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)
Thanks for this article, Jason. It's curious how we have previous papal statements (where they're speaking as pope, on a matter of faith and morals), indicating that a belief in the PVM and Assumption are necessary for saving faith.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, you have the very ecumenical, universalist leanings of Vatican II. So the two seem to be in tension.
How would you address this with RC apologists?
Different Catholics have different positions on those issues, so it depends on who you're interacting with. If they're adding qualifiers to what earlier sources said and claiming to be holding the same position as those earlier sources, about the perpetual virginity of Mary or whatever else, they should be expected to demonstrate that the earlier sources had such qualifiers in mind or implied them in some other way. In other posts, I've discussed the variety of views ancient sources seem to have held on the necessity of belief in Mary's perpetual virginity, such as here and here.
DeleteThough I discuss some of the relevant sources in those posts, I haven't studied the entire history of what's been believed about Mary's perpetual virginity and the necessity of belief in it. If there's a book, article, or other source that provides that sort of history, I'm not aware of it. I've read that sort of treatment of other doctrines, but not the perpetual virginity of Mary.
I've occasionally brought up Anthony Lusvardi's Baptism Of Desire And Christian Salvation (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Of America Press, 2024), for example. See my citations of it here and here. That book provides a lot of information about the history of belief in the concept of baptism of desire and other baptismal issues to some extent. I disagree with some aspects of the book. He underestimates how much opposition there was to baptismal regeneration before the Reformation. He doesn't address many of the disagreements that existed about the nature of the justificatory efficacy of baptism among the sources who believed that baptism has some type of efficacy in the context of justification. But the book provides a large amount of information about how beliefs about baptism of desire and other baptismal issues developed over time. That includes a lot of absence of baptismal beliefs earlier that would arise and become popular later and contradictions among the sources. Any modern claim about what the church allegedly has always believed, development of doctrine, and so forth has to be evaluated in light of evidence like what's provided in Lusvardi's book.
I mentioned earlier that one thing we should do is ask people arguing for consistency among the sources to demonstrate that earlier sources included the qualifiers modern sources have in mind. Another thing that should be brought up, which is illustrated well by Lusvardi's book, is how many disputes there have been on the subject in question, one source arguing against another. If somebody is going to claim that there was one view always held by the church, why were people arguing if they were in agreement? Somebody can try to get around such difficulties by defining doctrinal development in a way that accommodates those difficulties, but then you have to ask what evidential value that sort of appeal to doctrinal development has. Why are we supposed to believe in that kind of development?