The Marian Dogmas Debate

Debate Format, Moderator Housekeeping, and Speaker Introductions

Well ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming this evening. I know that some of you who've been to concerts and maybe seen the orchestra tuning and warming up, those of you who arrived earlier probably had a comparable experience this evening with some of the technology we've been putting together.

Shall I just hold the microphone? I'll just try this microphone if that one's not behaving. Is that better? Okay, we'll see how that goes, thank you. Okay, so thank you for coming. My name's Peter Byron.

I'm going to be your moderator this evening. So first of all, I just need to give you a few housekeeping rules before we begin. So, first of all, mobile phones. Very important to make sure that we have those turned off or put on silent or vibrate.

We don't want any distractions this evening and we don't want any profound theological moments to be underscored by somebody's ringtone. So if we can make sure that mobile phones are off, that would be great.

And please can we have no clapping, heckling or verbal agreement or disagreement or any other kind of interruption while the speakers are talking. A short applause can be given at the beginning and the end of the various speeches, but it's better not to interrupt them in the middle.

So please save applause and that kind of thing for between the speeches. If anybody needs a toilet break during the debate, then there are facilities at the bottom of the stairs just along the hallway that you came up.

And if that one's busy, there are other facilities through a door on the right side of the hall as you enter the building. And last of all, in the unlikely event of an emergency, please just walk calmly and at a sensible pace down the stairs the same way that you came in.

Now that those details are dealt with, I'll introduce the two speakers and describe the agreed structure of the debate this evening. So the topic of tonight's debate is, do the Catholic Church's doctrines on Mary constitute authentic Christian teaching?

So that's very specific. Do the Catholic Church's doctrines on Mary constitute authentic Christian teaching? That's the question that both of our speakers are going to be addressing this evening. So Peter D. Williams, he is a Catholic apologist, speaker and writer.

He began public media apologetics during the papal visit of Pope Benedict XVI in 2010, and he has debated on television, radio and in public settings like this one ever since. This is including at Oxford, Cambridge and Durham Unions and the Philanthropy College, Dublin.

He is a speaker for Catholic Voices and an author of the Catholic Truth Society, having written a booklet on same-sex marriage. He will be presenting the positive case for the Catholic doctrines on Mary this evening.

And James R. White is a Protestant apologist and writer. He has been a defender of reformed evangelicalism for around 30 years, debating with Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Oneness Pentecostals, Modernists, Atheists, Muslims and of course Catholics, amongst others, in over 150 moderated debates.

He is the author of over 20 books, including The Roman Catholic Controversy and Mary, Another Redeemer? Dr. White is also a pastor of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, and he will be presenting the negative case against the Catholic doctrines on Mary this evening.

Having heard both of these gentlemen before, I can assure you that you are in for an exchange of the highest quality this evening. No matter how rigorously or uncompromisingly these gentlemen present their cases tonight, and no matter how critical they might be of each other's most fundamentally held beliefs, they will only ever be attacking the other person's arguments, and never the other person themselves.

By willingly making their worldviews vulnerable to the scrutiny of the other, they are in fact actually serving each other and everybody here listening, by helping us all to think through seriously what we believe and why we believe it.

So that is the respectful scholarly spirit of the debate that you can expect this evening. So, both gentlemen will be observing the following debate structure. We will begin with Peter D. Williams, and they're both going to do opening statements of no more than 20 minutes each.

These will be followed by 15-minute rebuttals, then followed by a half-hour cross-examination period, where they'll both be allowed 15 minutes each to ask each other questions. Then it'll be 15 minutes more rebuttal again, then we'll open it up to the question period.

So that'll be your chance to ask your questions to them, and we will wrap up with a 10-minute closing speech from each of those, ending with James Wyatt. So, to begin our debate this evening, I will ask Peter D. Williams to give his opening presentation.

