[Note: The following is a guest essay by the Rev. Dr. John R. Stephenson, Professor of Historical Theology at Concordia Lutheran Theological Seminary in St. Catharines, Ontario. He is also the General Editor of the Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics series and the author of volumes 12 (The Lord's Supper) and 13 (Eschatology) in the series.]

Et tamen Virgo mansit—Und gleichwohl eine Jungfrau geblieben ist—And yet she has remained A Virgin

Some thoughts on the dogmatic status of FC SD VII, 24 from John Stephenson

Permit me to make an oblique approach to a topic that the Book of Concord treats in the context of the “lofty articles of the divine majesty” in general (Smalcald Articles, Part I), which are “not matters of dispute or contention,” and of the Person of Christ in particular (FC SD VIII).

When they reach the years 1547 to 1549, Martin Chemnitz and his fellow writers of the History of the Sacramental Controversy (i.e., Timothy Kirchner and Nicholas Selneccer) tell how Peter Martyr Vermigli denied the real presence so crassly as to arouse censure even from the Calvinising theologian, Martin Bucer. The co-authors register their own offence at Vermigli’s Reformed sentiments on the Blessed Sacrament, appending a sentence that takes aim at Vermigli on other matters also.

And a Christian heart is justly horrified by his horrible, detestable talk about Mary the pure Virgin and other such things—Un[d] was der grewlichen abschewlichen redden/von Maria der reinen Jungfrawen/under dergleichen mehr sind/darob ein Christliches Herz billich erschrecket.[1] (512)

Despite repeated efforts during spare half hours over the last several years, I have been unable to discover what off-colour remarks Vermigli let slip concerning the one whom St. Elizabeth described as blessed among women (Lk 1:42). Indeed, speaking under the same inspiration as her aged relative and hence with luminous humility, St. Mary the Virgin herself prophesied that all generations would call her blessed (Lk. 1:48); as the Church sings the Magnificat at Vespers, she concurs with these holy women.

Unable to confirm my initial suspicion that Vermigli was among the first to deny the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God, I remain impressed by the disposition of heart and tone of voice in which the three co-authors of the History speak of one whose nativity the old Missouri Synod once saw fit to celebrate on the 8^th of the present month (see William Weedon’s blogpost of 8 September 2010: http://weedon.blogspot.com/2010/09/just-sos-you-know.html )

Clearly, the generation that promulgated the Formula of Concord was unanimously minded to express itself with deepest reverence on the subject of the Mother of our Lord. Equally clearly, as a glance at a single paragraph of the article of the Formula of Concord devoted to the Person of Christ will show, that generation of Lutheran confessors solemnly and deliberately reaffirmed a dogmatic decision taken (at the latest) by the Fifth Oecumenical Council that assembled in Constantinople in A. D. 552-553.

In the company of other mainline Western confessions, Lutheranism professes the Chalcedonian Definition forged at the Fourth Oecumenical Council of A. D. 451. But, as David Yeago has pointed out in an article[2] that I used to have my students read in the years when I taught Lutheran Confessions II, historic Lutheranism views the Chalcedonian Definition through the lenses of one and only one of the two main schools of Christological reflection that flourished in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era.[3]

Somehow, by way of exegetical reflection, Luther embraced the mindset of ancient Alexandrian Christology when commenting on the Christ hymn of Phil. 2 in 1519. In the course of the sacramental controversy of the 1520s, Luther’s grasp of Alexandrian Christology deepened greatly, and he researched its historical nitty-gritty for his On the Councils and the Church of 1539. As is well known, the major patristic scholar Martin Chemnitz plumbed the depths of this brand of Christology, with the result that St. Cyril of Alexandria features as the most quoted ancient author in the Second Martin’s Two Natures in Christ.

