Category: Theology

As we saw in the previous post, Macquarrie argues that the Immaculate Conception is both a preparation for and an implication of Christ’s redeeming work. This can be the case because the redemption wrought by Jesus isn’t confined to time and space and his “saving work reaches backward in time as well as forward.”

In a comment on the last post, Brandon summarized the dogma this way:

(1) Whatever our account of original sin, it must require the conclusion that Mary must be redeemed from original sin.

(2) God can redeem someone through Christ as soon as they exist.

And the doctrine of immaculate conception is just that (2) actually occurs in the case of Mary. The precise account of how (2) actually occurs will vary, and isn’t part of the dogma.

Mary, then, is the prototype, so to speak, of humanity redeemed by Christ. This is “fitting” because of her status as the God-bearer. And this provides a good segue into talking about the dogma of the Assumption.

The Assumption, Macquarrie says, is a corollary of Christ’s ascension “because of the glorification of human nature in him” (p. 82). He points out the precedents for speaking of the assumption of a revered figure in the stories of Enoch and Elijah, as well as the apocryphal “Assumption of Moses.” Particularly in the latter case, the assumption of an important figure is seen as implying the ultimate taking up of all God’s people into the divine presence.

The Assumption is a transformation of the human condition from its familiar earthly state to a new mode of being in which it enjoys an immediate relation to God. … Would not the consummation of God’s purpose for his creatures be to take them up into his presence, to grant the vision of himself and communion with himself? (pp. 85-6)

Thus the Assumption of Mary points to the future for all those who God will redeem in Christ. The Feast of the Assumption is “a celebration of redeemed humanity” in addition to being a celebration of Mary as an individual. Since, as we have seen, Mary is the paradigmatic member of the Church, her Assumption is a fitting consummation of this role.

I think this idea of Mary as the prototype of redeemed humanity gives the dogmas of Immaculate Conception and Assumption their proper Christological focus. And I also think Macquarrie does a good job rebutting some of the more common objections. Certainly his arguments won’t convince everyone, especially not those with a strong opposition to Mariology and Marian devotion. And as he freely admits, he doesn’t want to impose new dogmas (for non-Catholics) that might cause further division in the church. But I’m convinced that a high Mariology, far from being idolatrous or obscuring the place of Jesus, can be a rich and edifying elaboration of the central truths of the Gospel.

As a follow up of sorts on this post, do check out these theses on divine suffering at Gaunilo’s Island. He’s an honest-to-goodness theologian-in-training and so actually knows what he’s talking about.

As we saw in the previous post, one thing MacQuarrie is concerned to do is to understand salvation in personal and relational terms rather than the impersonal categories of some traditional theology. We saw this at work in his argument against the strongly monergistic sola gratia position; since salvation entails the healing of a personal relationship between us and God, it must also involve a response on our part, allowing, of course, that the initiative always belongs with God.

This concern for using personal categories also informs MacQuarrie’s discussion of the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption. In taking this approcah he hopes to show that the close connection of these dogmas with the central Christological affirmations will be made apparent.

Conception

MacQuarrie offers an extended account of the meaning and significance of Mary’s conception that goes beyond, but includes, normal biological conception. This extended sense has three components: Mary’s conception in the mind of God, or what we might call her election; Mary’s origin in the context of Israel, which prepared humainty to receive God’s visitation in the Incarnation of his Son; and finally Mary’s conception in the bosom of her family, her parents Joachim and Anna, and nurturance in the ways of Jewish piety. He elaborates this extended “moment of conception” to show the ways in which Mary was related to God and his purposes from the very beginning of her being.

Immaculate

But what sense is to be given to the idea that Mary was conceived “preserved intact from all stain of original sin”? Again, MacQuarrie wants to shift from impersonal categories, where sin is understood as a quasi-physical “stain” that we each inherit from our parents, to a more personal and realtional understanding.