Peter Williams: Scripture, Tradition, and the Development of Marian Doctrine

Okay, well, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters in Christ, or else in our common humanity, thank you very much for having me here today. Thanks for coming. Thanks to Peter for his work as moderator.

Thanks to Dr. Wyatt for attending as well. It's a great pleasure to be with you, and I've really looked forward to having this debate on this very important topic. So the question before us this evening is, do the Catholic Church's doctrines on Mary constitute authentic Christian teaching?

And I think if we're going to answer that question, that we have to answer some preliminary questions first, essentially on epistemology, on hermeneutics. The principle of epistemology that I'm going to be proposing this evening is what's called the dual-source theory in theology, as opposed to the single-source theory that I expect Dr. Wyatt to present later.

I'm going to suggest that there are two main sources for our Christian doctrine that we find. I'm going to also suggest that the principle of those two sources is then developed over time by the Church herself in history.

So the first source, of course, is Holy Scripture, that which is theionousos, God-breathed or God-inspired. The second is sacred tradition, those truths passed down from the Apostles in the early Church, whether they be explicit or even implicit or even absent from Holy Scripture itself.

And then both of those are developed over time in the history of the Church itself, a magisterial development. And to illustrate the way this works—sorry, is this not working? Ah. Maybe I've got that into a safety reserve.

You're fine. Okay. Everything that has gone wrong this evening is going wrong almost, so. One, two, okay. To illustrate, then, the principle that I've just set out is the principle of the canon. The canon of Scripture is the knowledge of what texts are indeed theionousos and thus canonical.

This is a tradition. It's a truth passed down to us from the early Church to us today. It was recognised in and by the Church over time. So we see authentic Christian teaching proceeds from those two sources.

We have Scripture, but Scripture itself and the knowledge of what Scripture is, is in fact something which is a tradition that is then recognised in the historic particularity of the Church over time.

Then we have to talk about hermeneutics. We read Holy Scripture in its totality. I'm going to suggest that that's a breadth, but it's also a depth, that there is more than simply reading all of the literal sense of Scripture.

There's also a typological sense. I'll go on to that in a second. But we also read tradition in continuity with Holy Scripture itself as well. I'm going to suggest today that Mary, the doctrines of Mary, are indeed something that we see in the depth of Scripture, the breadth of Scripture, and in the continuity with sacred tradition.

So therefore, let's talk first then about Our Lady in Holy Scripture and what it tells us about her. On the one hand, we have her life. We have biographical details about Our Lady within, for example, Luke's Gospel and St. John's Gospel, and also the Apocalypse of St. John.

I'm going to suggest those are very important texts, mainly because we know that they are the ones most closely associated, those two authors, with Our Lady. St. Luke is, according to tradition, someone who knew Our Lady, lived with her in Ephesus, but also is someone who spent a lot of time, very meticulously, if you read Luke 1, he says very clearly that he focused on the eyewitnesses for his historical methodology.

That's quite important. And of course we know from St. John that he in fact was entrusted Mary into his care after the crucifixion, so indeed he had direct biographical knowledge of Our Lady. But we also have the typology of Our Lady in the Old Testament, as recognized by the early Christians, and I'm going to focus on four of those.

I'm going to focus on Our Lady's daughter of the New Zion, Our Lady as Queen Mother, Our Lady as the New Eve, Our Lady as the Ark of the New Covenant. These are the scriptural foundations of the traditional and developed doctrines about Our Lady.

What is typology, you might ask. Why am I referring to that? Well, typology comes from tupos, which means a blow or hitting or a stamp, to which is then added ante, when we're referring to the things within the Old Testament that correspond to those things in the New Testament that they are prefiguring.

So it's the prefigurement of New Testament realities in the Old Testament. So, for example, St. Paul in Romans 5 .14 calls Adam a type, a tupos, of the one who is to come, that is, Christ. Our Lord himself uses the sign of Jonah as an antitype of the resurrection.

