Hermeneutics and Dogma: Some Odds and Ends

The recent discussion on Mary in Church dogmatics has opened upon the stages of theodicy, the reality of the Incarnation, the Will of God, and the biblical representation of sin. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception (IC) has underscored the difficulty of its own language and its reception in the sensus fidelium. In order to move toward a reasonable synthesis, it would seem that the dogma should be contextualized within Christological, ecclesiological and soteriological themes and grace-theology as well.

1. Sanctifying grace (SG): The grace of holiness, SG maintains the integrity of a properly ordered relationship to God, and it is freely given by God, absolutely gratuitous, and beyond the reach of human merit. It is imparted by God through sacramentals, sacraments (the 7 properly so called and all others) and by direct will of the triune God. It is both cause and effect of the relationship between a human and God. SG is the grace operative in the dogmatic expression of the IC, for in this grace all abuse---sin--- of the relationship with God is impossible.

2. Ultimately, Original Sin (OS), from which Mary is preserved, is unintelligible apart from the representation of evil in the bible, which expresses the lived experience of evil and sin of the inspired authors of the biblical books, and the culture which produced the authors and books. Hence, only a hermeneutic that addresses the biblical representation of the reality of evil and sin can decipher the dogmatic representation of the IC. Any logic that seeks to separate the IC from OS and its representation cannot but fail to go astray in any effort to consider the meaning of the dogma. The Christian self-understanding of sin, Adam, Christ and (by obvious extension) Mary is already established in the Pauline corpus (cf. Rom 5:12ff; 1 Cor. 15:22) during the formation of the Church. For Paul, Adam was a historical figure, not merely a historical 'reality.'

3. The historical and biological uniqueness of the motherhood of Mary provides the facticity of her uniqueness as an individual. In this manner, Mary is forever embedded in Christology, and the uniqueness and facticity of the Christ-event itself.

4. Soteriologically, The Word made flesh, in order to effect salvation, must be of the flesh of Adam, real human flesh. The flesh of Adam was given to the Logos through the biological motherhood of Mary.

5. The sanctity of the vessel of the historical Incarnation of the Logos is a very ancient idea in the Church. How could God enter the world as a human being from a flesh always poised (effect of OS) to breach the relationship with God?

6. Which Adam would provide the flesh for the Word, a prelapsarian Adam, or a postlapsarian Adam? If we are to move to an interpretation of the IC and OS, a hermeneutic ordered to the mythological representation of the human being in proper relation to God is required, and that hermeneutic must be attuned to an Adam on either side of the breach, hence the validity, if not the essentiality of the question.

7. The dogma of the IC would be incoherent if it positioned Mary in a superior relation to sin from the incarnate Word. The Synoptic temptation scenes (Mk. 1; Matt. 3; Lk. 3 etc.) present Jesus being invited to sin by Satan. Though Jesus did not sin, narratologically there was an 'occasion' of sin. This simple concupiscence denied by Jesus cannot therefore be absent from Mary. The sanctifying grace imparted to the human nature of Jesus forecloses any real 'drama' in the moment. It must be something like this for Mary as well, without prejudice to the unique grace of the hypostatic union.

8. The simple concupiscence---the drive to seek the good--- of Adam is not the rejection of sanctifying grace. Such concupiscence is simply the reality of being human in a created environment. The IC implies that Mary did not answer to concupiscence, and this is held by the Tradition, though without de fide status. Mary's concupiscence is bracketed in this discussion (epoche) to allow her to appear on the same horizon as the prelapsarian Adam, both of them being full of grace.

9. OS is itself the mythic representation of the reality of moral evil in the world. In Gen 2: 16-17, God orders the freedom of the human to the special relationship with him, and informed the man that any exercise of freedom apart from that relationship would entail death. In the context of choice, and of seeking the 'good,' the human orders that choice to itself, apart from relation to God: when the fruit was judged 'good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable for gaining wisdom' (Gen. 3:6), choice is ordered against the relationship and to the human alone. The inspired author has witnessed the actions of humans apart from their relationship with God: treachery, murder, theft, pride and selfishness, and dislocates this reality to a mythic action in the past.

10. The plain language of the dogma of IC invites theodicy by presenting Mary's single privilege of grace (SG) in a uniqueness that alienates the rest of humanity in its divine exclusivity. By collapsing concupiscence as it has come to be known, Mary appears, with Adam, in the natural attitude of sanctifying grace, which was meant, from the beginning, for all of human-kind. As such, theodicy cannot make an appearance as an event.