Though we have indeed abandoned some of the crudely mechanical and materialistic views about the transmission of original sin, no realistic theologian denies the fact that there is a human solidarity in sin and that this persists from generation to generation. The dogma of Immaculate Conception is not tied to any outmoded belief about how sin is transmitted, and does not stand or fall with such beliefs. (p. 70)

MacQuarrie thinks that a better account of sin can be given in terms of “separation,” or “alienation,” or “estrangement”:

Sin is separation or alienation from God, and where there is alienation from God, it seems to be the case that there is usually alienation from other people and even alienation within the individual self. But if such alienation characterizes the several dimensions of human life, we can see how it perpetuates itself from generation to generation and weighs upon every individual human life. This pervading alienation is original sin, but we see that it is nothing positive in itself. It is fundamentally a lack, a lack of a right relatedness. To say this is in no way to minimize sin, for a lack or deficiency produces distortion. But the inner heart of sin, if one may so speak, is not something positive, but an emptiness. (pp. 70-1)

I think it starts to become clearer now what it might mean to say that Mary was conceived without original sin. It means that, from the very beginnings of her being, Mary did not lack that relationship to God, the absence of which constitutes our alienation. MacQuarrie suggests that, instead of saying that Mary was “preserved from the stain of original sin,” we might put it more positively by saying that she “was preserved in a right relatedness to God.”

An equivalent affirmative expression would be to say that she was always the recipient of grace. She was surrounded with grace from her original conception in the mind of God to her actual historical conception in the love of her parents. (pp. 71-2)

Of course, at this point we can, and should, raise the familiar Protestant objection that, if God was able preserve Mary from original sin, what need was there for the work of Jesus? And doesn’t Mary threaten to obscure the place of Christ himself, as she may have from time to time in popular devotion?

MacQuarrie offers four responses to this objection. First, he asks, can we claim anything less than what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception claims in light of the fact that Mary was Theotokos, or God-bearer, in the full personal sense? In other words, can we say that Mary could’ve nurtured her Son in his relation to his heavenly Father if she herself was alienated from God?

Secondly, he points out that any grace claimed for Mary is entirely in light and on account of the person and work of Jesus. “Mary has her significance not in herself but because of her relation to Christ. The latter’s saving work reaches backward in time as well as forward” (p. 74).

Third, Mary and Jesus exhibit different kinds of righteousness. Jesus is not just an example or ideal, but Redeemer and Mediator. He creates new possibilities of life for his followers. Mary, meanwhile, is the exemplar of the “old righteousness of trust and obedience, developed in the people of God from Abraham onward” (p. 74).

Finally, he returns to the charge of Pelagianism, that the idea of Mary’s cooperation with divine grace imperils the principle of sola gratia. While, as we say, MacQuarrie affirms the synergistic implications, he flatly denies that the dogma implies Pelagianism. Quite the opposite when we consider that God’s prevenient grace is at work from the beginning and that the election of Mary is due not to her own merits, but those of her Son.

Summing up, I think we might see the Immaculate Conception as expressing the fact that God, in his providence and prevenient grace, prepared a “place” for his Son to come into the world. The entire history of Israel leads up to this and comes to a point in Mary, who herself becomes the tabernacle of the Lord.

Over the weekend I finished John MacQuarrie’s Mary for All Christians (excerpt here) and thought I’d jot down some thoughts on it. MacQuarrie, a Scottish Presbyterian turned Anglican is a noted theologian who has been involved in various ecumenical endeavors, particularly with Roman Catholics.

One of the interesting contentions MacQuarrie makes is that the division betweeen Catholics and Protestants on the importance of Mary is related to the vexed question of monergism vs. synergism. To oversimplify, monergism says that in matters of salvation God does everything. This is associated with Calvinism and the idea of “irresistible grace.” Synergism, by contrast, is the view that there is an element of human cooperation in salvation, that God actually waits on us for our response. Of course, most adherents to synergism would say that God’s grace in some way enables our response, but it doesn’t determine it.

