Last week, I posted an article for the Aristophrenium entitled Was Mary Sinless?, which was a critical examination of the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Therein I compiled various pieces of biblical and historical evidence showing why Mary could not be regarded as immaculately conceived. Now, I deliberately chose to publish the article on the 26th of August because on the 28th of August, Dr. James White had a debate on this very topic against Christopher Ferrara, Roman Catholic lawyer from the American Catholic Lawyers’ Association. I chose to publish my article two days before the debate so that it can serve as a sort of “pre-emptive strike” that will equip other Christians beforehand so that they would know what arguments to expect. The interesting thing is that Ferrara quite predictably went to Luke 1 and egregiously misinterpreted the verses in it. He also threw up a few arguments that I didn’t address in my article. Of course, Dr. White was more than capable of refuting those arguments, but I think it’d be worth going through a couple of these arguments.

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Introduction

Because of the atmosphere of ecumenicism that has pervaded the Christian Church in recent decades, many Evangelical Christians are ill-equipped to properly handle the distinctive doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. Mariology is one particularly sticky topic. Many misconceptions abound, and there are relatively few Evangelical writings that adequately handle this topic.[1] As such, it is necessary to tackle the Roman Catholic Marian Dogmas with care and accuracy, and this will hopefully be accomplished in this analysis of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

Although the Immaculate Conception has an interesting history that goes back to the Middle Ages, it is one of the more recent of the Marian dogmas to have been officially declared a dogma by the Roman Catholic Church. It was declared as such by Pope Pius IX during 1844 in the apostolic constitution entitled Ineffabilis Deus. It is worth looking at the text of this constitution to see how Rome defines this dogma:

From the very beginning, and before time began, the eternal Father chose and prepared for his only-begotten Son a Mother in whom the Son of God would become incarnate and from whom, in the blessed fullness of time, he would be born into this world. Above all creatures did God so loved her that truly in her was the Father well pleased with singular delight. Therefore, far above all the angels and all the saints so wondrously did God endow her with the abundance of all heavenly gifts poured from the treasury of his divinity that this mother, ever absolutely free of all stain of sin, all fair and perfect, would possess that fullness of holy innocence and sanctity than which, under God, one cannot even imagine anything greater, and which, outside of God, no mind can succeed in comprehending fully.

And indeed it was wholly fitting that so wonderful a mother should be ever resplendent with the glory of most sublime holiness and so completely free from all taint of original sin that she would triumph utterly over the ancient serpent. To her did the Father will to give his only-begotten Son — the Son whom, equal to the Father and begotten by him, the Father loves from his heart — and to give this Son in such a way that he would be the one and the same common Son of God the Father and of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was she whom the Son himself chose to make his Mother and it was from her that the Holy Spirit willed and brought it about that he should be conceived and born from whom he himself proceeds.[2]

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I have a better idea for your consideration, Rick Warren:

I challenge any church in America to match the spiritual maturity, godliness and commitment of Jesus Christ.

And when you realize you don’t, repent daily.

~*~

(Rick Warren subsequently deleted this tweet. But since he did so without any comment, it is impossible to know his reason for doing so. We might pray that it was because he was convicted by the Spirit and repented. Nevertheless, it is illustrative as an object lesson.)

I don’t tire of saying it, Akshay is simply one of the most insightful well-articulated obscure young(?) Christian thinkers in the blogosphere.

I’ve been told more times than I’d like to have heard it that religion is the root of all war. The people who say this are generally people who believe that religion is irrelevant, unscientific, illogical and unreliable – the kind of stuff that weak people need to believe in so that they can cajole their insecurities, calm their restless fears and play the sacrificial host to their nagging superstitions – the kind of stuff that helps you sleep at night.

Their views of religion aside, I find it naive and somewhat ignorant that one would assume that religion was the root of all war. Naive, because it assumes that man would not go to war if not for religious beliefs. Ignorant, because it negates all the war and violence in history that was initiated by the most non-religious of men. [eg. Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Stalin]

Men go to war because men have war in their hearts. Religion may fuel the fire, but I find it naive to think that religion started the fire. If there was no religion, would not men fight for the color of their skin, for their place on the ladder of social class, for the borders of their countries, for the expansion of their kingdoms, for the establishment of their non-religious dogmas? Have they not gone to war for those very reasons in the past?

To take religion out of the picture would only mean that there was one less reason/excuse in the world for men to go to war. The fact that men go to war is not the failure of religion. It is the failure of man. It is his greed, his pride, his stubborn rebellion against reason and his insatiable hunger for glory. To fail to recognize that, is to fail to confront ourselves as a people. To fail to confront ourselves, is to set the stage for a world at war with itself. With or without religion.

http://whereisakshay.blogspot.com/2007/10/at-head-of-every-sword.html

Sorry misotheists, I know this is news to you but religion is not to blame; certainly no more than skin colour or social class systems are to blame. Because without all these things men would still have war in their hearts. Religion is not the reason for wars or the cause of our ills. It doesn’t poison everything as one of the four horsemen of the new-atheist apocalypse puts it. Far from it. You see, it’s not skin colour; it’s pride. It’s not social classes or land; it’s greed. It’s not religion; it’s man. Man is to blame. Man and every wicked thing within his heart. The rest is just an excuse. It’s fluff. And as soon as you take your focus off the man to point the finger elsewhere, you’ve taken your eye off the real instigator.

Here is a deep thought to chew on: The will is not a cause; it is an effect, whose cause is conation. “Acts of the will cannot come to pass of themselves,” writes Arthur Pink. “To say they can is to postulate an uncaused effect.” John Frame concurs, saying, “The very idea of a ‘will’ which exists in some independence from the person, the intellect, and the emotions, is deeply problematic.” [1]

Choice is a term describing a circumstance appropriate to volition or acts of will, which are determined (causally necessitated) by the mental activity of conation. The term conative (desire) describes one of the three aspects of the human mind, the other two being cognitive (intellect) and affective (emotion); [2] as such, the conative consists of the cognitive and affective and causally produces how one acts on them. Therefore, as Arthur Pink astutely noted: if volition or the will is the effect of these causal faculties, then it is subject to them; if it is subject to them, then it is not sovereign; if it is not sovereign, then we cannot predicate freedom of it.

But freedom should not be predicated of faculties at any rate, but rather of agency. As John Locke wrote, “Liberty is not an idea belonging to volition or preferring, but to the person having the power of doing, or abstaining to do, according as the mind shall choose or direct.” [3] I reference him not as an authority but as having raised a very good point. As the agent is free and not his will, so we should reject ‘free will’ in favour of ‘free agency’.

References:

1. On Arthur Pink: see Chapter 7 of his The Sovereignty of God, under the heading “The nature of the human will.” On John Frame: see his answer to the question on “Agent Causation and Free Will,” as well as the article “Perspectivalism 101” by his friend Joseph Torres.
2. See the article on “Conation” at Wikipedia.
3. “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” which can be found in print in Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources from Hackett Publishing Company, 1998, by Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins, eds.