In honor of Mary’s recent feast day, Trent gives us tips on how to defend the dogma of the Assumption and answer common objections to it.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Nearly four years ago, I debated the reformed apologist, James White, at the Atlanta G3 Conference on the subject, can a Christian lose his salvation? And I bring that up because in the debate, the topic of today’s podcast came up, which would be the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Just a few days ago, we celebrated in the church the Feast of the Assumption, celebrating the mystery of Mary being assumed body and soul into heaven, so I want to talk about that here on the podcast today and how we can defend this important dogma of our faith. Before I get to that, though, a big reminder and shout out to our supporters of trenthornpodcast.com. I’m very grateful for your support, especially during this difficult time for a lot of people who are experiencing economic downturns and stress. And by the way, if you’re supporting the podcast and you’re feeling financial stress, do what you got to do to get yourself in the right shape. So if you have to modify your donations a bit or temporarily suspend them, do what you have to do to right the ship, because you can always still pray for the podcast and listen to it and I’m always appreciative of that. Wherever you might be, however you’re supporting the podcast, whether it’s financially or through your prayers, by recommending it to others, through word of mouth, or by leaving a review at iTunes or Google Play, please know that you have my thanks and my gratitude for that and it’s reaching a lot of people, including people who are not Catholic, who enjoy listening to these episodes and have come to see the reasonableness of the Catholic faith, so once again, a big thank you to all of you. And now let’s jump into the topic of today’s show, how to defend the Assumption of Mary. I want to play for you a little clip from that debate with James White. I was listening to the debate just before doing this podcast, to a few clips here and there, and it’s just funny to go back in time and I remember all of it, actually, it was so fascinating. I went down there with Jon Sorensen, who’s our director of operations here at Catholic Answers and the Sovereign Alliance, the group putting it on along with the G3 conference, it’s a huge conference of reformed Christians, Calvinist Christians getting together and so, they usually do a debate before the conference.
So I’m there in front of 1,200 people who don’t share my views, though I did hear about a hundred Catholics showed up to see me do the debate against James White on the question, can a Christian lose his salvation? So actually the night before the debate, John Sorenson and I, James White and Rich Pierce, the four of us all went out together, we got dinner, it was a very pleasant affair, by the way. We talked about apologetics, dealing with Mormonism and it was just actually nice. We all sat down and had dinner together at the hotel restaurant. But then the next day we went off and did the debate and the debaters gloves come on and we engage in exegetical and logical fisticuffs onstage and I think the debate actually went very well. When you look at the comments section on the YouTube channel at Catholic Answers where it’s posted, there’s a fair number of comments from people who say I’m Protestant, but I really agree with Trent Horn on this issue. In fact, when I did the debate with White, I tried very hard. I didn’t reference Catholic teaching, I didn’t reference the catechism. On the question, can a Christian loses salvation? I articulated the view the church held for 1,500 years until the time of John Calvin and so, I just cited scripture over and over and over again. In fact, one person messaged me later and said, “You did a great job defending the Lutheran position on this question.” In fact, I cited Martin Luther as defending my point of view in the debate.
So I think later on James White had to remind everyone don’t fall for what this guy is saying, remember, he’s Catholic because there was a point in the Q and A, I’ll play the clip for you, but in the context, we were asked a question, how do you know if passages in scripture that say a believer can lose his salvation? What do you do with these passages that sound like warnings that a believer can lose his salvation? Now, what I said is that clearly we should just take them for what they sound like they are, genuine warnings of a real possibility. White was arguing that you can look at them in two different ways, either that they’re prescriptive, they’re giving a warning and telling you not to do something so you don’t fall away or they’re merely descriptive. They describe people falling away who were never really saved to begin with and so, it could be either prescriptive or descriptive and as I point out in my answer, he already brings to the table, his theology, his Calvinist theology that says that God decides who is saved, he gives people irresistible grace they can’t refuse and once they have this grace, they can never lose their salvation. He already assumes this theology is true, so he must read every single scripture verse in light of that no matter how contrary to that meaning it sounds. And so, here was my answer in the debate. Because my opponent’s theology has to be true first, the Bible has to fit it. Our theology should come from the Bible, not the Bible from our theology.
