The Diversity Of Views Of The Perpetual Virginity Of Mary In The Late Medieval And Reformation Eras (Part 1)

It's common for Roman Catholics and other critics of Protestantism to bring up support among the earliest Protestants for various Marian beliefs that are often rejected by Protestants today, like the perpetual virginity of Mary. Individuals like Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli will be cited in support of her perpetual virginity and other such beliefs about her. While it's true that the earliest Protestants were closer to groups like Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy on Marian issues than modern Protestants are, even the earliest Protestants substantially disagreed with those groups on some Marian issues. See the examples discussed here. And the early Protestants who accepted Mary's perpetual virginity sometimes disagreed with Catholics and other modern advocates of the perpetual virginity of Mary on some issues related to the doctrine, like whether she took a vow of virginity. In the coming days, I'm going to be discussing some late medieval and Reformation sources who were more distant from a traditional Catholic view on the perpetual virginity of Mary. What I want to do in this post is discuss some background issues that I think are helpful in framing the discussion.

One Way Protestants Can Further Their Cause

When you can cite an extrabiblical pre-Reformation source or a source from the Reformation era or later in a given context, make more of an effort to cite the pre-Reformation source. If a church father or a modern theologian could be quoted on a topic, for example, quote the church father. That helps address various problems with ignorance of church history among Protestants, neglect of pre-Reformation sources, mischaracterizations of the historical credibility of Protestantism, etc. I'm not saying you should always cite the pre-Reformation source. That would be simplistic. But it can and should be done more often than it is.

Reformation Resources

Reformation Day will be celebrated at the end of the month. I've been maintaining a collection of resources on Reformation-related topics, which you can access here. I've updated that post since linking it last year. The baptismal regeneration page has been updated in multiple places. I added an entry addressing the subject of apostolic churches and the alleged problem of Protestants disagreeing with what all apostolic churches believe. I also added a link to a post on Marian apparitions. The link on the perpetual virginity of Mary and children of Joseph from a former marriage has been updated.

When Protestants Handle Debates Poorly

I'm not just referring to formal debates, though they're part of the problem. The bigger problem is how Protestants in general handle certain debates in general, whether formal or informal ones.

Protestants Should Make More Of An Issue Of Who We Pray To

One of Stand To Reason's podcasts took a question yesterday about prayer to saints. I've noticed for years that Protestants seldom bring the subject up on their own initiative, even though they should. They don't even address it defensively much, and they bring it up as evidence for Protestantism even less. There are multiple Biblical and multiple extrabiblical lines of evidence for praying only to God. For a collection of resources on the topic, see here.

Reformation Resources

Reformation Day is coming up soon. Several years ago, I put together a collection of posts about the historical roots of Evangelicalism and the Reformation. I periodically update the collection. I've added some posts on opposition to Roman Catholic teaching among the pre-Reformation Waldensians, here, here, and here. On the pre-Reformation Lollards, see here and here. And see the comments section of my collection of links on the papacy for some recent additions to those posts. I've also added entries on baptismal regeneration, the New Testament canon, the afterlife, and the perspicuity of scripture. I added new links to the entries on prayer to saints and angels and the eucharist.

When You're Deep In History And Have Ceased To Be Protestant

Robert Wilken is a historian who converted from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism decades ago. He's sometimes mentioned in lists of converts to Catholicism. He appeared on Marcus Grodi's television program "The Journey Home" on EWTN. You often find Catholic scholars making comments like these ones from Wilken's book on the first millennium of church history:

"As the controversy over the dating of the Pasch revealed, there was no central authority within Christianity in the second century. The Church was composed of a constellation of local communities spanning the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East. They had a strong sense of unity among themselves, but they were only loosely organized." (The First Thousand Years [New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2012], 39)

"In the early Church there was no 'private' confession. According to church law the emperor could not present himself quietly before the bishop, confess his sin, and receive absolution. The penitential discipline of the early Church was unremittingly harsh and carried out in front of the Christian people. The penitents were segregated from the rest of the community, assigned a special section in the church, and forbidden to receive the Eucharist." (135)