Also St. Peter uses the antitype of the great flood when he discusses baptism in 1 Peter 3. Taking the first step, Luke 1, we see the angel, Gabriel, addressing Our Lady, greeting her as Chaire kakarathomene, the angelic salutation.

If we investigate into how the Greek fathers in the Byzantine liturgical tradition, such as the Akathistos hymn that we see later on, has understood these words, particularly the word chaire, which I'm going to focus on right now, we see actually there's a lot of shed light upon them.

In secular Greek, chaire is commonplace. But in the Septuagint, it always refers, in the words of John McHugh, to the joy of the people at some striking act done by God for their salvation. Specifically, it's to those verses where it's talking to Israel as a corporate personality, as the daughter of Zion.

So in Zephaniah 3 .15, we see, sing aloud, O daughter of Zion. Shout, O Israel. Rejoice, chaire, and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem. The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst.

These address Israel in that corporate person as a daughter who is also a mother in the context of the expectation of messianic fulfillment. So the fact that the angel Gabriel is referring to Our Lady, is talking to Our Lady, and saying, chaire karatoimene, is quite telling.

She is, in fact, the daughter of the new Zion. Our Lady also is seen as the Queen Mother. We can see that by the parallels that we see within the Old Testament to her. Now we know, of course, just very basically, I'll go on to talk later about Our Lady as Theotokos, but Our Lady is the mother of Our Lord, who is the king not only as the successor of King David, but as the Theanthropos, the God-man.

So he has a royal lineage on a spiritual level as well as on a physical fulfillment of the Old Testament Israel. St. Gabriel says, And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.

He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

Also, St. Elizabeth says, Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And why is this granted me that the mother of my Lord, the, and that's where the Greek has gone wrong, the mater tu curioumou, so in other words, the mother of my Lord, curios, which is Lord, the word for God in the Old Testament.

This shows us the duality of the physical fulfillment of that Old House of David, but also the spiritual fulfillment as well. In Israel, what's interestingly here is that the mother of the king was not the wife of the king, of which there might have been many, but the mother of the king, the Geberah.

So if the antitype of Christ are the kings of Israel, if all of those are antitypes of our Lord, then the antitype of Mary is the queen mother. And we see this, for example, importantly in Queen Bathsheba in 1 Kings 2, 17 to 20.

A particular person comes to her as they believe the king will not refuse her request, and then orders a throne to be brought in for her, and she's seated at his right hand, the position of authority.

Now, someone will point out, no doubt, that there's an objection to this, that this isn't a fulfillment really, because the king refuses the request of Bathsheba. But remember, this is an antitype, which is always a shadow of the type.

Yes, it failed. The queen mother failed in that instance to secure the favor for which she was asking. But if Christ surpasses the kings of Israel, so our lady surpasses the queen mothers as well. Just as the resurrection surpasses the falling of Jonah into the fish, and then his regurgitation onto dry land, or baptism completely surpasses the great flood.

All of those were temporary physical acts, they're temporary consequences, but baptism has a supernatural consequence, the resurrection has a supernatural consequence, our lady as queen mother has supernatural consequences.

Next, our lady is the new Eve. We see so many parallels within the Old Testament, within the New Testament as well, of our lady, and it so communicates the fact that she is the new Eve. Eve is bone of Adam's bone and flesh of his flesh, which is why he calls her woman, in Genesis 2, 23.

And then Mary, our lord says, our lord is the bone of Mary's bone and the flesh of Mary's flesh, and he calls her what? Woman, at the wedding of Cana. Eve is prompted by an evil angel, starts the fall of mankind by causing Adam to commit his first sin in Genesis 3, 6.

Mary, prompted by a good angel, starts the salvation of mankind, not only by her fear to the incarnation itself, but by causing our lord, the new Adam, as we said in Romans 5, to perform his first public miracle in the wedding at Cana.

Eve, through Eve came disaster to her disobedience, through Mary comes grace and redemption through her obedience to God. Eve is cursed for her disobedience, for her pride and her lack of faith, whereas Mary is blessed because of her humble and obedient faith.

