By venerating the Mother of Jesus, Catholics are “injuring ecumenism.” We are guilty of “scriptural blindness where Mary is concerned.” We should realize that “idolatry is sin–and religious devotion to anyone but God is idolatry.” Conclusion: Catholics are idolaters.
So we are assured by “The Mary of Roman Catholicism,” a two-part article published in the Christian Research Journal, the magazine of the late Walter Martin’s Christian Research Institute.
The author of the article, Elliott Miller, is the editor of the Journal and is a top staffer at CRI. His views express the views of the organization, and he writes as CRI’s spokesman. It is therefore fair to say the words of the article are the words of CRI. Throughout this and subsequent articles I will be referring to “CRI” as the responsible party.
Near the beginning of the Marian Year in 1987, Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Mother of the Redeemer (Redemptoris Mater), asked all Christians, “Why should we not all together look to Mary as our common Mother, who prays for the unity of God’s family?” Stung somehow by the Pope’s friendly words and bothered by “a campaign to revive Marian devotion in the Church,” CRI goes on the attack. “The time has come for a Protestant response. Just as surely as a man cannot `take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned’ (Prov. 6:27), Catholics cannot renew their emphasis on Mary without injuring ecumenism.”(Elliott Miller, “The Mary of Roman Catholicism,” Christian Research Journal, Summer 1990, 10. The second part of Miller’s article appeared in the Fall 1990 issue. In these notes the two parts are referred to as Part 1 and Part 2.) The suggestion is clear: Mary is a fire we are taking to our Catholic bosoms. The honor we pay her is idolatry, sin. We risk our own salvation and endanger ecumenism unless we stop adoring and worshiping her.(Part 2, 31, 32.)
Proverbs 6:27 seems important to CRI. It is quoted in the text of the article(Part 1, 10.) and is used again as a callout on the next page, “so that he who runs may read” (Hab. 2:2). Before we accept Proverbs 6:27 as a scripture having to do with Mary, we should read it in its context. Proverbs 6:23-29 (RSV) reads:
“For the commandment is a lamp and the teaching a light, and the reproofs of discipline are the way of life, to preserve you from the evil woman, from the smooth tongue of the adventuress. Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes; for a harlot may be hired for a loaf of bread, but an adulteress stalks a man’s very life. Can a man carry fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned? Or can one walk upon hot coals and his feet not be scorched? So is he who goes in to his neighbor’s wife; none who touches her will go unpunished.” It is clear. To apply any part of this passage to the mother of Jesus is sacrilege, a serious abuse of God’s holy Word. CRI insults and defames the one who is full of grace and blessed among women by applying to her a verse which the sacred writer uses of an adulteress and a prostitute.
CRI claims to give a “Protestant response.” Few Protestants will want this article to be their voice. There is abundant evidence today of a growing interest in Mary among Protestants. The Protestant theologian K. E. Skydsgaard writes, “Mary’s name shall not disappear in anonymity, but shall be recalled in every age and praised as holy. Evangelical Protestantism must also learn to sing this song.”(K. E. Skydsgaard, One in Christ, Protestant and Catholic (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1957), quoted in Bernard Leeming, “Protestants and Our Lady,” Marian Library Studies, nos. 128/129, Jan./Feb. 1967, 17.) The German Evangelical Adult Catechism says, “Mary is not only Catholic, but she is also Evangelical…. Mary is clearly the mother of Jesus and closer to him than the closest disciples.”(Quoted in Albert J. Nevins, Answering a Fundamentalist (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor), 97.) This new Protestant interest in Mary is more and more in harmony today with our Catholic devotion. By the power and will of her Son, which directs us all, she does seem to be drawing us closer together.
I. Divine Maternity
I shall follow CRI’s order of topics in responding to its attack upon our Lady. The first objection is to our calling her “Mother of God.” CRI asserts that the Church “officially assigned the title theotokos (God-bearer or Mother of God) to Mary” at the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451.(Part 1, 10-11.) Joseph Gallegos, a Catholic layman who frequently signs on to the Catholic Information Network, a computer bulletin board system, noted in one of his on-line letters that “[CRI] is twenty years too late. It was at the Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431 that theotokos was affirmed as a title of our Blessed Mother.”(Joseph Gallegos, Message 352, Message Base 4, “Ask Father” conference, Catholic Information Network echo, Mar. 1, 1991.) CRI makes this mistake four times within two pages.
