ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 17 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> This is interesting to me. I have a question that has occurred to me before but I've never had a chance to ask it. Roman Catholics call the Virgin Mary the mother of God. Can Lutherans speak of her in the same way? Would it be better to say Mary is the mother of Jesus to avoid confusion. >> DR. DAVID SCAER: Lutherans generally understand themselves as being Protestant. And this means they define themselves negatively over against the Roman Catholic Church. So it's quite common for many Lutherans to think that if the Roman Catholics believe something, therefore, the Lutherans shouldn't. And this phrase, the mother of God, is really an issue which might cause some confusion. We Lutherans have to insist that Mary is the mother of God. Because we believe that the person of Jesus Christ is a complete person. He's not half man and half God. He's totally God. And he's totally man. In fact, we have no access to God except through the person of Jesus. When his mother picked up Jesus, she picked up God. And this is what St. Paul says. He said that in Jesus dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And this takes us back to another Reformation controversy. And that is in what sense is Jesus God and in what sense is Jesus man? The other major wing of the denomination is generally called Reformed. I know there are decisions in it. Some were anti-Baptists. Swingley was not the same as Calvin or Bullinger. They all had their distinctions. But one thing they agreed on is that the two natures in Jesus were separate. That they were in no way intermingled or intertwined with one another. That Jesus the God did something. And Jesus the man did other things. And to understand the person of Jesus correctly, that the man Jesus is God, Lutherans have used and should continue to use the phrase that Mary is the mother of God. I was a little amused by our Concordia calendar. The diary which CPH, Concordia Publishing House, makes available to all of our pastors, they have a holiday in there -- and it's perfectly fine -- called Mary, the mother of our Lord. I think it would have been really better to really have called that holiday Mary, the mother of God. And we have a hymn. "Ye watches and ye holy ones." The second verse refers to the Virgin Mary. In the Lutheran worship hymnal they avoided that verse. They say it was always done inadvertently. Well, I can't judge motives of people I don't know. But it refers to Mary as though bearer of the eternal word. I must say that even myself, until recently I wasn't sure. I really didn't know what that phrase meant. I thought maybe it referred to somebody who preached the Gospel. But then I found out that that particular verse is addressed to the Virgin Mary. This is always going to be a problem for Lutherans. It was a problem for Luther. Luther had a very high devotion for the Virgin Mary. But with the near idolatrous attention that has been given to her in the Roman Catholic Church, Lutherans feel very sensitive about any place of prominence which is given her. And I don't think that I can solve this problem or that we are ever going to solve the problem. We simply cannot eradicate her from the narrative of the New Testament. We can simply not say that she is as unimportant or as important as someone else or that she simply is another believer. Luther said -- in describing what Christians received in the Lord's Supper quite specifically said that we received the body which is born of the Virgin Mary. And this is something we're going to have to wrestle with as long as we are a church. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***