How to ruin an otherwise good apologetic

(Or, “on the need to get things straight”, along with a true account of the history of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Reception of Mary).

Jesus said, “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak….”

Here’s one way that works:

This recent article by Eric Davis at The Cripplegate site illustrates what I mean. Of course, it’s a long, thorough article that makes dozens and dozens of good points. But it gets a fact wrong:

She is sinless, having bypassed receiving a sin nature. Therefore, she was not in need of Christ’s saving work,...

While much of the article is spot-on correct, a Roman Catholic will point out that this particular statement is incorrect, and then all other Roman Catholics will have an excuse to disbelieve everything else in the article. So no matter how great the article is, the “see-no-evil-hear-no-evil” Roman Catholic converts have a reason (they think – but really it’s an excuse) to ignore the rest of it.

I know, the article wasn’t even about that! It’s a terrible way to think about things, but that’s the way that Roman Catholic converts think.

Because in fact, Roman dogma does allow that she WAS in need of Christ's saving work (just differently from all the rest of us).

Here is what should have been said by the Cripplegate author:

But what about the claim that Mary of Nazareth was conceived without sin? This too is an extraordinary claim and so it too requires extraordinary proof. But when we examine Scripture, we see no evidence that anyone thought Mary was conceived without sin, nor any evidence that she was exempted from Adam’s curse. While there are traditions about her sanctity from the womb and throughout her life, the church is mostly silent on the issue of her conception until the middle ages, and even then most theologians either didn’t see how it was possible for Mary to be conceived without sin or they outright denied it. The list of those opposed to the doctrine reads like a Who’s Who of the medieval church: Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Anselm of Canterbury, just to name a few.

But then in the early 1300s, two English Franciscans (William of Ware and Duns Scotus) came up with a way to overcome the objections that the doctrine was a “superstition” (so Bernard) or that it could not be reconciled with the uniqueness of Christ’s redemption (so Aquinas). William used the argument from conveniens (Latin for “convenience”), which used the formula, potuit, decuit, fecit: God could do it, it is fitting that He would do it, therefore He did do it. Since Mary’s Immaculate Conception was both possible for God and fitting (on the grounds of the medieval supposition that never too much can be said of Mary), then it follows that God must have preserved Mary from contracting original sin, and so her conception was “immaculate” (stainless).

Scotus, for his part, theorized how God was able to preserve Mary from Original Sin without denying her need for redemption. The eternal God, who sees all things as present, must have applied the merits of the redemption to Mary before the redemption actually took place. Thus Mary’s redemption was by exemption. Instead of grace taking away the power of original sin after contracting it, she was graced by not contracting it in the first place.

By all means, continue talking about Roman Catholicism. But by all means, be careful with how you present it.

HT for the OP: Bnonn Tennant