When does Mary Matter for Salvation? Jimmy Akin and host Cy Kellett tackle this question in light of Soteriology.
Transcript:
Cy: What makes the Immaculate Conception, bodily assumption, and perpetual virginity necessary for salvation? I mean that in a theological, not ecclesiological sense. It cannot just be fidelity to the magisterium and tradition. There has to be some deeper theological reason for their necessity. So what essential truth about the gospel do I deny if I deny these three dogmas?
Jimmy: Okay, so there are several things there that I guess I’d comment on. One of them is you often hear Protestants claiming that things like the Immaculate Conception and bodily assumption and perpetual virginity should not be necessary for salvation. And those Catholics are wrong for saying that they’re necessary for salvation and therefore they’re distorted in the Gospel, which they equate with the message of salvation.
And there’s several things wrong there. The first one is that they’re misunderstanding what the Gospel is. The gospel is not how do you get saved. The gospel is that God is instituted in his kingdom in the world through his Son, Jesus Christ, and his death on the cross. That’s what the gospel is. How you get on the good side of God and get saved, that’s related to the gospel, but it is not what the gospel is.
You’ll notice, and I actually have an episode of the Jimmy Akin podcast about this, but you’ll notice that John the Baptist and Jesus, they’re preaching the gospel before Jesus even goes to the cross, before anybody knew Jesus was gonna go to the cross. And yet they’re preaching the gospel. So what that tells us is the gospel is not principally about how you get saved. It is about God’s kingdom.
Now, eventually, in fact, it’s even called the good news of the kingdom. Now, eventually it gets revealed that how God is instituted in his kingdom is through his Son, Jesus Christ and his death on the cross. So that becomes part of the gospel message, but it’s still not about how you as an individual get saved. What that is is a separate subject that is obviously of interest because we want to be saved. But it’s not the gospel.
People who portray the gospel as the message of salvation do not fundamentally understand how the word gospel is used in scripture itself. So what can we call the message of how to get saved? Well, in Greek, the word for Savior is soter. And so the study of salvation is often called soteriology.
And there are certain things you want to know as part of soteriology for how you get saved. Like you want to have faith in Jesus, you want to repent of your sins, you want to be baptized. Those are all aspects of soteriology, which is distinct from the Gospel itself.
And these beliefs about Mary, like the Immaculate Conception, bodily assumption, and perpetual virginity, those are not necessary for soteriology. Those are truths of a different branch of theology called Mariology, and they are not truths of soteriology. So they are not, properly speaking, part of the message of how you get saved.
But that’s true of lots of elements of theology that are outside of soteriology. Like, for example, the Bible indicates that God has created angels, and that’s not part of soteriology either. That’s a truth of a branch of theology called angelology.
So there are multiple different branches of theology where God has revealed stuff that are not part of the message of soteriology. And these Marian beliefs are not soteriological in nature, and it’s a mistake to present them as if they were.
But Cy Kellett, Jimmy Akin, has God revealed the existence of angels?
Cy: Absolutely, yes.
Jimmy: Okay. And if you were to reject belief, knowing that, if you were to reject belief in angels, would you have faith in God at that point?
Cy: No, not as I understand faith, no.
Jimmy: No, because faith is a theological virtue by which we not only believe in God, but believe everything God has revealed. So if you rejected belief in angels and knowing God has revealed them, and if you thus rejected faith, would you still have salvation?
Cy: No.
Jimmy: No, you can’t reject the faith.
Yeah, under ordinary circumstances, no, you wouldn’t. So you need to believe in angels. Not because angels are part of the gospel and not because angels are part of soteriology or the message of how to get saved, but because God has revealed them.
And if you reject what God has revealed, you’re rejecting faith in God, and that’s what’s endangering your salvation. And that applies not just to truths of angelology that God has revealed. It also applies to truths of Mariology that God has revealed and truths of all the other branches of theology.
So do you need to believe in the Immaculate Conception, bodily assumption, and perpetual virginity of Mary? Well, not because they’re related to salvation, but because God has revealed them.
And this is not a uniquely Mariological thing. It’s a mistake for our Protestant friends to say, oh, why did you make these doctrines part of the gospel when they have no native connection to soteriology? Well, it’s just God has revealed this, and we need to believe it for that reason.
The same way that angels are not connected directly to the gospel or soteriology, and we need to believe in angels because God has revealed them. So do you need to believe in these things? Yes. If you reject them, knowing that God has revealed them, will that jeopardize your salvation? Yes.
But that doesn’t make these part of the gospel. It doesn’t make them part of the message of salvation. It just makes them part of that body of truths that God has revealed. And we need to accept them because we have faith in God and what he reveals.
Cy: Thanks, Samuel. Got to take a break. Right back with more Jimmy Akin on Catholic Answers Live.