Posted on 10/08/2007 6:08:42 AM PDT by NYer
Now we are told that Mary had to be sinless in order to have Christ united to her by a umbilical cord. Why would it be necessary for Mary to be sinless (if the statement made by Hilary and repeated by the Pope is true) when the rest of mankind can be united to Christ while still sinful?
What an excellent hole you’ve discovered in the theory. 8~)
Based on how you have interpreted one word a whole dogma has been built. This dogma not only claims Mary was born without sin, but then expands to include her assumption into heaven (before or after she dies, I'm not sure which it is). Now because of this interpretation we are told she has the power to magnify prayers directed to her and with the Sabatine Privilege she can determine who gets out of purgatory quicker. All of this derives from one word.
Why is this so difficult for you to understand?
Scripture is very repetitive when GOD wants us to understand something. The wording may change, but the point is repeated numerous times. The dogma's surrounding Mary are based on what, one word.
Rule #1 of posting quotation comments to a thread, is to post the link. Here is the entire text of the Holy Father's dissertation on St. Hilary. There is no mention of the comments you attribute to his discourse.
"God Only Knows How to Be Love"
VATICAN CITY, OCT. 10, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the address Benedict XVI delivered today at the general audience in St. Peter's Square. The reflection focused on St. Hilary of Poitiers.
* * *
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Today I would like to speak about a great Father of the Western Church, St. Hilary of Poitiers, one of the great bishops of the 4th century. Confronted with the Arians, who considered the Son of God a creature, albeit an excellent one, Hilary dedicated his life to the defense of faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ, Son of God, and God as the Father, who generated him from all eternity.
We do not have definitive data about most of Hilary's life. Ancient sources say that he was born in Poitiers, probably around the year 310. From a well-to-do family, he received a good literary education, which is clearly evident in his writings. It does not seem that he was raised in a Christian environment. He himself tells us about a journey of searching for the truth, which little by little led him to the recognition of God the creator and of the incarnate God, who died to give us eternal life. He was baptized around 345, and elected bishop of Poitiers around 353-354.
In the years that followed, Hilary wrote his first work, the "Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew." It is the oldest surviving commentary in Latin that we have on this Gospel. In 356, Hilary, as bishop, attended the Synod of Beziers in southern France, which he called the "Synod of the False Apostles," given that the assembly was dominated by bishops who were followers of Arianism, and thus negated the divinity of Jesus Christ. These "false apostles" asked Emperor Constantine to condemn to exile the bishop of Poitiers. So Hilary was forced to leave Gaul during the summer of 356.
Exiled to Phrygia, in present-day Turkey, Hilary found himself in contact with a religious environment totally dominated by Arianism. There, too, his pastoral solicitude led him to work tirelessly for the re-establishment of the Church’s unity, based on the correct faith, as formulated by the Council of Nicea. To this end, he began writing his most important and most famous dogmatic work: "De Trinitatae" (On the Trinity).
In it, Hilary talks about his own personal journey toward knowing God, and he is intent on showing that Scriptures clearly attest to the Son's divinity and his equality with the Father, not only in the New Testament, but also in many pages of the Old Testament, in which the mystery of Christ is already presented. Faced with the Arians, he insists on the truth of the names of the Father and the Son and develops his entire Trinitarian theology departing from the formula of baptism given to us by the Lord himself: "In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit."
The Father and the Son are of the same nature. And if some passages of the New Testament could lead one to think that the Son is inferior to the Father, Hilary offers precise rules to avoid misleading interpretations: Some passages in Scripture speak about Jesus as God, others emphasize his humanity. Some refer to him in his pre-existence with the Father; others take into consideration his self lowering ("kenosis"), his lowering himself unto death; and lastly, others contemplate him in the glory of the resurrection.
During the years of his exile, Hilary also wrote the "Book of the Synod," in which, for his brother bishops of Gaul, he reproduces and comments on the confessions of faith and other documents of the synods which met in the East around the middle of the 4th century. Always firm in his opposition to radical Arians, St. Hilary showed a conciliatory spirit with those who accepted that the Son was similar to the Father in essence, naturally trying to lead them toward the fullness of faith, which says that there is not only a similarity, but a true equality of the Father and the Son in their divinity.
This also seems characteristic: His conciliatory spirit tries to understand those who still have not yet arrived to the fullness of the truth and helps them, with great theological intelligence, to reach the fullness of faith in the true divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ.
