CHAPTER 5

FROM TYPING TO TEACHING

THE MOTHER IS THE MESSAGE

THE STUDY OF biblical typology can easily consume an avid reader—or an amateur detective.It’s fascinating to search out the ways in which, as Saint Augustine said, the New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old is revealed in the New. Typology uncovers a hidden dimension to every page of the scriptures; careful study shows us that God writes history the way men write words, and that He is an author of supremely subtle artistry and meticulous craft. He wastes no words in revelation; nothing is incidental or accidental in God’s providence.

Typology is liberating. It frees us from the slavish reading of biblical texts in isolation from all other biblical texts and in isolation from Tradition. Typology can also be illuminating, revealing the richness of passages that had formerly seemed obscure or trivial.

Yet typology has its own pitfalls, and its abuses have led some scholars far afield and others into heresy. To avoid these excesses, it’s important that we be clear about our purposes, that we begin with an end in mind. When we read scripture in a typological way, we’re not trying to crack a code, or solve a puzzle, or impose our own fanciful visions on the inspired word. We’re trying to encounter a person. We want to know God, His ways, His plan, His chosen people—and His mother.

Thus we want to avoid a danger I call atomism—concentrating on biblical types in isolation, as if they were disconnected metaphors or individual specimens in a laboratory dish. Nor are we talking about some occult system of symbols when we consider the typology of Eve, the ark of the covenant, and the queen mother. We’re looking at creatures ordained by providence to come to fulfillment in a real, historical person. Just as Isaac, Moses, and David were real people who foreshadowed the divine Messiah, Jesus, so Eve, and the ark, and the queen mother give us glimpses of the great reality that is Mary.

She, then, must be our goal as we study her types. For she was and she remains a real, living person; and a person is an irreducible mystery, not the sum of his or her symbols. Paul was moved by the way Jesus was foreshadowed in Adam; but Paul was in love with Jesus Christ. So we must come to know and love Mary herself as she is illuminated by her biblical types.

This is not something optional for Christians. It is not something ornamental in the gospel. Mary is—in a real, abiding, and spiritual sense—our mother. If we are to know the brotherhood of Jesus Christ, we must come to know the mother whom we share with Jesus Christ. Without her, our understanding of the gospel will be, at best, partial. Without her, our understanding of salvation can never be familial. It will be stalled out in the old covenant, where God’s fatherhood was considered to be metaphorical, and man’s sonship was more like servility.

Who is this woman, then—this mother, this chosen vessel of God and of all believers? She is a historical person, and the Church has carefully preserved certain historical facts about her in the scriptural accounts and in the form of dogmas.

Keeping the Faith

What is dogma? A useful definition comes from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who wrote that “dogma is by definition nothing other than an interpretation of Scripture.” The cardinal’s insight was confirmed by the Church’s International Theological Commission in its 1989 document On the Interpretation of Dogmas: “In the dogma of the Church, one is thus concerned with the correct interpretation of the Scriptures.” Dogma, then, is the Church’s infallible exegesis of scripture.

There are certain facts of Mary’s life that the Bible teaches explicitly. Her virginal conception of Jesus, for example, is put forth clearly and unequivocally in Luke’s gospel (1:34–35). Other facts are implicit in the biblical text, but have always been taught by the Church, such as Mary’s assumption into heaven and her immaculate conception. The truth of these implicit facts is no less important for our understanding of the gospel. In fact, implicit details are often more important to a narrative, because they show us what the narrator takes for granted. Though these details—assumptions, if you will—remain unspoken, they make up the fabric in which the narrative is woven. Without their tacit presence, the narrative disintegrates.

Thus, down through the centuries, the Church has carefully preserved, protected, and defended its Marian teachings, because to give them up would be to give up the gospel. To suppress them would be to deprive God’s family of its mother. Without the dogmas, Mary becomes unreal: a random female body from Nazareth, insignificant in her individuality, incidental to the gospels’ narrative. And when Mary becomes unreal, so does the incarnation of God, which depended upon Mary’s consent; so does the suffering flesh of Christ, which He took from His mother; so does the Christian’s status as a child of God, which depends upon our sharing in the household and family of Jesus, the Son of David, the Son of Mary.

