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An Evangelical Protestant's Reflections on Roman Catholic Mariology

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An Evangelical Protestant's Reflections on Roman Catholic Mariology Perichoresis Volume 18.5 (2020): 21–38 DOI: 10.2478/perc-2020-0026 AN EVANGELICAL PROTESTANT’S REFLECTIONS ON ROMAN CATHOLIC MARIOLOGY BENJAMIN H. ARBOUR* Institute of Philosophical and Theological Research ABSTRACT. I count myself privileged to respond to Kenneth Collins and Jerry Walls recent book on Roman Catholicism. I live in Fort Worth, TX, and I am a member of Wedgwood Bap- tist Church, which is one of more than 40,000 churches that together comprise the Southern Baptist Convention. I mention this so readers will know that my comments come from a con- servative Evangelical Protestant perspective, and my thinking stems from a tradition that is decidedly not Roman Catholic. Having said this, I’m much more sympathetic to Roman Ca- tholicism than a great many Evangelicals, including Collins and Walls. I offer my criticisms of Rome, but I ask that readers not interpret me as someone who denies that the Roman Catholic Church counts as a Christian institution. In an effort to show good faith on this front, allow me to offer some defenses of Roman Catholicism against what I take to be over the top criticisms from some Protestant Evangelicals. KEYWORDS: Mariology, bodily assumption, theotokos, second-eve, ever-virgin, co-redemptrix In Defense of Roman Catholicism against the Claims of Extreme Protestants To be sure, there have been plenty of Protestants who have denied that the totality of Roman Catholic teaching is compatible with Christian orthodoxy. I do not mean to minimize the important differences between Evangelical and Roman Catholic soteriology, especially as concerns the doctrine of justi- fication. Nor do I mean to minimize the important ecclesiological differ- ences between the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches. How- ever, it’s a mistake to infer from these differences that Roman Catholics be- lieve another Gospel, at least so long as we understand the Gospel in the way that the apostle Paul defines it in 1 Corinthians 15. The Gospel is a his- torical event, not a plan of salvation. All faithful Roman Catholics and all faithful Evangelicals affirm that Jesus of Nazareth is fully God and fully man, was born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, died vicariously on a Roman cross, shedding His blood for our sins, and after He died, He bodily rose * BENJAMIN H. ARBOUR (PhD 2016, University of Bristol) is the Director of the Insti- tute for Philosophical and Theological Research. Email: [email protected]. © EMANUEL UNIVERSITY of ORADEA PERICHORESIS 18.5 (2020) 22 BENJAMIN H. ARBOUR from the dead three days later, in accordance with the Scriptures. So if we take St. Paul at his word, Roman Catholics believe the Gospel, even if they have a very different understanding of how one comes to benefit from that Gospel (McKnight 2016). Sadly, many of the theologians who seem eager to condemn Roman Ca- tholicism as heretical often jettison 2,000 years of consistent teaching con- cerning the doctrine of God. Roman Catholics have consistently defended the standard aspects of perfect being theology against process theism’s de- nials of omnipotence. They have also consistently defended a theology proper that includes the attributes of divine timelessness, immutability, im- passability, metaphysical simplicity, and divine aseity. So, when criticisms against Roman Catholicism come from those who reject classical theism, even if I agree with the specifics of their criticisms, I’m not one to quickly dismiss Roman Catholicism in total. Rather, I tend to see things through the lens of ‘mere Christianity’ as originally described by C. S. Lewis and adopt- ed and promoted by Collins and Walls (Collins and Walls 2017: 5-8). And it is precisely this issue of mere Christianity that serves as a launch- ing point for me to share my largest concern about the nature of Roman Catholicism. For our present purposes, I will define ‘mere Christianity’ as Nicene orthodoxy. That is, anyone who can confess the Creed in its entirety and with integrity counts as a mere Christian. To be sure, different Chris- tians have various doctrinal differences, say, about Calvinism and Arminian- ism, or about Episcopalian eccelisiologies or free church autonomy. Never- theless, such doctrinal differences, so long as they don’t violate Nicene or- thodoxy, remain consistent with orthodoxy, or what we mean by mere Christianity. Nonetheless, these differences do not contribute to making someone a mere Christian, at least not as I am using that term here. I take myself to be employing ‘mere Christianity’ in a very similar, if not identical, way to that of Collins and Walls. On Development of Doctrine, Briefly So, why make so much of mere Christianity? Much of this has to do with the development of Christian doctrine. Briefly, it seems that the catalyst for all Christian doctrine, insofar