These parallels are very clear. And this is something that the early church fathers also saw very clearly. St. Justin Martyr, in AD 160, says that our lord became man by the virgin in order that the disobedience which proceeded from the serpent might receive its destruction in the same manner in which it derived its origin.

For Eve, who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived the word of the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death. But the virgin Mary received faith and joy when the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings to her, that the spirit of the lord would come upon her, and the power of the highest would overshadow her.

Wherefore, also the holy thing begotten of her is the son of God. And she replied, be it done to me according to thy word. That's in his dialogue with Trifer. St. Irenaeus of Lyons similarly says, what is joined together could not otherwise be put asunder than by inversion of the process by which these bonds of union had arisen, so that the form of ties be cancelled by the latter.

It was that the knot of Eve's disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, thus did the virgin Mary set free through faith. That's in his Adversus Horatius in A .D. 180.

And he goes on as well. I'm not going to spend up too much time. But our lady is also seen within the Old Testament as the Ark of the New Covenant. There are so many parallels here, I'll try to zip through them.

For one thing, she, the Ark of the Old Covenant, contained the tablets of the Old Law. We know all this by Hebrews 9 .4. There are other verses as well which undermine this, underline this. In the Ark of the New Covenant, in the New Testament, we see that Mary contained the fulfilment of the Law, as we see in Matthew 5 .17, and the New Law itself, Galatians 6 .2.

The Old Testament Ark of the Old Covenant contained the manna from heaven that fed the Israelites as they wandered through the desert. Who does Our Lady contain? The Bread of Life. The Ark of the Old Covenant was overshadowed by the Shekinah on the mercy seat.

Our Lady was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, as the angel Gabriel says to her, and by the power of the Most High in Luke 1 .35. The primary role of the Ark of the Old Covenant was to mediate the presence of God to Old Israel by bearing the Shekinah.

But the primary role of Our Lady is to mediate the presence of God to the New Israel by bearing the Theanthropos. We also see this in the parallels, very, very direct parallels between Luke 1 allusions, between Luke 1 and 2 Samuel 6.

And David arose and went with all the people who were with him from Judah to bring up from there the Ark of God. What does Mary do when she goes to visit Elizabeth? In those days, Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a city of Judah.

Post-Uzzar, that is, post-Uzzar trying to reach out to stop the Ark from falling and being struck down dead, David was understandably afraid of the Lord that day. And he said, how can the Ark of the Lord come to me?

Elizabeth, upon greeting Mary, says, and why is this granted me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? So David was not willing to take the Ark of the Lord into the city of David, but David took it aside instead to the house of Obadidim the Gittite.

Our Lady enters the house of Zechariah and greets Elizabeth, and then in 2 Samuel 6, and the Ark of the Lord remained at the house of Obadidim the Gittite for three months. How long does Our Lady stay with Saint Elizabeth in the house of Zechariah?

For three months. And it was told King David, the Lord had blessed the household of Obadidim and all that belongs to him because of the Ark of God. So David went and brought up the Ark of God upon the house of Obadidim to the city of David with rejoicing.

And Our Lady's response to Saint Elizabeth's greeting is, my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour. So David and all the house of Israel brought up the Ark of the Lord with shouting, what does Elizabeth do before Our Lady?

She exclaims with a loud cry. So the Ark of the Lord came into the city of David and Michael sees David leaping and dancing before the Ark. What is Saint John doing in the room of Saint Elizabeth leaps in her room when she comes near to Our Lady.

Then we've also got the patristic evidence of Our Lady's Ark of the Covenant. Hippolytus says, at that time the Saviour coming from the Virgin, the Ark, brought forth his own body into the world from that Ark which was gilded with pure gold within by the world and without by the Holy Ghost.

So that the truth was shown forth and the Ark was manifested. And the Saviour, not just a parallel with Our Lady but with Our Lord as well, came into the world bearing the incorruptible Ark, that is to say his own body.

