Audio only:
Joe examines Protestant worries about overstating doctrine that is necessary for salvation, specifically Marian dogmas. On the surface it seems like a perfectly logical concern, but Joe takes the time to demonstrate why they are necessary.
Read Pope Pius XI’s encyclical on one of the Marian Dogmas here: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius11/p11verit.htm
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heshmeyer, and today I want to look at a particular objection to the church’s teachings about Mary, what are called the Marian dogmas that we often don’t talk about. So just for context, there are four beliefs about Mary that are dogmatically declared by the Catholic church. Number one, Mary is the mother of God. Number two, she is perpetually a virgin. Number three, she’s immaculately conceived. And number four, at the end of her life, she has assumed a body and soul into heaven. Now, plenty of Protestants disagree with any and all of those four things, but quite apart from whether they agree or disagree with those teachings, they might have another question like, why are these things dogmas in the first place? Why not just leave them up to each individual Christian to decide for themselves? And so I’m sympathetic to Austin Suggs of gospel simplicity, who a few years back posed this as one of the issues he was struggling with, not just whether something like the immaculate conception or the assumption was true, but why it should be dogmatic.
CLIP:
Especially some of the later Marian dogmas, such as the bodily assumption or the immaculate conception. I just don’t necessarily see them being described in scripture in such a way that it seems that they are dogmatic, that they’re binding on the faithful. And there I recognize I’m kind of revealing my Protestant way of thinking. I can’t help but go from text to doctrine.
Joe:
What Austin is struggling with here is a common objection. When Pope Pius the 12th announced that he was going to declare the assumption of Mary as a dogma, the two highest ranking Anglicans at the time released a letter to crime saying that they couldn’t hold this doctrine to be a necessary part of the Catholic faith, belief in which may be required by members of the church, and that the Church of England refuses to regard as requisite for a saving faith, any doctrines or opinions which are not plainly contained in the scriptures. And it is perfectly understandable why a Protestant or indeed even a Catholic might think this way. After all, to knowingly reject a dogma is damnable. And many Protestants find it simply absurd to imagine that they might go to hell for denying dogmas about Mary.
CLIP:
There’s four Marian dogmas. Now, a dogma, according to the Catholic church, is something you have to believe in order to be saved. I reject these Marian dogmas. Now, because I reject it, knowing about them and intentionally rejecting them, that’s considered a mortal sin and Catholicism. So I’m condemned to help.
Joe:
To answer this objection, I think we need to do two things. First, we need to think more clearly about what dogma is and what it is we’re doing when we declare something a dogma and by what authority. And then I want to take a closer look at why we take Mary so seriously that we put her in this dogmatic conversation. And I want to start with a really basic question about what do we even mean when we talk about a dogma? And I want to turn here to the work of a Dutch reformed theologian, Herman Bavink, who defines a dogma as a faith proposition that claims to be true and demands universal recognition. And then he defines dogmatics as a normative science that prescribes what we must believe. So this is going to be the critical point. There are plenty of things that you might think are true from reading the scripture.
You read a parable of Jesus, you read a historical account in the Old Testament, whatever it is, and you come out with a certain set of things that you believe to be true on the basis of that. Now, if pressed, you would probably hold some of those to a higher degree of I’m really sure it’s teaching X. Maybe I’m less sure it’s teaching Y. But there are a lot of things that are propositions you believe to be true, but not all of those are things that you say every other person to be a faithful Christian needs to agree with me on this. And so the question becomes, when and how can we make that second step from, I think Jesus is teaching X to all Christians must believe X. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it in that way, but it’s actually kind of surprising.
And I would suggest something very broadly, sort of an overview of the two sides of this controversy between Catholics and Protestants. If dogmas are rooted in fallible human interpretation of scripture, then it seems like we should have very few dogmas, if any. Because if we might be getting the question of dogma wrong, then threatening someone with damnation when it’s actually our fault would be a gravely sinful misuse of the authority that God has given the church. On the flip side, if the church’s authority when declaring something a dogma is actually rooted in divine authority, not new revelation, but an infallible protection from making error where you know when the church declares something dogma that she is speaking and acting with divine authority, then it makes sense on the flip side that whatever the dogma is, whether it’s big or small, to knowingly reject it is to put yourself at war with God.
That might sound dramatic, but it follows logically. In the same way that the person who say they hear the sermon on the mount and they agree with 95% of it, but 5% of it, they just say, no, Jesus got that part wrong. That person does not hold faith in Jesus in the way he needs to. Because the mere fact that they think that he got one thing wrong, that he taught one false teaching is enough to say, okay, then you clearly don’t understand what we’re saying about Jesus. Because Jesus isn’t just someone who happens to be right a lot. Jesus has divine authority because he’s the second person of the Trinity. Similarly, when you disagree with any dogma of the church, as we’re going to see, the Catholic argument is if you understand what the church is, it’s a pillar and foundation of truth, divinely protected from error by the Holy Spirit, you can’t both believe that and think the church got dogma wrong.