CRI fears that the title “Mother of God,” used “without strict qualification will naturally result in serious confusion, especially on the part of the theologically unschooled.”(Part 1, 11.) But the same is true of every other Christian doctrine. When worshipers sing the final verse of the grand, old Protestant hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” they segue into “God in three Persons, Blessed Trinity” and finish with a triumphant “Amen”–all without adding any “strict qualification.” Yet if any doctrine needs careful explanation, the Trinity does. So we are bound to teach and explain every doctrine, but never to muffle or drop a single one.
Before his Incarnation and from eternity, the Word is God and pure spirit, as are the Father and the Holy Spirit. But in his Mother’s womb he took human nature and became the God-Man, Jesus Christ. The titles “Mother of Jesus,” “Mother of the Lord,” and “Mother of Christ” can be correctly and devoutly used. But the history of doctrine shows that each of them has been misunderstood by some to suggest that Jesus was in some way less than God. Only “Mother of God” leaves the hearer in no doubt about Christian belief in his full divinity. Protestant theologian John de Satge accepts theotokos and writes, “It is hard to see how any Christian theology can be genuinely evangelical without doing justice to it.”(John de Satge, Down to Earth: The New Protestant Vision of the Virgin Mary (Consortium, 1976), 52.)
Throughout his life Luther used and defended Mary’s title “Mother of God” against all comers. “She is rightly called not only the mother of the man, but also the Mother of God. . . . It is certain that Mary is the Mother of the real and true God.”(Jaroslav Pelikan, ed., Luther’s Works (St. Louis: Concordia), vol. 24, 107.) (I wonder about CRI’s consistent failure throughout to mention Protestantsources in praise of Mary.)
CRI objects to the idea that “because of her divine maternity, Mary transcended all other created beings and stood next to her exalted Son in heavenly glory.”(Part 1, 11.) We do indeed believe that she is so exalted. But so do many Protestants of impeccable credentials.
Heinrich Bullinger, Cranmer’s brother-in-law and Zwingli’s successor, wrote, “She can hardly be compared with any of the other saints, but should by rights be elevated above all of them.”(Quoted in Max Thurian, Mary, Mother of All Christians (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 89.) Drelincourt wrote: “We do not simply believe that God has favored the holy and blessed Virgin more than all the Patriarchs and the Prophets, but also that he has exalted her above all Seraphim….the holy Virgin is not only the servant and the creature, but also the Mother of this great and living God.”(Ibid.)
CRI asserts that Catholics exalt Mary above all other creatures simply because of her physical relationship to Jesus, whereas she is “blessed among women” (Luke 1:42) more because of her role in giving birth to the Messiah than because of the mere fact of her physical relationship to him.(Part 1, 11.)
But there is nothing in Holy Scripture to support two motherhoods in Mary, one purely physical, the other spiritual. In the real order, these cannot be and never were separated. She is related as a person to the person of God the Son. From her flesh she gave him flesh. Mary was not an incubator. She was and is his Mother.
Martin Luther said that “God is born….the child who drinks his Mother’s milk is eternal; he existed before the world’s beginning and he created heaven and earth…. these two natures are so united that there is only one God and Lord, that Mary suckles God with her breasts, bathes God, rocks him, and carries him.”(Luther’s Works, vol. 22, 492-493.)
Mary is exalted above all angels and saints because God chose and prepared her, filled her with his grace to be his Mother. He drew from her freedom, by the promotion of grace, the full Fiat by which he accomplished the Incarnation. Christians who have not forgotten how to call her blessed know this well. “Men have crowded all her glory into a single phrase: the Mother of God. No one can say anything greater of her, though he had as many tongues as there are leaves on the trees” (Martin Luther, Commentary on the Magnificat).
II. Perpetual Virginity
By Mary’s perpetual virginity we mean that she was a virgin before, during, and after the birth of her Son and for the rest of her life. CRI notes that this doctrine was “a subject of intense debate as late as the fourth century.”(Part 1, 11.) It alleges that “belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity eventually won out thanks to the rise of asceticism and monasticism.”(Ibid., 12.)
