Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Responding to Nicholas Bowling · somewhere else: Weaker Vessel and Stronger Vessel
This is a part of Nicholas Bowling's argument I didn't respond to:
the 15:26 immaculate conception where for Jesus to 15:28 come into the world without sin Mary 15:31 also had to be without sin which I would 15:33 disagree with if he had to be born 15:35 through someone who had never sinned for 15:38 him to be without sin right that would 15:41 mean Mary for her to be without sin she 15:44 would have to be also born through 15:46 someone without sin
Sounds logical, right?
Until you consider that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, as Maria von Trapp said on the Charismatic Conference in Kansas City (my mother loved to quote it).
Part of this is, a man is (usually, and typically, and according to God's general plan, and therefore to be followed in the case of the woman and her seed) the stronger vessel. A woman is (same qualifications) the weaker vessel.
Now, likeness between parents and children produces harmony. Unlikeness instability, disharmony. And harmony in childhood is essential for strength, disharmony produces weakness.
Jesus did not just have to be sinless, He had to be this as an active and a confident male adult. AND as fully human.
Mary grew up with a certain disconnect by being sinless. She was sensitive to sins all around her, she was happily surprised at being sinless. I e, before the angel's greeting puzzled her and the cousin's greeting set her straight, she was anxious she might have committed a sin. Even a slight one would have been a horror to her. While the sin of the first parents was proportionally to their state (and to hers, had she known it) much worse than even mortal sins are in us, in its own kind, it was a very slight one. She hated, just as Adam and Eve should have hated, the sin that was so slight compared to most, but which was damning to them (and would have been damning to her).
This created a weakness, a need to get confidence from others. She could be sinless with this weakness, while having a parent who had had original sin, and most of whom, though not her parents, retained fomes peccati, a surrounding which every day committed venial sins. And she was meant to be weak, even as she is shown in the Apocalypse 12, because she was a woman. God was her strength, everywhere else she looked, she saw a disastrous weakness that could (until Elisabeth explained that Gabriel had told her otherwise) be a trap for her as well.
Jesus was male. That's why we have male only priesthood. He needed to provide strength, in His ministry. Humanly, He only could do that by growing up in perfect harmony with "the parents." At least one of them had to be perfectly sinless. And it couldn't be Joseph, because he wasn't His real father, through the flesh, it had to be the mother, Mary.
There were only two ways in which this could happen.
He could have divine and miraculous force in staying harmonious, obedient to parents, while sinless and neither of them fully so. Or He could have a sinless mother. A fully sinless mother. So that He could have this strength as a sinless person, humanly.
The former option is kind of if not totally negating, at least minimising, the Incarnation. Hence, if He is fully God and also fully Man, He needed to grow up in full harmony with a sinless mother. Mary as being the weaker vessel did not need this harmony in growing up.
A similar reason is also why God couldn't have allowed that Adam be born as a fully human baby to parents of human anatomy but no real human mind. That would have been cruel to the first Adam, and to him before he sinned. I think that should settle the debate that Humani Generis very cautiously allows for, in favour of the traditional doctrine. So also, for the Last Adam, for Jesus. Hence, the sinlessness of Mary.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
VIth Sunday after Easter
1.VI.2025
PS, normally, I would have taken an issue about the differences between Catholic and Protestant onto another blog, but I'm happy for the oversight, since it may help some to grasp how one of their difficulties about the Incarnation is solved.
The other blog is:
Great Bishop of Geneva!
https://greatbishopofgeneva.blogspot.com/