So we’re stuck in this position of saying that seems to be a symptom of a deeper problem that you don’t know the authority of the church. You don’t understand kind of where dogma’s coming from. So that’s big picture where we’re going to go. But I want to go through Bavink and Dr. Gavin Ortland and kind of show a little more precisely where we agree and where we part company. So Herman Bavink says, some say incorrectly that dogma rests on personal authority or coincides with the theological construction of a devout scholar. So you’ve got a great teacher. Even say like a St. Thomas Aquinas. The mere fact that a great teacher teaches a thing doesn’t make it dogma. And Bavink is very clear about this, that etymologically and historically, there’s a sharp distinction here between doctrine based on a given authority and authoritative for a specific circle.
Now I would broaden that to just say for the church, but we’ll leave that quibble aside. So that’s on the one hand. Dogma has this binding authority that it carries. And on the other hand, you have the private opinion of a person, however renowned. And so we don’t talk about the ideas and teachings of a particular theologian or even maybe a group of theologians as dogma. Instead, when we’re talking about dogma, we’re looking at a combination of two elements. Number one, divine authority. And number two, the confession of the church, what he calls churchly confession. And so if a thing is not rooted in divine authority, it’s not dogma, even if it’s true. So you may know Jefferson City is the capital of Missouri. That’s true, but that’s not a dogma. It’s just a fact that happens to be true. For it to be a dogma, the authority must be divine authority that it’s carrying.
And the flip side, as I said, is it’s actually not enough, as strange as this is to say, just that it is a divinely revealed truth. It has to also be recognized by the church. So there are plenty of things that are potentially dogmas, things that are true, which the church has never defined as dogma. So there’s this second step where it’s not binding on all Christians if Christians are allowed to agree or disagree on a particular topic. Even if one of those topics is correct, even if one of those topics is in fact what Jesus intends, there’s this role the church plays in defining dogma. This is why we don’t consider the private musings of a theologian to be dogma of themselves. So you might have an opinion on a question. For example, was St. Joseph an old man or a young man when he married Mary?
Or was the earth old or young? How long ago did God create the world? Christians reading the Bible might come to different conclusions about those things. And they’re arguably important topics. But to say that they’re dogmas, you would have to say something more than scripture seems to point in one of these directions. You’d also have to say this is the Christian teaching. And anyone who denies this is out of step with the Christian faith. They’re out of step with Orthodox Christianity. And that seems to require some authority capable of determining who does and doesn’t count, which is why you have this bit about churchly confession, that somebody needs to be able to determine which things are dogmas and which things are not. Not simply which things are true and which things are not, but which things are dogma and not. So those are the two elements.
Now, that actually matches very well with the Catholic understanding as we see in the Code of Canon law, which points out that dogmas are to be believed by divine and Catholic faith. And it goes on to say, they’re contained in the word of God, whether written down or by tradition. And at the same time, they’ve been proposed by the magisterium in some way as divinely revealed, either in the solemn declaration at the highest level or by the ordinary universal magisterium. Whatever the case, you see those same two ingredients. God is the origin of dogma, but the church has this recognition role. We can’t make a non-dogmatic thing or an untrue thing become dogma just by declaring itself. But the mere fact that something is true and revealed by God doesn’t automatically make it dogma. You need those two ingredients. And dogma recognizes that and the church recognizes that.
So, okay. Given this, where do we actually part company? Because so far we actually agree. Dogmas ultimately have divine authority because they’re rooted in what God has revealed. And the church has this critical role to play. So why don’t we just agree then? Well, as Dr. Gavin Ortland points out, in the Protestant view, typically, the church’s pronouncements, and that’s going to include dogma, are subordinate to scripture, but also reformable by scripture. So that’s going to be an important distinction that dogma becomes reformable, whereas the traditional view is that dogma’s irreformable.
CLIP:
And what I would say, the appeal that I would make is to invite you to consider embracing a Protestant understanding of the church, according to which she must always see her own pronouncements as subordinate under the word of God and reformable in light of it. That view avoids yoking the conscience to that which is not found in the apostolic deposit. It also results in fewer anathemas to other Christians.
Joe:
So as we’ve already seen, for something to be a dogma, it has to actually come from the deposit of faith. Gavin thinks that the assumption of Mary isn’t really in the deposit of faith, but at least recognize that we don’t disagree on that. Now, we disagree on a couple things here. We disagree, number one, on whether the deposit of faith is just the 66 books of the Protestant Bible. And we disagree number two on whether the assumption of Mary is contained in the deposit of faith. But at the level of principle, Catholics and Protestants actually agree that dogmas have to be rooted in the deposit of faith. Where we disagree is on the other thing he highlights correctly, which is that in Protestantism, dogma’s reformable. Dogma can change because the human authority recognizing dogma can err. On the Catholic side, we’re very clear because dogma is divinely and formally revealed, it is as such irreformable.
It carries divine authority. This is going to be a really important difference to understand why there’s more dogma in the Catholic church. And thus, as Gavin points out rightly, more anathemas, because we have the authority to actually know which things can and can’t be believed by everyone. There is a body capable of adjudicating those questions. And that body just doesn’t really exist in Protestantism. And even when smaller bodies like a denomination announce which things they think are correct, they don’t carry the kind of authority necessary to declare anyone who disagrees with them a heretic. I’ll get into that a little more, but first I want to let Herman Bavink kind of highlight the distinction because he does a good job here. He says the dogma of the church confesses and the dogmatician develops is not identical to the absolute truth of God itself. Not even the Roman Catholic church dares to make that claim.