CRI is in error here. There is no evidence whatever for this opinion. Anthologies of patristic spirituality prove that Jesus Christ, not Mary, was the ideal of virginity held up to monks and nuns from the beginning. John Cassian in his treatise On the Eight Vices (A.D. 425) writes, “If we are really eager….to struggle lawfully and to be crowned (2 Tim. 2:5) for overcoming the impure spirit of unchastity, we should not trust in our own strength, but in the help of our Master, God.” The earliest accounts of monks and their lifestyle–like Athanasius’ life of Anthony and Benedict’s rule–give us Jesus, not Mary, as the monastic exemplar. It is the same with religious rules in later centuries. For example, the Thirty-First Congregation of the Jesuit Order (1965) declares, “The profession of chastity for the sake of the kingdom of heaven….shows wonderfully at work in the Church the surpassing greatness of the force of Christ the King and the boundless power of the Holy Spirit.”(Our Jesuit Life (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1990), II, IV, A, 33.) Certainly, Mary is important to all Catholics and in particular to those “who follow the Lamb wherever he goes, for they are virgins” (Rev. 14:4), yet it is ironic that, in its zeal to attack our Lady, CRI gives her more credit as a spark plug for monasticism than Catholics do.
CRI confuses by raising a triad of questions we are supposed to find relevant to the issue of Mary’s perpetual virginity:
1. Is celibacy a higher state than marriage?
2. Is asceticism a biblical tradition?
3. Does the gospel teach celibacy?
CRI answers “no” to all these questions, thus exemplifying what Max Thurian, when still a Calvinist, called “the anti-ascetic or anti-monastic reaction found in a certain type of Protestantism.”(Thurian, 24.)
Paul writes that “those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24). Our Lord teaches us that, to be his disciples, we must take up our cross every day (Luke 9:23). We hear him telling a would-be disciple that the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head (Matt. 8:20), thus promising the man a lifetime of insecurity and discomfort. Elijah in the Old Testament (1 Kgs. 17:17) and John the Baptist in the New (Matt. 3:4) are examples of an ascetical lifestyle. Even a cursory reading of the New Testament proves asceticism as Christian and, to some degree, a means to salvation.
What about celibacy in the Bible? Elijah, Elisha, John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul–these are examples of celibacy no Christian should undervalue. Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the Kingdom of God, who will not receive manifold more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life” (Luke 18:29-30). With a flash of that rigorous honesty that often makes us wince, Jesus teaches us that “there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it” (Matt. 19:12).
But does the Bible’s teaching on asceticism and celibacy diminish marriage? Specifically, does Mary’s vocation to perpetual virginity imply disrespect toward her own marriage? No. We regard marriage as a lofty vocation, elevated by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament of the New Covenant. Indeed, the indestructible bond between husband and wife is so awesomely holy that it is comparable only to the bond which unites Christ our Head to his Body the Church (Eph. 5:23-32).
Now we turn to CRI’s specific objections to Mary’s lifelong virginity. Elliott Miller asserts that Mary and Joseph had normal marital relations after the birth of Jesus, adducing as proofs Matthew 1:18 (“before they lived together, she was found with child”) and 1:25 (“he had no relations with her until she bore a son”).(Part 1, 15.) These texts do not support CRI’s contention. In Greek, prin (“before”) and heos (“until”) do not imply a reversal of situation upon completion of the “before/until” clause. Notice these examples:
1. “Come down before my child dies” (John 4:49)–yet the child did not die even after Jesus came down.
2. “Until I arrive, attend to reading, exhortation, and teaching” (1 Tim. 4:13)–but Timothy did not give up these activities after Paul arrived. Other non-inferential “until” texts the reader may wish to examine are Romans 8:22, l Corinthians 15:25, Ephesians 4:13, 1 Timothy 6:14, and Revelation 2:25-26. In short, Matthew 1:18 and 1:25 prove nothing against Mary’s perpetual virginity.
CRI then refers to 1 Corinthians 7:3_5, asserting that normal marital relations were “in keeping with God’s will for the couple.”(Ibid., 12.) I wonder how the writer knows precisely what was or was not in keeping with God’s will for the couple. Looking ahead three pages in the article, we read: “While God certainly will do what is proper, theologians who take this approach to doctrine overlook the fact that they are assuming a priori that they know what is proper to God. Isaiah 55:89 tells us that God’s thoughts and ways are not the thoughts and ways of man. This is true because God is not bound by the limitations of a finite nature and also because man’s reasoning process has been distorted by sin.”(Ibid., 15.) You can’t have it both ways.
