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To: Campion
And believe me, he didn't dishonor her in her very creation by creating her enslaved to the power of sin.

Just curious (really)...but are you saying that Mary was not the product of human (and thereby fallen) bloodline.

I have always wondered what actually happened at this point. Obviously, God selected the most perfect human to have ever existed to serve as the Mother of Yeshuah, but how did a child of fallen humans come to such a state of sinlessness.

And of course, she had to be human because Yeshuah had to have a human aspect.

As said, just curious. Have wrestled with this for years.

78 posted on 07/25/2010 9:27:35 AM PDT by SonOfDarkSkies
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To: SonOfDarkSkies
are you saying Mary was not the product of human (and thereby fallen) bloodline.

Ah, so few words and such a complex question. :-) Short answer: "Depends on exactly what you mean by that." :-)

Mary was certainly the daughter of her parents and was conceived and born in the usual way. In what way was she different?

Protestants sometimes talk about a "sin nature," and seem to be saying that original sin is sort of like a positive hereditary corruption (a spiritual "birth defect," sort of) that is transmitted by the generative process.

That isn't the Catholic belief. The Catholic belief is that the consequences of the Fall come in two parts. The first, and most important, is the loss of sanctifying grace. Sanctifying grace is the divine life of God in your soul. It's what makes your soul holy and beloved of God. It's what gets you to heaven.

If the Fall hadn't happened, it appears that sanctifying grace would been present in every human child simply by virtue of his humanity. After the Fall, we're born without it.

So that aspect of original sin is not a positive "disease presence," but a lack of something very good that should have been there. It's not really "transmitted" in the generative process through a "fallen bloodline" because it's a lack -- it's a failure to transmit something good that should be transmitted.

The second consequence of the Fall was the deprivation of certain gifts that were present in Adam and Eve after the fall, called "preternatural gifts". These gifts include physical immortality (usually understood to mean the ability to not age and die from natural causes, not the complete inability to die), impassability (the associated ability to avoid suffering from, e.g., disease), and "freedom from concupiscence" ("concupiscence" = our irrational and unnatural attachment to sin).

Having said all of that, here's the punchline: Mary, by virtue of a special gift from God and in view of the foreseen merits of her crucified Son, was granted sanctifying grace from the moment of her conception, and also the preternatural gift of "freedom from concupiscence", but not all of the other preternatural gifts.

She thus had some (but not quite all) of the gifts God gave Eve prior to her sin (and which he took away afterwards).

Catholics call this doctrine the "Immaculate Conception".

81 posted on 07/25/2010 9:46:40 AM PDT by Campion
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