"By the middle of the third century the bishop of Rome had begun to acquire an unparalleled authority in the West - in Italy, North Africa, Gaul, and Spain. Not, however, in the East. There the churches looked to the bishops in the major cities, Alexandria in Egypt or Antioch in Syria. This geographical fact, that Rome was the principal city in the West, whereas in the East there were several, would lead to a quite different understanding of how the Church was to be governed at the highest level….It is clear from the minutes of the Council of Chalcedon that the bishops, most of whom were from the East, did not view Rome's authority as Leo [the Roman bishop] did." (165-66, 170)

"Apparently [in The Apostolic Tradition, a document of the third century] infant baptism was permissible - though not conventional - and parents or guardians would speak for the children." (176)

Focusing Too Much On The Patristic And Medieval Eras

One of the most popular criticisms of Protestantism, and one that seems to go a long way in convincing people, is the allegation that various Protestant beliefs were absent or not popular enough during the patristic and medieval eras. We're told that justification through baptism was widely accepted during that timeframe, for example, or we're even told that it was universally believed. Or look at how popular it was to pray to the saints and angels. Look at all of the agreement on such issues among the apostolic churches. And so on.

Protestants Aren't The Only Ones With Complicated Canonical Issues

Cameron Bertuzzi recently retweeted some comments from Josh Rasmussen on canonical issues and referred to how "this is a good [argument] for Catholicism". Keep in mind:

- The alleged ability of Catholicism to settle canonical issues in this context only addresses a portion of Catholicism's canon. That canon involves more than scripture. And Catholics continue to disagree with one another (and with non-Catholics) about what qualifies as tradition and what doesn't, which papal teachings are infallible, and so on. There's more agreement among Protestants about the canon of scripture than there is among Catholics about the canon of their rule of faith.

- Canons are complicated by their nature. That's not just true of scripture canons, but also of canons more broadly. People can dispute what documents were and weren't written by an ancient philosopher or a more recent individual, like Thomas Jefferson. If you broaden the canon to include all of the writings of a particular ancient school of philosophy or America's founding fathers in general, then the canonical issues will get even more complicated. How should the school of philosophy be defined? Who belongs to it and who doesn't? Who qualifies as one of America's founding fathers and who doesn't? Which documents attributed to George Washington were actually written by him? And so on. Since a canon of scripture in the Christian context involves multiple figures over a lengthy period of time (especially if you're including the Old Testament canon rather than limiting yourself to the New Testament), it involves the complexities that inherently go with a multi-author canon covering a longer rather than shorter timeframe. And there are other such factors that can make any given canon more or less complicated.

- Here's a series of posts I wrote about an Evangelical justification for the canon of scripture. We've written a lot more about the topic since then. You can find some archives of many of our relevant posts (not all of them) here and here. To summarize, the best explanation for what the relevant sources tell us about the apostles (e.g., Old Testament precedent, what Jesus said about the apostles, what the apostles said about themselves, what the other early Christian sources said about the apostles) is that they were communicating Divine revelation, including scripture. We have to make a probability judgment about whether a given document was part of that revelation, but the same is true of the alternatives (how probable it is that all of the sources supporting Jude's canonicity, for example, were wrong; the likelihood of Catholic arguments about the alleged authority of their denomination; whether it's probable that something that's claimed to be part of Catholic tradition actually is part of that tradition; etc.). It's not as though Protestants are the only ones who have a position to defend or the only ones relying on probability judgments about history. We have more evidence for the canonicity of 1 Corinthians than we have for the canonicity of Hebrews. But the evidence doesn't have to be equally good for every book, and a rejection of Hebrews has to be defended, just as an acceptance of it has to be. We've said a lot more about these and other canonical issues in the threads linked above. See my recent post here for a brief overview of how all of us (including atheists, for example) have to justify our own canons in many contexts in life and how those canonical issues are often complicated.

Protestants Aren't The Only Ones With Solas

To add to what I said in my last post, it's important that Protestants keep in mind that we aren't the only ones with solas. We use the sola terminology more explicitly and more often than others, but we aren't the only ones who accept such concepts. Every rule of faith has parameters. It includes some things while excluding others. It doesn't have to be sola scriptura in order to be sola something. So, if a Catholic, Orthodox, or somebody else wants to complain that he doesn't understand how sola scriptura works in some context, you can ask him if he understands how his own sola works in that context. If he claims that Protestants are being inconsistent by doing X while affirming sola scriptura, ask him if he's being inconsistent by doing X while affirming his own sola. It's often adequate to say, "Scripture is to me what your rule of faith is to you."

