Did Mary need a savior?

[steadfast7]

Perhaps we are beginning to tread on issues far beyond our feeble minds can handle. the mystery of incarnation, the incommunicable attributes of God.

I do find something interesting though: It’s impossible to fully grasp in one instance the humanity and divinity of Christ. Most often, we need to choose one or the other when we muse about him. When in relation to Mary and the incarnation, catholics eagerly desire to lean toward Jesus as divine. Mary is thus given the esteemed title *Theotokos * meaning “bearer/mother of God”. On the surface this makes God seem subordinate to Mary (though of course no one would ever admit that).

When speaking of other things unrelated to Mary, you’re less likely to elevate Jesus to a divine status. There is more of a tendency to lean toward Jesus as mere man, just like us. the same thing is happening when I argue that the profound difference between Jesus and Mary in their cognitive faculties - in response, I see a tendency to make them seem more similar than different.

In every case, there is a concerted and intentional effort to elevate Mary as high as possible - to bring he as close to Jesus as possible. Perhaps this is valid and right, the jury is still out on that; for me at least.

 

[Angel7]

You sure that’s Mary? I’d be totally fine with it if that was the case, but you have to convince me. There’s a ton of things in this apocalyptic vision that don’t seem to readily correspond to anything that happened in Mary’s life.

Are you familiar with our Lady of Guadalupe Apparitions?

A woman clothed in the sun, the moon at her Feet, and 12 stars around her head.
http://www.stmarystmarkparish.com/y...Lady-of-Guadalupe-Print-C10055392.5154933.jpg

See the crescent moon at her feet, the stars, and the sun.

 

[steadfast7]

As I told Mike before, it definitely helps but the dogma on Mary’s sinlessness does NOT hinge on just one bit of scripture like this.

Well it’s something that developed over time as is the case with most doctrines as understanding grows.

As I stated before, the interpretation of Revelation doesn’t make or break Mary as the new Eve.

From the link above, Genesis 3:15
“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” The Jews saw this passage as referring to the struggle between Christ and Satan, and so the Church see in “the woman” a prophetic foreshadowing of the Virgin Mary.

Given these facts, I’m left wondering, with MMM in his earlier posts, why this is considered dogma? Is it because of the Pope’s pronouncement? If so, fair enough, not much we can say about that.

The sources for this belief seems very elusive, and the allusions to it in authoritative sources are indirect and ambiguous. Why was it not deemed a pious opinion, or an optional belief, but rather given the status of dogma?

what about the hanging of Peter upside down. This is largely church tradition, and very important in church history - he’s believed to be the “first Pope” afterall. is this considered dogma for Catholics? Is it necessary to believe this?

 

[mmmcounts]

It’s been fun and intellectually stimulating (and sometimes mindnumbing) posting on this thread, but I think I am done for now – I can’t keep up anymore! Liraco and mmmcounts, you guys certainly know your stuff, it’s been a pleasure. Take care.

Wow, sorry I missed that by about 5 days. (Speaking of keeping up)… Thanks for engaging us for awhile; I’m glad you did. If you happen to have any Protestant-related questions in the future, I’ll be happy to take a look. If your questions are more oriented toward CC teaching, though, I’ll understand if you don’t come to me first. You have some impressive resources to turn to around here.

Have fun with your future explorations, and God bless. Take care!

 

[Liraco]

Perhaps we are beginning to tread on issues far beyond our feeble minds can handle. the mystery of incarnation, the incommunicable attributes of God.

Well you mentioned impassibility as an incommunicable attribute of God so I’d like to know where you read or learned that to understand you better. You avoided my questions though.

When speaking of other things unrelated to Mary, you’re less likely to elevate Jesus to a divine status.

How so? Was it my mentioning of the “limited human intellect”? That’s nothing to do with divinity and everything to do with the limits of the flesh. Please read my response again. This doesn’t make Jesus less divine. As I said, in His divinity He knew all, but as a man not everything was revealed to the human mind He possessed (unless you want to call Him a liar for saying He didn’t know the time when the end would come). His human intellect didn’t know the date, but did know what would happen and described it.

