ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 16 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. *** >> I am presently serving in a church which lies in the middle of several immigrant neighborhoods, many of them South American. There is a large Peruvian community nearby, for example. As a result, many of the people who worship in my church have more familiarity with Roman Catholic doctrine than with Lutheran. Obviously for them the immaculate conception is a well known concept. And I find myself struggling to understand how to respond with a Lutheran understanding. I'm not sure of myself. I guess it's a concept that confuses me a bit. What do we mean by the virgin birth and what is its theological significance? Is it biblically defensible? Is it the same as immaculate conception? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: We are going to be facing a new demographic situation here in the United States. And that is the Hispanic population has now become the largest minority population group in the United States. In this group of people -- and this group of people have predominantly Roman Catholic roots. This does not necessarily mean that they are fully doctrinally informed in Roman Catholic doctrine. But these people have been brought up in a situation in which there was a great deal of devotion to the Virgin Mary. And that Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is the appearance of the virgin in Mexico shortly after the beginning of the Spanish conquest in the 16th Century, that particular apprehension has a wide following throughout Latin America, South America, Peru, which is your general concern. And the phrase immaculate conception has almost been a rallying point. Several years ago I happened to be in Rome on Easter Sunday. I was very fortunate to actually be in the -- in St. Peters where the Pope was. And afterwards, a large crowd had gathered outside the basilica in order to wait for the Pope to come to the window. And many of the pilgrims who were there were carrying large signs which said "Immaculate Conception." That the immaculate conception is becoming a thing in itself. The way I see it, that the word immaculate conception is becoming another code term for devotion to the Virgin Mary. It's rather -- it's kind of a different meaning. Immaculate conception refers to this fact: That Roman Catholics believe and it's been decreed by the Pope in the 19th century that she was conceived without sin. We should understand the theological issue carefully. The way they argue is that she represents the church, which at the end time will be totally without sin. But in her case, a special dispensation was given to her. She was born in an ordinary way. And that is she has -- she had a mother and a father. They claim that the mother of Mary was St. Anne, which brings up of course part of our Lutheran Reformation. When Lutheran was terrified in a thunderstorm and made a decision that he was going to enter a monastery, he offered a prayer up to St. Anne. So she's not completely unfamiliar to us. Whether there is any historical evidence that that was the name of Mary's mother, that's an entirely different question. But what is not a question for Roman Catholics is that she was conceived without sin. The virgin birth is different. Even though I think that even among Lutherans the distinction between the immaculate conception and the virgin birth gets confused, then many Lutherans will actually say that Jesus was immaculately conceived. They've heard the Roman Catholic phrase used so often that they attributed it to the birth of Jesus. I suppose we can say that Jesus was conceived without sin. But we certainly don't use that particular term which is used specifically of how the Virgin Mary -- how the Virgin Mary was born. When we say that Jesus was born of the virgin, we mean he was born without -- without the participation of a father or a male. The immaculate conception lies at the basis of Roman Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary. And part of the argument is that for Jesus to be -- to be God, to be the Son of God and to be born without sin. It was to his advantage that his mother was conceived herself without sin. And closely connected to the doctrine of the immaculate conception is her assumption into heaven which is a relatively new doctrine in the church. It was defined in Christmas of 1949. That after -- and there's a division on this. That either before she died or after she died she was assumed bodily into heaven. And there are representations of this in many, many Roman Catholic Churches in the United States and in Europe. *** 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. ***