Saint Athanasius of Alexandria himself also says, O noble Virgin, truly you are greater than any other greatness. For who is your equal in greatness, O dwelling place of God the Word? To whom among all creatures shall I compare you, O Virgin?

You are greater than all them, O Covenant, clothed with purity instead of gold. You are the Ark in which is found the golden vessel containing the true manner, that is the flesh in which divinity resides.

Gregory the Wonderworker and John Damascene also make reference to the idea of the Ark as well. This is something noted by more than just a few fathers. So how does this become relevant then to the doctrines of the Catholic Church regarding Our Lady?

Well I'm going to now very quickly present what those doctrines are and show you why they're supported by the parallels that I've just shown. So the first and most important doctrine about Our Lady is that she is Theotokos, the God-bearer.

The one who bears the one who is God would probably be the most literal translation. And that is a defidae dogma of the Church, that she is the mother of God. It is of course something which was developed in the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD against the error of the Nestorians.

The Nestorians wanted to say there are two persons in Christ that were somehow united by a kind of uniting principle. That's what Nestorius thought. Instead what was affirmed completely contrary to that, his idea that she was the Christotokos, the Christ being the unifying principle, no, no, no.

They wanted to say that Our Lord is fully man, fully God, united in one person, and that therefore what can be said about him is that he is God. And because of that Our Lady, the God-bearer, didn't just bear a human nature, didn't just bear a unifying principle, she bared the one who is God.

So she is the Theotokos, the mother of God. What is also then as a lesser doctrine, but nonetheless a sure doctrine, a sententiae certa, as we would say, or certa, is the idea that Our Lady, the mother of God, is entitled to the praise of hypedulia.

As our mother and our queen, we can ask for her intercession. Also related to that is another idea that she is the mediatrix, that because she gave the Redeemer, the source of all graces, to the world, in this way by her cooperation in the redemption, she is the mediatrix and channel of all graces.

In that sense. So because she gave birth to the Saviour, she can be said, in that sense, in an honorary way, to be the mediatrix of all graces. And we see this through lots of different scriptures as well.

When we say, again, Wisest grant to me that the mother of my Lord, the Mertitude Curio Mu, should come to me, she is the mother of the Lord. Our Lady is also the daughter of the New Zion, the daughter mother.

Our Lady is the Ark of the New Covenant, who contains the new law, the bread of life, the eternal high priest. All of these support the idea of Our Lady as Theotokos, as Theotokos. And then also the fact that she is Queen Mother, and also Mother in a broader sense for us, is a reason why we can trust in her intercession.

If she is the Queen Mother, and the people of Israel could come to the Queen Mother to intercede before the King, then I think much more can we come to our own Mother, our Mother Mary, as is accepted in tradition.

But don't believe me when I say that. Believe, again, what we see in Christian history. This is the subterranean Presidium. This is the John Rillons Papyrus 470, which is in a collection at the University of Manchester.

It contains the oldest prayer to Our Lady, written between 250 to 280, well, the oldest one we have on record, anyway. And that's called the subterranean Presidium. And this is it. Beneath your compassion we take refuge, O Mother of God.

Do not despise our petitions in time of trouble, but rescue us from dangers. Only pure, only blessed one. Just remember those phrases. Because now, the second doctrine would be Our Lady is a Parthenon.

The idea that Our Lady was a virgin before, during, and after the birth of Our Lord. That she was conceived by the Holy Ghost without the cooperation of man, she remained a virgin during birth, and she was a virgin thereafter as well.

This follows again from the parallels that I was mentioning before. Our Lady's Ark of the New Covenant. Just as one would not use the Ark of the New Covenant for, let's say, ordinary storage, they caved it for the most sacred things in the Jewish religion.

Nor would one use the Ark of the New Covenant ordinarily. She was reserved in her status as a theotokos. And this isn't because we think that somehow sex is a bad thing. It's simply an ordinary thing.