James White:
Before I give my thanks to everyone, while the words are still echoing in the hall, I want you to hear that someone who denies Sola scriptura and demands that you read scripture in the light of the teachings of the Bishop of Rome just said we need to get our theology from the Bible. Someone who will tell you that Mary is bodily assumed that to heaven, we need to get our theology from the Bible. I’m sorry, that went just a little bit beyond where I could let it pass by and not make a few references to that.
Trent Horn:
Of course, what I meant when I said we needed to get our theology from the Bible, I did not mean we need to get our theology from the Bible alone. What I meant was that in the debate, White was clearly reading his unbiblical theology that you can never lose your salvation. He’s reading that into biblical texts and then twisting them in order to get that meaning out of the text. Whereas what I was saying that as a source of theology, we should let the Bible speak for itself and that just couldn’t go by White. So when he got up, he wanted to point out, remember folks, this guy does not believe in Sola scriptura. That’s right, I don’t, because guess what? The Bible doesn’t teach Sola scriptura. Another example of getting our theology from the Bible. If we get the theology from the Bible, one of the truths we get from the Bible is that there is no teaching, that all of Divine Revelation is contained in the Bible and the Bible itself even speaks to the existence of tradition and the word of God outside of the written text. So he wanted to bring up to everyone, this guy doesn’t really believe in biblical theology. How does he know that? Because he believes in the assumption of Mary. And so, that’s why I wanted to talk about that today because when many Protestants bring up the idea that Catholics are unbiblical, they’ll bring up the assumption of Mary as the number one example of that. So we need to be able to offer a sound reply to those criticisms, so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So let’s get into the dogma of Mary’s Assumption and how to defend it. So on November 12th, 1950, Pope Pius the 12th, he solemnly declared and defined, so he made an ex cathedra statement. Now of course, this doctrine was believed, as you’ll see, long before 1950, but it was in 1950 when the Pope using the special charism of infallibility given to him as the successor of St. Peter solemnly declared and defined this. He wrote an entire document to accompany the definition, the documents called munificentissimus deus, but only the small part is the infallible teaching of the church, that this is a dogma, one has to believe as being contained in Divine Revelation. That is “the immaculate mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary having completed the course of her earthly life was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” So notice the Pope says, “Having completed the course of her earthly life was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” This leaves open the question of whether Mary died. So this dogmatic definition only says Mary was assumed, it doesn’t dogmatically define her fate at the end of her life, whether she died and was assumed into heaven, or it was assumed alive body and soul. The majority view among Theologians is that she died a peaceful death and was assumed into heaven, that she died like her son. So people will say, “Well, how can Mary die? She was free from sin.” Well, Jesus was free from sin as well, but he was capable of dying on a cross. And so, Mary entered into death in a fitting way to mirror and follow her son who also chose to enter into death for our sake in order to overcome it. Now, the episcopal constitution munificentissimus deus says this about the dogma. It says it is “based on the sacred writings, which is thoroughly rooted in the minds of the faithful, which has been approved and ecclesiastical worship from the most remote times, which is completely in harmony with the other revealed truths, which has been expanded and explained magnificently in the work, the science and the wisdom of the Theologian.” So how would Protestants argue against this particular Marian dogma? Unlike the Immaculate Conception, which says Mary is free from sin, Protestants often attack that dogma by trying to point to biblical evidence, either that Mary sinned or biblical evidence that says all human beings sin without question. And I actually have a show on the Immaculate Conception itself if you want to go back to that to see how to answer those arguments. I’ll include a link to it in the show description, but when it comes to this dogma, there’s really no biblical evidence against it. Some Protestants will cite John 3:13, where Jesus says, “No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven the son of man,” but this doesn’t disprove Mary’s assumption because Mary was taken up into heaven, she didn’t ascend into heaven. By that statement, if Jesus said, “No