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OS is the religious expression of the experience of the universality of moral evil. It is the sitz im Leben, the condition in which we, like the inspired authors of Genesis, find ourselves, and that which is mythologically represented in the biblical narrative of the fall. OS is itself mythos, and a dogmatic interpretation of mythos. It is therefore a mythos that represents an experience on either side of the mythic and dogmatic enterprise of faith. OS unites scripture with its tradition in a metalanguage of dogma.

To be free of OS, one assumes the position of Adam, who walked in graced freedom with God; and this condition is rather like the fullness of grace imparted dogmatically to Mary. Like her ancestor, Mary is immaculately conceived metahistorically with him, inherits his flesh and in turn gives that flesh to her son, Jesus. This much is already understood in the early Church, as Paul declares the relationship to the first and second Adam. Paul does not examine the condition of the portal of sin, but simply asserts a parallelism of grand design, leaving the examination to posterity.

Jesus then is 'born of a woman' of Adamite flesh. That flesh, Mary's flesh, though, is free of sin, of even the possibility of sin. This condition of the [im]possibility of sin cannot be the evil concupiscence that the Tradition identifies as the consequence of OS. This condition must be instead a simple attribute of the human nature. An attribute that is constitutive of the human partner that in and of itself does no injury to the relationship. Human nature, sanctifying grace, the immaculate conception of Adam and Mary are anterior to the fall. How can there be two outcomes from the lived experience of the same grace? How can impossibility and possibility come from the same grace in the same flesh?


"Their eyes were opened" [Gen. 3:7; Luke 24:31].


These identical phrases in Genesis and Luke read each other, the Tradition and dogma.  For the walkers on the road to Emmaus, there was the vision of a saturated phenomenon, the icon of the risen Christ. For the eaters of knowledge,  there was the vision of the saturated phenomenon, the idol of shame that overwhelms their gaze.

The early chapters of Genesis do not know of prophets, so God himself must declare the state of affairs in Eden.


He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be in some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall. [ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 188].


And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." [Genesis 3:15]


Adam on the precipice of a self-determined good, experiencing his lapse before the fact in some instance to come; God prophesying the struggle between good and evil through motherhood of all human offspring, to the motherhood of the savior: this is the protoevangelium.

In the last gasp of the prelapsarian world the Christ-event becomes a reality, as does the conception of Mary in the grace that preserves her from what is about to happen. Mary does not fall with Adam, because the prelapsarian grace has opened her eyes to the icon of Christ through the providence of God which gazes back at her,  redeeming her through the very event Luke has depicted. Adam's eyes were opened, but Mary's eye's were opened wider on the same grace enjoyed by both. Adam could only be bedazzled by overwhelming gaze upon himself through his new knowledge, but Mary's gaze is saturated by a larger view upon grace and she partakes of the grand affirmation of creation itself: the fiat of creation whose reshith (thought of as perhaps 'chaosmic' time, Joyce's time of 'fall, falling, fallen') has ticked a heaven round the stars, becomes her own fiat, her 'yes' whose time ticks to and fro. Poor Adam, he could have hardly known, with all that knowledge, he was saying 'no.' He just couldn't see it, drowning in grace and blinded by the idol. Mary though, bathing in the sea of faith and the same sea of grace, was seen by God in the gaze that looks upon the gazer.


We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful. [Ineffabilis Deus]



Though Mary did not fall, she inherits and inhabits the same human condition as all other human beings. She was heir to everything that is human: joy, sorrow, suffering, death. The dogma states that she is graced, without saying how. Because it is also dogmatically stated and therefore de fide that Adam, too, in "the first instance of" his "conception by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God," he is joined by Mary in the relationship with God as it was in the beginning. Unlike Adam, Mary was left behind in prelapsarian grace, even though she was historically born into the postlapsarian world to receive God in her very flesh, the flesh of Adam, who, in the beginning was very like her. Mary's singularity and privilege play out in this fallen world in the historical motherhood of Jesus. As Adam was, for just a moment, falling out of love with God, God loved Adam unconditionally as he fell, and though Adam was fallen and surprised, God  had already declared the coming of Paul's new Adam. In the light of Christ, Paul could see it all coming.

It is therefore not the grace the marks the difference between Adam and Mary, but the gaze. Mary and Adam appear within the same horizon of grace; but for one, eyes open to the idol, and for the other, eyes open to the icon. The events of the fall and the redemption are released in the phenomenality of grace which pulls both Mary and Adam into selfhood. The gaze trumps the theodical attitude on both the Adamic and Marian trajectories toward the saturated phenomena. God has willed only freedom, the gaze upon which is the only determinant in the different outcomes. The rest is history.

The idol and icon present themselves within our experience in their very givenness. How shall we become? How wide shall our eyes open? Shall our souls lapse, or magnify the Lord? What shall appear to us in a disappearance on our own road to Emmaus? 

