Читать книгу Stunned by Scripture - Dr. John S. Bergsma Ph.D. - Страница 9

Chapter Two

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

The Bible and the Blessed Mother

For myself, as for many Protestants, the role of Mary in the Christian life was the major sticking point in the process of my conversion.

One memorable episode comes to mind. In the Fall of 1999, we had just moved to the University of Notre Dame. I was warming to the Catholic faith and had just read a modern Catholic apologist who had made some good points in favor of Catholicism, so mentally I was toying with the idea of becoming Catholic. I came home from class to our small, on-campus, basement apartment in the married student housing, and Dawn was there with the kids to greet me. She told me about a conversation she had earlier that day with another grad student wife who was a Catholic. They had talked about teaching the faith to children, and the Catholic mom had given her some catechetical material she used with her own kids. I picked up one of the booklets and opened it up. It happened that the page I turned to showed Jesus on the cross with his heart on fire. The stream of fire went up to heaven before the Father. So far, so good. But there was a catch. There was also a stream of fire leading from Jesus’ heart to the heart of Mary standing below him, next to the cross. The hearts of Mary and Jesus were united by this stream of fire, which joined and went up before God.

I didn’t really understand what this was meant to represent, and I definitely was not accustomed to the romanticized, even mawkish artistic style that Catholic children’s books traditionally use. I was completely “freaked out” by what looked to me to be a denial of the exclusive role of Jesus Christ as the mediator between mankind and God the Father: “there is one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ” (1 Tim 2:5). It confirmed all my worst fears about Catholic Mary-olatry. I tossed the booklet down and ran into the other room. I gave myself an internal tongue-lashing. “What were you thinking? Get control of yourself! This Catholic stuff is crazy idolatry. You can’t go down this path. You’ve got to stop reading those Catholic apologists!”

But the attraction was just too great. The beauty was too much to resist. My resolution only lasted about a week, and then I was back to reading Catholic literature and talking to my friend Michael about the Church again.

Sometime later, I was eating lunch with Michael and debating theology with him when I got frustrated by the fact that he seemed to have a response for every accusation I could hurl against the Catholic Church. It so happened that, looking around the venue where I was sitting, I could see an image of Mary presented as Queen of Heaven on the wall (such images, inspired by Our Lady of Guadalupe, are common on the campus, whether in sculpture, relief, painting, or another medium). “Look,” I said to Michael, “where do you Catholics get this idea that Mary is Queen of Heaven? Isn’t that title on the verge of blasphemy? I challenge you to point to any scriptural evidence at all that Mary is ‘Queen of Heaven’!”

I sat back in my chair, a little self-satisfied that I had “pinned him to the wall” with the barbed shaft of a theological weapon. But Mike didn’t seem taken aback at all. He was neither shocked nor impressed. Without missing a beat, he said, “What about Revelation 12?”

“What do you mean? What about Revelation 12?”

“You’ve read it, right?”

“Of course. I’ve read the whole book of Revelation at least three times. My mom started me reading the Bible through each year when I was twelve.”

“Well, let’s think about it. You know how it has a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, right?”

“Right.”

“So she’s in the heavens?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s got a crown of twelve stars, so she’s a queen, right?”

“I suppose.”

“And then she gives birth to a male child who’s destined to rule the nations with a rod of iron. No doubt about who that is, right?”

“No, that’s a reference to the messianic ‘son of David’ from Psalm 2.”

“So we have a heavenly queen who gives birth to the Davidic Messiah. Couldn’t that be a reference to Mary, the only woman in Scripture who gives birth to a Messiah?”

I just looked at him in silence, and then glanced away in a huff. “You’re so clever I feel like you could prove to me this trash can over here is worthy of divine veneration,” I said in frustration.

But inside, I was impressed. Later, when I had the opportunity, I looked at Revelation 12:1–5 again and thought about it. I had spent several years of my childhood in Baptist churches near the various military bases where we lived. There I was exposed to Baptist end-times teaching. It was often quite elaborate, with various current events linked to different verses of Revelation by an exegetical hair. Inevitably, they found ways to see the threat of Russian communism and other current affairs in the text.

I would ask my father about these interpretations, and he just told me to keep an open mind. “Maybe,” he would say. “It’s a possible way to read the text.” Personally, he was unconvinced — as was I — but we allowed it could be true. So, I had always given the benefit of the doubt to my Baptist friends.

But now I was being confronted with a Catholic interpretation of Scripture that was relatively straightforward. The logic was not excessively contorted. It wasn’t contorted at all: “We have a heavenly queen here who gives birth to Jesus; may it not be a reference, in some way, to the woman who actually gives birth to Jesus?” I had always given the benefit of the doubt to my Baptist friends with their proofs that the “beast from the sea” (13:1) was Russia or some similar view. Could I, in all honesty, deny the same benefit of the doubt to my Catholic friend? Could it be that there was some scriptural basis for Mary as “Queen of Heaven”? Could one plausibly interpret the Bible that way? If so, could there be scriptural support for other Catholic doctrines as well?