Immaculate (mis)Conception
I have no idea now why the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception came to my mind at some point yesterday, but it did, and following fast on the heels of that I remembered how much it irritates me that the vast, vast majority of people who would recognize the term, think that it is the technical term used to refer to the virgin birth of Jesus.
(deep breath) IT IS NOT! The actual meaning can't be understood without referring to another, much more fundamental doctrine, one whose acceptance across all the major branches of Christianity is as broad and (I believe) clear, as that of the Immaculate Conception is narrow and obscure: Original Sin. This is the belief that all human beings who are descended from the first couple, Adam and Eve, are stained with sin from the moment they come into existence, i.e., conception.
So here's the basic gist of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Jesus is God. Mary was Jesus's mother. Ergo, Mary is the mother of God. God is "holy", meaning completely separate from all evil, and unable to be in the same place at the same time as anything evil or impure...
I just realized the reason for the "necessity" of the doctrine. If Jesus came to die as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of all the human race--past, present, and future--then the only way a sinless "vessel" could exist to carry him from his *virgin* conception until his birth, would be for God, by divine fiat, to *prevent the stain of sin from falling upon that vessel upon that vessel's human conception*, i.e. to arrange that the conception would be immaculate (from Latin, unspotted). How could he do that? He can do anything. Ok, if he can do it for one person, why not all people? Well, now we get into thornier matters, but I imagine that the reason given would be something like "Because he wanted to save the rest of humanity through a different means." I.e., through the death of the sinless God-man, Jesus.
I have to confess that I haven't done my research on this (i.e., I haven't looked it up on Wikipedia) yet, so I don't know when the doctrine was first adopted, or if my guess as to the reasoning behind it is correct. I have a feeling it arose sometime within the first six hundred years after Jesus' death, and that it was at least partly driven by the usefulness of having a female divinity to set up against the female divinities in many of the indigenous religions that Christianity encountered as it spread throughout Europe. But it seems clear that the most important presupposition is that a sin-stained woman could never carry in her body a baby who is as fully God as he is fully human.
Protestants hate this doctrine, because it has no strong basis in the bible, and the idea that Mary's sinlessness did not make her divine in the same way that the divine Jesus was sinless, is just too subtle. And also pointless, to them, because they don't have the same way of thinking about the interaction of the "earthly" and the "divine" (e.g. "transubstantiation": the bread of the mass is transformed, each time, into Jesus' actual body, so that the priest can literally, not figuratively, offer Jesus up as a sacrifice again to God), and they have no trouble with the idea that a God-man could be born from the body of a sin-stained (i.e. normal) human woman.
I was tempted to launch onto a tangent, regarding what it could possibly mean, that Jesus is "fully God and fully human". But I think I've made my point, which is that the argument stems from different ideas about how God relates with "fallen" humanity.
I wish this ignorance about the Immaculate Conception were not so widespread, and even more, I wish that it didn't irritate me so much. But alas, it does. Maybe a little less, now that I've vented about it some.
Oh yeah, I'm also fully aware of how incredibly unlikely it is that I'm the first person to come up with the cutesy phrase I used for the title of this post. I'm too lazy to confirm its prior existence by looking it up on Google, and I'd like to linger a little bit longer in the delusion that I'm as witty as that.
(deep breath) IT IS NOT! The actual meaning can't be understood without referring to another, much more fundamental doctrine, one whose acceptance across all the major branches of Christianity is as broad and (I believe) clear, as that of the Immaculate Conception is narrow and obscure: Original Sin. This is the belief that all human beings who are descended from the first couple, Adam and Eve, are stained with sin from the moment they come into existence, i.e., conception.
So here's the basic gist of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Jesus is God. Mary was Jesus's mother. Ergo, Mary is the mother of God. God is "holy", meaning completely separate from all evil, and unable to be in the same place at the same time as anything evil or impure...
I just realized the reason for the "necessity" of the doctrine. If Jesus came to die as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of all the human race--past, present, and future--then the only way a sinless "vessel" could exist to carry him from his *virgin* conception until his birth, would be for God, by divine fiat, to *prevent the stain of sin from falling upon that vessel upon that vessel's human conception*, i.e. to arrange that the conception would be immaculate (from Latin, unspotted). How could he do that? He can do anything. Ok, if he can do it for one person, why not all people? Well, now we get into thornier matters, but I imagine that the reason given would be something like "Because he wanted to save the rest of humanity through a different means." I.e., through the death of the sinless God-man, Jesus.
I have to confess that I haven't done my research on this (i.e., I haven't looked it up on Wikipedia) yet, so I don't know when the doctrine was first adopted, or if my guess as to the reasoning behind it is correct. I have a feeling it arose sometime within the first six hundred years after Jesus' death, and that it was at least partly driven by the usefulness of having a female divinity to set up against the female divinities in many of the indigenous religions that Christianity encountered as it spread throughout Europe. But it seems clear that the most important presupposition is that a sin-stained woman could never carry in her body a baby who is as fully God as he is fully human.
Protestants hate this doctrine, because it has no strong basis in the bible, and the idea that Mary's sinlessness did not make her divine in the same way that the divine Jesus was sinless, is just too subtle. And also pointless, to them, because they don't have the same way of thinking about the interaction of the "earthly" and the "divine" (e.g. "transubstantiation": the bread of the mass is transformed, each time, into Jesus' actual body, so that the priest can literally, not figuratively, offer Jesus up as a sacrifice again to God), and they have no trouble with the idea that a God-man could be born from the body of a sin-stained (i.e. normal) human woman.
I was tempted to launch onto a tangent, regarding what it could possibly mean, that Jesus is "fully God and fully human". But I think I've made my point, which is that the argument stems from different ideas about how God relates with "fallen" humanity.
I wish this ignorance about the Immaculate Conception were not so widespread, and even more, I wish that it didn't irritate me so much. But alas, it does. Maybe a little less, now that I've vented about it some.
Oh yeah, I'm also fully aware of how incredibly unlikely it is that I'm the first person to come up with the cutesy phrase I used for the title of this post. I'm too lazy to confirm its prior existence by looking it up on Google, and I'd like to linger a little bit longer in the delusion that I'm as witty as that.
posted by Joel GL at 2:17 PM
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