“Less likely to elevate Jesus to a divine status” is almost insulting, as if any good Catholic would ever deny Jesus is God. Equally as bad is implying we elevate Mary to a level of divinity. Certainly those in Heaven are made to be like God, but they remain creatures nonetheless. The Church has always said Mary is a creature, and that is enough to see she is below God.

In every case, there is a concerted and intentional effort to elevate Mary as high as possible - to bring he as close to Jesus as possible. Perhaps this is valid and right, the jury is still out on that; for me at least.

Jesus WAS a man, but definitely more than that. Even the Apostles came to see that in time.

“Concerted effort” makes it seem like we’re pushing for Mary to be something she’s not. It’s a shame you still misunderstand “mother of God”.

As I said, that title does **not **elevate her above God at all. Remember that in the Blessed Trinity there are 3 persons. Mary is the mother of Jesus, the son, and NOT of God the Father, creator of all things (Mary included), nor mother of the Holy Spirit. Again: Mary DID give birth to Jesus, Jesus IS God, therefore, Mary is the “mother of God”. Remember though that everything we teach about Mary is looking at her as a creature, if she was conceived immaculate it’s because that was God’s will, and if she was the one who gave birth to Him it’s because God chose her for that. What Mary did of her own was chose to cooperate with God in His plan.

We’re not elevating Mary beyond what is fair, and remember that the ultimate end of everything is God. The saints and Mary are there to help guide us to Him, not distract, not lead astray, etc. I asked once and got no response, to protestants not seeming to heed the call to consider Mary “blessed” (just like it says in the Bible), mentioning her only during Christmas and that’s it.

what about the hanging of Peter upside down. This is largely church tradition, and very important in church history - he’s believed to be the “first Pope” afterall. is this considered dogma for Catholics? Is it necessary to believe this?

There’s a lot we can teach you about the true Catholic faith, but this is not the place. The subjects you want to discuss will derail this further. In the case of Mike, I don’t mind going off-topic as much since he’s the one who originally asked the thread’s question and had more pop up. I would ask you to do the same, and send me a private message if you do.

I’ll quote again (page 12 here, if you’re curious)
Doctrine is Church teaching in all of its forms.
A dogma is a doctrine that has been expressly taught by the magisterium––either by conciliar or papal definition––to have been divinely revealed and contained in the Word of God, therefore requiring the belief of all Catholics.

Pete upside down is neither dogma nor doctrine. He was martyred but the way it was done is not a matter of faith or moral teaching.

Forgive me if I didn’t answer everything thoroughly enough, but I don’t want to go off-topic and you ask a lot of questions which could go on a thread of their own.

---

@Mike, I’ll “see you” tomorrow. Don’t have the time to properly reply to what you may post right now. I took a pretty long break from the forum too, so I guess we’re almost on the same page there. Hopefully you were able to study more interesting things on Revelation today.

(And if I may ask you, please pray for the deceased mother of a friend and their family.)

Hope all is well with you. God bless.

 

[Liraco]

One more quick add-on on the subject of Jesus and what He knew:

*The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “By its union to the divine wisdom in the person of the Word incarnate, Christ enjoyed in his human knowledge the fullness of understanding of the eternal plans he had come to reveal. What he admitted to not knowing in this area, he elsewhere declared himself not sent to reveal” (CCC 474).
*
Many more quick answers and questions here:
catholic.com/thisrock/quickquestions/category/Jesus

 

[panevino]

This does imply that she was not planning on having sex in the near future; it does not necessarily imply that she intended to abstain from sex forever. The angel’s message was one that carried a sort of immediacy, so Mary- knowing that sex is a necessary though insufficient thing for pregnancy- wondered how God would cause this to be. I suppose one acceptable answer would have been “Actually, not yet- wait a few weeks, consummate the marriage, and THEN you’ll get pregnant. I just wanted to give you plenty of warning.” Given the situation, though, another possibility would have been a more immediate pregnancy that did not involve sex- but Mary didn’t know how that would work.

And now I have one more question for you guys. Take a look at Luke 2, verses 22 to 24. Here’s what they say.

"And when the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord”) and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons."

It doesn’t look like anything at first. But wait, let’s grab the cross reference. Away we go to Leviticus 12.