To cut a long story short, FC SD VIII and its official appendix, the Catalogue of Testimonies (which the next edition of Kolb & Wengert should bump up from the companion volume of Sources and Contexts to the actual text of the Confessions themselves—presumably we are no longer to be intimated by a Reformed-leaning elector in a tantrum), view Chalcedon through thoroughly Cyrillian spectacles. Yeago has shown how Luther’s distinctive theology remarkably mirrors that of the Fifth Oecumenical Council,[4] which anathematized selections from the works of three Antiochene (sadly, Nestorian-inclined) bishops of the fifth century (namely, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyhrrus, and Ibas of Edessa), who had managed to escape censure in their lifetimes. Is it an accident, pray, that LSB invites its users to commemorate, on 14 November of each year, Emperor Justinian (+565), among whose many claims to fame is his having been the prime mover and shaker of the Fifth Oecumenical Council? Indeed, our Calendar highlights the late emperor as not only a Christian Ruler but also a Confessor of Christ.

As it stands shoulder to shoulder with Alexandrian Christology in general and with Justinian and his Council in particular, FC SD VIII recoils from the Antiochene brand of Christology that produced Nestorius, attacking it as picturing the Two Natures of our Lord as juxtaposed in the manner of two boards of wood stuck back to back (SD VIII, 14-15). And it reserves especial ire for the low Christology of Paul of Samosata (SD VIII, 16) who deemed our Lord a mere man adopted into a sonship of God different from that of Christians only in degree, not in kind. Paul of Samosata and his Unitarian successors reduce the hypostatic union to an especially glittering instance of the mystical union.

It is an open secret that, in the wake of the Enlightenment and all that, Antiochene Christology has come back into vogue—even such a meticulous scholar as J. N. D. Kelly found it hard to write kindly of St. Cyril of Alexandria. And all major Western confessions now nurse within their bosom vipers sympathetic to the perspectives of Paul of Samosata.

Given classical Lutheranism’s predilection for the Christology of Alexandria and its most famous confessor of the truth of our Lord’s Person, namely, St. Cyril, paragraph 24 of FC SD VIII simply fits. Of course, a Samosatene would repudiate this paragraph with vigour, and a modern Antiochene would want to qualify it, at least.

Their Alexandrian-Cyrillian perspective rendered it inevitable that Chemnitz and his fellow confessors of FC SD VIII would voice their Yea and Amen to the dogmatic decision of the Third Oecumenical Council, held at Ephesus in A. D. 431, to the effect that St. Mary “wahrhaft Gottes Mutter …ist/vere Theotokos, Dei genitrix est—is truly the Mother of God.”[5] Of course they are going to say this, since they are completely at home in the Alexandrian thought world of the hypostatic union and the communion of natures and with the things that are “wont to be said—dici solent”[6] by those who have stood, stand, and shall stand in this diachronic line of tradition.

Oddly, having reiterated the foundation of hypostatic union and communion of natures,[7] Chemnitz and his fellow confessors could have passed straight to their confession of Mary’s divine motherhood,[8] but careful readers of the Solid Declaration will notice that they deliberately and solemnly make a further point that culminates in a crystal clear proclamation of a truth that (to my best knowledge) was first dogmatised by Justinian’s council, that is, the Fifth Oecumenical Council of 552-553. Permit me to quote the German and the Latin texts, subjoining thereto my own rendering of the Latin:

Welcher seine göttliche Majestat auch in Mutterleibe erzeiget, daß er von einer Jungfrauen unvorletzt ihrer Jungfrauschaft geboren; darum sie wahrhaftig Gottes Mutter und gleichwohl eine Jungfrau geblieben ist.[9]

Is filius Dei etiam in utero matris divinam suam maiestatem demonstravit, quod de virgine inviolate ipsius virginitate natus est. Unde et vere Theotokos, Dei genitrix est, et tamen virgo mansit.[10]

He the Son of God showed His divine majesty even in the womb of [His] Mother by being born of a Virgin without detriment to her virginity. Whence she is truly the Theotokos, the Mother of God, and yet she has remained a Virgin.

Call in question the wisdom of the confessors of 1577, if you will, but please do not pretend that they were making an off the cuff remark with which they thought pious Christians free to disagree. No, for their own part they were confessing dogma, giving voice to the rule of faith to which they were committed, standing in a great diachronic and synchronic consensus of Holy Christendom from which they would have shuddered to depart.

