Thanks, David, great article. You have articulated something that I have not heard too often. We need to make sure that when talking to Evangelicals, that we know their reference point. I had wanted to talk about the 'Mother of God' to an ex-Catholic, who is now fiercely anti-Catholic. My question to him was: is Jesus God? He answered: the Son of God. I said: I agree, but would you grant that He is also truly God? I was surprised at the reaction I got. He is the Son of God.
This was one heck of a scripture quoter, but when it came to it, he simply could not bring himself to acknowledge the true Deity of Jesus. I have since reason to believe that his idea of God is not that which we take for granted. I hear prayers that Evangelicals pray and there is a similar pattern. The prayer is almost always addressed to 'Father God' and ends with 'in Jesus' name we pray'. Nothing wrong with that, but how about addressing Jesus directly in prayer? or for that matter the Holy Spirit? If Jesus is my Lord and Savior, why would I be uncomfortable in praying to Him directly?

Excellent article, and one that is much needed. Even among Catholics speaking of, say, Latin American society, people speak of overly zealous devotion to the Mother of God here as if it is "Christo-paganism". They don't understand that, one hundred years ago, it was like that everywhere, even among the clergy. The reason even some "conservative" Catholics are scandalized by it is that they have drunk too much at the waters of Protestant rhetoric; Catholics in this country have historically been assumed not to be "Christians", and feel that they have to check the "thickness" of their Catholic praxis. But in reality, Catholicism is not just a "Protestantism taken to another level", but an entirely different creature altogether.

The Orthodox are even worse. Gregory Palamas, a medieval Orthodox theologian, once called the Mother of God, the "boundary between the created and Uncreated". I think many Catholics can agree with that statement. The most power creature in all of the cosmos is a woman. That is a profound insight that seems counter-intuitive to modernity.

Not to be a stick in the mud, but there is something wrong with the picture above. The "Virgin" in the blue dress with the star on her head is not the Virgin Mary, but the Brazilian Afro-syncretic goddess of the sea, Yemanja. As a student of Latin American religion, I am 100% sure on that one. A little ironic considering the subject matter of this essay.

As a convert from evangelicalism, here are the five logical points I needed to understand so as to understand Mary correctly:


(Thought #1) Jesus is God. Mary is the Mother of Jesus' incarnation. *Therefore,* Mary is Mother of God as incarnate human.

(Note, on this point I had to unlearn my former misunderstandings of what Catholics mean by Mother of God: specifically, Mary did NOT create the Blessed Trinity, nor is she in the Trinity, nor is she above the Trinity. She is a human creature, a saint now glorified in heaven)


(Thought #2) Christ's' Eternal Kingdom is the Monarchy of Israel, and Israel's Monarchy included a place of honor for the Queen Mother. Since Mary is the Queen Mother of Israel's unique Messianic Divine King, Mary is therefore Israel's most honored Queen Mother.

(Thought #3) Saints in heaven retain their identity in relation to who they were on earth and are "crowned" and rewarded for their deeds. Mary in heaven now retains her identity as Jesus' mother and Israel's Queen Mother, and she is crowned and rewarded in accord with her role and dedication to Jesus.

(Thought #4) Departed saints are now in heaven and are glorified and participating with God in his salvific work (similar to the angels). Therefore, Mary the Mother of God, is now glorified in heaven and participating with God in his salvific work. (This is the Communion of Saints.)

(Thought #5) The specific role that saints have in the plan of salvation is intercession. Therefore Mary in heaven is doing intercessory work.


There you have it. The *combination* of those truths, which individually I could grasp as a protestant evangelical versed in Scripture, produced the proper Catholic understanding of and devotion to Mary.

greenman,

Your point is spot on. I've had an eerily similar exchange with an acquaintance (also a former Catholic, who is now an anti-Catholic Evangelical).

It's amazing that I had much the same conversation with him. In my exchange, however, his argument was that Mary was only the mother of the human Jesus. I argued that Christ's is both fully human, and fully divine, as well as other arguments.

But he just kept regurgitating the arguments his evangelical pastor repeated often...he eventually ended the discussion and stated: "Mary is not the Mother of God, because God has no mother. The Catholic belief in Mary as the Mother of God is impossible because God has no beginning."

It almost seems at times that some Evangelicals don't really believe in the Trinity. Instead, they believe only in God the Father, and don't necessarily consider Jesus to be fully God or the Holy Spirit to be fully God either. They are coming at this from a totally different place than Catholics.

Fascinating, Arturo -- thanks for that. The image was originally chosen to go with the theme of discovering who the real Mary is, and who she is not, among the many conflicting images people hold of her. In that sense, "not Yemanja" is even better!

Does anyone doubt Mary’s complete understanding of Jesus and his mission? She knew what the Spirit had asked her to do and she accepted because it was her desire to do the will of God at all times. Those 30 years spent in a divine love arrangement with Jesus at her side had to be the ultimate bonding experience. Their lives and thoughts became one in union with the Father which is evidenced in their interactions recorded in the gospels.
“Mother, (not to worry) did you not know that I must be about my Fathers business”? “Son, they have no wine!” “What would you have me do?” “Do whatever HE tells you!” “Woman, behold your son; John, behold your mother”. Though little of their discourse is recorded in scripture there is no doubt they shared an infinite consciousness of their divine and eternal union and the Father’s plan for them throughout eternity.

Awareness, knowledge, and trust were so evident in Mary’s conversations with our Lord. She knew who he was and why he had come. It would be totally unreasonable to imagine that Mary and Jesus spent all those years together without discourse regarding his being, his mission, and his destiny. She was the active and ordained “co-participant” in all of it like any mother only more so because of it’s divine origin and purpose as foretold by the annunciation angel.

The wedding of Christ and his church is coming. The mother of the bridegroom desires the guests to be prepared for the joyous occasion and worthy of his invitation. She is attentive of every detail so that he will be received with honor and proper respect by those so eager for his arrival. We, the guests, would do well to pay heed to her message to be worthy, joyous, and above all humble ourselves in honor of the great occasion. For it is only these who will be recognized as having prepared themselves with the proper “wedding garment” of humility, adoration, and thanksgiving to share the “good wine” and to be part of the everlasting “life” of redemption, the Eternal feast of Cana.

Our mothers, I should say, our parents, provided our flesh, not our souls, and it is the soul created directly by God at conception that makes us a rational being created in God's image and likeness. Still, we call our parents "mother" and "father," although the "form" (soul) that makes us human did not come from our parents. In Our Lord's case there was no human father in His conception, so all of Jesus' material human substance came from Mary. Hence, she is more of a mother to Him than our mothers, since His flesh is taken totally from her. Mary is Jesus' mother, but she did not give Him His human soul; it was created by God. The word "person" is defined in scholastic philosophy as a complete and incommunicable substance of a rational (intellectual) nature. Our human parents did not give us our "whoness" nor our full "whatness", but we (persons) still call them mother and father, not creator. The Person in Jesus is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. That Person became incarnate and was born of Mary. Filium ejus Unigenitum: qui Natus ex Maria Virgine. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father and, in time, the Son was begotten of Mary. Therefore she is His mother. Whose mother? God's, in time, and after the fiat of Mary, forever. There is one God, one divine substance and nature, in three equal and infinite Persons. The Son, who is God, became man. Therefore Mary is His mother, the Son of God's mother. Indeed she is more His mother than our own, because she supplied all of His flesh.

I appreciate your comment there. I have never read or heard this confirmed by anyone else. All thanks to David's wonderful article.

Being anti-Marian doctrine is, at it's root, really little more than anti-Catholicism. That is, the rejections of Marian doctrine have less to do with her than they have to do with rejection of the Catholic Church.

In short, for much too much of Protestantism, if the Catholic Church is for it, then the Protestant is ipso facto against it.

Thank you all for the encouraging responses. One response of my own, to:

Does anyone doubt Mary’s complete understanding of Jesus and his mission?

Alas, yes, some do. I'm fairly sure most do. From their point of view, the text does not tell us this and we have no warrant for assuming it. What they see in Scripture is a woman who is described most in the telling of the story of Jesus' birth, for obvious reasons, and then almost entirely dropped thereafter even in the gospels, and who doesn't appear in the epistles except for St. Paul's reference to Jesus being "born of a woman" in Galatians. This tells them that she is not very important.

And given the way they understand the authority of and the reading of Scripture, this makes sense. Even if they suspect that Mary completely understood Jesus' mission, for them that is speculation, and they don't build a theology or practice on speculation.

I've been teaching class on Mary at a local parish, and the last two weeks I've emphasized that in things Marian, what you see depends on where you stand. You have to read the Bible knowing who she is to see her there in her fullness, but if you read the texts with a Protestant understanding, you'll see someone very different and much, much less important. I don't see any way of reconciling these divergent paradigms or minds or points of view.

I can't emphasize enough the width and depth of the divide here. My godly and learned former colleagues at the Episcopal seminary just do not get the standard Catholic arguments. They're aren't strongly anti-Catholic, but the arguments just didn't fit the way they understand the Faith.

This last sentence in my post: Therefore Mary is His mother, the Son of God's mother. Indeed she is more His mother than our own, because she supplied all of His flesh. It should rather read "she is more His mother than our mothers are to us, because etc.

You're absolutely right, David.

Since protestants don't allow data from any other source but Scripture, they cannot fully arrive at the full truth about Mary on their own, for the data provided from Scripture is scant. Interestingly, most protestants have properly maintained the Trinity, the list of New Testament books, the Sunday Lord's Day, Christ's Celibacy, Easter, etc., even though they do not have clearly stated explicit scripture backing for those dogmas. They rely on Catholic Tradition there and do not even know they are doing it.

The error of protestantism here, of course, is that protestants restrict their data to Scripture Alone, and scripture doesn't tell them to use that methodology. So, their dogmatic insistence on using Scripture ONLY is an insistence *nowhere taught in scripture* --- it's an errant protestant TRADITION. I was shocked to discover that when I was an evangelical investigating these matters.

David, if you look at my earlier comment at this thread, it took FIVE separate steps, which had to combine together, for me to see the Catholic understanding of Mary using scripture. Once I had connected those five separate truths together, the Catholic teaching on Mary made scriptural sense to me. But I had to think deeply about each point before the whole picture became evident.

I think it is possible for Catholics to guide protestants through those steps using scripture alone, but it takes deep reflection and a learning posture.

I truly believe, upon prayer and contemplation of the old testament and new, is that Protestants don't get Mary because they don't believe in the Eucharist.

If the Eucharist is nothing to worship, it is also not the symbol of the fleshy, New Covenant that God made with us through Christ, who is part and parcel to his very Self.

Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant. If you ponder the Ark of the Old Covenant (the Gold thing that Indiana Jones found in the movie that contained the 10 commandments), it was miraculous and venerated. It won wars and annihilated opponents by its very presence. And yes, the Jews did bow to it and it had a place in the Holy of Holies in the Temple. It was very understood by the Jews that it was not worshipped.

How can we, then as Catholics, respond to our theology regarding the Ark of the New Covenant when the New Covenant is not understood by our Protestant brothers and sisters; although Christ was very clear in the Bible about his True Presence in the Eucharist? It may be that we have to inform our separated brothers about what we really worship as Catholics (the Eucharist - aka the New Covenant marked in Flesh) and how this belief stands up to the scrutiny of Sola Scriptura before we even speak about the Ark (Mary).

"Mary is not the Mother of God, because God has no mother. The Catholic belief in Mary as the Mother of God is impossible because God has no beginning."



I've heard this argument repeatedly, and it's frustrating that so many Protestants tend to see the title "Mother of God" as a challenge to God, when it is in fact a simple declaration that Jesus is TRULY GOD.

In Scott & Kimberly Hahn's book, "Rome Sweet Home," Kimberly writes that even after graduating with a master's degree in theology (from a Protestant school), she thought that Catholics literally think that Mary gave birth to God (she has since then learned the truth :). When someone so highly educated still has such a profound misunderstanding of Catholic teaching, it makes it even more clear how much work we have to do just to get our Protestant brothers and sisters to understand us.

Thank you, David. Your article was concise and very well written. As a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran convert myself, I have to say that you knocked it out of the ballpark.

As a young girl, I received for confirmation a book entitled, "Women of Character in the Bible." Mary, of course, was nowhere to be found. Mary??!? Goodness. Mary was only a human incubator; a holding station of sorts. Nothing more. NOTHING MORE. She received only slight visibility at Christmas, and a brief comment at Easter.

(Only) so far, so good. How true. Tiny baby steps are indeed very pleasing. But Protestants are more than an ocean away from parallel reasoning and understanding. Catholics need to pray for their dear Protestant friends (and for some of us, our family members), that they may some day view with crystal clarity and loving adoration our most beautiful, glorious and blessed Virgin Mary; Faithful Spouse of the Holy Spirit.

I wake up every morning, thanking the Lord for allowing me to come this far--to have finally come to the realization and the knowledge of the Truth. I'm so unbelievably joyous. I'm so very thankful. I hope some day to be able to share this joy with those I have had to leave behind.

There is indeed a deep crevasse that separates us from most of our Protestant friends and family. There is much work to be done.

Thank you, David.

"Does anyone doubt Mary’s complete understanding of Jesus and his mission?"
I loved the article, but I can't agree with this as a litmus test for Catholic Mariology. I think it would be a bad mistake to articulate the Catholic position thus. Romano Guardini, for instance, has a beautiful chapter on Mary in The Lord. He argues that what's so remarkable about Mary as scripture presents her is the depth and power of her faith, given that she did not and could not have a complete understanding of Christ and his mission. To claim otherwise, he argues, is both to divinize Mary, and to lessen her act of faith. As he says, "Blessed is she who has not seen and yet has believed." Perhaps Guardini's wrong, but I don't buy that he's obviously wrong - still less that he's un-Catholic on this.

You have accurately portrayed here, David, the range of Protestant opinion, both well- and ill-disposed, and are also quite correct that for us believing what Catholics are supposed to believe about Our Lady requires a profound conversion.

You are also right that even the well-disposed can go only so far. At a certain point the conscience raises a bar, forcing the question of the honesty of making so many exceptions to rules one applies to other matters presented to him as truth.

My own conclusion: better to doubt beliefs that have all the marks of pious folklore, admitting in honor of the Tradition and out of respect for those who believe them that one might be wrong, than to outrage the conscience by forcing oneself to believe them.

Fr. Reardon once told me that in his experience Mary is the last and highest hurdle for the Protestant entering Orthodoxy. The reason has mostly to do with conscience, and rarely, in such people, prejudice against the Lord's Mother, to whom the devout Protestant wishes to deny nothing that is her due.

Bob: Thank you for the two thoughtful responses. The second suggests I wasn't as clear abt one thing as I should have been.

Your argument could lead one to a high view of Mary, but it wouldn't necessarily lead anyone even to say the Hail Mary. My Evangelical friends would say that she may be interceding for us, but that doesn't mean we can approach her to ask her for her intercession. They say we have no biblical reason to do that.

But even if the argument got them that far, and had them saying "Hail Mary, full of grace," the real divide comes not there, but at what I sometimes call "the Catholic Mary" and the kind of piety that follows from knowing her -- Mary, as I wrote above, "in all her glory, as the Mother of the Church and the Queen of Heaven, immaculately conceived, perpetually virgin, assumed into Heaven."

That's the problem, or the challenge.

MRA: That's a very good point, but "complete" cab be taken different ways. I understood Bill Sr. to be talking abt Mary after thirty years of living with Jesus and pondering these things in her heart, with "complete" describing the kind of knowledge she could have after living that kind of sanctified and dedicated life. I haven't read The Lord in years, but I suspect Guardini was writing abt the story of the Annunciation. At any rate, it doesn't diminish the reality of someone's faith to say that she had gained knowledge that came only as the result of acts of faith, esp. as to hold even this knowledge required the continuous acts of faith.

Since I dragged him into this, maybe I should quote Guardini's own words: Certainly, Mary did not comprehend the ultimate. How could she, a mortal, fathom the mystery of the living God! But she was capable of something which on earth is more than understanding: faith. She believed, and at a time when in the fullest sense of the word probably no one believed. "And blessed is she who has believed...." If anything voices Mary's greatness, it is this cry of her cousin Elizabeth.

Guardini insists that this continues throughout Mary's life as Scripture presents it, not just at the beginning: And literally, every step the Lord took towards fulfillment of his godly destiny Mary followed—in bare faith. Comprehension came only with Pentecost. Then she understood all that she had so long reverently stored in her heart.

Also: Mary's vital depths supported the Lord throughout his life and death. Again and again he left her behind to feel the blade of the "sword"—but each time, in a surge of faith, she caught up with him and enfolded him anew, until at last he severed the very bond of son-ship, appointing another, the man beside her under the cross, to take his place! On the highest, thinnest pinnacle of creation Jesus stood alone, face to face with the justice of God. From the depths of her co-agony on Golgotha, Mary, with a final bound of faith, accepted this double separation—and once again stood beside him! Indeed, "Blessed is she who has believed!"

He takes it very far, and some Catholics I know are offended by it. But I don't think he's wrong. As he puts it:
It is this heroic faith which places her irrevocably at Christ's side in the work of redemption, not the miracles of Marianic legend. Legend may delight us with deep and gracious images, but we cannot build our lives on imagery, least of all when the very foundations of our belief begin to totter. What is demanded of us, as of her, is a constant wrestling in fide with the mystery of God and with the evil resistance of the world. Our obligation is not delightful poetry but granite faith. . . The purer we see and understanding the figure of the Mother of God as she is recorded in the New Testament, the greater the gain for our Christian lives.
Sorry for the length - it just seems so apropos it's worth it.

I can't let several inaccuracies in these comments go unanswered. The most serious is that Evangelical Protestants don't really believe that Jesus is God. Conservative Protestants fully believe the declarations of the Nicaeo-Constantinopolitan Creed, and have no difficulty whatever with confession that Mary is the Theotokos, the God-bearer, as a declaration of the full deity of Christ.

Of course, if they suspect that someone is trying to get them to deny the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Persons of the Godhead--as some sects do--by confessing that "Jesus is God" apart from confessing that the Father and the Spirit are also God, they will be as reluctant to confess this as any Catholic in the same position would.

The same is true with confessing that Mary is the Mother of God. If they didn't understand the history of the title, they might think someone is attempting to make them say that the eternal God has a female predecessor--which, of course, no knowledgeable Catholic believes either. It's unfair to present a Protestant with a theologically ambiguous proposition and expect him to prove his faith by affirming it.

The correspondent who feared that Evangelicals fix upon the Father to the exclusion of deity of the Son clearly does not know much about Evangelicals, in whom the tendency is in fact the opposite: to focus on Jesus as God in such a manner as to eclipse the Father and the Spirit. At the far (and heretical) end of this are groups which Evangelicals clearly exclude from their number who have been identified as "Sabellians of the Second Person," who believe that the Father and the Spirit are modes of the Son's existence. Has one ever had a good look at a standard Evangelical hymnal?

Misrepresentation of each other's beliefs perpetuates and amplifies the strife. Lord knows we have enough real disagreements without inventing ones that don't exist.

David said: Your argument could lead one to a high view of Mary, but it wouldn't necessarily lead anyone even to say the Hail Mary.

Actually, those five steps, when combined, lead me to believe I could call upon Mary and other heavenly saints for intercessions, even as I asked brothers on earth to pray for me.

So, at that point, it was just a matter of trying it out for myself. And at that point I would have told you that it was biblical and logical for me to do so.

Of course, I agree with you that knowing Mary "in all her glory, as the Mother of the Church and the Queen of Heaven..." requires that I get extra data from Sacred Tradition.

Which leads me to a final point. Once I learned that Sola Scriptura was not in the bible and that I would need to trust the early Church for certain data (i.e., Sacred Tradition), I was immediately vulnerable to accepting the many undeniable utterances of Marian devotion by the early Christians. So, that was a whole other path of finding Mary. If Marian veneration was good enough for so many of the early Christians, then it was good enough for me, and who was I to say they were all wrong?

Do they have a Biblical reason to read the Bible? After all, *every word* of the Hail Mary is in Luke Chapter 1.

Very interesting article. Great comments, too.

I love this excerpt from the bishops' pastoral letter "Behold Your Mother: Woman of Faith":

"There is a danger of so spiritualizing the risen Christ that we diminish awareness of his humanity ... When he was asked about the decline of Marian devotion, the German Jesuit Fr. Karl Rahner declared that the special temptation that affects Christians today, Catholics and Protestants alike, is the temptation to turn the central truths of the faith into abstractions, and abstractions have no need of mothers."

Not "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death." That's not in Luke, or anywhere else in the New Testament, and it's that part of the Hail Mary our Evangelical brothers object to. And on their understanding of Christianity and the Christian revelation, quite rightly.

My first recommendation to all who wish to speak with their Protestant friends regarding Our Lady is to pray one "Hail Mary" before you even begin speaking to them. (Better still if you can pray the entire Rosary for them and leave the outcome in Our Lord and Our Lady's hands).

The "Hail Mary" is so honored by God, as it is His very words from Luke Chapter 1. His own angel came to Mary and called her "Full of Grace." Also, as we go on when Our Lady goes to help St. Elizabeth who was with child, the scriptures say that when Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, she was "Filled with the Holy Spirit" and cried out in a loud voice "Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb and of course at the greeting it also mentions how John The Baptist lept in the womb at that time as well. Then St. Elizabeth goes even farther, humble woman that she was, and said "But how is it that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?"

I have to tell you that apart from the scriptures in John 6:56 on the Eucharist, this is one of my very favorite scriptures, especially as to how it relates to Our Lady. It clearly ties in Our Lady's closeness with being "Filled with the Holy Spirit." After all, she is the Spouse of the Holy Spirit. Who could be closer to Jesus than his own Mother.

I also am a bit concerned that some of the recent bible translations saying "Highly favored daughter" are what I believe to be slighting Our Lady's Immaculate Conception by replacing "Hail full of grace" perhaps with the idea of being more ecumenical, but there is a huge difference between being highly favored, which is nice and being "Full of Grace" which clearly indicates the Immaculate Conception.

I have had many problems with all of these things as my husband was Catholic when we married, but has left Holy Mother Church, and is of the evangelical Protestant nature and very anti-Catholic. Sadly, he seems to have found someone else who agrees with him, as he wished for me to leave the Church for him, which I refused to do, as I know she has the "Fullness of the Faith" - I even tried going to Mass first and then accompanying him to the other church after discussing with my Spiritual Advisor; however, that was not good enough and so I continue to pray for him as we are still married; however, he continues to see another woman for over 5 yrs. and is talking of moving out of state. I would like to ask if each of you would please pray a "Hail Mary" for his return to "Holy Mother Church" and I continue to keep him in prayer for the same. I will no longer argue the faith with him, as the scriptures say that benefits no one, so he continues to follow the way he has chosen, and I continue to follow as best as possible, though I am lacking in many areas, my devotion to the Lord, Our Lady and Holy Mother Church and also have the example of St. Monica who prayed for many yrs. for her husband and her son, and we know what happened with St. Augustine, and also St. Monica's husband was converted prior to his death as well.
Might I make one comment here also, about sola scriptura Protestants, and that is that no place in the scriptures does it say sola scriptura, but actually the scriptures tell us to hold fast to the doctrines and teachings that were passed down to us. Patrick Madrid has written several books on what Catholics believe that could also be very helpful if any Protestants would be interested to find out why the church teaches what she does with scripture to back up the teaching. There are other books as well such as "Catholic and Christian" which are similar in content and clearly show the reasons for what Holy Mother Church teaches.
I find it sad that all who call themselves Christians cannot agree, and especially sad if they fight over it, as it clearly does no service to the faith.
May the Lord bless you and keep you.
Blessings,
Patty Theresa, SFO

I would like also to make a comment that the lady in blue in the above picture with the lowcut dress and the star on her head in no way represents Our Lady, as Mary's purity and modesty would prevent her from dressing in such a manner.

Blessings,

Patty Theresa, SFO

For many years even though I was Catholic, I had a problem with Mary. Why do we need Mary, when we have Jesus? The more deeply I got into my faith, I realized without a relationship with Mary, my relationship with Jesus would not be as strong. She leads you right to her son. I think so much is based on misconception. No matter how many times you tell a protestant you do not worship Mary, they do not believe you. For Catholics who don't quite understand Mary, it has to do with a lack of teaching of their Catholic faith. Bob Mills "5 steps" to Mary is a good start. Also Christine's post on protestants not believing the Eucharist is probably one of the biggest factors. Mary usually is the last stumbling block for converts into the Catholic Church. Getting them to believe in the Eucharist is probably one of the first.
To Patty, your post is so moving. I will definitely say a Hail Mary for your husband, but also for you. You seem to be a remarkable person. Just like Mary, your heart has been pierced. I will continue to pray for you and your very heavy cross. God Bless you.

David, I think you are spot on in your assessment of Evangelicals here. As you know, I am an Evangelical who appreciates Roman Catholicism deeply. I am always looking for common ground...and I find myself at times actually having more in common with Catholics than with other Evangelicals.

But you are right to emphasize the seriousness of disagreement that many of us have with Catholics when it comes to the Marian doctrines. It is unlike our differences in other ways--more a difference of kind than of degree.

And yet if it is true that Catholics go too far in the things they ascribe to Mary (as I believe they do), most Evangelicals err in the opposite direction by refusing to say anything good about her at all (lest they sound "too Catholic").

It doesn't help Catholic-Evangelical dialogue when, with the (right) desire to look for common ground, we pretend we are closer to one another on a matter than we really are. Better to just honestly agree-to-disagree.

I am a cradle Catholic who, I must confess, has no Marian devotion. I just don't feel anything at all for/about her, preferring to focus on saints whose lives and example impact me more. And count me as one who finds distasteful the marian piety so prevalent in Latin American culture - it smacks of mariolatry to me. I can only imagine the impression it gives to thinking Protestants.

Perhaps one reason that Protestants object to Catholic focus on Mary is that there's a sense one gets from observing believing Catholics that a relationship with Mary is required of a Christian, pratically integral to our salvation. And she's mentioned only once in the Creed, and then only in reference to our Lord. And Scripture certainly downplays her, which belies all the fuss Catholics make about her role in salvation.

I think the reason most Protestants have a block about the Blessed Mother is that accusing Catholics of idolatry toward her is one of their favorite talking points in apologetics classes. They say the same thing about all the saints. I wouldn't worry too much about what they think; they're wrong about the Real Presence, for me that pretty much negates any other opinions about Catholicism they may hold.

Sadly, this rigidity about Mary stops them from having even a minor relationship with the mother of Jesus, which leaves something of a hole. She is our example of female purity and perfection - who provides this in her absence? No other female saint is her equal.

We have tenderness and affection for our own mothers, Jesus had it for His mother. It follows that we should have tenderness and affection for His mother, too. It doesn't have to be intense, it can be very simple and sweet. She is the gateway to Christ. She is especially helpful to those who have troubles relationships with their own mothers or who lost their mothers at a young age. The Memorare is a beautiful and simple prayer for petitions that will bring anyone closer to her almost effortlessly.

Interesting read! Evangelicals have so many barriers to assenting to Marian doctrine, but I think they converge upon a less-than orthodox understanding of Christology. Most Evangelical Christians I've encountered seem to adhere to a "practical monophysitism" that de-emphasizes the humanity of Jesus. This ripples outward and expresses itself in many ways: in attitudes towards the Scriptures, Church and Sacrament, and the human person. Concerning the human person, this practical monophysitism seriously minimizes the redemption, and the result is a subtly manichaean understanding of the human person that makes Marian confessions unthinkable.

In the old Rite the Blessed Mother was appealed to first, in a list of heavy hitters such as Saints Peter and Paul, at every Mass during the Confiteor (still is at my church and it's in Latin - gorgeous):

I confess to Almighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the Archangel, to blessed John the Baptist, to the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, to all the Saints, and to you brethren, that I have sinned exceedingly, in thought, word and deed: through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. Therefore I beseech blessed Mary ever Virgin, blessed Michael the Archangel, blessed John the Baptist, the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, all the Saints, and you brethren, to pray to the Lord our God for me.