one has ascended into heaven,” and you say, “Well, Mary wasn’t assumed into heaven,” then you’d have to say that Elijah was never assumed into heaven even though Second Kings 2:11 clearly says that he was. Only a few Protestants put forward John 3:13 to try to argue against the assumption, but it’s not talking about this, it’s talking about Jesus’s unique divine identity. He is the one who goes back up to heaven because he is the one who came down from heaven. But the other main biblical arguments come from an assumption of Sola scriptura, Protestants will say, and like James White will say, “Why would we believe this when it’s not clearly described in scripture? Something that’s important should have been described in scripture.” Well, we don’t expect scripture to describe every single event that happened to the apostles or happen to those who knew Jesus. For example, scripture doesn’t describe the deaths of Peter, Paul or John. Scripture doesn’t explicitly say when Divine Revelation even ended, so there are truths we believe, like truths about the Canon of scripture, the extent of Divine Revelation, these are the things we believe that are not found in scripture. So when Protestants criticize the dogma of the assumption, we as Catholics must be careful not to fall in the trap of tacitly assuming Sola scriptura and trying to prove the assumption of Mary from the Bible alone, because we don’t have to do that. You can point to your Protestant friend and say, “Look, you believe things that are not in the Bible. You believe these 27 books comprise the new Testament Canon. You believe that Divine Revelation ended with the death of the last apostle or the last apostolic man, you believe there are no more living apostles. You believe that the office of being an apostle died with the last apostle.” There are other people who don’t believe that, most notably the Mormons believe that the office of apostle has continued even to the present day in the present church. So we don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking we have to be able to prove this from the Bible. However, I think that we can offer implicit evidence for the dogma of the assumption from scripture, not a proof text, not saying, “Here, this proves the assumption,” but rather saying, “Look, when you look at all the evidence as a whole, the dogma of the assumption naturally coheres with the evidence that we have in sacred scripture. Namely, a description that St. John has of a woman he sees in Revelation chapter 12.” So here’s what he says. “A great portent appeared in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of 12 stars. She was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth and anguish for delivery. And another portent or sign appeared in heaven, behold, a great red dragon with seven heads and 10 horns and seven diadems upon his head. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child that he might devour her child when she brought it forth. She brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness where she has a place prepared by God and which to be nourished for 1,260 days.” Now, if you think that this woman is Mary, you’re not alone. Even many Protestant scholars like William Barclay or Larry Heiler, they admit in their commentaries on Revelation that the suggestion this woman is Mary, the mother of Jesus is an obvious one to make because we’re looking at a discussion of the Messiah, the devil and a woman who gives birth to the Messiah, Mary just should automatically flash into people’s minds. But these Protestant scholars don’t endorse that hypothesis wholeheartedly because they’ll say that that particular apocalyptic imagery and symbolism that John is using means that this woman cannot simply be one literal woman or only have one meaning. N.T. Wright says the same thing, the Anglican Bishop of Durham. He says, “This woman, she is a sign, not a literal mother.” But here’s the thing, Catholics can agree that the symbolism and revelation, like other symbolism and scripture is multivalent or bivalent. It has more than one meaning to it, other Protestants recognizes this. Gregory Biel in his commentary on Revelation says, “Most of Revelation symbols have multiple associations or meanings and that the interpreter can never be sure that all the multiple meanings of a symbol have been discovered,” and other Protestants see this, that this woman is symbolizing Mary in some form, even if she’s not the complete meaning of who this woman is, they’ll say that it is Mary in some form. For example, Ben Witherington says, “This figure is both the literal mother of the male child Jesus and also the female image of the people of God.” Again, the text is multivalent. So here are the other ideas that this woman in heaven symbolizes the people of God who brought forth the Messiah like ancient Israel, Eve is another example, but of the individuals it’s usually Eve and Mary or the people of God or the church are the symbolism’s wrapped up in this woman.