In 360 or 361, Hilary was finally able to return from exile to his homeland and immediately resumed the pastoral work in his Church, but the influence of his teaching extended, in fact, well beyond its borders. A synod celebrated in Paris in 360 or 361 took up again the language used by the Council of Nicea. Some ancient authors think that this anti-Arian development of the bishops of Gaul was due, in large part, to the strength and meekness of the bishop of Poitiers.
This was precisely his gift: uniting strength of faith and meekness in interpersonal relationships. During the last years of his life, he wrote "Treatises on the Psalms," a commentary on 58 psalms, interpreted according to the principle highlighted in the introduction to the work: "There is no doubt that all the things said in the Psalms must be understood according to the Gospel proclamation, so that, independently of the voice with which the prophetic spirit has spoken, everything refers to the knowledge of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, incarnation, passion and kingdom, and the glory and power of our resurrection” ("Instructio Psalmorum," 5).
In all of the Psalms, he sees this transparency of Christ's mystery and of his body, which is the Church. On various occasions, Hilary met with St. Martin: The future bishop of Tours founded a monastery near Poitiers, which still exists today. Hilary died in 367. His feast day is celebrated on Jan. 13. In 1851, Blessed Pius IX proclaimed him a doctor of the Church.
To summarize the essential aspects of his doctrine, I would like to say that the starting point for Hilary's theological reflection is the baptismal faith. In "De Trinitate," he writes: Jesus "commanded to baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit (cf. Matthew 28:19), that is to say, confessing the Author, the Only Begotten One and the Gift. One alone is the author of all things, because there is only one God the Father, from whom all things proceed. And one alone is our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things were made (1 Corinthians 8:6), and one alone is the Spirit (Ephesians 4:4), gift in everything. … Nothing can be found lacking in a plenitude that is so grand, in which converges in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Spirit, the immensity of the Eternal, the revelation in the Image, the joy in the Gift" ("De Trinitatae" 2:1).
God the Father, being all love, is able to communicate the fullness of his divinity to the Son. I find this phrase of St. Hilary to be particularly beautiful: "God only knows how to be love, only knows how to be Father. And he who loves is not envious, and whoever is Father, is so totally. This name does not allow for compromise, as if to say that God is father only in certain aspects and not in others” (ibid. 9:61).
For this reason, the Son is fully God without lacking anything or having any lessening: "He who comes from the perfect is perfect, because he who has everything, has given him everything" (ibid. 2:8). Only in Christ, Son of God and Son of Man, does humanity find salvation. Taking on human nature, he united every man to himself, "he became our flesh" ("Tractatus in Psalmos" 54:9); "he took on the nature of all flesh, thus becoming the true vine, the root of all branches" (ibid. 51:16).
Precisely because of this motive, the path to Christ is open to all -- because he drew everyone into his humanity -- even though personal conversion is always required: "Through the relationship with his flesh, access to Christ is open to everyone, provided that they leave aside the old man (cf. Ephesians 4:22) and nail him to his cross (cf. Colossians 2:14); provided they abandon their former works and are converted, in order to be buried with him in baptism, in view of life (cf. Colossians 1:12; Romans 6:4)" (ibid. 91:9).
Faithfulness to God is a gift of his grace. Therefore St. Hilary asks, at the end of his treatise on the Trinity, to be able to remain faithful to the faith of baptism. One of the characteristics of this book is this: Reflection is transformed into prayer and prayer leads to reflection. The entire book is a dialogue with God.
I would like to end today's catechesis with one of these prayers, that also becomes our prayer: "Grant, O Lord," Hilary prays in a moment of inspiration, "that I may remain faithful to that which I professed in the symbol of my regeneration, when I was baptized in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. That I may adore you, our Father, and together with you, your Son; that I may be worthy of your Holy Spirit, who proceeds from you through your only Son. … Amen” ("De Trinitatae" 12:57).
[Translation by ZENIT]
Now we are told that Mary had to be sinless in order to have Christ united to her by a umbilical cord.
I will begin with the assumption that you have read the other postings to this thread. If not, PLEASE revisit them for the sake of not having to repeat what has already been written.
Secondly - and most importantly - should you insist on rejecting the words of Scripture "Hail, full of grace - then at least run this through your common sense. If you truly believe that God - who is perfect in every sense - created the universe and all that is within it, then sheer common sense would dictate that He could and would choose to arrive in this world through a sinless vehicle. Anything short of that is illogical. If He could creat the world then He can also create a sinless woman, pardoned for purposes of giving birth to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. THAT is what Scripture tells us.
I repeat my earlier question - why is this so difficult to accept? You have already accepted that Mary was a virgin.
