In
my last essay I made use of the following syllogism to demonstrate that one
cannot logically object to the expression Θεοτόκος (Theotokos) or
“Mother of God” for the Virgin Mary without either denying the deity of Jesus
Christ or denying that Mary is the Mother of Jesus (by saying, for example,
that she is the mother of only one of His natures rather than of Jesus as a
Person, which is the heresy of Nestorianism):
Premise A: Jesus is
God.
Premise B: Mary is
the Mother of Jesus.
Therefore:
Conclusion (C):
Mary is the Mother of God.
One
Hyper-Protestant took exception to this.
Posting as “Anonymous” he lumped me in with “filthy papists” (I recognize
neither the Patriarch of Rome’s claim to universal jurisdiction over the entire
Church, not his claim from Vatican I on to infallibility) and described my
syllogism as “anti-trinitarian”. This
proved to be deliciously ironic in that he then offered up the following two
alternative syllogisms:
The Father is God and not born of Mary so Mary is not
the "Mother of God." The Holy Spirit is God and not born of Mary so
it is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost to call her "Mother of
God."
Now, these
are not proper syllogisms in form, of course.
Both attempt to draw their conclusion from a single compound premise and
the second introduces a concept into the conclusion “blasphemy against the Holy
Ghost” that is not present in the premise.
This is what “Anonymous”’ first syllogism would look like cleaned up:
Premise A:
The Father is God.
Premise B.
Mary is not the mother of the Father.
Therefore:
Conclusion (C): Mary is not the Mother of God.
Substitute
“The Holy Spirit” for “The Father” as the Middle term in both Premises and you
have the cleaned up version of his second syllogism.
Can you see
why these syllogisms are invalid?
For either
of these syllogisms to be valid, that is, for the conclusion to necessarily
follow from the premises, the Major Term, “God” would have to be a closed set,
including only the Middle Term of the syllogism (“The Father” in the case of
the first syllogism, “The Holy Spirit” in the case of the second
syllogism). Yet this is precisely what a
Trinitarian cannot claim. The Father is
God, yes, but not to the exclusion of either The Son or The Holy Ghost. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the
other Persons. God is One in Being, but
Three in Person. “Anonymous”’
syllogisms require God to be One in Person as well as Being. This is Unitarianism not Trinitarianism. Or, since he made the same argument with
both the Father and the Holy Spirit, it is the heresy of Sabellianism.
By
contrast, in my original syllogism both the Minor Term (Mary) and the Middle
Term (Jesus) are as individual Persons closed sets, but there is no need for
the Major Term (God) to be similarly closed, for the conclusion to necessarily
follow from the Premises. My syllogism
allows for the Trinity, it is “Anonymous”’ syllogisms which do not, and which
are therefore the anti-Trinitarian syllogisms.
Of course,
considering that “Anonymous”’ post consists almost entirely of bitter, acidic,
vitriol it is clear that he was writing from a standpoint of high emotion
rather than reason. Later in the
comments, however, Jason Anderson, who like “Anonymous” defends the Nestorian
position, responded to my remarks in the essay about the implications of his
claim that Jesus “disowned” Mary. Mr.
Anderson had made this claim originally in the comments on an earlier essay “Be
a Protestant BUT NOT A NUT!” The
claim, obviously, is an attempt to get as far from Rome as possible on the subject
of Mary. Like the base Nestorian
position, however, it has Christological implications, in this case that Jesus
broke the fifth commandment. Mr.
Anderson’s response to my pointing this out is more level-headed than “Anonymous”’
comments. Is it more rational however?
He begins
by saying:
What does "they
went out to lay hold on him" mean if not "kidnapping"? If they
were cops it might mean "arrest" but being private citizens it means
"kidnapping."
