Posted on 08/18/2019 7:05:12 PM PDT by Al Hitan
Today the Church remembers with thanksgiving the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. Historically, this day was understood to mark her dormition, or "falling asleep," which was most anciently regarded as her natural death and burial. From early on, however, the Church considered that she who conceived and gave birth to the very God of very God, by His Word and Holy Spirit, was also resurrected and ascended into heaven, in both body and soul, soon after her death. There is no word of Holy Scripture to teach these traditions as doctrine, but we should not be too quick to dismiss them as merely pious devotion. Such piety, at its heart, is a confession of that which is the Church's faith in Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary's Son, our Savior and our God.
St. Mary is uniquely honored among all the saints of God in Christ, not only by the Church, but first of all by the Lord God Himself. He has had mercy upon her, blessed her with His grace and favor, and chosen her above all other women to bear the almighty and eternal Son of God. She is rightly called, and truly is, the Mother of God; for her own dear Son, the Fruit of her womb, is indeed the one true God, begotten of the Father from all eternity. It is from her flesh and blood that the Lord has taken for Himself a true and natural body, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, so that henceforth He is true Man, the perfect second Adam, our elder Brother, our kinsman Redeemer, the promised Seed of the Woman, by whom we are reconciled to God. As the ancient fathers of the Church confessed, God thus became like us, in order that we become like Him, by grace. It is that great salvation that we celebrate in commemorating any of the saints, and in particular the Blessed Virgin Mother of God, St. Mary.
She is an icon of the Church, a living Sacrament of Christ, and a beautiful example of faith, of all the true children of father Abraham. Her body was comprehended by the Word and Spirit of God to become the tangible means by which the Son of God became flesh and was given to us, and not only for us, but for the life of the world. It is His body, conceived and born of St. Mary, that our sins and sorrows did carry. It is a human body, like our own in every way, save without sin, because He was born of this woman (born under the Law to redeem us). Thus do we recognize in her an archetype of the Blessed Sacrament of our Lord's body and blood.
What is more, in conceiving and giving birth to the Son of God, she is a type of the Church, the holy mother who surely gives birth to the sons of God in Christ. We too have been conceived and given new birth by the same Word and Spirit of the same Holy Triune God that overshadowed the Blessed Virgin Mary and knit within her womb the incarnation of the only-begotten Son. Thus are we, like Him, "born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God" (St. John 1:13).
Along with her vocation as the woman by whom the Son of God was given to and for the world, St. Mary also stands with us as a living member of the Church, the Body of Christ. When the Word of the Gospel was announced to her, she received that Word in faith, obtained in her by the mercies of God, and meekly bowed her head in humble trust: "Let it be to me according to Thy Word." Blessed is she who has heard the Word of God and kept it, who treasured it in her heart, who believed that there would surely be a fulfillment of all that God had spoken to her. In all of this, St. Mary is one of us, a faithful disciple of her own dear Son, and among that great cloud of witnesses with which we are surrounded, of that blest communion, fellowship divine.
When the Church in pious tradition has considered St. Mary to be resurrected and ascended to heaven, already in both body and soul, it is a confession of faith in that which Christ Jesus our Lord has accomplished for us and for all by His victorious Cross, Resurrection and Ascension. We may indeed contemplate that she by whom the Lord became like us, should exemplify the way in which we all become like Him, recreated in the glorious Image of the Man from heaven. Of course, we do not rest faith upon the tradition of St. Mary's dormition and assumption into heaven; faith clings to Jesus Christ alone and finds true peace and Sabbath rest forever in Him. But what we envision concering St. Mary, we understand to be the Church's hope precisely in Christ our Lord, our Savior and our God. For we know that He is the Resurrection and the Life, and that she who believes in Him will live even if she dies; yes, and everyone who lives and believes in Him will never die.
We believe, teach and confess with the absolute certainty of faith that St. Mary is the Mother of God; that the almighty and eternal Son of the living God was born of this woman, born under the Law, to redeem us who were under the Law. In celebrating that marvelous incarnation of God the Son, in which He died and rose again for us men and our salvation, we may also celebrate proleptically the resurrection of the body that all His saints share with Him by grace through faith in the Gospel. And in that glorious light, we sing: "O higher than the cherubim, more glorious than the seraphim, lead their praises: 'Alleluia!' Thou bearer of the eternal Word, most gracious magnify the Lord: 'Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!"