Peter Lightheart, I think he teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary, another Protestant like Witherington. He says, “If not only Mary, the woman is also Mary. Mary is [escatos 00:15:09], in a line of miracle mothers as the embodiment of the virginity of Israel’s labor, all of it necessary to form Christ in this world.” Now, some people say, “Well, how can it be Mary?” Because this woman has birth pangs and Mary, the long standing tradition holds that Mary being free from original sin didn’t have any birth pain. Genesis 3:16 says it’s a penalty, a punishment, the consequence of original sin and Mary didn’t have original sin. But once again, remember these symbols are multivalent, there’s different meanings behind them. So it may refer to Mary literally giving birth to Jesus but the birth pangs can also reveal the fact that at Luke 2:35, it was said that sorrow would pierce Mary’s heart or in John chapter 19, the pain Mary felt at the foot of the cross when she became a spiritual mother to John and consequently, a mother to all believers.
Remember, he said, “Woman, behold your son,” and he says to John, “Behold, your mother,” which is of course the title of Tim Staples’ wonderful book on Mary, Behold Your mother. Now here’s, what’s really fascinating about this. People will point to Revelation 12 and say, “Yeah, but why would you say it’s Mary? It doesn’t say it’s Mary, it just says a woman.” Well remember that John is the traditional author of Revelation, or at least it has deep connections to the Johannine community and so, is Revelation is connected to the author of John’s gospel, if they’re either the same person or a disciple of John or someone related to him, if Revelation and the gospel of John are connected in the gospel of John, Mary is never called mother either. She’s not called Mary, she’s always called the mother of Jesus and Jesus never calls his mother mother.
In the gospel of John, Jesus always refers to Mary, not as Mary, not even as mother, he just calls her woman, in John 2:4 and John 19:27. And many of the church fathers saw this as a reference to the fact that Mary is the new Eve because in the Genesis account prior to the fall, Eve is not called Eve, Adam names her Eve after the fall. Prior to that, she is called [foreign language 00:17:13] or woman. In fact, you can see this in the 1978 work Mary in the New Testament, which is a collaborative work between Catholic and Protestant scholars, the most famous scholar in there being Father Raymond Brown, a moderate Catholic biblical scholar. So this is a work of Catholics and Protestants and it concluded that John’s symbol of the woman who is the mother of the Messiah might well lend itself to Marian interpretation.
One thing that really stands out as to why we should think that this is Mary is because just a few verses earlier in Revelation 11:19, John sees the arc of the covenant in heaven, which had been lost for over a thousand years and he sees the arc and then immediately speaks of this woman. Now the church fathers have said that Mary is the arc of the new covenant. The Ark of the old covenant contained the word of God written on stone tablets and Mary contained the word of God within her very womb. In fact, when Mary visits Elizabeth and Elizabeth says, “How does the mother of my Lord come to me?” That’s a direct parallel to when David speaks of the arc saying, “How can the Ark of the Lord come to me?” So when all of it is put together, I would say that this woman at the very least symbolizes Mary. At least in part that’s something Protestant scholars agree with, but the woman in Revelation 12, even more fitting if this woman just is Mary, she also symbolizes the other elements.
She symbolizes Eve because she’s the new Eve. She symbolizes the people of God who brought forth the Messiah. She symbolizes the mother of the church because she gives birth to people of God that she’s the mother of all believers because she seeks our intercession always to lead us closer to her son. Now, one argument against this view of Revelation chapter 12, that this is Mary is the claim that the church fathers are very late in identifying this woman as Mary. The earliest explicit reference is saying the woman in Revelation 12 is Mary the mother of Jesus who’ll be saying [foreign language 00:19:10] in AD 430, even though Saint Methodius and Saint Hippolytus commented on the passage before that point. But my perspective on this is that this isn’t that big of a deal because during this time in the third and fourth centuries, there was controversy in the church about whether Revelation was even a Christian text at all.
