No Immaculate Conception, No Immutable God

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The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception teaches that the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived without original sin. (It doesn’t refer to the “Conception” of Jesus, Who was not technically “conceived” but rather “became incarnate” of the Virgin as stated in the Nicene Creed).

This doctrine is one of the top “sticking points” for Protestants in their criticism of the Catholic Church. “Just get rid of Mary and let’s focus on what we can agree on,” they say. Here is one reason why we absolutely cannot.

At the time of the fall of man, God has to be 100% sure that the plan of salvation will go through: that Mary will say yes. Otherwise Christ doesn’t ransom us, and all of us are gonna go to hell. Now who doesn’t want it to be 100%? The devil.

Now, because of original sin, all of us are conceived with concupiscence (a weak, wounded conscience and tendency towards sin) and are to some extent under the devil’s power in a way that Adam and Eve were not before they fell. If Mary is not protected from that, the devil can exploit concupiscence the way he does with us. We fall all the time, don’t we? If Mary had fallen, ALL OF US DO, and the devil wins.

But wait… maybe God can just find another Virgin to say yes. Infinite recursion. A train of just cabooses. No engine, goes nowhere. And so God would have to change the plan of salvation. He can’t do that. He made a promise in Genesis 3:15 and He has to keep it. God cannot change. (Malachi 3:6). He is Perfect, and change means lack; if you change, you lacked something before you changed. And if God could change one of His promises… what else can He change? We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with… oh wait not anymore. Marriage? Abortion? Any question of morality… A changeable God is how you get today’s moral relativism.

The other “fix” is to deny free will: Mary is a robot and so are we. That’s Calvinism. Problem is, there is a hell with a population greater than zero. If we have no free will, God is the cause of our sins. Then the atheists are right: God is evil. Again, welcome to today’s dark world…

A possible response was that God saw what Mary would do from the beginning and so He didn’t have to protect Her, but this begs the question and contradicts Genesis 3:15 (“I WILL put enmity…”).

What do you think?
 
I think the reason we cannot deny the Immaculate Conception is that it is true.

As for “what would have been,” as the saying goes “what would have been is what was.”
 
Are you suggesting that Mary could not have said “No” to God? That her fiat was a guarantee because she was immaculately conceived? We can still fall from grace by sins that are not motivated by concupiscence. Some of the angels fell even, and they certainly didn’t have concupiscence. God sees all of time, so He always knows what Mary’s decision is; but it is to her merit that she freely cooperated, that she said yes and why she is co-redemptrix. This might seem to be contradictory (how can God’s omniscience and immutability coincide with human free will) but I think the answer is that God always knows what everyone does in time because his knowledge does not precede their choice, but is simultaneous (B-theory of time).
 
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Cross posted from parent thread
mcq72 said:
I prefer what other Catholics say. That the IC was not necesary but was fitting.
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But it WAS necessary that Mary’s assent be borne entirely by God’s Grace. CCC 490
 
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A very interesting argument! While I’ve always understood the immutability of God, I’ve never related it to the Immaculate Conception in that way.
 
prefer what other Catholics say. That the IC was not necesary but was fitting.

The fact is there were multitudes of “yeses” paving the way for the Incarnation. None of these pivotal, obedient yes’s required IC. There were graces inherent with each covenant .

For Mary to be obedient to the angel did not require a pre fallen spirit. Abraham was obedient without one. Noah was, Rahab was, Moses was, David was also…100 % predestined thru foreknowledge.
 
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mcq72 said:
For Mary to be obedient to the angel did not require a pre fallen spirit. Abraham was obedient without one. Noah was, Rahab was, Moses was, David was also…100 % predestined thru foreknowledge.
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There was no promise to put emnity between any of them and satan. There was for Mary. Plan-arounds were possible for all of them because the redemption, hence creation itself, wasn’t contingent on their consent.
 