Together with the scriptural accounts, the Church’s Marian dogmas keep us close to the incarnate reality of God’s family. Again, for a believing Christian, neither the dogmas nor the types should be abstractions or metaphors. They are aspects of a living person, our mother.

Consider the Christian example of Saint John of Damascus, a Father of the Church who loved the scriptures so much that he moved to Jerusalem in order to live within their landscape. He knew, in a profound way, all the Old Testament types of Mary and Jesus. And he knew the facts of Mary’s life, including those that had not yet been officially declared as dogmas. Around 740 A.D., he preached three homilies on Mary’s assumption into heaven, and he incorporated many of the dogmas of the Church and the types we’ve discussed in this book: the new Eve, the ark of the covenant, the queen mother. Yet all the while, John never preached about ideas; he interpreted the scriptures as he preached about a person, a person who had been taken by God to heaven.

His evocation of Mary’s reception into heaven is especially telling. “David her forefather, and her father in God, dances with joy,” he said, “and the angels dance with him, and the archangels applaud.” In imagining this scene, John did not see King David dancing around a dogma, or around a metaphor for the ark of the covenant (2 Sam 6:14). Rather, John saw David dancing out of love for a person, who was his daughter and yet his mother.

It is, however, dogma—the Church’s infallible interpretation of scripture—that enables us to see this real mother as clearly as David did. For the dogmas are facts of faith that preserve a certain vision of God’s family.

God’s Plan of Salvation: Immaculately Conceived

The immaculate conception is the doctrine that God preserved Mary free from all stain of original sin. From the first moment of her conception in the womb of her mother, then, she lived in a state of sanctifying grace won for her by the merits of her son, Jesus. Thus the angel’s greeting to Mary, “Hail, full of grace,” was uttered years before Jesus won grace for mankind. Yet Mary was, even then, “full of grace.”

Cardinal John Henry Newman taught that the immaculate conception was an important corollary to Mary’s role as the New Eve. He asked: “If Eve was raised above human nature by that indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that Mary had even a greater grace?…And if Eve had this supernatural inward gift given her from the first moment of her personal existence, is it possible to deny that Mary too had this gift from the very first moment of her personal existence?”

Newman also found it fitting for Christ to be born of a sinless mother.

Mary was no mere instrument in God’s dispensation. The Word of God…did not merely pass through her, as He may pass through us in Holy Communion. It was no heavenly body which the Eternal Son assumed…. No, He imbibed, He sucked up her blood and her substance into His Divine Person. He became man from her, and received her lineaments and her features as the appearance and character under which He should manifest Himself to the world. He was known, doubtless, by His likeness to her, to be her Son…. Was it not fitting…that the Eternal Father should prepare her for this ministration by some preeminent sanctification?

The immaculate conception was a commonplace of the early Church. Saint Ephrem of Syria testified to it in the fourth century, as did Saint Augustine in the fifth. Augustine put the doctrine in its proper, familial context, saying that it would be an offense against Jesus to say that His mother was a sinner. All have sinned, said Augustine, “except the holy Virgin Mary, concerning whom, for the honor of the Lord, I wish no question to be raised at all, when we are treating of sins. After all, how do we know what greater degree of grace for a complete victory over sin was conferred on her who merited to conceive and bring forth Him Who all admit was without sin.”

While in the West theologians have taught the doctrine somewhat negatively, emphasizing Mary’s sinlessness, the Eastern churches have always put the accent, instead, on her abundant holiness. The affectionate colloquial term for her is Panagia, the All-Holy; for everything in her is holy.

Still, the Church did not make a dogmatic pronouncement on the immaculate conception until 1854. In the meantime, some Christians—even some saints—worried that to say that Mary’s sinlessness proceeded from the moment of her conception would somehow nullify her human nature or Christ’s saving work. Yet Pope Pius IX addressed these concerns completely as he solemnly defined the dogma “that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of Original Sin.”