And he makes a point that when we talk about the infallibility of the Pope, we don’t think this is the same as apostolic inspiration. Now I would explain here, what we think is different is with apostolic inspiration, you can have things added to the deposit of faith that were not there before. The apostles can give you new dogmatic information that you had no prior access to. You can learn about miracles of Jesus or teachings of the faith or something like this that were not previously taught and wouldn’t have been knowable otherwise. That’s not what’s happening. Even if Protestants sometimes caricature the Catholic view that way, Catholics don’t think we can do that with dogma. Again, that’s not an actual area where Catholics and Protestants disagree.
So we don’t think of dogma as new scripture, something like this. And we recognize that the way something is expressed, even if it is perfectly true and dogmatic in that sense, there might be more things that are also true. We don’t claim these are like exhaustive revelations or that they’re divinely inspired in terms of how things are worded. They’re protected from error. And so what is dogmatically defined is in fact known with divine authority. And so it deserves the ascent of faith. We make an act of faith in dogmas by making a fact. In other words, like this, when you believe in Jesus, you don’t just believe that there was a guy named Jesus. You believe in claims he makes about who he is and teachings that he teaches. And so with a dogma, this is part of what it is you’re believing. That’s going to be critical to understand.
Okay. Going back to Herman babbing though. He says in Catholic theology, there’s less room left for the question of how far the truth of God has found fully adequate expression in the church’s dogma. You can imagine we could really use more dogmatic definition in area X, Y, Z. You’re never going to have less dogma. We’re not going to say, oh no, we said something that was false. But there’s always room to say we could more fully define this area. Whereas on the Protestant side, in Daving’s words, he says this, on the basis of Protestant assumptions, however, this is much more the case. For here, the guidance of the Holy Spirit promised to the church does not exclude the possibility of human error. So this is the tension Protestantism, I think, finds itself in. On the one hand, they want to say, yes, there is this dogmatic authority.
Yes, there is this way that we can speak and act and say God has in fact said something and everyone is bound to it. If it was merely human authority, if it was just, I think this is. Take like a purely human matter. There’s no divine scripture that tells you what the appropriate tax rate should be. We’re told to pay taxes, so seemingly the answer is not zero, but you’re not going to find some kind of number given in scripture. So Christians are going to disagree on that. If somebody declared Catholic Protestant, whatever, that there should be a dogma about what the appropriate tax rate should be, that would of course be absurd. So we all recognize to declare anything as dogma has to be rooted in divine authority. Again, go back to Baving’s two elements, which Canon law recognizes as well and the church’s always recognized.
There has to be divine revelation and the recognition of the church.
But the problem is, in the Protestant view, the church can get it wrong. And in the Protestant view, the church has gotten it wrong. The visible church prior to the reformation repeatedly got dogmatic declarations wrong at church councils and papal declarations and the like. This creates a real problem because on what authority do you say that it stopped happening? Well, seemingly none. And so this creates a real tension. If you can’t be sure when you declare a dogma that you’re not declaring a false teaching as a dogma, when are you ever comfortable enough saying something needs to be held as a dogma by all Christians? And it seems like the more self-aware one is of their own limitations, the more they’re going to say there’s very little we can say dogmatically by our own human lights. So I want to take a concrete test case.
And it’s not going to involve Mary, but just strict Christology. Can we say dogmatically that Christ has a human will? Because as we’re going to see, a lot of Christians believe that he doesn’t have a human will. And yet the sixth ecumenical council, which part of the original seven that many Protestants will acknowledge in some way, shape or form, the sixth ecumenical council is very clear as a matter of dogma that he does.
CLIP:
Monothelotism is the teaching that Jesus has only one will. And the other position, of course, was diathelotism or diathelotism, that Jesus has two wills. Now, this led to a fair amount of controversy that we don’t have to rehearse in much detail, but the church came to the conclusion, I’d really like to pull you, which you think is the Orthodox point of view, monothelotism or diathelotism. I do that at seminary. Seminarians almost always get it wrong, which is very distressing. But I try to correct them. Monothelotism was declared a heresy. And the reason it was declared a heresy is because the church concluded a will is an essential part of a nature. If Jesus didn’t have a human will as well as a divine will, it would be very difficult to see him as truly and fully human.
Joe:
Now, the most obvious dissenter from this dogma is William Lynn Craig, but William Lynn Craig is brilliant and seemingly devout. And so the question that I think Protestants should grapple with is by what authority do you know that you are right in your Christology and William Lynn Craig is wrong? Because one of you is gravely wrong on an area that the church historically though was a damnable error. A pollinarianism is condemned by the church. So either William Lynn Craig is holding to damnable Christology or everybody else is, or the church should never have condemned a pollinarianism in the first place. And we have too much Christology that we need to actually have less dogma even about Christ. And this is, I think, the third option that a lot of people end up going for because they start to say, well, even this is too much.
