David (VK3AUU),
>> it would (not) matter if the story of the Virgin birth was not true<<
This is one of many stories in the Bible, the trueness of which is principally impossible to check (we have no access to Jesus’ genes or DNA), although if it were true, it would represent not only a violation of what is acceptable to contemporary science, but also a puzzle, a mystery. So it depends on what one accepts, defines, as true.

May I offer a Catholic layman’s solution: we believe that the consecrated host (the Eucharist) IS the Body of Christ, without defining what the IS here means (certainly nobody thinks a laboratory test could detect a difference between a consecrated and non-consecrated host); it is referred to as a mystery.

I also believe that Christ “appeared“ to Paul, or the Virgin to Bernadette of Lourdes, however I do not believe that if a camera was present it would have detected anything. In both cases the apparition is a “reality“ of the kind where the state of mind of the subject is an essential part of it. The difference between this kind of “apparitions“, officially recognised by the Church (although a Catholic is supposed to accept only the first one of them as “real”), and mere hallucinations (of a sick mind) is to be found in the subject, and is about the same as in general between a genuinely mystical and merely a psychotic experience: how the event(s) influenced the rest of the subject’s life.

Anyhow, theologically sound or not, this is how I understand these things.

George, The "Mystery" to me is "How can so many otherwise rational people believe such a heap of twaddle when there is no scientific evidence to support it?"

David

David,
The pure empiricism of Sigmund Freud has certainly led to an insightful observation. His 'oral, anal, genital, and Oedipal ' view of humanity, however, relieves us of a personality devoid of responsibility i.e., I am who I am and I do what I do not because of me but because of early experiences over which I had no control. I am not responsible for my actions -- my mother is.

Human civilization is more than a struggle between Eros and Thanatos, as depicted by Freud. In a certain sense the famous monograph of Freud that 'religion is an illusion' is true, but one must be careful to distinguish between illusion and delusion. It is not so much the subjectivity of the 'Damascus experience' which is at stake but ultimately whether Paul's message was one of distortion and delusion or the revelation of a 'deeper', psychic truth.

Unlike empirical assertions, the assertions of religion are generally not based on observations of the external world which can be either verified or falsified, but rather on inner convictions that neither seek nor require rational justification. The shift in psychoanalytic gestalt of which Kuhn speaks of in 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' is perhaps underway, it is paradigmatic and therefore has the appearance of something irrational. A translation of meaning occurs, as with Newtonian mechanics and Relativity and its radical reordering of perception .

Freud would have it, the worship of God can be explained in terms of a fantasy substitute for the earthly father. Jung has it, the ancient symbolism in which the wind, both in Greek (pneuma), Hebrew (ruah) and Arabic (ruh), stands for God and spirit. The feminine aspect of the Divine comes to life in the symbol of Mary.

David (VK3AUU),

I apologise, my contribution to this discussion should obviously not have been addressed to you.

I am aware that there are many people who have difficulties with understanding symbolic representations of reality - e.g. in contemporary physics (relativity, QM, string theory etc.) through non-intuitive mathematics - and hide behind (nineteenth century ideas of) scientific evidence. Nevertheless, I hope relda’s explanation will help you to understand that also as far as human experience is concerned, there is more than what meets the eye (and the scientific instrument).

George.
Your suggestion that truth, beauty and goodness may relate to the persons of the Trinity must be rejected. Firstly, I am rather at odds with the pope on the necessity of Greek philosophy as a ground for Christian theology as though it were universal. Colin Gunton's book "Act and Being" spells this out very well. We may say that truth, beauty and goodness are attributes of God, although I would even hesitate here. But to identify them with the persons of the Trinity would be to introduce modalism in which the persons are distinguished by their attributes rather than their actions. The Son is differentiated from the Father because is generate from the Father and the Spirit is differentiated because he is spirated from both the Father and the Son. Augustine insisted that when God acts, all three persons are implicated. We see the truth of the Father in the Son by the power of the Spirit. So you see to give attributes to either of the persons does not work.

Karl Barth has described the Trinity in terms of God as the Subject, predicate and object. The subject, the Father, has as his object of action the Son and what he does in the Son is predicated in the Spirit. The Son is thus the historical presence of the Father and what he is as this is revealed by the Spirit.

Peter Sellick

Thank you Sells, Relda and George for your responses to my suggestion of formulating a quaternary as a way forward. I am persuaded that the Holy Trinity should be left as is. My thoughts now return to how best to approach Mary.

Relda suggests that Mary be held up as the pro-creator of the Trinity. According to the Nicene Creed, Jesus Christ is “eternally begotten of the Father…begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.” Thus Christ always was with the Father, and presumably with the Spirit, even before “he came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human.”

If Mary, with God the Holy Spirit, was procreator of Jesus as a human being, how does this proposition fit with the notion that Mary pro-created the Trinity? I suppose one could say that before the incarnation humans did not perceive a third person in the Godhead, but following Jesus’ birth (and his ascension) the concept of the Trinity could be born in the human mind. That would make Mary the pro-creator of human awareness of the Trinity, rather than of the Trinity in itself.

Relda: Is this what you are proposing? And how do you others see it?

Sells: In your article you present yourself as a member of a “Protestant” church. You also say that Mary is “almost written out of Protestantism”. I have been reading the document “Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ” (2004), which presents the agreement reached by the Anglican and Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC II). Your article, in its view of Mary as a symbol of the Church, seems to be in accord with the ARCIC agreement. The Commission, however, reached agreement on many more points concerning Mary. Can you tell me what status the document now has in the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches? Further, as an Anglican, to what extent do you agree with the ARCIC II agreement as a whole?

By the way, I must agree with George that we are having a very interesting and worthwhile exchange of views!