Also - We are called to unite with Mary's suffering during Lent; the Way of the Cross, and in effect Easter itself, is incomplete without her. The Way of the Cross according to the method of St. Alphonsus Liguori includes singing the gorgeous medieval hymn Stabat Mater. A few select verses (it's better in Latin):

At the Cross her station keeping,
stood the mournful Mother weeping,
close to Jesus to the last.

Holy Mother! pierce me through,
in my heart each wound renew
of my Savior crucified

Let me share with thee His pain,
who for all my sins was slain,
who for me in torments died.



Are you sure? :)

OK, second only after Almighty God.

Thank you all again for the interesting and stimulating responses. Here, because I suspect most readers haven't seen it, is Hilaire Belloc's "Ballade of Illegal Ornaments." He's taking off on an Anglican bishop's rejection of statues in the churches in his diocese. Whether he was a low churchman or a liberal, or both, isn't stated.

I think it is very funny, but the envoi (a sort of poet's p.s.) always moves me. It may give some Protestant readers an idea of the feelings behind Marian piety.

Ballade of Illegal Ornaments

"...the controversy was ended by His Lordship, who wrote to the Incumbent ordering him to remove from the Church all Illegal Ornaments at once, and especially a Female Figure with a Child."

When that the Eternal deigned to look
On us poor folk to make us free
He chose a Maiden, whom He took
From Nazareth in Galilee;
Since when the Islands of the Sea,
The Field, the City, and the Wild
Proclaim aloud triumphantly
A Female Figure with a Child.

These Mysteries profoundly shook
The Reverend Doctor Leigh, D.D.,
Who therefore stuck into a Nook
(or Niche) of his Incumbency
An Image filled with majesty
To represent the Undefiled,
The Universal Mother--She--
A Female Figure with a Child.

His Bishop, having read a book
Which proved as plain as plain could be
That all the Mutts had been mistook
Who talked about a Trinity
Wrote off at once to Doctor Leigh
In manner very far from mild,
And said: "Remove them instantly!
A Female Figure with a Child!"

Envoi

Prince Jesus, in mine Agony,
Permit me, broken and defiled,
Through blurred and glazing eyes to see
A Female Figure with a Child.

Many good comments here!

I feel I should mention another point -- or perhaps it is the same point phrased a bit differently -- which is a stumbling-block for the Evangelical who might otherwise be more easily persuaded by the claims of the Catholic church.

We human beings have only so much time in a day, and there are psychological limitations which go along with our temporality.

Were I to praise and spend time with one of my daughters twice as much as with the other, family complications could ensue...but it would not be a matter only of one daughter suspecting me of loving the other more. It would also be within my own heart: That which I spend time contemplating or talking about or praising becomes more important to me; it cements psychologically within me the order of my own priorities. When left to my own devices, the habit into which I fall is the habit I've spent the most time developing.

Or if my wife were to say, "You should spend more time with your daughter," and by that mean that I should spend so much time with one or another daughter that I felt I had much less time with my wife, I would, while not begrudging the time with my daughter, nevertheless feel distanced from my wife. And if my wife seemed to encourage that my daughter serve as go-between in most of my communications with my wife -- if our communications were more often "go ask your mother if..." instead of a direct conversation with my wife -- I would feel more distant still.

Now the Protestant -- and I'm speaking here of a devout Protestant who loves Jesus and has resolved, for love of Him, to follow Him where ever He leads, even if it means following Him into a weird, oft-inexplicable, and socially-discouraged exotic alternative Christian tradition, such as the Catholic or the Orthodox -- this Protestant is probably excited about plumbing the depths of early Church tradition, so long as it will rapturously draw him closer to Christ.

To this Protestant -- and please note that the Protestant I'm describing is the most fair-minded and open audience a Catholic apologist is ever likely to receive, more so than many Catholics! -- the notion of adopting ancient devotions awakens in him a longing for rootedness and depth of spirituality. And then...

And then, he encounters what is to all external appearances the chief indicator of devout Catholicism, the regular praying of the Rosary. And in this prayer form:

(1.) Mary is described as "our life, our sweetness, our hope";
(2.) Mary is described as the one to whom we turn in need;
(3.) Words of prayer directed to Mary number around 2800-3000 words, depending on translation and variation, whereas words of prayer directed to any/all Persons of the Trininty total about 600, or perhaps 750-ish if one adds in the "O My Jesus" prayer on each decade before the "Glory Be."
(4.) All kinds of indulgences and promises are associated with it...promises from Mary, mind you, which she herself is apparently in a position to fulfill, on Her own Authority.

This far-from-anti-Catholic Protestant has, despite his openness, some major hurdles to overcome, here.

...continued...

First, there's the distinction between latria and hyperdulia. In theory, the Catholic grants latria only to God, and hyperdulia to Mary. "But really," reasons the Protestant, "if everything I normally say to God, these Catholics are saying to Mary, then the latria/hyperdulia distinction is non-existent unless they're ALSO doing stuff for God which is above and beyond anything I've ever done for God, myself!" So the Protestant examines the Catholic layperson's devotions to God and finds...nothing unique. Nothing distinctively just-for-God. Sacrifice, it is said, is uniquely for God...but only priests and bishops may offer the Sacrifice of the Mass; therefore, the Catholic layperson apparently has nothing he can do only for God, that he is not also encouraged to do for Mary.

Were our Protestant friend an infinite, infallible being being in eternity for whom All Times Are Now this would be no issue. A saint in glory can probably give infinite time and adulation to Mary, and still have infinity-times-infinity time and adulation left over for God.

But our Protestant has limited hours in the day for prayer; he already feels he shortchanges Jesus just in the business of doing life. Now he feels he is being asked to leave his "first love" for another, to leave off time with Jesus for a surrogate.

Moreover, he is accustomed to coming directly to Jesus with every concern. Now he feels he is being asked to talk to Jesus' secretary...and even if the secretary is Jesus' own mom, it feels like a step down in intimacy.

He has turned to Jesus with his needs and sorrows: Now he is saying in prayer that it is to Mary that he turns as a poor, banished child of Eve.

Sure, he asks his friends to pray for him. On that basis he's willing to ask Mary to do the same -- not to mention Peter, Paul, Francis, and various other saints of old. Once he's convinced of the Communion of Saints, that all follows.

But he doesn't ask any friend to pray for him fifty times in the space of fifteen minutes. He thinks were he to do so, that the friend could be forgiven for thinking he was a little bit nutso.

Our Protestant -- our friendliest audience we have any right to expect -- looks at the Rosary, and concludes that something is amiss.

And therein is the danger. For of course our Protestant probably became open to the Catholic church by learning about Church History and the Church Fathers (isn't that always the story?). His reasoning is, "If the Church started by Jesus Christ is still in the world, I want to be in it!"

But the danger is in that word "if." For there remains in his mind the other possibility: That all churches have gone astray; Catholics by overemphasizing Mary and Baptists by forbidding drink and dancing and Episcopalians by ordaining those who flaunt homosexuality instead of repenting it.

In that case, he reasons, what difference can it possibly make which organization I'm in, so long as I cling to Jesus? And the Catholic church, whatever it may say about the Christocentric nature of Marian dogmas in theory, seems in practice to put me at a distance from Him!

The Protestant often, therefore, chooses to follow the maxim "dance with the one that brung ya": To ignore organizations as a secondary concern, and double-down on private devotion to Christ.

I do not argue that this is a correct decision. But if anyone here has previously found a devout Protestant's visceral aversion to Marian devotions inexplicable, I hope the above sheds some sympathetic light on what such a Protestant may be thinking.

He just wants Jesus, more Jesus. The idea "More Jesus by means of Jesus' body, which is The Church" seems logical, but the Protestant wants to see how that works in practice. He may try praying the Rosary, but he finds some phrases in the "Hail Holy Queen" choking in his throat, and the whole thing a distraction from the one on the Great White Throne, towards the lady on the throne off to one side.

Any wonder, then, if it's difficult to swallow?

Well-said, R.C. I would add that it's not only Protestants who see it this way. You've described pretty much how I see Mary.

Very well said, R.C. - as usual!

If I may add - and please correct me if I'm wrong about this - Protestants not only don't understand the way Catholics feel about Mary but also about the saints as well. So this "block" if you will isn't exclusive to the Blessed Mother.

I recently had someone say to me, "I could be a Catholic but I just don't get the whole 'Mary' thing." After I fumbled through my response it later occurred to me that if this person really understood the Mass and the act of true worship that we experience there they would better understand the "Mary thing". For there is absolutely no comparison between Catholic *worship* of Christ - the beautiful reenactment of Calvary that we are witness to at every Mass, the center and heart of the Faith - and the *veneration* we give to the Blessed Mother and the saints; they pose no threat to Jesus. Unfortunately a belief in transubstantiation is necessary to understand this. So the answer is simply not avalaiable to Protestants.

Mary and the saints are provided to us by God to give us earthly representations of holiness in all stations and at all times. They help us to know God and to know ourselves. Naturally Mary, as the mother of God, is held in high esteem to say the least. I don't think a particular devotion to Mary is necessary for Catholics but certainly an understanding of the difference between our love for Jesus as compared to how we view the saints is.

Before Vatican II veneration of Mary was built into the Mass/liturgical year - Catholics didn't have to go out of their way to honor her - it was a natural part of the Faith. I already mentioned the Confiteor - aside from that every Mass was concluded with 3 Hail Marys, 1 Hail Holy Queen and a prayer to Saint Michael. There were processions on her holy days and the May crowning. Catholics took part in these traditions effortlessly and benefited from them perhaps without even realizing it. I might add that children seem to have a special tenderness for her and love her traditions.

In any mainstream Christian tradition, we say that the husband and wife becomes "ONE." If you think about the Holy Spirit being the spouse of Mary, and you really ponder about it, it just blows the mind. Of course, we have to stop at regarding Mary as a deity, but no creature would be as close to God, than Mary is. The spouse of God is also the Mother of God. What mystery that even the greatest minds would not be able to fathom! One can perhaps arrive at a deeper understanding only if he understands the Trinity. But even that is a greater mystery!

Much of what the Catholic church teaches about Mary cannot be found in Scripture. Its interesting to note the none of the writers of the New Testament ever point to her as the primary model of a disciple (although she was one of many) and they never appeal to her for anything in prayer. Paul uses himself as a model to be followed as he follows Christ but he never appeals to Mary as one.

The point of the rosary is not the constant repetition of the prayers but the meditations. The 'Hail Mary' is the background music to focus the mind and facilitate contemplation of the relevant mystery. To pray the rosary is to focus on Jesus'life, and where Mary fits into it. One can also consider any specific intention that that you wish to bring to Mary to place before her Son. It took me a long time to appreciate how to pray the rosary properly, but now I try to set aside time for it every day, and feel a sense of loss if for any reason I don't. I did not have any particular devotion to Mary, possibly as I had a difficult relationship with my mother, until I had children of my own.

It is true that many protestants feel the devotion to Mary is very over done. For instance I have an evangelical friend who feels Mary, or for that matter any saint, is of no consequence. She tells me Jesus is her Saviour - she speaks to him directly and does not need to ask anyone to intercede on her behalf. I would like to thank Bob Wills for his five points; it was a wonderful summary of Mary's place in the life of the Church. They will certainly help me when I talk to my friend.

Marie Bell

This is from the article above where David Mills writes at the end -"We want our Protestant friends to pay the cost, because the knowledge of the Blessed Mother can only change their lives for the better." What knowledge is he referring to and how can our lives change for the better if Christ is sufficent for all that we have? Did not Paul in Philippians 4:13 write-- I can do all things through Him who strengthens me and in verse 19--And my God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

There is nothing that can be added to the riches we have in Christ.

Finally! A real, true-blue Protestant ("Protestant 1") contributes some thoughts, as opposed to all the straw-men Protestants that have been referred to in earlier Catholic posts!

I'd like to add my two cents worth as well.

Protestants believe we have no authority to go beyond what God has revealed to us when it comes to formulating our beliefs on doctrine. When God has not revealed something to us, the humble response is to allow the mystery of our questions to remain unanswered rather than to turn to speculation or the words of men. (Living with mystery encourages us to walk by faith and not by sight.)

And what has God revealed to us in Holy Scripture about Mary? Actually, what is significant here is how little the New Testament says about her. She is a woman "full of grace", highly favored. So are many other saints. Noah also "found favor" in the sight of the Lord" (Genesis 6:8). So did Moses (Exodus 33:17). This of course is a good thing--but Mary is no superwoman here.

And then there's our Lord's own words about Mary in Mark 3:31-35 and Luke 11:27-28. "Jesus, your mother and brothers are outside looking for you." What an opportune time for Jesus to say something like, "Did you say my *mother* is outside?! Let me tell you all about this amazing woman! She is without sin! She will not die! She is the Queen of Heaven. She is..." But no, he actually intentionally puts her on the same level as *anyone* else who does the will of God!...And when others exclaim, "Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed," again, Jesus could have answered, "Amen and amen! In fact, let me tell you something more about this amazing woman!..." But no. Instead he does almost the opposite! "On the contrary, blessed are those who heard the word of God, and observe it."

Then we have the Epistles. Paul wrote at least 13 letters. Peter (the first pope?) wrote 2. John wrote 3. And there's James. And Jude. And Hebrews. These were situational letters where the apostles are helping these young churches become grounded in the Faith. Different churches needed different things emphasized. And yet the really important things are repeated throughout these letters. Things like Christ's atonement, God's grace, the nature of the Church. But NOT ONE WORD about Mary! Nada. Zippo. Zero. Not even once, in passing. Just silence. Surely if an understanding of Mary is fundamental and foundational to the life of the Christian, God the Holy Spirit could have made sure that she be included in these important early instructions to the first churches.

It saddens many of us Protestants to watch how easily and quickly our Roman Catholic brethren go overboard in drawing attention to Mary--in ways that so often detract from our Lord Himself! So much of the art, so many of the statues, so many of the prayers--Mary is drawn attention to and Jesus seems eclipsed.

What's ironic here is that Mary herself would probably be very unflattered by all the attention she is getting! One can almost hear her crying out, "Please, please, stop talking to me so much! Stop thinking of me, drawing pictures of me, speculating about my sex life or moral status or how I died. Look over THERE, at my son--look at JESUS!! He died for our sins, not me; He is worthy of glory, honor and praise, not me; He answers your prayers, not me."

Does Mary want us to pray to her? Does Mary even *hear* us when we pray to her? We can't know for sure--God has not revealed this to us.

So let's go with what we *do* know for certain: those things that God has told us in Holy Scripture. And let's lock arms together, as brothers and sisters in Christ, and worship Him who alone is worthy of our very lives: Jesus Christ! Let's follow Mary in her humility by not focusing on Mary!

There is much to be said in response to Protestant 1 and my friend Kevin Offner, and I'm hoping someone is going to say it, since I've got a deadline to meet. But I would say one thing to Protestant 1.

Invoking Jesus this way doesn't prove your point. I just happened to come across a quote from the openly homosexual Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, which goes:

<< "The gay agenda? It's this: Jesus." the Rt. Rev'd Gene Robinson, Bishop of NH >>

Everyone invokes Jesus. And everyone -- Catholics included -- believes the verses you quoted. But really, don't you notice that they don't say what you're claiming they say?

Jesus strengthens us, yes, of course, but how does He strengthen us? The verses don't deal with this. Maybe he strengthens us through the sacraments, through the fellowship and instruction of the Church, through corporate prayer, through our friends on earth, through our friends the saints, through His Mother? There is no conceivable contradiction between "I can do all things through Him who strengthens me" and "pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death," since one of the ways He strengthens us is through the prayer of others. The same argument applies to to the other verse.

This kind of (mis)use of Jesus is a universal solvent. You use it to eliminate Mary, someone else uses it to eliminate intercessory prayer in general, or the sacraments, or worship, or anything else you think essential to the Christian life. Someone like Gene Robinson uses it to eliminate Christian sexual morality.

There are reasons for rejecting Catholic doctrine and devotion, and I understand them from the inside and know how compelling they seem, but this appeal to a Jesus abstracted from His life and His Church is not one of them.

I did not invoke Jesus out of context nor have used Him as some kind of "universal solvent" but have shown clearly from Scripture that He alone is sufficent. There are no texts in scripture as you may know where Mary is ever appealed for help or grace. The Apostles in their writings never mention her in this way. There is no indication in the Philippians passage as being sacramental in nature. To have a relationship with Jesus does not require a sacrament. What is required it to believe Who He was and to entrust ourselves to Him via faith.
If you want to claim Paul in this passage is teaching that you need Mary to strenghten you then you have your work cut out for you since its not in the passage.
Finally,there is a major problem in appealing to Mary at the hour of death. First and foremost the scripture never speaks of her as having this kind of authority or power. The only One Who is has such power is the Lord Jesus. Secondly, this is not the same thing as asking one of your friends to pray to you.
As for Gene Robinson and those like him that want to use scripture to support their unbiblical claims we can easily look at their arguements and see if they truly are supported by scripture. In this case its quite easy since in every case where scripture mentions it, its always condemned. It is never spoken of in positive terms.
Just because someone misuses the scripture does not mean the scripture is in error but rather they have misused it.

I don't know how often you peruse these forums, so you may not be familiar with the writing style, let alone the biographies, of particular authors here.

I'm about to ask you a question which could be viewed as disrespectful, or merely rhetorical, or ignorant, or dismissive of the word of God, or any number of other things. I don't intend it that way.

To ensure that you don't misunderstand it in that way, I should first off clarify that I ask it...

1. In respect and sincerity;
2. As someone who was devoutly and intelligently and analytically and conservatively Protestant for 20-ish years prior to discovering a fuller and more Scriptural experience of Christianity in the Catholic faith;
3. As someone who believes the Bible is divinely inspired and inerrant and vitally important to the spiritual health of the believer.

Okay. Now that I've set expectations correctly, and hopefully prevented certain misunderstandings from the outset, let me ask this question:

Why are you operating under the assumption that Christianity should look to the Bible for information about what defines the dogmas of Christianity?

That, after all, seems to be your assumption. You seem to be saying, "but this Mary-related stuff isn't in the Bible!" ...to which I'm asking, politely and with no disrespect at all, "So? How does that prevent it being true?"

Again, I'm not snarking at you; this is a respectful question asked by someone (me) who, five years ago, would be posing the exact same questions (challenges?)about Catholic Marian stuff that you are now posing.

Now, I understand why I would have asked those questions, at that time: They would have been logical questions, given the assumptions I then held. But the assumptions I then held were, themselves, not internally consistent, and in order to correct my own logic errors regarding Scripture, I found no alternative but Catholicism.

Still, your assumptions may differ from mine. So rather than assume you're asking these questions (posing these challenges?) for the same reasons I would have done, I'm asking you to clarify your underlying assumptions, by asking this question:

Why should the dogmas about Mary and the saints be required to be present in the Bible -- present at all! -- in order to be true?

(As it happens I think some of them are quite present -- more obviously present than even some of the dogmas all Christians share; e.g., the Trinitarian nature of God.)

But put that aside for a moment, and lets pretend for a moment that none of this Marian stuff is to be found in the Bible. If so, ...so what? Does that prevent it from being not only true, but obligatory Christian doctrine? Why?

My point at this point in the discussion is to look first if it is in the Scripture to begin with. Is the doctrine or practice taught in Scripture? This is important for a number of reasons but the primary reason is that it is only the Scripture alone that is inspired and inerrant. There is nothing else that has this kind of authority. It is from these writings alone we determine whether sometime is apostolic or not. That’ why Kevin Offner’ post was so important. He outlined in a concise way that the claims made about Mary by the Catholic church are not grounded in Scripture. What this means is that it’s not an apostolic doctrine. Therefore it would not be binding on men. If it’s not grounded in Scripture then what we have is a teaching of men.
If the teaching does not have its source in Scripture then where is the source of the teachings? Who first came up with the idea that Mary was conceived without sin? It’s certainly not revelation and it’ not derived from the texts of Scripture. The only alternative is that it is the speculations of men.

You ask “Why should the dogmas about Mary and the saints be required to be present in the Bible -- present at all! -- in order to be true?” That’s a good question and one you have the burden to show that it is true. Merely asserting its true does not make it so. Lots of people make reasonable assertions about things but that does not mean they are true.
Since Jesus is our great high priest as Hebrews 4:14-16 says, why would anyone need to pray to Mary or the saints (who have died) need their help when the Lord Jesus is the One Who intercedes for us?

I've been in many discussions with Roman Catholics on a number of topics and how I'm seeing things progress between R.C. and Protestant 1 is very typical. The conversation begins with some difference between Catholics and Protestants--whether it be the Eucharist, purgatory or in this case, Mary--but soon the focus shifts from the matter at hand to one of epistemology and authority.

The six million dollar question behind all other questions, it seems, is this: does the Roman Catholic Church speak with the authority of God or does she not? If she does, then all else follows. (I have a friend who recently converted to RC and his last "issue" holding him back was Mary. But then he shrugged his shoulders and said, "But since this is what the Roman Catholic Church teaches, and since the RCC speaks with God's authority, then I will accept all the Marian doctrines. I don't need to understand these doctrines but I accept them by faith--faith in the teaching authority of the RCC.")

Protestants do not believe God has given any of the church traditions the authority to speak infallibly for God. Catholics do believe this. And we are thus at an impasse. Roman Catholics see the Roman Catholic Church as *the* Church, while Protestants see the Roman Catholic Church as a subset of the Church. And we are thus at an impasse.

We all have consciences and our consciences must be guided by truth--or rather, they must be guided by our *understanding* of the truth. Protestants understand that God has revealed truth in and through Holy Scripture. God has *not* revealed in Holy Scripture that Mary was without sin, that she never ever had sexual relations with a man, that she was bodily assumed into heaven, that she hears any of us when we would say our "Hail Marys" to her, etc. Therefore we can not *know* that these things are true. Rome says these doctrines are true...but God has not.

Now simply to state that the Holy Scripture is the place where we find God's revelatory Word is not the only thing to be said here. For God's Word must be *interpreted*. And here there is much that can be said about the role of Tradition, the Church, human reason, human experiences, etc.

But here we go talking about issues of revelation, the nature of the Church, authority, hermeneutics,etc...and yet these posts are supposed to be focused on Mary.

Maybe it's just this simple: *all* differences between Catholics and Protestants ultimately go back to the issues of *revelation* (where has God spoken infallibly and authoritatively to humans?) and *authority* (whose interpretation of this revelation trumps all others?)

I agree with Kevin. In my dialogues with catholics on catholic doctrines the ultimate issue is one of authority. I have been told by catholics in so many words that the Catholic church cannot err in matters of faith and morals. If the church proclaims something is true even though scripture says otherwise, its true. It is also claimed that the Catholic church is the only church to have the authority to interpret the Scripture correctly and yet no offical interpretation of the Scripture can be found (at least by me). This is quite perplexing.

Even with this i do think its worthwhile to dialogue on these issues.

No, Catholics don't. Or no more a burden than you have to show that your contention is true. You're importing a theological claim as if it were an objective principle, but it's only one way of understanding the nature of Christianity and how the Christian story is brought to us.

If anything, you have the greater burden, to show why a view of Scripture and Tradition held since the Fathers -- and indeed, a Catholic would argue, from the Scripture writers themselves -- is to be abandoned in favor of yours. The Catholic would naturally ask how, if this is the sole way God communicates His truth to us, the poor Church went on so long without it, and exactly what, other than the Church, tells us it's Scripture at all?

I think the reality is as my friend Kevin Offner put it:



If we start there, and try to understand the matter of others see it, we might make some progress in mutual understanding. Probably not much movement one way or the other, but at least a little better understanding of why our friends think and act the way they do. That's not nothing.

October 22nd, 2009 | 11:49am
You ask “Why should the dogmas about Mary and the saints be required to be present in the Bible -- present at all! -- in order to be true?” That’s a good question and one you have the burden to show that it is true.
— Protestant 1


"No, Catholics don't. Or no more a burden than you have to show that your contention is true. You're importing a theological claim as if it were an objective principle, but it's only one way of understanding the nature of Christianity and how the Christian story is brought to us."

You are right. We both have the burden of proof for our positions. You to are making a theological claim. Not sure what you mean by how we are to understand the nature of Christianity and how the Christian story was brought to us. I do know as you do that the story of Christ can be found only in the Scripture.


"If anything, you have the greater burden, to show why a view of Scripture and Tradition held since the Fathers -- and indeed, a Catholic would argue, from the Scripture writers themselves -- is to be abandoned in favor of yours. The Catholic would naturally ask how, if this is the sole way God communicates His truth to us, the poor Church went on so long without it, and exactly what, other than the Church, tells us it's Scripture at all?"

Actually the ball is in your court when you want to say the Marian dogmas are based on what Scripture or Tradition says about her. It does not take much study to show that the Scripture never say anything about her conception, her being sinless or kept from sin, her being the queen of heaven nor that she should be prayed to. This is where you need to show why a Tradition should be trusted that is not grounded in Scripture. What do you do when there is a contradiction between the two?
The church has always had the Word of God either in the form of the OT or the NT. It is the primary way God communicates with believers. It provides for us a way to determine if someone is speaking the truth or a lie. That’s why we need to test all things by it. See I Thessalonians 5:21. Anyone can make claims to having spoken with God. The question is how do you determine if its true or not.

""I think the reality is as my friend Kevin Offner put it:
Maybe it's just this simple: *all* differences between Catholics and Protestants ultimately go back to the issues of *revelation* (where has God spoken infallibly and authoritatively to humans?) and *authority* (whose interpretation of this revelation trumps all others?)
— Kevin Offner""


"If we start there, and try to understand the matter of others see it, we might make some progress in mutual understanding. Probably not much movement one way or the other, but at least a little better understanding of why our friends think and act the way they do. That's not nothing."

I agree that we need to understand each other and go from there. But we must pursue the truth in this matter. That’s why discussions and looking at the details of beliefs are so important. Once we do this we can then compare this what the apostles taught and see if we really have Christian truth or not.

I had to work all day and couldn't get back here to check in; in the interim, the conversation has progressed.

Yes, the real issue is authority.

My contention is that, when I was a Protestant, I based my authority on the Bible, because the Bible was inerrant. That was all right so far as it went; however, what I didn't realize was that there was no logical way for the Bible to have authority -- to be known to be inerrant -- without the Church having it first.

There were a lot of things I just had not really thought about. Having now considered them, I find that there are only two logical options:

OPTION ONE:
There is real authority in the Church Jesus founded; that authority is passed down from God the Father to Jesus the Son, from Jesus the Son to His Apostles, and from His Apostles to their successors.

It was, as a matter of historical fact, those successors who decided the canon of the New Testament in the period between 325 AD and 400-ish AD, depending on how you measure it. It is on the basis of their decision that Christians for the last 1,700 years have considered certain books of the New Testament belong in the Bible at all.

If we may trust those successors in their determination of the canon of Scripture, then we may trust them in the florid and chivalric things they said about Mary. If we cannot trust them, we have no foundation for certainty that books which were disputed up until their day (Hebrews, Jude, 2nd and 3rd John, 2nd Peter, Revelation, sometimes others) truly belong in the canon.

OPTION TWO:
There is no real authority in the Church founded by Jesus Christ. In that case, it follows that there is no certain authority in the Bible.

Given these two options, I realized I could either become a Catholic, or I could become another unmoored theological liberal in the mold of John Shelby Spong. The latter position I find ignorant, irrational, and contemptible (the position, mind you, not the man, who needs our prayer, however hard it may sometimes be to care for such a reprobate).

That was my decision, and I labored for a couple of years to find a good Protestant argument that didn't break down under close examination, which would allow me to continue holding the Bible as authoritative, without requiring that the Church be authoritative first.

I never found one. Some were visibly illogical at cursory examination. Others took considerable study before their weaknesses became apparent.

But they all ultimately failed, so after all attempts to circumvent it, I was left with the decision of either Church-plus-Bible, or neither. I opted for the former.