If you can be a good faith Christian like William Lane Craig and being a pollinarian, then surely this is not a damnable error. And so therefore using exactly the same arguments Mike Winger uses about how obviously the Marian dogmas are wrong since it would mean he’s going to hell. You could say the same thing. Obviously the condemnation of a pollinarianism is wrong or else Wilming Craig is going to hell. Now, I would caveat that line of argumentation by saying it’s about a knowing conscious affirmation of the heresy, a knowing conscious rejection of the authority of the church and declaring dogma. But you see where the argument leads that within Protestantism, the impulse, because dogma is reformable and thus a little bit uncertain, because it’s always capable. I mean, you might be at a pretty high level of certainty for something like the Trinity, but as you get further into the definitions, it does seem like even on Christology, you start to have less and less certainty about this.
And so I would suggest this is a reason why many Protestants have stopped speaking of heretics. Or if they do speak of heretics, they mean either people who affirm one of the explicitly condemned heresies in the early church or just reject something that is really super basic in terms of its rejection of Christianity. And I just want to point out there is a deviation. There’s a trajectory we’ve already seen here. The Westminster Confession of Faith talked about how the role of the state, the civil magistrate had a role to suppress all blasphemies and heresies. But within a pretty short time, we see, I would suggest, a movement away from this towards something like what John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, describes. He says, “We believe Christ to be the eternal supreme God.” So he’s going to reject the. There were radical Protestants who rejected the Trinity.
And so they even left kind of the fold of Protestantism and reject Aryanism. But he says, “As to all opinion which do not strike at the root of Christianity, we think and let think. Because if you don’t have the divine authority to declare dogma, that’s kind of, I think, where we end up, think and let think. You interpret it the best you can. I’ll interpret the best I can. Maybe your interpretation isn’t what most Christians throughout the ages have held, but I can’t automatically say that’s wrong if I’m a Protestant who thinks that the majority of Christians throughout the ages got a lot of things wrong. Now I want to contrast it. So I would suggest within Protestantism, you have this impulse built in, and it’s a sensible impulse to have less and less and less dogma because we could be getting it wrong and could be damning good people who are actually right.
Because dogma is held loosely. It’s reformable. On the other hand, let me introduce you to Pope Pius the 11th and the Catholic view. The Catholic view is that we hold with an irrevocable adherence of faith to things dogmatically revealed because they aren’t coming from merely human authority. Because we believe that the Holy Spirit does not allow us to fall into error, that whenever the church definitively declares something a dogma, it is divinely protected from error, not because of the brilliance of the human beings involved. So I don’t need to particularly look at how holy I think the people on one side of the question are or the people on another or how much research has been done on one side of the question, how much research on the other, or how many even of the church fathers lined up on one side or the other.
It’s a much more simple question. If the church has the ability to declare these things dogmatically with divine authority, then I can hold all of the church’s dogmas with the same divine faith. But as Popius 11 points out, then it makes no sense to talk about some dogmas as fundamental and others as maybe more negotiable where we can agree to disagree. If something is declared dogmatically, then the same act of faith is involved in saying yes to all of it. In the same way that somebody who refused to believe one of Jesus’ teachings, you wouldn’t be like, “Well, do you reject one of his important teachings or one of his optional teachings?” Someone who rejects the teachings of Jesus is putting themselves at war with divine authority. And so once we understand this is the way the church’s authority works when it comes to dogma, then we see the same thing playing out here.
And so as Pius points out, all who are truly Christ believe, for example, the conception of the mother of God without stain of original sin with the same faith as they believe the mystery of the August Trinity and the incarnation of our Lord, just as they do the infallible teaching authority of the Roman Pontif. That in other words, it is the same act of faith when we’re saying yes to everything God has revealed. When we’re saying yes to everything God has revealed, it’s not to everything that you might potentially draw from the deposit of faith. It’s to everything that has in fact been drawn. So the dogmas. And so someone who doesn’t believe that doesn’t believe in the dogmas revealed by Christ. They might believe in some of the dogmas revealed by Christ, just as they might believe in some of the teachings of the sermon on the mound.
But that’s where that critical distinction comes in. In Pius’s words, are these truths not equally certain or not equally to be believed because the church has solemnly sanctioned and defined them? Some in one age and some in another, even in those times immediately before our own? Has not God revealed them all? So our response to revelation is the ascent of faith. And it’s the same object revelation that we’re saying yes to in each of these cases. It doesn’t matter in what year or by what Pope or by what council the dogmas were defined. In other words, it makes no sense to say every Christian has to agree with the first council of Nicia about the Trinity, but not with the second council of Nicaea about images. Either they carry divine authority or they don’t. If they do, you should agree with both of them. If they don’t, then you really can’t enforce the fact that you happen to believe in the trinity on your neighbor.
In Pius’s words. But in the use of this extraordinary teaching authority, no newly invented matter is brought in. In other words, it is a character of the Catholic view to claim that we think that dogma can somehow be separated from the word of God. It’s not the real Catholic. The dispute is not in the first of the two things Gavin identifies. It’s in the second one. Whether divinely revealed dogma is reformable or not. And we would say it’s not because the act of dogmatizing is itself protected from error. But if in dogmatizing, we are simply giving our best human understanding of scripture. Anyone who’s ever been a Christian for more than a few minutes will say, “Yeah, there were times that I though Jesus was teaching X, but then as I prayed with the word, as I studied it more, I realized I was wrong.” So if dogma is only at that level of authority, it’s our best understanding of Jesus and we might be wrong, then it doesn’t carry a great deal of authority at all.
