Luther and Zwingli Defended Our Lady's Perpetual Virginity; a Pity Modern Protestants Don't

A great article at the Catholic Herald, from January 2017.

An excerpt:

Bishop Hugh Latimer – a staunch Protestant burned at the stake by Queen Mary – goes to great lengths in his St Stephen’s Day Sermon of 1552 to rebut the arguments of those who reject Mary’s perpetual virginity, blasting them as “heretics” who “violate, toss, and turmoil the Scriptures of God, according to their own fantasies and foolish minds.” In a letter to a Catholic in 1749, Methodist founder John Wesley – himself an Anglican priest – professed his belief that Mary “as well after as before she brought [Christ] forth, continued a pure and unspotted virgin.”

With this in mind, it is intriguing to see how universally – and often how vociferously – ancient Christian teaching on Mary is rejected by most evangelical Protestants today.

A typical example comes from respected Presbyterian scholar Peter Leithart, who has just published a robust attack on the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity at First Things.

Leithart claims that that when the Gospels say Joseph did not have relations with Mary “until she had borne a son” (Matt 1:25), this implies the couple did have marital relations after she gave birth.
To understand why this view is mistaken, Leithart need only have consulted the footnotes of the classic Protestant Geneva Bible published in 1560, in which the translators note that the word “until” is not an indication that something different happened afterward. When Jesus says, “I am with you always, until the end of the world” (Matt 28:20), obviously this does not mean he ceases to be with us in the afterlife.

Leithart claims that Joseph did not have sex with Mary during her pregnancy because the temporary presence of Jesus within her body rendered it holy, like the Temple in the Old Testament. After this, however, she “reverted to ‘common’ status.”

But this is to overlook what the Trinity teaches us about what it means to be a person – that who we are as persons is defined, in part, by the relationship we have to other persons. Mother of God (Theotokos) – the relationality that Mary had to Jesus – was not a function she performed for a period of time, like an incubating machine. It was part of who Mary was as a person, and who she was always destined to be.


The Council of Ephesus in 431 reaffirmed Mary’s traditional title of Mother of God, not for the sake of her own honour but to rebut Nestorianism, a bizarre Christological heresy which claimed that Jesus, while one individual, was two persons (one human and one divine). Ancient Marian teachings all serve a similar function, protecting the integrity of what Christians believe about Jesus.