The “Catholic” view, being more synergistic, thus attributes far more importance to Mary. Because of Mary’s response, “Let it be to me according to your word,” the Incarnation and human salvation are made possible. God has allowed the fate of the human race to depend on the response of a single young girl.

Calvinists and many Lutherans would strongly object to talking like this. God’s will doesn’t require human cooperation to be effective. But MacQuarrie argues that the very nature of salvation is such that it requires a free human response. Salvation isn’t something that is external to us, or happens “above our heads” in some heavenly transaction, as some Atonement theories seem to portray it. Salvation is being freed from the power of sin, which essentially involves a change in us, and our willing cooperation.

MacQuarrie criticizes the view, which he attributes to Karl Barth, that salvation is an event outside of us, and which might not even have a “subjective” effect:

I was careful to say that there are ambiguities in what Barth says about salvation and the human beings’s part (or lack of part) in it. Though salvation is, in his view, an objective act accomplished by God, he does believe that it is important for human beings to become aware of God’s redemptive work and to appropriate it in their lives—he can even at one point introduce the controversial word ‘synergism’ or ‘co-working,’ though he envisages this as something which does not belong to redemption itself but is subsequent to it. I do not think, however, that his occasional modifications are sufficiently clear or that they are fully integrated into his main argument. Certainly, he never concedes what is for me a vital point—that from the very first moment when the divine grace impinges on a human life, it needs for its fruition a response, however feeble, of penitence and faith. Not for a moment is it being suggested that the human being initiates the work—the initiative belongs to God. But if it is merely outside of us, without us and even against us, then nothing worthy to be called ‘salvation’ can take place. There has got to be something corresponding to Mary’s reported words to Gabriel: ‘Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word’ (Lk. 1:38).

[…]

In theology and probably in many other subjects as well, highly one-sided solutions to problems are rarely satisfactory. As far as our present problem is concerned, I believe that in any adequate theology there must be a place both for divine grace and for human effort, for divine initiative and for the human acceptance and active response. When [E.P.] Sanders speaks of getting these things in the right order and well balanced, I take him to mean that God’s grace comes first, and presumably it is grace that evokes and enables the human response, but the priority of grace does not for a moment render the human response superfluous, or suggest that the person who is the recipient of grace is in any way delivered from the imperative to bring forth ‘fruits worthy of repentance’ (Lk. 3:8). It is the combination of divine grace and human response that is so admirably exemplified in Mary. She is ‘highly favoured’ of God (or ‘full of grace’ in the familiar Vulgate rendering), but she is also, in words which I quoted from W. P. DuBose, the one who ‘represents the highest reach, the focusing upwards, as it were, of the world’s susceptibility for God’. If we accept that the human being has been created by God, endowed with freedom, and made responsible for his or her own life, and even if we accept in addition that there are limits to freedom and responsibility, and especially that through the weakness of sin no human being can attain wholeness of life through effort that is unaided by divine grace—even Kant in spite of his insistence on autonomy conceded as much—yet we are still bound to say that there must be some human contribution to the work of redemption, even if it is no more than responsive and never of equal weight with the grace of God.

Though this kind of talk is liable to drive confessional Lutherans to drink, MacQuarrie enlists the aid of Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s right-hand man:

It is often claimed that [Melanchthon] taught a doctrine of synergism, though some Lutherans have tried to play down this side of his teaching. But others have accused him of betraying the Lutheran cause and of subverting even the key doctrine of justification by grace alone. The truth is that Melanchthon retained a strong humanistic bias through the passionate controversial years following the Reformation, and therefore he could never feel at ease with doctrines which seemed to him to threaten such essential human characteristics as rationality, freedom and responsibility. So he was obviously unhappy with such notions as predestination and irresistible grace. He could not accept that, as he put it, ‘God snatches you by some violent rapture, so that you must believe, whether you will or not.’ Again, he protested that the Holy Spirit does not work on a human being as on a statue, a piece of wood or a stone. The human will has its part to play in redemption, as well as the Word of God and the Spirit of God. Such teaching might seem to us to be just common sense, but in the highly charged atmosphere of Melanchthon’s time, it needed courage to say such things, and it brought angry rejoinders from other Lutherans. But Melanchthon shows that even at the heart of Lutheran theology an effort was being made to find an acceptable place for synergism or co-working between God and man in the work of salvation.

