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.

Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin as Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe (or Cheatum, Fleecem, and Scramm) Part I

I've been blogging some apologetics lately, and once again it is driven home to me how Luther, Zwingli and Calvin were the infamous law partners "Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe" (Do we cheat 'em, and how!) 

Once again, I've had to discuss why Catholics believe, are supposed to believe, in the Real Presence. The following is some bits of that. 

The idea, the dogma, of Our Lord being truly present in the consecrated bread and wine goes back to the beginning, as in St. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 11: 23-32. Notice how St. Paul says, "What I have received from the Lord is what I have passed on to you...", an oath of sorts, a "I solemnly swear I'm telling the truth". He says almost the same thing in chapter 15 at verse 3, "For what I received I passed along to you as of first importance," after which he witnesses to Our Lord's Passion, Resurrection, and the the Apostles meeting with the Resurrected Christ. It is a formal testimony to the reality of Christ rising from the dead. 

He even mentions five hundred of the brethren who saw Christ at one time. A Greek speaker with something of a classical education (as well as a Pharisaic one), I think St. Paul is mentioning these 500 (no where else referenced in the NT) because he would have known that in Athens, the greatest intellectual seat of the original Greek-speaking world (surpassed in the larger Mediterranean world by Alexandria, of course), a man on trial for his life faced a jury of 500. I think he's saying he has evidence that would pass an Athenian jury in that city's heyday. So therefore back in chapter 11, when he says he is passing on what he "received from the Lord" is an upping of the witness, a supreme capping of the oath. I think there can be no question that St. Paul means Christ is truly present, and that is what St. John in his chapter 6 is on about, for he would be writing after the Synoptic Gospels and he, John, did not include a Last Supper/Institution scene – instead, we went into a extended narrative about the reality of eating Christ's Body and Drinking His Blood. The Early Church Fathers after St. John clearly taught the Real Presence, but they used Platonic philosophy to explain to the pagans how such a thing could be. "Sign" and "signify" language – but they meant by that that the image contains a real essence of the higher reality (a basic tenant of Platonism).

They did not mean it in the more modern sense of only "symbolizes" the reality. (I've had Catholics, middle-aged, salt-of-the-earth types, tell me the Eucharist is "only symbolic"!)

By Aquinas' day, the up-and-coming theologians (like St. Thomas) used Aristotle, and thus developed the Transubstantiation definition. A wonderful lecture on this, and one very respectful to Protestants, is given here by Msgr. Frank Lane. I highly recommend it.