In his 2017
debate with Peter D. Williams, James White, during the cross-examination,
questioned Peter who (correctly) noted that the Eastern Orthodox believe in the Bodily
Assumption of Mary (albeit, not as a dogma).
As one Eastern Orthodox bishop and theologian wrote:
But Orthodoxy, while for the most part
denying the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary firmly believe in her
Bodily Assumption. Like the rest of humankind, Our Lady underwent physical
death, but in her case the Resurrection of the Body has been anticipated: after
death her body was taken up or ‘assumed’ into heaven and her tomb was found to
be empty. She has passed beyond death and judgement and lives already in the
Age to Come. Yet she is not thereby separated from the rest of humanity, for
that some bodily glory which Mary enjoys now, all of us hope one day to share.
Belief in the Assumption of the Mother of God
is clearly and unambiguously affirmed in the hymns sung by the Church on 15
August, the Feast of the ‘Dormition’ or ‘Falling Asleep’. But Orthodoxy, unlike
Rome, has never proclaimed the Assumption as a dogma, nor would it ever wish to
do so. (Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church
[rev ed.; London: Penguin Group, 1997], 260, emphasis added)
In a
footnote for the above, Ware adds the following:
Immediately after the Pope proclaimed the
Assumption as a dogma in 1950, a few Orthodox (by way of reaction against the
Roman Catholic Church) began to express doubts about the Bodily Assumption and
even explicitly to deny it; but they are certainly not representative of the Orthodox Church as a whole. (Ibid., 270
n. 1, emphasis in original)