It's a profane thing that Our Lady was preserved from for the sake of her role as a theotokos. We compare this with liturgical instruments. We wouldn't use a vessel that we'd be containing communion wine, sitting down, vegging before Netflix.

We would use it only for sacred things. We wouldn't use a Bible as a desktop. We wouldn't use a church. Well, we feel very sad when churches are turned into nightclubs. These are things where we see the profaning of something which is, in fact, sacred.

Not because those things are bad. Dancing is good. Netflix is great. Tabletops are great. Wonderful, too. But we use sacred things for sacred things. We use profane things for profane things. We have an evidence of this early Christian belief in things like the Protoevangelium of the James, which, even though it's maybe not a perfect text, nonetheless is still one which was found within the Christian milieu.

We also have Origen, St. Heriopatius, St. Athanasius, St. Epiphanius, St. Salamis, St. Jerome, many others who affirm the continual divinitudinity of Our Lady. We also see her as Panagia, that she was conceived without stain of original sin.

That is, again, a de fide, but actually the more universal doctrine is that she had, in consequence of a special privilege of grace from God, she was free from every personal sin during her whole life.

And this, again, follows from the idea of her as Theotokos. Is it really consistent to see Our Lady, the Theotokos, as someone who would be compromised, dominated by the dominion of saint, and a saint of original sin during her time as the mother of God?

I think it is inconsistent with that. We see, again, these beliefs in the ascension of Isaiah and the hoax of Solomon. This is evidence of early belief, even though these are, as Dr. White would say, tinged with Gnosticism.

Hippolytus, again, also affirms this, as do many other patristic writers. Now, I'm coming up to the end of my speech, and I don't want to try your patience, so I may continue this in my second period.

But we see, I think, with both the doctrine of original sin being developed later, there's also the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception being developed later, from clear premises within Scripture. This is not something which is made up on the hoof, this is not a new doctrine, this is something consistent with that.

I will continue the rest later when I talk about also the Assumption, but what I would just simply establish in closing, ladies and gentlemen, with my opening statement simply is this, that the doctrines of Our Lady, that the Catholic Church holds to, are not simply doctrines made up on the hoof, they are not merely things that we come within the very limited data within Luke 1 and 2, they are things that we find within the depth of Scripture, the breadth of Scripture, and also within the patristic sources themselves.

And there's much more to say about that, but I will now close with Dr. White's opening statement. Thank you very much. And people at the back, are we hearing okay at the back? Everything's all right at the back?

Brilliant, thank you very much. And I'll hand over to Dr. James White when you're ready.

James White: Sola Scriptura and the Sufficiency of Scripture

Well, good evening. Thank you for being here this evening. We managed to pack everybody in here, that worked out really well. I was a little scared for a while, I'll be honest with you. It's good to be here in London, we have a lot to talk about, and we've already begun that.

The fundamental issue is the issue of authority this evening, that has already been noted. If a person who had never heard the Bible picked it up and read it and was asked, does this book teach that Jesus' mother is the sinless queen of heaven, who was bodily ascended to heaven at the end of her life, conceived without the stain of original sin, and never had other children, the look of confusion on the face of the reader would be fully understandable.

And if you are not familiar with Roman Catholic teachings on this subject, then you might be a little bit confused as well. But this illustrates the central issue this evening, we are not debating it, but we are, in essence, that is, Sola Scriptura.

If one believes in Sola Scriptura, one will never embrace the Roman Catholic dogmas unmarried for the simple reason that no meaningful form of exegesis would ever lead you to those particular conclusions.

The interpretation Roman Catholic apologists use to derive the Marian dogmas differs markedly from that used to defend the Trinity, for example. I would ask you to compare what was just presented with any meaningful definition and defense of the Trinity by a Roman Catholic apologist, and you'll see a fundamental difference in how these things are approached, and there is a reason for that.