It was a disputed text, for example, in AD 330, the church historian Eusebius said that Revelation, or as he calls it, the apocalypse of John is for some people, the rejected class of works, that it’s not scripture even though there were other Christians who held that it was scripture, there was a dispute in that regard. The Council of Laodicea and Cyril of Jerusalem, they didn’t include Revelation in their canonical lists, so a lot of these scholars, including Protestant scholars have said, “Once Revelation became widely accepted as a Christian text, after the announcement of the Christian Canon at the regional councils of Hippo and Carthage and the papal announcement by Pope Damascus at the end of the fourth century.” Once Revelation became more widely accepted, then you see a growth in Marion interpretations of the woman in Revelation 12, such as [foreign language 00:20:22], which would be at the beginning of the fifth century. Tim Perry, the author of Mary for Evangelicals says this, “It is not surprising therefore, to find that Marian interpretation of Revelation 12 begins in the fifth century after the New Testament Canon is fixed.”
I’d also point out that identifying the woman in Revelation 12, with an individual who also is able to symbolize other groups, make sense to say the woman actually is an individual because like N.T. Wright says, “Well, John says it’s a sign, not a woman,” but John also says that the great record dragon is a sign, in Greek, a [foreign language 00:20:58] but it’s clearly standing for the devil, it’s standing for an individual. So if the dragon is a sign and an individual at the same time, Mary can be the same way. Now let’s talk about the historical evidence for this doctrine. This is not something that just popped up ex-nihilo in the year 1950, there are even Protestants who were open to this doctrine at the beginning of the reformation. Heinrich Bullinger was a Protestant reformer, he became more skeptical the dogma later in his life, but he did believe at one point the pure and immaculate embodiment of the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, the temple of the Holy Spirit, that is to say, her saintly body was carried up into heaven by the angel.
So this was a common belief in the church, the Protestant reformers, it was taken for granted at that time in the 16th century, you go back another 1,000 years, you have an explicit description in Saint Gregory of Tours in 590, but is there evidence before the sixth century or before the fifth century? Yes. In the fourth century Saint Epiphanius was writing about this and discussed disagreements people had about the fate of Mary. Now some Protestant apologists will jump on this and say, “See, if Mary had been assumed into heaven, Epiphanius would have known about it.” Well, what happens with doctrines and dogmas is that there is a development that takes place over time, sometimes they start as theological opinion, disagreements among Theologians, and then there’s a general coalescing around a truth that arises from the discussions people have.
But I would say that if Mary had just died like every other Saint, like every other apostle or anyone else, you wouldn’t have these disagreements, you don’t have disagreements about what happened to the end of Peter’s life for example, or Paul, it was taken for granted that they died martyrs deaths. So Epiphanius says in the [Panarin 00:22:45] of Mary, “For her end, no one knows,” but that disagreement lends evidence of the fact that people were talking about whether Mary died or she didn’t die at all. And remember, that’s still an open question even today in Catholic theology, but Epiphanius does say this, which is interesting. He says of Mary, “Like the bodies of the Saints however, she has been held in honor for her character and understanding. And if I should say anything more in her praise, she is like Elijah, who is Virgin from his mother’s womb, always remain so and was taken up and has not seen death.”
So Epiphanius saw in Mary that she was like Elijah and Elijah was assumed into heaven. So I think that provides evidence of people at that time seeing in Mary, having these qualities like Elijah this ever Virgin element of holiness and also being assumed into heaven. Now Stephen Shoemaker, who’s done probably the most extensive treatment on the assumption and other related traditions that are in the Eastern church known as the Dormition of Mary, which sometimes overlap, he has done an extensive study on this and he notes this, that the story of Mary being assumed into heaven. There are early accounts of it that go back quite far. He says that the Ethiopic version of the story reliably transmits a very early account of Mary’s dormition and assumption that had been composed already by the fourth century, and is most likely even earlier than that. We can locate this text with some confidence to the third century, although the possibility of an even earlier origin perhaps in the second century should not be excluded.