Words, as you well know, have meaning. Anyone who has studied an ancient or foreign language will tell you that language is one of the worst forms of communication. The Norwegian language is comprised of the least number of letters in the alphabet. To compensate, the same word with a slightly different accent mark, takes on an entirely different pronunciation and meaning. Native born Norwegians 'get it'; outsiders who study the language are challenged to recall all of the rules. In Italian, for example, the word for table is masculine - 'il tavolo'. But when the table is covered with food, the word now takes on the feminine - 'la tavola'. Same word - different meaning.
To understand Scripture, one must go back to the original languages. Oftentimes, there are no 'modern day English' equivalents for certain terms. The translator must resort to an existing English word to fill in the gap. A good example of this is how certain English translations of the Bible ascribe 'brothers and sisters' to Jesus when the original word did not have that meaning. But contemporary readers who pick up the Bible and read it, see the words 'brothers and sisters' and take the term literally which is not the case.
This dogma not only claims Mary was born without sin, but then expands to include her assumption into heaven
While I have not addressed the Assumption of Mary in any of my postings to this thread, the argument follows the same lines as that of her sinlessness. For that I will refer you to my previous post.
Why?? Is He incapable of arriving in a sinful vehicle?? He came to a sinful world, and grew up in a house of sinners, and hung around with sinners, and ate with sinners, and yet none of that bothered Him. He rode a donkey into Jerusalem. Do you really think that that would have bothered Him???
If He could creat the world then He can also create a sinless woman, pardoned for purposes of giving birth to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. THAT is what Scripture tells us.
THAT must be that overworked and underpaid "Hail Mary, full of grace" scripture, right??? You guys have ridden that poor scripture to death. You drag that one out for everything from the immaculate conception to the perpetual virginity to the co-redemptricks and God knows what else. You need to give that poor verse a rest.
Maybe you could try another grace scripture for awhile like Romans 5:20: "But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound".
Oh wait, that won't work for you guys, because that means that in order for Mary to been full of grace, she first had to be full of sin. Oh -- scratch that one -- and go back and drag out that old worn out workhorse again. It really is getting old though and on the verge of collapsing under the weight of all that heretical merchandise you saddle it with.
Here's the link for the quotation I made earlier, posted on FR from Catholic News. Because of Jesus Divinity... Was the reporting in error?
Here's what common sense tells me: my body, your body, and Mary's body in the sense of flesh & blood is neutral to sinfulness -- the sinfulness of humans is determined by the will. Mary's body was no more capable of sin than a Volvo is capable of an accident unless there is a driver. The womb was neutral.
LOL! :)
What is this?
Fourth paragraph from the bottom..."Taking on human nature, he united every man to himself"
Did you read it?
Seriously, can you imagine a pastor of a Protestant church, finding, say a black Mayan statue of a child in a lake, would say “Oh look I’ve found the Baby Jesus,let’s build it a shrine!”
Not only would we think him daft, we’d all leave his church and go somewhere else, and when he excommunicated us, we’d laugh or get him help.
= = =
INDEED.
But by a special intervention of God, undertaken at the instant she was conceived, she was preserved from the stain of original sin and its consequences. She was therefore redeemed by the grace of Christ, but in a special way—by anticipation.
May God give you eyes to see the fiction of this statement and the heresy within it which has NO Scriptural support, although there are plenty of admonitions against such errors.
==
INDEED . . .
What a convoluted bunch of trumped up rubber logic . . . crazy enough to make even a JW blush.
I completely agree. However, (you knew there would be one) to build a whole dogma that then creates other dogmas around one word of one verse is inconsistent with the examples we are given in Scripture. If I look at the word Faith in the concordance in my Bible it is listed over 100 times. I am not counting faithful, faithfulness etc. IOW, throughout Scripture all important things we are to know are given to us several times.
While I have not addressed the Assumption of Mary in any of my postings to this thread, the argument follows the same lines as that of her sinlessness.
The sinlessness which is based on how your church has interpreted one word in Scripture. The Assumption which is never mentioned in Scripture follows from that one word interpretation. However, John who was entrusted with the responsibility of caring for Mary never mentions her sinlessness or the Assumption. This is the same John who was the last Apostle to die.
BTW, I appreciate you sticking with trying to support these ideas.
Actually, quite a wholesale utter mangling,
embellishment all out of recognizable shape;
fantasized power mongering aggrandized definition all galactically out of whack of anything similar to the original;
TRUMPED UP vain imaginings thoroughly at odds with the whole counsel of Scripture;
Wholesale pagan magical thinking infected & injected into the word;
Brazen ASSUMPTIONS, EXTRAPOLATIONS SO EXTREME AS TO HARDLY FIT THE WORD "EXTRAPOLATION" . . .