This is the stuff of grace, of hope, of what is to come. This is Mary-for-us in her givenness, as gift, as the exemplar of human cooperation in the ongoing creation of the world in the relationship with God as it was in the beginning.  This is Mary, mater et magistra, within the Catholic rule of faith: scripture (read, received, alive), Tradition (read, received, alive) and magisterium (read, received, alive). 

Credo in Deum, Patrem Omnipotentem

Well, you really can't get much more Catholic than putting the words of the ancient creeds in your mind and on your lips. The Tradition of the Church is a great gift, and dogma is a part of that tradition. Though today we really are suspicious of dogma, (its not really a good thing to be 'dogmatic'), understood as a gift of a living body of faith, understanding and belief, a gift bequeathed from the past to the present, we can accept and authenticate the gift. Yet, we might say to ourselves, 'beware of Nicaeans bearing gifts.' And therein rests our suspicion; where's the catch? what must we give back, what return is implied in the giving? Perhaps we should just say, 'thanks but no thanks.' Still, a gift is a gift, and some gifts, the really good and authentic gifts, have no strings attached. A gift is in its purest, holiest form when it is dissociated from reciprocation, even the possibility of reciprocation. I want to keep the tension between pure gifts and less than pure gifts in this discussion of omnipotence, an idea handed down not just from the 4th century, but from the formation of Christian identity in relation to God.

Sadly, the problems with omnipotence subvert any realism, falling prey to the inability to distinguish the univocal from the analogical, collapsing both into some impossible human ideal of what something 'all-powerful' can do, has done, and continues to do. The dogma of divine omnipotence is intended as a gift, but brings trouble in all the confusion. Even the dogma itself is troubled by speculation on the absolute power of God and the ordinated power of God. The distinction between these 2 manifestations of the divine omnipotence is intended to bring peace, but instead often brings discord. Peter Damian denies the potentia ordinata, while Thomas Aquinas holds this ordered power in tension with the potentia absoluta. Neither purveyor of the divine power gives a satisfying synthesis of what humans actually experience, both thinkers being entrenched in big-time onto-theology. Still, an omnipotence ordered to the world declared 'good' in Genesis makes more intuitive sense than holding the divine omnipotence to pleasing the desires and judgments of creatures. The simplicity in a strategy of restricting the absolute power of God to the choice of 'any world order,' and describing the ordinated power as the self-limiting realism attached to divine power in 'this world order' just accounts for the phenomena confronting creatures better than a strategy that draws no distinction at all.

In any event, the Catholic dogma of God's omipotence has always been more nuanced than an unqualified "God can do all things." It is a very Catholic notion that God cannot contradict, betray integrity, suspend the 'good' of himself or creation. So, against the good monk Damian, God is incapable of making occurences 'unhappen.' There is nothing capricious about the divine omnipotence, reports to the contrary in the bible and recent headlines notwithstanding.

I am certainly not arguing that the distinctions between the potentia absoluta and the potentia ordinata have solved the riddle of the aporia of an omnipotent God. These distinctions do, however, show the traces of the way omnipotence haunts both dogmas and sacred texts, and how omnipotence is harbored in the name of God, how it is structured in texts (sacred and profane---and by 'text' I mean any locus [or circus] of signification). Everywhere God's power is in such texts, there will be found the creature wrapping its head and fist about it. Still, if we use Caputo's definition of 'theopoetics' as the discourse of what haunts theology, of what circumfesses within confessional theology, then Catholic dogma is the religion's first whack at a living theopoetics. The next developments in Catholic dogma might be to be less dogmatic about it; developments in doctrine might be to be less doctrinaire. A dogma without dogma seems to fit inside the notion of a religion without religion.

Indeed, each word of the ancient creeds is but an invitation, our four words in this post's title each a call to reflection. What is belief? God? A Father? Omnipotence? Pantokrator? Almighty? All-ruling ruler of rules? The creeds, traditions, and sacred texts of the Church are an invitation to read. But not only to read draped in a hermeneutic from which no one really emerges, but reading to release the events waiting to be born in these texts. What event is really harbored in the dogma of omnipotence if not that of love and freedom, integrity of creation and embrace of the good?

Not every event of human complicity with power in this world has its call in the divine insistence. The events released in the name of God, especially those events pried loose from the divine name with analogical claims of univocal omnipotence, are often just plain trouble. They visit the absolute upon the relative, totalizing in events what cannot be totalized; and trying to contain the uncontainable sends the event back to the harbor, even after the trouble comes, which is usually in the form of violence.

Violence results from gifts that are assumed to be asking for something in return. Only a real openness to the gift can discern the nature of the gift. If the gift is a contract, then thanks but no thanks. We see how those gifts are reciprocated in this world. If the gift is a gift of grace, then we know the tree by its fruit.