There is no evidence that Paul had Mary and Joseph in mind when he wrote 1 Corinthians 7:35. Moreover, Paul permits abstention from marital rights by mutual consent in 7:5. He wishes this to be temporary “so that Satan may not tempt you through your lack of self control.” This proviso could never have applied to Mary and Joseph. Furthermore, Paul recognizes the existence of particular charisms both within and outside of marriage (7:7). Certainly, perpetual virginity with abstention on the part of husband and wife is such a particular charism. The Pauline text, therefore, does not disprove Mary’s perpetual virginity.
Now CRI comes to the often-urged question of the “brothers and sisters of Jesus” (Matt. 13:55-56, Mark 6:3, and elsewhere). The procedure used here is to attack Karl Keating, whose treatment of this vexed problem is now the best in the field of popular apologetics.(Karl Keating, Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on “Romanism” by “Bible Christians” (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), 282-289.) Keating needs no defense. His book is easily available to the interested reader. Here I want only to make a few observations.
The point at issue in the “brothers/sisters of Jesus” texts is the translation of the Greek words adelphos (brother) and adelphe (sister). CRI admits that the Greek Septuagint(The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the third century B.C. in Egypt.) uses these words not only for brother/sister, but also for remoter relatives.(Part 1, 12.) Keating rightly notes that New Testament writers follow this Septuagint usage. CRI tries to dismiss Keating’s argument with two counter-assertions:
1. “He never gives an example of a New Testament writer using adelphos for a cousin…. There are no such examples.”(Ibid.) This is a red herring. Keating does not claim adelphos means cousin. He claims, rightly that it often is used for “relative.” And there are New Testament texts which must be so translated. I invite the reader to examine Matthew 27:56, Mark 15:40, and John l9:25. In these James and Joses (Joseph), who are mentioned in Matthew l3:55 with Simon and Judas (Jude) as Jesus’ adelphoi, are called sons of Mary, wife of Clopas, a different Mary from our Blessed Mother. This “other” Mary (Matt. 27:61, 28:1) is called our Lady’s adelphe in John 19:25. It is wholly unlikely that two daughters of the same parents were given the same name, “Mary.” Our Lady and the “other Mary” were related only in the wider sense of adelphe. They were relatives, but not sisters. Since Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3 mention Simon, Judas, and the sisters of Jesus along with James and Joses, calling them all adelphoi (masculine) and adelphai (feminine), these words in the texts at issue must be translated “relatives.”
2. CRI asserts against Keating that “The Septuagint is a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures and thus is not in a class with the contemporary narratives and letters of the New Testament.”(Ibid.) But Septuagint usage is indeed a safe and necessary guide in interpreting New Testament Greek. From the middle of the second century B.C., many Jews in Egypt (where the Septuagint translation was made) and throughout the Diaspora had lost touch with Hebrew. The Septuagint began to be read in synagogue worship. By the time of Christ, for most Jews, the Septuagint was the Bible, their only readable Bible. This became true also for several generations of early Christians. Thus the influence of the Septuagint on the Greek language, as spoken and written by early Christians and by the Jews of the D.aspora and even in Palestine, was enormous. Almost 80 percent of the Old Testament citations and allusions in the New Testament come from the Septuagint, not from the Hebrew Bible. Stylistically, much of the New Testament, especially the four Gospels and Acts, is heavily dependent on the Septuagint.
David Hill of the University of Sheffield says, “The vocabularies [emphasis mine] of the Greek Old Testament and the Greek New Testament have a great measure of similarity; and research into the syntax of the Greek of the Septuagint has revealed its remarkable likeness to that of the New Testament…. The language of the New Testament…reveals in its syntax and…in its vocabulary[emphasis Hill’s] a strong Semitic cast, due in large measure to its indebtedness to the Jewish biblical Greek of the Septuagint.”(David Hill, Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 16-18.)
A. T. Robertson, in his Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research (1934), makes this remark about the nineteenth-century New Testament lexicographer and grammarian Gustav Adolf Deissman: “He properly condemns the too frequent isolation of the New Testament Greek from the so-called ‘profane Greek’…he insists on the practical identity of biblical with the contemporary later Greek of the popular style.”
The writers (except for Luke) and the very early readers of the New Testament, being Jews of that period, were “Septuagint conditioned.” They were accustomed to the Septuagint usage of adelphos/adelphe as the ordinary Greek rendering of the Hebrew word ach in all its familial and extra-familial meanings, meanings much broader than uterine brother/sisterhood. Texts which call James, Joses, Simon, Judas, and the unnamed women the adelphoi and adelphai of Jesus cannot be understood except by calling these people Jesus’ relatives, not his uterine brothers and sisters.