MacQuarrie concludes:

Perhaps we do have to acknowledge that Barth and others have been correct in believing that the place given to Mary in catholic theology is a threat to the doctrine of sola gratia, but I think this is the case only when the doctrine of sola gratia is interpreted in an extreme form, when this doctrine itself becomes a threat to a genuinely personal and biblical view of the human being as made in the image of God and destined for God, a being still capable of responding to God and of serving God in the work of building up the creation. This hopeful view of the human race is personified and enshrined in Mary.

Protestants may see an exalted role for Mary as a threat to “grace alone,” but MacQuarrie’s contention is that the extreme sola gratia position isn’t sustainable for just these sorts of reasons. And so, he can say that Mary represents the model of a cooperation between the human will and God, and that she is rightly seen as the “preeminent and paradigmatic member” of the Church.

Hopefully I’ll get chance to post on MacQuarrie’s accounts of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption and then offer some thoughts of my own.

Here’s a good article by Dr. Giles Fraser an Anglican rector and philosopher in defense of liberalism, rightly understood. Dr. Fraser contrasts the self-assertive hyper-individualistic version of liberalism which receives much well-deserved ire from theologians and social critics with a more temperate tradition of liberalism he traces back to Edmund Burke:

Burke’s suspicious liberalism begins from an acknowledgement of human fallenness. Moreover, he applies the idea of fallenness so much more widely than Evangelicals such as Professor [Oliver] O’Donovan; for Burke believes that it is not just wilful individuals that are fallen, but also groups, institutions, political systems, theologies, and Churches.

Edmund Burke’s famous political caution applies particularly to those who reform out of a burning sense of moral virtue. These people are especially dangerous when they are too confident in their own position, and not prepared to acknowledge the fallenness of their world-view.

Liberty is an important principle in so far as it protects human beings from those who are convinced they know best; those who are convinced they always know the truth. Liberal freedom is not wilful self-assertiveness: it is an insurance policy against dangerous bullies who believe they have God on their side.

Dr. Fraser is, by his own admission, leaning on the work of Christopher Insole (see here, here, here, and here for more on Insole’s theological defense of liberalism). He suggests that a commitment to this version of liberalism is characteristic of Anglicanism and could help hold the Anglican Communion together. “What gives this form of liberalism such an affinity with Anglicanism is that it disavows a clear-eyed certainty about the truth, in the name of peaceful co-existence between those of very different theological persuasions — which is just what Richard Hooker was after. “

I’m in broad sympathy with what Dr. Fraser says here, but the obvious objection is that making the peaceful coexistence of different theological persuasions the governing principle of a church will lead to wishy-washiness and theological laxity or indifference. After all, the church didn’t decide to include Arianism as just another “theological persuasion;” it declared it anathema and sub-Christian. Or to use Fraser’s example, hardcore Puritans and Catholics both found the Anglican via media unacceptable, despite Hooker’s best efforts. Don’t there, in other words, have to be some non-negotiable truths in order for the church to maintain any distinct identity? The idea of adiaphoria seems like it should come into play here, but in the case of many of the issues dividing our churches, there is disagreement precisely over what is adiaphoria.

(Link via A Conservative Blog for Peace)

Several people in the blogosphere have darkly pointed out that Pastor Greg Boyd, who made headlines for his renunciation of any close identification between Christiaity and a particular political party (which shall remain nameless…), is also a proponent of “open theism.” Some of these same folks have also alleged that open theism is heretical. Is that true?

