1. The History and Danger of Roman Catholic Doctrine
2. Mary Dogma and Christ as Sole Mediator
Category Archives: Mary
Mary In New Testament Perspective
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Article “The Misplaced Marian Emphasis of Roman Catholicism” by Keith Mathison – original source: https://www.keithmathison.org/post/the-misplaced-marian-emphasis-of-roman-catholicism
One of the most noticeable features of Roman Catholicism is its doctrinal and practical emphasis on Mary, the mother of Jesus. Every significant Roman Catholic dogmatic theology text includes a lengthy section, if not an entire volume, devoted to Mariology. Dozens upon dozens of lengthy books on Mary are published every year, and this doesn’t include all of the candles, statues, pendants, portraits, nightlights, lampshades, rosary stands, throw blankets, jigsaw puzzles, and more with Mary’s image.
Over the centuries, Mary’s role in Roman Catholic doctrine and practice has only increased. In the nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church declared as dogma the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (not to be confused with the doctrine of the miraculous conception of Christ), and in the twentieth century, the Roman Church added the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. Vatican II used the title “Mediatrix” to refer to Mary. As Mediatrix, Mary is seen as the one who mediates the redemptive work of her Son Jesus Christ. Roman Catholic practice includes prayers to Mary, hymns to Mary, and exaltation of Mary as queen of the universe. These are essentially acts of worship, effectively making of Mary a quasi-divine goddess of sorts.
Obviously, Mary had a unique role in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. The incarnation began in her womb. As the Definition of Chalcedon expresses it, the Lord Jesus Christ was “begotten before the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer as regards his humanity.” She truly was blessed to be chosen for this unique task. And her humble and faithful response to God’s call upon her is a model example of faith.
That said, does the dramatic emphasis on Mary in Roman Catholic doctrine and practice correspond in any way to the emphasis we find in the doctrine and practice of Christ’s apostles?
No, it doesn’t.
Anyone familiar with Roman Catholic doctrine and practice might suspect that the New Testament is filled with teaching about Mary and filled with examples of devotion to Mary. However, as is often the case with Rome, the correspondence between its teaching and practice and the teaching and practice of the Apostles is non-existent. The emphasis among the Apostles is upon Jesus Christ. As Paul says, “we preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23). And a bit later: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). No one is surprised at the apostolic emphasis upon Jesus Christ. But do they also emphasize Mary in the way that the Roman church does?
Let’s look at one way we might consider emphasis – the number of times a person is explicitly mentioned by name (I know this has only limited use, but this is a blog post, not a journal article, and this does shed some light on the question).
Mary, the mother of Jesus, is mentioned explicitly by name a total of 19 times in the entire New Testament. The majority of those references are naturally found in the birth narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke because birth narratives are where mention of a mother would be expected. In Matthew, she is mentioned by name 5 times. In Luke, she is mentioned by name 12 times. That’s 17 out of the total of 19. In Mark, she is mentioned by name once. Outside of the Gospels, Mary is mentioned by name only once in Acts 1:14.
Mary isn’t mentioned by name a single time in the epistles of Paul, Peter, John, James, and Jude. She is referred to as “woman” once by Paul in Gal. 4:4 when he writes, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law.” Even this one reference, however, is saying something about Jesus rather than about Mary. It’s indicating His true humanity. Scholars are continually publishing books on the Pauline theology of this doctrine or that doctrine. It’s not even possible to write an article on the Pauline doctrine of Mary, however, much less a book, because Paul doesn’t say anything about her.
Outside of the early chapters of Matthew and Luke, Mary is mentioned by name only twice in the entire New Testament and not even once in the epistles where the various newly planted churches are being given foundational apostolic teaching regarding doctrine and practice.
For the sake of comparison consider the number of times some other biblical figures are mentioned explicitly by name in the New Testament and in the Epistles:
Moses – 79 times in the NT (23 of those in the Epistles)
Abraham – 71 times in the NT (33 of those in the Epistles)
David – 54 times in the NT (6 of those in the Epistles)
Isaac – 18 times in the NT (8 of those in the Epistles)
Noah – 8 times in the NT (3 of those in the Epistles)
Adam – 7 times in the NT (6 of those in the epistles)
Eve – 2 times in the epistles
Eve is mentioned by name only twice in the epistles, and that is still more than the number of times Mary is mentioned by name (zero times). [As a side note, it is fascinating that around the third century or so, as Christians started looking for people and events in the Old Testament that prefigured people and events in the New Testament, they focused on Christ as the second Adam. Somehow, they concluded that if Jesus is the second Adam then Mary must be the second Eve. An entire Mariology then began to develop from this curious parallel they drew. The analogy is faulty, however. Eve was Adam’s wife, not his mother. If anything in the New Testament is an analogy to Eve, it is the bride of Christ, not the mother of Christ.]