And if we’re saying it’s dammable, we should have very few dogmas. We should have very few anathemas. So that leaves us with these two possibilities. Number one, if dogmas are a fallible human authority, on what authority can we make anyone else agree with us? Or number two, if they’re of divine authority, then to intentionally reject any of them is akin to intentionally rejecting God’s own authority, which is of course a damnable sin. Now, the question might reasonably be asked, which of these two models of dogma do we see in scripture? And I would point to a couple of areas. First, in one Corinthians 15, you have what appears to be the first crete where Paul passes on what he received when he became a believer. It’s very clear from the beginning, the church is giving dogmas. They’re giving cradle formulas. And these are to be believed.
You can’t just choose to reject the first part of one Corinthians 15. But second, of course, there’s a famous line in Acts 15, the Council of Jerusalem, where the church says, “For his seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things that from the beginning, it fell to the church acting in concert with the Holy Spirit to determine which things must be practiced, which things are the necessary things that must be done, which things are the necessary things that must be believed.” So this view of dogma, the Catholic view is, I would argue, the clearly biblical view. If you have this view of dogma, then you’re not going to minimize dogma because more dogma is better. Think about it like this. Imagine during the Old Testament, when new prophets were on the scene, new books of scripture were being written and all of that.
Somebody might say, “Oh, there’s more stuff we have to believe in now. But now if somebody rejects that, they could go to hell. And before this prophet came on the scene, we didn’t have to believe this and we didn’t go to hell.” Someone could say that, right? But that would show an attitude that did not understand the gift of divine revelation. And it would show a corruption in one’s own thinking because Because if you realize that in revelation, God is giving us himself, revealing himself to us, then the person who doesn’t want revelation ultimately does not want God. Well, the same is true here when we’re talking about dogma, because dogma is just having a more refined understanding of revelation. It would be insane to say that you love someone and want to know as little about them as you can. And so likewise, there’s an absurdity in imagining that in loving God, we would want the least amount of revelation possible.
Just try to stay in ignorance as long as you can, or that you’d want the least amount of dogma possible.
So these are what I say are kind of the two trajectories. If dogma is unreliable, if it is reformable because it might be imperfect and precise, human error might have crept in, which is the standard Protestant position, although they’re articulated in all sorts of different ways, then dogma is a little bit unsafe and you’d seemingly don’t want too much of it. On the other hand, if dogma is divinely protected from error and is a way that we come to know and understand and love God better, then the more dogma we have, the better. So that’s the first of the two things I wanted to cover. The second is if that’s true, why Mary in dogmas? Why have dogmas about the virgin Mary? Why not just have Christological dogmas? I think that’s a great question. And I think actually Austin, who raised the original question a few years back about dogmas like the assumption of Mary, actually does a good job in an episode that came out last week of starting to answer that question.
And he does a couple really important things. First, he points out that when we’re talking about the importance of something to the Christian understanding or to our understanding of scripture, you don’t just count the number of references. So one of the arguments you’ll hear Protestants make sometime is, oh, Mary doesn’t get mentioned a ton in scripture directly. So therefore we’re making too big of a deal about Mary if we define Mary and dogmas. And Austin has what I think is a correct understanding in terms of why that view is wrong.
CLIP:
If we followed that logic, we’d be forced to say that King Saul is 21 times more important than Mary because he’s mentioned by name 400 times and Mary’s mentioned by name 19 times. In case you’re tempted to bite that bullet and say, no, Saul really is 21 times more important than Mary. Clearly the logic is going to fail if we were forced then to say Saul is four times more important than the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity who was referenced at the most generous estimate, a hundred times. And furthermore, when we shift to Paul, I don’t think we should put too much weight on Paul’s lack of reference to Mary because once again, if we carry that out consistently as a methodology, we’d land in unfortunate places like saying none of Jesus’ miracles mattered because Paul doesn’t mention them, ditto with many events of Jesus’ ministry that are recorded in the gospels, but are lacking in Paul.
Joe:
So clearly the sheer number of mentions someone or something gets not actually key to whether it’s dogmatic or not. The high priesthood of Christ is a really important theological concept. And you know how many New Testament books is described in? One, just the Epistle to the Hebrews, a book which by the way, not every Christian though belonged in the Bible. And yet it’s still containing these unique doctrinal truths that are not explicitly said anywhere else. So if sheer number of mentions isn’t enough to determine the importance of a dogma, what’s a better way of looking at it? Well, here’s what Austin suggests. He suggests you look not at the quantity of mentions, but the quality.
CLIP:
And here’s where Mary gets really interesting. If you read the Bible as a unified story with Christ at the center, then Mary is right near the heart of the story. Her yes to the angel Gabriel is much more structurally significant than say Jonah responding yes when God asks if he’s angry at a plant. While all scripture is God breathed, I think it’s fair to say that certain parts are more central to the narrative. And Mary shows up on the scene at the most pivotal moment of all, the incarnation.
