According to Holy Scripture, Mary was not ‘Immaculately Conceived.’
According to the Sacred Scriptures, Mary was indeed spared from sin through God’s divine intervention. Please refer to Genesis 3:15 and Luke 1:28 for evidence.
Mary declares she needed a Savior WHILE she was pregnant with Jesus (Luke 1:46-47).
This is faulty logic. Mary “needing a Savior” does not rule out the possibility of her Immaculate Conception.
First. you seem to be implying that Jesus was created when God chose Mary to carry Him and give birth to Him. Jesus, however, is perfectly God. Therefore, He has existed for all eternity. Further, God is outside of time.
Second, consider the following analogy: suppose a man is walking along a path and ends up falling into a pit full of mud, twigs, leaves, etc. Sometime later, someone comes along a helps get the man out of the pit. By all rights, this man has been “saved” from being stuck in the pit and being covered in mud. Now, suppose that a woman is walking along the same path. She too is about to tumble down into this mud-filled pit. However, before this can happen, someone who is also walking along the path sees her falling and rushes over to pull her away from the pit. The woman has also been “saved” from the pit, but the manner in which she was saved was even better than the man who was previously in the pit.
This is an excellent illustration of how Mary’s Immaculate Conception happened, as well as an illustration to show why the “Mary needed a Savior, therefore she was a sinner” logic falls short of being a good argument.
And she was not saved prior to her conception, because Paul tells us that since Mary was born under the Law, she needed a Redeemer for the forgiveness of sins (Galatians 4:4-5; Colossians 1:13-14).
Umm… I hate to break this to you, but the grammatical subject in Galatians 4:4-5 is Jesus Christ, not Mary. The “born under the Law” you are talking about is referring to our Lord and Savior. To be specific, that phrase is talking about Jesus’ circumcision. Galatians 4:4-5 is in no way talking about Mary.
If Mary was conceived without sin (and she was), then she was indeed saved at the very moment of her conception. Further, Catholics already agree that Mary too needed a Savior. Thus, your misinterpreted text-proofs are not a problem for us.
If God has the ability to protect Mary from the sins of her parents, why couldn’t God have the ability to protect Himself from Mary’s sins?
First, no Catholic will say that the Immaculate Conception was
necessary. It was, however, very
fitting.
God certainly
could have spared His Son from inheriting the sinful nature from His human mother, but He instead chose to spare Mary from the effects of sin so that she could properly carry God within her. After all, Scripture makes it blatantly clear that God does not tolerate sin.
The concept of the ‘Immaculate Conception’ of Mary is neither Biblical nor necessary.
Evidence for the Immaculate Conception, or at least Mary being sinless:
Genesis 3:15~ This verse explicitly states that the woman and her seed shall be at enmity with the Devil. The seed is obviously and reference to Jesus Christ. Therefore, the “enmity” mentioned must be a reference to sin; Jesus, beside the fact that He is God, is like us in all ways except sin because He is perfectly human. I honestly don’t see how one can be at enmity with the devil if he or she is giving into the various temptations of sin.
Since the verse also says that the mother of the seed shall also be at enmity with the Devil, this must mean that the mother is like us in all ways except sin. This mother of the seed has to be Mary, as she’s the only one who fits the bill.
Luke 1:28~ The important phrase here is “full of grace.” In the original Greek, the phrase is rendered as
kecharitomene. This word is a perfect passive participle of the Greek word
charitoo, meaning “to fill or endow with grace.”
Kecharitomene is in the perfect tense, and that means that Mary was in this “full of grace” state at some point in her past, and this state continues well on into the present and the future. This is a pretty clear implication that Mary was spared from the effects of sin. The Catholic Church has just defined this being spared from sin as happening at her conception.
Logical support: Scripture makes it blatantly clear that God does not tolerate sin. Therefore, there is no logical reason as to why God would allow His only begotten Son to be conceived, carried, and birthed by a sinful woman.
God doesn’t tolerate sin, and yet He was inside something completely sinful for nine months? That’s a contradiction if I ever saw one. Further, if Mary
had been a sinner, then Jesus would have inherited this because He inherited in His human nature from His mother.
Further, the original Adam and Eve were created without sin. Therefore, it’s logicall plausible that the New Adam, Jesus Christ, and the New Eve, Mary, were also created without sin. Similarly, since the original Adam and Eve eventually fell into sin, then the New Adam and Eve had to be spared from falling into sin.