. . .
And then they have the . . . . unmitigated galactically olympic class audacity to expect us to have a shred of respect for such a farce????
And then they wonder why so many of us shake our heads in utter aghast disbelief that ANYONE of our era and a sane mind could fall for such brazenly obvious hogwash???!!!
I mean, some time ago, here on FR, I was still quite of a mind to give such dear RC folks more or less a gracious pass on such matters as due to minor misinterpretations and a minor excessive hobby of excessive adoration etc. toward/re Mary.
HOWEVER, THEIR BEHAVIORS AND ATTITUDES toward Mary--coupled with THEIR OWN OFFERED DOCUMENTS--and increasingly the TRUER HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS have all served to show me what an absolutely outrageous and demonic set of doctrines of demons as well as political vain power mongering trumped up garbage such dogmas etc. are. They have only themselves to thank for my enlightenment of the truer seriousness of such errors.
I'd always had a hunch lurking in my spirit that the whole mess was darker than I wanted to admit. But I preferred to give them the benefit of the doubt. As THEY HAVE EXPOSED the seriousness and extreme outrageousness of the dogma from hell--I've had to face the fact that it is no small matter and is indeed horribly destructive to the faithful and to their relationships with Christ as well as with The Father and The Spirit.
Of course, I have no expectation that short of a miracle of God, those RC folks over the cliff in such regards will ever see the truth of the matter. Clearly logic cannot scratch their surface. Neither can historically accurate FACTS. And they flushed the Bible well down their priority list a long time ago. So what's left save their own convoluted magicsterical hysterics? Not much. Very sad.
. . .
INDEED.
God has repeatedly demonstrated in Scripture that the more SUPER IMPORTANT POINTS He had a priority for . . . were repeatedly made in the OLD TESTAMENT AND REPEATEDLY MADE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. HE LEFT NO DOUBT.
Yet here, is a proffered set of illogical, UnBiblical etc. stuff contrary even to the first and most basic of the Ten Commandments and we are supposed to follow meekly in line based on ONE very mangled word and very jury rigged interpretation????
What utter unmitigated audacity and nonsense to the max. I'm still incredulous as the gravity and scope etc. of the farce. The cargo cult of the Pacific Islands is the only thing I can think of off the top of my head which comes remotely close to such a convoluted, illogical and outrageous affront to basic Scripture and basic Godly spiritual truth.
USATTM--UTTERLY SHOCKINGLY AMAZING TO THE MAX.
Not only that, but they're now appealing to "scripture only" as it suits them, lol
That's because the founder of the Vatican School of Theology was Father Humpty Dumpty whose namesake is famous for this exchange with Alice in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass:
"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' "Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"
"But `glory' doesn't mean `a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
The magisterium at the Vatican Humpty Dumpty School of Theology are able to make words like "grace" mean so many different things. You see, if their words had fixed meanings, then their sentences would have fixed meanings, and their paragraphs, etc. But the Vatican's Humpty Dumpty magisterium can't allow that because then they would no longer be able to sit on the wall and be masters of their words and all who hear them. They would instead be bound by their words. It is a matter of who is to be master -- their words or them -- that's all.
That's why when discussing religion with them, one often feels like Alice in Wonderland talking to Humpty Dumpty.
That one word - kecharitomene carries tremendous weight. It appears only 2x in Scripture. Freeper stfassisi has already provided an indepth analysis of that word at link #284. The authors of Scripture were very selective in their choice of words. As a christian believer in the Bible, I'm sure you can respect that fact.
The Assumption which is never mentioned in Scripture follows from that one word interpretation. However, John who was entrusted with the responsibility of caring for Mary never mentions her sinlessness or the Assumption. This is the same John who was the last Apostle to die.
Why should he? He wasn't writing for future generations. Our Lord never instructed His disciples to write down anything He said. His instructions were to preach the gospel. If He wanted an accurate and detailed account of His life preserved in writing, don't you think He would have assigned that task to one of His disciples? Better yet, don't you think He would have written it Himself?
Mary is the Mother of God. Revelation 12:1-8 shows us that Mark is truly the mother of all christians (even those who refuse to acknowledge her as their mother). This passage also shows us a vision of Mary, queen of heaven, and hints at her Assumption.