Note that
his question is written from the position that his interpretation of these
words of St. Mark’s is the default correct one unless some other interpretation
is proven, a rather bold position to take with regards to an interpretation
that is novel with him. Especially
since it involves a concept that would have been nonsensical to anyone in the
first century – the idea of someone being “kidnapped” by his own people. This is not a nonsensical concept to us,
because in our day where liberal, individualistic, rights is a concept that is
almost universally taken as axiomatic, and family break-ups are common, one
parent kidnapping a child from the other parent to whom the court has awarded
custody is, sadly, not unknown. In the
first century nobody believed in liberal, individualistic, rights. What was universal then was the idea that
the family had authority – almost absolute authority – over its members. The idea that a family detaining one of its
own constituted a “kidnapping” was completely foreign to that world. So, for that matter, was the form of law
enforcement Mr. Anderson suggests as the alternate possibility. Since the explanation given in the text is
that they thought He was “beside himself”, i.e. had become mentally disturbed,
the correct interpretation is that they, based on an erroneous presumption,
were doing what was expected of the family of someone who had become mentally
unstable, as evinced elsewhere in the Gospel narratives. In my essay, I described this as a “misguided
intervention”, but I at least acknowledged the anachronism of using “the
parlance of our day” in such a way.
Certainly the description is accurate if anachronistic. The family was doing what society expected
of them under such circumstances and doing so out of love for Him, to keep Him
safe. That they were mistaken in
thinking Him to be “beside himself” does not change this into a “kidnapping”
and it is obscene to suggest that it could justify breaking the fifth
commandment.
Mr.
Anderson goes on to say:
Now whatever other construction you try to put on it
is the same as how pastors frequently claim calling your mother "woman"
was magically respectful in that one society and time despite never being so
anywhere or time else.
Here Mr.
Anderson has compounded the error of his first two sentences with a basic inductive
error that anyone who has ever studied philosophy or logic could identify after
their first class. In his time and in
his culture, calling your mother “woman” is disrespectful, so he extrapolates this
onto all other cultures in all other societies and times – for he has not
investigated every single culture, in every single society, in all times, to
support his claim, I guarantee you that – to dismiss those who say that “woman”
was not a disrespectful form of address in the first century. One does not have to go outside of the text
of the Gospel of John to show that the pastors he so dismisses are right and
that there is no magic involved.
γύναι, the vocative form of the Greek word for “woman”, is
used as a common form of address throughout the Gospel. In addition to Mary in the second and
nineteenth chapters, Jesus addresses the Samaritan Woman this way in the fourth
chapter when telling her that the time is coming that those who worship the
Father will do so neither in the Samaritan mountain nor Jerusalem, address the
woman taken in adultery when asking her where the accusers He had just rescued
her from were in the Pericope de Altera at the beginning of the eighth chapter,
and Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection in the twentieth chapter. There is no hint of disrespect in any of
these passages. In the last mentioned,
the vocative is joined to the question “why weepest thou?” which, if the form
of address was disrespectful, would be absolutely bizarre, as the question and the
moment are ones of tender kindness.
Note that only a couple of verses earlier, the angels at the empty tomb
address her in the same way. Clearly this address was both a) common and
c) not perceived as disrespectful, within the context of the Gospel according
to St. John.
The Gospels according to St. Matthew and St. Luke provides
additional confirmation of this. Jesus
addresses the woman He heals from an eighteen year infirmity in the synagogue
on the Sabbath this way in the thirteenth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel, and the
Canaanite woman who asked Him to cast the demon out of her daughter in the
fifteenth chapter of St. Matthew. Note
with regards to the latter, that this address is not part of the earlier
portion of the conversation, but when Jesus is praising her faith and granting
her request in the twenty-eight verse.
For the record, γυνή is the basic Greek word for “woman” and “wife”, and
in the vocative, was used as a term of affection rather than disrespect,
comparable to “Ma’am” and in some cases even “My Lady” in English. William Barclay in his commentary on St. John’s
Gospel writes:
The word Woman (gynai) is also misleading. It sounds to us very rough and
abrupt. But it is the same word as Jesus used on the Cross to address Mary as
he left her to the care of John (John 19:26). In Homer it is the title by which Odysseus addresses
Penelope, his well-loved wife. It is the title by which Augustus, the Roman
Emperor, addressed Cleopatara, the famous Egyptian queen. So far from being a
rough and discourteous way of address, it was a title of respect. We have no
way of speaking in English which exactly renders it; but it is better to
translate it Lady which
gives at least the courtesy in it.
