OUR DIFFERENCES WITH ROMAN CATHOLICISM (PART 6)
The Excellence of the Christian Faith • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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-{Luke 1}
-We have been using our Wednesday evenings to see the excellencies of the biblical, evangelical Christian faith (as represented by us Baptists), contrasting it with other faiths and religions. I have spent several weeks contrasting our Baptist faith with the Roman Catholic Faith, touching on subjects such as sources of authority and beliefs about justification before God.
-Tonight, I want to tackle the difficult subject of their views about Mary, the mother of Jesus. This doctrine of the Church has taken thousands of years to develop, with some teachings not being codified in their belief system until the middle of the 20th century. This is another area of sharp divide between Protestants and Catholics, so I believe it is important to tackle so we have an understanding when we have a discussion with a Roman Catholic. She is obviously important to them. So much so, that when Pope John Paul II survived an assassination attempt, he credited Mary for protecting him and called for greater devotion to Mary.
-What I’ll do is first set a baseline for us about what the Bible says about Mary, and then try to tackle the various beliefs that the Roman Catholics have added to their theological system.
-So, to set a baseline, let’s look at the passage that first introduces us to Mary:
26 Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city in Galilee called Nazareth,
27 to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary.
28 And coming in, he said to her, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”
29 But she was very perplexed at this statement, and was pondering what kind of greeting this was.
30 And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.
31 “And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name Him Jesus.
32 “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David,
33 and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and there will be no end of His kingdom.”
34 But Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
35 The angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy Child shall be called the Son of God.
36 “And behold, your relative Elizabeth has also conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren.
37 “For nothing will be impossible with God.”
38 And Mary said, “Behold, the slave of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.
-Now, from just the standpoint of what we have read, Mary is a young Jewish girl who was strong in faith. And for reasons that are only known to God Himself, He decided to show Mary favor and chose her to be the vessel through whom the human nature of Jesus would be born. Mary, while not fully understanding the logistics of everything, willingly gave her life for God to use as He saw fit. She was a willing servant.
-In the rest of the Bible, we see her visit her relative Elizabeth; we see her give birth to Jesus; we see Mary and Joseph looking for Jesus when He was left behind in Jerusalem; we see her at the wedding at Cana; we see her and her other children try to get to Jesus to bring Him home because they think He went crazy; we see her at the crucifixion; and we see her amongst the disciples at Pentecost. She is only mentioned twice in any of the epistles.
-And when you look at the biblical witness you notice something—not one of the major doctrines that the Roman Catholic Church declares about the person of Mary is found. If you remember, I had mentioned that Roman Catholics believe that their authority comes from tradition as much as anything else. Everything about Mary comes from later tradition. Interestingly enough, most of the major doctrines about Mary are not found in the early Church Fathers either.
-So, what is it that the Roman Catholics teach about Mary? First, we’ll tackle the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Often times people make the mistake of hearing the term Immaculate Conception and thinking that it refers to Jesus—His truly was an immaculate conception. We read it in the Luke passage, the Holy Spirit came upon Mary and conceived the child. But that’s not what is meant by the term for Catholics. For Catholics it refers to the conception of Mary.
-They teach that for Mary to be a fit habitation for Christ, God decided to preserve her from the defilement of Adam’s sin. According to the church, she was created without a sin nature and was ever absolutely free of all stain of sin. In essence, in order to be the vessel for the Messiah, she herself had to be free of sin.
-First, from a logical standpoint, that makes no sense. If God was able to preserve Mary from sin, why couldn’t He do the same for Jesus? Because obviously both of Mary’s parents were sinners—how or why would God or could God do that for Mary with two sinning parents, but couldn’t just do that for Jesus who only had one sinning parent? Wouldn’t then Mary’s parents have needed to be preserved from sin, and then on backwards down the family tree? Here is where we stand—even though Mary was a sinner, Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit, so Jesus did not receive the sin nature of Adam for He was preserved by God.
-But then we also have the Scriptural testimony. In her Magnificat later in Luke 1, Mary says:
47 And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
-Mary admitted that she needed a Savior. Then in Luke 2, it describes Mary bringing her prescribed offering to the temple for her uncleanness. The biblical witness is that everyone is a sinner, and we know:
4 ... For You alone are holy; ...
-The next Catholic doctrine we want to tackle is their belief that Mary remained a perpetual virgin. Yes, we all believe in the virgin birth of Christ—that is one of the top beliefs you must hold to be a Christian. But Roman Catholics believe she remained a virgin all her life. In fact, they teach that Mary experienced no pain in giving birth to the child and claims that even after Jesus’ birth God was able to preserve Mary’s virginal integrity.
-Again, the biblical witness speaks against this. According to:
25 but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus.
-The word UNTIL in that verse is small but very important—it indicates that Mary remained a virgin throughout Jesus birth, but after His birth and her physical recovery, she had normal relations with her husband Joseph. We know this because the Bible then constantly refers to Jesus’ brothers and sisters. For example,
55 “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?
56 “And His sisters, are they not all with us? Where then did this man get all these things?”