"And when the days of her purifying are completed, whether for a son or for a daughter, she shall bring to the priest at the entrance of the tent of meeting a lamb a year old for a burnt offering, and a pigeon or a turtledove for a sin offering, and he shall offer it before the LORD and make atonement for her. Then she shall be clean from the flow of her blood. This is the law for her who bears a child, either male or female. And if she cannot afford a lamb, then she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering. And the priest shall make atonement for her, and she shall be clean."

Did you know Mary made a sin offering according to the Law of Moses? That would be a sin offering for her. In order that she could be forgiven of her sins. She went ahead and did it.

Now, I know the basic argument against the obvious conclusion: She did it so she wouldn’t freak people out. She did it to fit in. Essentially, she allowed a priest the privilege of making a sin offering for “the queen of heaven” in spite of her sinlessness rather than because of her sin.

It’s a bit like going to confession in spite of perfection rather than because of sin. The thing is, what do you say once you walk in the booth? As you imagine how this scenario plays out, you should begin to realize the truth: A sinless person does not have any good reason to be at confession, nor does a sinless Jewess have any business making sacrifices for sin as if she were a regular Jewish girl.

May I remind all of you of something? While this is the only time Mary is specifically recorded in the Bible doing a sin offering, it was almost certainly not the only time she did a sin offering. If she did it in order to “not freak people out” at this expected time following childbirth, I’m certain that she would have participated in the expected sin offering each month as required for Jewish women. She did the sin offering in Luke 2, so I am hard pressed to find a reason for why she would be inconsistent when faced with a remarkably similar situation every month.

While you’re thinking about how to respond to that, here’s the other little bit of this Catch-22: If, as you say, Mary was sinless…but, as we know from Luke’s Gospel she brought a sin offering for herself…is this not just a little bit deceptive? This becomes a much more serious problem for you if your reason (on her behalf) is insufficient to separate this event from all of the monthly demands for sin offerings, which put her in a very similar position. Can you really call Mary “sinless” if she spends her entire life allowing the priests to believe a lie?

So what’s the push-back from your end? Assuming that Mary was sinless (which has never been anything more than an assumption for anyone at any time), can you articulate a simple reason for why a sinless person would assent to an unnecessary sin offering? Can you do it without forcing Mary into deception, but still make it believable? And lastly, what do you do with all the sin offerings demanded of Mary once every month?

The only halfway decent response I can come up with at this point is one that emphasizes her uncleanness at the expense of the sin offering. That would probably be enough for you to continue believing Mary is sinless, but your best case scenario is one of “disaster averted.” The more you think about it, the harder it is to imagine how Mary could be sinless, participate fully in Judaism, and keep her sinlessness a secret from the priests. And the writers of the Gospels, of course. All without being deceptive. It’s a good thing those guys in southern Europe found out about it two generations after she died.

Mary obeyed the law of the old covenant.
Did Jesus need to be baptised by john? To fullfill all righteousness
Did Jesus need to be circumcised? To make him a part of gods people?

 

[r1c3b0x]

Yes. Not because of sin, but to rescue her from the enemy.

Rev 12:1 A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.
Rev 12:2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.
Rev 12:3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads.
Rev 12:4 His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born.
Rev 12:5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne.
Rev 12:6 The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
Rev 12:7 And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back.
Rev 12:8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven.
Rev 12:9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
Rev 12:10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.
Rev 12:11 They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.
Rev 12:12 Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.”
Rev 12:13 When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child.
Rev 12:14 The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the desert, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach.
Rev 12:15 Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent.
Rev 12:16 But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth.
Rev 12:17 Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring—those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.

It’s in the bible.

That cannot be Mary as Catholic tradition holds that Mary suffered no pain in child birth (Revelation 12:2). The same Church that holds the tradition that Mary was also sinless. So one cannot use this verse without contradicting tradition or Scripture.

Furthermore, if this passage is used one has to deny the Ever-Virginity of Mary as well (Revelation 12:17).

 

[Angainor]

I guess most of you are working from the assumption that she never sinned. Let’s see what comes up.

If Mary was sinless, she wouldn’t need a savior.

And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” Mark 2:17

 

[nuntym]

If Mary was sinless, she wouldn’t need a savior.

And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” Mark 2:17

Unless of course the Physician made sure His patient will never become sick.

