Mary IV

Assumed Body and Soul into Heaven:


This is the heart of the matter! What happened to that flesh which the Eternal Son of the Father took from Mary? What happened to that crucified humanity? What is the fate of the street children feeding from the waste tips of the wealthy; to the body wracked by the pain of addiction; to the woman whose body has been violated by rape and to the boy who has been abused? What will happen to the victims of torture and terror; the slaughtered of the killing fields and the bodies lost in the mud of Passchendaele?  Is the woman condemned to a life time of beatings doomed to die a miserable, lonely death? Is the hero who fought to save his comrades gone for nothing? Is the life of that wonderful mother who fought so hard in her battle against cancer utterly pointless? What will happen to the child who died the agonising death of starvation?

This is the heart of the matter and the Dogma of the Assumption boldly asserts that third class citizens, those who are excluded, the inferior and the lowly, are to be lifted high. On the Feast of the Assumption we sing Psalm 113: “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust; from the dung-hill he lifteth up the needy” and we echo Mary’s Magnificat: “He casts the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly poor.”

The Assumption answers the question about what happened to the crucified Jesus: to the flesh and blood, body and soul he took from Mary. But it answers too the question about our own destiny, the fate of the poor: what are we destined for? Dust or glory? And this is why I am a Catholic Christian which is a religion not of “spirituality” but a religion of flesh and blood and reality. Catholic Christianity is not about cosy feelings and personal fulfilment but about the fate of those children scrambling over the scrap-heaps in desperate search of sustenance. Catholic Christianity is the religion of the God who feeds the poor by giving nothing less than himself.

© Peter Bolton

Mary III

Conceived without the guilt of Original Sin:

We must not confuse the Church’s teaching that Mary was conceived without the stain of sin (immaculate conception) with the church’s teaching that Jesus was conceived in the womb of a virgin (Virgin birth or Virginal conception).

The dogma (for so it was defined by Pius IX in 1854) depends on our understanding of Original Sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that original sin is a deprivation of original holiness and justice. (§ 405) It is really important to note that before Original Sin the really original condition of men and women is Holy and Just. The same paragraph describes human nature as “wounded” and of us having an “inclination towards evil”. (Baptism is the restoration of this original state of holiness though we are left with the need to struggle against the tendency to sin).

Our Original Sin, then, is humanity shutting out God. We have closed ourselves to the possibility of God. This “loss of Holiness” is a loss of connectedness with him. This is the tragedy of the human condition: we have lost God, the source of life and goodness and therefore we know death as well as life; we know evil as well as good. Life becomes the unfulfilled longing for God ending in death. We are no longer singing the song we were supposed to sing; we are out of tune with God. And no matter how hard we try we cannot re-connect; we cannot hear the tune; we live in darkness.

If the church claims that Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin then she is saying that God restored her (at the very beginning of her life) to the original state of holiness which was proper to the whole of humanity before the fall. In this sense her holiness is not unique to her but is, rather the “natural state” of all men and women. In other words, were it not for original sin, we would all be like Mary. So she is conceived without this obstacle which so impedes us: she is reconnected to God by God. God opens her heart so that she is open to him in a way we cannot be without his grace. Mary is given the possibility of God; she sings his song.

So what does this say about God? The dogma affirms that God will not be trapped by our sinful condition. We are trapped: we cannot fulfil what is God’s purpose for us but God is not so bound. God is not prevented from acting in the events of human history because we have separated ourselves from him. We see this beautifully illustrated in the story of the Patriarchs: no matter how much  human beings make a mess of things, God still fulfils the promise he makes to us.  Esau sells his birthright and Jacob tricks his father, Laban tricks Jacob and Joseph’s brothers all but do away with him whilst Joseph gets himself thrown into prison and yet, despite all this and more, God’s purpose is fulfilled. God acts in human history and gives his holiness to his people despite them.

And so God gives his holiness to Mary. It is not because of something she has done. This is God’s action so that his purpose for humanity might be fulfilled. And if God has done this for Mary it is because he intends it for us all: what is given to Mary at the beginning of her life is given to all of us when we are re-born in the waters of Baptism. This holiness meant that Mary was capable of receiving God into her heart as she received Jesus in her womb. So too, at our Baptism we are cleansed of our sins and made holy so that we too are able to receive the Word of God and allow it to grow in our hearts. God is not trapped by our sinfulness but even more importantly, nor are we. By the grace of Baptism, we too can sing our Magnificat; we can say “Yes” to God.