In any case, Mary is never mentioned by name in any of the epistles. Does this mean that Mary is unimportant? No, but her level of importance is where the apostles placed it when they wrote the birth narratives in the Gospels. She had the awe-inspiring and unique blessing of being the mother of God-incarnate, the Lord Jesus Christ. But once the apostles move beyond the birth narratives, she fades into the background. The focus is now on the one she bore in her womb. The focus is now on the Lord Jesus Christ. The Apostles are Christ-centered in their doctrine and practice, and there isn’t even a hint of the kind of Mary-centered doctrine and devotion that is now found in the Roman Catholic Church. Paul doesn’t talk about her in his writings. Peter doesn’t talk about her in his writings. James doesn’t talk about her in his writings. They continually talk about Jesus. They preach Christ and Him crucified.
Roman Catholic Marian doctrine and practice is to the teaching of the Bible what the romantic subplot between Tauriel and Kili in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films is to the book written by Tolkien.
The extreme misplaced emphasis on Mary in Roman Catholic doctrine and practice is simply one more of the many ways that the Roman Catholic Church publicly displays how radically different it is from the Church that Jesus Christ founded.
The Anger of Jesus
The Marian Dogmas Debate
Why is the Reformation Still Important?
Dr. James White:
Why is the Reformation still important? Why is it proper for us to focus upon it this year in celebration of 500 years? Why do I pray that by the end of 2017 more and more of God’s people will embrace the Reformation, and Reformed theology as a whole? Well, here is a tweet from the current Pope. He encourages Roman Catholics to “entrust the new year to Mary.” Doing this, evidently, will result in “peace and mercy” growing throughout the world. And here I thought that could only happen as men and women bow the knee not to Mary, but to the Lord Jesus, in repentance and faith, trusting in His once-for-all work upon the cross as the perfect Savior. Rome’s departure from the Gospel remains complete, and defiant. She continues to blaspheme the cross every time a man-made “priest” pretends to “re-present” the once-for-all sacrifice of Calvary upon a Roman altar. And she continues to enslave men with her endless gospel of sacraments and penances, which can never bring them peace. And in this tweet the Pope demonstrates once again the grossly idolatrous nature of modern Roman teaching concerning Mary.
How many non-Roman Catholics today understand why they do not bow the knee to Rome? In what is loosely called Evangelicalism, very few. One either has the wild-eyed bigotry of the Jack Chick variety anti-Catholicism, or the luke-warm “it’s just a matter of taste” variety of synergistic Tiber-paddling that is so common today. May the number of those who knowingly, and out of a true commitment to sound biblical doctrine, reject Rome’s pretensions, grow in this the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.
Mary, According to Rome
Dr. Sam Storms – “10 things you should know about what the Roman Catholic Church believes about Mary” – article (original source here)
In our continuing series on 10 things every Christian should know, we turn our attention to the Roman Catholic Church and its beliefs about the Virgin Mary.
(1) Rome believes that when Mary was conceived in the womb of her mother she was preserved and protected from the taint of original sin. This is the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. This dogma was proclaimed by Pope Pius IX on Dec. 8, 1854. We read this in the Catholic Catechism:
“Through the centuries the Church has become ever more aware that Mary, ‘full of grace’ through God, was redeemed from the moment of her conception. That is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception confesses, as Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854 – ‘The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin” (CC, 491).
(2) The RCC also teaches that “in consequence of a Special Privilege of Grace from God, Mary was free from every personal sin during her whole life” (Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, p. 203; this view was endorsed by Augustine). Again, the Catechism declares that “By the grace of God Mary remained free of every personal sin her whole life long” (CC, 493).
(3) Rome also believes in the perpetual virginity of Mary. The dogma of the perpetual virginity of Mary was proclaimed by the Council of Trent in 1545-63. The Catechism affirms the following:
“The deepening of faith in the virginal motherhood led the Church to confess Mary’s real and perpetual virginity even in the act of giving birth to the Son of God made man. In fact, Christ’s birth ‘did not diminish his mother’s virginal integrity but sanctified it.’ And so the liturgy of the Church celebrates Mary as Aeiparthenos, the ‘Ever-virgin’” (CC, 499).