That’s less than a single sentence, but it’s densely packed with teaching. Pope Pius makes it clear that the immaculate conception is a unique (“singular”) grace of God, just as the incarnation of Jesus is a unique event in history. Next, he states unequivocally that this singular grace was won for Mary by Jesus Christ, her Savior. And finally, the pope emphasizes that the immaculate conception is a divine act of preservation—a work of God, and not a work of Mary herself.

The immaculate conception, then, was a fruit of the redemption applied to Mary by way of anticipation; for the redemption was always in view for the eternal God, Who is not bound by time as we are. Thus, Christ’s redemption applies to you and me, though we could not be there at Calvary—and it applied to Mary at the moment of her creation, though Christ’s saving death was still years away. Her redemption was an act of preservation, while for all others it is an act of deliverance.

Even today, we can see that Christ, in an analogous way, rescues some sinners by deliverance and others by preservation. Some people turn away from sinful habits, such as shoplifting, drug abuse, or adultery, after they receive the grace of conversion. But others reject sin habitually from an early age because God has given them the grace of a good upbringing in a Christian family. Either way, by preservation or deliverance, redemption is a work of God. In His providential plan, He found it fitting that Mary should be preserved from sin completely, all the days of her life.

If Mary was sinless, did she really need Jesus to redeem her? Yes, she did. Her singular preservation could not have taken place without the redemption won for all men by Jesus. Jesus is God, and so He is both our creator and our redeemer. In the very act of creating Mary, he redeemed her from any limitations of human nature or susceptibility to sin. She is a creature, but she is His mother, and He has perfectly fulfilled the commandment to honor her. He honored her in a way that is singularly beautiful.

Fetal Attraction

As we pray the Hail Mary, we echo one of the most ancient titles Christians have given to Mary: Mother of God (in Greek, Theotokos, literally “God-bearer”). As early as the third century (and probably earlier), the Church in Egypt prayed: “We fly to your patronage, O holy Mother of God…” Early Fathers such as Saint Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Saint Alexander called upon Mary as “Mother of God” or its equivalent, “Mother of the Lord.” This prayer of Christians follows Elizabeth’s inspired greeting of Mary, her kinswoman: “And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Lk 1:43).

With such scriptural precedent, the title “Mother of God” went uncontested in the first centuries of the Church. Moreover, the statement follows logically from a Christian’s necessary acknowledgment of Christ’s divinity. If He is God and Mary is His mother, then she is the Mother of God.

The traditional use of “Mother of God” depended upon a theological principle called the communication of idioms. According to this principle, whatever one says about either of Christ’s natures can be said truly of Christ Himself; for the two natures, divine and human, were united in Him, in one person. Thus, for example, Christians can boldly say that God the Son died on the cross at Calvary, even though God is surely immortal. Thus, too, Christians have always maintained that God was born in a manager in Bethlehem, even though God is surely eternal.

In the fifth century, however, some theologians began to raise scruples about the title “Mother of God,” worrying that it implied Mary was somehow the “originator” of God. They could accept the title “Mother of Christ,” they said, but not “Mother of God.” They further argued against the unity of Christ’s natures, saying that the Virgin gave birth to Christ’s human nature but not His divine nature.

The Church disagreed, and Mary’s title was vigorously defended by Pope Celestine I, who drew strong support from Saint Cyril of Alexandria, a leading theologian of the day. Cyril pointed out that a mother does not give birth to a nature; she gives birth to a person. Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ, Who was and is a divine person. Though Mary did not originate God, she most certainly bore Him. She “mothered” Him.

To us, the dispute might seem abstract and academic, but its progress consumed the attention even of ordinary Christians in the fifth century, stirring them to more fervent devotion. History tells us that when Pope Celestine convoked the Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431) in order to settle the “Mother of God” controversy, Christians thronged the city, awaiting word of the bishops’ decision. When the bishops read the council’s proclamation that Mary was indeed the Mother of God, the people gave way to their joy and celebrated by carrying the bishops (all two hundred of them!) aloft through the streets in a torchlit procession.