as we take Christianity to be a development out of and difference from Judaism, is the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The historic event of the Resurrection is what led the disciples to proclaim the Good News to the world. As this preaching developed into the apostolic kerygma, Christianity experienced the formation of doctrine. Various tests were developed to determine the authenticity of the message being pro- claimed, often called the rule(s) of faith, even as ongoing debates continued about the canonical status of various epistles. In fact, although the canonical status of the books of the Hebrew Bible were fairly well established during PERICHORESIS 18.5 (2020) An Evangelical Protestant’s Reflections on Roman Catholic Mariology 23 the Apostolic era, the first list of all twenty-seven books of the New Testa- ment that names each book individually comes from the Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter of Athanasius in the year 367 A.D., and even there, Athanasius at- tributes Pauline authorship to the book of Hebrews. Debates about which books did and/or did not belong in the New Testament canon went on well into the eighth century (Norris 2002). So, without modern Protestant appeals to Scripture that fall under the heading ‘sola Scriptura’, early Christians were taught the Rule of Faith, which came in several variants (cf. Irenaeus 1994). As orthodox Christians found themselves needing to contend against heretics who were maligning the faith and distorting the teaching of the Church, further developments took place along the way, including the First Council of Nicaea at 325 A.D., re-affirmed in 381 A.D. at the Council of Constantinople. Of course, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is just the original Nicene Creed with an added stanza that clarifies the divinity of the Holy Spirit, the relationship between the three Persons of the Godhead, and a few important ecclesiolog- ical and soteriological claims, including dogmatic statements that the one true Church is holy, universal, and apostolic. The claims made concerning orthodoxy at Nicaea that exclude Arianism from Christianity were made because Arianism undoes the entire economy of Christian salvation. As St. Athanasius so carefully pointed out in several places, God became man so that man might become God. If Jesus is not ful- ly God, then we are still in our sins, and there is no eschatological hope for humanity. Accordingly, the entire telos of the Christian Gospel—the redemp- tion of sinners to the glory of God—is literally impossible on Arianism, or so argued Athanasius; and I happen to agree with Athanasius. Arianism is heresy because a non-divine Jesus invalidates the entirety of the Apostolic kerygma. That is, the divinity of Christ is not just some ancillary detail that plays an insignificant role in Christian theology. No, Jesus, both fully God and fully man, is the main point! To get the divinity of Jesus wrong guaran- tees that one gets Christianity wrong. And this same story can be told about the full humanity of Christ, and that Christ was one Person with two na- tures (as affirmed by the Chalcedonian Definition, 451 A.D.). In a brief article, it would be impossible to discuss all of the issues per- taining to Roman Catholicism’s dogmatically going beyond mere Christiani- ty. I agree with Collins and Walls (and C. S. Lewis) that Rome itself acknowledges a core to Christian orthodoxy. I also agree with Collins and Walls that Rome goes beyond this core, even by adding and changing what Rome believes has always been the core by way of later doctrinal develop- ments, all while calling the additions part of the original core. I find these later additions objectionable, but not principally because I regard later ad- PERICHORESIS 18.5 (2020) 24 BENJAMIN H. ARBOUR ditions as untrue. Rather, I object to non-ecumenical additions to the list of doctrines that, according to Rome, count as orthodoxy for all Christendom. [The issue of ecumenicity is particularly important since the split between the East and the West that was formalized in 1054. This ongoing problem that en- tails a lack of ecumenicity was aggravated by the Protestant Reformation. In my view, it has been even further exacerbated by Roman Catholicism by virtue of the recognition of ‘separated brethren’ in Vatican II.] In order to illustrate my concerns, I will focus on Roman Catholic Mariolo- gy, and in particular the way that Roman Catholics elevated various Marian doctrines to the level of dogma. In so doing, I will argue that the elevation of the Marian doctrines to the canonical level of dogma was anti- ecumenical. Furthermore, I point out that if one assumes Roman Catholic understandings of both soteriology and ecclesiology, these elevations ulti- mately make salvation more difficult, at least for some. I don’t offer these criticisms as a refutation of the Marian doctrines, nor do I think that what follows constitutes anything akin to a proof against Roman Catholicism.
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