CRI, in fact, has ignored the historical and etymological importance of the Septuagint. It is as impossible to understand New Testament Greek without reference to the Greek of the Septuagint as it is impossible to understand the peculiarities of the Septuagint without reference to the original Hebrew.
CRI’s next problem is with the Catholic interpretation of Luke 1:26-35. There, Luke says that Mary was a virgin and already engaged to marry Joseph when the angel Gabriel came to her. After greeting her, he calmed her fear: “Do not be afraid, Mary. You have found favor with God. You will conceive and bear a son, Jesus.” Mary answered, “How shall this be? I do not know man” (a Hebraism for sexual intercourse). Her question shows that Mary knew how babies are made. The question makes no sense unless she resolved to remain a virgin even in marriage. Only then could she wonder how Gabriel’s invitation could square with her resolve. When assured that her motherhood would not involve Joseph, but be altogether from the Holy Spirit, she acceded to God’s plan as the “handmaiden of the Lord.”
CRI attempts to refute the Catholic position by pouring contempt on the notion of a “vow of lifelong virginity, even in marriage.”(Part 1, 13.) Such a vow would be “unheard of and unthinkable in biblical culture”(Ibid.)–a statement unsupported by any kind of proof. The phrase “biblical culture” is an abstraction so diffuse as to be nearly meaningless.
Besides, the problem here is not cultural, but theological. We are considering the Incarnation, and the Incarnation was unheard of and unthinkable in any culture. No human culture, “biblical” or not, could possibly anticipate or frame any detail of an event so shatteringly unique as the Incarnation of the Son of God. An integral part of God’s plan for the Incarnation was the sole and total dedication of Mary to the God she bore in her womb and to the Holy Spirit, who possessed her utterly.
In 1 Corinthians 7:25-40 Paul bases his doctrine of marriage and virginity not on an appeal to prevailing cultural norms, but on his own apostolic authority (v. 25). His recommendations on virginity are in some ways “alien to biblical culture”–and to secular culture as well! He realizes this (v. 40a), yet insists on his decision (gnome) in this matter, and he further insists: “I, too, have the Spirit of God” (v. 40b).
To balk at Mary’s vow is to nurse a non-problem. A vow is simply a promise to God to follow a course more excellent than its contrary. Mary did this. The conditions of a vow of virginity are perfectly met in her, as early and unbroken Church teaching affirms. Augustine made a very incisive remark on this subject: “Surely, she would not say, ‘How shall this be?’ unless she had already vowed herself to God as a virgin…. If she intended to have intercourse, she wouldn’t have asked this question!”(Augustine, Holy Virginity, 4, 4.)
Several times CRI claims to present “the Protestant position” or “the Protestant view” or “a Protestant response.” Yet Mary’s lifelong virginity is well attested in Protestant sources too–something CRI does not mention.
Martin Luther said, “Christ our Savior was the real and natural fruit of Mary’s virginal womb…. This was without the cooperation of a man, and she remained a virgin after that.”(Luther’s Works, vol. 22, 23.) John Calvin also defended Mary’s perpetual virginity: “Helvidius [a fourth-century heretic] has shown himself too ignorant, in saying that Mary had several sons, because mention is made in some passages of the brothers of Christ.”(Quoted in Leeming, 9.) (Bernard Leeming reports that Calvin translates adelphoi as “cousins” or “relatives.”(Ibid.))
The Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli wrote, “I firmly believe according to the words of the Gospel that a pure virgin brought forth for us the Son of God and remained a virgin pure and intact in childbirth and also after the birth, for all eternity. I firmly trust that she has been exalted by God to eternal joy above all creatures, both the blessed and the angels.”(Augustin Bea, “Mary and the Protestants,” Marian Studies 83, April 1961, 1.)
John de Satge says “There is certainly nothing in the Scriptures to invalidate the conclusion of the Church, in the days before the split between East and West, that Mary was a virgin all her life…. The full glory [of perpetual virginity] may be seen in the person of our Lord and his universal love, which all could claim and receive, but none could monopolize. In this sphere of love’s freedom[emphasis mine] Mary enjoys to the full an identification with him. It has set her free for universal ministry.”(de Satge, 112-113.)
Read part II here.