Joe:
So what I want to try to show is that Austin is right. Mary plays a pivotal role, both in of course this critical moment of the incarnation, but that properly read, scripture actually points to Mary having this very important role from the first to the last book of the Bible. I want to start with Genesis 3:15 where God is punishing the serpent. And he says to the serpent, “I’ll put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed.” Now you should know there that the seed there is normally measured through the man. Zarah means seed and refers to the man’s contribution to there being a baby. And so here we have this curious detail. Why does God say the seed of the woman rather than the seed of Adam? Because he’s not talking about the woman Eve. He’s talking about the woman, Mary, that Eve simply prefigures Mary.
And Mary is going to have a son who will not be the offspring of any human man, who will not be the seed of any man, who will be the seed of a woman rather than the seed of a man. That’s right there, Genesis 3:15. This was quickly understood by the early Christians as a prophecy of the virgin birth, which means that you have by chapter three of Genesis, the first prophecy about Mary and Jesus. Notice this is going to be a very important theme. What we believe about Mary has always been inseparable from what we believe about Christ. That this comes up in a clear way in the early church, for example. If you don’t believe that Mary is the mother of God, then you seemingly don’t believe that Jesus is God because Mary is his mother. To say she’s the mother of God doesn’t mean she gives him his divine nature.
Just as if you say that a woman is the mother of a son, you’re not saying she gives him his male genome or his masculinity. But you are establishing a real relation between persons that Mary is in fact the mother of the second person of the Holy Trinity. She is the mother of God because the second person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ, is God. And when you give birth, you give birth not to a nature, but to a person. So getting Mary right and getting Christology right are way more interconnected than a lot of people realize. And a lot of the attacks on Mary end up being attacks on Christ, whether they recognize it or not. Over and over again, people will aim at Mary and hit Christ without even realizing that’s what they’re doing. So here in Genesis three, we have this prophecy of Mary as well as Jesus because the prophecy of the virgin birth.
And strikingly, Mary is described as number one, the woman, a title previously given to Eve. And number two, at war with Satan. Now bear that in mind because when you get to Revelation chapter 12, John sees something incredible. He sees a woman enthroned in heaven. She’s clothed with the sun with the moon under her feet and on her head, a crown of 12 stars. So she is established as having a throne, excuse me, a crown in heaven. She is a queen in heaven. Now that automatically already challenges some people’s understanding of heaven where any human having that kind of authority would be blasphemous. But biblically, that’s not the case. Someone is the queen in heaven. Someone is wearing a crown here in heaven. Who is this someone? Well, she’s with child. And we’re told that she brought forth a male child, one who was to rule all the nations with a rod of iron.
That in the first and most obvious sense is a reference to Christ. This is one of the messianic Psalms. And in a more extended sense, it’s going to be all of the saints. And we’ll see that in a minute. And notice she’s at war with the dragon who Revelation 12 describes as that ancient serpent. So clearly Revelation 12 in describing the dragon, the Satan as the ancient serpent, is begging you to connect Genesis three to Revelation 12. And so he hates the woman. Whoever this woman is, she’s the mother of Jesus and the devil hates her. And he pursues her after she bore the male child. But she was supernaturally protected. She was given the two wings of the great eagle that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness. So she’s protected from the power of the devil. This is, by the way, one of the reasons we believe Mary is without sin, because she is supernaturally protected from the power of the devil.
And whoever this woman is in Revelation 12, this is true of her.
The dragon then, who is identified explicitly in Revelation 12 as Satan, is angry with the woman and goes to make war with the rest of her offspring and those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus. Now, you might read Revelation 12 as the church. You might read it as Mary and it is both. This is one of the ways prophecy works. But in this, we see that the mother of Jesus is protected from error and is the mother of all those who hold these commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus.
So I want to consider that. If all of that is true, then knowing who our mother is, the mother of all those living in Christ, the new Eve, is actually a really important thing for Christians. And just as you’d want to have, think about it this way, good Christianity is more than just having a sound theology of Christ, but also having a sound theology of the church. Similarly, if that’s right, if it’s important to understand the church properly, and historically that was the Protestant belief as well as the Catholic belief. If that’s true, then we should also have a theology of the mother of Jesus Mary, not just the mother of Jesus, the church. So with that in mind, I want to look at a church father from the 300s, St. Epophaneus, who has a work called Panerion, which is an attack on all heresies.
And in chapter 77, he’s looking at those who he says have a grudge against the virgin and desire to cheapen her reputation. He refers to them simply as enemies of Mary. Inspired by some envy or error and intending to solely men’s minds. They’ve dared to say that St. Mary had relations with a man after Christ’s birth. I mean with Joseph himself. So notice in the 300s, the idea that Mary might not be perpetually a virgin, he just regards this view as disgusting and is a view that is just cheapening Mary’s reputation. And he goes into a great deal of depth about why he believes that. But for now, I just want to point out that the early Christians did believe this, that they understood dogma and Mary in a way much closer to the Catholic view than to the Protestant view. And he mentions, just as a fascinating detail, we mentioned the Apolinarians earlier, that Apolinarius was accused of having believed that Mary had relations with Joseph after the birth of Jesus.