According to Wikipedia, Open Theism

claims that God is not immutable, impassible, nor timeless since they believe that these attributes are not consistent with the personhood of God and his relationship to man as presented in the Christian scriptures. According to open theists, the God of the Bible is a God whose actions are not timeless but historical. God is neither completely immutable nor impassible as He may change his mind and He may be affected by his creatures emotionally and in other ways. God does not practice meticulous sovereignty (determining everything) but practices general sovereignty that allows for free will in mankind and allows man to contribute to bringing about the future. The most controversial aspect of open theism is the claim of its proponents that the omniscience of God does not include foreknowledge of the outcome of individual free choices that have not yet been made. Open theists argue the existence of such knowledge is not consistent with the nature of the future that they believe is implied by free will and that such knowledge is not consistent with the belief that our prayers can make a difference to God with regard to his plans.

As far as the first part – the stuff about God being passible and historical – goes, this has become a very common theme in contemporary theology. Names like Moltmann and Jenson come to mind, not to mention the process theologians. And anyone who believes in libertarian free will must believe that God doesn’t determine everything.

And the more controversial claim – that God doesn’t have knowledge of future free choices seems to follow pretty much directly from these premises. If God is “in” time rather than “outside” it, it’s hard to see how he could have certain knowledge of an even which was not completely determined by antecedent events. That’s just the definition of libertarian free will, or at least a necessary condition for it.

Now, I’m not too sure about any of this. I’m much less eager to jettison “classic theism” than open theists and other proponents of God’s passibility. Or at least I haven’t been convinced that it’s necessary or desirable. But I’m not sure that I can identify anything here that’s heretical, even the controversial bit about God’s knowledge. That seems analogous to a traditional question about God’s omnipotence. The textbook answer to the question of whether God’s omnipotence is threatened if he can’t do what’s logically impossible is that, strictly speaking, the logically impossible is not a coherent or conceivable thing. So it’s no limitation of God’s power to say he couldn’t perform the logically impossible.

So likewise with future knowledge of undetermined free choices. If God is in time and some acts of human choice are truly undetermined, then it seems like certain knowledge of those choices would be logically impossible. So, granting the Open Theists’ premises, to say that God doesn’t know the outcome of those choices wouldn’t be anymore problematic than the analogous issue regarding omnipotence. It’s no limitation of God’s omniscience if he’s unable to know what it would be logically impossible to know.

But, as far as I can see, there’s nothing heretical going on here, though admittedly I could be missing something. Open Theism may be false, but that’s not the same thing as heretical.

Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but I didn’t realize there were still major Christian denominations that officially proscribed the drinking of alcoholic beverages by their members. And yet the Southern Baptist Convention has reaffirmed this stance at their recent annual meeting. The resolution could even be read to support reinstating prohibition.

It’s easy to make fun of something like this, but the Southern Baptists are surely right that alcohol abuse is a serious problem. But their resolution insists that it’s the use, not the abuse which is forbidden. How do they square this with the fact that Jesus, by all accounts, drank wine? He was even called a drunkard by some of his critics!

Psalm 104 invites us to praise God for, among other things, providing wine that “maketh glad the heart of man” as the KJV puts it. Surely wine (and beer, and whiskey, and…) should be received as God’s good gifts to be enjoyed, though, of course, not abused. But not scorned either!

One possible argument is that Christians shouldn’t drink, even in moderation, because it might cause their “weaker” brethren who have problems with alcohol to stumble or might be occasion for scandal. This might be a good argument for not having strong drink at church functions, and certainly for abstaining while in the presence of a recovering alcoholic, but I don’t think it’s sufficient to show that we must abstain altogether. Many otherwise innocent activities can be occasions for sin under the right circumstances, but that doesn’t mean we have to refrain from them altogether. Surely there’s a limit to our responsibility for the ways in which other people might respond to our actions if those actions are innocent in themselves.