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

Dogma and Religious Language

I did promise something on the Blessed Virgin Mary – and that piece will be forthcoming – but as I was struggling to write it I realised that there was still a bit more to be said about Dogma. The very word will send a shiver down the spine of the intellectual liberal (even though she has one overriding dogma she adheres to) and it usually appears in the form of an adjective describing one who is less than open minded. Though, as I have already suggested, the whole point of Christian Dogma is to insist on a sort of open-mindedness; to preserve the Catholic “and”.

Today, Christians are in love with poetry and imagery, art and iconography but far les comfortable with Dogma. I want to suggest that they are two sides of the same coin and that the Dogma preserves the iconography and imagery and purifies it. (At the same time, the art and image prevent the Dogma from becoming merely dry, empty intellectualism).

You can, perhaps, already see how I might be thinking about Mary here but I am going to put her on one side for now and look briefly at another idea in Christianity which presents itself to us as a Creedal statement and very frequently in art, iconography, music and poetry and so on. As I write I am looking at an icon representing the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. In the top half of the picture Jesus is seated in the heavens (blue circle) which are held up by an angel on either side. The bottom half depicts Mary and the Eleven. Mary too is accompanied by two angels and whilst she looks directly at us whilst pointing upwards to her Son, the eleven are looking all over the place, still in utter confusion before they receive the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Mary and Jesus have halos the Eleven do not. Mary is dressed in the blue of heaven and the red of martyrdom.

It is a powerful picture but it is not my favourite depiction of the Ascension. My favourite representation is that over the Altar of the Mystery of the Ascension in the Shrine Church of Our Lady in Walsingham. There, the feet of Jesus are seen simply disappearing into the clouds. Perhaps slightly less theologically informed – and I have to say that it is my favourite because it makes me laugh not because it is a good art or good theology!

But the truth is the second image could be hugely misleading. It is too literal, certainly, but in its literalism it depicts the Absence of Jesus and not his presence. In the first picture, the icon, there is no doubt about Jesus presence in the picture. He dominates the picture. And although the Eleven cannot see him there is a serenity in the posture of Mary who seeks to assure us who also cannot see that her Son is indeed present always.

I want to suggest that the first picture is of more use to us precisely because it is faithful to the Church’s understanding of the meaning of the Mystery. The icon needs the dogma. Without sound teaching our religious representations (like the disappearing feet of Jesus) become nothing more than misleading cartoons.

So,what are the Dogmas that inform the image? Well, obviously the statement in the Creed: “And Ascended into heaven.” But who ascended?  And it is the dogmatic answer to this question which is crucial. It is He whom the creed has already affirmed as the Eternal Son of the Father and who had taken human flesh and was crucified. The Jesus sat in the blue circle is the eternal Son of God who had assumed human flesh. The picture depicts the destiny of humanity. This picture is precisely about the destiny of those confused men who are looking all over the place in the icon. Mary’s steady gaze reminds us that although we, like the Eleven, cannot see Him we must trust. Look, she says, he is only there!

The Dogmas that the picture draws on are Dogmas concerning the Incarnation and the Church. The picture is about the destiny of human flesh; it is about the fate of the poor; and here the Eleven - that is us - can be reassured that where he has gone we shall surely follow.   We are reminded of what the Eastern Churches know so well, that the heart of this picture is heaven where all women and men can call home.

So something odd happens in the promulgation of Dogma. If we were asked we would probably say that Christian Dogma is about God. But actually there is not much dogma which is directly about God. Most dogma is about Jesus but even then the dogma is really about the human beings at the bottom of the picture. Why do we want to insist that Jesus, true God and true man ascended body and soul into heaven? Why does it matter? It matters because the Eleven – us – matter.  Dogma says we MUST say THIS about Jesus because to deny it would be to say something untrue about human beings. To deny that Jesus has ascended body and soul into heaven is to deny the destiny of humanity.

Interestingly, when we come to talk about dogmas concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary, we are usually doubly under-scoring, for dogmas about Mary are usually affirming a truth about the rest of humanity (we say it about Mary because it is true of all Christians) but we are usually also affirming something about the person of Jesus. Dogma about Mary has, in this sense become a double check: if we say this, what are we saying about the rest of humanity and what are we saying about Jesus? (And if we are saying this about Jesus, what are we saying about humanity?)

So, when we say what we shall say about Mary it will matter. It will matter because really it is about us and about the fact that we matter.

© Peter Polton

Real Presence

This is the first of a few short essays in which I try to grapple with controversial Catholic Teaching. Here I am going to examine the doctrine of Transubstantiation but I want to begin by exploring the idea of Revelation and that God communicates Himself to us.

I want to suggest that the church has always understood scripture as being (in some way) God's self disclosure; that somehow, through human history God made himself known to his people. The pages of the Old Testament witness not just to human grasping after truth but also to the fact that, through certain people at specific times, God made himself known. He communicated Himself to us.

The fullness of that self-disclosure is found in the person of Jesus Christ. The important thing about Jesus is not that he is good or that he taught wise teaching (though he was and he did). The important thing is who he is. Jesus is God's self-communication. He is God-moving-toward-us. So, for example, when we see him dying on the cross we are not (just) seeing a good man die, we are seeing God's ultimate self-disclosure. If you want to see what God is you have to look at a man dying on the cross. This is not only ultimate revelation; it is also unique revelation. (No other religion has grasped this truth about God and we couldn't have guessed it from our experience of creation.

