There has been a quest to determine how Perfection (Christ) could issue forth from imperfection (Mary). Another way to think about it is how does the Infinite come from the finite? I am not Catholic theological scholar, so if I describe something awry, forgive me. There was a tendency among early Catholics to solve this problem by not only describing Mary’s conception as immaculate but going further to describe her as immaculate. The pressure to solve it in this way came from the idea that sin was hereditarily passed on, as though sin was now baked into human nature.

I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the biblical notion of “flesh” and “sin.” The Hebrew word for sin, Chatah, means to “miss the mark.” The biblical notion of flesh (Bazar in Hebrew, Sarx in Greek) has a range of meanings, but central to its meaning is “limitation,” or “weakness.” It might take a bit of thought, but the idea of “weakness” is “limitation.” The word sin paints a picture of setting the limits of a target and then trying to hit it. If we miss, we sinned, or missed the mark. If our early Catholic theologians knew this, as I know now, and they certainly would know, why did they move to make Mary effectively sinless (immaculate)?

During this time of early Church history when the Christological debates were raging inside the Church, they were attempting to pinpoint and provide a firm doctrine of who Christ was and man’s relation to Christ—these debates warred on from about 120 A.D. until 500 A.D. Central in these debates around the 4th and 5th century was the heresy of Pelagianism. The critics of Pelagius (the main activist of this movement) accused him of teaching that man could attain perfection without divine grace, or without God’s help. Clearly, Mary, Jesus’ mother, comes powerfully to the fore if we assumed she was somehow immaculate, even if we define her being immaculate a bit different from Jesus. If Mary was one way or another immaculate, this would tear down or at least trouble the widely accepted idea that the sinful nature was passed on hereditarily. It definitely would raise the question, “If Mary could be, why can’t I?”

Rather than retracing others work on this subject, let me try to offer something new. Have you ever heard of “theomorphism.” In biblical hermeneutics (the art of interpretation), there is a well known concept of anthropomorphism, which is where God is described in a humanly way (e.g., “the hand of God”). This unfortunately gets the cart before the horse. Theomorphism rightly recognizes that human personality, psychological, and other markers of being human, are “forms of God.” In case I have theologians reading this, these “forms of God” are of the analogical type not univocal type, and if this means nothing to you, just ignore it. Human personality is only what it is because God made it that way “after His image.” In short, God’s personhood predates human personhood, and human personhood is formed and fashioned after God’s personhood.

I am going to tie all this together now: all that it takes for sin to be possible is freedom of choice and the knowledge of evil. Presumably, Adam and Eve had freedom of choice in the Garden (or how else could they love?), but they did not have the knowledge of evil (or “of good and evil” as the biblical text puts it). It is access to this knowledge that began and continues the inglorious “fall of man.” The biblical text as late as Genesis 9:6 emphasizes that the “image of God” prevailed inside of humankind even after the fall and the total indoctrination into utter evil of the world—this is not overstatement since God just finished killing everyone except a few (the Great Flood).

Okay, I lied, I have one more piece to introduce: that God created anything at all is called “gratuitous creation.” This means that creation was unnecessary; it did not have to be. This notion of gratuity entails two features in its definition: (1) grace and (2) bounty. That God would create and provide access to Himself is one large impulse of gratuity or grace. It can be conceived that God might create a world in which His creatures’ mental/spiritual capacities exclude the ability to know Him: they might be autonomous in the truest sense of the word. The world was fashioned so that humanity could know God and “walk” with Him, as some of the earliest verses in Genesis attest. That the world was this way is a statement of both God’s bounty and His grace. Recall, it is not necessary that God make the world in such a way to share Himself so that humanity could get to know Him. Consider most animals and beasts of the wilds: they are unaware of God’s presence yet part of the created order. Humanity is unique in its makeup, that it can conceive and commune with a God beyond their immediate environment.

God’s grace is therefore “baked in” or endowed in God’s Image he imbued into humanity. This is grace, surely: it is both unmerited and unnecessary. God did not have to make humans in this way. Before the fall of humanity, the spiritual environment is already charged with grace (or gratuity). Not just any grace either, the unfathomable bounty of limited humans coming to know endless Riches, that is, God Himself. Thus, the Garden of Eden is a place full of the grace of God, not just in the environment but in the humans themselves who carry God’s Image. The Holy Spirit is directly involved in this imbuing of humanity: “breathed the breath of life . . . became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7; c.f., Gen 1:2). The word “breath” is from the underlying Hebrew word “nishmat,” which means “breath, Spirit, wind” depending on context. It might not be the best translation for readers to understand, but we could translate 2:7 this way: “breathed the Spirit of life . . . became a living soul.”

