Mary
Mother of God · Ever-Virgin · Immaculate · Assumed into heaven · Mediatrix and Queen · the doctrine of Mary according to Rome, weighed by the Word of God.
What Mariology Is
Mariology is the body of Roman Catholic teaching about the Virgin Mary. Rome’s own manuals present it as a part of dogma. In the words of Joseph Pohle’s standard treatise, it “is that part of Dogmatic Theology which treats of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Divine Redeemer,” and because she is his mother she is “intimately bound up with the atonement.” That last phrase is the heart of the matter. Rome does not merely honor Mary. It assigns her a part in the saving work of Christ.
Scripture says remarkably little about her. As Tim Perry admits in The Essential Lexham Dictionary of Church History, Mary is “a fairly minor character in the New Testament.” She appears in the birth narratives, at Cana, at the cross, and once more in prayer with the church (Acts 1:14). After that the Bible is silent. Everything else Rome teaches about her was built up over centuries. The New Dictionary of Theology calls it “a classic example of the gradual development of doctrine,” and Philip Schaff traced the turn to the fourth century:
The Catholic church, however, both Latin and Greek, did not stop with this. After the middle of the fourth century it overstepped the wholesome Biblical limit, and transformed the “mother of the Lord” into a mother of God, the humble “handmaid of the Lord” into a queen of heaven, the “highly favored” into a dispenser of favors, the “blessed among women” into an intercessor above all women, nay, we may almost say, the redeemed daughter of fallen Adam, who is nowhere in Holy Scripture excepted from the universal sinfulness, into a sinlessly holy co-redeemer.
Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 3, §81
For a side-by-side summary of each teaching and the Scripture that answers it, see the Mary Comparison Table.
The Four Marian Dogmas
Mother of God (431). The Council of Ephesus confirmed the title Theotokos, “God-bearer,” to defend the truth that the child in Mary’s womb was one person, truly God and truly man. Rome states it plainly: “the Church confesses that Mary is truly ‘Mother of God’ (Theotokos)” (CCC 495). Rightly understood, the title guards the doctrine of Christ, and Elizabeth called her “the mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43). But in time the title was cut loose from Christ and made a throne for Mary. As the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia warns, it is “not a biblical term, and is perhaps better avoided in view of its dangerous Mariological implications when isolated from Christology.”
Perpetual Virginity (649). Rome teaches that Mary remained a virgin before, during, and after the birth of Christ, and the liturgy hails her as “Ever-virgin” (CCC 499). The brothers and sisters of Jesus, it says, are “close relations” or the children of “another Mary” (CCC 500). Scripture reads otherwise. Joseph “knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son” (Matthew 1:25). The people of Nazareth named his brothers, James, Joses, Juda, and Simon, and asked, “are not his sisters here with us?” (Mark 6:3). His brothers did not believe in him at first (John 7:5), but they were praying with Mary after the resurrection (Acts 1:14), and Paul met “James the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:19). As the ISBE concludes, “The natural reading of these several passages is that Mary and Joseph had normal marital relations.” Much of the argument for the doctrine, the same article observes, rests on the notion that celibacy is holier than marriage, “But there is no basis for that idea in either the OT or the NT.”
Immaculate Conception (1854). Pius IX defined that Mary “was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God … preserved immune from all stain of original sin,” and the Catechism adds that she “remained free of every personal sin her whole life long” (CCC 491, 493). Yet Scripture knows no exception: “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). After the birth of Jesus, Mary brought the offering the law required for purification, one bird of it a sin offering (Luke 2:22–24; Leviticus 12:6–8). Above all, she called God “my Saviour” (Luke 1:47). Boettner states the point simply: “No one other than a sinner needs a Saviour.” Thomas Aquinas himself rejected the doctrine, and the New Dictionary of Theology notes that when it was defined, “There was no scriptural basis for it.”
Assumption (1950). Pius XII declared it “a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory,” and warned that whoever doubts it “has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith” (Munificentissimus Deus 44–45). Scripture says nothing of it. Even Rome’s own theologian Ludwig Ott admitted, as Geisler and MacKenzie report, that “direct and express scriptural proofs are not to be had.” The story first appears in apocryphal writings, the transitus Mariae, which, as the Lexham Survey of Theology records, “Pope Gelasius I condemned … as being apocryphal and false.”
The dates of each dogma, with the earlier teaching that prepared for it, are set out on the Roman Catholic Dogmas chart.