How do former Protestant accept and believe all that the Catholic church teaches about Mary? For example,how do they accept the belief that all graces come through her when the scritures themselves never mention such a thing about her?

So there are only two options out there: become a (Roman)Catholic or become "another unmoored theological liberal in the mold of John Shelby Spong"?

R.C, you seem to have skipped over an Option Three where thousands upon thousands of Evangelicals attend churches that are not Roman Catholic and yet which teach with an authority grounded in historical Christian orthodoxy. *And* which *don't* teach Roman Catholics' Marian doctrines.

By the way, I wonder if any of you have seen the most recent issue of the magazine *First Things*? Therein is a Statement of Evangelicals and Catholics Together on Mary. I must say I found it encouraging, and I found myself (I suppose, obviously) resonating with the section entitled, "An Evangelical Word to Catholics," especially with the following:

"...disputed questions remain serious points of difference between us [i.e. Evangelicals and Roman Catholics]. These points represent postbiblical developments in Catholic teaching. Evangelicals also claim continuity with the doctrinal development of biblical teaching in the early Church. But the notion of development itself, along with the necessary refutation of error, implies that the Church can be, and sometimes has been, mistaken and misled about important matters of faith. Jesus did not guarantee the infallibility of ecclesiastical pronouncements. Jesus did promise instead that the Holy Spirit would lead his disciples into all truth, that true faith would be found on the earth when he returned..."

It needs to be remembered: the Eastern Orthodox Church does not hold the Marian doctrines as dogma (i.e. as part of the Great Tradition which must be believed by all orthodox Christians). Furthermore, Augustine did not believe Mary was conceived without original sin. Neither did Bernard of Clairvaux nor Thomas Aquinas. And the first three centuries found reticence everywhere on the topic of Mary's bodily assumption. So I'm afraid I must disagree with my friend David Mills when he says that affirming the Marian doctrines is a "view of Scripture and Tradition held since the Fathers."

Kevin,

I didn't mean any disrespect. You're where I was, and I don't think I was at fault for being there at the time, so I don't hold you to be at fault now.

With respect, I have considered every non-Catholic explanation for the authority of the New Testament canon which I could think of, and found myself less convinced by them than by the Catholic explanation of the authority of Scripture...an explanation which happens, in the course of adopting it, to adopt the Church's teaching as also authoritative, and the authority of the Bible as emanating from that same source.

There remains the possibility that either (a.) there is a non-Catholic defense of the authority of the New Testament canon which I haven't thought of, or (b.) one of the explanations which I considered and found unconvincing is, nevertheless, convincing to you.

I suppose we can't know why I no longer find it logically tenable to remain Protestant, while you do, without hearing your argument for the authority of the New Testament canon. It may turn out to be something I considered and found unconvincing...in which case we'll know that you and I consider different kinds of arguments convincing. Or, it may be something I hadn't considered.

If the topic interests you, let me know why you are certain of the inerrancy of the New Testament canon, without appealing to the magisterial authority. And we can discuss further from there.

But again, I don't intend to cast aspersions at your current status, which was once mine. The Catholic-or-theological-liberal dilemma was what seemed required of me, when I felt I had exhausted other options; I do not mean to imply that anyone who isn't a Catholic is a Spong-clone! I wouldn't accuse you or anyone else of that without pretty significant damning evidence!

Respectfully,

R.C.

i'm sorry,...my whole message disappeared,...did i not delete the required text properly?,...i was backspacing,...please explain,...

ok,...guess i figured that out (the deletion-thing),...so maybe now i only have patience for a nutshell version: i remember the days of walking in the valley of the shadow of the war of words about God and faith,...it is not a pleasant memory, and it is in actuality quite painful to revisit,...i'm always surprised when mere humans, or should i say, that "mere human intellect" can be so staunchly self-assured in making its own claims and assertions about God and God's kingdom, especially concepts that tend to be limiting, compared to the vastness of the reality and potentials of God,...i could never claim to "know" all those things "for sure,"...

and by contrast, i'm happy to say that i am now able to experience being part of a very wonderful huge loving family, visible and invisible, (i.e., the Communion of Saints, which of course includes my beloved mother/sister/friend Mary and many others, who are united in love, worship, and adoration of God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, via the Eucharist and the Catholic Church),...i have lost nothing pertaining to the lessons/truths of faith and scripture (exceedingly valuable!), but have gained a greater participation (sometimes hard-fought) in a very comforting realm of peace and light and love,...sounds like the Christmas message/invitation to me!

i have not seen these references to Mary mentioned here,...

...i should have said: Revelation, the last book of the Bible,...

This is a point some Protestants keep making, but it isn't actually true. The Orthodox are not on the Protestant side on these matters.

Both Churches hold to the same belief in the Perpetual Virginity of Mary. The difference between the Catholic belief in the Assumption and the Orthodox belief in the Dormition is very slight, if they differ at all, and indeed you will find Orthodox parishes named after the Assumption.

The issue of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is more complicated, but is not evidence for Kevin's contention. That theological formulation was a matter of debate in the Catholic Church, and still is with the Orthodox, but the belief in the sinlessness of Mary it expresses isn't. If you ask an Orthodox if Mary was just like everyone else in this, he will tell you no.

And that is to leave out the argument I have heard that some Orthodox of the nineteenth century did accept the doctrine, and the current Orthodox opposition has more to do with Orthodox apologetics and the desire to draw a sharper line between Orthodoxy and Catholicism

Also, while I'm at it, I would note that Kevin misquotes me when he applies my ""view of Scripture and Tradition held since the Fathers" to the Marian matters. I was talking about, as the quote itself says, a view of the relation of Scripture and Tradition. Though that said, I would still argue that the Catholic Church's Marian doctrines are biblical and patristic.

How would you argue that Mary herself was concieved without sin, assumed into heaven and is to be prayed to by using the Scripture?

I am a Protestant believer with a newfound appreciation for Roman Catholic theology. In the past couple of years, I have devoured numerous works from Catholic authors, both modern and ancient – Chesterton, Pope Benedict XVI, Augustine, Dante, Aquinas, Francis de Sales, Scott Hahn, and others. I’m currently attending RCIA classes, and the personal time I spend reading through the Church Catechism has been refreshing, both intellectually and spiritually.

In regard to Marian doctrine, Bob Wells (post 3: How I became a Marian) describes well the logical process that I, as a Protestant, am now working through for myself. And the two posts from R.C. (36, 37: A Sympathetic Perspective) provide an accurate picture of the theological hurdles that I face in moving toward a full Roman Catholic Mariology. What I struggle with is not so much the Catholic teaching about Mary (which I believe has drawn me closer to God), as the Catholic practice. To make this real simple, I can’t understand the inordinate emphasis on Mary in the Rosary.

The frequent distinction drawn between “tradition” and Scripture is not particularly helpful for me. In once sense, the early Protestant reformers saw themselves as rediscovering the tradition of the first-century apostolic church, which they believed had become corrupted over time. Luther never set out to leave the Church, and even though the formal and material principles of the Reformation are said to be sola scriptura and sole fide, I really wonder if the separation in Christendom would ever have occurred if the “practice” of the Church in Luther’s day had not been so corrupt. Luther himself held to a very high and fully Catholic Mariology.

I’m not having too much difficulty giving up the notion of sola scriptura. The late Dr. John Gerstner, a staunch Calvinist, once stated (according to Scott Hahn) that since the Church is not infallible, the “best we can have is a fallible collection of infallible documents.” I think most Protestant laypeople would cringe to hear that kind of talk, but that seems to be the “best we [Protestants] can have.” Personally, I see no reason why God would not also speak authoritatively through His own Body, the Church, if He speaks authoritatively through Scripture. After all, according to Scripture [Heb 4:12], God’s Word is alive. Calvin himself said that the Church did not determine the cannon, but is “duty-bound” to accept what is manifestly the Word of God. But how is that different than saying that God’s Word is preserved and communicated through both Holy Scripture and the Church? The Word written can only be recognized by the same Word that also indwells the people of God. And besides, Protestants are always trying to recover tradition themselves – the tradition of the first-century church – the church that wrote the books of the New Testament. It’s the tradition after the first century that they have problems accepting – hence this Protestant notion of the cessation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit after the death of the Apostles.

The current difficulty for me in regard to Roman Catholic Marian practice is related to everything that I have learned through my Christian experience about the doctrine and practice of sole fide. In the mind of most Protestants, that doctrine is broadened into the notion of faith alone in “Christ alone.” Deeply embedded within the Protestant psyche is the idea that it’s “not in trying but in trusting, not running but in resting… that we find the strength the Lord.” We believe this because we believe that only the infinite God – in the fully divine and fully human Christ – could pay our infinite human debt; and that we need only to receive Him – just as Mary, the mother of God, received Him. If Mary loves Jesus as much as we know she does, if she understands the supreme value of Christ as we know she must, is she not preeminently concerned that we honor Him and not her? Isn’t it the deep humility of the saints that we most respect – they being so full of Christ that we know longer see them, but only Christ through them?

Much of the Mariology of the Catholic Church is strikingly profound and beautiful. So for me, it is not so much the doctrine that is disturbing, but the practice – the extravagant devotion given to Mary and the saints. Mary is the mother of God, and the mother of the Church; but it is Jesus, not Mary, who lives within me. And as I live, I want others to see not me, but Christ in me. And does not Mary desire the same?

since i am an enthusiastic convert, familiar with many transitioning adjustments in practice, i'd just like to make a quick comment: in my own personal experience, i have never focused on ANY saint in prayer, meditation, reading, etc., for any reason--help, inspiration--that i have not also felt/experienced the transcendent presence/reality of Christ permeating everything connected with that prayer,...(it might be similar to the meaning of Ephesians 1:22-23: "22And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.")

truly the saints lead us more fully and closely to Christ, and as we join our faith more closely with theirs, we find an empowering effect that pulls us closer to the realities of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,...it is definitely not a divisive experience,...

that said, just as in learning to swim, we at first "just nervously get our toes wet," we might find ourselves not quite "comfortable" in the presence of all the very assured pray-ers and prayers that have been long-standing over time in the Catholic Church,...i wasn't,...but God never seemed to ask me or require me to go beyond my level of comfort in any given situation,...sometimes i could only say half of a prayer, whispered, (for years), but that was OK,...and over time, i gradually became assimilated to much more than i ever could have imagined,...and in all honesty, it's MUCH easier than stoically walking/standing in "naked faith,"...we don't have to "prove" our faith or loyalty to God in certain particular ways,...God loves us and accepts us,...welcome home,...(-:

Glenn:

I'm right there with you, friend. Or, at most, a year or two ahead, which isn't as long as it sounds to percolate on these deep things.

I agree with you that Marian practice grinds against the grain more stringently than Marian dogmas, once one has realized the unsustainability and ahistoricity of Sola Scriptura. One arrives at a sort of limbo in which, no matter which way one turns, the phrase "it is hard to kick against the goads" comes to mind!

On the one hand: The ancient Church was the Catholic church. Not all the dogmas are in Scripture, but enough of them (Apostolic Succession, the Real Presence, Petrine role as Prime Minister or Grand Vizier under the Davidic Kingdom, the role of Mary as Ark of the New Covenant, New Eve, and "Queen Mum" of the Davidic King, teaching authority for apostles that rests not on exegesis of Scripture but upon "what seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us," and so on) are there that they lead unavoidably to the authority of the Church to pronounce the others.

On the other hand, one wants to become closer to Christ, to feel His strong arms in an embrace, to kiss His feet and hands, to step out of the boat and walk the waves. And the Mass is okay where that's concerned, as are most other Catholic devotions. But then there's Mary, as a statue with roses at her feet, as a half-dozen paintings lining the church hallways, as Our Lady of Apparently Absolutely Everything.

Then: The Rosary. You can't skip it; half a dozen popes are quoted recommending it, Scott Hahn and others have apparently managed to jump the chasm and come away unscathed. It's there, you gotta do it, or else you feel like you're still keeping one toe on the opposite bank of the Tiber.

So you look at it, and it sums up as: Cross, Credo, Daddy, Mary-Mary-Mary, Trinity, Daddy, Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary (take a breath) Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary, Trinity (with maybe an O My Jesus to try to even the odds a bit), Daddy, Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary (breath) Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary, Trinity (O My Jesus), Daddy, Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary (breath) Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary, Trinity (O My Jesus), Daddy, Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary (breath) Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary, Trinity (O My Jesus), Daddy, Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary (home stretch now) Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary-Mary, Trinity (O My Jesus), and finally, MAAAARY, with a dash of Daddy (mention of Jesus in passing) tacked on at the end. Cross yourself, you're done. Hallelujah.

And one starts to ask, "Good golly, could these new-found brethren of mine please tone it down a little? I mean, I love my Mom, too, and I guess I can learn to love this surrogate Mom. But c'mon!"

One can also look at it the other way. If Mary stands at the head of a column of glorified saints, one wonders why all the others vanish into her shadow. So you start looking up devotions to the saints, thinking that perhaps if I try to upgrade their proportions, Mary won't seem quite so out-of-proportion. But that option has its drawbacks, as one begins to encounter some really odd stuff. Oh, the medals and such don't ruffle too many feathers. But then you find out about burying a cheap-looking statue of Joseph to influence the Real Estate Market, and exasperation brims over. "Oh, for Pete's sake!" you begin to say, and then catch yourself, because, y'know, Pete is listening.

If any of that is familiar, I commiserate. All I can tell you is: There isn't any way out of the realization about where The Church can be found. Like it or not, "to become deep in history is to cease to be Protestant." (To read Scripture with an open mind, rather than through the lenses of one's own original faith tradition, comes pretty close, too.) As long as one steers clear of Catholic authors describing the Catholic Faith, one is safe, but read a couple of the wrong books, and it's over. To borrow from C.S.Lewis, a young man who is serious about his a-Catholicism cannot be too careful about what he reads.

...continued...

...continuing...

So here we are, stuck in the undertow of the Tiber, and it feels like the Jordan, but a lot of the folks standing on the far bank (rapidly getting closer), tho' otherwise stable-looking individuals, strike us as rather eccentric on the subject of their Mother. What to do?

First, strike off subscribing to Jack Chick tracts -- that would be reactionary.

Second, strike off Anglicanism. Judging by recent news, most of what remains commendable there is en route to Rome anyhow, possibly including the monarch were British upper-class reserve and discretion not what it was. In the U.S., nothing remains but excellent real estate and hymnology, Political Correctness substituted for moral theology, and those few stalwarts who can find an African bishop to stave off gangrene.

Take a long look at Eastern Orthodoxy. But which one? And how can the Universal Church be so nationalized? And where's the authority? One gets the sense that Orthodoxy would be a means of deferring, not solving, one's logic problems. (Which isn't very fair to one's Orthodox catechist, if that's the reason one is going.)

After that? It's either stay in Limbo, a sort of peripatetic homeless soul, or crawl dripping up the bank of the Tiber and find a priest, and pray God it's one of the good ones, not some dissenter without the spine to leave, and that the local parish music isn't too terribly worse than what you're used to. One relates to C.S.Lewis' experience of becoming a Christian, when he describes himself as "perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."

Sorry for the travelogue. But it gets better. It even gets haltingly Marian eventually, in a good way. Submission to authority requires trust. Unearned, as it happens, when it comes to terrestrial Catholics...but In God We Trust. He knows what He is doing, when we don't.

And if the dirty Joseph statues and the Mary-Mary-Mary start to grate? Well, a friend of mine liked to describe certain troublesome people with whom he had sometimes to deal as "EGR": Extra Grace Required.

If we former Protestants keep giving Extra Grace whenever the sheer Catholic-ness of Catholics starts to rub our fur the wrong way, perhaps they'll keep giving us Extra Grace when we can't help but sing the polyphonic parts of hymns of which they apparently only know the melody (and sometimes the wrong words). Perhaps they'll keep giving us Extra Grace when we stutter and bite our lips at the end of the Our Father.

If we all keep giving one another Extra Grace, I think it likely God honors the effort by giving us extra grace. Enough to appreciate just how great Our Lady is -- not in spite of Christ, but through and by Him -- and maybe our new sisters and brothers will find, through God's grace, new ways to express that Christocentric reality a little more clearly, into the bargain.

Either way, it's still God's grace. Because I am (and probably you are) also one of the "EGR" people.

I was encouraged to come to this website from a friend, and to read all the posts concerning Mary. How well I know the protestant arguements as I was one for 55 years! But oh how I cherish the 'completion' of my faith as I've entered the Church!!! Mary was my biggest stumbling block, even after having read all of THE books by THE best known authors. The dogmas about her were difficult to accept too. But with time and patience, I have begun to understand the Marian teachings. It didn't come all at once, but like a flower slowly opening to receive the warmth of the sun, I have come to understand the teachings of the Church.

It is important for us to remember that Marian doctines, believing them or not, have nothing to do with our salvation. As my friend David Hall shared with me just before I came into the Church, "...our entrance to heaven is not on the basis of getting theology right(no one is "right" enough, just as no one is "good" enough. When our hearts are humble and hungry for God and coming to Him through Jesus as best we understand, that is our salvation. But as we understand, we need to walk in the light of what He shows (or we are not being hungry and humble for Him.)

God bless all of you, Catholic and Protestant, on your journeys. I would highly recommend Rod Bennett's "Four Witnesses". Eye opening and a great asset to the knowledge all are seeking concerning the early Church and the Church Fathers.

Gracie

R.C.'s description of the rosary is priceless - good chuckle.

For clarification purposes, as someone already mentioned, the rosary is actually a meditation - we're not to focus on the Hail Marys but more on the mystery we're contemplating, with accompanying virtues. Using a similar vein to R.C.'s, the focus during the decades would go something like this:

Joyful Mysteries: Mary, Mary, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus

Glorious Mysteries: Jesus, Jesus, Holy Ghost, Mary, Mary

Sorrowful Mysteries: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus

How is it not possible to concentrate primarily on Mary when there are over 50 prayers to Mary at the most important and citical time of a person' life (hour of death)?

I wonder what Jesus and His apostles would think of this prayer.

One of the problems with so many entries zipping back and forth is that many comments one makes are never answered.

I know that Roman Cathoilcs and Evangelicals both hold to a high view of Holy Scripture. I'd love to hear someone's response to my Entry #43 above.

Thanks.

both of you have tried to focus on particular Scripture references about Mary,...and have quoted some anecdotal references to her life,...i am NOT a Marian scholar in any traditional Catholic sense, so i would bow immediately to correction as to what i am about to "suggest:" as far as what Christ says about "his mother" to the people around him, which does not seem to honor her in a stand-out way,...this strikes me as perhaps being as much a reflection of where the people themselves are coming from (how they are "seeing her"), as pertaining to the spiritual character of his mother, herself,...perhaps the people are relating to her in the fleshly/bodily sense common to all women in child-bearing, but not really "seeing" the true Mary within that transcends the obvious natural maternal characteristics that they can identify with,...perhaps in redirecting their focus, he has actually pointed to the true spiritual Marian qualities that they have "missed,"...as in being willing to follow the will of God,...

and i think that that same quality is referred to in chapter 12 of Revelation about the children of this "woman" who is bearing a male child, being protected by God, while she and her "children" (those who do the will of God) are being attacked/persecuted by the dragon/devil,...i'm pretty sure some of this Revelation chapter 12 stuff figures in to the Catholic picture of "who Mary is,"...but i don't dare say much more, as i haven't studied this in an official sense,...but i would think that there are others who have,...or else, i might be completely "missing it,"...but it makes pretty good sense to me, together with other things i've "gathered" about Mary,...

I'm not sure what you are asking or saying here. Protestants have no problem in believing Mary was a godly woman and was blessed in her part in bringing Christ into the world and raising Him. The Catholic church in its doctrines and practices in relation to her go far far beyond what the Scriptures say about her and this is what the problem is.

i am exploring this, as well as you, not because i "need" to do so to validate a relationship that i feel i now already have with a "Catholic" Mary (whom i have already accepted), but because (1)i feel you and Kevin are asking in sincerity, (2)i also have a Protestant background, and (3)i find it a very interesting question,...i'm hoping others more familiar with the "Catholic teaching" on this issue (especially with respect to what might be being indicated about the position of Mary in the church, if indeed Revelation 12 is referring to her at all), will be willing to share some of the traditional interpretations of this with us, before i get too enthusiastic about speculating,...i do think what we read about the "woman clothed with the sun" (and apparently "in a good way," as compared to the woman of Revelation 17, who most obviously could NOT possibly be Mary or the "body of Christ") is provocative of a more "cosmically" grand/transcendent picture of this woman's role in relation to the body of Christ than the simple life story of Mary in the Gospels,...i'm only holding back from saying more, out of respect for true scholars, which i'm not in this case,...but in Revelation 12, it does make a reference to this woman's "children" (not just the male child) as the followers of God's will, or something similar,...does that imply that as far as "walking in faith," that we could somehow also be Mary's "spiritual" children?,...we, humans, walk in faith, as she had to also walk in faith, trying to be obedient to the will of God, even when under attack by the devil?,...isn't this what we do?,...well, it makes enough sense to me to consider it a possibility, at least,...and it certainly doesn't make me uncomfortable to consider that all of us "in Christ" do have some sort of meaningful "relatedness" to one another,...as a mother, myself, i would have to say that if my children thought it would be a really good idea to pay no attention to me, out of respect for my humility, i would have to really "wonder" about that concept,...it doesn't really seem very "natural" or "spiritual" to me,...god bless,...wishing you "all the best,"...

Thanks georgia-ann for your encouraging words, and R.C. for the great “travelogue.” I must admit, it’s been a bit of a coaster ride for me. I’ll struggle with something a priest says, and question all over again those things I thought I had resolved. I have to tell myself “Jesus is Lord… Jesus is Lord… I know that for sure.” But then I sit down with the Bible and the Church Catechism, am moved through the words into contemplation, and new vistas open in both my mind and spirit.

georgie-ann as you said, there is insight in the Ephesians passage, where we see that God is distributed but not divided (“the fullness of Him who fills all in all”), and this brings greater, not less, glory to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

R.C., I actually landed a couple of years ago in one of those “stalwart [Anglican churches that found] an African bishop to stave off the gangrene.” The rector’s journey seems to be paralleling my own – intensely interested in the dialogue between Rome, Orthodoxy and Protestants. I did actually take a close look at Orthodoxy, but I could not resolve what seemed to be an over-emphasis on the apophatic (fundamentally negative) approach to knowing God. Yes, God is transcendent, ineffable, but Christ is the express Word of God. We don’t need to exhaust that mystery in order to “affirm” it. And it is the very “fleshiness” of that affirmation that smacks of truth.

In regard to Kevin’s and Protestant 1’s questions about authority, it may be that we split hairs too much on this issue. Your submission to Scripture is no less strange to the unbeliever than the Catholic’s submission to the Church is to you. I don’t think a reasonable Catholic just “blindly” accepts the teaching of the Church. He must first conclude from his own reasoning that it makes sense to trust that the Church speaks authoritatively, just as the Protestant must rationally conclude that the Scripture speaks authoritatively. From this perspective, we are all priests who can never violate our reason or our conscience. True knowledge does not end in contradiction, but it must still rest in the most wonderful and completely-satisfying mystery.

What is the metaphysical obstacle that prevents God from leaving the “deposit of faith” in His own Body? Ultimately, if you deny that reality, what are you left with but your own mind, since you alone are the interpreter of the truth? Could not Luther have submitted to the Body of Christ, as did Francis of Assisi, and waited for the “progressive refinement” – not "new" revelation – that would have come through an internal reformation of the Church?

In regard to the Scriptural passages (or lack thereof) about Mary, don’t your see that at every pivotal point in the life of Christ, Mary is there as an example, “contemplating these things” in her heart. Of course, in the Annunciation, she is overshadowed by God the Spirit, and receives God the Son in her own flesh. She lived with divinity in her body for nine months, and even after this fruit of the Spirit was born, she was at his side. This was not just a historical event. Mary is the mother of Jesus, who is fully God. She will forever and uniquely be His only mother, just as Christ in his resurrected body still bore the marks of history (the crucifixion). Outside of Jesus, can you think of a more supreme example of faith than Mary, who bears the fruit of the Word of God?

Are we not struck by the Spirit-revealed greeting of Elizabeth “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb,” and the pre-birth conversion of John the Baptist, as he leapt for joy? Both Jesus and Mary, together, are called "blessed." What about the intensely intimate association of Mary with her Son in Simeon’s prophesy, “Yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul also?” Wasn’t Mary part of the story when the death and burial of Jesus was prefigured by the loss of her "twelve"-year old boy in the temple for “three” days.

The wedding at Cana, far from being a denial of the uniqueness Mary, is an amazing affirmation. This is where Christ first revealed His glory, the beginning of His public ministry, and the event that prefigured the heavenly feast of Christ with His bride. And regardless of how you interpret the verbal response of Jesus to his mother, the fact remains that He did answer his Mary’s request, and the rest, as they say, is history. Was not Mary “instrumental” in that history?

On the cross, the last words of Jesus, immediately prior to the prophetic fulfillment, “I thirst” and “It is finished” were His words “Behold your mother!” – not simply “John, watch over my mom,” but “Behold your mother!” This passage is just as strong as the one where Jesus with declarative emphasis says “This is My Body!”

There is much, much more to say from Scripture about Mary, such as her presence at Pentecost, but I think the above is enough to illustrate that the Bible is not lacking in regard to Catholic Mariology. The question I have is: are we going to go it alone, or do we think that the Body of Christ has something to say to us as well? This is, at the least, a valid first step. I still don’t know about the sinlessness of Mary, her perpetual virginity, or the Assumption, but I’ve leaned enough from the Church to keep going.

There is a lot here that needs to be discussed. You mention the "Catholic Mary". This Mary is not the same as the Mary of Scripture. Just compare what the Catholic church says about her i.e. queen of heaven, sinless, taken up to heaven and prayed to with the statements found about her in the New Testament. What you will find is that Jesus nor His apostles ever taught that she was to be looked upon like this. This is a crucial difference and cannot be easily dismissed. The only spirtual relationship we are exhorted to have is with the Lord Jesus Who is our Great High Priest Who gave Himself for us.

On the basis of Scripture alone, I'd have to say that the Catholic view of Mary was possible but not probable. You're right, Kevin and Protestant 1, to call attention to bits where Mary seems to diminish into the crowd rather than be a major player. That she should be such a pivotal figure has nothing to contradict it, but little apart from Revelation 12 and a smattering of events in the Gospels to commend it.

Why, then, make room for the notion that the Catholic view is right? Well, two reasons:

Reason #1: Accepting Scripture Requires Accepting Authorities Beyond Scripture
If we're going "on the basis of Scripture alone," we have to ask why we consider Scripture authoritative to begin with, let alone uniquely so...and how we know what is Scripture, and what isn't.

Christianity is either the completion of Judaism, or a corruption of it. Now Judaism was always pretty attached to "The Book," but also attached to authority structures leading the people as father-figures: Priests, Judges, and later Kings. If we look at "The Book" on the basis that Judaism always did, we would have to ask the parallel question "where are the priests and the father-figures?" God was never in the habit, prior to Christ, of just delivering a book from on high and then saying, "Okay, you folk can read; you figure it out."

But let us put that aside and say that, even if we today dispute about who are the correct "father-figures" to hold authority in Christianity, we must give attention to "The Book" as the Jews always did. But which book? Paul, a Roman-citizen Jew raised among Greeks tells Timothy, also a Jew living among the Greeks, that all Scripture is God-breathed and useful; from this we know that Paul is asserting the value of the Old Testament as Paul and Timothy would have known it among the Greeks (most probably the Septuagint). Okay, that covers the Old Testament (probably including Wisdom and Maccabees and whatnot, but that's neither here nor there for the current discussion).

But what about the New? Paul didn't have that in mind when writing to Timothy; most of it didn't yet exist.