 

[nuntym]

That cannot be Mary as Catholic tradition holds that Mary suffered no pain in child birth (Revelation 12:2). The same Church that holds the tradition that Mary was also sinless. So one cannot use this verse without contradicting tradition or Scripture.

Even if the Blessed Virgin had no pain during child birth (which was so; some point to Luke 2:7 as proof of this, as it is remarkable that the woman who gave birth would also be the one to wrap the infant and place Him in a bed), her care and ministering of Jesus until His death, her “birth” of Jesus to heavenly glory, was very painful for her, as the prophecy of St. Simeon attests:

Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against, and a sword will pierce through your own soul also, that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.” Luke 2:34-35

That is why the Catholic Church has a devotion to the Blessed Mother called The Seven Dolors (or Sorrows) of Mary, to honor her for the indescribable pain she experienced while she was on earth.

Furthermore, if this passage is used one has to deny the Ever-Virginity of Mary as well (Revelation 12:17).

The Blessed Virgin is our Mother, the Mother of All Christians, because (1) Jesus Christ is our Brother through our adoption by God the Father through grace, (2) Jesus Christ gave His mother to us as our mother on the cross:

John 19:26 - Jesus makes Mary the Mother of us all as He dies on the Cross by saying “behold your mother.” Jesus did not say “John, behold your mother” because he gave Mary to all of us, his beloved disciples. All the words that Jesus spoke on Cross had a divine purpose. Jesus was not just telling John to take care of his mother.

Source

 

[Angainor]

Angainor:

If Mary was sinless, she wouldn’t need a savior.And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” Mark 2:17

Unless of course the Physician made sure His patient will never become sick.

So you are saying Mary was not well because she needed a physician.

 

[panevino]

Given these facts, I’m left wondering, with MMM in his earlier posts, why this is considered dogma? Is it because of the Pope’s pronouncement? If so, fair enough, not much we can say about that.

The sources for this belief seems very elusive, and the allusions to it in authoritative sources are indirect and ambiguous. Why was it not deemed a pious opinion, or an optional belief, but rather given the status of dogma?

what about the hanging of Peter upside down. This is largely church tradition, and very important in church history - he’s believed to be the “first Pope” afterall. is this considered dogma for Catholics? Is it necessary to believe this?

my understanding is that the dogma of Mary immaculate conception/sinlessness
is to show/ shout the divinity of jesus, with Mary prepared to carry god made flesh.
It is to glorify god and I say essential honour due god.
I think It is misunderstood as an elevation of Mary only.
The point is Jesus and the effect/symbol of truly having god within us , ie the temple.
Like the reason we need to be pure for the Eucharist, which is even observed by baptists I believe (ie need to reconcile self before participating in the rememberance supper)

Peters upside down cross is incredible but it’s not a salvific/divine(Ie definition of god etc) so to me it makes sense it not on par with proving the divinity of Jesus.

 

[jousephustruth]

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men[a] because all sinned— for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law - Romans 5:12-13

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, - Romans 3:23

As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. - Romans 3:10-12

Notice the term which God uses in this verse, “all have sinned.” God is not saying some or a few or even the majority, He is definite in His usage of “ALL.” This means that Mary was part of that “all.” Below in 1 John 3:4 we see the biblical definition of sin which is the transgression of God’s law. There is no division of sin into either venial or mortal classifications but only one class and that is sin. (James 2:10 ) For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. Since Mary was part of the human race at that time, she was guilty of sin as every other human being was. John 3:16 written For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. MARY believe in JESUS CHRIST and she is saved. ACTS 16-31 Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved–you and your household."

IS THERE ANY SCRIPTURE THAT MARY WAS SINLESS? please give me some verse in your own BIBLE that MARY can have salvation. JESUS died on the CROSS for our sin and do you think MARY died also for our SIN? it is clearly in the scripture that only JESUS CHRIST is the mediator between GOD and MANKIND. no one else. because JESUS gave his LIFE to have reconciled us in the HEAVENLY FATHER because in Hebrews 1:3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.

MARY is part of the human race. DO you think that he can hear our PRAYERS in HEAVENLY KINGDOM? WHO MADE US? WHO CREATE US? GOD can only HEAR our prayers and can see what we have done in this world.

JESUS CHRIST “Therefore He is able to save completely those who come to God through Him, because He always lives to intercede for them” (Hebrews 7:25).