As they incorporated the hymnody of early and later Lutheranism into the liturgy, the classical Lutherans were memorizing, meditating on, and singing dogma, the rule of faith that they both derived from Scripture and used to unlock its meaning. A friend drew my attention a couple of years ago to an edition of the hymnal produced by a sainted pastor of the SELK, one Pfarrer Schwinge, that was published by the Evangelical Lutheran Free Church in the former East Germany and that continues in use among those in Germany who stand in communion with the Wisconsin Synod. Pfarrer Schwinge’s great merit was to recover the original wording of the classic Lutheran hymns whose content was progressively watered down in successive editions of the “generic” hymnals of the German Lutheran-Reformed hybrid “Church”.

For starters, let’s look at Luther’s 1524 rendition of St. Ambrose’s Veni Redemptor Gentium (“Saviour of the Nations, come”). The third stanza of the East German Lutherisches Kirchengesangbuch’s #69 is simply omitted in my 1975, Hanover-printed edition of the generic Evangelisches Kirchengesangbuch’s #46. The third stanza appears as LSB #332, 3, but does “Yet remained a virgin mild” capture the fullness of “doch blieb Keuschheit rein bewahrt—and yet chastity remained purely preserved”? Then let’s turn to the famous hymn of Lutheranism’s first female composer, Elisabeth Creutziger (whose husband, Caspar, according to Chemnitz & co. in their History, later took off at a Zwinglian tangent). In its second stanza EKG #120 wreaks great damage upon the original text preserved in LKG #120’s version of Herr Christ, der einig Gotts Sohn. LSB #402’s The Only Son From Heaven reduces five German stanzas to four, and, alas, weakly renders the watered-down (actually, mutilated) version found in EKG’s second stanza (okay, translation is difficult, tell me, but let’s consider the original). “O time of God appointed/O bright and holy morn” loses the eschatological overtones of “Für uns ein Mensch geboren/im letzten Teil der Zeit—For us born a man in the last segment of time,” preserved even in the generic hymnal. But—get this—the generic hymnal replaces Frau Creutziger’s “der Mutter unverloren/ihr jungfraulich Keuschheit—the Mother undeprived of her virginal chastity” with “daß wir nicht wärn verloren/vor Gott in Ewigkeit—that we should not be lost before God in eternity.” Foul play, eh?

As we shall shortly see, the good Frau Creutziger has not been the only victim of inner-Lutheran dirty pool in the matter of an author’s saying one thing concerning the Blessed Virgin only to have their words either crassly changed or severely distorted.

It seems to have become a standard opinion among many contemporary Lutherans that the NT evidence overwhelmingly overturns the dogma confessed by those ignorant old coves, Chemnitz & co. (not to forget the first Martin, who forthrightly labeled Helvidius (infamous in the ancient Church for his denial of Mary’s perpetual virginity) a “coarse fool—ein grober Narr.” So let’s ponder the inspired text.

First of all, the author of the NT Apocalypse pictures the Blessed Virgin Mary in ch. 12 of his work as the Mother of One Seed, on the one hand, and of “the rest of her seed”, viz., all Christians, on the other, with nothing in between. Since the Apostle to whose care Christ committed His Mother is the likely author of the last book of Sacred Scripture, this description is surely significant.

Secondly, Johannes Ylvisaker was so impressed by the dying Jesus giving His Mother into the care of the Apostle John, the Blessed Disciple, that he expressed his conviction that Mary could have had no other children living at that time.[11] Note well that “from that hour the disciple took her eis ta idia, into his home” (Jn 19:26-27). The Blessed Disciple does not recall that a few weeks later, sometime in Eastertide, he handed over the Blessed Mother to a natural son, now converted, who in due course stood at the head of the Church of Jerusalem. That pious, even saintly man, dear Dr. Marquart of blessed memory, found these verses of the Johannine Passion narrative thoroughly convincing with respect to the support they give to the dogma propounded in FC SD VIII, 24.

