Not IMHO. You have to draw the line somewhere or accept that every miracle recorded actually happened. So which revealed miracles in the Bible do you not accept as miraculous?
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I believe the Eastern Orthodox acceptance of a virgin birth is not based on the idea of
sin, but based on the writings alone.
The Quran explicitly details the birth of Jesus (Isa) to the virgin Mary (Maryam) as a sign of God’s power (Quran 3:47; 19:19-21; 21:91).
Hindu scriptures describe several “miraculous” births where a deity, rather than a human male, is the father (the Devas, Ganesha and Sita).
In Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca, Perseus is conceived when Zeus visits the mortal Danaë in the form of a shower of gold.
In Livy’s History of Rome, the vestal virgin Rhea Silvia is impregnated by the god Mars to bear the founders of Rome.
Hesiod’s Theogony says Athena was not born of a woman but sprang fully grown and armored from the forehead of Zeus after he had swallowed her mother, Metis.
I don’t think about most of them. If they happened they happened. If they didn’t they didn’t. I don’t know why you are drawing lines. I would just analyze them on n a case by case basis when they came up. But I would generally accept them all as possible. If God can do one, He can do them all. That was my point. If you can walk on water, you can make an axe-head float. A man rising from the dead after “3” days is not less absurd than a talking ass from a materialist position. Either there is a God who can work impossible miracles from our perspective or this is not.
Yes, I know it’s in the Bible so we believe it but even for more “liberal” Christians there is often an insistence on the virginal conception as one belief that should not be rejected. If any narratives in scripture open themselves up to tough historical questions, the infancy narratives are definitely included. So I wonder if its creeds or something else? That is what I am getting at?
The point I was asking is why couldn’t Jesus have born to Joseph and the infancy narratives viewed as attributing a wondrous birth to Jesus? I don’t believe this but surely the greater miracle is that “God became man” and I suspect that could happen with or without a virgin birth. I am not saying I do not believe it. I accept it all, Including the perpetual virginity of Mary and the immaculate conception.
Mary living a life without sex after giving birth to Jesus… I’m not sure how that is connected to original sin? The perpetual virginity of Mary is not really an issue for the majority of the Church. Even the reformers (Calvin, Zwingli and Luther etc) all strongly affirmed this extremely widespread and early belief of the fathers. think you may be mixing up beliefs. The immaculate conception is how Mary is understood to have lived in a state of grace as the new Eve. The better questions to ask Catholics is if Mary felt pain during childbirth and then further ask if she would have died a physical death had she not been assumed into heaven.
Vinnie
Question number 1: no.
Question number 2: it’s still debatable.
So the third question is then why would Mary not suffer one named consequence in the garden narrative but possibly suffer the other one? What is the rationale for not inserting “no and no” or “yes and yes”?
That’s true and personally I believe it’s a no in both cases but it’s not a definitive view at least when it comes to Mary’s “dormition”, it’s still subject to debate
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I recognize the RCC interpretations related to Mary. There is not much sense in jumping deep into these questions because the interpretation I follow is so different from the interpretation of the RCC.
I see Mary just as a young Jewish girl who got mercy and a great task (burden) from God. A blessed girl, although the blessing was both a joy and a heavy burden. Nothing special in her, except that she seemed to have a right kind of attitude towards God - that may have been rare.
After giving birth to Jesus, Mary lived the life of an ordinary Jewish wife and got several children with his husband. It seems likely that her husband (Joseph) died before Jesus started his public ministry.
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I side with the ancient Church and majority view held by even the reformers. Denying the perpetual virginity of Mary looks like nothing more than purposefully adopting a late, contrarian position that is based on a wooden view of sola scripture. The irony is is It gets scripture wrong as well.
Vinnie
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I disagree, which is natural based on the differences in the interpretations.