(4) When Protestants object to Mary’s perpetual virginity by pointing to those texts that refer to the brothers and sisters of Jesus (Mt. 12:46-50; 13:55-56; Mark 6:3; John 2:12; 7:1-5,10; Acts 1:14; 1 Cor. 9:5; Gal. 1:19), Rome responds in this way: Continue reading
The Roman Catholic Mary
Jordan Standridge is a pastoral associate at Immanuel Bible Church in Springfield, where he leads the college ministry. He is also the founder of The Foundry Bible Immersion. In an article entitled “7 Problems With the Roman Catholic Mary” he writes:
About 10 years ago I was walking around the Duomo of Milan and these ladies captured my attention as they were staring at this stained glass picture of Mary. Being spotted by one of the ladies she quickly came to me to hand me a rosary. As she tried to convince me to take it, I said that I only needed to pray to God and that I would not pray to Mary, her shock quickly turned to anger and she said “may Mary whip you with the seven whips of Satan!” As I booked it out of there I was wondering to myself first of all, why is Mary working with Satan? But second of all and more importantly, how in the world do you get to that point where one talks to Mary more than God? How do you get to the point where you pray 10 prayers to Mary for every prayer to God? Well in honor of the lady who cursed me that fateful day, here are 7 problems with the Roman Catholic Mary.
She’s the mother of God
495 Called in the Gospels “the mother of Jesus”, Mary is acclaimed by Elizabeth, at the prompting of the Spirit and even before the birth of her son, as “the mother of my Lord”.144 In fact, the One whom she conceived as man by the Holy Spirit, who truly became her Son according to the flesh, was none other than the Father’s eternal Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity. imagesHence the Church confesses that Mary is truly “Mother of God” (Theotokos).145
In order to refute certain heresies that taught against the Hypostatic Union, the early Church named Mary the Theotokos (wrongly translated the mother of God, it actually means the God-bearer), not in order to raise Mary to a God-like level but rather to correct the heresy about Jesus. Over time this developed into this strange idea that Mary was the spiritual mother of Human beings. As time went on, Mary received more and more honor to the point where the following statements about her began to appear. It’s fascinating how in order to protect the church from heresies about Christ, the Church unknowingly ended up creating one about Mary. Some say that when Constantine made all of Rome “Christian” the pagans now forced to be “christians” brought in several idols. One of these idols was the mother goddess. They say that they replaced the worship of the mother goddess with the worship of the Roman Catholic Mary.
She is sinless
493 The Fathers of the Eastern tradition call the Mother of God “the All-Holy” (Panagia), and celebrate her as “free from any stain of sin, as though fashioned by the Holy Spirit and formed as a new creature”.138 By the grace of God Mary remained free of every personal sin her whole life long. CCC (The Catechism of the Catholic Church)
The Bible clearly states that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23) Mary herself refers to her Son as her personal savior (Luke 1:47). 1 John 1:8 adds, “If any man says he has no sin he is a liar and the truth is not in him.” Mary was a sinner who needed to be born-again just like everyone else who has ever taken a breath. Claiming that somehow she was without sin leads us to have a view of her that is unhealthy. This is an example of adding to Scripture, we end up venerating her, looking up to her and this leads us into thinking that somehow she has grace to impart on us.
She ascended into heaven Continue reading
Mariolatry
I can only imagine what the Lord will one day say to those who so clearly blaspheme Him by means of this prayer and likewise disrespect His mother in this way:
“O Mother of Perpetual Help, thou art the dispenser of all the goods which God grants to us miserable sinners, and for this reason he has made thee so powerful, so rich, and so bountiful, that thou mayest help us in our misery. Thou art the advocate of the most wretched and abandoned sinners who have recourse to thee. Come then, to my help, dearest Mother, for I recommend myself to thee. In thy hands I place my eternal salvation and to thee do I entrust my soul. Count me among thy most devoted servants; take me under thy protection, and it is enough for me. For, if thou protect me, dear Mother, I fear nothing; not from my sins, because thou wilt obtain for me the pardon of them; nor from the devils, because thou art more powerful than all hell together; nor even from Jesus, my Judge himself, because by one prayer from thee he will be appeased. But one thing I fear, that in the hour of temptation I may neglect to call on thee and thus perish miserably. Obtain for me, then, the pardon of my sins, love for Jesus, final perseverance, and the grace always to have recourse to thee, O Mother of Perpetual Help.”
From the book “Devotions in Honor of Our Mother of Perpetual Help” – Quoted by Dr. James White in his book “Mary—Another Redeemer?” (pp. 9–10)
The truth about Luther’s devotion to Mary
James Swan sheds some much needed light on the subject here.