Peter asserts that some of Paul's letters are Scripture, but we have to assume that Paul didn't think of himself as writing Scripture when he wrote, say, Philemon. Indeed most of the New Testament letters are written to address certain problems: Putting out fires, not writing a catechism. One who doesn't know context is in danger of misinterpreting, which is why Peter notes that Paul is a difficult writer to follow and that folks who're over-excitable or who just don't know any better have misconstrued Paul's words "to their own destruction." Even Romans was probably thought of more as a doctrinal dissertation than Scripture. The Revelation was known to be Scripture at its authoring, apparently. The Gospels were likely viewed at their authoriship to be more like the first-century equivalent of a Four Spiritual Laws tract: "...these [things] are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."

Now Christian churches began having regular Scripture readings even before the death of the Apostle John, and in addition to the Old Testament, they seem to have read both a Gospel or two, and whichever letters from Apostles they themselves had received. These letters circulated and other churches, not the original recipients, started reading them, too. But there was no standard by which a churchman could know which of these writings were on par with the Old Testament, and which weren't. Hence 1st Clement and the Shepherd (by Hermas) were read, along with the Apocalypse of Peter and other such items. Many churches long rejected Hebrews, Jude, the letters by John, and Revelation. A few churches only had one Gospel. And even the Old Testament wasn't exactly set in stone: enough churches were in the habit of considering the book of Enoch scriptural that it's quoted in the New Testament; the Ethiopian churches consider it canonical to this day!

But the word "canon" apparently comes from the name of a reed whose regular length made it useful for measuring; the word became a generic word for an "accepted standard or norm" later on. By the time of the late 4th century, when the Catholic Bishops decided it was finally time to settle, once and for all, as a disciplinary matter, which of the Christian writings should be formally read in worship services with the same level of respect as the Old Testament, it was natural to refer to such a standard as a "canon."

This standard was then issued, the first such to contain all twenty-seven books of what we today call the New Testament. All previous lists by Origen and others had been shorter, containing twenty-one or twenty-two, with different things included and excluded. There was no agreement on the twenty-seven, until the Catholic Bishops standardized it.

So my first reason for accepting the testimony of the Church is that these authority-figures, these authority-figures, seem to me to be a natural extension of the authority structures set up by God in the Old Testament -- the normal way that God leads His people -- and because if it wasn't for them, I'd have no reason to be sure that the New Testament was authoritative.

...continued...

This issue is not about "splitting hairs" but about the truth and contending for it. If Catholic Mariology is the truth then we should see direct and explict support for it in Scripture. Anyone who studies the New Testement will find that this is not the case. Where in the New Testament does it say she was sinless? Where does it say Christians are to depend on her for all graces? Where do the apostles in their writings exhort us to call her the queen of heaven?

If Mary was the supreme example of faith why don't we see the Lord Jesus pointing us to her? Why don't the apostles? Paul, when he does mention examples of faith uses himself as a model.

Finally if Mary is the mother of the church why do we not see this in their writings? There is not one reference to it.

What this and more points to very serious problems with these doctrines.

Here is what some Catholic scholars say about the woman in Revelation 12. Its quite insightful.

"Raymond Brown and J.A. Fitzmyer, editors of the Jerome Biblical Commentary (2:482):
a woman: Most of the ancient commentators identified her with the Church; in the Middle Ages it was widely held that she represented Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Modern exegetes have generally adopted the older interpretation, with certain modifications.
In recent years several Catholics have championed the Marian interpretation. Numerous contextual details, however, are ill-suited to such an explanation. For example, we are scarcely to think that Mary endured the worst of the pains of childbirth (v. 2), that she was pursued into the desert after the birth of her child (6, 13ff.), or, finally, that she was persecuted through her other children (v. 17). The emphasis on the persecution of the woman is really appropriate only if she represents the Church, which is presented throughout the book as oppressed by the forces of evil, yet protected by God. Furthermore, the image of a woman is common in ancient Oriental secular literature as well as in the Bible (e.g., Is 50:1; Jer 50:12) as a symbol for a people, a nation, or a city. It is fitting, then, to see in this woman the People of God, the true Israel of the OT and NT."

Just because the church of 4th-5th century got the canon of the NT correct does not mean church leaders would always be correct. Any reading of church history up to the present times knows that church leaders do err. Secondly in regards to the canon of the NT the church did not make these writings inspired-inerrant but only recognized them as so.

in order for me to understand your position a little better, could you please also comment on "the woman" in Revelation 12?,...thank you,...

You are right to be concerned about truth. I can only point you to R.C.'s recent post, "Scriptural examples," which I think seriously challenges the Protestant notion of what actually comprises the revealed Word of God, and why the current 27 books of the New Testament should be viewed as the sole authority for answers to questions of doctrine. If you are asking the Roman Catholic to provide answers that are "directly and explicitly" from those 27 books, then you must address the issues that R.C. raises.

What specific issues are you referring to?

See my post at 77. I think these scholars are right in light of what this chapter is saying.

...sorry, don't know how i missed your comment,...maybe they crossed in the mail!

what you quoted was pretty much something that i would have expected based on other perusals of Bible commentaries that i have done in the past,...i have often found them to be somewhat "informative," but rarely illuminating or inspirational to the degree of reading "the Word" itself,...

i'm going to re-read Revelation 12, and i'll be back soon,...probably!

thanks again,...g

Revelation 12
The Woman and the Dragon
1A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. 4His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. 5She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.

7And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

10Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
"Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Christ.
For the accuser of our brothers,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
11They overcame him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
12Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short."

13When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. 14The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the desert, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent's reach. 15Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent. 16But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. 17Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring—those who obey God's commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.

my apologies,...this is an on-line Bible translation,...it is not Catholic,...

i guess i would not be in agreement with the commentators' interpretation here of an implication that Mary would somehow obviously not have suffered birth-pangs; certainly her "other children" (depicted as "God-fearing") in Revelation 17 were not persecuting her; if she has bonded with us as "spiritual mother," she would also most likely suffer in sympathy/be protective as her "spiritual children" are persecuted,...i guess i don't have a problem with a Medieval "take" on this woman representing Mary,...who else could the male child be but Jesus?,...her other children are us,...could not her "wings to fly" be representative of the Assumption?,..."clothed in the sun" sounds a lot like heavenly glory, which is probably pretty sinless,....so i'm still OK with the possibility that these things are quite possibly true about Mary,...obviously, i don't expect you to have to agree,...peace,...god bless,...

...continuing...

You can have the Church without the New Testament -- just ask any Christian who lived from 30 A.D. to 400 A.D. -- but you can't have the New Testament without the Church.

This leads to the conundrum "which Church?" but that conundrum isn't hard to work through once you've realized that the proper role of Scripture is not as an alternative to Sacred Tradition, but as a product of it. Get past that point, and "which Church" doesn't take long. According to the Nicene Creed, it must be "One, Holy, Universal, and Apostolic." Only one candidate matches all four marks. Most of the others don't date back to the time of the Apostles (and you can't really judge on the basis of whether they correctly interpret the Apostles' teaching because of course that's the question under debate!), and of those that do, none of the others are both worldwide and unified.

So, I find myself either needing to accept the teaching of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic church that (a.) these books are Scripture, and (b.) XYZ is the best way to understand that Scripture, or else say that there is no reliable Christian teaching authority on earth, and thus no reliable way to know which books are in the canon.

Reason #2: Some Interpretations Are Incompatible With Who Jesus Is
The bits where Jesus seems to be downplaying Mary are, I think, a result of our seeing the text through twenty-first century eyes. Jesus is a sinless, first-century Jew. The notion that He is showing disrespect toward or disregard of his mother can therefore be crossed out! Indeed, the word "honor" in the Ten Commandments when we are commanded to "honor" our fathers and mothers is the same root as "glory"; i.e., we are commanded to "glorify" or "bring glory to" our fathers and mothers. That Jesus glorified His Father in heaven is a foregone conclusion; but if He is sinless, He must also glorify His mother.

So whatever is meant by Jesus seeming to "shoot down" those who comment favorably about His mother in one or two passages in the gospels, it cannot be that He is "dissing" Mary.

After that, other points are more favorable:

Luke shows us her as pivotal in the Nativity story: An angel greets her in monarchial fashion, declares her kecharitomene, and for a change, it's the angel which seems to be doing obeisance rather than the human being collapsing into a quivering heap on the ground. Next, Mary goes up to visit Elizabeth, and here the text goes out of its way to mirror the Old Testament story of the Ark being carried up into the hill country, with David dancing before it. "Who am I that the Ark of the Lord should come to me?" asks David, and Elizabeth asks "who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" For of course, as many of the ancient Fathers wrote, Mary is the New Ark: Clothed in purity as with pure gold, she carries the Bread from Heaven and the Word of God inside her: She carries the New Covenant.

John, of course, shows her as pivotal at the Wedding at Cana. Apparently on her initiative, Jesus begins his public miracles. At critical moments (also at the Cross), Jesus seems always to call her "Woman": For of course it is the seed of the Woman which was prophesied to crush the serpent's head.

And it is John also who writes in Revelation 11-12 of seeing the Ark in heaven, and immediately thereafter proceeds to describe a woman with a crown of twelve stars, giving birth to the Messiah. Generally speaking, a crown represents something other than cleaning-woman status, and we know who was mother of the Messiah. Naturally this imagery is representative of many things: The dragon is Satan; so it might also be Herod or Rome; the male child is Jesus; so it might also be Salvation generally. The woman might likewise represent Israel or the Church...but if the male child is understood as Jesus, and the dragon as Satan, why should the woman be the only character present who does not have a personal, individual meaning? And the only person she can be is Mary, apparently wearing all the lights of heaven as regalia.

Why is it that devotion to Mary shows up so early? That early iconography shows Mary enlarged, with all the apostles as smaller figures surrounding her? That the Mother and Child dominate art from the catacombs to the earliest cathedrals of east and west?

All of this is insufficient to prove a single Marian dogma; it only goes far enough to show them to be not incompatible with the beliefs of the earliest Christians.

It is the need for a justification for the authority of the New Testament canon which sends me to the Church. And once the Church gives me that source of authority, I find they give me Mary as well.

It's more than what I asked for, and more than I expected to get, and in some ways I'm not sure what to do with it! I went looking for a Bible, and got a Bible, a Pope, and a Mother.

But at least I now have a sure foundation for the Scriptures. For that, I would have gladly paid a price; if instead of paying a price, I actually get a bonus, then who am I to complain?

Sorry about the delay between the posting of parts 1 and 2 of my latest. I hope it didn't cause any confusion.

....thank you for your recent beautiful posts,...they confirm and express much better some of the things i have been trying to "get to,"...

This is a true statement you make, in response to my post about the process of the canonization of Scripture:

...but it misses the point.

The point is epistemology: How do we know what we know? If these bishops "got it right," it means that you personally must have "checked their sums" against the right answer, and determined that they "got it right." But where did you find the right answer? How did you figure it out?

Now if you want to accept the view that we're not sure that the New Testament is inspired, then you can say: "Well, Jesus didn't give us any way to discern inspired writings from uninspired, and therefore we must all make our best educated guess and work on that basis."

You can, of course, take the doctrinal pronouncement of Catholic Bishops as having been correct. But you will have to come up with good reasons why you shouldn't also accept what they say about other things: Transubstantiation, for example. (Yes, the term wasn't in use, but the doctrine was held by all those involved in the canon process.) Or Apostolic Succession. Or confession to priests. Or baptismal regeneration. Or Sacramental Theology generally. Or calling Mary Mother of God and saying she never had personal sin.

You can say, "Even a blind sow can occasionally find an acorn, and even a stopped clock is right twice a day; so even Catholic Bishops believing a lot of stuff I think is milarky can correctly determine the canon of Scripture." But how do you know they did?

How do you know they didn't include Revelation because it appeared to glorify Mary and that was their institutional bias? Perhaps it shouldn't be in there...Martin Luther was inclined to remove it at one point, changing his mind later to make it a matter of personal opinion. Or perhaps James' rejection of Sola Fide in chapter 2 is due to its erroneous inclusion in the canon? Who knows how many Catholic corruptions made their way in, if the Catholic Bishops can get it wrong!

How much will you investigate it?

How much will a high-school educated plumber investigate it?

How could a typical illiterate Christian church member in the years between the death of the Apostle John and the canonization of Scripture determine what was true Christianity? How could he fact-check his pastor's teaching, without benefit of some external authority, when the New Testament did not yet exist as that external authority?

How could a typical illiterate Christian church member know the truth in the years between the canonization of the New Testament and the advent of broad literacy some 1,200 years later? How could he even gain access to a copy of the Scriptures, in the years prior to the printing press, when each copy of the Scriptures would cost several years' wages?

How is it that these Catholic Bishops, already believing and preaching doctrines so distinctively Catholic as to differentiate them from every modern Christian denomination except the more traditional Eastern Orthodox churches, could possibly have canonized the twenty-seven books of the New Testament -- and read from them at Mass every Sunday thereafter -- without noticing all the alleged "incompatibilities" between them and the very Catholic doctrines they were preaching?

The problem is not that one cannot interpret Scripture in an non-Catholic way. The problem is that one can interpret Scripture in twenty mutually exclusive non-Catholic ways, and set up many thousands of denominations, one for each permutation of the interpretations, but only the Catholic, or possibly the Orthodox, view allows history to make sense.

In the end, I think that the Protestant view of Scripture is a very well-meaning mistake. (I hold it to be well-meaning, because I was well-meaning when I held it.) The New Testament gives us some writings from the apostles, and they are very useful in context, "for training, for correction, for reproof," and so on. But "in context" means "in the Church." No ancient Christian was expected to take the Scriptures by themselves and determine correct foundationaly doctrines from them, for they do not contain a Catechism. They were meant to be read initially as letters and tracts and an Apocalypse; later, they were bound and the Church recommended reading them as additional historical information for those who had already been Catechized.

But to take them by themselves as the sole source of doctrinal truth is to take them:

(1.) As something they never claim to be;
(2.) As something they themselves point to the Church as being;
(3.) As something we'd have no reason to think them to be, unless the Church told us so, and we had reason to think the Church was right.

Protestant 1, your position is that of knowing that the twenty-seven books are what they are, but not realizing that the reason you know it is because it's a Tradition handed down from and approved by the Catholic Church, and inherited without argument by every other denomination. You can either say that the Catholic Church's authority is sufficiently reliable as to make the matter effectively closed, or not. But if you reject that, there's no other reason to consider the matter effectively closed.

In which case the canon remains open. Want to go there? The Mormons would like it, but I don't suspect you would.

...it was asked by someone, why the Apostles didn't make a bigger deal about Mary in their writings/epistles,...i believe that all this was "a work in progress" at the time,...Catholic Saints are not usually proclaimed to be so, until after their death, and their life's work/evidence is also confirmed in subsequent ways by signs & wonders (i.e. "miracles") associated with their connection/help, which is always, of course, with and through Christ,...so, just as Jesus accepted to be "limited" and to live a human life in human form, and was known at the time in this certain way, and for us later anecdotally, He returned to His greater reality and identity after death,...it is through revelation only that we know about His "greater self,"...things that were not observed/recorded as He lived,...similarly, a Saint's greater identity in Christ becomes more apparent/revealed/developed after death,...surely the recordable heroic efforts, great faith, or great sufferings while living are characteristic of the Saints,...but their influence usually expands and broadens and is more widely known/experienced after death,...even if Mary did have a special identity and mission in her birth, it did not have to be so fully apparent in her lifetime,...

another point that has occurred to me about Protestants approaching the Catholic "world," is the scripture, "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed," spoken to doubting Thomas by Jesus,...in the simplicity of having felt/experienced and accepted certain realities and practices of their faith, many Catholics are not really prepared to "step up to the plate" and defend them to rabid scripturally informed and demanding Protestants, of which i have been one!,...but they may be the ones who are yet blessed in the believing practice of their faith, even though not having tried rigorously to "prove" that which they have accepted,...personally, i like the idea that both camps can be nourishing in the faith to one another,...

Let me address this issue briefly from RC. You wrote--
"Protestant 1, your position is that of knowing that the twenty-seven books are what they are, but not realizing that the reason you know it is because it's a Tradition handed down from and approved by the Catholic Church, and inherited without argument by every other denomination. You can either say that the Catholic Church's authority is sufficiently reliable as to make the matter effectively closed, or not. But if you reject that, there's no other reason to consider the matter effectively closed.

In which case the canon remains open. Want to go there? The Mormons would like it, but I don't suspect you would."
I do know the reasons why these books were considered canon and others rejected. This is not a difficult question to answer. Secondly, as i stated above it does not follow that just becasue the church in this period got the canon right does not mean everything after this the church would be correct on everything else. Many examples could be pointed to that the Catholic church has erred many times. What this means is that there is no such thing as an infallible church that cannot err.

....if there is no such thing as an infallible church, in your opinion, then why in the world do you accept the scriptures as being infallible?,...if you don't mind my asking?,...

Protestant 1:


Then tell us!

That's a rhetorical request. I mean, I do know, too.

The 27 were included in the standard set of readings (that is, they were "made part of the canon") for different reasons.

Some were included because as far as anyone could remember, they had never been in dispute.

Those that were in dispute, which were ultimately included, were included because nothing doctrinally objectionable to the Catholic bishops was found in them, and because they seemed likely to the scholars of the day to have been written, if not by an actual apostle, at least by someone closely associated with an apostolic ministry.

Those that were in dispute, which were rejected, were rejected either because they made doctrinal assertions or historical claims which the Catholic bishops found imperfect or contrary to the faith as they understood it, or because they clearly didn't date back to apostolic times, or for both reasons.

Now the interesting thing is that "modern scholarship" is constantly "discovering" new things about the authorship of the New Testament. Depending on which modern scholar you follow, half the Pauline letters may not have been written by Paul.

So: Does one re-open the canon, throw those letters out, on that basis? I mean, if the Catholic bishops got the authorship wrong after all....

We know that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And we must Know the Truth, to be set free. Doctrines matter.

Jesus did not, of course, end His earthly ministry saying, "Give everyone this book, so that they'll know my teachings." What did He actually do?

...continued...

...continuing...

He did this: He arose from the dead, hung around a few weeks teaching the Apostles important things about how to run the newly founded Kingdom, before Ascending. Among the things the Apostles heard Him say, which rang in their ears after Pentecost, were such tidbits as:

(1.) All authority in heaven and earth has been given to Me;
(2.) Even as the Father has sent Me, so I send you (the Apostles);
(3.) Go ye therefore into all nations teaching them whatsoever I have commanded you;
(4.) You aren't ready for all the doctrines just yet, but I'll send the Holy Spirit to teach you the additional ones as time goes by;
(5.) Peter has the Prime Ministerial keys and will serve the role of being the Rock of my Church...so much so that we're all going to nickname him "Rocky" from now on;
(6.) The gates of Hades will not prevail against My Church;
(7.) Whose sins you forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained;
(8.) When someone does or teaches something flaky, discuss it with him, if he doesn't turn aside, bring two or three witnesses to discuss it with him; if he still doesn't repent, take it before the Church, and if he doesn't listen even to The Church, let some serious shunning begin;
(9.) There will be persons who never marry, who become effectively "eunuchs," for the sake of the Kingdom.

Years later, the apostles were doing such things as:
(a.) Issuing doctrinal teachings and making disciplinary judgments based not on Scripture but on what "seemed good" to them and to the Holy Spirit;
(b.) Commending Christians for accepting their verbal preaching "for what it was, that is, the Word of God."
(c.) Making sure their disciples knew how they ought to act in "the pillar and bulwark of the Truth, which is the Church of the Living God."
(d.) Being so casual about the writing of the New Testament scriptures that, far from being formally written for the purposes of being Scripture, they're often laced with personal observations, recommendations for tummyache, requests that a former slaveowner treat his newly-converted runaway slave well, references to earlier letters that we don't actually have, and such a general lack of concern for writing important doctrines down quickly that some 65 years elapsed before the canon was complete.
(e.) Acknowledging the correctness of an Ethiopian's complaint that "how can I understand the Scriptures, unless someone explains them to me?"
(f.) Noting that "How can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear, unless someone preaches it to them? And how can there be a preacher to preach it to them, unless he is sent?" Remember the word "sent" here is related to the word for "apostle"; one could almost say, "Unless he is apostolated." Sounds suspiciously like only teachers approved by the Church have any rightful authority to go out teaching....

This picture simply does not fit with a Christianity which uses the Bible as its sole source of revelation, and otherwise leaves everyone up to their own devices.

If Scripture were the sole pillar and bulwark of the truth for the Christian, Scripture would have made that claim. And it would need to have included a Table of Contents of what was, and wasn't Scripture.

But it didn't make that claim, and it doesn't include a Table of Contents by which we could learn what was, and wasn't, Scripture. Instead, Scripture claims that the Church is the pillar (upholder) and bulwark (defender) of the Truth. Which is why it's the Church's job to issue a Table of Contents.

Which they did. If they hadn't, we'd all be doing guesswork today, just like the "modern scholars" who want to continually re-invent the wheel.

The Protestant can, in the end, say, "But that Catholic interpretation of Scripture is wrong, therefore, they aren't infallible." The Catholic responds, "Actually, it's right after all, and so are the others; therefore, the infallibility of Sacred Tradition remains intact."

Who will decide? God, ultimately, at the judgment...but in the interim, the Catholics are faithful to the ecclesiology laid out in the New Testament. And they trust that the Gates of Hell ultimately never did prevail against Jesus' Church. And they trust that it didn't take until 1,500 years after the Resurrection for people to finally figure out what true Christianity was...that the Holy Spirit didn't abandon the vast majority of all the Christians who have ever lived for all that long time.

If, in the end, they are ascribing too much credit to the Body of Christ, they will show up at the gates of Heaven, see Jesus face-to-face, and say, "We're sorry, Lord...we gave you too much credit."

If there's any error to make, that's the kind I want to make.

I accept them because they are God-breathed. That is their nature.
Do you believe the Catholic church cannot err?

Since Catholics make claims about Traditions can any catholic provide a list of all the Traditions in the Catholic Church? I hear this phrase quite a lot from catholics and i have never seen such a list. There must be some kind of offical list that can be checked.

Secondly, where does a catholic go to get the offical interpretation of Scripture that shows them if they have correctly interpreted a verse of scripture correctly?

Protestant 1:


I think the answer to both those questions is the same: Consult the full-sized, green-cover, official Catechism of the Catholic Church.

So far as I'm aware, it covers at least in overview every item defined as dogma. It also tends to copiously reference the historical origins of each dogma, or even of popular descriptions of those dogmas, with references to Church Fathers, councils, and the like.

You might also find it useful to read the compilation of the Church Fathers put together by a scholar named Jurgens, since he indexes various quotes from the Fathers, from the 1st century onward, according to the current Catholic dogmas for which they demonstrate early support.

If you get particularly interested in early support for Catholic teachings, Mike Aquilina's The Fathers of the Church and The Mass of the Early Christians are easy-to-read and a good introduction. But Jurgens is more robust, if a far longer read.

Anyhow, if you want "the real skinny" on what is required belief of the individual Catholic, the Catechism's probably the way to go.

i did make a reply to you awhile ago, but it didn't appear,...whether someone did not approve of it, or whether i did something mechanically stupid, i can't say,...i said that i found your position to be somewhat illogical, to trust in the self-defined, self-limited, infallible God-breathed scriptures, that managed to be unerringly selected by a group of fallible people who apparently, according to this description, have not been able to get anything infallibly correct before or since,...i'm just wondering how they did this, got something so right once and only once, and why you happen to believe that they did,...and i asked you if you thought God had stopped breathing since then?,...it was actually a serious question, but maybe someone thought i was being sarcastic,...i wasn't,...and i believe what the scriptures say, that right now we (all of us) do see "through a glass darkly," but that many things will become more clear when we see face-to-face,...meanwhile we do our best, while God is patient and understanding,...

The idea that God could use fallible men to discover His infallible Word does not require these men to be infallible themselves. The only infallible Man is the Lord Jesus. All other men are fallen and capable of making errors. Secondly, I did not say the Catholic church has always been wrong only that it has been wrong on some doctrines and practices.
Secondly, I’m not sure what you mean by “i asked you if you thought God had stopped breathing since then?” Are you asking if I think God is still giving further revelations to the church? If that is what you are asking then my answer would be no. If you think He is then it would follow this “new revelation” should be part of your Bible (since that is what revelation is).
Thirdly, Scripture commands us to be on guard against false teachers who will come into the church itself and deceive many. See 2 Peter 2:1-3. If the church was incapable of erring then this command would be absurd. My question for you and others is how do you go about applying this in your own church? On what basis do you know Mary was without sin, assumed into heaven, is to be prayed to and is queen of heaven if the Scripture never teaches this? In fact the Scripture tells us all men are sinners and there is not one case in Scripture where men are exhorted pray to anyone but God.

I appreciate the honesty of RC in Post #75. If we simply stick with the words of Scripture alone, it's tough to make a case for the "Marian doctrines". Then RC launches into a lengthy discusson on the nature of Scripture, the nature of authority, etc.

And I do think this is the key issue at hand here. Has God given the Roman Catholic Church the authority to *add* conscience-binding dogmas to Holy Scripture, or has He not? Where is the Word of God to be found? Is the Church's role to interpret the Bible or to add to the Bible?

All Christians have a conscience. And all Christians must one day stand before Almighty God and give an account for whether or not they obeyed God. My conscience is irrevocably tied to the Word of God and not to any church. I will refuse to pray to Mary, I will refuse to teach my son to pray to Mary, I will plead agnostic on whether Mary ever sinned or was assumed up to heaven--all because GOD HAS NOT REVEALED THESE TO ME. Does Mary hear us when we pray? Maybe--but we don't know, for God hasn't told us. Was Mary without sin? I suppose all kind of logical reasoning could be used to show how it's theoretically possible that God could have kept her from sin...but God has not told us this, so I will gladly plead agnostic here once again.

This is really the heart and soul of it all, isn't it?

It makes sense to me why many Roman Catholics do not know their Bibles very well. They don't need to! Just run to the Catechism for any and all answers to questions. Why spend rigorous blood, sweat and tears studying the Bible when you can skip ahead to the Final Word, the Roman Catholic Church? It seems that for Roman Catholics, the Bible is a secondary source of authority and inspiration--the real action is with Church encyclicals, Catechisms, papal prounouncements, etc. Whereas for Protestants, Scripture is primary, not secondary. God has uniquely revealed Himself in Holy Scripture--and the apostolic writings can not err...whereas all church teachings can and do err. (For Catholics, the Bible needs to be read in line with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church; for Protestants, the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church need to be read in line with the Bible.)

We Protestants want to say to you Catholics: we're so happy that you find solace in the Rosary, in praying to saints, in indulgences, in purgatory, in Marian devotion, in marriage annulments, in indulgences...the list just goes on and on. But please don't try and bind other Christians' consciences with your unique Roman views. The Roman Catholic Church speaks for Roman Catholic Christians, but she doesn't speak for *all* Christians.

C.S. Lewis has perhaps come the closest to writing a book that helpfully speaks to, for and from *all* Christians in *Mere Christianity*. He does this by avoiding those teachings that are unique to various churches (e.g. Rome's Marian doctrines, Geneva's predestination doctrines, the Orthodox' icons) and highlighting those truths that all Christians can embrace. We would do well to follow his example.

Thanks R.C. for taking the time to address the question of the Church’s authority in such detail. You’ve proffered many convincing arguments in support of the Catholic Church’s position. I guess we can say the same thing in so many different ways, but one fundamentally must recognize that Jesus’ Body is still here, and that He wouldn’t abandon Himself. If Protestant 1 is not swayed by your arguments, you’ve still given me a lot to bolster my understanding of the reality of the Word in the People of God.

What are your sources? You mentioned Mike Aquilina’s The Fathers of the Church and The Mass of the Early Church. What is the name of Jurgens’ book? Have you written a book yourself?

Protestant 1, I would encourage you to spend a little more time reflecting upon each point that R.C. has laid out, and see if there is not some morsel for you as well?