To the examples of classical literature he cites might be
added Euripides’ Medea. It is how Creon addresses the title
character, while trying to soften the blow of her exile, following Jason’s
betrayal. This is the first example
Liddell & Scott give of the affectionate use of the term.
Does Mr. Anderson have anything more to back up his claim
that Jesus “disowned” His Mother other than the vile accusation that she was “abusive”?
No, not really. The
rest of his response is an entertainingly arrogant form of the Argumentum ex
Silentio. Here is the first part of
it:
If he did not disown
her, why is she never mentioned by Paul? Not by name, only as "made of a
woman"---again that word woman not mother. To Paul she is just a
"woman" as to Jesus she is just a "woman." Paul doesn't
speak of any "Mother of God." It proves she was disowned.
So,
according to Mr. Anderson, if St. Paul never mentioned Mary, the first
explanation to come to mind is that Jesus disowned her. I would have thought that a more rational
explanation was that St. Paul in his epistles was addressing specific
situations in the Churches to which he was writing and explaining specific
doctrines of the faith rather than trying to be comprehensive. Then, however, I am not trying to take a
position as far removed from Rome’s as possible and then impose that position
on the text of the Bible whether it supports it or not. Mr. Anderson is mistaken in saying “Paul
doesn’t speak of any ‘Mother of God.’”
St. Paul says that Jesus was “made of a woman” (Gal. 4:4), which points
to His having a Mother. St. Paul says
that Jesus is God (Titus 2:13 among many other verses). Therefore St. Paul speaks of a Mother of
God. It is comical that he writes “It
proves she was disowned”. His Argumentum
ex Silentio is not even evidence, much less proof. Nor does it become any stronger when he
compounds it by adding SS Peter, John, James and Jude.
Indeed, he
would have been wiser to have left St. John out of it. He writes “Nor Peter or John (and she is called John's mother, but even he doesn't
assert that she is ‘Mother of God’) nor Jude nor James.” A) Everyone who asserts that Jesus is God,
asserts that Mary is the Mother of God by doing so, for Mary is the Mother of
Jesus. St. John asserts that Jesus is
God in the very first verse of his Gospel.
B) The passage in which Jesus tells Mary to behold her son in St. John,
and St. John to behold his mother in Mary, far from being the disowning that
only a most reprobate mind would see in it, is the demonstration of filial
affection and care that is universally, even by Hyper-Protestants other than
Mr. Anderson, seen to be, C) It is by no means established fact that St. John
was silent about Mary outside of his Gospel.
St. John is acknowledged, by conservatives at any rate, to be the author
of the Book of Revelation. In the
twelfth chapter of this book a woman is mentioned who gives birth to a male
child:
And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all
nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his
throne. (v. 5)
There is no significant
disagreement as to who this child was/is.
This is Jesus. Who the woman is,
however, is hotly contested. There have
been multiple candidates put forward but the ones that deserve serious
consideration can be reduced to four – Mary, Eve, national Israel and spiritual
Israel (the Church). Mary is an obvious
candidate because she literally gave birth to Jesus. I will defer Eve until later. Israel is a candidate because of the
description of the woman in the first verse (the sun, moon, twelve stars
alluding to Joseph’s dreams in Genesis) and because of the reference back to
Isaiah’s “unto us a child is born” sign, which reasoning can be used for Israel
either in the sense of the nation (not the state that goes by that name today
but the ethnicity), or in the sense of the Congregation of the Lord, which is
in the New Testament the Church.
Hyper-Protestants like Mr. Anderson will detest the thought that Mary is
in view here, especially since this chapter if referring to her completely
undermines the foundation of their complaints against most of the honours Rome
has bestowed upon her including the title “Queen of Heaven” (the first verse of the
chapter depicts the woman as wearing a crown in Heaven) but it is impossible to
rule her out. The biggest argument
against viewing the woman as the Church, spiritual Israel, is that Jesus built
the Church but here the woman gives birth to Jesus. This is not a fatal argument in that while
the Church in the New Testament began at Pentecost the Old Testament Church –
the spiritual Congregation of the Lord within national Israel – was folded up
into her at Pentecost, and so there is a continuity there. Understanding her to be national Israel
would seem to commit one to a dispensationalist view of Revelation, or at least
something very close to it. The best interpretation
is that the woman is a compound symbol.