And even St. Epophaneus who rejects apollinarianism hesitates to actually impute this view to Apolinarius because it’s such a disgusting thing for someone to believe about Mary. This is Christianity in the 300s, guys.
He goes on to say that it is Mary who’s intimated by Eve. And he makes this point that Eve is called the mother of the living. So in Genesis two, her original name is woman. And then she goes to be known as in Genesis 3:20. Adam changes her name to mother of the living, Eve. And so Mary is both woman. Remember Wedding Feast of Canada, Jesus calls her woman. And then she goes from being called woman to being called mother. Think about on the cross when he says, woman, behold your son. Then he says to John, behold your mother. Same kind of name change. And Abaphanius says, well, it’s no wonder that she received the great title. Physically speaking, every birth of human beings on earth is from Eve. But here, life itself has truly been born into the world of Mary so that Mary brings forth the living one and becomes the mother of the living.
Mary then was mystically called the mother of the living. Now, I like this because this is a really cool way of thinking about this, that the first way that Mary is mother of the living is that she’s the mother of Christ who is the way the truth and the life. That if Mary is the mother of Christ, she’s the mother of Jesus, she’s the mother of God, then she is the mother of life because Christ is life. And so that’s the first way that she fulfills this title that begins with Eve. But also remember Revelation 12, that she’s the mother of those who believe in Christ. Those who are on the way, the truth and the life. Those who are connected to Christ are then also the sons of the mother of the living. That is what it is to be born again. We go from being born of Eve to being born of Mary, being born of flesh, to being born of water in the spirit.
That’s the kind of distinction. This is early on. He’s recognizing that Mary has a maternity over the church. But Epophanius goes on to make a point that we know Mary was perpetually a virgin because when Jesus is on the cross, he entrusts her to John and says, “Behold your mother.” And so he entrusts the care of Mary to John. Now, there’s much more that could be said on this and I’ve said it elsewhere, but this is a basic idea that if Mary had other children, there was a duty both under the Old Covenant and under the New Covenant for her children to take care of her in her old age. This is the proper meaning, at least in part, of honor your father and your mother. That it was not about little kids obeying their parents. They’re not just about that. It’s also about taking care of your parents in their elderly years.
And so if Jesus had brothers and sisters wandering around, they would’ve had a moral duty recognized universally to care for Mary as she’s aging. The fact that she’s instead entrusted to a non-relative John is very strong proof that she must not have had any other biological children. Epophaneus then goes on to make a fascinating point that scripture is silent about Mary’s death, that it’s an open question whether or not Mary died. And it’s still, by the way, an open question. Even though Catholics believe in the assumption of Mary, the question of whether or not Mary died before her assumption is not something that is dogmatically defined one way or the other. But notice that the Christians in the 300s are asking that question. Did Mary even die? And one of the reasons Epophanius thinks maybe she didn’t is that line in Revelation 12 about the woman being taken up on the wings of an eagle.
That maybe this is a reference to her being assumed bodily into heaven. And he says, “Perhaps this can be applied to her. I cannot decide for certain. And I’m not saying that she remained immortal, but neither am I affirming that she died.” So that is putting her in quite a position. Now, he is ambivalent on that question, but in the next chapter, it’s going to be pretty clear that he strongly suspects she was in fact assumed into heaven. He says, “Like the bodies of the saints, however, she, Mary, has been held in honor for her character and understanding. Now I should say anything more in her praise. She is like Elijah who is virgin from his mother’s womb. So okay, virgin virgin. Always remains so. So clearly perpetually a virgin. We already saw that he believes that. And was taken up and has not seen death.
That looks like a pretty clear indication that he believes that like Elijah, Mary was bodily assumed into heaven. He then compares her to John who leaned on the Lord’s breast, the disciple whom Jesus loved. So she has a special intimacy with Jesus. I mean, of course, she goes beyond lying on his breast. She nursed him at hers and she carried him in her womb. She is like St. Thekla. Let me do that again. She is like Saint Thekla. This is a second century. Wait, that’s the earliest count we have. This is believed to be a follower of St. Paul who was committed to virginity. And Mary is still more honored than she because of the providence vouch safer. So we see there’s this really high view of Mary that seems to point to Mary’s assumption, certainly points to her perpetual virginity, seems to point to her being preserved from the influence of the devil and this just radical holiness.
I want to go back though to the new Eve, because this is, I think, a good image to understand why we care about Mary. Samphanius says, “But there’s another marvel to ponder in connection with these women, even Mary. Eve has become the occasion of human death for death entered into the world through her. But Mary, through whom life was born for us, is the occasion of life.” And what I want to point out here is that Epiphaneus, while he’s very early in the 300s saying this, is by no means the first. This is not some novel insight that he has. You can go back to Saint Ireneus in 180 and he makes this same connection. He says, “In accordance with this design, Mary, the virgin is found obedient.” Saying, Behold, the handmade of the Lord, be it unto me according to your word. But Eve was disobedient, for she did not obey while as yet she was a virgin.
