Originally posted by Bro. Curtis:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by tragic_pizza:
The problems with this, of course, are that if Jesus received His divinity at some point, how and why? Did He earn it? And if He earned it, can't we do so as well? And if He wasn't born divine, His death could not really be substitutionary, could it? A "natural born man" would still carry Adamic sin. Thus His life serves as an example, and if we follow closely enough perhaps we, too, can earn divinity somehow, but we can't at all depend upon His death and resurrection as anything beyond a promise that if we ourselves are good enough, perhaps we too can rise again.
Jesus is God eternally. Mary was His mother. Well, if Mary was the vessel which God chose to birth God, she was certainly special, wasn't she? How special? Could a corrupt vessel hold God? Then she must have been free of corruption. So that means she was born of immaculate conception, right?
I took the liberty of paraphrasing your answer....
We have no hope at all of earning divinity. That is coming to us, free of charge, when we join our Lord for eternity. Joint-heirs with Christ.
Second, if Mary was born sinless, so that she could bring forth a sinless son, how did Mary come to us ? For if you follow the RCC doctrine, and believe a corrupt vessel couldn't bring forth God's son, then surely a corrupt vessel could not have brought to us a sinless woman, either. And ad infinitum, so forth, where did Mary's divinity begin ?
And please don't say that the RCC doesn't call her divine, because sinless means divine. </font>[/QUOTE]Of course they do. It is, as I said, an outgrowth of trying too hard to define something indefinable.
Mary was a special person who was chosen, even before there was a thing called "time," to be the mother of Jesus.
Virginity carries with it more than simple chastity. There's also the sense of sanctity, purity, devotion, even holiness. Cultures predating Christianity understood this; for example the women who served the Roman goddess Vesta were to be virgins (ever heard the term "vestal virgin?" That's where it comes from).
This idea of being set apart from before birth to be the mother of Jesus is hard to define. Mary was a virgin at the time of the Conception, and at birth. This much is solidly Biblical. The idea that Mary was, in a strictly spiritual sense, an eternal virgin, is also arguably Biblical (remembering all of the things that word implies
besides chastity), since she was obviously devoted to serving God, and was present at all the most pivotal times in Christ's ministry.
The error occurs in insisting that Mary
must have been physically a virgin throughout her life. There's no proof for or against this idea in Scripture, and no real need for it until one tries to "go to 11" in explaining the miracle of Christ's birth. Some Athenasians crossed over into heresy early on by
overspiritualizing the nature of Christ, effectively removing from Him any humanity whatever.
This seems to be the antecedent to what I call radical Marian theology, which insists that she was immaculately conceived (though, as you point out, from sinfully conceived parents, so where does it end?), that she never ever ever consummated her marriage to Joseph (though to have done so would have been unnatural and against God's clearly defined plan for marriage as far back as the book of Genesis), ascended bodily into heaven (and as you point out, such an event would have certainly caught the attention of John, the apostle charged with her care), and serves as heaven's Queen (a view dangerously close to idolatry, if not stomping all in it already).
Mary was blessed among all women as one who was set apart from the very foundations of the earth to be man's redemption. But divine? Nope, sorry. That is Christ's office alone.
By the way, look more closely at the verses I cited for the bronze snake. I think you'll see a parrallel to the way Mary is viewed by the radical Marian theologians. The snake was a conduit of grace, if you will, rather than the source of grace, which was Christ's office. Thus I see the snake as a type of Mary. Later, when the snake became an object of worship, it was destroyed as a graven image, because the conduit of grace superceded the Source of grace.