So some of the earliest testimonies of Mary being assumed into heaven can be found in hetero docs works like the book of Mary’s Repose that had been translated from Syriac and Coptic and we’ve discovered these manuscripts and dated them showing Christian belief in this doctrine going all the way back into the third and possibly even the second century. So this was not something that disappeared whole cloth in the medieval church, even when Saint Gregory of Tours was speaking about this in 590, there were already well-established liturgical customs and celebrations and honorings of Mary having been assumed into heaven, it was not something that appeared out of whole cloth, but it had still been present for several centuries. Now, James White, helpful to book end here when it comes to talking about the subject, he says that Pope Gelaius the first condemned an apocryphal work called the Assumption of Holy Mary. So he says, “How can you believe in the assumption of Mary when Pope Gelasius the first condemned a book called the Assumption of Holy Mary?”
So here’s the problem with this. First, the decree that White is referring to called the Decretum Gelasianum , it’s probably a forgery attributed to Pope Gelasius but he didn’t actually write it. Second, that Decretum only declares certain works. It declares certain works to be apocryphal, but it doesn’t condemn all of their content. So in the Decretum even if Pope Gelasius had written it, there are different works that are condemned as being apocryphal, that they’re not scripture. For example, that same decree attributed to Gelasius, it declares as apocryphal the book of the nativity of the savior and of Mary or the midwife. So Pope Gelasius allegedly condemned a book called the Nativity of the Savior but does that mean we shouldn’t believe in the nativity of the savior because of some book talking about it being apocryphal? No, of course not.
Just because a book is apocryphal, it doesn’t follow that every single statement in it is false or that it’s incapable of being an early witness to Christian belief. Finally, there’s good evidence that belief in Mary’s Assumption goes back far in antiquity because we have no evidence of people collecting or venerating relics related to the Virgin Mary. In my book, the Case for Catholicism I put it this way. Since the second century, Christians routinely collected the bones of martyrs and saints, but no such relics have been associated with the Virgin Mary. Instead, just as the relics associated with Jesus consisted only of what he left behind after his Ascension, like the Shroud of Turin or the true wood of the cross, only objects associated with Mary’s life rather than her death, like her bones have been found in the historical record.
So I hope that was helpful for y’all to provide a little bit of an insight into the biblical evidence, at least the implicit biblical evidence for the assumption and also to the historical pedigree of this dogma showing the reasonableness of this belief. But ultimately what this comes down to is the authority of the church, that doesn’t mean that the church has the ability to impose on us any kind of proposition or statement it feels likes, the church is the custodian Divine Revelation. So when we talk about the assumption of Mary with our Protestant brothers and sisters, we can provide evidence that it’s reasonable, but I wouldn’t say that we can prove the doctrine on its own from scripture or from history. In fact, Cardinal John Henry Newman, he said of the immaculate conception and the assumption, “I am not proving these doctrines to you my brethren, the evidence of them lies and the declaration of the church. The church is the Oracle of religious truth and dispenses what the apostles committed to her in every time in place.”
So don’t fall into the trap of thinking we have to have Sola scriptura light. As if oh, well, we don’t get all our theology from the Bible alone, but it does turn out we can prove everything from the Bible anyways and here, let me do that because I’m a Catholic apologist who knows scripture very well. No, we shouldn’t do that because there’s things we believe that are not found in scripture, like the Canon, like the Cessation of Divine Revelation. So we should not be ashamed to have the gift of the magisterium that Christ gave us. Christ gave authority to the apostles and that authority did not die out with them.
However, if we’re talking with our Protestant brothers and sisters who may be hesitant of accepting the authority of the magisterium, I think the evidence we show here of this dogma being reflected in scripture and of being part of the historical continuity of the faith, can help them see that what the church teaches is not arbitrary, but rather a faithful guarding and custody of the Divine Revelation that has been entrusted to her. So thank you all so much and I hope that you have a very blessed day.
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