Friday, June 12, 2020

Steve Ray is Wrong about Mariology (and a note on typology)

In a recent issue of Reason and Theology, Steve Ray (alongside William Albrecht and Michael Lofton) repeated the bogus claim that the Catholic dogmas of Mary have always been believed throughout Christian history:

 

Steve Ray on the Life of Mary 


 To see why this is easily disproven, take the overwhelming historical evidence against the Immaculate Conception being an apostolic teaching:

 

Answering Tim Staples on Patristic Mariology and the Immaculate Conception

 

Interestingly, Lofton tried to defend the Marian dogmas through typology—his reasoning is that the NT authors had no issue with using typology, so it is proper for Catholics to appeal to such. Problem is (1) there is no historical evidence that such beliefs were part of the theology of the NT authors; (2) there is no historical evidence from the earliest centuries that beliefs such as the Bodily Assumption and Immaculate Conception were believed and (3) such is an exercise in special pleading—how does one determine if one is using typology properly? (Lofton’s answer will be “the Church is infallible, ergo, it is allowable, if not proper, to use typology in such a way!" in other words, assuming Rome is the true Church to prove Rome is the true Church—a circular argument).

 

For the NT authors, even when they used typology and other forms of interpretations that are not based on the historical-grammatical method, they based such on a historical reality; for instance, Matt 2:15’s use of Hosea 11:1 is based on the historical reality of the Holy Family returning from Egypt; there is no historical reality behind Rome’s Mariology. Note what one Evangelical apologist wrote on the use of Hos 11:1 in the Gospel of Matthew:

 

When Matthew narrates the flight to Egypt, he says (Matt. 2.15) that this event “fulfilled” Hosea 11.1, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” You may certainly puzzle over Matthew’s application of Hosea 11.1. You can worry about double fulfillment. You can ask what Matthew means by “fulfillment” in this passage. You can wonder about what sort of parallel he is drawing between the events in Jesus’ life and the events in Israel’s history. But what you cannot doubt, if you are a reasonable person at all, is that Matthew is saying to his readers that the flight to Egypt and the return from Egypt really happened in the life of the infant Jesus, and that this event fulfilled something written in the Old Testament.

 

Douglas Moo comments trenchantly concerning Matthew and the Christian worldview:

 

[Matthew] writes from the conviction that the decisive revelation of God had recently been manifested in the historical actualities of Jesus’ life and teaching. To say . . . that “’Jesus said’ or ‘Jesus did’ need not always mean that in history Jesus said or did what follows” . . . attributes to Matthew an unconcern with history that seems to me at odds with one of the most distinctive features of the Christian message . . .I am suggesting that concern for historical actualities, which is the essential byproduct of the incarnation, kept [Matthew] from combining history and nonhistory . . . (Douglas J. Moo, “Matthew and Midrash,” JETS 26 [1983], pp. 38-39)

 

For Mathew, as for John, theological significance and literal events are inextricably woven together. Fake points don’t make points. (Lydia McGrew, The Mirror and the Mask: Liberating the Gospels from Literary Devices [Tampa, Fla: DeWard Publishing Company Limited, 2019], 249-50)

 

 For more on Mariology, see my book-length treatment thereof, Behold the Mother of My Lord: Towards a Mormon Mariology (2017). It contains a discussion of the "go-to" purported OT "type" o Mary, the ark of the covenant, for e.g.