Defending a Marian doctrine

Mark Shea on his home turf (as opposed to screeching about politics) is usually a good read.

Here are the highlights from his own book excerpt, posted at the link, in defense of what Catholics call the Immaculate Conception of Mary:

Paul's remark that "all have sinned" in Romans 3:23 is used so often against the Immaculate Conception one can almost get the idea some critics think Paul was writing the Epistle to the Romanists. But, in fact, Romans 3:23 is not the climax of an argument about the sinlessness of Mary, but about the basic situation of Jews and Gentiles before God...

Paul's basic point in the first part of his letter to the Romans is that people who worry about being "ahead" or "behind" in a competition for God's favor are like cancer patients fighting over who is the least terminal. The only distinction, he says, between Jews and Gentiles is that God gave Jews an x-ray machine called the Law of Moses so they could see the progress of the disease called "sin" as it ravaged their souls and, thereby, become aware of their need for the Divine Physician. But that was it: the x-ray machine of the Law could only show Jews how sick they were. It could not heal them in the slightest. So Jews are no closer to health than Gentiles, says Paul. Sin is eating away at all of us. And Jesus is the only one Who can cure it.

...But if Paul really means to say absolutely every last human being is unrighteous, this makes nonsense of the very text he's citing. For the author of that text, David, also rejoices, "The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness;/according to the cleanness of my hands he recompensed me" (Psalm 18:20).

Paul [also] recognizes that infants, though children of Adam and therefore subject to original sin, are not capable of committing individual, personal, guilty sins. That's why he writes of Isaac and Esau that when they were still in utero they "had done nothing either good or bad" (Romans 9:11). But he does not laboriously explain that children below the age of reason are not capable of committing sin when he declares "all have sinned". He expects us to know this exception, just as he expects us to know that the son of Adam named "Jesus of Nazareth" is also not included in the "all" who have sinned.

...There are two ways Christ saves us from sin, just as there are two ways medicine saves us from disease—curative and preventative. A repentant sinner is naturally inclined to think of Christ the Physician primarily in His curative capacity. We see prostitutes and tax collectors rescued from a life of death, or a persecutor knocked off his horse, or some prideful hard-charging guy like Charles Colson get born again and we say, "That's what salvation is! Rescue from the quicksand of sin in which we were drowning."

That's fine and true, but it shouldn't blind us to the possibility that Christ the Physician can apply preventative medicine too. It's possible to rescue somebody from quicksand by keeping them out of it in the first place. And so Mary, according to the Church, was saved from original sin by Christ in much the same way I was saved by Christ from being a drug dealer. Just as He never let me fall into that particular sin in the first place, so He never let Mary fall into any sin in the first place. That, in sum, is the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

[Yet] some people have the vague idea that the Church can legitimately take three centuries to iron out what "Jesus is Lord" means, but it can't legitimately take eighteen centuries to iron out what "Kaire, Kecharitomene!" ("Hail, Grace-Filled One!") means.

After the above, the second part of Shea's excerpt gets into church history, and his explanation of why Eastern Orthodox churches reject that doctrine is very interesting. I was likewise fascinated by his description of the Pelagian Controversy and the intellectual interplay between Thomas Aquinas, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Duns Scotus.

Briefly, Tom (the Dominican "Angelic Doctor") and Bernie (the Cistercian) agreed with Christian tradition that Mary was born sinless and remained that way, but they couldn't figure out how. The Franciscan thinker Duns Scotus (d. 1308) resolved the problem for them, and, eventually, the rest of the (Roman) Catholic Church.

Shea writes:

Duns Scotus said that since Christ is a perfect savior, there must be at least one instance of somebody who is perfectly saved by Jesus—saved from top to bottom and from beginning to end—saved so perfectly that they were saved, not by being pulled out of the pit of sin, but by being kept from ever falling in at all. And the fitting candidate for that perfect gift of preventative salvation is Mary.

...Notice the logic here. The point is not ultimately Mary's glory, but Christ's. Mary's absolutely perfect salvation—a salvation so perfect that sin never got its hooks in her in any way—is a witness to the perfection of Christ's saving power. It's a sign of hope to all sinners—even the most wretched—that Christ's saving power displays complete dominion in any human circumstance.

I like being part of a church that can reach back not just to 1854, but also to 1476 and earlier (see Shea's post for details), with an enthusiastic faith in the "communion of saints" that lets twenty-first century believers engage the likes of Paul, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus -- not to mention King David -- in conversation.