Now to address a bunch of elephants in the room. When Calvinist state that God’s special or efficacious grace is needed for humanity to even choose for God, we can affirm this without losing freedom of choice if we understand this grace to be endowed from the earliest days of creation. The original spiritual environment of God’s “very good” creation was one in which God’s grace was already abundant. Then, this knowledge of good and evil enters into the environment extending the freedom of choice to an abundance of evil options. We could digress into a serious and longwinded debate on the nature of “freedom,” but I’ll leave and close the topic by only stating that “it is behavior that invigorates and enhances further free acts”—I do understand this is a bit of a tautology, but let’s move on.

Someone else might object and note that what I’ve presented here might undermine the special ministry of the Holy Spirit that was inaugurated at Pentecost. I have two responses to this. First, there are texts in the OT that speak of the Spirit “being in persons” like the NT language. Second, the Spirit’s ministry is marked out by pointing persons to the Christ and His work on the cross. In the OT, the Spirit was enlivening persons to God and His Word; in the NT, the Spirit enlivens persons to God and His Word, the living Christ, or Logos. The Spirit’s ministry is about enhancing intimacy and knowledge about extremely personal things about God’s inner life.

When the Scriptures speak of humanity being “dead in trespasses and sin,” this is true, but it does not need to suppose that the image of God has somehow become void of grace. I am mindful of the fact that the Spirit of God is the locus and direct Agent involved in fashioning the image of God in humanity in the first place. It is therefore not strange that the Spirit of God is marked out as the Regenerator necessary for humanity to have renewed relationship with God and no longer be dead in their sins. The “Re-” on “Regenerator” is not unimportant: implying an initial act of Generation. As the early Church Fathers were fond of saying, “It takes God to know God.” I won’t delve deeply here, but understanding this saying hinges on understanding that God is infinite and uncreated, and therefore categorically different from finite, created things, like humans. Unlike Pelagius, I whole-heartedly affirm that God’s special grace is necessary to know God (be saved) because humanity could in no way know God unless God had provided gratuity (grace) in making humanity in a manner that could be endlessly and bountifully enriched through ever growth in knowing God.

Let me give a few thoughts on the phrase “dead in sin.” I think the Calvinists are right that this makes humanity utterly unable to do anything to attain their salvation. Even the choice for God has to be a gift from God. Presumably, most Christians believe that each human life comes from a mother, a father, and the Spirit of God who continues to provide that human’s spiritual makeup, either directly involved or involved at the inception (Gen. 1:2, 2:7). Either way, it is the Spirit who is responsible for a human having a spirit, which enables them to transcend and is part of what makes a human made in the image of God. This makeup is a gift from the Spirit of God. I think what I’ve worked up here attunes well with the biblical theme of the image of God prevailing even after the fall and the fact that the Scriptures point it out. If we back up to the original creation as the place where the grace was provided to be with God, we don’t have the terrible problem of making humans into pawns fatalistically drawn to a certain doom or glory.

Structuring this whole thing this way also affirms the fact that humans are composed via theomorphisms. Humanity’s makeup is not some arbitrary created matrix. Humanity is the Image Bearer. Human personality, ability to transcend (spiritual), psychology, Communal Intersubjectivity, and expression are all theomorphisms owing to Who God is. The “mark of the Divine,” as it were, is not something we can simply say, “well humanity fell, now all their theomorphisms that are their very composition don’t mean squat.” I think the entire debate between the Arminians and Calvinists of the 16 – 18 centuries were spurred on by an underlying humanist worldview. All that humans are were assumed to be proper to humans. The idea of theomophisms had little place in those conversations: the zeitgeist of those times all but prohibited it. This is not to say we cannot find any strand of thought on theomorphisms during this time, but it is to say that such were marginal at best.

I actually think I may have just solved the Arminian vs Calvinism Debate is an unhitherto fashion. I’ll write that up next.

Dr. Scalise