about it like this. The person who’s not addicted to drugs still could do drugs, but they have a much easier time just saying no than a person already addicted. Likewise, the point here isn’t that Mary couldn’t sin, it’s that her will was much freer than our wills not to sin. Because unlike us, she wasn’t a recovering sin addict. And so if Mary was either without the divine grace to say yes to God’s will, or on the other hand, without the freedom to say no to the invitation to motherhood like this, then her freedom would be radically curtailed.
But instead, God gives Mary these tremendous gifts of grace, which enable her to give the free ascent of her faith to the words of the angel Gabriel. So approaching Mary’s consent to the incarnation this way actually led me to the third thing that changed my mind. Isaiah chapter six. In that chapter, the prophet Isaiah has a vision in which he says, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up and his train filled the temple. The angels are performed crying out Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. And you might think for a prophet that seeing God like this would be pretty amazing, but that’s not Isaiah’s reaction at all. He panics and he cries out, woe is me for I’m lost, for I’m a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.
And look, Isaiah is not wrong to react in this way as the book of Revelation shows nothing I pure can stand before God. So the only way Isaiah can withstand God’s presence is by having his sinfulness purged away. An angel takes a burning coal from the altar and presents it to his lips saying, behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away and your sin forgiven. Isaiah’s reaction is the understandable one, and you can find versions of this throughout the Bible, people responding to the presence of God with a holy terror. But Mary responds with a strange calmness. Consider she’s just been told not only that she’s going to look upon the face of God, that he’s going to make his dwelling within her very body. She’s not like Isaiah seeing God in his heavenly temple. She’s going to become his earthly temple, and yet she doesn’t react like Isaiah does, like any of the others. There’s no note of panic. There’s simply this docility, this openness to whatever it is God has in store. Behold, I’m the handmade of the Lord. Let it be to me, according to your word, Trent and I, we’ve disagreed on things over the years and I think we’ve learned a lot from one another. I hope I can say that in this case, I’m actually really happy to be wrong, and Trent was even gracious enough to share his own thoughts.
“Trent…”:
People often ask me who I think the best Catholic apologist alive is, and I always tell them with some hesitation, Joe sme, not because he’s smarter than me, though he probably is, but because when he walks into a room, people actually want to listen to him. I walk in and folks are like, oh no, here comes the debate club kid again. Joe walks in and it’s, wow, is this theology or the cover of gq?
Joe:
Yeah, that was definitely not ai. Now, if you want to find out more of why the yearly Christians thought Mary was the New Eve, I cover that right here for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.