Think, for a moment, about the intensity of the affection those believers felt for the Blessed Virgin Mary—to sojourn to the city of the council, to wait outdoors for the bishops’ decree, then to spend the night in celebration, all because this woman had received her due honor. They would not act this way out of love for an academic argument. Nor would they celebrate the triumph of a metaphor. I daresay they would not make the perilous journey to Ephesus for the sake of any other mother: only for their own. For their own mother was also the Mother of God.

When we call Mary “Mother of God,” we share that long-ago joy. For bound up in that phrase is the astonishing fact that we are children of God. We are brothers and sisters of Mary’s Son—the God-man—and not just His human nature!

Once a Virgin, Always a Virgin

The gospels of Matthew and Luke leave no room for doubt that Mary was a virgin at the time she conceived the Son of God (Mt 1:18;Lk 1:34–35; 3:23). Of course, the early Fathers and creeds all uphold the truth of the virginal conception. Why has the Church always insisted that Christians believe in Jesus “born of the Virgin Mary”? Because Mary’s virginal motherhood is the guarantor of both Jesus’ divinity and His humanity. Saint Thomas Aquinas summed it up: “In order that Christ’s body might be shown to be a real body, He was born of a woman. In order that His Godhead might be made clear, He was born of a virgin.” As we have seen in previous chapters, Mary’s virginity is crucial also to Tradition’s understanding of her as the New Eve.

Thus, from the beginning of the Church, Mary’s name has almost always appeared with a modifier: “virgin.” In the Apostles’ Creed, in the Nicene Creed, in the early baptismal creeds of Rome and Africa, believers have consistently professed belief in Jesus “born of the VirginMary.” For the first Christians, to believe in Jesus was to believe in Mary’s virginity.

Indeed, Mary’s identity is incomplete without the word “virgin.” She is “the Virgin Mary.” Virginity is not merely a characteristic of her personality, or a description of her biological state. Virginity is so much a part of her that it has become like a name. When literature or songs refer to “the Virgin” or “the Blessed Virgin,” it can mean only one person: Mary.

“Virgin” is, once and always, who she is. Thus the church has constantly taught that Mary preserved her virginity not only before the conception of Jesus, but ever afterward as well. Though she was married to Joseph, the two never consummated their marriage by sexual intercourse. This doctrine is known as Mary’s perpetual virginity.

Heretics in the early Church occasionally challenged this teaching, but they never gained much ground. Their purportedly scriptural arguments were easily refuted by the likes of Saint Jerome, the great biblical scholar of the ancient church. (Jerome was also a great name-caller, and he reserved his most scathing insults for those who dared to question Mary’s perpetual virginity.) What were the arguments of these heretics?

The bulk of their arguments rested on the New Testament passages that refer to Jesus’ “brethren.” We find in Saint Mark’s gospel, for example: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not His sisters here with us?” (6:3). In Matthew 12:46, we see: “Behold, His mother and His brethren stood outside, asking to speak to Him.” In Luke 2:7, we read that Jesus was Mary’s “firstborn.”

This is virtually a nonissue for anyone who has a glancing familiarity with Hebrew customs. The Hebrew word for “brother” is a more inclusive term, applying to cousins as well. In fact, in ancient Hebrew there is no word for cousin. To a Jew of Jesus’ time, one’s cousin was one’s brother. This familial principle applied in other Semitic languages as well, such as Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. Furthermore, precisely because Jesus was an only child, His cousins would even assume the legal status of siblings for Him, as they were His nearest relatives. Finally, the word “firstborn” raises no real difficulty, because it was a legal term in ancient Israel that applied to the child who “opened the womb,” whether or not the mother bore more children afterward.