Mediatrix and Queen
The four dogmas concern Mary’s person. The deeper error concerns her work. Rome teaches that at the cross Mary was “lovingly consenting to the immolation of this Victim which she herself had brought forth” (Lumen Gentium 58). It teaches that “she cooperated by her obedience, faith, hope, and burning charity in the Savior’s work of restoring supernatural life to souls,” and that from heaven “by her manifold intercession [she] continues to bring us the gifts of eternal salvation. … Therefore the Blessed Virgin is invoked in the Church under the titles of Advocate, Helper, Benefactress, and Mediatrix” (CCC 968–969).
The popes went further still. Leo XIII wrote, “as no man goeth to the Father but by the Son, so no man goeth to Christ but by His Mother” (Octobri Mense, 1891). Pius X taught that Mary “merited to become most worthily the Reparatrix of the lost world and Dispensatrix of all the gifts that Our Savior purchased for us by His Death and by His Blood” (Ad Diem Illum 12, 1904). Pohle’s treatise lists the titles the theologians gave her: “liberatrix, salvatrix, reparatrix, restauratrix, reconciliatrix, and co-operatrix.” And Louis de Montfort, whose devotion shaped modern Catholic piety, told the faithful that “we must never go to our Lord, except by Mary,” and warned, “Beware, predestinate soul, of believing that it is more perfect to go straight to Jesus, straight to God.”
Rome insists that none of this “takes away from nor adds anything to the dignity and efficaciousness of Christ the one Mediator” (Lumen Gentium 62; compare CCC 970). But the Word of God leaves no room for a second mediator, however subordinate: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Christ “ever liveth to make intercession” for those who come to God by him (Hebrews 7:25), and he bids us come boldly to the throne of grace ourselves (Hebrews 4:16). Geisler and MacKenzie conclude that “the scriptural evidence for calling Mary a mediator or co-redemptrix is totally lacking.” Even at Cana, Mary sent the servants to her Son: “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it” (John 2:5). As McCarthy observes, “If the passage has anything to say about intercessory prayer, it teaches that we should take our requests directly to the Lord Jesus even as Mary herself did.” Gregg Allison writes that “with deep perplexity and unmitigated concern, evangelical theology laments and rejects” these titles, for “her mediatorial role is wrong because there is no need for it.”
Devotion to Mary
Rome distinguishes the worship due to God (latria) from the veneration given to the saints (dulia), and assigns to Mary a higher veneration (hyperdulia). The Catechism says that “the Church’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin is intrinsic to Christian worship” and commends the rosary as “an epitome of the whole Gospel” (CCC 971). In the Hail Mary the faithful are taught to “surrender ‘the hour of our death’ wholly to her care” (CCC 2677). The distinctions are fine on paper, but as Geoffrey Bromiley wrote in the ISBE, “Mariolatry may not correspond to the verbal definitions; it is certainly in keeping with the attested practice.” Mary is crowned “Queen of Heaven,” a title Scripture knows only as the name of an idol (Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17–19).
When a woman in the crowd cried out, “Blessed is the womb that bare thee,” the Lord Jesus answered, “Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it” (Luke 11:27–28). He did not deny that his mother was blessed. He pointed beyond her to the only blessing that saves.
Co-Redemptrix. The title has long circulated in Catholic devotion and in papal language, but it has never been defined as dogma. See the note on the Dogmas chart.
Blessed Among Women
None of this is a reason for Christians to think less of Mary than Scripture does. We gladly join Elizabeth in saying, “Blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:42), and we fulfill Mary’s own words, “from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48). She believed the word of the Lord when it seemed impossible. She bore and nursed and raised the Son of God. She stood at the cross when most of the disciples had fled, and she waited in prayer with the church for the promised Spirit. Calvin wrote that “to this day we cannot enjoy the blessing brought to us in Christ without thinking at the same time of that which God gave as adornment and honor to Mary, in willing her to be the mother of his only-begotten Son.”
But we honor her as she herself would have us honor her, by giving her the place Scripture gives her, and no more. She was never sinless, for “all have sinned” (Romans 3:23), and Scripture makes no exception for her. She merited nothing on her own; she “found favour with God” (Luke 1:30), and called herself the Lord’s handmaid of “low estate” (Luke 1:38, 48). She did not remain a virgin, but lived as Joseph’s wife and the mother of his children (Matthew 1:25; 13:55–56). She stood in need of Christ for her own salvation, as much as any sinner in Nazareth, and rejoiced “in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:47). And she contributes nothing to the forgiveness of sins, for “by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14), and “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
“We honor Mary best,” wrote Bromiley, “by giving her the dignity that is hers in Scripture and not by indulging in speculative glorification.” John MacArthur put it tenderly: in the Magnificat “Mary was amazed that an absolutely holy God would do such great things for one as unholy and undeserving as her.” That is the true Mary of the Gospels, a redeemed sinner who magnified the Lord. Her last recorded words to men still point the way: “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.”
