One of the issues that sometimes comes up in discussions of Mary's perpetual virginity is the necessity of accepting the doctrine. Is acceptance of it a requirement for salvation? If somebody believes in the perpetual virginity of Mary, to what degree does he think opponents of the doctrine have erred? As my last post mentioned, a person could be agnostic about whether Mary was a perpetual virgin. And people who support the doctrine or oppose it can do so to a wide variety of degrees. Issues like these often get overlooked or underestimated, not just when considering the timeframes I'm focused on in these posts, but also more broadly.
I've written in the past about an important, but neglected figure of the Reformation in England, Thomas Bilney. See my biographical sketch of him here. You can watch a video about his conversion here. And here's a segment on his martyrdom. He had a lot of influence on other Reformation figures who are better known, like Hugh Latimer. Bilney didn't die as a martyr until 1531, but the perpetual virginity of Mary came up during an earlier trial in 1527. John Foxe's Book Of Martyrs discusses that 1527 trial and refers to how Bilney was asked the following question:
"VII. Whether that a man may believe, without spot of heresy, that our Lady remained not always a virgin?"
Bilney's response:
"To the seventh article he said, that it is not to be thought contrary."
I've seen two different interpretations of Bilney's response. John Davis wrote, "To article seven he answered unorthodoxly by saying that one should believe that the Virgin 'remained not always a virgin'." (Heresy And Reformation In The South East Of England, 1520-1559 [Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press Inc., 1983], 49) However, I've also seen Bilney interpreted as only saying that opposition to the perpetual virginity of Mary is acceptable within Christian orthodoxy. Davis seems to be taking Bilney's response as affirming the following portion of the question: "that our Lady remained not always a virgin". The other view takes Bilney as responding to the question as a whole, which merely allows rejection of Mary's perpetual virginity as one among multiple options. That latter view seems to make more sense, since Bilney was expected to respond to the question as a whole, not just a portion of it. But Davis may have known of one or more other factors involved that convinced him of the other view (something in the larger context of the trial or whatever else). I think the best conclusion to reach is that Bilney at least allowed opposition to the perpetual virginity of Mary within orthodoxy and that he may have gone as far as denying that Mary was a perpetual virgin.
Whatever you make of the situation with Bilney, some early Protestants believed in Mary's perpetual virginity, but didn't consider it something a Christian was required to accept. For example, William Tyndale wrote that Mary's perpetual virginity "is yet none article of our faith to be saved by. But we believe it with a story-faith, because we see no cause reasonable to think the contrary." Go to the article just linked for more examples of the diversity of views held around the time of Tyndale and in later generations. Near the end of the sixteenth century, Richard Hooker wrote:
"This is why, even in divine matters, we may sometimes legitimately doubt and suspend our judgment, inclining to neither one side nor the other, such as concerning the time of the fall of both man and angels. Some things we may very well hold as probable and likely to be true, such as the belief that men have souls by creation instead of by propagation, or that the Mother of our Lord was a virgin after our Lord's birth as well as before (for it is necessary that we believe that she was a virgin before; but her continuing in virginity only has more likelihood of truth than of falsity)." (The Laws Of Ecclesiastical Polity 2:7:5, in Bradford Littlejohn, et al., edd., The Laws Of Ecclesiastical Polity In Modern English [Hillsdale, Michigan: Davenant Press, 2019], 140)
No comments:
Post a Comment