I must be missing something. What points did RC make that were so persuasive? I didn’t see anything from him or anyone else for the matter that just because the church of the 4th-5th century got the NT canon right means that all other doctrines of the church are correct. It does follow in the least that the Marian dogmas that were formulated centuries are correct in light that the Lord Jesus nor His apostles ever taught these doctrines. What I’m finding with all cattholics I have encountered is what Kevin wrote that catholics do not know the Bible very well. If they did they would see the problems with the Marian dogmas.

I believe that most Protestants would say that the heart of the matter is justification, not authority. Both Gerstner and Sproul, two dyed-in-the-wool Calvinists, have said that if the Catholic Church is correct that justification is by faith and works, and not by faith alone, they would be on their knees tomorrow outside the Vatican doing penance.

Sproul went further by saying that all of these other issues, like the Saints and Mary and Purgatory, were peripheral issues to the Reformers. He insists that Luther would not have risked dividing the Church of Christ for any reason other than the question of how a man is made right with God – the question upon which the “Church stands or falls.” Therefore, I have to say that Protestants would do well to follow the early Reformers, dispense with all of these sideline issues, and seek the unity of the faith, if a proper understanding of justification is not at stake.

But in regard to authority, without a doctrine of the Word of God in the People of God, I don’t see how it is possible to escape Gerstner’s conclusion that in the Bible all we have is a “fallible collection of infallible books.” Is that good enough for you? For me, it not so much that I am looking for an authoritative Church; I just can’t seem to avoid it.

Sorry Kevin. The post "Re: The Heart of the Matter," written by "To Kevin," was really from me. I entered "To Kevin" in the wrong field...

How can there ever be unity so long as the Roman Catholic church has these doctrines? Do you consider the Marian dogmas a sideline issue?

i'm not really writing anything here in an attempt to convince someone else of my own particular believing path, experience or framework,...yes, i do believe in/participate in many things that are an integral part of Catholic experience/teaching,...(do i believe/experience exactly as someone else does?,...i doubt it!),...and i, personally, am very very partial to scripture as a tool for understanding,...but i do not disrespect or dispute the existence or relative validity of the many many other writings, including the catechism and historical/biographical accounts, but they were not formative for me (except maybe for the "lives of the saints"),...i make no claim to great sums of knowledge as to every single detail that could be considered to be part of the vast amount of approved catholic teaching/literature,...i'm sure that in my lifetime, i'll never even become familiar with the details of a huge percentage of it,...and this does not worry me,...i consider the necessary valid testimony of the "basics" to be in place,...with regard to Mary, i am very very thankful for Revelation 11,12, because without those references, i would probably have as hard a time as some others here in accepting the role she is given in the Catholic church,...do i pray TO Mary?,...no, i pray WITH Mary TO Jesus & the Father & the Holy spirit, even while "doing" the rosary...i am more partial to silent prayer than i am to the rosary,...but i can be OK in a room full of vocal rosary pray-ers, although i am more often found whispering Hail Marys, anywhere and everywhere, quietly under my breath,...i DO like to spend quiet time in the church in the presence of God, and communing with the Father & the Son & the Holy Spirit & the Saints,...this is the prayer niche that i have developed after more than 30 years in the church,...it works for me,...no one is demanding that i perform in any other way for them,...i can read/study further if i so desire, but no one is compelling me to do so, although i do follow further trains of thought from time to time as things catch my interest,...

I don't believe the Marian dogmas of the Church determine whether or not I will get to heaven. I have not settled all of the questions about Mary in my own mind, but I do believe that the communion of saints that Protestants say they believe includes communion with those saints who are alive on earth and those saints who are even more alive in heaven.

God can save Mary by preventing her from falling into the pit, and he can save me after I fall into the pit. Either way, God is still the savior. In heaven, we will be perfected and free of all sin, and will be preserved from ever falling again. And there is no rational reason why God could not preserve Mary from falling into sin even in this life. If your response is that this is not in the Bible, you must remember that your question was "How can there ever be unity so long as the Roman Catholic Church has these doctrines?" It is not a sufficient reason to reject a doctrine simply because it is repugnant to you. I am simply saying that there is no reason to reject the Church's Mariology, based on reason alone, or from our knowledge of the character of God.

Consider some of the things that Luther himself said about Mary:

[S]he became the Mother of God, in which work so many and such great good things are bestowed on her as pass man's understanding. For on this there follows all honor, all blessedness, and her unique place in the whole of mankind, among which she has no equal, namely, that she had a child by the Father in heaven, and such a Child.... Hence men have crowded all her glory into a single word, calling her the Mother of God.... None can say of her nor announce to her greater things, even though he had as many tongues as the earth possesses flowers and blades of grass: the sky, stars; and the sea, grains of sand. It needs to be pondered in the heart what it means to be the Mother of God.

Luther also said:

The Holy Spirit permitted the Virgin Mary to remain a true, natural human being of flesh and blood, just as we. However, he warded off sin from her flesh and blood so that she became the mother of a pure child, not poisoned by sin as we are. For in that moment when she conceived, she was a holy mother filled with the Holy Spirit and her fruit is a holy pure fruit, at once God and truly man, in one person.

So I do not believe that Luther would have split the Church if the issue was simply disagreement over Mary.

Protestant 1:

You ask, quite fairly,
I didn't say anything like that. If I could have, and were it logical, it would have persuaded you, which is why you're asking for it...but so far as I know, there is no such argument to be made.

However, this doesn't mean that that particular argument, were it to ever be found, is the only route to being persuaded of the Catholic position on this.

In my case, the route was different, namely, what I enunciated to you: That were I a Christian in the first century, or the second, or the third, or the fourth, I would have no New Testament to explain to me the nature of Christianity...but I would have the Church, which claims to be the pillar and bulwark of Truth.

In the fifth century, were I literate and a scholar, and could afford the education in Koine Greek, and tutelage by rabbis who knew Hebrew, and could afford to spend several years' salary to obtain copies of the Scriptures, I could look in them and find:

(1.) nothing to obviously contradict the elements of the faith I'd been taught;

(2.) quite a lot that clearly enunciated the elements of the faith I'd been taught; and,

(3.) many silences on elements of the faith I'd been taught.

Were I then, as an early fifth-century Christian, to ask an older Christian why Scripture didn't say things clearly on every topic, but only on certain topics, I'd be told, "Well, not every topic was a point of contention in the days of the Apostles. Everyone accepted Mary's importance despite her personal habit of making little of herself and receding into the background whenever anyone called attention to her...a bit like Cephas referring to himself a mere pastor, har har har, or John calling himself the elder, both of which are true, of course, though a great deal more could be said about the Beloved Apostle and the Holder of the Keys respectively!

"Anyway the most clearly enunciated items in Scripture are those enunciated by writers with a habit of clear and concise writing -- which, for all his other wonderful traits, sadly excludes Paul -- on topics then being debated. That meant primarily refuting the Gnostics who wanted to turn Christ into the hero of a Greek mystery cult, the other Gnostics who were just Manichean pessimists, the Judaizers, and a handful of weirdos in Corinth who believed that they should form spin-offs -- you might refer to them as 'denominations' or some such word -- focusing on the teachings of a given person such as Apollos or Paul, to the exclusion of the overall authority of the Church in Christ.

"So these were the topics covered in Paul's writings, and Peter's, and whichever of Paul's best buddies wrote Hebrews, and John's various writings, and James and Jude. Specific issues were refuted, but not everything was spelled out...why should it be? Nobody claimed they were writing a Catechism; they were just writing letters for specific issues at specific times, to people who already knew the faith in most other ways because they'd had Apostles stay at their cities sometimes for years on end to explain the faith to them verbally."

Were I then to ask this older Christian where I could find a first-century Catechism, spelling out things basic beliefs in detail, he might say the following:

"Funny question. Don't you go to Mass? Don't you know the Creed? But if you must go searching for an older document to tell you what your town catechist should already have taught you, I suppose the best you can do is to read the Didache, and glean some of the salient details from Hermas, Clement of Rome, Athanasius, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Ignatius of Antioch, and Justin Martyr. None of those writings are Scripture, of course, so they don't have the Church's official stamp of approval as being God-breathed and therefore inerrant. But for the authors I just listed, you'll find them very orthodox 99% of the time. You'll see from what you read there that what you've been taught your whole life, the Catholic Faith, is exactly what Ignatius and Polycarp were martyred for, what the Apostles were martyred for teaching apart from John, and what is these days is increasingly the faith of the whole Mediterranean world."

***

There ends my hypothetical fifth-century conversation, but I think you get the idea. In the end, in order to be respectful of Scripture, I feel I must treat Scripture as it was intended to be treated: As the "memoirs of the Apostles," plus some topical letters requiring great sensitivity to context (the recipients, the problem being addressed), plus an Apocalypse.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that the New Testament should contain a complete description of everything that comprises the dogmas of the Christian faith. It never claims to contain that. No part of it was ever written to contain all that. No part of it was even written to fill in gaps which the other parts had left out. And nearly all of it was written to an audience who were already Christians, who'd already presumably learned the basics, and to whom the only reason to spell out the basics a second time was for remedial purposes on particular topics they were getting wrong.

...continued...

...continuing...

But in order to be faithful what was clearly taught in Scripture, I found that I must at least heed the following items:

(1.) Paul was absolutely scandalized by the beginnings of denominationalism in Corinth;

(2.) The Church is described as "The Pillar and Bulwark of Truth";

(3.) Judas Iscariot's apostolic office was left vacant after his death, and Peter immediately moved to fill it, suggesting these offices survived the deaths of their original holders and had successors;

(4.) Paul and others frequently stated that they preferred to teach Christians in person by word-of-mouth, and wrote to them only briefly out of immediate necessity, but sent the letters in the hands of trustworthy representatives when possible, and expected Christians to heed apostolic teaching when it came to them "whether by word-of-mouth, or by letter";

(5.) The apostles were granted the power to forgive sins in Jesus' name, finally explaining why in the Gospels, when Jesus (singular) forgave sins, the gospel author commented that the crowd were amazed that God had granted authority among men (plural) to forgive sins;

(6.) Jesus expected that The Church would have those in it who'd forgo marital relations to work for the Kingdom of Heaven as "eunuchs";

(7.) Jesus expected the Church to sometimes exercise excommunication as a church discipline for those who unrepentantly defied the moral teachings of the Church -- implying a Church where unity of moral teachings would make it possible to consistently do so;

(8.) Jesus promised His Church would never fail.

When I looked for a Church that had been there from the time of Jesus, that was unified enough to expel someone for violating moral teachings without having the same-denomination church one town over make the same person a deacon a week later, with a large number of "eunuchs for the Kingdom" serving in important roles, which claimed power to forgive sins, and had in it successors of the successors of the original apostles, there just weren't a lot of candidates out there.

And when I realized what Scripture really was and wasn't meant to be, and the role it did and didn't play in the lives of Christians until after 1500 or thereabouts...well!

I didn't feel I could be true to history, and take Scripture any other way, or the Church any other way, than St. Augustine and Company had.

Therefore, I feel I can expect there to be doctrines not spelled out in Scripture (the hypostatic union and the Trinity, as well as Mary), since the New Testament was never intended by its authors (or its Author) to spell everything out.

That's what the Church is for. Or at least that's how it was in the beginning (the first century at least), and is now, and how I expect it forever more will be.

I'll have to blame Kevin Offner for getting me into this discussion. ;-) Like him, I'm an evangelical Protestant with an interest in Roman Catholicism (devoted ROFTer), but with many serious disagreements with the stands of Rome on certain significant issues, Mary being one. I appreciate David Mills' fair presentation of evangelical views; the fact that he was once a thoughtful adherent certainly shows itself.

A few points I'd like to make which either haven't, I think, gotten as much attention as they might, or which haven't been addressed in a way I'd like:

* I make a distinction between recognizing Mary as Theotokos and Mary as the Mother of God. The first term is what the Council of Ephesus used in AD 431; the latter is how it typically has been translated, first into Latin and later into other languages, but the terms are not synonymous. Time was when I would have disagreed with either term, but on further reflection, I have come to agreement with Theotokos, God-bearer, as a valid description of Mary's giving birth to the God-man, Jesus.

I'm still not willing to accept "Mother of God," though, as Mother has a generative sense that I believe confounds the two natures of Jesus. Mary is the Mother of God only in an adoptive sense, but would anyone call Joseph the Father of God because he was Jesus' adoptive father? I don't think so, and in the same way, I don't see how "Mother of God" accurately portrays Mary's relationship to the Triune God. (I recoil even more strongly against calling Mary the Spouse of God or of the Holy Spirit, language which veers much too close to deification--or to pagan mythology of gods impregnating women. It's also rather jarring to see her called "Queen of Heaven," when the only reference in the Bible to the "Queen of Heaven" is to the pagan goddess Artemis/Isis in Jeremiah.)

* The sinlessness of Mary is not only not taught in Scripture; it is explicitly denied, as the Bible makes clear that the only sinless human is Jesus. (I'll have to disagree with my good friend Kevin; I can't be agnostic on this point.) The Catholic insistence that only a sinless person could have been holy enough to be the vessel of God's incarnation puts a limitation on God that is without Scriptural or logical basis. The glory of God's interaction with humanity is that he uses all of us sinful creatures to accomplish his purposes; he deigns to dwell in each one of us, original sin and all, when we in faith receive him. And to use Occam's razor, since a direct intervention by God to interrupt the natural transmission of sin is necessary in any case, why not simply apply it where it is known (Jesus) rather than going back a step and adding someone else (Mary)? (Once you start going backward in time, why stop with Mary? Let's make her parents sinless as well, so that they're able to bring such a person into the world...)

* Mary is not without flaws in the Biblical portrayal--she joins with Jesus' brothers (kinsmen if you prefer; I won't fight that battle here) in seeking to prevent Jesus from carrying out his ministry, considering him literally crazy (Mark 3:21-35). While she knew from before his birth that he had a special role to play, she clearly misunderstood at least on occasion, and it is simply not correct to say that she had a complete understanding of Jesus' mission. Is it any wonder, then, that Jesus takes that occasion (as well as Luke 11:27-28) to elevate every person who follows the word of God above his mother?

* The doctrine of the Assumption is, from the perspective of this Christian, a pious fairy tale that somehow got translated into dogma. The elaborated story, with the disciples magically transported to her side from the four corners of the known world, strikes me as similar in unbelievability and inappropriateness to the stories of the child Jesus making birds out of clay which then fly away. The fact that no mention is made of the Assumption before the 4th century makes appeal to Tradition (with a veneer of questionable Scriptural allusions) for its basis yet more reason for Protestants to distrust Catholic appeals to Tradition. And it's an example of why Protestants distrust the concept of a Magisterium, wondering what further innovations dressed up in Tradition will come in the future (Mary as Mediatrix/Co-Redemptrix, which has been ardently pushed by many contemporary Catholics in defiance of Scriptural assertion that the only mediator and redeemer is Jesus?).

It is certainly true that the question of authority is paramount in Marian discussions. If the doctrine of the infallible Magisterium is accurate, then it matters not how unlikely a doctrine is based on Scripture or logic; we salute. But for those of us who have not been able to accede to the doctrine of the Magisterium, Marian dogma is a perfect example of why we find the Magisterium difficult to accept--apocrypha turns into dogma, and the result is, in our view, to obscure the central truths of the faith, which focus on the person and work of Jesus (isn't that why we hold the name of Christians?).

Have Protestants over-reacted in ignoring or denigrating Mary? Yes, we have, and some corners, at least, are recognizing that and seeking to make changes. (Anyone who considers her passive needs to revisit the Golgotha scene; being there required more courage than most of the disciples had.) Timothy George's CT article that David Mills mentioned is one example; so is the just-released ECT statement on Mary. But David is right; the changes we are making are not first steps on the path to Rome, any more than Catholics reading the Bible are doing so to prepare to become Protestants. We are looking at Mary based on the Bible, not based on the accretions of legend or the assertions of a pope. So for us, "Hail Mary" will remain only 1) a historical quote on a par with "Do not go to Egypt" in Jeremiah 42:19 (true in its Scriptural time, but not repeatable today in its particulars) and 2) a desperation football pass.

P.S. If anyone chooses to respond, please keep names distinct; I'm Kelvin, not Kevin.

I've done some checking and I will continue to stand by my earlier point about the Orthodox, with which David disagrees. Putting it bluntly, one can be a faithful Orthodox Christian and still believe that Mary, while NOW "all-holy", once sinned. This is what Saint Basil the Great taught, it is what Saint Chrysostom taught and it is what the Greek Orthodox Bishop Maximus of Pittsburgh teaches. The Orthodox believe that Mary inherited fallen human nature and had a consequential need to be purified *after* her own conception. Augustine believed this, Pope St. Leo the Great in the fifth century believed this, and so did Bernard of Clairvaux and Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Remember, the only point being made here is not that Orthodox and Protestants agree about Mary. Rather, it is simply to show that the "Marian dogmas" are unique to the Roman Catholic Church, and not among those that have been held by all Christians throughout all time. These doctrines are not part of The Great Tradition, though they are part of the Roman Catholic Tradition.

And I of course disagree with David's last sentence as well: "I would still argue that the Catholic Church's Marian doctrines are biblical and patristic." There's not a whit of evidence from Holy Scripture that Mary was without sin or was bodily assumed up to heaven (or that we Christians are to be encouraged to pray to her). And as I've showed above, there was disagreement among the Patristics about her Bodily Assumption as well, so it's not straightforward to state what the "patristic position" on Mary is.

i wonder if Protestants have a corresponding concept to the Catholic belief that receiving Christ in the Eucharist, body, soul, and divinity, has a transformative effect on the receiver,...the quality of this gradual transformation, as we receive this special "food" in faith, helps to incline us more to be able to participate in a perception and connection/communion with the Holy Trinity (God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and with the spiritual nature/development of the Saints, wherein great changes and victories over the base level of human nature (with its flesh & sin inclinations) have been wrought,...i think it is much easier for a Catholic with this orientation to the Eucharist to accept/perceive/value the possibility of this type of new/sinless nature that is attributed to Mary,...(it does not make her part of the God-head),...and otherwise, i think it is almost impossible to imagine,...(since i'm not directly quoting Catholic literature in attempting to describe this phenomenon, i stand open to correction from the Catholic literature experts anytime they feel the need to do so,...) (-:

So on the one hand Mary gets to bear Jesus, on the other she gets to 'adopt' Him? Please explain.

Kelvin:

That was a great response, very like my own thoughts on certain matters. (I suppose when one sees another person thinking like oneself, it's always easier to say "great response!")

I have a quibble with you on one item, though:
Which passages are you using to defend that assertion?

I ask because I know of no passages which, taken as utterly universal declarations of sinfulness, don't (a.) also include Jesus, and (b.) also include infants and young kids and even unborn children who most Christians would regard as having never committed personal sin. That fact requires Christians to regard those passages as generalizations, but not required to be universally applied in every instance; i.e., allowing for exceptions.

Also, at one point, the New Testament quotes the Old, saying, "All have sinned, there is no one righteous, no not one." (Romans 3, I think.) But Paul is quoting a passage from the Old Testament (Psalm 14) which does not refer to all human beings, but rather to the fools who say in their heart "there is no God," who are depicted as victimizing "my [the Lord's] people." The Psalmist also says there is no one who calls on the name of the Lord, but that the Lord is "with the generation of the righteous."

So this would be confusing were it to be interpreted as a universal declaration of personal sin: All infants have sinned? Jesus has sinned? (He isn't listed as an exception; if He's permitted as an "understood" exception, why can't Mary also?) No one is righteous? Who then are "the generation of the righteous?" Is that a hypothetical generation? Are "my people" also the unrighteous, who say in their heart that there is no God? In that case, why are they "my people?" There is "no one" who calls on the name of the Lord? What can we say, then, about the Psalmist, who spends pages and pages calling on the name of the Lord?

It gets more complicated. Luke 1 relates:Blamelessly? All the commandments? Apparently not the one about ticking off an angel by expressing skepticism about his message. Perhaps it only meant blamelessly until that point.

Here are some more examples (H/T to "theblackcordelias" (a WordPress blog, which I partly quote here).
No one? How did anyone ever come to be saved, then?



But we know there were exceptions to the “whole” and the “all,” such as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. Again, this verbiage indicates a majority of the Sanhedrin or all of its members who were actually in attendance at the trial—but not literally every single person who composed this Jewish council.

So apparently sometimes the Bible uses "all" or "no one" in a hyperbolic way -- not unsurprising, since we do the same in modern English -- without thereby indicating that it is literally rejecting all exceptions. And, again, were it to be read as rejecting all exceptions, infants and Jesus Himself would have to be excluded also.

But perhaps you had different passages in mind? I'll keep an open mind on this.

Still, Luther himself held to the Immaculate Conception, and had a deep Marian piety, without finding it contradictory to Scripture. Funny how those things change, among Protestants, over a paltry few hundred years.

I suspect that Protestant exegesis in this matter, which started out not requiring anything that wasn't explicitly stated in Scripture, is continually drifting towards requiring the denial of anything that isn't explicitly stated in Scripture.

In another hundred years, will the hypostatic union and the Triune nature of God be denied in some quarters? Perhaps, for they aren't explicit. Already there are those who deny that God the Father is outside Time, favoring a God who sees Time sequentially as we do "because the Bible speaks of God that way." And, again in some quarters, restrictions on sexual morality and the sanctity of marriage have nearly evaporated. Setting aside the gay bishop and blessing same-sex unions, we also have divorced-and-remarried deacons and elders and pastors showing up frequently, despite having been (by first-century Christian standards) the husband of more than one wife and being thereby ineligible for those Biblical offices. And of course every single Protestant denomination taught against the morality of artificial contraception up until 1930, after which that crumbled so quickly that the earlier position is now barely remembered.

It sure would be nice, as a backstop against all this crumbling belief, if there were an Authority in the Church, a living authority, which could say "No, that isn't an acceptable way to interpret that passage of Scripture."

Of course, such an Authority would be prone to human weakness, too...so, wouldn't it be nice if that Authority was given very little freedom to act because it was utterly prohibited from changing any dogmas formally defined by its predecessors? If the act of changing a dogma would in fact immediately invalidate its whole authority, so that it became impossible to do? What a blessing it would be, to have an anchor against the slip-sliding away of Christian doctrine!

Oh, wait....

Since I was the person using "adopt" in my post, I'll assume you're asking me.

There is no question that Mary is in all senses of the word the mother of Jesus. The question is whether that makes it appropriate to call her "Mother of God." While Jesus is God, that doesn't mean that God is Jesus; there are three persons of the Trinity, and Jesus' two natures (human and divine) are united, but not confounded.

My point is that Mary bears, gives birth to, the God-man, Jesus, and that therefore it is appropriate to use the term Theotokos, God-bearer, for her, as the Council of Ephesus did. But she is not the source of the divine nature of Jesus, only of his human nature, and therefore I find it inappropriate to call her "Mother of God," except in an adoptive sense (an adoptive parent is not the generative source of the child, but cares for the child). But I don't think any Catholic is using the language in that way, or they would also talk of Joseph as the "Father of God," and I've never heard such a phrase used.

...your "reasoning" may sound "good" to you, but you're very obviously not a mother,...without going into detail, i think this is a very flawed concept, and is producing a very weird result: kind of like looking at a Picasso painting of a woman,...or the product of a strange laboratory experiment,...

Do we really need to debate the universality of sin? Paul doesn't merely quote the OT on this topic; Romans 3:23 says "all have sinned." 3:9 says "Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin." 3:20 says "no one will be declared righteous in [God's] sight by observing the law." 5:12 says "death came to all men, because all sinned."

But Jesus is explicitly a special case: 2 Corinthians 5:21: "God made him who had no sin to be sin [or "a sin offering"] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." Hebrews 4:15: "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin." 1 John 3:5: "And in him is no sin." I'll admit I can't find an explicit statement in Romans that Jesus is sinless, but how could Jesus free us from sin if he himself had sinned and therefore needed to pay his own penalty? That's inconsistent with the entire thrust of the book. The gift of righteousness in Jesus is continually presented as the antithesis of sin and death.

As the father of a toddler, I've seen very clear indications, from amazingly early, of the effects of sin--my son knows that he's doing something he's not supposed to do and does it anyway, staring me down as he does it. Even little children need a Savior from their sin. I don't understand how God judges those who are incapable of conscious faith; I trust God's justice and mercy, and fall back on John 21:22 (taking it only slightly out of context): "What is that to you? You must follow me.”

forgive me,...i put things in my own words,...my studies were years ago, leading to my own reduction of concepts to forms/pictures/ideas that were easy for me to retain, that "made sense" to me, "nutshell" versions in many cases,...

i understand universal sin-nature to be a result of the hold/claim of the influence of satan on our beings, as we are conceived and born into this spiritually contaminated world,...i do not think this means that every person is affected in the same way, or to the same degree,...the Bible says that the evil men do will persist for a number of generations, and likewise that the good that men do will influence even more generations,...we are born into an obvious struggle zone between good and evil,...the church is here to help us in that struggle in every regard,...Catholic baptism contains a prayer to help mitigate the effects of original sin,...the sacraments of the church also contain spiritual blessings and instructions and conditioning that help further protect us and properly orient us, in order to minimize our vulnerability to and witting or unwitting cooperation with the influences of evil in our personal lives,...further, we pray continually and do good works to increase the "critical mass" of forces for good in our portion of the universe,...synergistically we hope for a magnification of these good influences,...Christ is with us and also works through our efforts of cooperation with His will,...

since it is therefore possible to diminish, or minimize, the effects, or hold, or contamination, of satan and his evil influences on our selves, our beings and our surroundings, it is also very understandable to me that Mary could have merited a special position or condition of being kept free of the contamination of sin in that sense,...after all, God really is God, and can handle satan anyway He sees fit, i suppose...

There are many prayers to Mary and i think these prayers can help protestant and catholics better understand the differences in our belifs. Even though the Hail Mary is the most common there are many more that shows what the Catholic church teaches and believes about her.

The Memorare
by St. Bernard
Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to your protection, implored your help, and sought your intercession, was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, I fly to you, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother; to you I come, before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful! O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions; but in your clemency hear and answer me. Amen.


Is St. Bernard speaking the truth here about Mary's protection?

speaking for myself personally, i have not been left unaided,...

I looked up the word 'confound' on Merriam Webster and there were several meanings attached, that seem to be at odds with each other. I like that you are so precise. Would you you please clarify for me once again how the title 'Mother of God' confounds Christ's nature?

Even though the Scripture may not be exhaustive they are sufficent for us to grow in salvation. As 2 Timothy 3 says:

16 All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;

17 so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

Only the Scripture can help us to determine what is true in regards to what we are to believe and practice. Only they are inspired-inerrant and are authorative. They are more than just the "memoirs of the Apostles," plus some topical letters requiring great sensitivity to context (the recipients, the problem being addressed), plus an Apocalypse"
but reflect the mind of Christ for the church. Only the Scripture can be said to have its source and authority in God and all men are under its authority.

Since you claim that the Scripture is not "a complete description of everything that comprises the dogmas of the Christian faith" i would ask how you know this? Why should i not believe that the Lord Jesus gave the Scriptures to the church and they would sufficent for all that we need to grow and mature in Christ?

How do you know for example that Jesus and His apostles meant for the church that Mary was without sin, queen of heaven, and to be prayed to if its not recorded in Scripture? These are the kinds of issues anyone has to address if they don't think the Scriptures alone are sufficent for all doctrines.

Kelvin:
Well, sure we do, if by universality you mean "having no exceptions other than Jesus."

I agree with you so far as toddlers go -- I have three kids under 7 -- but one presumes no eternal culpability -- indeed, very little capacity to form intentions of any kind -- in the actions of very young children. If either Mary or Jesus throw their sippy cups, I don't see how that could be sin...though one grants that they certainly would have shown themselves unusually obedient as they got older.

In the meantime Mary is the new Eve, to hear the early Christian writers tell it. How so? Well, she was the woman whose "seed" crushed the head of the serpent. And when faced with a choice, instead of disobeying, she said "may it be unto me according to your word." She's Eve, done right; Eve Mark II...but could God have created her without original sin?