12 After this He went down to Capernaum, He and His mother and His brothers and His disciples; and they stayed there a few days.
14 These all with one accord were continually devoting themselves to prayer, along with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and His brothers.
-However, Roman Catholics say that this refers to cousins. But there are several problems with that. First, there is a Greek word for cousin that any of the writers could have used, but they didn’t. They are constantly referred to as brothers. So, the word should be taken in its normal context. And a second reason is that it is actually a fulfillment of prophecy. Psalm 69 is a Messianic psalm, and we see things like:
8 I have become estranged from my brothers And a foreigner to my mother’s sons.
-And we could say this is fulfilled in John 7:3-5. There is no basis to think that brothers and sisters refers to anything else than brothers and sisters. And that being the case, Mary did not remain a perpetual virgin.
-Another doctrine of the Roman Catholics is the Assumption of Mary, something that was not fully added to their doctrine until 1950. They teach that Mary did not die, that her body did not undergo decay at the end of her life. Instead, they say, “The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” In essence, like Enoch, or Elijah, Mary was taken up into heaven without dying.
-While the time and place of Mary’s death and burial are unknown, that doesn’t mean that she was bodily assumed into heaven. In fact, the early Church Fathers assumed her death and burial, and that it just passed by with no unusual notice. As one author described it:
She departed life humbly and modestly as she has lived it, and none remembered the place of her burial, even if a tradition toward the mid-fifth century gave her a sepulcher near Jerusalem in the garden of Gethsemane.
-There are several titles that the Roman Catholic Church give to Mary that I believe are particularly troublesome theologically. One, is that they call her the Mother of God. The argument goes that since Jesus is God and since Mary is His mother, therefore she is the mother of God. However, the Bible never calls her the Mother of God because God has no mother. God is eternal and infinite and has always existed. God the Son, the second member of the Trinity has always existed. As someone once said, just as Christ’s human nature had no father, so His divine nature had no mother.
-The Bible calls Mary the mother of Jesus. Mary was the human vessel through whom the human nature of Jesus was born. However, the divine nature had always existed. She did not give birth to the divine nature, therefore, to call her the Mother of God is misleading and theologically troublesome.
-Something that is even more troublesome, is that the Catholic Church calls her a co-redeemer, meaning that she has some sort of contribution to make to redemption—to salvation. Their documents state:
the Fathers see Mary not merely as passively engaged by God, but as freely cooperating in the work of man’s salvation through faith and obedience. For, as St Irenaeus says, she “being obedient, became the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race.” Hence not a few of the early Fathers gladly assert with him in their preaching: “the knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by Mary’s obedience: what the virgin Eve bound through her disbelief, Mary loosened by her faith.” Comparing Mary with Eve, they call her “Mother of the living,” and frequently claim: “death through Eve, life through Mary.”
-Of course, they take Irenaeus out of context, who was merely making the observation that by obeying God’s will for her to birth the Christ child, she gave birth to the One who would give her and all believers eternal life. But how they come to this point is that they teach that somehow Mary joined in the suffering on the cross and being united with Christ somehow offered Him as a sacrifice to God on the cross. Again, as one of their documents state:
Mary suffered and, as it were, nearly died with her suffering Son; for the salvation of mankind she renounced her mother’s rights and, as far as it depended on her, offered her Son to placate divine justice; so we may well say that she with Christ redeemed mankind.
-And then, as this co-redeemer, the Catholic Church teaches that she is the mediator of God’s grace. Did you hear that? They say that she earned the privilege of being the one through whom God would dispense all grace to the world. They teach that Mary is God’s unique channel of blessing. Christ grants all graces to mankind through her and nothing is imparted to people except through Mary. So, in a sense, to receive grace, you have to go to Mary who then goes to Jesus who then goes to the Father.
-There are obvious problems here. But the Bible makes clear that there is one redeemer, and she isn’t it.
26 ... And all flesh will know that I, Yahweh, am your Savior And your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.”
13 Who rescued us from the authority of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of the Son of His love,
14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
-Jesus alone bore the weight of sin, alone died for sin, and alone is the Redeemer. And He also is the only mediator between God and man—not Mary, not saints, not anybody else.
5 For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,
-Because of all this we rightly say that they worship Mary—which is idolatry. However, the Roman Catholics respond that they merely venerate her. They say that they give God LATRIA worship, the highest form of adoration. They give Mary HYPERDULIA, the highest degree of veneration. And they say they give DULIA to saints and angels.
-However, the Greek words LATRIA and DULIA are often used as synonyms in Scripture. And as one person put it, they are trying to make a difference without making a distinction. If you honor/worship/venerate anybody, attributing to them what alone should be attributed to God, it is the worship of idols. If any sort of honor like this should have been given to Mary, it would have been recorded in Scripture. But nothing of the sort exists.
-Over the centuries there have been many sort of apparitions of Mary—last week I mentioned Fatima, and there’s been many others. But these are nothing but demonic activity because they are trying to steer people away from Jesus and turn people over to idols.
-There was a lot here, but you run into this particular a lot when dealing with Roman Catholics. We need to pray for them that God would turn them from such idolatry to the truth of grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone...