Heretics also quoted passages that seemed—again, to those unfamiliar with Jewish modes of expression—to imply that Mary and Joseph later had sexual relations. They would cite Matthew 1:18: “Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit.” Saint Jerome’s antagonist Helvidius placed his question squarely on the word “before” in that sentence, claiming that Matthew would never have applied “before they came together” to a couple who did not eventually come together. Helvidius also cited a passage later in Matthew’s first chapter that declares that Joseph “knew her not until she had borne a son” (1:25). Again, Helvidius said that Matthew’s use of “until” implied that Joseph “knew” Mary afterward.

This is a classic example of amateur exegesis. It was definitively and easily leveled by a professional biblical scholar. Responding to Helvidius, Jerome demonstrated that scripture “often uses a fixed time…to denote time without limitation, as when God by the mouth of the prophet says to certain persons, ‘Even to old age I am He’ (Is 46:4).” Jerome thundered on: “Will He cease to be God when they have grown old?”The answer, of course, is no. Jerome goes on, then, to quote Jesus, Who said: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:20). Wryly, Jerome asked Helvidius if he thought the Lord would then forsake His disciples after the close of the age. Jerome multiplies such examples, but we don’t need to repeat them here. Suffice it to say that those who question Mary’s virginity don’t have a page of scripture to stand on—and Christian Tradition is univocally against them.

If they wanted to find a message implicit in scripture, they should have examined the first chapter of Luke’s gospel. There, the angel Gabriel appears to Mary—who was then betrothed to Joseph—and tells her that she will conceive a son. Mary responds: “How shall this be, since I have no husband?” (Lk 1:27–34).

Now, this would be an odd question if Mary had planned to have normal marital relations with her husband. The angel had told her only that she would conceive a son, which is a commonplace event in marriage. If Helvidius were right, then Mary should have known exactly “how shall this be.” It would happen in the normal course of nature.

But that, apparently, was beyond the realm of possibility for her. The unspoken assumption behind her question is that, even though she was betrothed, she should not have an opportunity to conceive a child. How can that be? Some commentators speculate that Mary must have vowed virginity from an early age, and that Joseph knew of her vow, accepted it, and eventually took it on himself. Contrarians respond that vowed celibacy was almost unheard of in ancient Israel. Yet we do find examples of celibacy in the time of Jesus, evidenced in the New Testament by Jesus Himself and by Saint Paul, among others. The Dead Sea Scrolls attest that celibacy was a common practice of some Israelite sects. So it is not unthinkable that Mary could have vowed virginity.

In any case, it is clear from scripture and Tradition that she lived her virginity—so much that, for all future generations, she became its very personification. Saint Epiphanius dismissed all arguments against Mary’s virginity with the witness of her name. Even in his day (the fourth century), she was well established as simply “the Virgin.” A good son firmly defends his mother’s honor—though most of the time, he need not do so with long and labored argument. Still, there is a place for proofs as well; and sons of Mary can, if challenged, take up the Scriptures in her defense, as Jerome did.

A Gratuitous Assumption

Earlier we established that Christ honored His mother by preserving her from sin from the first moment of her life. That would be glory enough, but we know that He didn’t stop there. As she received redemption as a first fruit of Christ’s work, so she also received bodily resurrection and heavenly glory. We see this in the scripture: “And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Rev 12:1). Christ brought the ark of the new covenant to dwell in the holy of holies in the temple of the heavenly Jerusalem. This fact we profess as the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. At the end of her earthly days, Mary was taken up, body and soul, into heaven.

Documentary evidence of the assumption stretches back to the fourth century. By the end of the sixth century, the doctrine and the feast day were already universally established in the Church.

There is no evidence that the teaching was seriously challenged or disputed during the period of the Fathers; nor did any church or city ever claim to own the relics of the Blessed Virgin. That, in itself, is quite remarkable. In the early Church, cities and churches vied with one another for possession of the bones of the great apostles and martyrs. If Mary’s bones had remained on earth, they would, of course, have been the grand prize. The search for her relics and their transfer from city to city would have been well attested. But again, the historical record shows not a hint of a Marian reliquary—aside from her empty tomb. (And two cities claim that prize!)