It's remarkable how large of a percentage of objections to Protestantism consist of the sort of inconsistencies on the part of the objector that I've been addressing in these last two posts. Take away those inconsistencies, and you take away a large percentage of what many critics of Protestantism consider their best objections.

Some past correspondences with Steve Hays

A longtime Triablogue reader and a friend of Steve Hays thought some of their past email correspondences might be beneficial for others to read. He granted us permission to post these correspondences. He preferred to be anonymous so I've edited and anonymized the content. Of course, "SH" refers to Steve Hays.

Schism

1. Catholic polemical theology stresses the grave sin of schism. But that's circular because schism in Catholic usage is basically a made-up category. And don't quote me NT passages that use the word "schism" in Greek, because that's a semantic fallacy. In ecclesiastical usage, "schism" is a technical term. NT Greek usage doesn't have that specialized meaning.

The NT does have two related categories: heresy and apostasy. The clearest NT example of schism are the heretics who broke away from St. John's congregations (1 John). But, of course, evangelicals don't think the Catholic church is comparable to John's congregations. If anything, it's the other way around. The Catholic church broke away from NT exemplars. 

2. Here's another problem with the traditional Catholic allegation that Protestant denominations are schismatic. Schismatic in relation to what? To the church of Rome? A basic problem with that comparison is that the church of Rome keeps reinventing itself. Even though Protestants broke away from the 16C church of Rome, that no longer exists. It isn't possible to reunite with the 16C church of Rome, even if that was desirable. The 16C church of Rome is radically different from the 21C church of Rome. The 1C church of Rome is very different from the 6C church of Rome. How can you be schismatic in relation to a "parent" denomination that's constantly changing? The church of Rome keeps mutating into something else. 

Of course, Catholic apologists insist that there's fundamental continuity, but that's only convincing to Catholic apologists and like-minded Catholics. 

"Protestantism is not a church"

I'm going to comment on something by an Eastern Orthodox apologist:

https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/orthodoxyandheterodoxy/2017/10/31/protestantism-not-united-not-catholic-not-church/

The EO/evangelical debate is underdeveloped on both sides compared to traditional debates like the Catholic/Protestant debate, the Calvinist/Arminian debate, &c., because evangelicalism wasn't a contender in the East while EO wasn't a contender in the west. So it's useful to engage EO arguments from time to since since that's the trail less taken. I won't comment on everything he says because some of his objections are identical to Catholic objections, and I've discussed those ad nauseam. 

He's interacting with a document called “Reforming Catholic Confession”. I might agree with some of his criticisms, but that just means I disagree with how the “Reforming Catholic Confession” frames certain issues. I can disagree with both of them: Eastern Orthodoxy and the “Reforming Catholic Confession” alike. 

30,000 denominations redux

I'd like to revisit a mindless but ever-popular Catholic trope about the Protestant faith. And that's the claim that sola scriptura spawned "30,000" denominations. The figures varies depending on the Catholic apologist. This is related to the Catholic objection that Protestants can't agree on anything. 

Here's why I say that's a mindless trope: if you think the Protestant movement is so disunited that it doesn't stand for anything, then why classify all these groups as Protestant? Put another way, if you can't say what the opposing position represents, then you have no target to aim at. 

If there's no such thing as a core Protestant theology, then there's nothing to critique. At best, a Catholic apologist could say the basic problem with the Protestant faith is that there is not Protestant faith. That would be catchy, and you could put it in one pithy sentence. 

But of course, Catholic apologists offer detailed critiques of Protestant theology. They write whole books on the subject. And Catholic attacks on the Protestant faith bear an uncanny family resemblance. 

In practice, a Catholic apologist takes one of two approaches. One line of attack is to critique generic Protestant theology. He attacks typical, representative Protestant doctrines. But that's a roundabout admission that Protestant faith does have a common, identifiable core theology.

The other line of attack is to pick a particular expression of the Protestant movement like Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, or Calvinists. Although these have distinctive positions that distinguish them from one another, they are representative Protestant schools of thought. 

