There is such*** profound error*** in Protestant teaching on Mary. If you do not understand Mary, then you cannot understand the name of Jesus,
Emmanuel, God with us.
If we accept Protestant teaching, then we accept that Mary’s only relevance to the Incarnation was having a body and conceiving Jesus by the Holy Spirit rather than through a natural man. She was an incubator. In fact, she didn’t even necessarily need to be a virgin according to Protestant teaching. She could have been like Elizabeth, the mother of John, who had been married many years and was barren. She could have simply become pregnant while Joseph was on vacation if we take Protestant teaching on Mary to its logical conclusion. The only thing that is important is that the Holy Spirit caused Jesus to begin to grow in her womb.
If we accept Protestant teaching, then the Holy Spirit’s union with Mary was hit and run. He came by, impregnated her, and then went back to the sky. Sort of like Zeus, or some other Greek mythological god. He certainly never made her His spouse.
If we accept Protestant teaching, that Jesus was born of a woman who was corrupted by original sin, then Jesus might as well have been born from the foam of the sea like Venus. His nature then takes nothing substantial from Mary, save his Jewish heritage.
The importance of realizing that when Jesus actually took Mary’s nature, (which was of a person who was free from the curse of original sin in preparation for the mediator between God and man to be born) and His father’s nature, is that He must have done so to truly bridge the gap between God and man.
If he were not one with human nature, but simply emerged, divinely protected from sinful human nature, then
He could not save us because He still would be remote from us. This is why Mary, as our Mother, is representative of the Church (us) and the Body of Christ (us), and our example in relationship to the Son.
Below the consubstantiality of Jesus with Mary is addressed by Fr. Peter Damien Fehlner:
Eutyches claimed that the hypostatic union defined as one person, therefore one nature, was merely a fusion, not a confusion of natures, and so the Son by virtue of His divinity remained “consubstantial” with the Father, as defined at the Council of Nicea (325).
St. Leo then posed to him the key question: in his (Eutyches’) view, was the Incarnate Son also “consubstantial” with us? Eutyches replied in the negative. Christ is truly human, but His humanity is a divinized humanity, whereas ours is merely an ordinary, natural humanity. Christ can save us because it is God alone Who is acting in His divinized humanity. In our terms, Mary is not a maternal Mediatrix Who actively begets the Saviour, but merely a virgin through Whom the divinized man passes to appear in the world as God-with-us.
St. Leo then explained why this view is just as fatally wrong as that of Nestorius: it renders null the entire purpose of the Incarnation, namely, that a divine Person without ceasing to be divine and so consubstantial with the Father becomes consubstantial with us in being born of the Virgin Mary. The humanity assumed by the Word hypostatically is a complete, fully natural human nature, consubstantial with ours. That is the realistic basis for our sharing in the divine nature (cf. 2 Pet 1: 4), in the adoption of sonship (cf. Gal 4: 4-7). All of this, as St. Paul hints, depends on the maternal Mediation of the Woman, whereby the Son of God came to be born as man, to be born under the law (of suffering for sin), but being man-God was able to save those under the law unable to save themselves. All this, St. Leo insists repeatedly, hinges on Christ’s consubstantiality with Mary. She is not merely Mother of Christ as Nestorius said, but virgin Mother of God. But as perpetual virgin, She is truly and not merely apparently mother of the God Who became man for our sake, that is of the Christ: Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, exclaimed St. Peter (cf. Mt 16: 16).
Once we appreciate the “consubstantiality” of Jesus with Mary, we grasp why in a supernatural view of the Incarnation and Redemption, the maternal Mediation of Mary is so important. The Incarnation, as willed by God in the one economy of salvation, is Marian in mode, because Jesus and Mary are jointly predestined: Mediatrix in the Mediator. Of course Christ is our one and only Mediator (cf. 1 Tim 2: 5): not to the exclusion of our cooperation, and above all the unique cooperation of Mary, but to its inclusion. This is why He became Incarnate, says Bl. John Duns Scotus: not to exclude, but to make possible our cooperation in a truly human way. That is why the merit and satisfaction of Christ on the Cross and on the altar is not an action of God alone, but of a man Who is God. That is why in coming into the world and in leaving it He can be joined actively by His Mother, and through that Immaculate Mother by us. For through Her we are consubstantial with Him, both in being and in operation.
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