She is indeed Mary, the literal Mother of Jesus, but not merely in her
own person but as the symbolic representative of Israel, certainly in the
spiritual sense – note how believers are described as “the remnant of her seed”
in the seventeenth verse – and perhaps in the national sense as well, and as
the New Eve who gave birth to the New Adam. This last image, Mary as the New Eve, is
strongly suggested in the chapter in which Satan appears as the dragon who is “that
old serpent”, i.e., the one that deceived the original Eve, and makes war
against the woman and her “seed”.
Now, the concept of Mary as
the New Eve was spelled out in so many words very early in Church history. It first appears in Justin Martyr’s
writings, specifically his Dialogue With
Trypho which dates to the middle of the second century (this is also our
oldest source identifying St. John the Apostle as the John who wrote Revelation). It is then expounded upon at length in Adversus Haereses, written two to three
decades later by St. Irenaeus, a second generation disciple of St. John (his
teacher was St. Polycarp, who was taught directly by the Apostle). It is significant that this connects the
concept to those most directly influenced by St. John, with whom the Blessed
Virgin lived out the rest of her life as he himself records, and the author of
Revelation in which this image so strikingly appears. It is next found in De Carne Christi, written in the early third century by Tertullian.
It is also however suggested
by the very wording that Mr. Anderson finds so disparaging. Here is the very first Messianic prophecy in
the Old Testament:
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and
between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise
his heel. (Gen. 3:15)
Note that this verse speaks
merely of “the woman”. There is a
double reference here, obviously, to Eve, who is named later in the chapter (v.
20), and to Mary who actually gives birth to the seed that bruises the serpent’s
head. When St. Paul, whose epistles spell
out the concept of Jesus Christ as the New Adam (Rom. 5, 1 Cor. 15), describes
Jesus as “made of woman” in Galatians 4:4, this is an allusion to this prophecy,
and not the dismissal of her importance that Mr. Anderson assumes it to be.
Perhaps you
are wondering why I have wasted so much time and space answering this sort of
thing. It is to once again show that
Hyper-Protestantism is a dangerous path to tread.
Hyper-Protestantism,
remember, is the form of Protestantism that is not content to disagree with the
Roman Catholic Church merely on the matters that led to the Reformation (Rome’s
rejection of the supremacy of Scriptural authority over the authority of Church
and tradition and her rejection of the assurance of salvation in the Gospel to
all who believe leading her to compromise the freeness of salvation as the gift
of God to man in Jesus Christ) or even on these and the claims of the Roman
Patriarchy that were disputed in the Great Schism (mainly Rome’s claim to
universal jurisdiction, despite this being denied by the canons of the
Ecumenical Councils) all of which have to do with errors and claims made by
Rome specifically and relatively late in Church history. Hyper-Protestantism opposes and rejects, at
least in part, what is truly Catholic, as well as what is distinctly
Roman. That which is Catholic is that
which belongs to the entire Church, everywhere she has been found, from
Apostolic times to the present day as opposed to what is distinctive of the
Church in one specific place, or one specific time.
Doctrinally,
the most important part of what is Catholic is the Creed, the original version
of which most likely was drafted by the Apostles themselves, which underwent
regional variation as the Gospel spread, with one such regional version, the
Roman Baptismal Symbol, evolving into what is now called the Apostles’ Creed,
and another regional version being modified by the first two Ecumenical
Councils, into what is now called the Nicene Creed, more properly the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and which is the most widely used and accepted
confessional statement in Christianity. The Creed is the essential Christian faith. All
ancient Churches confess the Creed. Next
to the Creed in importance is the Definition of Chalcedon, which clarifies the doctrine
of the One Person and Two Natures of Jesus Christ – that He is fully God,
co-equal with the Father and Holy Spirit, and fully Man, with the same nature
as us, except no sin, that these two Natures remain distinct, but are
permanently united in His One Person so that what is true of Him in either of
His Natures is true of Him in His Person.