So tonight's debate is not specifically on Sola Scriptura, but it is anyways. For me, no topic more clearly demonstrates the absolute necessity of holding to Scripture as the sole infallible rule of faith in the Roman Catholic dogmas and doctrines that are now taught 2 ,000 years after the birth of Christ.

Now, before looking at the facts, biblically and historically, let's ask a question. What constitutes authentic Christian teaching? That's a part of our thesis statement. I would like to submit to you that the New Testament does, in fact, give us an answer to that inquiry.

First, Jesus plainly held men accountable not to unwritten traditions, but to revealed truths of Scripture. In Matthew 22, verse 31, Jesus said, Have you not read what God spoke to you, saying? He viewed God's written word as if God spoke to the individuals alive in his day and held them accountable for the things that he said 1 ,400 years earlier.

Jesus plainly placed that over any unwritten tradition, including those written traditions that claim to have God as their origin, their source. We know, of course, what Paul said about this. He said, All Scripture is God-breathed.

And this evening, the question will be, What else is God-breathed? What else can be placed on the same level? Is there anything else that is God-breathed? And is therefore profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be proficient, that is, qualified, equipped, or sufficient for performing every good work.

If the teaching of these doctrines and dogmas is a good work, the question is, does the Bible actually sufficiently prepare you to do so? And I suggest to you that especially as we look at the dogmas, the most recent dogma, the dogma defined in 1950 of the bodily assumption of Mary.

Not only did no one ever teach that as Christian doctrine for 1 ,000 years after Christ, but there is absolutely no evidence that no apostle, that any apostle of Jesus Christ ever dreamed of such a belief.

So how could the Scriptures, how could that which is theogonistos sufficiently equip you to teach that as a good work? That is a question that we will have to deal with this evening. If a belief is based in that which is not God-breathed, it is not binding upon Christians, and is therefore not authentic Christian teaching.

That is something that will be illustrated this evening. I'd like to state to you, not a single bishop who met at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, believed what modern Roman Catholicism defines as dogmatically true about Mary today.

Not a one. Not a single one. If modern Roman Catholic teachings are true, then God allowed many centuries to pass without anyone believing the full truth about those doctrines. Why would that be the case?

That is a question we must think about this evening. In fact, I think it is indisputable that no one in the first 1 ,500 years of church history believed as dogma what modern Roman Catholicism has defined to be true.

And in fact, I was listening very carefully, every single early church father that was cited earlier denied or gave absolutely no evidence of believing numerous other Marian dogmas that Rome has now defined.

In what was just presented by my opponent this evening. Keep that in mind. Ask yourself what that actually means. Yet despite this reality, Rome claims her teachings are true and ancient, and she condemns of the anathema those who reject her claims.

We didn't have the anathemas read, the definitions, the bodily assumption, macular conception, these very recent defined dogmas. Well, I think 1854 is fairly recent, relatively speaking. We didn't have those read in our hearing, but they are there.

We will look at them if we have time to do so. And so in those statements, the claim is made that this is what the ancient church believed. No one who studies church history can actually state that with a straight face.

You have to embrace a development concept to be able to come up with that. That means this is not a matter of possibilities. We cannot have, well, it's possible that this typology might mean this, and it doesn't matter if it breaks down here because you see it.

It could possibly mean that when you say something is de fide, dogmatically definitional of what it must be, what you must believe to be in true fellowship with Christ's church. That can't be mere possibilities.

That has to be revealed fact. That has to be revealed fact. Rome makes eternity rest upon these teachings. Now, I want to read to you the words of Bishop Fulgentius of Rusp. He said these words. This is the grace whereby it came to pass that God, who came to take away sins because sin was not in him, was conceived and born a man in the similitude of sinful flesh.

The flesh of Mary forsooth, which had been conceived in iniquities after the manner of men, was indeed sinful flesh, which bore the Son of God in the similitude of sinful flesh. We must believe that the only begotten God did not derive the defilement of sin from the mortal flesh of the Virgin.