Well, did he create Eve without original sin?

Original Sin is a contracted deficiency: An inherited lack of being full of grace, which makes us double minded about sin. Now Jesus had no Original Sin. On His Father's side, this is utterly explicable. But it's hard to follow, on His mother's side, unless either Jesus Himself, or Mary, or both Mary's parents, had the fullness of grace restored, that He might be from birth "The Perfect Man, the New Adam."

Protestants say this restored fullness of grace in the ancestry of Jesus began at Jesus' conception; Catholics say it began at Mary's. Of the two, Protestants quote Scripture as saying that all have sinned, and claim this means "excluding Jesus, and because of non-culpability, very young children...though not excluding Mary." If there were a direct Scripture of Mary sinning, it would be on point; but there isn't, so this non-exclusion of Mary seems arbitrary.

The Catholics, on the other hand, have the angel's words to Mary: Chaire, Kecharitomene! ...a tough bit of Greek which sums up as, "Hail, you who has been already filled up with grace through no doing of your own," with the latter translation being required because the word is a perfect passive participle: Perfect, so she is completely "graced," passive, so it happened to her rather that being an action of hers, and past, so it's already a finished work.

So, from this, Catholics naturally conclude that, since a prevention of inherited original sin had to occur sometime, either at the conception of Christ or the conception of Mary, or of her two parents, or her four grandparents, or...(!) well, the best fit is with the conception of Mary: Something already done, to make Mary "fully graced."

But this is not a new argument, in the sense that a Protestant argument would be. Catholics don't look at their dogma, then look back to Scripture to find a new argument to justify it based on Scripture. The historical reality is that the early Christians were saying stuff like this in the earliest records we have of them.

One difficulty with Protestant argument from Scripture is that it neglects the realities history. We have to remember that Catholic scholars and clergy had been reading the Bible constantly for one thousand five hundred years prior to the sad divisions of the 16th century.

In all that time, did they somehow never notice that the Bible contradicted the elements of their faith? In all that time, did none of the scholars, the theologians, heck, even the copyists note something was amiss?

Is it now, in the 21st century, that we are finally understanding Christianity the way the Apostles understood it? After all that time being, apparently, utterly misunderstood by people who actually knew the Apostles and their direct successors, people who were of the same first-century time period and Mediterranean world, who considered the rise of Christianity to be "current events" instead of dusty history? Is it probable?

And is it consistent with Jesus' promise that His Church would never fail, that the gates of Hell would not prevail, that the Holy Spirit would lead the Church into "all truth," that the earnest, God-seeking Christ followers of fifteen centuries, or 75% of the earthly history of Christianity, would be misled into some non-Christian mishmash? Did the Holy Spirit take a vacation, abandoning the vast majority of all Christians who ever lived, including the vast majority of all of them alive now, to fundamental misunderstanding of the Gospel?

Wondering about these things, I began to study the Church Fathers, and found that in their writings, Catholic dogmas kept unmistakably popping up, ridiculously early.

I mean, there's Ignatius of Antioch, contemporary and friend of the Apostle John, second successor to the bishopric of Antioch begun by Peter, writing to Christians en route to his martyrdom. And what's he saying? It's all "well, you know, heretics don't bother praying or doing good works because they, poor slobs, don't confess that the Eucharist actually is the body and blood of the crucified Christ...and oh, remember that the Eucharist isn't validated unless it's with your bishop and his priests...to whom, by the way, you should make a point of remaining obedient as you would to Christ, because where the bishop is, there is the Catholic Church." This is in A.D. 110 or earlier. Justin Martyr, says the same things, around 150 A.D. All 'round the Mediterranean basin, the common translation of John chapter 6 was utterly literal, in the mouths of the men trained by the Apostles themselves.

That's not the only example. Confession to priests, the authority of the See of Peter, and other Catholic distinctives seem to be there, early.

So, yes, from the Bible alone, without reference to history, I see the sinlessness of Jesus being unique to Jesus as a plausible interpretation.

But when I look at what Christians actually believed for 1500 years, it's hard to argue that it's the only plausible interpretation, or the one with the longest history.

St.Alphonsus Liguori is not only a saint but a Doctor in the Catholic church.

"Prayer to Mary, Refuge of Sinners
by St.Alphonsus Liguori
O most holy and pure Virgin! O my Mother! You who are the Mother of my Lord, the Queen of the world, the advocate and refuge of sinners! I, a most wretched sinner, now come to you. I honor you, great Queen, and give you humble thanks for the many favors which have come to me in the past through your intercession. I love you, Lady most worthy of all love, and by the love which I bear you, I promise ever in the future to honor you, and to do what lies in me to win others to your love. Receive me as your servant, and cover me with the mantle of your protection, you who are the Mother of mercy! And since you have so much power with God, implore him to deliver me from all temptations, and to give me the grace ever to overcome them. Pray for me that I may love Christ in this world as you love him, and intercede for me that I may have the grace of a good death. O my Mother! by your love for God I beseech you to be at all times my helper, but above all at the last moment of my life. Cease not your supplications until you see me safe in heaven, there for countless ages to bless you and, your holy company, to worship and adore your Son, for ever and ever. Amen."

Should protestants have a problem praying this prayer? If you are a catholic and want to show a protestant that its a good thing to pray to Mary would you share this prayer with them?

[quote=R.C.]Kelvin:

Just because there is no explicit statement that says Mary sinned does not mean she didn't. There are many people in scripture where it does not mention they sinned either. Should we assume that they to were immaculately concieved and without sin?

Secondly. the angel' greeting (hail favored one) to Mary in Luke 1:28 does not mean that she was without sin her entire life. In fact the defintion says nothing about this. The single Greek word kexaritomena and means highly favored, make accepted, make graceful, etc. It does not mean "full of grace" which is "plaras karitos" (plaras = full and karitos = Grace) in the Greek.

We know that Eve was created from the rib of Adam before the fall. We conclude from this that she was sinless. What we do not have in regards to Mary is any declaration in Scripture that she was concieved without sin or kept from it. The question is-- did God create Mary without sin? Where are the statements that He did?

i would hate to be found "putting words into a Saint's mouth," but here i go,...

to me this is a fervent prayer of a sensitive individual, painfully aware of the vulnerability to sin and darkness inherent in his own flesh, and also aware of the attraction to (love of) the ineffable beauty and spiritual light of the state of grace characteristic of and associated with Mary, our human example and leader in this,...she is one of us,......

i'm glad for the introduction of the word "love" here, as it is a very strong motivating force for Catholics spiritually, and a big reason why the extreme negativity of the Protestant denial of these realities is found to be very painful by them,...spiritually striving Catholics are aware that growth and transformation from the heaviness of the inclinations of the flesh and darkness of doubt in the mind, can be overcome by participating in these graced mysteries of the church, including attendance at Mass, receiving the Holy Eucharist, Confession, prayer/meditation, including but not limited to the Holy Rosary,...and on a on,...it is always a work in progress,...acknowledgment of, love and attraction to these spiritual refinements of heavenly grace are the normal way we get there,...as humble, needy moths drawn to the flame of light, revelation and purification,...my sincere apologies to St. Alphonsus,...

yes, i would share this prayer and related thoughts with Protestants,...i just did,...

Protestant 1:


I personally prefer the stronger translation, "that the man of God may be complete," but, yes, great verse.

But you'll notice it doesn't say, "Scripture is the sole medium of God-inspired teaching, reproof..." nor does it say "Scripture is, by itself, sufficient for teaching, reproof." The verse says exactly what it says, and the Catholic church gives a hearty "Amen!" to exactly what it says, and I believe what it says, one hundred percent...but I don't believe that Scripture is the sole medium by which God-breathed inerrant truth is transmitted to man, nor that Scripture, by itself, is sufficient for understanding Christianity apart from the guidance of the Church which produced Scripture, identified Scripture, and delivered Scripture to the world.

Were that true, it would have to be stated as such somewhere in Scripture. Since it is not, and since you don't allow as authoritative anything outside Scripture, that statement itself undercuts its own authority.

Apart from observing that logical inconsistency in the structure of the statement itself, the historical provenance of the notion is suspect.

The statement is in fact a man-made Tradition, dating to about the middle 1500's, with a few rare near-equivalent ideas popping up here and there in preceding centuries (e.g. Marcion chucking everything but the New Testament). St. Augustine is more representative of the broad Christian tradition prior to Luther, when he states, "I would not believe the holy Gospels if it were not for the authority of the Holy Catholic Church."

You continue...Since they don't actually claim that, that statement is, by its own admission, not authoritative.

Surely! But you and I agree that they are at least that, and we agree that they are more than that, and we only disagree on exactly what more they are.

You believe that, in addition to being the "memoirs of the Apostles" (a description I borrowed from some early Church Father, Justin Martyr I think, but I'll have to look it up) plus "topical letters," et cetera, that the Scriptures are:

(a.) Perspicuous; and,
(b.) Sufficient.

Or, to put it in different words, you hold that the New Testament constitutes such an understandable and functionally-complete Catechism of the Christian Faith that, with some assistance from scholars and translators, a person can be certain of all the important doctrines of Christianity given adequate knowledge of the Scriptures and ongoing submission to the Holy Spirit in reading and applying them.

My reply is that, while the Bible is many great things, it is not a functionally-complete, comprehensive, easy-to-understand Catechism of All Important Christian Doctrines and Practices. I firmly assert that it is not, not because it somehow failed to be a functionally-complete Catechism of Christianity, but rather because it never attempted to be a functionally-complete Catechism of Christianity. None of its parts pretend to be so, nor is there any reason to suppose that its parts, when combined, should happen in summation to become so. God certainly could have willed the parts to add up to a complete and perspicuous Catechism had He desired it. But He nowhere claims to have done so, in or outside Scripture.

The tradition that the Bible can reliably serve as such is a man-made tradition, roughly equivalent to saying that the Bible can serve as an all-inclusive and easy to understand history of the Samaritans. Were such a history to be written, the Bible would be a vital primary source...but it by itself doesn't claim to be such a history.

Says who? The Scripture doesn't claim that...in which case the statement itself is not authoritative.

But the Scripture does say that Jesus is a King, and that his Kingdom has ministers, and that they hold offices and exercise authority, and one of them more than the others, and that the Church is the pillar and bulwark of truth. The Scripture does say that the teaching of the apostles are to be received "for what it really is, the Word of God," and that that teaching might be delivered "by word of mouth, or by letter." The Scripture does exhort us to hold "fast to the traditions" that the early Christians heard from the Apostles. The Scripture does tell us that not everything even about the life of Jesus is found in Scripture: "I suppose were all the things Jesus did written down, the whole world could not hold all the books...." The Scripture does tell us that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church, preventing us from believing that true Christianity was lost to the world for any period of time, let alone a thousand or more years. The Scripture does, in short, point to an authority outside itself, playing an ongoing role in the life of the believer: The Church.

...continued...

...continued...

Scripture says so (see above), and the Church tells me this is the way Christians have always understood the Scripture, so I know I am not interpreting it improperly.

Because the Great Commission does not say "Go ye therefore into all the world, and by the way here's this book." It bids the Apostles go and teach men of all nations whatsoever Jesus had commanded them. No promise is made that anyone would write down every word of all that preaching...and as a matter of history, we can see that the early Christians were pretty casual about getting it written down. The Gospel of John contains details not found in any other gospel, and yet wasn't written down until, at the earliest, fifty years after the Resurrection!

Because you take Scripture for your sole authority, and:

(1.) Scripture never claims to be all Christians need to grow and mature in Christ; and,

(2.) Scripture never tells us which books should, and should not, be in Scripture. For that, we must rely on an outside authority. That outside authority, if fallible, makes our canon fallible, and thus the teachings we derive from that canon, fallible. Only an infallible outside authority can give us an infallible canon to allow us to draw doctrinal conclusions based on Scriptures we are assured of being God-breathed.

I don't. But if Jesus says that whatever Peter binds on earth will be bound in heaven, and Peter says I'm bound to believe that, then I can assume that heaven expects me to believe it, too.

It's a huge amount of faith for me to be placing in the power of God to prevent His gospel from being corrupted by the fallibility of men, I know. But, then, I'd be placing an equal amount of faith in God's power, if I leaned only on Scripture. So it's all God's power and provision either way.

A final note: If Scripture were perspicuous and comprehensive, there would not be disagreements between Protestant denominations on matters of really screamingly vitally important doctrine.

But there are. Big differences, in core areas. Not just between Person X who is a devout Christian with excellent scholarly credentials, and Person Y who is a bit of a cad and wants to twist Scripture like a rubber nose, but between Person X who is a devout Christian with excellent scholarly credentials, and Person Y who is a devout Christian with excellent scholarly credentials. Say what you like about disunity among Catholics, but there's far more variation among well-meaning, highly-educated, brilliant Protestant exegetes. I think History disproves the perspicuity of Scripture...when there's no Church to help interpret it. The living authority of the Church makes all the difference.

Since catholics affirm that the Scriptures are inspired-inerrant where does it say that the teachings, Traditions, pronouncements of the Roman Catholic church are also inspired-inerrant?

Where in scripture does it say that the teachings of the Roman Catholic church are profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness?
Secondly, where do the Scriptures claim that the Marian dogmas lead to righteousness and corection?

[quote=R.C.]...continued...



Where did Jesus teach that the church would be infallible?

It seems like the discussion has moved from Mary to the question of authority--as these conversations always seem to do! The same old arguments are brought out on both sides and, as always, there's an impasse.

Thank you all for your openness and thoughtfulness in your many posts. It's time for me to bow out as some busy next few weeks are upon me at work.

May any and all words about Mary lead us each to love and adore our Lord Jesus Christ more and more! Surely any unity, present or future, that Christians from the different Traditions/Communions will ever experience with each other will revolve around Him.

Yes, true enough.

Absolutely! Our communion with one another in the body of Christ is an imperfect one, but in that and many other things, we are truly one.

May any and all words about Mary lead us each to love and adore our Lord Jesus Christ more and more! Surely any unity, present or future, that Christians from the different Traditions/Communions will ever experience with each other will revolve around Him.--Kevin

no matter what anyone has said about authority or anything else, i think it has been pretty well agreed by all that Christ, and the God-head, is the source of all the graces and blessing, no matter "how" one is inclined to relate to that verbally or in prayer,...that should be a point of unity at least,...

Protestant 1:

By "it" do you mean the Catholic church (whether Roman or Eastern Rite...the whole Catholic church is not "Roman Catholic" in the sense of being Roman Rite)? Or by "it" do you mean "Scripture?"

What we don't want, here, is a circular logic problem, where the only reason we know the Catholic Church to be authoritative is because Scripture tells us it's authoritative, but the only reason we know Scripture is authoritative is because the Catholic Church says so.

The Catholic argument is more spiral than circular, and goes something like this:

1. Historical sources, including the New Testament writings taken only as mere historical sources, reliably tell us what Jesus was like;

2. On the basis of Jesus' character and biography, the fulfillment of prophecies we know to predate Jesus' life, and the fact that the early expansion of Christianity isn't explicable except by the resurrection, we conclude that Jesus was God incarnate;

3. On the basis that Jesus was God, and that the New Testament writings are historically accurate renderings of His words, we conclude that He created a Church whose "bindings and loosings" on earth would be upheld by the judgment of heaven;

4. Therefore we trust that Church;

5. Therefore we trust that Church when it tells us not only which writings do and don't belong in the New Testament canon, but that those writings are inerrant and God-breathed, and that they are useful for the reproof, training, and correction of any adequately catechized Christian, so that when added atop his basic catechesis and his participation in the life and sacraments of the Church, study of the Scripture will make the man of God "complete" and prepared for every good work.

6. Therefore we can rely on Scripture even more than we otherwise could have done if it were merely an unusually reliable record of the life and times of Jesus and the Apostles.

In short, if you start without assuming the inerrancy of Scripture, you can work your way to the inerrancy of Scripture by means of the authority of Christ, conferred on the Church.

But if you refuse to take that route, the best you can do is say that Scripture claims inerrancy for itself, which if true, would of course be true, but if false, would of course be false: A circular argument, and therefore useless in any event.

From the time I was confronted with these notions, to the time I realized they couldn't easily be refuted, took me about a month.

From that time, to the time I realized I couldn't refute them at all, and that I'd better start reading some Protestant apologists to see if anyone else could, either, was about a year.

And it was about another six months of reading Protestant apologists before I realized that Sola Scriptura just doesn't hold up; it's ahistorical, and that nobody has ever proffered an supporting argument for it that could stand up under the test of both logic and history.

In the meantime, I'd also learned that Sola Fide was ahistorical and contrary to any plausible interpretation of many Scripture passages.

Lose Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide, and you can't remain Protestant. After that, it's only a question whether you become Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, or dishonest.

It's an exhausting, demoralizing, annoying, and did I mention exhausting transition. A few bright spots of divine grace, too. But the thought "Not THIS, still?! When am I ever going to be at Home, at Rest?" is the recurring theme.

Or that, at least, was my experience.

I still don't see any teaching of any church rising to to the level of Scripture. Sola Scriptura (doctrines taught in Scripture) is the only basis we can have confidence in the truth that Christ would have for us. Without this firm foundation on the Scripture itself we encounter all kinds of problems that lead to unbiblical beliefs and practices. The Marian doctrines are a case in point. What the Catholic church teaches today is not what the church of the NT believed. Rejection of Sola Scriptura leads to traditions of men which Scripture warns about. Just read the Glories of Mary by St.Alphonsus Liguori to see how far the Catholic church has added to Mary what the Scripture never says. Or take the Promises of Brown Scapular. "The Brown Scapular
Another magnificent assurance of Salvation is Our Lady's Brown Scapular. One of the great mysteries of our time is that the great majority of Catholics either ignore or have forgotten the Blessed Virgin Mary's promise that "whoever dies clothed in this (Scapular) shall not suffer eternal fire." She further says: "Wear it devoutly and perseveringly. It is my garment. To be clothed in it means you are continually thinking of me, and I in turn, am always thinking of you and helping you to secure eternal life."

As i have said before, this is what happens when Sola Scriptura is rejected.

This poorly Cathechized cradle Catholic is learning a lot. Can I just ask a quick question?

Are you saying that Scripture as we know it wasn't standardized until the late 4th century - so that Christianity was fully functioning for 3 centuries without the New Testament?

Without this firm foundation on the Scripture itself we encounter all kinds of problems that lead to unbiblical beliefs and practices.--Protestant 1

not relying on Scripture alone can lead to unbiblical beliefs and practices(?): well, if something is in fact "not Scriptural," by definition it would be "unbiblical," but (1)this is subject to how the Scriptures are interpreted, which very often becomes a matter of conjecture and opinion, and (2)if something is so-called "unbiblical" (no reference found to it in the Bible, i guess), is it necessarily anti-Christian or not compatible with a serious Christian life?,...

i grant you that you are very firm in making one point over and over again,...it's pretty easy to see where you stand,...but i don't see an effort to defend it or support it or prove it in any other way than to keep restating, again and again, that this is what your position is,...i don't think that anyone here has been saying that you can't find the path to Salvation by relying on Scripture, so hopefully that is the case, and you are greatly honoring and experiencing the "joy of your Salvation,"...i'm sure no one desires to be a stumbling block on the spiritual path of someone who is relying on Scripture alone,...Salvation would of course would be the main goal, and i wish you every blessing of God,...we should desire to find peace,...

Meg:


That's pretty close. To get closer, say that we were without a standardized New Testament or widely-known New Testament. We therefore had no body of writings which was used as a way to judge orthodoxy. Orthodoxy was consequently judged in other ways.

Let's say you're a Christian in the year 175 A.D., or somewhere in there.

You go to Mass. There are "readings," as there are today, but not standardized ones. What you hear, then, will vary according to where you are.

If you're in Corinth, you certainly hear the letter to your church which we today call "First Clement," though we don't now include it in the New Testament, and of course Paul's two letters to the Corinthians.

You might have one or two of Paul's letters to other nearby churches...or not. You may never hear of his more personal letters (to Timothy, to Philemon). Your chief readings are from Gospels: You'll have at least one, and perhaps all four if you're a fairly wealthy and well-read congregation.

If you get Old Testament readings, they are from the Septuagint, so they include the Books of Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, as well as possibly the Book of Enoch, or references to it.

You may also hear some letters of encouragement or correction from the current pope, if he's sent any, or from your bishop if you're not in his cathedral. There may be no distinction drawn between the authority of these letters from your bishop and the bishop of Rome, and that of the letters of Paul, except vaguely that Paul is more famous. And you may hear readings from, or merely stories of, certain martyrs (Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch). These also fall vaguely under the heading of "readings," but there's no real categorization into "Scripture" versus "Helpful Devotional Readings."

There may never be any readings from Revelation or Hebrews or 2nd Peter or 2 and 3 John or Jude, since these are "disputed." The Shepherd by Hermas, and the Apocalypse of Peter, might be read or referenced as well. None of these are thought unorthodox in content, but there's some question about their authorship.

You'll only hear many of the aforementioned if you're in a very well-read and well-connected congregation. In a poorer congregation, you may never hear anything but the four gospels and one or two letters, which may or may not all be among the letters that were ultimately judged canonical.

But it's hard to get and keep any of these writings. After all, copies are precious, and often burned by Romans during persecutions. Your local church almost certainly doesn't have all the parts of what 21st century Christians call "Scripture": That would cost far too much, something like $500,000 in 21st-century dollars. They're hand-copied, and only by the small minority of folk who're literate enough to both read and competently write.

When anyone discusses the notion of "Scripture," it falls into "Moses and the Prophets and the Histories" on the one hand and "The Gospels" on the other, with "Letters from Blessed Cephas and Paul and Clement and Ignatius" being thought of all in a bunch, like encyclicals.

With such an unsettled state-of-affairs, how could one be sure of doctrine? Not by looking each one up in "Scripture" -- an utter impossibility! -- but by adhering to teachers with the right credentials.

When a writer or speaker would preach, he would say, "I got this from Abercius, who got it from Mercurius, who got it from Ignatius, who, as Second Bishop of Antioch, was friend to the Apostle John and the Bishop-Martyr Polycarp, and who was trained by other men, since martyred, who knew the Apostle Peter. I have been sent on behalf of your bishop and the Bishop of Rome, where the right faith delivered to the Apostles is preserved for the world."

You listened to this person's doctrines, because his credentials strongly identified him with the Apostolic Sacred Tradition.

Christianity functioned in this way, under persecution no less, for some 350 years after the Resurrection -- longer than the history of the United States.

Occasionally Christian scholars would speculate about what were and were not the true "inspired writings," but not one of them ever listed all twenty-seven of the New Testament books we have today...until...

Until the Catholic Bishops of the late 4th century, men who believed in Transubstantiation (though the term hadn't yet been invented) and Apostolic Succession and Mary's Perpetual Virginity and Confession to Priests and the Primacy of the See of Rome...only those men finally assembled the list of the twenty-seven books of the Bible which we now call the New Testament, which are nowadays quoted by Protestants in an attempt to disprove Transubstantiation and Apostolic Succession and Mary's Perpetual Virginity and Confession to Priests and the Primacy of the See of Rome.

If those Catholics hadn't bothered to identify what they thought were the core writings of the Catholic faith, then not only would Catholics now likely have a guesswork-canon of twenty or twenty-one books, but so would Protestants.

That last statement should put it all in perspective. Protestants are taking a Catholic book which they only have because Catholic bishops told them which books comprised the correct compendium of the Catholic faith, and trying to use it to score points against Catholic doctrines.

However...!

I should add that my last statement to Meg,
...should not be construed as a slap against Protestants.

Our "separated brethren" are often devout, and devout in a way that would be very familiar to the early Christians, in that they sniff very suspiciously around anything that seems like a post-apostolic innovation.

Now the early Christians didn't have a sure-fire New Testament by which to judge what was or wasn't a post-apostolic innovation; instead, they judged by the name-dropping credentials of the person doing the preaching, as I described in my note to Meg, above. (And, as time went by, they increasingly relied on the official judgments of the successor of Peter in Rome.)

A Protestant who was raised hearing every Sunday that XYZ is Apostolic Christianity will of course sniff suspiciously at anything he hears which is not like what he was raised with! Good! He should! He doesn't care enough, if he doesn't!

The trick, ultimately, is that these folks are not enemies of Catholics; they are (in a certain way of looking at it) somewhat poorly and very eccentrically-catechized Catholics. That is: They have a communion with the Church, but an imperfect one; as a consequence, they're just as antagonistic to the Church's teaching as the average Catholic pro-choicer or Catholic pro-women's-ordination writer. (The most Protestant group on the planet I can think of off the top of my head is the editorial writers of National Catholic Reporter.) But the Baptists and Presbyterians come by it more honestly, in that they have the experience of their entire childhood, or else, the powerful experiences of an adult conversion, telling them "this is what Christianity is all about."

And that's why folk like me, coming to the Catholic faith, don't look back at our Protestant upbringing and scorn it. The new crop of Anglicans won't, either, nor the Eastern Orthodox when they eventually come in. How can you scorn the people who taught you Scripture? How can you scorn the people who told you about Jesus? How can you scorn the passionate worship and humble service of thousands of folks giving ten percent of their pre-tax income monthly, traveling on short-term mission trips to third-world countries to fix village wells and hold Vacation Bible Schools for shoeless kids?

Protestant 1 hammers on Sola Scriptura because he knows it, and it's been an anchor against creeping moral relativism and against bad teaching by flaky health-and-wealth pastors. Good for him! If in good conscience he can't ever see the historical problems with it (only the tiniest percentage of Protestants ever hear a single quotation from the Church Fathers, let alone read them), then at least the Apostolic Writings anchor him to the side of the Body of Christ.

If a protestant does encounter the Church Fathers in a serious way, he gets a shock, because they're so darned Catholic. That can shake one's faith -- or it did, mine. And eventually I learned the only plausible way out of the resulting logical inconsistencies was through Rome...which I did not ask for, would never have gone looking for, and was not on my radar screen at all.

But in the interim: Grace, grace, grace. We're brothers and sisters, albeit in a fractious family, and we wrestle not with flesh and blood -- still less the flesh and blood of others who have communion in, however imperfectly, the Body of Christ! -- but with principalities and powers, with the rulers of the dark forces of this world, with depraved hypersomatic beings at great heights.

A crowd of people standing outside the abortion clinic, praying, half with Rosary beads, and the other half with leatherbound King James Bibles and "God's Gym" t-shirts...that is the right picture.

[quote=R.C.]Meg:



Are you claiming that all church fathers and leaders of the church in the first 4 centuries believed that Mary was a perpetual virgin and taught that she was without sin, and queen of heaven?

Secondly, is it the the church that makes Scripture inpsired-inerrant or God?

Third, were the Jews who were entrusted with the OT and put it together also catholics?

Finally, do you put the church father's and their writings at the same level of authority on the same level as Scripture?

Thank you, R.C. Someone very dear to me wants to convert and has been asking these kinds of questions. You have helped more than you can know.

Its diffcult on a forum like this to be clear. I don't need to make the case that Scripture alone is inspired-inerrant here since catholics believe it also. Since the topic is about Mary this is what i have tried to focus on. These Marian dogmas have major theological ramifications if true. To disbelieve them according to Catholic church is to be condemned. We see this in Munificentissimus Deus where it warns at the end of this document these words by pope 12th –
“ 47. It is forbidden to any man to change this, our declaration, pronouncement, and definition or, by rash attempt, to oppose and counter it. If any man should presume to make such an attempt, let him know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.
48. Given at Rome, at St. Peter's, in the year of the great Jubilee, 1950, on the first day of the month of November, on the Feast of All Saints, in the twelfth year of our pontificate.
I, PIUS, Bishop of the Catholic Church, have signed, so defining.”
To think that a person can be condemned for not believing in a doctrine (her supposed assumption) not based on Scripture is mindboggling. For one thing there is no historical proof for it. There are no reliable eyewitness accounts. It does not appear until the late 5th century and its based on a condemned apocryphal gnostic book called Transitus Mariae which Pope Gelasius condemned the authors of.
Secondly and more importantly no apostle ever taught this. Its nowhere to be found in Scripture. Do we believe the teachings of men or the Scripture?

