The True Story Of My Life #26 (Dogma 1: Immaculate Conception)

Never rely on footnotes when doing important research. Without context, the meaning may be lost or misinterpreted. Trusting a footnote to back up an argument is like trusting an unverified source. I have discovered a lot, on my own, by digging and refusing to simply believe something is right because someone else, even more educated and accomplished, has said it's right or true.

While researching the origins of the dogma of The Immaculate Conception (which is referring to Mary's immaculate conception in traditional RCC theology), I read Aristotle's volumes, especially his opinions on this matter; Augustine; Irenaeus; Athanasius; Aquinas; Duns Scotus; the opinions of popes; and I got into church history and the council which debated the inclusion of this belief into RCC doctrine as dogma. There were plenty of Roman Catholic advocates for this belief, and there were also many priests who were firmly against it, and over 1/3 of them at the council which decided this matter left the Roman Catholic Church on this point alone. They believed it was wrong to assign this belief as a dogma when there wasn't enough evidence to support it, and when making a theory dogma suddenly requires a person to fully accept this doctrine or be in danger of heresy and falling outside of the church, and therefore, outside of salvation.

I read the original writings of early church fathers, and the Eastern Orthodox position on Theotokos (Mary), and I followed the line of thought and the debate through the centuries. It was absolutely fascinating and all-consuming. I read hundreds of books and texts on it, and nothing from a Protestant standpoint until I came to my own conclusions, and then much later I tried to find out if there were any Protestant discourses or books which thoroughly covered the topic. There aren't. At least there were not when I went through everything at Powell's and religious Protestant libraries. I think the reason is because Protestants simply accept and believe Mary wasn't sinless, and they don't really care why the idea came to be dogma in Catholic theology.

I started out with Irenaeous and found that instead of making an argument for the sinlessness of Mary, he directly, when his book is read in its entirety, in context, ascribes the conception of Christ to be "immaculate" and upon reading his arguments, he makes a case for the Holy Spirit having done the "work" of undoing the curse of original sin, not Mary. He speaks of Mary in the highest terms, as most church fathers do. But from the beginning, the early church, which is also what the RCC calls the Only Church and True Church, did not believe Mary was immaculately conceived and nowhere is this argument made.

It didn't come up as an idea until much later in church history.

Br. Ansgar told me sometimes it's not present in scripture or writings, but that it can be evident in other traditions. He pointed to two other things: Ansgar said Mary had been depicted in paintings as crushing the heel of the serpent, AND, he said, Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate, makes it clear in Genesis that the serpent had struck the heel of Christ, but "SHE will crush his head." Ansgar said this scripture foretells Mary's act of turning original sin around, through her own grace of immaculate conception.

I need to explain what is meant by "grace" and how it was described to me. I will also explain how I discovered the verse in Genesis about "SHE will crush the head" of the serpent is incorrect. The Latin Vulgate mistranslated the pronoun "he" for "she". Jerome made a mistake. In more recent times, after the dogma was already MADE dogma, new research and better translations and document restorations, have made it unequivocally clear to Jewish, Protestant, and even Catholic scholars, who study in the original Greek and Hebrew and other languages, that the correct pronoun for this verse is "HE", not "SHE". If it is "he" and not "she", this suggests it is a male who reverses the role of original sin, and the assumption would be that this male is Christ.

I also discovered there ARE many paintings of Mary crushing the head of the serpent, after the 7th century, but this was possibly an analogy of the whole theme of doing away with original sin (or mediating it). What shocked me later, which came years later, after the monks of Mt. Angel Abbey and their lawyers had already sought to defame me and tried to use police they knew from their church against me, was a discovery made in a class at Portland State University--a course in early church art, where there were students from the Mt. Angel Seminary present, I later discovered. The painting which left me with my mouth open, was not found in the regular course material offered by the professor. It was through a simple and regular student of art history, who had selected a series of paintings from ancient abbeys and churches for her presentation. One of them was from the 3rd or 4th century and is found, preserved, in a RCC church in Turkey (I believe). It is a painting of Christ crushing the serpent under his heel. The belief that it was CHRIST, not Mary, was present from the beginning.

So how did this change? I will tell you...

Next post.