While some ancient Churches
dissent from the Definition of Chalcedon, they do not seem to teach what is
condemned by Chalcedon. The heresies
condemned at Chalcedon are Nestorianism, which separates Jesus’ natures from
His Person, and Monophysitism, which teaches that Jesus’ human nature was
swallowed up into His divine nature so that Jesus is fully God but not fully
Man. The Non-Chalcedonian Churches,
such as the Coptic and Armenian, do not accept the “two natures’ language of
Chalcedon, but do teach that Jesus was fully God and fully Man and call their
position “Miaphysitism” rather than Monophysitism. All ancient Churches therefore, even the
ones that don’t accept the Definition of Chalcedon, reject the heresies
condemned at Chalcedon. There are other
doctrines and practices that are Catholic in that they have been taught and
practiced in all the ancient Churches since the earliest times but they are of
varying degrees of lesser importance to the truths in the Creed and the
Definition of Chalcedon.
The Roman
Catholic Church, that is to say, the portion of the Church that recognizes the
jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Rome, claims to be the Catholic Church
confessed in the Creed. All Protestants
reject that claim, as, of course, do the Eastern Orthodox, and the other
ancient Churches. A Protestant,
therefore, should never refer to the Roman Catholic Church as the Catholic
Church without the Roman, or refer to members of her Communion as “Catholics”,
for this concedes the claim which we contest.
The Roman Catholic Church is a particular Church – like the Church of
Corinth or the Church of Galatia mentioned in the New Testament. Indeed, you could say that she is a very
large version of the Church of Rome that is mentioned in the New
Testament. She is not the whole Church,
however. A Protestant must insist on
this. A Hyper-Protestant will either
call her the Catholic Church and her members Catholics, thus accepting Rome’s
claim while rejecting that which is Catholic, or alternately and inconsistently
deny her claim to be Catholic at all even in the sense of being a particular
Church within the Catholic Church by accusing her of teaching things that would
place her at odds with the Nicene Creed.
Rome does not claim to teach
these things. Rome confesses the Creed
and the Definition of Chalcedon.
Hyper-Protestants maintain, on the basis of some Roman practices they
object to – in some cases the objections are justified, in some cases not –
that these other things are what Rome really teaches and what the members of
her Communion really believe, even though they say they don’t teach and believe
those things. This is, of course, a
form of the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi,
and it is also a violation of any number of Scriptural commandments, including
the eighth of the Ten. None of the doctrines that ordinary
Protestants contended with Rome over in the Reformation touched on the truths
in the Creed or the Chalcedonian Definition.
The Catholic
doctrines, those held by all ancient Churches, everywhere, since ancient times,
are the first tier of Christian truth. Within
this first tier, the core truths are those confessed in the Creed and the
Chalcedonian Definition. Ordinary
Protestants, or better, orthodox Protestants, do not contest Catholic
doctrines. The doctrines emphasized in the Reformation – the primary of
Scriptural authority over ecclesiastical authority and tradition, the freeness
of salvation as a gift, and the assurance of salvation in the Gospel – belong
to a second tier of Christian truth.
Now, some of these may be more important than some doctrines of the
first tier outside of the core faith in one sense. The freeness of salvation, for example, is
more important than anything that might be believed universally throughout the
Churches about angels. The ranking of
the two tiers is based on that which is common to all (Catholic) being
generally more important than that which is particular to the part (Protestant,
Roman, etc.) The essence of the faith, remember, belongs to
that core part of the Catholic tier. Hyper-Protestants tend to major on differences
with Rome that are of lesser importance than the core doctrines of the
Reformation. This would make them third
tier at best. Yet Hyper-Protestants use
Rome’s differences from themselves on these points to deny Rome, which
confesses the first tier of Christian truth, a place within Christianity at
all. In doing so, they often compromise
their own adherence to the first tier of Christian truth. The error of Hyper-Protestantism could be
described, therefore, as an extreme form of ecclesiastical provincialism.