MarysLurker said:
There was no promise to put emnity between any of them and satan. There was for Mary. Plan-arounds were possible for all of them because the redemption, hence creation itself, wasn’t contingent on their consent.
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Oh, i did not know there was not emnity between children of the light and darkness in the world till Mary came on the scene.
 
mcq72 said:
Oh, i did not know there was not emnity between children of the light and darkness in the world till Mary came on the scene.
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Why would God want people to be at emnity with each other? Genesis 3:15 is talking about Jesus and Mary vs. the devil and his cohort, not factions of humans versus each other.
 
MarysLurker said:
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception teaches that the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived without original sin. (It doesn’t refer to the “Conception” of Jesus, Who was not technically “conceived” but rather “became incarnate” of the Virgin as stated in the Nicene Creed).
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Just nitpicking here, while I consider the rest of your post. Not “technically conceived”, why does the Apostles Creed say “conceived by the Holy Spirit”. I think conception occurred, and that was when Jesus became incarnate.
 
tafan2 said:
Just nitpicking here, while I consider the rest of your post. Not “technically conceived”, why does the Apostles Creed say “conceived by the Holy Spirit”. I think conception occurred, and that was when Jesus became incarnate.
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Conception means beginning and Christ, as God, had no beginning. The Nicene Creed is more specific than the Apostles’ Creed about that in order to address the Christological heresies like Adoptionism that incorrectly drew from “conceived” the implication that Jesus wasn’t divine.
 
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Much of your post reads as if God just knows the future, so He creates a scenario in His mind and determines what He has to do to make it so. Which I know is what you are trying to avoid with your “maybe God can just find another Virgin to say yes” paragraph.

God doesn’t just know the future, the future and the past and the present are all present to Him at once. So here is what we know:

Mary was conceived immaculately, as you point out, she had no concupiscence (tendency to sin, or be attracted to sin). That does not mean she was never tempted, that would be naïve. We can only assume that devil worked pretty dang hard in tempting her to sin, just like with Adam and Eve and just like with Jesus.

Mary was sinless.

God knew that she would say yes, her yes was present to him when He made his promise.

I don’t know if I can go from that to an immutable God. But I don’t need to, the knowledge of an immutable God can be achieved by our reason, without any divine revelation.
 
Granted that the Nicene creed was more specific, but that does not mean the Apostles Creed was wrong, it just means there was a little too much ambiguity.
 
tafan2 said:
That does not mean she was never tempted, that would be naïve. We can only assume that devil worked pretty dang hard in tempting her to sin, just like with Adam and Eve and just like with Jesus.
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I never said She wasn’t tempted. Eve was conceived in the same state and was certainly tempted (and gave in). What I am saying is that it is unreasonable for God to expose the plan of salvation to concupiscence because there was no backup.
 
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply you said she was never tempted. I through that in unnecessarily. While I have to say you are right that Mary’s lack of concupiscence played a role in salvation history, I still have a problem with God’s plan being “exposed because there was no backup”. God’s plan, Mary’s free decision, etc has been present in God’s mind throughout all eternity. There was no need for a backup regardless.
 
I don’t think your argument works. God in his eternal knowledge knows if someone will say “yes” or not, even if they have free will to say no. He could choose that person from all eternity while preserving their free will knowing they have the capacity to say no but won’t.

In fact, Mary did have the capacity to say no. And there was no risk for God here that his promise would fail.

If I were to tweak the argument, it may be that God would only act upon the Incarnation in a case where the “yes” was said without any reservations, and it’s impossible for a person with any attachment to sin to have absolutely no reservations about such a request.

But even then, that’s not the basis for our belief.
 
MarysLurker said:
A possible response was that God saw what Mary would do from the beginning and so He didn’t have to protect Her, but this begs the question and contradicts Genesis 3:15 (“I WILL put enmity…”).

What do you think?
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Yes

Genesis 3:15 gave a glimpse of the fix that is to come, from one woman, the new EVE.
 
tafan2 said:
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply you said she was never tempted. I through that in unnecessarily. While I have to say you are right that Mary’s lack of concupiscence played a role in salvation history, I still have a problem with God’s plan being “exposed because there was no backup”. God’s plan, Mary’s free decision, etc has been present in God’s mind throughout all eternity. There was no need for a backup regardless.
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I agree with this.
 
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