You ask above- "(2)if something is so-called "unbiblical" (no reference found to it in the Bible, i guess), is it necessarily anti-Christian or not compatible with a serious Christian life?,..."

The only answer can be is that these dogmas are not compatible with the Christian life that is to be focussed on Christ alone.

Running low on time, here, so I'll be brief:


I don't have any evidence for or against the "without sin" part; maybe there is some, maybe there isn't, but nothing comes to mind.

But the "queen of heaven" part is depicted in plenty of icons dating from the time, showing Mary as the second-most prominent figure surpassing the smaller figures of the apostles who are dotted around her, with crown of twelve stars and sun and moon for raiment (as in Revelation 12.)

And as for "perpetual virgin": Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying: That was what they taught.

Check it out for yourself: Pick up Jurgens' 3-volume set of the Church Fathers, with the passages indexed according to their applicability to Catholic doctrines.

Well, okay, there was one exception, one early writer who wrote a pamphlet denying the perpetual virginity of Mary, a poor schlub in the 400's named Helvidius. He issued a pamphlet that Mary had other children on the basis of his misunderstanding the word "brother" or "brethren" in Scripture (where it means "kinfolk"; compare to the part of the Old Testament where Abraham and Lot are described as "brothers" despite them being uncle and nephew).

He was excoriated for it by the most famous Bible translator then or for many years thereafter, St. Jerome. And when I say excoriated, I mean excoriated, laughed at, belittled, given "Michael Moore visits the Heritage Foundation" treatment. In essence, he'd caused a stink by saying something contrary to what everyone had believed for generations, and got publicly pilloried for it.

And that was the last sign, so far as I know, of someone denying the perpetual virginity until the 1500's.


God, of course. No other power could either:
(a.) prevent the Pope, a mere man, from teaching error to the Church (or end his life if he were about to do so); or,
(b.) enable the authors of the New Testament, both those who were apostles and those who weren't, from making errors while writing Scriptures.

But once God has done such a thing, how may an individual believer know that he has done so?

Well, any given book of the New Testament could claim infallibility, but that wouldn't apply to any other book: They hadn't yet been assembled together.

And even if Book X claimed infallibility, so what? The Koran claims that too, as does the Book of Mormon. One can't believe an authority that authorizes itself.

Indeed, in 2 Timothy Paul claims "all" Scripture is God-breathed...but in reference solely to the Greek Old Testament Timothy learned at his mother's or grandmother's knee. We can presume that Paul is inerrant in saying this because Peter calls Paul's writings "Scripture" (some of them, at least; we can't know if Peter had Paul's second letter to Timothy in mind).

But that's only reliable if we assume Peter is inerrant in saying this.

Which we can, because Jesus told us that what Peter binds on earth is bound in heaven. And so the inerrancy of Scripture keeps coming back to the Church, and to the guy whom Jesus selected and enabled to "feed His sheep," "tend His lambs."

No, not recognizably so, nor recognizably Protestants, but Jews: Passover-keeping, sin-sacrificing, tassel-wearing, wine-drinking, praying-for-the-dead, Messiah-expecting Jews. They followed the Torah and read the Prophets and the Psalms and the Writings (yes, including Maccabees and Wisdom and Sirach, especially in the Greek-speaking areas) because those "seated in the seat of Moses" told them to do so. In that tradition there were always twin streams of authority -- a written Tradition to which new writings were added as time passed, and a living authority, ordained priests, to safeguard it and teach it and weed out spurious writings.

After Christ, naturally, the authority of the Aaronic priesthood ended and a new ordained clergy was initiated after the order of Melchizedek, the successors of the Apostles, which were differentiated into bishops, priests, and deacons by the time the Apostle John died around A.D. 95-100. Check out the mid 1st-century writings The Didache and 1st Clement, or the epistles of Ignatius of Antioch, if you think I'm mis-stating the norms of 1st-century Christianity. They're on the web.

No, I don't.

However, I'm aware that Scripture can be interpreted in many ways, and that the best guides for interpretation are always those who come from the same background as the original authors, who use words the same way...especially if the topic of their writing comments on the meaning of Scripture, or the common practices of Christians.

So if I read Scripture with a certain interpretation, only to find that that interpretation is utterly incompatible with the clear consensus of what the Early Church Fathers not only argued, but assumed everyone already knew, then I know my interpretation is wrong, a consequence of my not knowing the Biblical languages and culture and times the way an early Christian would.

The Fathers, therefore, don't trump Scripture...but if a view of Scripture is unreconcilable with their views in areas which they regard completely non-controversial, it ought to be rejected as an anachronism.

[quote=R.C.]Running low on time, here, so I'll be brief:


I don't have any evidence for or against the "without sin" part; maybe there is some, maybe there isn't, but nothing comes to mind.[quote=R.C.]

We know the Scripture nevers claims she was sinless and what we have for centuries many who thought she had indeed sinned.



[quote=R.C.]But the "queen of heaven" part is depicted in plenty of icons dating from the time, showing Mary as the second-most prominent figure surpassing the smaller figures of the apostles who are dotted around her, with crown of twelve stars and sun and moon for raiment (as in Revelation 12.)[quote=R.C.]
A statute is not enough to show its true or what the church taught and believed. If anything this shows how quickly the church was deviating from what the spostles taught.

[quote=R.C.]And as for "perpetual virgin": Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying: That was what they taught.[quote=R.C.]
Again this is another aspect of the Marian doctrines that cannot be supported by scripture. We can look at the passages in dtail if you want.

Let me encourage you to be as the Bereans were commended for in Acts 17:11-Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

Notice what they were commneded for: they checked the Scriptures against what Paul was teaching to see if what he, the great apostle was teaching was in fact true. Thats why we must check all teachings of any church with what the Scripture. If that teaching does not line up i.e. supported clearly by Scripture it should be rejected.

Why would you think that a church father who lived centuries after the scriptures were written and in many cases in a different culture would have a better grasp of Scripture? Secondly the idea that Scripture can have different interpretations does not mean they are all correct. In fact the Scripture when understood in context has only one meaning. Just as your comments have one meaning so do the Scriptures. Take for example Luke 1:28 where the angel greets Mary with the saluation-- "Greetings, favored one". Any Greek lexicon of the NT will tell you that this phrase does not mean without sin. When we look at the context in this passage we also notice in verse 47 her acknowledgement of a Savior. This clearly shows she was aware of sin in her life.

I agree with you that the fathers are not at the same level of of authority as the Scripture. They are a fallible source just as any other source that involves humans.
Don't you use the catechism to determine if you interpreted a verse correctly? I'm not sure how you would do this. All i see in it are paragraphs about beliefs of the Catholic church and not how to understand the Scripture in context.

That's one of the reasons that I find it hard to accept the Catholic Magisterium. The arguments Catholics make for the authority of the Magisterium could have been repeated, almost word for word, by Caiaphas. But the fact is that the living authority of the Jews was so contrary to God that it condemned Jesus to death.

And it simply is not true as a matter of historical fact that the Church Fathers faithfully passed on the teaching of the apostles in all cases. One example is the negative view of many of them toward marriage, sex, and women (Jerome, for instance, considered marriage evil, though a "lesser evil" than sexual immorality; the Bible clearly disagrees). Another example is the developing practice (well established by the 4th century) of waiting until one was on one's deathbed to be baptized, because they thought that baptism cleansed you of any sin, but you only got one chance to wipe the slate clean like that, so they would wait rather than following the clear practice and teaching of the New Testament that baptism should come at the start of one's Christian life, not the end. A third example is the rejection of married men for leadership in the church, contrary to the explicit instructions of Paul in 1 Timothy and Titus. (Sadly, Protestants have tended to go to the opposite extreme; most churches are reluctant to consider an unmarried man for the pastorate.) A pedigree of teachers/succession would no doubt have been valuable, but it was no assurance of orthodoxy. It's no less true today--both the Catholic Church and other churches have examples of priests/pastors with a good pedigree who have gone off the deep end theologically.

But to focus back a bit more on Marian beliefs and why Protestants tend to react the way we do, sadly including an excessive rejection of any consideration of Mary's Biblical role and example, I think a major reason is that this, like some other Catholic doctrines that we reject, seems almost inevitably to take away from God. The doctrine of Mary's sinlessness diminishes the uniqueness of Jesus, the ONLY sinless human (and therefore the only person who could make the reconciliation between humanity and God). Calling her the Queen of Heaven redirects attention from the King of Kings. The doctrine of praying to Mary takes away from directly approaching God with our requests ("Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence," Hebrews 4:16).

While Catholics suggest prayers to Mary and the saints are no different than asking a friend on earth to pray for us, that's really an inaccurate comparison--we are embodied creatures, and there is viscerally a difference between speaking to an incorporeal being and a flesh-and-blood fellow human. Asking for prayer has a horizontal dimension as well as a vertical dimension, and that horizontal dimension is simply not present in praying to Mary or another departed saint, making it a difference in kind, not merely degree. And I don't think we normally ask other humans to pray in the thought that "x has a direct line to God, so what he prays for will happen but what I pray for might not," which is often very explicitly the motivation for prayers to Mary/saints. Mary functions much as a priestess, even if Catholics would recoil from the term; one of the foundational concepts of Protestantism is the priesthood of all believers, and Marian devotion clearly inhibits such a concept. This is not just a matter of excesses of popular Catholic piety in Latin America; Marian devotion thoroughly permeates the Catholic Church (John Paul II proclaimed a special "Marian year" to epitomize his own such devotion).

So when I see a doctrine that has no clear Scriptural support, and which seems to me to draw attention away from God, I find little attractive about it. I know Catholics will say that Marian devotion draws them closer to God, but if that's true, it's in a way that is invisible to this observer. Perhaps it has to be experienced to be known, but I think it's not going to be Mary (or more specifically, the distinctively Catholic doctrines on Mary) that draws people across the Tiber.

I know Catholics will say that Marian devotion draws them closer to God, but if that's true, it's in a way that is invisible to this observer. Perhaps it has to be experienced to be known,--Kelvin

i think that this is a true statement,...i like it because it shows humility and openness to possibilities other than what one has experienced thus far,...it seems right and appropriate in discussions like this for all of us to remember the perceptual limitations congruent with our "human condition," (a kind of "tunnel vision," if you will,...), and to be loving and patient with one another,...after all, how we think about things now, as we "see through a glass darkly," is not in any way going to change the Fullness of the Eternal Glory/Reality of God's Kingdom of Truth, Love, Peace, Hope, Faith, Joy, Beauty, Glory, etc., to be revealed when we do "see face to face,"...as promised,...

for some people, thinking about Mary seems to have the effect of blocking the Sunshine of God, so maybe this is not appropriate for them at this time, or ever, in their walk with God,...for others, myself included, Mary appears to be permeated/suffused with the heavenly Light and Glory of Christ, part of, and together with, many other Saints and beings in a huge heavenly panorama, where Christ IS the Light and the Essence of All, the True "Fullness...that Filleth All in All,"...and just maybe, as they say in the vernacular, it IS "all good,"...peace, love & god bless,...

Fellows,

I commiserate with you regarding what seems on the surface to be an exaggerated role for Mary. This still bothers me; were it not for the authority of the Magisterium, I would not accept it. But as I arrived at the conclusion that the Magisterium has just authority through other means, I am forced by logic to accede to it in that area also.

Yet I have been blessed through that avenue, also. It is confusing.

I am at a point in that area of doctrine where I say, "God, I do not have to know all the answers. I'll obey, if that's what you ask for." But this is difficult, because I am an analytical person by nature. (You might have noticed....)

As for the Church Fathers: Of course they were in error on some items. They were not infallible. But in reading them, it's relatively easy I think to distinguish between the things which were controversial, and those which were not. And in any event those Fathers who took too negative a view of marriage were always reined in by the Bishop of Rome; this is true when also when they got out-of-hand in other areas, such as Church Historian Eusebius' too-enthusiastic support for imperial intrusion in Church matters. (Good historian, but a bit of a brown-noser.)

Among the things which were not controversial are many Catholic, or at least Catholic/Orthodox, distinctives:

(1.) The bread and wine are said to really become the Body and Blood of Christ, provided the consecration is done in a valid fashion, which in practice means only by a bishop or his representative;

(2.) The Bishop of Rome exercises jurisdiction in churches all over the world, rather than only within his bishopric, though each bishop has great power within his bishopric, and has priests and deacons under him;

(3.) Confession to priests (initially public, later private) is performed regularly and absolution comes with a command of penance (in the early days, the penance for an act of adultery might be three years' public mourning!);

(4.) Prayers for the dead, a continuation of first-century Jewish practice (many Christian tombs from that era ask Christians visiting the grave-site to pray for the occupant; see re: the grave inscription of Abercius);

(5.) Requests that Mary and other saints and the angels pray on behalf of the living;

(6.) Declarations that not only abortion, but artificial contraception, was a grave moral evil;

(7.) Church leaders proclaimed dogma, doctrine, and discipline with authority, believing themselves to be successors of the Apostles' offices by virtue of ordination.

...and there are others, but you get the idea. These things were not controversial, and it was not a matter of one Father accepted them and another rejected them. It was not a matter of some churches did it this way, and another, that way. These things were all 'round the Mediterranean basin by the year 200, easily, and without any great uproar to suggest that they represented any kind of innovation. Quite the contrary: They were described, almost with a yawn, as the Fathers went onward to discuss more current and controversial topics.

Evidence of Transubstantiation, even if you're unwilling to concede that it's the meaning of John 6, is found in Ignatius of Antioch in 110 (who knew the Apostle John) and Justin Martyr in 150. How could such a thing be an innovation, if it is cropping up in the words of men who personally knew the Apostles and the bishops the Apostles installed in the first churches?

So I had to ask myself: Which church or churches in modern times still perform these practices? If a church wants to practice and worship and believe what was practiced and worshiped and believed by the authors of the Nicene Creed and the slain saints in the catacombs, which church most fits the description?

A hundred years ago I'd have offered "the Anglican" as an alternative since they had bishops, priests, deacons, confession, and a lot of people holding to the Real Presence, but without what feels like excessive devotion to Mary. But today, the inner rotting of the Anglican communion in Britain and America, the inability to uphold the basic, obvious morality of Christianity, leaves me wrenchingly, sadly unable to place the church of Oswald Chambers and C.S.Lewis, both of whom I hold dear, into consideration.

So I'm stuck with either the Eastern Orthodox, or the Catholic, as the only plausible candidates for unaltered continuations of Early Christianity. And I find that the lack of Petrine authority undermines the Orthodox claim.

...continued...

...continuing...

Anyway, fellows, as I said, I commiserate with you in that some parts of the Catholic faith strike me at first glance as disproportionate or inexplicable. The first instinctive question for someone like me who grew up Southern Baptist is "The Rosary? Brown Scapular? Where in the heck did that spring from?"

But there are answers to such questions. What I can't find an answer for is:

(1.) Why do Protestants disagree about the essentials of the Christian faith, and few of them much resemble the early church, and seem always to be drifting farther away, if Scripture is a sufficient authority to give us all the essentials of Christianity?

(2.) How could we have ever known what was and wasn't Scripture anyway, or what level of authority and inerrancy we should assume for Scripture, if there hadn't been a valid authority to declare it?

(3.) Why has the Eucharist, which was the core of every Sunday worship in early Christian churches, from whom all who were not doctrinally-sound Christians in good standing were turned away, become such a non-item in Protestant churches, celebrated as infrequently as quarterly, with pretty much anyone invited to table in many churches?

(4.) Why has every church but the Catholic pretty much abandoned confession to priests, given that Jesus gave the apostles the power to forgive sins, and given that the apostolic offices were clearly intended to have successors (Matthias being the first one)?

(5.) Why has every Christian church but the Catholic given in on the matter of artificial contraception, which was held gravely immoral by all Christians throughout the period from the early church to the year 1930?

(6.) Why do some churches have abortion providers as deacons?

(7.) Why do most Protestant churches fail to acknowledge the indissolubility of Christian marriage, the factual nonexistence of divorce from such marriages, which is clearly taught by Jesus in the gospels?

(8.) Why don't Protestants have a large body of persons "who have renounced marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven" as Christ clearly anticipates?

I don't think, in the end, these questions can be answered as satisfactorily as the corresponding queries to the Catholic church.

Hence my belief in the Catholic church as the original intended Body of Christ, to which all other Christians of any stripe, without even knowing it, are loosely connected in proportion to their devotion to Christ and the non-culpability of their rejection of the Church.

After that, heebie-jeebies about Marian devotions tend to pale in significance somewhat. I still don't know where some of it comes from, but I can trust Jesus when He said the gates of Hades would not prevail over His church.

i appreciate your comments and your recent list about the straying tendencies of some Protestant churches from certain valued positions, as yet still promoted/protected by the Catholic Church (thank God!),...i'll refer, for an example, to the point regarding the church's firm stand against abortion and artificial contraception,...this is one of the things that i love so much about the Catholic church,...i can only imagine that the obvious, visible appreciation of Mary, (a very special mother indeed!), and her special quality of "sweetness," is a very strong reinforcement to the whole appreciation of the pro-life position of the church,...and even though there are, admittedly, particular members of the church who would promote otherwise, thanks to the Magisterium, (and Mary's intercession/help/presence?) this position remains officially uncompromised,...

this is one of the reasons that i felt comfortable/"at home" in the Catholic church very early on,...i say that i "converted" to what i "already was" in my heart,...i found the things that in essence i deeply love in the Catholic church,...even if some of the attending prayers/practices/customs seemed "strange" (really just unfamiliar, basically) at first,...

i agree there are problems in Protestant churches. I'm not suprised by it since the church is composed of fallen men and women. Secondly some things are not clear in Scripture as we would like. Take your example of divorce. There is a provision for it in Matthew 19:9 under strict circumstances. I do think that the Catholic church is being dishonest in this area by calling divorce annulments.

Jesus says that Moses permitted divorce in the Old Testament, due to "the hardness of their hearts" (as i understand the situation, they had been killing their wives in order to end their marriages, and this provision was considered to be more merciful,...i suppose), but "in the beginning, it was not so,"...i think God will always honor the stalwart soul who walks according to a better personal conscience in all matters of moral choice, taking the "high road" so-to-speak,...we are not required to lower our personal standards, even though mercy may be shown to those who have and do,...forgiveness of personal sin is a basic restorative gift of God to the sincerely repentent,...

the Catholic church also teaches that it is possible to participate in the graces of the church by "desire" (again, i may be mis-using terminology here,...sorry),...there is considered to be something called "the baptism of desire;" "spiritual communions" may be made when it is not possible to participate in the actual sacraments, even if the reason is not yet being a matriculated, baptized member of the church,...very often these conditions are prominent during the initial phases of the conversion process,...although i had not heard those terms yet, i believe i was approaching the church, being drawn closer, through these means,...God is good, and merciful,...

Protestant 1:

Yes, sometimes annulments seem a bit too easily-given to me, also.

Yet in the end, it is a fact that some (very few) annulment requests are rejected. If the Church finds that there's every reason to believe a sacramental Christian marriage has taken place, that both parties entered into knowingly, rejections still do occur. And even when they don't, the "hassle" of the often months-long period of investigation can, if handled properly at the pastoral level, bring closure and healing to the damaged relationship.

Since sacramental Christian marriage as the Church defines it is such a high and holy thing, there aren't perhaps, our of all the people who wind up getting civil divorces, very many who initially intended to enter that kind of high life-calling to begin with. But if they did both initially enter into that understanding of marriage, and were of sufficient age and sound mind and under no compulsion, the Church does not grant an annulment.

I don't think Matthew 19 should be viewed in isolation from Matthew 5: The divorced woman would need to find another husband, to keep her from destitution (or prostitution); but Jesus seems to say that even after the divorce, she is being "forced" by a divorce to become an adulteress, by merely marrying another to stay out of the poorhouse.

Unless, of course, if she already were an adulteress to begin with, in which case she wasn't forced; it was her choice.

In short, for Matthew 5 to be true as written, marriage bonds really are permanent in the Kingdom of God, and a civil divorce decree doesn't sever that spiritual reality. People remarrying are committing adultery because they never got un-married from their original spouse. Only if his wife was already voluntarily unchaste, does Jesus allow that the later unfaithfulness (of remarrying) is not the fault of the husband who divorced her.

From what I understand, there are (extremely rare) occasions in which a divorced-and-remarried Catholic, whose annulment was rejected, may not take communion until they separate from the second (civil) spouse, thus ending the state of adultery (which is mortal sin, making a person unfit for communion).

Even if the quantity of annulments makes it seem like "Catholic divorce," still, I think the above constitutes a far better effort to uphold Christ's high view of marriage than any other church policy of which I am aware.

On another topic: The Catholic church has its problems; the various Protestant denominations also have theirs. As a friend once told me: "Don't go looking for a perfect church this side of heaven, because if you ever find it, it'll stop being perfect the moment you join."

So I wasn't trying to slam Protestants in general with my list of issues, above. (Again, I come from that background; most of my family remains in it; and that was where I met Jesus.)

I listed those issues only as illustrations of the "problem of authority." Without a living authority, there is no one to say "Scripture Interpretation X is valid, but Y is invalid."

This doesn't seem like a big thing -- God doesn't guarantee us perfect knowledge, and even the Catholic church allows for variations of opinion in certain areas of doctrine.

But when this vagueness extends into core issues of salvation, it becomes vitally important to know the truth. What does baptism do? What happens to the bread and wine? Who is allowed to ordain, to consecrate, to preach? Should we pray for the dead (in Christ) or not? Can they pray for us or not? Who may take communion? When one sins after initial justification, what are the consequences? What is the nature of grace? The relationship of faith and works? Works of Torah, works of Grace? How to reconcile James 2 and Romans?

Among Protestants, we fool ourselves sometimes into thinking that the areas where we differ from one another aren't important ones; that we have all the important doctrines in common and differ only in the niggling details, things of interest to picky theologians. But as soon as we ask which things we differ in, we see this is utterly false; our differences are large and in vital areas.

(Oops. You see how recently I left the Protestant camp: Here I am still saying "we.")

Anyhow, if Scripture is perspicuous and sufficient, surely there would be more agreement about these vital things. But there isn't. Its inerrancy matters little if every crowd of five devout, Spirit-led, praying, educated scholars comes up with six possible interpretations.

How can one know The Truth? Not about tangential things, but about Vital Doctrines? Jesus prayed that we be one as He and The Father are one. Does Jesus ever disagree with the Father about whether the Eucharist is a sacramental transformation or a mere symbolic remembrance?

Jesus intended that the world would see Christian's unity and, by it, know that Jesus was truly sent by the Father (John 17:21). Does the world look at Christians and say, "Gee, look how unified they are; that Jesus fellow really must be God?"

Can Scripture, without a living authority to accompany it, ever produce that level of doctrinal unity? We've had a five-hundred year experiment in which to find out: It doesn't look good thus far.

Hence, I think, the need for living authority.

R.C., I really do appreciate the argument from history. I think all of us here do want to be faithful to the apostles' teaching. What makes me unwilling to accept arguments based solely on Tradition is the knowledge that traditions can change and develop out of nowhere, and that proponents claiming to speak for that Tradition have been guilty of clear denials of Biblical teaching. I know you say that heretical teachings haven't ever been accepted by councils and other Magisterial teaching sources, but it raises the question of how reliable the Tradition really is. I believe the Church Fathers are worthy of deep respect, but at times they clearly erred.

The Assumption in particular strikes me as pious folklore turned into dogma. It has no known provenance before the 4th century, and its magical elements add to its suspect nature. Even if the transportation of the disciples isn't part of the official dogma, it's certainly a part of the popular conception of the Assumption that the Magisterium has done nothing to discourage, at the very least.

I won't try to defend Protestant churches that have discarded their theological moorings (like the churches that you say have abortion providers as deacons); nor will I expect you to defend the bishops who covered up the scandals of sexual abuse. But if you're going to criticize other Protestant practices through history, I have a few questions as well:

1) Jesus taught the ordinary people, as did the apostles. They used everyday language to make their teaching clear; the New Testament was written in everyday Greek, not a formal style. Why has the Catholic Church been so antagonistic to providing the Scriptures to the laity, even to the point of executing Tyndale, persecuting other translators, and destroying vernacular Bibles? It really wasn't until after Vatican II that most Catholics felt free to study the Scriptures themselves.

2) If being faithful to the apostles' teaching is truly of utmost importance to the Catholic Church, why did it demand allegiance to the Vulgate text long after it was clear that it did not reflect the most ancient manuscripts now available?

3) Peter calls the whole body of believers a "royal priesthood;" Jesus calls us his "friends;" Paul calls us Jesus' "brothers" and God's adopted "sons." Why does the Catholic Church tells the laity not to approach God directly, but to go through earthly priests and heavenly saints, when every prayer in the Bible is addressed to God?

4) Jesus rejected the sword as a means of spreading the gospel. Why has the Catholic Church executed those it accused of heresy?

5) Peter was married. Why should his successors, and all clergy, be prohibited from marriage? For whom was Paul laying out the requirements to be a leader (which speak of being the husband of one wife) in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1?

6) Why does Catholicism make dogma (something all faithful Catholics are duty-bound to assent to) on matters of which Scripture says absolutely nothing (the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, purgatory, prayers to saints, penance, etc.), when the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) and Paul's letters to the Romans and Corinthians speak of the importance of permitting alternative views on "disputable matters"? How does this differ from the law-making practices of the Pharisees that Jesus condemns?

7) If "by their fruits you shall know them," how can apostolic succession be held to have any meaning in the wake of the utterly corrupt popes of the late medieval and early Renaissance period (and the corrupt cardinals who elected them)?

Those are some of the things that, given the lack of a clear Scriptural basis, leave me unable to accept the validity of the Magisterium as an infallible teaching source. It would be nice to have such an authority, but I don't see that God has provided it.

since one of the most conspicuous differences between the Catholic church and any Protestant church that i have ever heard of is the very central principle of the Catholic church being a sacramental church, where we firmly accept transubstantiation, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, our Holy Communion, made possible by the consecration prayers of the consecrated priest (which are--by the way--in agreement with the faithful in attendance),...how much closer and more intimately connected to Christ can we get?,...

to listen to some of these "objections," phrased as if Catholics are somehow hindered from a direct connection to Christ, in that our focus has somehow been diverted away from Christ by being taught to "pray to" (an incorrect expression anyway) Saints, is to totally ignore the central reality of the Catholic church,...weekly (and even daily) attendance at the sacred Mass, where Christ is received in Holy Communion regularly by the faithful believers, is the most encouraged practice of all,...

somehow, i think because this conversation began and is supposed to be about "sharing the real Mary," we've been focusing on a (very interesting) discussion, but a discussion, nonetheless, that has taken a side issue and made its defense (or the opposite) into an argument for and against the sensibleness (to a Protestant) and acceptableness of just about anything and everything ever postulated by the multiple human founders of the Catholic church in its entire history,...anything that can be referred to as inerrant or infallible in this process can only be considered to be so on the basis of God's faithful, persistent, guiding and correcting influence (the faithfulness of the Holy Spirit's involvement in the overall process),...it's pretty obvious across the board on all sides of this discussion that humans have made (and continue to make) mistakes,...

as interesting and challenging as many of the points are, when an argument starts to be repeatedly phrased as if Catholics are somehow being prevented from full access to Christ, because of their attention being diverted from Christ to the Saints in prayer by "longstanding church teaching," is to really miss the central reality, experience, focus, and practice of the Catholic Church in a very big way,...

I commiserate with R.C. I’ve been a Protestant for 40 years – I’m now 58. But the doctrines of sola scriptura and sola fide just don’t make sense for me any more. Like R.C., I did not go looking for this road to Rome. It started with some innocent re-readings of C.S. Lewis; then Chesterton, who really caught me off guard. From there, I couldn’t get enough of Catholic authors.

