Patrick Chan writes on Triablogue (12 October 2011):
The following quote is (I think) from C.S. Lewis in his book Christian Reunion and Other Essays: "The real reason why I cannot be in communion with you [Roman Catholics] is not my disagreement with this or that Roman doctrine, but that to accept your Church means, not to accept a given body of doctrine, but to accept in advance any doctrine your Church hereafter produces. It is like being asked to agree not only to what a man has said but also to what he is going to say."
Fifth Marian dogma here we come.
ReplyDeleteI blush to say that I didn't know what the term "fifth Marian dogma" meant, but I have hastily remedied my deficiency. On the grounds that the Immaculate Conception is just a conception and the Bodily Assumption is just an assumption, we can happily treat as pure fiction the notions of Mary as Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix of All Graces, and Advocate.
ReplyDeleteYes, there are four infallibly decreed Marian dogmas (i.e., something that is to be receive dei fidei, “by faith,” for salvation), and the fifth is now being petitioned by millions of Romanists to be made an official Roman dogma. Unfortunately, many Romanists already believe that no grace is dispensed apart from Mary, thanks to Ligouri’s papally approved Glories of Mary. If you didn’t know, the Immaculate Conception doesn’t refer to Christ as being conceived without sin, but that Mary herself (by some preemptive application of Christ's merit) was actually conceived immaculately (i.e., without the stain of original sin). Therefore, someone who has lived a sinless life can’t have a normal death but must be bodily assumed (not ascended) into heaven, though “traditionally” it is held that she was assumed after her death. The dogma that she is the “mother of God” is actually from the Greek word theotokos (Eng. “God bearer”), as found in the Chalcedonian definition of who CHRIST is, and is a statement about who Jesus was in the womb not who Mary was as “the mother of God.” Biblically Mary is the mother of “our Lord,” who is God, but she was mother to his HUMANITY not his DIETY, for God cannot have a mother in the sense Rome uses it. Furthermore, her “perpetual virginity” has it that she suffered no labor pains in the delivery of Christ, and that Jesus did not pass through her birth canal in any natural sense, i.e., keeping her a virgin(?), but rather he was miraculously beamed(?) out of the womb (per the heresies of the Gnostic gospels).
ReplyDeleteI meant "per the heresies of the Gnostic writings."
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