So here’s the thing to recognize. You have with Mary a virgin being greeted by an angel. And you have with Eve, a virgin being tempted by a fallen angel. Mary responds with obedience and Eve responds with disobedience. And so the church fathers from very early on were very clear that this is a meaningful, this is not just a coincidence, that we’re supposed to take something from this. And even as she having indeed a husband Adam, but being nevertheless as yet a virgin, having become disobedient was made the cause of death both to herself and to the entire human race. That’s Eve, obviously. So also did Mary, having a man betroth and being nevertheless a virgin by yielding obedience became the cause of salvation, both to herself and the whole human race. That sounds like the kind of thing significant enough to connect to dogma, that if Mary is the cause of salvation, not cause of salvation in the sense of dying on the cross, but cause of salvation in the sense that she gave birth to the savior of the world, that she freely says yes to the plan of God to redeem humanity.
That we have here a good reason to believe that Mary matters to the Christian story and was recognized as mattering to the Christian story from incredibly early on. As I always love to mention when I’m talking about St. Irenes, he is the first guy to tell us Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the four gospels. So if you think Christianity has already gone off the rails by here and in a grave way where they’re talking about Eve and Mary in this way that maybe you think is like blasphemous or something, then we’re in trouble because if you think the guy who tells us the four gospels or Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is some unreliable blasphemer who’s not an Orthodox Christian, we’re striking right at the root of the tree. And you’re not just cutting off the branch you’re on, you’re cutting off something much deeper than the branch.
In any case, says, “Thus it was that the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve has bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith.” Now, some people are going to hear this and they’re going to just be a little uncomfortable because it sounds like we’re saying Mary is a savior apart from Christ, and that’s not it. When you think of Mary saving us and Jesus saving us, don’t think of it as two individuals trying to be savors. It’s rather about faith saving us and Jesus saving us. Then we talk about what Mary did, she acts by faith and the world is saved because she brings the savior into the world. But this is to show Mary’s got this important role. Now I mentioned when we’re reading this text of Irenaeus and Against Herresies, we’re going back as far as the first reference to the four gospels that we still have today because it’s in this book Against Heresies.
We find that. But in fact, when we’re talking about this special role Mary plays in the order of salvation, we can actually go back even further. About 30 years before this, St. Justin Martyr has a dialogue with Tripho. And when she says that Christ became man by the virgin in order that the disobedience, which proceeded from the serpent, might receive its destruction in the same manner in which it derived its origin. That there is a fittingness to Christ being born of a virgin because you have two sinless virgins, Jesus and Mary, corresponding to this two sinless virgins, Adam and Eve who originally fell. That’s the subtext to what he’s saying here. For Eve who was a virgin and undefiled. So she’s not just bodily a virgin. She’s spiritually a virgin, meaning she has never sinned. Having conceived the word of the serpent brought forth disobedience and death.
But the virgin Mary received faith and joy. When the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings to her, the spirit of the Lord would come upon her and the power of the highest would overshadow her. Wherefore also the holy thing begotten of her is the Son of God. And she replied, Be it unto me according to your word. So this idea that Mary plays a special role in undoing the curse brought into the world through Eve fits very neatly in the biblical account. Just as St. Paul can say through one man, Adam, death entered the world, so through one man Christ redemption. Then it doesn’t take much of a stretch to say, I notice in each of these two cases, there is one woman who plays a really important role alongside that. Eve by tempting Adam, because she’s tempted, falls and then tempts Adam. Mary by saying yes and then supporting Christ by saying, for example, at the wedding feast of Cana, do whatever he tells you by presenting the issue of the lack of wine to Jesus to begin his public ministry that leads to the cross.
That it isn’t just like she says yes and then passively observes what’s going on from then on. She faithfully follows Jesus and is right there at the foot of the cross when everybody else runs away. Mary has this really important role to play. And it’s a joy to get to understand that role better. And this is the true joy of having reliable dogma. One of the points that I think is very beautiful that the catechism makes is that dogma establishes basic parameters for things like spirituality. And it’s very easy without dogma to have a little bit of a free for all where you don’t know if a certain way of praying, a certain understanding, et cetera, is orthodox or if it’s theoretical. And dogma gives boundaries. So if you’re familiar with the image G.K. Chesterton gives, he imagines an island with a wall around it.
And within that island, within the boundaries of the wall, the children are able to play, but there’s a steep edge to the island and it crashes down into the rocks below. So if you got rid of the boundaries, if you got rid of the fence, you would have less room to play within because you wouldn’t know where the boundary is. This is why dogma matters because without it, you have one of two extremes. You either have people going all over the map, crashing into the rocks of heresy, or you have people who become so fearful that they might say and do too much that honors Mary a little bit too much, that even like having a nativity scene might be too much. And this ends up working against the honor of God. It doesn’t honor God if you destroy your nativity scene. It doesn’t honor God if you have your nativity scene, but take Mary out of it.
That in fact, having the right understanding of Jesus in his humanity, which includes understanding the incarnation, which includes understanding the woman that the seat of the woman is born from, this actually improves rather than detracts from our love and appreciation of Jesus Christ. Now, if you want more about why Catholics believe as we do about Mary, I hope you’ll check out this video right here. For Shamus Popri, I’m Joe Heshmeyer. God bless you. I