September 20th, 2006
Mary’s Immaculate Conception
Possibly because I’m a student at a Roman Catholic university or maybe because I recently subscribed to First Things, I now receive lots of mail from Roman Catholic (RC) organizations. Today, I got an appeal from a group called “Catholic Answers” asking me to subscribe to their magazine, This Rock, which focuses on RC doctrinal apologetics for laypeople, mostly directed toward Protestants–or so it appears from the mailer.
Like all informed and committed Protestants, I find a number of RC doctrines objectionable, so I went to Catholic Answers’ website to see what they have to say. My first stop–and the only thing I have time to comment on in this post–was an article on Mary’s immaculate conception.
The article starts off strong by helping RC lay apologists understand what the doctrine of the immaculate conception states, so they can clear up common Protestant misconceptions. The doctrine says that Mary herself was born without original sin; by a special act of God’s grace, when Mary was conceived she was prevented from inheriting original sin. As a result, Mary was sinless.
After that definition, everything in the article goes south for one simple reason: they try to defend the doctrine of the immaculate conception using Scripture, which is the only authority that Protestants will accept on the matter. The problem is that the immaculate conception isn’t a Scriptural teaching, and no amount of exegetical elbow grease can refashion it as one.
Their first argument is from Luke 1:28, where the angel Gabriel greets Mary, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” (ESV). The Greek word standing behind the phrase “O favored one” is a perfect passive participle of the verb xaritoo, meaning “to bestow favor on.” The article points out, correctly, that the perfect tense of the participle portrays the grace she received as being given in the past, but with continuing results. It then jumps to the conclusion that this is “sanctifying grace.”
Mary’s sanctifying grace, as these RC apologists conceive of it, was a gracious act of God in which he interceded to prevent her from inheriting original sin. But Gabriel doesn’t say anything like that! He just says that she has received grace. Perhaps God decided that Mary would never have a headache in her life, quite apart from any question of sinfulness. Since Mary had never had a headache, and never ever had a headache after that, we have met the condition stipulated by the Greek verb: a past action of grace with continuing results.
Of course that’s absurd. There’s nothing in the text that says anything about headaches. But neither is there anything in the text that says anything about an immaculate conception. So what is in the text? Verses 30 and 31 answer the question. Mary will bear a son, and she is told to name him Jesus. Now that’s an act that shows God’s great favor, an act of grace! God had decided to do this, so he dispatched Gabriel to deliver the news. When Gabriel spoke to Mary, God’s bestowal of grace was a past action, but with results that would continue for the rest of her eternal life. It seems quite clear, just on a cursory reading, that this is the grace Gabriel is talking about, and nothing whatsoever related to an immaculate conception.
There are other problems with the article, which I’ll only touch on briefly. Romans 3:23 says that “all have sinned,” but the RC apologists argue that children below the age of reason aren’t guilty of sins, so “all have sinned” must not mean “all without exception.” Mary is supposed to be one of the exceptions. Even if we were to grant that Paul only has in mind adults, Mary was an adult–certainly by the time Paul wrote Romans! But, they point out, Jesus is also an exception to Paul’s statement, so if he can be excepted maybe Mary can too. The problem is that Jesus had to be sinless in order to atone for others’ sins; Mary had no such responsibility. And he was God, for whom sin is antithetical to his nature. And Scripture explicitly declares that Jesus was sinless (2 Cor 5:21). Jesus is not just one among many–his life was unique. Mary was unique, too, by virtue of being Jesus’ mother, but there’s nothing in Scripture to indicate anything more than that, certainly not that she was sinless.
I should point out that I’m studying theology, no less, at a RC university, and with some very well known and respected RC theologians, whom I also respect and expect to learn very much from. In other words, I’m not hostile to Roman Catholics or the RC church. Nor am I trying to undermine the authority of the RC church over its own members. Given their other beliefs, especially about the authority of the church, Roman Catholic laypeople have at least one good reason to believe in the immaculate conception: the Pope said it’s so. But, many of the RC doctrines that Protestants object to have their basis in RC tradition and papal authority, not Scripture. Their attempts in hindsight to provide a Scriptural basis are clumsy and shouldn’t be convincing to anyone, not even to Roman Catholics.
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