So both in principle and practice, Catholic apologists think there are recognizable Protestant doctrines. If they didn't think that, they couldn't write entire books attacking the Protestant faith. 

Why I'm still Protestant

1. Let's begin with an admission. As a Protestant, it would be nice to have more theological clarity and certainty on some issues. It would be nice not having to sift through multiple interpretations of Scripture. It would be nice to have more evidence or direct evidence for some OT events. It would be nice to have more evidence for some books of the Protestant canon. The evidence for the Protestant canon is patchy in places. It would be nice to have more evidence for Jude and 2 Peter, or the Megillot (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther).

2. So why aren't I Roman Catholic? For one thing, I know too much about Roman Catholicism to mistake that for the solution. 

i) To take one example I just used, if I pick up a Protestant commentary, it sometimes reads like a multiple choice exam. The commentator will list several competing interpretations, then by process of elimination, explain why he thinks one interpretation is the best. But sometimes he will confess that it's hard to choose between two competing interpretations.

Guess what–when I pick up a Catholic commentary on the same book, by a scholar like Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer, Jerome Quinn, or Luke Timothy Johnson, it's exactly the same process. They're in the same boat. 

ii) Take another example I used: where the Catholic canon happens to coincide with the Protestant canon, the evidence is uneven in all the same places. Thinner on some books and thicker on others. Catholics don't have an extra stash of evidence to bolster the less well-attested books. So that's no improvement. 

But they have an addition problem we don't, which is poor evidence for the Deuterocanonicals. In that regard, they're worse off that we are. 

BTW, does anyone seriously think that Tobit or Bel and the Dragon is the equal of Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, or Song of Songs? 

3. Now at this point a Catholic apologist will exclaim: That proves our point! Who decides? That's why the Magisterium is indispensable. 

But there are fundamental problems with that "solution":

i) It's an appeal to ersatz evidence. An artificial makeweight. Catholics have no additional evidence, so they invent an oracle to fill the gap. Yet Catholic apologists must resort to so much special pleading to defend the machinations and peregrinations of the papacy. To all appearances, the papacy behaves just like you'd expect an uninspired institution to behave. 

ii) The problem with asking "who decides" is that it only pushes the same question back a step: Who decides "who decides"? You decide who decides! A convert to Catholicism decided to make the Magisterium the decider. So the convert is the ultimate decider. 

4. God could make it easier to be a Protestant. But that's hardly a damaging admission. God could make it easier to be a Catholic. God could make it easier to be a Christian. Catholic and Protestant alike find themselves in situations where they crave greater clarity and certainty. Times when we wish we had more evidence. When you're going through an ordeal, or watching a loved one go through an ordeal, when your life hit rock bottom, wouldn't it be nice to have Jesus appear to you? Or have an angel appear to you? And some Christians experience that, but Christophanies and angelophanies are not a normal part of Christian experience. 

Wouldn't it be nice of God answered your prayers more often? Wouldn't it be nice if you could ask God a question and get an audible answer? But that rarely happens. Many lifelong Christians never have that experience. 

So you just have to muddle through. That's not unique to Protestants. Consider Catholic "saints" who complain about the dark night of the soul. God wasn't there for them. 

5. There's a sense in which charismatics and apostates or atheists have a Roman Catholic outlook, but they are more consistent than Catholics. They take it to the next step.

A charismatic expects that God will give us certainty, clarity, and evidence whenever we need it or ask for it. God will answer all our prayers. He will perform miracles upon request. He will give us a sign. So the charismatic goes the Catholic one better. 

It's not that the charismatic position is completely wrong. Sometimes God does something extra. But that's unpredictable. Not something you can count on.

6. By the same token, apostates and atheists think that God, if there is a God, ought to make things easier. Why should we have to trudge through Ed Feser's, Five Proofs for the Existence of God, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, or Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God–when God can give me a personal, custom-made epiphany? 

That's why some professing Christians become apostates. They had a Catholic outlook that was dashed by rude experience. God didn't give them the clarity, certainty, and evidence they demanded. 

7. The Protestant experience is like hiking on a trail. On some stretches, the trail is indistinct. Are you still on the trail, or are you lost in the forest? However, the trail picks up on the other side, so you were on the right path all along, even when the trail might be unrecognizable in spots.