The matter
discussed in my last essay and in the first section of this one illustrates
this point. There is a huge difference between Protestantism and
Hyper-Protestantism when it comes to their disagreement with Rome over the
Virgin Mary. In the Reformation, the
dispute between Rome and the Magisterial Reformers, both continental and
English, was almost entirely a dispute over practice rather than doctrine. The Reformers all thought that the cult of
the Blessed Virgin, like that of the saints in general, had been taken to
idolatrous excess in the late Medieval Roman Church. They reformed this in the Churches they
led, usually by eliminating the cult altogether, but they did not take a hard
stand against the doctrines Rome taught regarding Mary.
These are
called the Marian Dogmas. There are
four of them, all of which were taught by Rome at the time of the Reformation,
two of which did not become dogma – doctrine officially binding on members of a
Communion, in this case the Roman – until long after the Reformation. The Marian Dogmas are that Mary is the
Mother of God (Theotokos), her Perpetual Virginity, her Immaculate Conception,
and her Bodily Assumption. The first
two of these are truly Catholic, having been held by the entire Church since
the earliest centuries. The first,
moreover, is integral to sound Christology, and cannot be denied without either
denying the deity of Jesus Christ or separating His deity from His Person, both
soul-damning heresies, and so the first Marian Dogma is not only Catholic, but
belongs to “the faith once delivered unto the saints”, that core element of the
first tier of Christian truth. This
cannot be said of the other three, even the other truly Catholic doctrine. The Immaculate Conception – this means the
idea that Mary herself was protected from the taint of Original Sin in her
conception, do not confuse it with either the Miraculous Conception or Virgin
Birth of Jesus - was declared dogma by the Roman Church in 1854, and the Bodily
Assumption in 1950, less than a century ago.
Neither can be said to be truly Catholic. The Eastern Church, although she teaches
that Mary was kept by grace from personal
sin, rejects the Immaculate Conception (that she was kept from Original Sin) and while the Eastern
Church does teach a form of Assumption (that Mary was taken bodily into heaven)
in her theology, which emphasizes the Dormition (literally “falling asleep”
i.e., in death) of the Theotokos, the Assumption is understood as a
resurrection rather than a rapture, to borrow a concept from dispensationalist
eschatology, whereas the Roman dogma is worded in such a way as to allow for
the latter possibility and perhaps suggest it.
The Hyper-Protestants reject the last three of these, usually claiming
not only that they cannot be proved from Scripture but that they are disproved
by Scripture, and, as we have seen, many Hyper-Protestants reject the first
one, that one cannot reject without embracing Christological heresy of one sort
or another, as well. This is a
remarkable contrast with the Protestant Reformers who believed, almost
unanimously, in the first two, the truly Catholic ones, and in some cases held
to all four.
The
Lutheran Reformers, following Dr. Luther’s lead, were the strongest proponents
of the Marian doctrines. Mary as the
Mother of God and her Perpetual Virginity are both affirmed in the Lutheran
Confessions. An argument for Mary’s
being the Mother of God is even placed in the Formula of Concord (Epitome
VIII.xii, Solid Declaration VIII.xxiv), while her Perpetual Virginity is
affirmed by the use of “Ever Virgin” in the Smacald Articles I.iv. Dr. Luther also taught a form of the
Immaculate Conception in which Mary’s physical conception was normal but her
ensoulment was miraculously protected so that the effects of Original Sin
touched only her body and not her soul. The
English Reformers were usually as conservative as the Lutherans if not more so. In this case, they – Cranmer, Latimer,
Ridley, Coverdale, Jewel, et al. - all
personally affirmed their strong belief in the first two Marian doctrines, the
genuinely Catholic ones, but did not make them binding on the Church of
England, except in that the orthodoxy of the Creed and Chalcedon is binding,
which brings the first Marian doctrine along with it. Interestingly, William Perkins, the
Elizabethan era clergyman who is generally regarded as a moderate member of the
Puritan party – the original Hyper-Protestants – was a strong defender of the
Catholic Marian doctrines. Even more
interesting was the situation with the non-Lutheran Continental Reformers. On many issues, John Calvin was closer to
Dr. Luther and hence “more Catholic” than the other leaders of the Reformed
tradition. When it comes to Mary,
however, Calvin was the odd man out in the other direction. Zwingli, Bullinger, even Calvin’s own
protégé Beza, all affirmed in the strongest possible terms the Catholic Marian
doctrines. The Perpetual Virginity made
it into the Reformed Confessions, albeit in Bullinger’s Second Helvetic
Confession (XI.iii) rather than any of the Three Points of Unity, and was later
defended by the Calvinist scholastic Francis Turretin. Calvin himself, however, was equivocal. On the Mother of God, he defended the
theological soundness of the title but disapproved of its common use. Regarding the Perpetual Virginity, he
maintained that it cannot be proven either way, although his specific
refutation of Helvidius’ claims that it can be disproven by the Gospel of
Matthew and his commentary on St. John’s Gospel to the effect that those
identified as the brethren of Jesus were His cousins, strongly suggests he
personally held to it.
