This continues a series of posts in which I engage Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella over my idea of philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV, V.)
Bill Vallicella asks me if Mariology (the doctrine of Mary, the mother of Jesus) is a part of the presuppositionalist “package deal,” that is, an essential element of the worldview that (I argue) uniquely makes intelligible predication possible.[1]
My answer is, yes, “some version of Mariology,” as Bill puts it, is derivable from an exegesis of Scripture, but not the Roman Catholic version that Bill tacitly presupposes.
That version was unknown to the writers of Scripture and the early Church Fathers. History knows of no writing alleging Mary’s “immaculate conception” (freedom from contracting Adam’s sin, “original sin”) until over a thousand years since Christ’s Ascension had passed. That’s when theologians could consider, and then reject, the musings of Eadmer, a 12th-century monk who studied under Anselm (who denied Mary’s immaculate conception).[2]
Bernard of Clairvaux rejected the idea as a novum. He was joined in rejecting it (as inconsistent with the need for universal redemption in Christ) by Peter Lombard, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Aquinas. The distinctive dogma that the Roman Catholic magisterium has since 1854 taught de fide (that is, as binding on all Catholics) forms no part of the Biblical worldview.
Bill feels a logical tug toward that dogma.
Now the God-Man [Jesus, the only sinless being (Hebrews 4:15)] had to be free of original sin to be able to do his redemptive work and restore right relations between man and God. So, he could not have ‘contracted’ original sin from his earthly mother. Hence the logic of the soteriological narrative required that Mary be conceived without original sin. Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
Non sequitur. Jesus, born of Mary but conceived of the Holy Spirit, assumed a true human nature, but not its fallenness or corruption. Bill’s logic would extend to Ann, Mary’s mother, and her mother, and so forth back to one of Noah’s daughters-in-law. Or, as Bernard put it (decades after Eadmer wrote): “On the same ground they might appoint festivals for the conception of the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of Mary, and so on without end.”[3]
Unlike Mary’s alleged immaculate conception, the Trinity is taught in Scripture, even if the Hebrew or Greek equivalents of the Latinate English word “Trinity” are not found there. That is, all of the doctrine’s elements have a basis in God-breathed words (2 Timothy 3:16).[4] The two teachings, one divine, the other all-too-human, do not have the same epistemological value—unless, of course, one is presupposing Sola ecclesia rather than, as I presuppose, Sola Scriptura.
Scripture—only Scripture and all of Scripture—contains all that any Christian needs to know to have peace with God (that is, salvation). It follows that there is no need for an infallible teaching authority to declare what Scripture is, what Scripture means, what tradition (“oral” or “written”) is, what tradition means, or what historical research may or may not uncover.
. . . [In his worldview Flood] includes more than the existence of God where ‘God’ refers to a purely spiritual being, of a personal nature, endowed with the standard omni-attributes, who exists of metaphysical necessity, and who created out of nothing everything distinct from himself, or at least everything concrete distinct from himself. One reason for this ‘more’ is because Flood’s God is not just personal, but tri-personal: one God in three divine persons. This is not intended as tri-theism, of course, but as monotheism: one God in three divine persons.
I see no reason to subscribe to the presumption of monopersonalism (according to which the biblical concept of God is seen as adding “more” to an alleged “default” concept), but yes, at the base of my worldview is the triune God who existed in “eternity past,” that is, “before” decreeing and then exnihilating the spacetime continuum and His interactions within it, many revealed in the Scriptures.
. . . One and the same person, the Son [of God, the Second Person of the Trinity], without ceasing to be fully divine, became fully human, with a human body and a human soul, by being born of a virgin named ‘Mary’ in a stable in Bethlehem. So it seems that the ‘package deal’ must include, in addition to Trinity and Incarnation, some version of Mariology. Why must it? Because Jesus Christ, the God-Man, had to have gotten his human nature from somewhere. He inherited his human nature from his human mother.
Yes, the worldview implies a Mariology, just not the Roman Catholic version.
God the Son is not a creature. Is Jesus a creature? His earthly mother is a creature. Jesus had no heavenly mother, at least not until the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven.
Which is quite an “assumption” in this context! Bill says he “won’t say anything more about the Assumption here,” but for some reason feels the need to introduce an idea of which secular history (and Scripture) knows nothing.
And Jesus had no earthly father. Joseph was his stepfather, and a stepfather is not a father in the earthly or biological sense of the term. The father of Jesus is a purely spiritual being. So, Jesus Christ, the God-Man, at the moment of Incarnation, has a heavenly father but no earthly father, and an earthly mother but no heavenly mother.
Granted. And?