The most reliable surviving testimonies of the assumption come from the sixth-century Saint Gregory of Tours. Earlier documents, such as the fourth-century Passing of Mary, testify to her assumption, but with descriptions that are perhaps too fanciful and extravagant to be believed. We can accept them as testimony to the doctrine without accepting them as authoritative in the small details.

A great theologian and biblical scholar, Saint John of Damascus, left us the most trustworthy and enduring legacy of the assumption. We mentioned earlier that John’s three homilies weave together all the biblical types discussed in this book into a single portrait of a mother in heaven. He refers especially to the liturgical readings for the feast and its vigil. They are the same readings the Church uses today.

What do they show us? They show that Christians have always venerated Mary as the Ark of the Covenant. John draws extensively from 1 Chronicles 15, in which King David assembles all Israel to bring the ark of the Lord to its resting place in Jerusalem. Though John of Damascus never quotes Revelation 11:19–12:17, he repeatedly calls Mary the Ark, and describes David dancing around her upon her arrival in heaven. This connection is continued in the responsorial psalm for the Vigil of the Assumption: “Lord, go up to the place of Your rest, You and the ark of Your holiness” (Ps 132:8). Could a single line more perfectly summarize King David’s transfer of the ark—or the Son of David’s assumption of the new Ark?

John of Damascus also draws from the typology of Eve and Eden to show that the assumption was a fitting end to Mary’s days:

This day the Eden of the New Adam welcomes its living Paradise, in whom our sentence has been repealed…. Eve gave ear to the message of the serpent…and, together with Adam, was condemned to death and assigned to the world of darkness. But how could death swallow this truly blessed soul, who humbly gave ear to the word of God?…How could corruption dare touch the body that had contained Life? Such thoughts are abhorrent and totally repugnant in regard to the body and soul of the Mother of God.

Thus, this last of the Church Fathers makes explicit what was implicit in the doctrine of his second-century predecessors: Mary’s status as the New Eve requires our belief in her bodily assumption.

The readings for the feast also show us how the assumption confirms Mary forever as the queen mother. The responsorial psalm of the feast day itself describes the wedding of a Davidic king: “The queen stands at your right hand, arrayed in gold” (Ps 45:9). Yet that line just as surely describes the heavenly court of the ultimate Davidic king, Jesus Christ, who reigns with His queen mother at His right hand—just as Solomon reigned beside Bathsheba. “So it was fitting,” said John of Damascus—after calling Christ the New Solomon—“that the Mother should take up her abode in the Royal City of her Son.”

Why in heaven would God assume such a queen? She’s more than His type. She’s His mother. The Damascene gets the last word in that matter: “What honors He has conferred on her—He Who commanded us to honor our parents.”

Idol Talk?

Some non-Catholics charge that all these Marian dogmas add up to Mary worship—idolatry pure and simple. There was a time in my life when I thought so. As a young evangelical, I even passed out tracts identifying Mary with the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, whose worship is described by the prophet Jeremiah (7:18; 44:15–17). Marian devotion, I believed, was nothing more than goddess worship smuggled into Christianity by long-ago pagans who feigned conversion.

I was wrong, of course—first of all, in my belief that Catholics “worship” Mary. In truth, the Church gives her honor and veneration as the greatest of saints, while reserving adoration and worship for God alone. Indeed, the early Christians who were most vigorous in their Marian devotion were equally vigorous in denouncing any local remnants of goddess worship.

I was wrong, too, in condemning the title “queen of heaven” just because it was once applied to a pagan goddess. Anti-Christians use this very argument to discredit the claims of Jesus Christ. Call it the comparative-religions approach. It runs like this: many ancient pagan myths told of a “son of a god” born of a virgin who came to earth, died, and rose from the dead; therefore, the “Jesus myth” is nothing but a late and very successful copycat.

On the contrary! From great Christians like C. S. Lewis I learned that such parallels between Christianity and paganism are best understood as a preparation for the gospel—God’s way of giving even the gentiles a hint (Lewis called these premonitions “strange dreams”) of a glorious future that would one day be theirs.