Clearly, in
their belief that antidicomarianism is the only true Protestant position and
that anyone who accepts any of the Marian dogmas, even the one you cannot
reject and consistently hold to the Hypostatic Union, is a closet “papist”, the
Hyper-Protestants are out to lunch way off in left field on some other planet. More importantly to the point at hand,
however, is the fact that with the exception of Mary’s being the Mother of God,
none of these doctrines belongs to the essence of the faith. That essence, again, is the Creed, the basic
confession of the truths all Christians believe, the formal expression or
Symbol of “the faith”. Mary’s being the
Mother of God belongs to the essence of the faith, because it is primarily a Christological doctrine, and only
secondarily about Mary. It is in the
Creed because Jesus having been “born of the Virgin Mary” is part of the Creed
as is His being “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God…being of One
Substance with the Father”, making Mary’s being the Mother of God, that is, of
Jesus Christ Who is God, part of the Creed.
None of the other Marian
doctrines can be found in the Creed, even in its expansion into the Athanasian
Symbol that guards against every possible way of misconstruing the Trinity and
brings the clarifying affirmations of Chalcedon into it. Only
one other of these doctrines, the Perpetual Virginity, belongs to the first
tier of Christian truth – that which is Catholic in that it is held by all
ancient Churches, everywhere, from the most ancient times. The other two are neither first tier, nor are
they, in either their affirmation or rejection, second tier, that is to say,
belonging to the key truths of the Reformation. These are third tier doctrines at best, which
Hyper-Protestants, who in their rejection of these doctrines often go so far as
to place themselves in serious doctrinal heresy by also rejecting the one that
belongs to the Creedal essence of the first tier, elevate to a level of undue
importance by writing people who sincerely confess the Creed out of the Church
and out of Christianity, dismissing them as pagans or worse, for affirming
these lesser doctrines that the Hyper-Protestants deny.
You have
probably noticed that I have not directly addressed in this essay the question
of what the Scriptures have to say, one way or another, about the Perpetual
Virginity. I shall address that, Lord willing, in a
future essay, although not necessarily my next one. All I will say about it here is that doctrines
that are truly Catholic – held by the ancient Churches since ancient times – are
not of the essence of the faith unless they are also tenets of the Creed, but
should be presumed true unless proven otherwise from Scripture. This is the orthodox Protestant position. Hyper Protestantism reverses the onus. I have also not addressed in this essay the
position of those who would write the Roman Church and others which confess the
Creed out of Christianity for disagreeing with the Protestant position on what
I have called the second tier of Christian truth, the core doctrines of the
Reformation. This too, Lord willing, I
shall address in a future essay. Suffice it to say for now, that the core
soteriological disagreement between the Reformers and Rome, boils down to the
question of whether St. James interprets St. Paul (in Romans) or the other way
around, that the evidence suggests, conclusively in my opinion, that it is St.
Paul who interprets St. James, but that either way, the Protestant Reformers were
not guilty of the antinomianism Rome accused them of, nor was Rome entirely
guilty of the Galatianism the Reformers accused her of, that Rome went too far
in anathematizing the Protestant position in the Council of Trent, and the
Reformers went too far in applying the term Antichrist to a Church that, in
error though it be, confesses Jesus as Christ and Lord.