Look under traditions of men seeking to empower an Org (rhymes withy Borg).
You are correct cool guy. I am an ex catholic. I have never regretted leaving the Catholic Church for a moment. Now, I have assurance of salvation. I NEVER had any assurance of salvation, when I was a catholic. I won’t be swimming the Tiber, for at least, oh, I don’t know, the next trillion eons or so. 😁🤣😀👍
I thought the Apostles taught everybody the same thing from Day One??!!??
Yep. When I was a catholic, it was all about salvation by works, with NO assurance of anything, whatsoever. Not good odds. In the little cartoon, it mentions grace. Catholics engage in catholic speak. The word “grace,” means something entirely different to you, than it does to them. My opinion is, we are not even speaking the same language. We are playing word games. This is, of course, based on my own experience as a catholic. It might not be everyone’s experience. 😁🤣
Meant to ping you folks to the post.
Isn’t this somewhat similar to the NAR and the Toronto blessing?
Thanks for keeping me posted. I did read your last comment #469 that you pinged me on. Well said!
Placemarker
I'm not familiar with those...
Among other things, I think NAR is dominion theology, but I think there is more to it.
I left before all the pedo/homosexual priest stuff came out and I didn’t regret it thenand more so now.
And obviously it's been there all this time but has been suppressed by the Church and news media...With the advent of the internet, all kinds of seedy information surfaces...
I left before it all came out too. I went to catholic grade school and catholic high school. I did not know anyone who said they were abused. In high school, we did wonder if the school principal (a priest) was doing the nuns. The nunnery was only two blocks from school. There were 3 other priests there too. One of them left the priesthood and married the school secretary.
I was sweet on one of the nuns. I tried to talk her into leaving the nunnery, but she wouldn’t. 😁😆😂 Oh well, I tried. 🤣
The God has no progenitor, but He has a surrogate Mother in the sense of mothering Jesus.
. . . God placed Jesus in Mary's womb, without having sex with her and not using an ovum from her.
I totally agree with you, You have chosen good words to impart to others that which has been obvious to me, separately, not having heard it of anyone else previously.
Here's the general speculative thoughts that have occurred to me:
Knowing that Jehovah Elohim made human flesh of the atoms present in the Earth's materials (dust of the ground) has finally been discovered by the human beings He created, through. employing the intellect by employing the scientific method of deduction together with intuitive induction from existing evidence, to find that the various kinds of RNA and DNA molecules bear bear self-reproductive biological life, breathed into it by the Creator.
Realizing from God's Word that Jesus' body and blood must have been holy, sinless, and incorruptible, the material cannot any of it have come from a descendant of Adam, who was made of the first sinless batch (Genesis 1:26-27,31; 2:7), and the only one who had all the components from which Elohim made the first soul by breathing life into the DNA to make a him-with-a-Y-chromosome.
What I postulate that Elohim either kept some of the undying--by itself incorruptible--original DNA of which Adam was composed; and of it, a living part yet lacking the Y-chromoseme which constituted the human person called Eve.
Sadly, Eve sinned, and in doing so drew her complement Adam with her. And we know the rest of the story down to Eve, being made of the same sin-transmitting substance made corruptible through Adam's choice to err, forever tainting His get.
With this in mind, it is clear that there must have been a way for the God-man Messiah Emmanuel prophesied (Isaiah 7:15,9:6; Matthew 1:23) to be made of sinless DNA-cellular substance designed when enlivened to form the human male figure fit for occupation by the Spirit of God-The-Son and integrated as a carnal conjoined tripartite individual.
While this has been an absolute necessity, recognized by the early followers of Jesus, still The Father had not revealed how this was to be accomplished.
What one may assume is that the First Adam, the Federal Head of all living human critters, was especially made by the Creator in the whole, ready to begin life as the mature complex form of differentiated cellular DNA and mitochondria, unaided by the process of the oogenesis of the haploid predecessor ovum made complete by union with a spermatozoam resulting in the first diploid human cell. That is, it is proposed that Elohim utilized no ovum or sperm in the life-initiating self-propagating step of integrating spirit and flesh as one soul.