Thirdly, if the James who presided over the Apostolic Council recorded in Acts 15 was indeed a natural son of Mary and Joseph remarkably converted during the Easter period and constituted an Apostle by the Risen Lord, isn’t it mighty odd that St. Luke omits to record this startling fact? He does tell how St. Matthias took Judas’ place among the Twelve, and he carefully introduces Saul to his readers before relating his subsequent ministry as Paul. But, as in ch. 12 he describes the blessed end of James brother of John first introduced in Lk 5:10, of whose induction into the apostolate we learn in Lk 6:14, he conspicuously avoids mentioning more than the name of the James who presides at the apostolic council (Ac 15:13); he sees no need to supply further detail concerning him. This is an indication that James Bishop of Jerusalem is to be identified, most likely, with the 9^th-named apostle, described as the son of Alphaeus in Lk 6:15, or—less likely if this figure is someone distinct from the second apostle with the name James—with the James mentioned in the Lucan resurrection narrative at 24:10, whose mother was a certain Mary. As he mentions this same woman in Mk 15:40 and specifies her son as mikros/little-small-“lesser” James, the second evangelist opens up the possibility that this man was the second James of the apostolic list, whose stature whether physical or personal put him somehow in the shade of his namesake the son of Zebedee. At all events, insistence that three evangelists would introduce the Mother of God into their accounts of the Passion and/or Resurrection, listing her after other women and under a different identity is, as we say in the North of England, too daft to laugh at. St. John leaves us in no doubt concerning his companion at the foot of the Cross when he solemnly tells how “Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother …” (Jn. 19:25), self-evidently listing her before the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene.

Whether those mentioned by the synoptists, John, and Paul as “brothers” of the Lord were, as the East supposes, children of St. Joseph by an earlier marriage, or, as Rome teaches, cousins of Christ on whichever side of the Holy Family, does not affect the integrity of FC SD VIII, 24 or its biblical support.

I am much impressed by an argument in favour of FC SD VIII, 24’s “and she has remained a Virgin” advanced by Burnell Eckart in an entry on his Gottesblog website dated 6 November 2009: http://gottesblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/rev.html . To put Eckart’s point in my own words, I just cannot wrap my mind around the possibility that St. Joseph, a devout Jew who needed no lectures on what all is involved in the holiness of God, would presume to effect and exercise physical union with a body selected by the Almighty from eternity to be the womanly holy of holies. If a personalized ark of the covenant were living in your house, you would not treat such a one according to the analogy of a regular piece of furniture.

A note of oddity attaches to Mary’s initial response to Gabriel’s announcement that she is to be the mother of David’s greater Son, for “How shall this be since I know no man—poos estai touto, epei andra ou ginooskoo? (Lk 1:34)” is not the reply one would expect from an engaged woman, who would have no doubt concerning the physical mechanics of her forthcoming conception of a child. I would not wish to entertain the notion, popular in some Roman Catholic circles, that Mary had already, nun-like, vowed lifelong celibacy, but I cannot refrain from registering the singular quality of her answer.

An advocate of the perpetual virginity of the BVM once remarked to me that some explanation has to be sought and given concerning the explosion of virginity as a permanent lifestyle in the early Church from the time of the NT onwards. Okay, we Lutherans have an instinctive aversion to virginity in the form of lifelong celibacy and cling—in this point at least—to a sentence found in the Apocrypha: “For he created all things that they might exist, and the generative forces of the world are wholesome” (Wisdom 1:14). But we cannot expunge from the sacred text St. Paul’s big plug for celibacy in 1 Cor 7, in which chapter he imparts commands concerning sexual conduct that blow antinomianism out of the water and challenge our cowardly accommodation to current mores. Again, I would point to an odd turn of phrase in this chapter (which might be expounded under the heading “sacramental ethics”), where the Apostle favours, in certain cases, the non-consummation of a standing engagement (1 Cor 7: 37). “To keep her as his virgin—teerein teen heautou parthenon” might make better sense if we add the words, “As Joseph did.” Why did the four daughters of Philip, of whose burial in Asia we hear from Eusebius, preserve lifelong virginity? It makes sense if, along with many others, they were following two supreme examples from the time of the Church’s foundation.