Her womb housed the One who created the Universe. Her breasts nourished Him. Do you suppose our Lord would allow her to rot in the ground after her death? This gift of suffering no corruption in the grave and of being "caught up" into heaven while still alive is prefectly in accordance with Scripture. Similar assumptions happened to Enoch (Gen. 5:24, Heb. 11:5) and Elijah (2Kings 2:1, 11-12) and are promised to some christians in the future (1 Thessalonians 4:13-17).
The fact remains that the Church Fathers wrote enough, and Scripture said enough, to warrant the Church to investigate and judge whether the doctrine of the Assumption was valid. The issue is not the amount of evidence but the Church's right to warrant a judgment on the available evidence, just as a judge in a court of law can call for a hearing and from this decide whether there is sufficient evidence for a trial and verdict. The issue is the authority of the Church, not the Assumption of Mary, per se.
You have no evidence from either Church Fathers or Scripture that the Assumption of Mary is not true. If, as you claim, Scripture is silent on the issue, well, Scripture is silent on a lot of issues, but that does not make the particular issue untrue or non-existent.
Rome does discern which teachings from the early church to believe. That is how God protects the Church. Otherwise, there would be total chaos, not unlike what we see in the tens-of-thousands of Protestant denominations today, all claiming something different from Scripture. Yes, Rome, with the help of the Holy Spirit, decided many things, such as the consubstantial Trinity, Christ as homoousios, the canon of Scripture, and many other doctrines.
The Catholic Church clearly teaches that she is the servant of Scripture (Dei Verbum, Vatican II). But where Scripture is either silent or unclear, the Church is specially guided by the Holy Spirit to determine what the faithful are to believe. The Church had such guidance when she dogmatically declared that Christ was homoousios, not homoiosios, since Scripture is silent on the nature of Christ. The Church did this when she declared, by the Holy Spirit's guidance, that the NT contains 27 books, something about which Scripture is silent. The Church continues to do this today. Why? Because Jesus told her: "I will ask the Father and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you FOREVER." Notice that the guidance of the Holy Spirit does not stop with the apostles. God continues to guide the Church today. But logically, the Holy Spirit can't be giving different answers to different people. He can only be giving one truth and it must be a continual truth. That is what you have in the Catholic Church, and which has been the case for 2000 years, since no dogma she has declared has ever changed.
Everything you claim as inerrant truth on faith and morals must come from the Bible. Where does the Bible teach that doctrine is only to come from the Bible?
The reason why the verb in Ephesians 1:6 does not imply sinless perfection, whereas the form of the same verb in Luke 1:28 does so imply, is this: The two verb forms use different stems. Every Greek verb has up to nine distinct stems, each expressing a different modality of the verb’s lexical meanings ... Ephesians 1:6 has the first aorist active indicative form, echaritosen, “he graced, bestowed grace.” This form, based on an aorist stem, expresses momentary action ... action simply brought to pass. It cannot express or imply any fullness of bestowing because “the aorist tense . . . does not show . . . completion with permanent result.” Luke 1:28 has the perfect passive participle, kecharitomene. The perfect stem of a Greek verb denotes the “continuance of a completed action”... “completed action with permanent result is denoted by the perfect stem.” On morphological grounds, therefore, it is correct to paraphrase kecharitomene as “completely, perfectly, enduringly endowed with grace.”
So even that explanation proves "kecharitomene" with all its changes still maintains the fundamental meaning of the root word "charis" -- "grace". No mood change, tense, or stem changed "charis [grace]" to mean "sinless perfection", did it??? And none of your Catholic Bibles translate it that way either. They all use "full of grace" not "sinless perfection". Why? -- because they all know that the fundamental meaning of the word remains not matter what mood or tense is used.
Grace in scripture means "unmerited favor" and it is granted to those who are sinful and unworthy of it, as Romans 5:20 records: "For where sin abounded, grace did much more abound". Did grace abound there upon Mary? It sure did. Well then sin had to have been there with her first.
As have other FReepers.
You ignore the other point, that Scripture tells us something several times in several different ways if it is very important for us to understand. Your church is building dogmas around one word.
In the second instance this word is used it is in reference to the church of Ephesus. Does this mean that the entire church of Ephesus was sinless, assumed into heaven, can determine who gets out of purgatory quickly and can magnify prayers to Jesus? I think we can both agree, of course not. Thus, why would Mary based on one word have all these powers?
Our Lord never instructed His disciples to write down anything He said. His instructions were to preach the gospel.
Then why did they write anything down?
That's why when discussing religion with them, one often feels like Alice in Wonderland talking to Humpty Dumpty.
Exceedingly well put. Thanks.
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