Mary, the Mother of God
From First Things >>>>> http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=907
The project known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together is now in its thirteenth year—following its initial statement, “The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium,” with much-discussed statements on salvation, Scripture, and the Communion of Saints. The group is currently engaged in studying what can be said together about the Blessed Virgin Mary, and a number of participants were asked to prepare preliminary papers. With the permission of the authors, we will be posting five of these papers over the next five days—papers by Edward T. Oakes, J.I. Packer, T.M. Moore, Matthew Levering, and Cornelius Plantinga.—eds.
Protestants and Catholics differ across a range of issues, but never more obviously than over the Catholic doctrine that the mother of Jesus was immaculately conceived, meaning that from her conception on she was free from sin, very much including from the “stain” of original sin (“immaculate” = without stain). But even those who disagree with the doctrine can admit its meaning: the grace given to Mary is above all the premier example of the grace of meritless predestination.
: the grace given to Mary is above all the premier example of the grace of .This absence of merit on Mary’s part is obviously no mere concession to the Protestant stress on sola gratia but is required by the very meaning of the words immaculate and conception. Since this grace became operative at the very inception of her existence, it had to come to her prior to any deeds she might later perform. Furthermore, the doctrine explicitly states that the grace of the Immaculate Conception was given to Mary in view of the later merits of Christ. As Pope Pius IX says in his encyclical solemnly defining the doctrine for Catholics, Ineffabilis Deus, “To the glory of the holy and undivided Trinity, to the honor and renown of the Virgin, . . . the most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and in view of the merits of Christ Jesus the Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin.”
But Pius IX also makes clear that, although singular, this grace was not given to Mary purely for her own glorification but to effect a turning point in salvation history:
“I will put enmity between you and the woman.” In these words the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was announced to our first parents. It was to be the reversal of the friendship with the serpent contracted by Eve, when she listened to his voice and fell under his power. The second Eve was never to be under the power of the devil; the enmity between them was to admit of no possible exception. This involved the grace of being conceived immaculate. Mary’s Immaculate Conception was the foundation of all her graces. The absence of any stain or spot of sin distinguished her from all the rest of mankind. It distinguished her from the holiest of the Saints, since they, one and all, were sinners. Her perfect sinlessness was the source of all her glory and all her majesty; it was this which opened the door to the unlimited graces that she received from God; it was this that qualified her for her divine maternity and raised her to the throne as Queen of heaven. (emphases in the original)
In other words, Mary is the perfect example of sola gratia at work: Everything she later did and was given came from this first grace of predestination, won for her purely and entirely by the merits of Christ, not her own; and even those “merits” she “earned” came from the graces given her aboriginally, in view of her predestined status as the chosen Mother of the Savior. As Pius IX clearly asserts, by a venerable exegetical tradition dating from patristic times, she was predestined to be sinless when God spoke thus to the Serpent in the Garden of Eden after our first parents’ first sin: “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your dead, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15).
By placing the promise of Mary’s sinlessness in the Garden, Pius definitively altered the usual perspective on what predestination means. Unlike both Protestant and Catholic views of predestination in the Augustinian tradition (which tends to see predestination in terms of the fate of the individual soul at the end of time), recent Catholic mariological thought picks up on Pius IX’s salvation-historical perspective by interpreting Mary’s predestined status to be the mother of the Lord as part of God’s wider intentions for the world. For example, in his essay “The Sign of the Woman,” located in his book Mary: The Church at the Source 
The Fathers saw God’s words of punishment to the serpent after the Fall as a first promise of the Redeemer—an allusion to the Descendent [Seed, Offspring] that bruises the serpent’s head. There has never been a moment in history without a gospel. At the very moment of the Fall, the promise also begins. The Fathers also attached importance to the fact that Christology and Mariology are inseparably interwoven already from this primordial beginning. The first promise of Christ, which stands in a chiaroscuro and which only the light to come finally deciphers, is a promise to and through the woman. (emphases added)
In other words, Mary is wholly enclosed within the biblical narrative of God’s dispensation to his people, an insight deftly caught by Dante when he places on the lips of St. Bernard of Clairvaux this address to Mary: “Virgin Mother, daughter of your Son” (Paradiso
Read the entire essay and the others at >>>>> http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=907