Alas, as he confessed FC SD VIII, 24 in the second volume of his Christian Dogmatics, Francis Pieper joined Elisabeth Creutziger in the ranks of victims of foul play. Over the years, as I read Pieper’s Christology section (to my shame only in English translation, although a complete German set of his work sits on my bookshelves), this writer struck me at one point as a crusty, even bad-tempered old cove prepared to offer a forthright opinion without offering much textual backing for his view.[12] Around a decade ago someone brought to my intention how Pieper’s translators took unfounded liberties with the words he actually wrote, moving a small quantity of footnote material into the body of the text, omitting some sentences intended to form part of the main argument, and then brusquely omitting the footnote extended over three printed pages in which he carefully substantiated his contention that honest exegetes can doch (after all) subscribe to FC SD VIII, 24.[13] In the German original of this section, by way of contrast, Pieper appears as an elegant and erudite author in command of his subject matter. If Pieper is still to be used in the classroom and not relegated into forgetfulness as new works of dogmatics (however slowly!) appear, CPH would do well to revise the translation, checking its accuracy and, above all, ensuring that contemporary readers have access to all that the St. Louis dogmatician committed to paper and saw through the press.

C. F. W. Walther was much blunter than Pieper in his own attitude to FC SD VIII, 24. Whereas Pieper (especially in the German original) followed the medieval scholastic technique of setting forth arguments on both sides of the issue before coming down firmly for one option over the other, at the 1867 Colloquium held in Milwaukee between members of the Iowa and Missouri Synods, Walther declared the perpetual virginity of Mary off limits for discussion:

Grossmann: “When you subscribe to the confessions, were you aware of the fact that they declared the permanent virginity of Mary?” Walther: “Yes, I can say so in the presence of God.” Grossmann: “Do you still believe this to be true doctrine?” Walther: “Yes, I can say so in the presence of God.” Grossmann: “What are your reasons for considering this a true presentation?” Walther: “Pardon me, but you have no right to ask this question.”[14]

At the end of its doctrinal articles, the Augustana pointedly aligns itself within and not outside the preceding tradition of the Western Church (AC, conclusion of first part, 1[15]), and the Solid Declaration gives a hugely important direction concerning Lutheran theological method in SD RN 17, which I quote from Tappert: “In the first place, we reject and condemn all heresies and errors which the primitive, ancient, orthodox Church rejected and condemned on the certain and solid basis of the holy and divine Scriptures.” Luther himself had, after all, declared in 1532 how “it is a perilous and dreadful thing to hear or believe anything against the unanimous testimony, belief, and doctrine of the entire holy Christian Church.”[16] There is, then, such a thing as rightful Lutheran appeal to the Vincentian Canon, the determination of orthodoxy in virtue of what has been taught everywhere, always, and by everybody—quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. This un-Roman Catholic way of doing theology (check out John Henry Newman’s Development of Doctrine!) might not in fact be the sole preserve of the Christian East and High Anglicanism.

Which leads me back to a point close to where I began, namely the Christology proclaimed by the Fifth Oecumenical Council held in Constantinople in A. D. 552-553 under the aegis of Emperor Justinian of blessed memory. As it ensures that Chalcedon be read through Cyrillian lenses (i.e., with the spectacles worn by the confessors of 1577), the Sentence of Contantinople II against the “Three Chapters” refers (if I count correctly) four times to the “ever virgin” Mary.[17] If the Fathers of the Fifth Oecumenical Council were wrong to speak of the Lord’s Mother in this way, why should we trust their appraisal of the Christology of the three Nestorianising Antiochene bishops whom they consign to the heretical side of the aisle? If we may not be confident that the Holy Spirit has guided the Church, described by St. Paul as the pillar and bulwark of the truth (1 Tim. 3: 15), into a diachronically and synchronically ascertainable confession on which we may rely and to which we must cleave in our exposition of the Word of God, then are we not ipso facto “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4: 14) and hence no better situated than the mindless chatterboxes of a decaying Liberal Protestantism? For the sake of the peace of our earthly Zion, we may admit with Pieper that, “If the Christology of a theologian is orthodox in all other respects, he is not to be regarded as a heretic for holding that Mary bore other children in a natural manner after she had given birth to the Son of God.”[18] But for the reasons set forth above I respectfully maintain that Pieper is right to contend that those who profess, according to the dogma (re)stated in 1577, that the Mother of God “has remained a Virgin” are not exegetically out to lunch, and that there is much wisdom in sticking on this and other points of doctrine and practice with the “unanimous testimony, belief, and doctrine of the entire holy Christian Church.”