I belong to those that do not support most of the additions and modifications that have been made to the doctrines of the western church after the first ecumenical councils. If we follow the historical development of the doctrines related to Mary, we can see that they have developed step by step within the RCC. I am not an expert on this topic, so I cannot now tell the years, councils or Popes that made those additions to the doctrines. Anyway, a Wikipedia page about Mariology cites a pope:
" “Many centuries were necessary to arrive at the explicit definition of the revealed truths concerning Mary,” said Pope John Paul II in 1995".
A great part of Mariological doctrines in the RCC stems from the special interpretation about the ‘original sin’, adopted from the speculations of Augustine of Hippo. If we abandon that interpretation of Augustine, then there is no need for all the speculative doctrines about the sinless state of Mary to ensure that Jesus was not contaminated with the ‘original sin’ at birth.
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You are uncritically lumping all beliefs about Mary together and using a cleaver when a scalpel is required. I specifically said the perpetual virginity of Mary.
Not necessarily.
Those are very different events. Additional premises and logic are required to bridge the gap.
I agree that lumping all the Mariological doctrines together may cause misunderstandings. In that your criticism is accepted.
The perpetual virginity of Mary is a point where the biblical scriptures and the fifth ecumenical council (553 AD in Constantinople) or at least the following lateran synod in 649 AD seem to be in conflict. The fifth ecumenical council gave Mary the title ‘ever-virgin’ and at the lateran synod in 649, Pope Martin I emphasized the threefold character of that title: before, during and after the birth of Jesus.
I see no good reasons to interpret that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were not children of Mary. Or that the note that Joseph did not have sex with Mary before Mary gave birth to Jesus should be interpreted so that the celibacy lasted also through the rest of the marriage.
The idea that being an ‘ever-virgin’ is something specifically needed appears to be based on a generally negative attitude towards sex. If Mary had sex with her legal husband after she gave birth to Jesus, there is nothing wrong in it. In fact, if there was no sex in the marriage, we might ask what was wrong - the expectation and even a social demand was that in a marriage of two healthy Jewish persons, there should have been sex and if God blessed, also children. The idea that Mary stayed as ‘ever-virgin’ is a suggestion that is strange to the contemporary Jewish culture.
Whatever the sex life of Mary was, ‘ever-virgin’ or normal Jewish marriage, that is not an important detail for me. As I do not support the special interpretation of the ‘original sin’, the lifting of the status of Mary to a ‘semi-goddess’, and not even the practices of praying to dead Saints or Mary (I really hope that they don’t have to listen to our problems!), the doctrine of Mary being ‘ever-virgin’ does not play a significant role in my worldview.
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Different events don’t matter. If God is capable of one He is equally capable of the other. Vinnie hasn’t mentioned that if you accept this you need to also accept that God is capable of creating the universe last Thursday. There is nothing that would prevent that (except for what it says about God’s nature).
So it would appear he would throw some of the miracles out.
So a being capable of performing one miracle must be capable of performing any miracle? You can’t conceive of a being capable of performing some miracles but not others?
If God truly is God, then He can do anything, except what is logically impossible (not even God can make a square circle, for example).
It’s a strong bulwark against Adoptionism: Messiah was Yahweh right from the start.
There’s no need for them anyway. By analogy with the woman who was healed by merely touching the edge of His robe, the Christ could not have been contaminated anyway; touching Him made things go in the other direction.
Which I find to be a greater miracle than the contrived idea that God would be so cruel as to apply the benefits of Christ’s passion to one person yet not to everyone else.
There is a difference between being capable of performing some miracles and choosing not to perform some miracles. I for one don’t like to put limits on what God is capable of performing. Care to provide an example of a miracle that God is not capable of performing?
To me, the only limits to God’s capability are those that are outside of His nature. A nature of which we may not be fully aware.
If God truly is God.
Of course. If we’re talking about God in the fullest sense — not some second-tier demiurge or limited being — then He is certainly capable of doing anything that isn’t logically impossible. True omnipotence includes all that is possible within the bounds of logic, not the incoherent or self-contradictory.
Is that ‘no, you can’t conceive of such a being’? Or merely ‘I don’t want to think about it’?
That would depend on what version of God yoy’re asking about. Though vanquishing charioteers comes to mind.