So, on the night before he died Jesus acted out a little drama to help his disciples understand and claim for themselves this self-givingness of God in Jesus. (I know that that word has only just come into existence - but it’s a useful one).

“This is my body”, he said. “This is my blood, given for you. This is who I am: the self-giving one, the one whose blood is poured out, whose body is broken, whose life is given away. This is not only what I am doing tomorrow, this is who I have been for you from the moment of my conception through death and beyond: I am the God who gives Himself away”.

Then he says, “Do this in remembrance of me”. Where I think we get hung up is our English word has lost its meaning but originally remembrance is the opposite of dis-member. Remembrance is putting the members back together again. As a word it captures something of what is going on at the Passover meal when a good Jew is not just celebrating something that happened to his ancestors but is celebrating something that happened to him or herself. "This is the night God brought US out of Egypt". The deliverance is not a past event but a present reality for the Jew who thanks her God that she is no longer living in slavery.

The Exodus event commemorated at Passover includes, of course, that other significant moment of God's self-disclosure when he gave the Law to Moses on Sinai. The Exodus is an event in which God is revealing Himself and revealing Himself as Saviour.

“So”, says Jesus, “(from now on) do this in remembrance of me. Once upon a time, when you gathered together, you gathered to remember God's self-disclosure and saving activity in the Exodus event. From now on you are to remember God's self-disclosure and saving activity in my self-giving death on the cross. As Jews you claimed the Exodus event as your own; as my disciples you will claim this self-giving as your own. As when you celebrated Passover you were partaking in the Exodus event, so at the Eucharist you are participating in the event of my self-giving”.

Long before Thomas Aquinas invented the word "Transubstantiation" you can find countless accounts in the writings of the Fathers witnessing to the universal belief in the early church that to participate in the Eucharist was to receive this self-givingness of Jesus. So Justin Martyr (who was born in about AD 110), "We do not receive these as common bread and common drink; but as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the word of God, had flesh and blood for our  salvation, so likewise have we learned that the food over which we gave thanks ..... is the Flesh and Blood of the same incarnate Jesus".

Note that St Justin leans heavily on the notion of Incarnation to back up his teaching that the bread and wine have changed. It is the same movement of self-communication which made Jesus God-toward-us that makes the bread and wine God-toward-us: the very presence of Jesus.

I promise I could go on finding other very primitive sources in the Fathers for an equally physical understanding of the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. This was so much the case that one of the charges that the Roman authorities brought against Christians was cannibalism

But was this just a primitive notion that we who are more sophisticated should give up? I want to suggest that this belief is absolutely fundamental to Christianity.

I don't want to dwell on Aquinas because I don't think he is that important. That is to say, I think he is merely one more witness to the church’s universal belief in the Real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I think he was expressing in his doctrine of Transubstatiation something which the church had always believed. What is different in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas is his (very revolutionary) use of the language of Aristotle to communicate the Christian Gospel. Lesser men that Aquinas had been condemned as heretics for trying to marry Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity and Aquinas was tried for heresy. (This was the time when the really interesting thinking was being done by Islamic scholars and Christianity was struggling to keep up. It was a fascinating era in philosophy and theology). But I digress. The point is that Aquinas wanted to hold onto this key Christian belief: that the self-communicating God, the God who became incarnate (flesh and blood) really does communicate Himself, becomes REAL in the Eucharist. The incarnate, crucified, risen and ascended Lord makes himself present to us, he does what he does best: He gives Himself. So what is there on the Altar? It looks like (form) bread and wine; but the inner-reality has become nothing less than the very presence of the crucified, risen and ascended Jesus. The substance (reality) has changed
even though the outward form remains that of bread and wine.

Now the Reformers (especially Calvin and Zwingli) wanted to deny what I think the church had ALWAYS believed up to that point. They wanted to say that the bread and wine merely symbolised the presence of Jesus or even that the bread and wine "remind" us that Jesus once (a long long time ago) gave himself. They did say that if we received "worthily" we would receive Jesus spiritually. The emphasis shifts from the Consecration to the eating and drinking.

My problem with this is that this idea of "spiritual" giving is not faithful to the scriptures. The scriptures witness to a God who does NOT communicate spiritually - even in the Old Testament. Our God is a God who communicates very much through the messy flesh and blood events in human history. Our religion is NOT a "spiritual" religion it is a very physical one. Jesus didn't give spiritual healing he gave physical healing, he didn't spiritually give himself away he physically suffered and died. I would very much want to add that he didn't "spiritually" rise from the dead but he actually physically rose again (though in a very different dimension to our own flat world). No. Christianity is not a "spiritual religion" and God's self-giving at the Eucharist is NOT spiritual but physical. At the Eucharist God does what he does best. He gives Himself to us and he is physically present as Word made flesh.

(I'm glad to say, by the way, that Mrs Wesley's two boys are on my side. So in Charles Wesley's hymn, Victim Divine, we end by singing:

We need not now go up to heaven
To bring the long-sort Saviour down;
Thou art to all already given,
Thou dost e'en now thy banquet crown:
To every faithful soul appear,
And show thy real presence here.

© Peter Bolton