That there be no logic-begging process of the materialization of the Second Adam, it is conjectured that union of Jehovah Elohim's spirit with the same exactly identical fresh uncorrupted unsinning carnal matter as for the First, resulted in incarnation of the Messiah--without any incorporation whatsoever of the host female--and implanted as an embryo with systems-separating placenta attachment in the believing, willing surrogate host equipped with the uterus to accept the wholly-separate living organism for the maturation to a normal infant until its natural ejection from the womb through the birth canal exiting the naturally enlarged cervix and vulva, eventually separating the two intimately but nutrient/waste-exchanging life-giving blood systems from each other.
In this, when supervised by the overseeing Holy Ghost, it is not unreasonable to assume that the virgin female's hymen be preserved throughout the whole process of implementation (equally defined as conception by placement of and attachment to the host's uterus wall) of the embryo and its normal foetal development, ruptured only as the birth took place. This would have been obvious to Joseph, the only human agency assisting in the birth, for his assurance of his espoused wife's pre-birth virginity.
With today's store of human-experience-based store of reasoned and practical medical knowledge, such a scenario may be confidently proposed. It is a process quite different from the imaginative one endorsed by theologians of old, whose febrile inventive reasonings supposed that all of Jesus' flesh came from His surrogate mother's body, a not knowing then that for a man-child to exist in her womb, a requirement of at least one element that none of her cells could provide: the Y-chromosome presence in each of the infant's multiplying cells.
The same theologians whose logic failed in such efforts as "proving" how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, wrongly gave them a selfish arrogant certainty that Mary's fleshly composition must then have been essentially and thoroughly sinless, that the proposition of the Messiah's carnal essence proceeding from her would therefore also then be sinless.
But if through the artifice dogma of her immaculate conception in her mother's womb (name of mother?) was so, would that not then commensurately imply that, having a sinless bodily constitution, thus incorruptible, and its function not interrupted by crass human stoppage of the flow of life-giving blood throughout it, could she therefore logically die? Answer: No.
And of course, this brings on the logically necessary but fallacious consequence that never dying, somehow she must have been removed from the earthly sphere by a miraculous supernatural transfer to another sphere, namely God's Third Heaven, eh? Or else she would still be here and circulating around amongst other humans cursed with aging and physical death.
The Scotsman Walter Scott, who gave us the oft quoted line, "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!" was again proven right in his observation when it is applied to the science-blind theologians of yore who came up with the schema of interwoven false doctrines touching on "Immaculate Conception" and "Mother of God" and "Assumption of Mary" and "Her Ever-virginity" and "Queen of Heaven" and "Dormition" or other such indefensible, illogical, interlocked, and non-sensical unbiblical propositions when confronted by unarguable physical facts now known, facts outside the circle of provable knowledge in the day, circa 500 AD, when the Mariolatry themes began to take root.
Personally, I feel more comfortable with the concept that the All-Mighty Omniscient Trinity Jehovah Elohim implanted Jesus' birth host mother Mary with His Completed Incarnated Being apart from any borrowing from the flesh of Adam/Eve's descendant Mary of Nazareth, however graciously favored; than I do of the human-constructed one-generation pushed-back immaculate sinless conception of the body and soul of Mary, imagined by the proud but totally naive Cathologicians.
This is not at all offered as a spiteful counter-argument, but rather one whose foundations are based upon the now-known and humanly-practiced medical arts, even at the gene-editing level, of pragmatic proven procedures.
As to how God did the construction of basic DNA capable of being enlivened and passing the gift on, my thoughts are still conjecture, not unimpeachable dogma proclaimed ex cathedra by some humanly-appointed, fallible religious leader or his cabinet of devious magisteric claims.
Can anyone prove me Scripturally or medically wrong in this matter?
Is this not a field of questions for which we will not have TRUTH answers this side of the veil?
The pompous assertions of a particular religion not withstanding, HOW embryo aged Jesus was conceived and then conceived by Mary's womb is not answerable by other than the miraculous.
Since the placental barrier separates the direct connection to the Mother's blood, there is no need for Mary to have been sinless (the life is in the blood). Therefore fabricating an entire blasphemous mythos around a false assertion is hallmark of Catholicism.
Watch out; SLC - they're coming after you!!
Sounds like these folks and Mormonism are gonna have to share the same demon.
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