I'd add that to say the evidence is uneven doesn't mean it's inadequate. It's not that you don't have enough evidence but that in many cases you have more than enough. 

But even if we sometimes lose our bearings, that's the actual situation God has put us in. God doesn't protect us from making mistakes. Rather, God protects us in our mistakes. 

I'm a schismatic!

In light of Catholic ecumenism, it's worth recalling that all Protestants are still officially classified as schismatics: 

schism is the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff (1983 CIC 751). 

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P2H.HTM

Sheltering Jews

https://www.chambon.org/sauvage_chambon_ten_questions_en.htm

Formation of the Catholic epistles

Catholic apologists treat the canon of Scripture as a miscellaneous collection of books. Only church authority can justify that particular, arbitrary selection. The unity is imposed by the church, and not by the internal contents.

By contrast, this study draws attention to intertextual unity. The canon isn't just a random collection of books:

http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/review/letters-from-the-pillar-apostles-the-formation-of-the-catholic-epistles-as

Catholic methodists and Protestant particularists

Roderick Chisolm drew a classic distinction between two different approaches to epistemology: "methodists" begin with criteria or paradigms, whereas "particularists" begin with concrete examples or experience.

Another way of putting this is that methodists have an a prior stating-point while particularists have an a posteriori starting-point. 

This is one way to compare and contrast Catholic and Protestant theological method. Traditionally, Catholic theologists and apologists are methodists. They begin with their theological paradigm. They take their a priori criteria as the frame of reference. 

Take examples like the principle that an infallible text requires an infallible interpreter. Hence, there must be a living teaching office. 

Take appeals to "unity" or "visibility". Therefore, the church must have whatever it takes to meet these conditions. 

Take "extra Ecclesiam nulla salus". Therefore, saving grace must be challenged through the sacraments, which must be channeled through the priesthood, which must be channelled through apostolic succession. A circuit-breaker anywhere in the transmission disrupts the current. Anything after the break is invalid. 

Or take the claim that Protestant churches can't be true churches because they lack historical continuity. To be a real church, you must have a historical genealogy extending back to the founding of the church in the 1C. 

What all these stipulative principles share in common is to begin with a preconceived idea of what must be the case; then adjust your theology accordingly. 

By contrast, Protestants take a more a posteriori approach. We don't intuit ecclesiology.  We don't resort to armchair postulates regarding God's design for the church; rather, we judge God's intentions in retrospect by observing what God actually does. 

Unlike Catholics, we don't presume to know in advance what reality is like. God's design for Christianity is something we discover, after the fact. We learn from Bible history and church history what God's intentions are. 

Unlike Catholics, we're not scandalized by the messiness of church history. 

In a sense, Protestants begin with experience. The experience of divine providence. The experience of Bible history. 

And one of the systemic problems with traditional Catholic theological method is the ever-widening chasm between the idea of Catholicism and the reality of Catholicism. The disconnect between the abstract paradigm and the facts on the ground. 

In practice, the paradigm eventually adapts to unforeseen historical developments. When the paradigm becomes overly-encumbered by too many epicycles, ad hoc adjustments are made to the paradigm. Ex post facto revisions to criteria. Take the sea-change in how tradition is defined. Instead of a historical witness to early Christian belief, it becomes "living tradition". Take reversals on "extra Ecclesiam nulla salus", the anti-modernist strictures of the Leonine PBC, the death penalty, admission of divorced/remarried Catholics to communion, &c. 

Catholic apologists are like lawyers who can argue both sides of any case, depending on whether their client is innocent or guilty. If Benedict XVI or John-Paul II is their client, they defend that position; if Francis is their client, they defend the opposite. Ironically, what started out as an idealistic paradigm has become totally destabilized. 

Both supporters and opponents of Francis resort to circular logic:

Supporters: If Rome reverses policy, then the status quo ante was never definitive, irreversible teaching in the first place.

Opponents: If a pope teaches heresy, then he was never a real pope in the first place. 

Problem for supporters: Catholics can never know what's definitive, irreversible teaching, since all they know is the past, not the future–which may abruptly reverse course.

Problem for opponents: Catholics must be able to independently interpret what's magisterial and what's heretical.

Catholic "unity"

https://epistleofdude.wordpress.com/2017/11/03/1296