Mary became pregnant. What was the nature of the inseminating seed? It had to be purely spiritual. Why? Because it came from God who is purely spiritual. What about the inseminated egg? It had to be physical. Why? Because it was the ovum of an earthly woman. It was a miraculous pregnancy by supernatural agency.
Bill seems to have smuggled in (innocently) a nonbiblical concept of “spiritual.” The spiritual is that which comes immediately from God (who is primordially spirit [John 4:24]), and the spiritual can have physical attributes. A clear example of this is the manna that the Israelites ate (ἔφαγον, ephagon) during their Sinai sojourn (1 Corinthians 10:3). The manna was spiritual food (πνευματικὸν βρῶμα, pneumatikon brōma) but no less physically nourishing for being spiritual.
Apropos Bill’s concern: a few months ago, a priest sermonized that Jesus got His form wholly from Mary. I asked him if he thought Jesus looked like His mother but with a beard. After his embarrassed denial, I rephrased: did not the Holy Spirit necessarily supply what Joseph did not, namely, the spermatic complement to Mary’s ovum and that both contributed to His phenotypical expression?
The busy pastor had somewhere else to be. Of course, it would have been a small matter for the Spirit to cause the embryo that Jesus once was to receive genetic information that would have the phenotypical expression of a male child of Mary and Joseph (as did His siblings). The spermatic complement was spiritual, that is, directly from God with no human intermediary, but also as physical as Mary’s ovum.
To summarize: Bill overlooked my restriction of “Christian worldview” to the one “expressed on the pages of the Bible,” whose texts supply no material for an inference to any of Rome’s Marian dogmas. About them, history knows nothing before the passing of a thousand years after Mary walks off the pages of Scripture. Maybe there is an argument to the conditions of intelligible predication from the Catholic worldview (or the Jewish, or the Muslim, or the Dale Tuggyan). If there is, I’d like to examine it. The Immaculate Conception and the Body Assumption of Mary, therefore, form no part of the worldview I defend.
Bill closed with three interrelated questions, which he said he “cannot develop and defend in this installment,” so I will do no more than indicate a possible line of response:
Given the well-known logical conundra that arise when we try to render intelligible to ourselves such doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation, conundra that seem to threaten the intelligibility of these doctrines, and therefore seem to threaten the intelligibility of any explanation of intelligible predication in terms of a worldview committed to them, how do you respond? Do you maintain that the supposed logical puzzles are easily solved and that Trinity and Incarnation in their orthodox formulations are logically and epistemically unobjectionable? If that is not the tack you take, what tack do you take?
Easily? No. The choice, however, is between a worldview in which unity and plurality are eternally in equipoise and all the others in which they aren’t and consequently bring intelligible predication crashing down with them. I’ll let Bill spell out for me the allegedly “well-known logical conundra”—I won’t do that for him—before concluding that they are fatal to my position.
The doctrines mentioned, properly understood, are logically and epistemically unobjectionable because, as I’ve argued in this series (see the top of this post), many others posts, and my book, they form the very ground of logical and epistemic irrefutability.
To be continued
Notes
[1] William F. Vallicella, “Is Mariology a Part of the Presuppositionalist ‘Package Deal’?: A Question for Flood,” Maverick Philosopher, April 27, 2024. Bill quotes me: “The Christian worldview, expressed on the pages of the Bible, is a revelatory ‘package deal,’ if you will, not a buffet of optional metaphysical theses. The organic connectedness (within the divine decree) of creation, trinity, and incarnation—even the so-called ‘contingencies of history,’ e.g., Joshua’s impaling the King of Ai on a pole after slaughtering all of his subjects (Joshua 8)—await clarification in God’s good time, if He sees fit to provide it, but are put before us for our assent today.” And “The Christian does not avail himself of his birthright (Christian theistic) worldview because it confers omniscience on him, but rather because (a) it saves intelligible predication and (b) no competing worldview does.” See the first part of this series, “Christianity and intelligibility,” April 24, 2024.
[2] Eadmer inked De Conceptione sanctae Mariae around 1120, that is, after Anselm’s death. It was rooted in Greek oral tradition, not Scripture. Even some in Rome (ironically in retrospect) thought it a heresy when they got wind of this Anglo-Saxon novelty.
[3] Letter, circa 1140, as quoted in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, Baker Book House, 1931, rev. ed. 1990, I:121-122.
[4] Sola Scriptura is another doctrine whose elements are taught in Scripture, but not explicitly referred to by that label. It is Jesus’ view of Scripture. The Sola is grounded in the metaphysically unique status of what is God-breathed (theopneustos).