© Peter Bolton

Mary II

Mother of God:

In the early Christian centuries there were fierce arguments about who exactly Jesus is.  The argument mattered to people because they were anxious not to blaspheme God or to underestimate the significance of the Salvation event. It mattered that Jesus was fully God and fully human because affirming that affirmed that human beings mattered to God. What is not assumed, the dictum went, is not healed. The title “Theotokos” or “God bearer”, affirmed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, guaranteed that when we speak about her son we are affirming that he is Divine (because she is Mother of God) and that he is human (because she is the Mother of God). We are affirming the most intimate union between God and man: that He took our humanity in order that we might be partakers of his Divine nature.

So, of course, the title God Bearer or Mother of God is about us too. If the son of Mary was not God, what use would he have been in bringing us to God? If he were not man, what on earth had he to do with us? This title above all the titles of Mary is about the destiny of humanity. It is THE title which affirms all that the Church wants to say about the person of Jesus who is God made man and therefore it is THE theological statement which affirms our destiny as human become divine. The title adds not one little jot to our knowledge of Mary but it tells us all you ever needed to know about Jesus and about the dignity of humanity. Eastern Christians still speak of the Deification of human persons as our ultimate end: union with God.

It is also a title about our Vocation as individual Christians who, like Mary, are called to bear God to a world which is hungry for his love and his truth.

© Peter Bolton

Mary I

Mary and Dogma and Us:

Most dogma is about Jesus. Even dogmatic statements about Mary are really statements about Jesus. But all dogma is also really a statement about humanity. A dogma says we MUST say this because to deny it would be to say something untrue about Jesus and untrue about humanity. In the next four posts I intend to test this in relation to the key things that we say about Mary: that they are really statements about Jesus and the whole of humanity. I will examine four dogmatic claims: that Mary is a Virgin; that she is the Mother of God, that she was conceived without the guilt of original sin and that she has been assumed body and soul into heaven. In each case I will ask what the statement says about the person of Jesus and or the nature of God on the one hand and what each statement says about the nature and destiny of human persons on the other.

Mary ever Virgin:

Recall that image of the feet disappearing into the clouds. It was a bad picture of the Ascension because it was not informed by proper doctrine. It was a bad picture because it was bad theology. We must be careful that our minds don’t paint a similarly naïve picture of the virginal conception of Jesus.

Jenkins’ mocking, “God doesn’t do that sort of thing” is blatantly untrue when we look at the virgin birth in the light of Holy Scripture. Firstly, God is always intervening all over the place in the events of human history and most especially in the history of His people. Secondly, and much more importantly, the Virgin birth is entirely consistent with the Biblical claim that God is creator. The Virgin Birth must be seen in the light of the Genesis story: as Eve was taken from Man so now the Son of Man is taken from the woman. Here is a new creation.

So the doctrine of the Virgin birth in the first place is about God as Creator. This, (with apologies to David Jenkins) is exactly the sort of thing God does. And here, in the conception of Jesus, man is being re-created. The creation of Jesus in the womb of Mary is no mere continuation of the old created order subject to decay; here, by God’s direct intervention, that old creation of sin and death is being made new. Yes, Jesus is the child of Mary and therefore as fully human as you or I. But, Jesus is the child of God: unique amongst men. The story of the Virgin Birth turns out not to be about the absence of a human father but about the presence of God.

The doctrine of the Virgin birth is about God as creator; it tells us that in Jesus, God has brought about a new creation. It is, therefore a statement about us and the possibilities for the rest of humanity. Jesus is the beginning of a new creation not a one-off event in history.   In the ARCIC Agreed Statement “Mary Grace and Hope in Christ” the Commission says of the virginal conception that it “points to the new birth of every Christian as an adopted child of God”.  If Jesus is a new creation then we who belong to him also have the possibility being made new, of being re-created in his image. “Therefore if any man [be] in Christ, [he is] a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new”. (II Corinthians 5: 17)

We are not trapped in the vicious cycle of birth and death which characterises the old creation. As Christians we have been “born again from above” (John 3: 3-5) and so the “miracle” of the new birth of Jesus turns out not to be a unique event at all: we are all born again into the new creation as our Baptismal regeneration places us firmly in the new paradise.  The Church speaks of Mary as “Ever Virgin” because, just as with the Grace of Baptism, that new Creation can never be undone. This new thing is not subject to decay.

So, just as when we look at the disappearing feet of Jesus we are totally distorting the doctrine of the Ascension, so too, if our understanding of the virginal conception is nothing more than the absence of Joseph we are totally missing the point!

© Peter Bolton