Roman Catholicism is often accused of incorporating superstitious beliefs into its doctrine and practice. But if there is anything magical, it seems to me to be the Protestant belief in sola scriptura. Protestants understand the divinity of the Bible, but they lack an appreciation for its humanity – its historical context. There are various levels of sophistication in Protestant views of Biblical authority, but they all ultimately resolve to something on the order of the Bible being dropped down from heaven, whole and complete. In my mind, without historical context, there is no context – only the Bible in a vacuum.

In many ways, this current stage of my Christian journey has been an enlightening one, but very painful as well. I often feel overwhelmed, and caught in the middle. On the one hand, it appears that the Protestant view of authority is firmly planted in midair; on the other hand, I struggle with all of the trappings of Rome’s hierarchy. I read and read, and struggle to know more of the Church Fathers and history, and my list of must-read books keeps growing. But where does this lead? Greater certainty – greater confusion? I yearn for the simplicity of the Gospel – my savior, brother and friend – Jesus.

What certainty has God given us? Possibly only in our understanding of those things that are essential to our salvation. And in those essential matters, I believe we must insist there is perspicuity.

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good ol' way
And who shall wear the starry crown?
Good Lord show me the way!

O sinners, let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
O sinners, let's go down
Down in the river to pray

This is very well said and points out the fundamental misunderstanding.

Kelvin:

I don't know if you're still reading this thread; sorry I've been away but (a.) a man has to work gainfully sometime and (b.) anyway I thought the conversation had at long last died out.

I may not be able to take the time to reply to all your questions (challenges), but there are some to which I can briefly reply:
The historical claims in this question are misleading. The Catholic Church did in fact order the burning of Bibles not printed by approved printers in approved translation, and encouraged secular authorities to impose secular punishment on those violating the ban. But the reasons were: (a.) some had horrible translation errors, e.g., the "Unrighteous Bible" in which the omission of the word "not" causes 1 Corinthians 6:9 to read: "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?..."; and (b.) some had anti-Catholic notations or glosses or decisions of translation. This latter may seem a pretty weak reason to send pitchfork-waving mobs after a printer, but consider that in and prior to the Reformation, the Catholic Church naturally enough thought of the Bible as "our book," and viewed messing around with it as blasphemous in about the way a modern jihadist views messing with the Koran.

But this wasn't to keep Bibles out of the hands of the people; note: just those viewed as outrageous because of errors or dissenting doctrine (viewed at the time as intrinsically blasphemous and diabolical).

You also add,There's sadly some truth to this, and indeed too many American Catholics are still unfamiliar with the Scriptures; however, it isn't for lack of the Vatican trying to encourage them to study Scripture! Indeed, for centuries there have been huge indulgences granted to those who took the time to study Scriptures, often documented in Catholic Bibles. That may not give a Protestant much comfort if he's squicky on the topic of indulgences, but he should recognize that it represents a serious effort to encourage Scripture study among Catholics. However a culture of "clericalism" still exists among some Catholics, who sadly take the attitude that Scripture study and saintliness are the priest's job. It's a hard view to eradicate, no matter how hard the Church trumpets the words universal, individual call to holiness.

The Church does not teach "either/or" in this context, but "both/and." The instruction is: Pray to God, pray without ceasing; and furthermore, ask others to pray for you. Since "the prayer of a righteous man availeth much," and since no earthly saint is as righteous as a saint already in God's presence in heaven, it follows that the saints in glory are the best "prayer chain" to call on in times of need. (Protestants also ask others to pray for them in times of need; but in the Catholic view, Protestants make the error of forgoing the assistance of some of the best pray-ers in the universe.)

As for "earthly priests": The Catholic view is that all believers are priests in one sense, just as all Israelites were priests in the Old Testament ("a royal priesthood"/"a nation of priests"). But in the Old Testament, not all members of the body were given the same functions; not any Israelite could enter the Holy of Holies, but only the high priest, once a year; not all could offer sacrifices, but only the Levitical priesthood. In the New Covenant (which fulfills the Old rather than changing its character) the same pattern exists: Christ entered the Holy of Holies in the Heavenly Temple, and sits at the right hand of the Father; but the new Levites are those in the Apostolical Succession, who are set aside for the offering of the sacrifice of the Mass.

Catholic rulers, when they found a citizen was guilty of heresy, often executed those citizens, because in a Catholic kingdom, heresy was considered a form of treason. A person accused of heresy or witchcraft usually asked for a Church trial rather than the alternative, since a priest brought in from Italy was often less biased and excitable than one's pitchfork-waving neighbors or the soldiery of the local prince.

Still, I don't deny evil done in the Church's name. Often the problem was that, even when there was a good Pope in office, he'd have no idea what they were doing in, say, France, until months after some evil thing occurred. Hard to imagine in this day-and-age, but when a report of a conflict with Protestants could take a year to reach the Vatican, it was difficult to set good policy.

...continued...

...continuing...
Because the Church regards itself as preserving Sacred Tradition in these matters; it sees itself as "contend[ing] for the faith once for all delivered to the Apostles" which has been delivered to us (later generations of Christians) "by word of mouth or by letter." That some of that Sacred Tradition was not delivered "by letter" (i.e. in the canonical Scriptures) makes no difference in this view, provided it was delivered from apostolic times "by word of mouth," since Paul says we are to attend to both.

This differs from the Pharisaical practice in that it is not a man-made tradition which contradicts the word of God, but an Apostolic Tradition which is the word of God. Though all facets of the Apostolic Tradition are thought to be referenced in some fashion in the Scriptures, many of those references are oblique or even in the form of an "understood context" of what is being said. In order to tease out the doctrines which are present but not specifically stated (e.g. the Trinity, Purgatory, the hypostatic union), we mostly rely on evidence of the "word of mouth" portions of the Tradition, which we find in the Church Fathers.

I have sympathy for this objection, however. You should know that for some dogmas, my feeling is "While I see that it may be so, I cannot see why it must be so." Yet because I find the Church's claims of authority more plausible than any other construction of Christian authority, I accept these dogmas on the basis of that authority.

Well the Church certainly doesn't argue that these folk are going to heaven! ...or for the less immoral ones, that they'll get there without a really uncomfortably thorough scrubbing-down in Purgatory. So I'm not defending the Borgia popes and their cronies.

But does that invalidate Apostolic Succession?

Well, that depends on the rule we find for such things in the Old Testament, which prophetically foreshadowed the New. Did the immorality of some of Abraham's descendants cause God to give up on the notion of blessing the nations through Abraham's descendants? Did the immorality of some of King David's grandsons cause God to give up on the whole notion of a Davidic Kingdom which a "Son of David" would come to rule forever? Did the immorality of Aaron's sons or Eli's sons cause God to give up on the notion of priests in Israel? And, in the New Testament, did Judas' betrayal cause Jesus to give up the whole idea of Apostles?

If not, then we assert God's Standard Operating Procedure is as follows: kick out the bad officeholders, but keep the office. And if one out of ten are bad apples; well, even Jesus couldn't do better than one out of twelve.

I understand. I myself would be in the same boat, did I think there were any viable alternative.

However, Sola Scriptura is not viable, historically or practically. And it seems to me that the Magisterial authority of the Church (the "pillar and bulwark of the Truth" (1 Tim 3:15) and the guarantee that the Church on Peter would not fail) does give us an alternative to Sola Scriptura which is both faithful to the facts of history and to Jesus' words in Scripture.

There's a clear connection from Davidic Kingdom's Prime Minister/Grand Vizier office in Isaiah 22 to the Petrine office Jesus grants Peter. And His threefold "feed my sheep" "tend my lambs" "rule my flock" (yes, I know, there are alternative translations to "rule") clearly puts Peter in a leadership role. We know that Apostles have successors (e.g. Matthias to Judas) and we know that Peter planned to ensure, before he died, that someone would carry on his office (2 Peter 1:13-15, traditional interpretation). We know Jesus said to the Apostles and Peter that "Satan has asked to sift ya'll[plural] like wheat, but I have prayed for you[singular, to Peter] that your faith may not fail; so when you've turned yourself around and gotten your, uh, stuff together, Peter, strengthen your brothers." (my paraphrase, obviously). We know that "what you bind on earth is bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth is loosed in heaven." We know the Prime Minister under the Davidic King is "as a father to the people" (see Isaiah 22 again).

All these verses are meaningless under Protestantism in a modern democracy, but to a first-century Jew the kingdom implications would have been obvious. So I am forced to conclude that the Magisterium, or something so like it that no other Christian denomination has ever come closer, is what Jesus intended for His followers, "that they may be one, even as [Jesus and The Father] are one."

P.S. I skipped #2; I don't know enough about the history of the Vulgate to comment.

Kelvin:

Whoops, I just realized I forgot to paste in my response to item #5. Sorry for the oversight; here it is:

Paul wasn't requiring a wife, but insisting that an overseer (bishop), elder (presbyter or priest), or deacon should have no more than one wife; i.e., not have remarried after a divorce.

Today, some Catholic clergy are married; e.g. most Eastern Rite Catholics and many Anglican or Lutheran converts. These are not the norm, however, so their presence is unnoticed by many, who wrongly assume two things: (1.) that all Catholic clergy are celibate, and (2.) that it is a dogma, rather than a discipline, that they be so.

However, it is a matter of discipline (changeable temporary policy rather than eternally unchangeable dogma) that Latin rite priests and bishops may not marry. This discipline exists for various reasons, some historical, and some current. Among them: (a.) a family distracts too much from their role as servant to their flock, (b.) prevention of financial security concerns, (c.) a sense of being "married to the Church" in their role as an alter Christus, and (d.) ensure that medieval clergy weren't put in the awkward position of trying to hand on their Church offices (or worse, Church property) to their heirs after the manner of the heirs of medieval landowners.

Anyhow, the point is that the Pope could decide tomorrow to lift the restriction on marriage of priests, and would not thereby invalidate any Catholic dogma. He probably won't, though, because in the judgment of folks who've studied the issue, the arguments for married clergy as the norm are weaker than the arguments against.

And keep in mind, Jesus (and Paul) clearly anticipated that ministers of the Gospel would include a large number who renounced marriage for the Kingdom of Heaven. I'm not saying that the Catholic Church has to worry about making sure all Jesus' prophecies are fulfilled or anything, but I observe that were it up to Protestants, there would be very few ministers who chose to be "eunuchs" for the Kingdom.

Doesn’t the belief that Mary can receive the simultaneous prayers of millions of devotees imply that she is somehow ubiquitous? In our glorified nature, we will be like Jesus – but in His glorified humanity, not in His Divinity. It is only Christ that will ever possess a dual nature.

I think we need to be very careful in our theology of the divinization of man. As image bearers of God, there are ways in which we participate in the Divine attributes as He fills “all in all.” We will be holy, but not as He is Holy and “set apart” from all else that exists. The distinction between Creator and creature will remain forever. It is true, as St. Paul says, that we will be “like Him,” but only because “we will see Him as He is.” There will be analogy, but never equality. Mary can never be “all in all,” since she is not omnipresent.

How is it any different between God hearing all prayers and Mary hearing all prayers? To do so would require omnipresence. Secondly, if God intended for us to pray to others who have died why isn't this demonstrated in the NT? Take Stephen and James who were recorded to have died in the NT and yet no prayers are offered to them nor is their any exhortation to pray to them. Surely there would have been an exhortation to pray to them if Christ had wanted such a practice to be done by His followers. The fact that there is not one such exhortation to do so clearly shows He wants us to depend only on Him for all things.

Since we are discussing Mary its important to see how these doctrines are manifested in the Catholic church. Should anyone who claims to follow Christ consecrate themselves to Mary as these prayers teach?


Daily Renewal of Total Consecration by St. Maximillian Kolbe

Immaculata, Queen and Mother of the Church,
I renew my consecration to you for this day and for always, so that you might use me for the coming
of the Kingdom of Jesus in the whole world. To this end I offer you all my prayers, actions and
sacrifices for this day.

Fatima Prayer
My God, I believe, I adore, I hope, and I love You.
I beg pardon of You for those who do not believe,
do not adore, do not hope, and do not love You.

2 Kings 13:20-21

20 "Elisha died and was buried.
Now Moabite raiders used to enter the country every spring. 21 Once while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man's body into Elisha's tomb. When the body touched Elisha's bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet."


...an old testament example (familiar i'm sure to the early church fathers/apostles) of a miracle attributed i would assume, at least in some measure to the godliness of the deceased involved: the prophet Elisha; but even so i'm also sure it is ultimately seen to be the power of god that has wrought the miracle,...i don't think this is essentially any different from the Catholic perspective regarding anything being attributed to the Saints,...

I guess I wasn't clear. Please read my last sentence: "Mary can never be "all in all," since she is not omnipresent."

Prayers to Mary pose a particular difficulty for me because I do NOT think she is omnipresent. I am seeking clarification from those of Catholic persuasion, to explain how Mary can receive the simultaneous prayers of millions of devotees when she is a human being, and therefore does NOT possess the Divine attribute of omnipresence.

I agree with your point that "hearing all prayers" requires omnipresence. So I want to understand if Catholics really believe that Mary is omnipresent, or if there is some other explanation as to how she is able to receive and answer all of these prayers.

1 Corinthians 2:9
However, as it is written: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him" —

i think it's a mistake to hold on too rigidly to earthly parameters, when thinking about heavenly things/conditions,...it's reasonable to keep an "open mind" to the fact that you really do not know what heaven will be like, or what souls in glory will be like as well,...

Yes, 1 Corinthians 2:9 is a great passage. And 1 Corinthians 13: 12 says that we currently "see through a glass darkly," but then - "face to face." Both passages encourage us not to constrain our notions of eternity to what we currently experience in the temporal. But we can also see those verses as a caution against speculation. We do not know what is on the other side of the dark glass. But God has clearly revealed to us those attributes that are exclusively His - e.g., self-existence, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence.

I do have an open mind to these things. Certainly, in many ways, God's attributes are communicated to His creatures. As Aquinas noted, a hot poker in the fire inherits the attributes of the fire. I still sense, however, that our "likeness" to God will always be analogical - always lacking full equality. And I am very tenative (even fearful) to attribute qualities to a human being, no matter how exalted in heaven, that seem to belong exclusively to God. We will always be creatures, and will always have limited knowledge. Can Mary know my heart as God knows my heart? If not, it is difficult to understand how Mary can answer my prayers.

fear is a double-sided kind of a "human" problem,...the scriptures tell us it is NOT faith,...and that in fear lies "torment,"...(i can try to look up the references for these comments later),...

on the one hand, it IS appropriate to be wary (which involves a certain amount of "healthy" apprehension--"being wise as serpents, (but innocent as doves)"--because, after all, we DO live in a realm that is affected by our spiritual ancestors having eaten from the tree of the knowledge of "good and evil"),...but, on the other hand, to be therefore so scrupulously wary of EVERYTHING--just in case it might semantically be tinged with this dangerous, seductive undercurrent of "evil"--can lead to a frustrating, paralyzed state-of-mind in which true revelation may actually be blocked from acceptance, resulting in an unintended different kind of self-limiting, God-limiting problem,...

i don't think it is really possible to hand someone a convenient and satisfactory verbal "exit" from this situation:

(1) we certainly DO need to be wary of false teachers and false prophets, and false doctrines, and false interpretations of doctrines, etc., especially in this day and age,...

(2) even very very well-intentioned people can "miss it," or get things mixed-up,...actually, i more or less EXPECT this to broadly be the case, and am not so surprised or disappointed to find that they/(we) do,...why?,...because, realistically, we are ALL of us "human," and not-God and therefore (we are) inherently fallible and LIMITED,...do ALL of us agree on anything and/or everything at any given point in time, or ALL the time?,...of course not,...some types of differences are not really serious issues, but some are very serious issues, with all kinds of things and circumstances in-between,...it takes patience and maturity and experience and very serious prayer and study (and the confirmation out of the "mouths of the two or three witnesses")to be able to "discern" with some degree of confidence and accuracy, just how valuable and pertinent and useful certain information and concepts are,...and if we can understand this much, certainly God can understand, and is patient and tolerant (as we should also be with ourselves and others) while we "work on" the things that concern us,...it was certainly very traditional for the Jews to study the Scriptures and wrangle over the "meanings," and we know they didn't always "get it right,"...

(3) so, i guess it boils down to--eventually--each one's very personal walk of faith,...study of the scriptures, tradition, etc.,...talks with God,...talks with others "on the journey,"...observations of examples of those who "practice" one thing or another,...learning and teaching experiences,..."events" in life,...one of my own personal "sayings" is that "God never wastes anything,"...we can learn, develop, and grow from everything,...grow in wisdom and understanding, compassion, righteousness, prayer, etc., etc.,...."the sky's the limit" for those who dersire to grow with God,...

be blessed,...you are blessed,...(-:

...(sorry for mis-spelling "desire" at the end of last post),...

1 John 4
Test the Spirits
1"Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world."


13"We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. 16And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. 17In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. 18There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love."


18"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.",...this is what i found when i went looking for other references (not yet located),...it is good also, because it points out that if we are in a position of "fear" that we have not yet been "made perfect in love,"...this is part of the process of healing and discovery in the personal walk that continues to draw us closer to the full reality/realities we share in the Kingdom of God,...once the love (going both ways--man to God, and God to man) becomes perfect (or at least more perfect), our fears and anxieties decrease,...i'm guessing that this is a benefit that many Catholics have found and share in practicing their well-defined sacramentalized faith,...i know i have,...

I have an emotional, but not an intellectual, problem with all these saints hearing the prayers of the faithful on earth (Mary chief among them, but essentially no different than any other saint in hearing the petitions of the faithful for prayer on their behalf).

The Emotional Concern
The emotional one is a fear of attributing more glory to Mary than is proportional.

Jesus, being sinless, honors both His Father and His Mother, and the Hebrew word "honor" in the Ten Commandments is at root the same as "to glorify." Jesus glorifies His Father and His Mother. We are in His Body, therefore, so long as we abide in Him, she is also our mother as God is our Father. And we are to imitate Jesus.

Jesus, being God and in heaven, has infinite time and energy to glorify both His Father and His mother. So it's no problem for Him.

But my emotional fear of disproportionality comes from the knowledge that I am not in heaven. I remain in Time, without benefit of infinite time and energy to expend, in a fallen world, beset with the remnants of the sin nature which Christ is gradually replacing in me. The proportional glorification of Father and Mother is no problem when one has infinite resources to spend in either direction, but with limited resources, one must take care to keep things proportional. As a result, I err on the side of caution, and perhaps do Mary somewhat less glory than she proportionally deserves, lest I give her more, and cheat God, my higher loyalty, of anything.

However, I must keep in mind that:

(1.) God knows my heart and honors my desire for faithfulness in this matter;

(2.) My overconservatism in this matter is emotionally tied to my Protestant upbringing. Good tho' it was, this is one area in which it is no asset;

(3.) Anything that glorifies Mary glorifies God indirectly, in so far as she is His creation, and nothing worthwhile about her comes from anywhere but Him, and she herself acknowledges this, always directing the focus away from herself and towards her Son.

The Intellectual Unconcern
On the intellectual side, I am untroubled by the question of whether the saints in glory, including Mary, can hear and cope with a zillion prayers.

The reason is simple. Were a zillion, or even twenty, of my friends to request that I pray for them, I could not, because I am Inside Time. I must live my life sequentially, doing one thing at a time.

The saints in glory do not have that problem. They are Outside Time, just as they are outside Space. (Physicists tell us that Time is, like Space, a facet of a seamless fabric of "spacetime.") For the saints, as for God, All Times Are Now just as All Places Are Here.

...continued...

...continuing...

This explains the various points in the Bible where the saints are depicted as being aware of events on earth. How could they not? No matter when or where it is, they are right there, right now.

This is not, however, a divinization of the saints, not in any excessive way. Nothing about the current status of the saints in glory may be attributed to anyone other than God, who holds this universe together at each instant by the word of His power, deciding for each interaction between two quanta what its probabilistic outcome will be.

Likewise the continued existence of the spirit of a saint is, I think, an ongoing consequence of God's intent that it be so. Our eternality is permanently contingent on our right relationship to God, and not the mightiest fallen angel, despite his higher order of being, will avoid the transition from eternal existence to eternal destruction. From the point-of-view of the damned I expect that damnation feels everlasting, but only because the damned, having lost all the last of God's graces, are so nearly nothing that no time at all seems everlasting to them. To the eternally saved, I suspect that the everlasting damnation of hell seems more like the evaporation of a false start or error that happened for such a short duration so long ago that it counts, compared to glorious eternity of God's Everywhen, as no time at all.

But that's a sideline. Suffice it to say that, being Outside Time, there's no reason to worry that Mary, or St. Joseph, or St. Peter, or whomever, "can't cope with all those prayers at the same time." For of course the phrase "at the same time" gives the game away; it's a nonsense phrase, like asking "what happened before the Big Bang?" or "what happens after the Last Day?" or "who's more powerful than God?" You can put the words together so that they sound like they make sense, but they don't: There's no-one "more powerful than God," nor is anything "after the Last Day" or "before" the first, nor is there anything happening "at the same time" outside time.

If it helps to imagine it this way, think: Sts. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas More, and the Apostle Thomas each have all of eternity to attend to my request that they ask God to grant my son, their namesake Thomas, a love of truth, courage to stand up for it, and faith not to doubt it, respectively. They each also have all of eternity to attend to anyone else's prayer requests that come at them. Using eternity to attend to one request does not exhaust any Time, preventing its use on another request, when there's no Time to exhaust.

By the way, this Timelessness seems to exist even for saints who have been already granted their Incorruptible Raised Body (which would include Jesus Himself, Enoch, Elijah, Mary, and perhaps Moses). Jesus after His resurrection has no problem teleporting into rooms and vanishing; His behavior is familiar to readers of Edwin Abbot's Flatland. Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration are not, one presumes, bent over with decrepitude, and certainly none of Mary's apparitions seem to involve her looking old. All this is consistent with a being able to slip into and out of our space and time dimensions at will.

In Summary
There is no logical contradiction between Catholic doctrine in particular or common Christian doctrine in general, and the notion that saints can hear a zillion prayer requests "at the same time."

It cannot be discounted on that account; however, that does not prevent emotional discomfort for some of us in contemplation of Marian devotions. Prayers that God grant us the grace to be freed of this discomfort (not by adopting an attitude of carelessness about the proportion of honor due to Mary and God, but rather by developing habits of honoring both correctly) are truly salutary and surely have the approval of heaven.

in looking through scriptures about "faith," i was reminded about Paul's teaching about someone whose faith is "weak" on certain points (his example was about eating or abstaining from eating meat),...he goes on to say that for a person to "do" the thing that his faith is "weak" in regard to, IS sin for that person, because that's the way he sees it,...

therefore, we shouldn't "force" ourselves, or others, to go beyond our "comfort levels" in practicing our faith,...something that is faith for one, may not be an expression of faith for another,...

there are lots of little ("catholic culture"--not dogma, i suppose) "sayings" about Mary (and other things) that never really resonated with me, especially upon first hearing them,...but as time has gone by, i've ended up making my own little "sayings" that reflect my own path/growth/walk/experience,..."to Jesus, through Mary" was one of them,...beginning as a "conditioned Protestant" by exposure, my mind would just go "tilt" on that one!,...

now, as i reflect on that, i would say rather, that for me it was "to Mary, through her Son, Jesus,"...Jesus introduced me (lovingly) to his mother,...she has never eclipsed Him in any way,...i feel as though i look through a broad magnifying glass that IS Jesus, Himself, right into His Kingdom--which is Love (& Glory), and there is his mother Mary, and lots of other people!,...it is very exciting, very dynamic,...and rather than being proportioned or separated from one another, all is pulled together in a beautiful and harmonious, loving, mutually respectful, balanced unity,...i think we can leave the proportioning of heavenly balances to heaven,...they're ALL great friends "up there!",...(-:

but going at our own pace is very suitable,...we admit, and know, that we are the ones with the limitations,...it is the "human condition,"...

Thanks georgie-ann and R.C. for your thoughts. They were very helpful. I have to run to work right now, but I will re-read your posts this evening and respond. Thanks.

georgie-ann:

Thanks very much for your words. Yes, that Scripture passage is one I keep in mind. There are old-school Baptist friends around whom I don't drink wine (and another who's a teetotaler because of his alcoholic father) with that particular passage in mind.

Likewise, I appreciate that some Catholics are entirely comfortable with wildly florid phrases about Mary (St. Louis de Montfort comes to mind), but I appreciate it when they don't stress them overmuch in my hearing, in consideration of my upbringing.

At the same time, I cut them some slack and try not to be inflexible if the phrases they use strike me as being out-of-proportion, remembering that if my non-drinking friends looked in my top kitchen cabinet at the merlot and Crown Royal and whatnot, they'd have to make an effort to cut me some slack, also.

Anyhow, thanks for your comment and allow things to develop as God wills it, but at an unforced pace.

Sorry, that "allow" was meant to say "I'll allow." I got distracted by the fussing of my seven-month-old who absolutely refuses to take a nap. The Apostles in the Garden should have fought sleep as valiantly as this kid.

R.C.,...you've just said a lot of "truth" there!...about realizing how much "slack" we need to give one another, due to our differing viewpoints and frames of reference!,...in actuality, i think Protestants find more things than Mary to be "worried" about us Catholics about,...feeling free to drink wine, definitely being "on the list,"...all i can say is, i'm very happy being a serious, practicing Catholic,...i'm pretty careful not to cross into forbidden territory, as i take the "commandments" very seriously,...but i DO enjoy not being too terribly nit-picky with myself over things that i consider to be "small stuff," that i personally do not abuse, but that still would possibly go "against the grain" for someone of a different theological conditioning/training,...

none of us likes to be restricted from doing something that we find to be pleasant and acceptable, or forced to do something that we find useless or unacceptable, by another's "optional" dictates,...a genuine faith walk is NOT a static, robotic, copy-cat deal,...we must "work out our own salvation (with fear & trembling),"...our faith walk should be genuinely, personally and sincerely our own path to finding/developing a closer relationship with God,...each person's experience will have some unique characteristics, while also sharing a commonality of faith and love with other believers,...since God needs so many different types of "helpers" in the Kingdom, He has not made us all alike!,...and that makes things very interesting, to say the least!,...

Glenn,...i'm happy to hear that some of what we're all trying to say here is meaningful to you!,...love, and god bless!,...best wishes,...

Just because something does not contradict Christian doctrine i.e. Scripture does not mean it's true. The Mormon claims mormonism is true because he as a "burning in the bosom" and yet its doctrine are not Christian even though they may sound like they are. We are commanded by Scripture to examine everything carefully (I Thes 5:21) which includes all that Christians are to believe. Thats why i encourage you to examine these Marian dogmas in light of the Scriptures as the Bereans did with the message that Paul was teaching in Acts 17:11. As i have said before these teaching on Mary are not grounded in Scripture and were not believed for centuries. These facts should cause any catholic great concern. Perhaps the emotional concern catholics have about these Marian dogmas is the Spirit at work in that person not to pray to Mary but only to the Lord Jesus Who alone has the power to intercede on our behalf. See Hebrews 4:14-16.

some of these things/issues may also never be known clearly until we're seeing "face to face,"...i prefer to give the serious individual credit for being able to walk a discerning path, collecting information/data, praying, studying,...to basically follow anything or anyone in a condition of blind submission/"obedience" to someone else's emphatic assertion of "doctrine" (sola scriptura or otherwise) is to be setting oneself up for a disappointing/unfulfilling experience, lacking personal authenticity, and perhaps leading to "cultism,"...

Christ says we are not called to be His slaves (although Paul calls himself a "love slave"), but He calls us his "friends,"...in my experience Christ does not "push us around" through insinuation, limitation and intimidation,...yes, the Holy Spirit may nudge us this way and that, and we may learn to take advantage of and trust His guidance, along with our prayerful study and consideration of what's at hand,...not all possibilities are loaded with automatic failure consequences,...if we proceed in good conscience, a lot will be forgiven us, as we more clearly see where we are going,...God is good,...God is love,...patient, and very kind and understanding as wel