Mary is the Answer to Wesley's Historic Questions
“Mary’s whole life is a series of steps in an uninterrupted ascent from earth into heaven.”
“My spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
— Luke 1.47
Just prior to ordination, candidates in the United Methodist Church must answer a series of historic questions. The first question bequeathed by John Wesley is the inner basis for the second.
Have you faith in Christ?
Are you going on to perfection?
The third question follows after it, “Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life?”
Rendered into English, perfection is but the term theosis which the church fathers simply took to be the sum and substance of salvation. Theosis, meaning deification or divinization, refers to the spiritual journey that begins at baptism and continues throughout life; it’s the process by which the believer— by grace— gradually becomes more like God, culminating in union with the triune life.
In that this is a promise which death cannot condition, it is the gospel.
Now in the past I have balked at the historic questions, cynically commenting that in twenty-five years of ministry I yet to bury a perfect a believer who was perfect in love. “Such a person doesn’t exist,” I’d chide what I took to be a sanctimonious church short on grace. Only recently has it occurred to me, however, that I need look no further than my Nativity display for the scriptures’ archetypal answer to John Wesley’s historic questions.
The scriptures’ narrative image of salvation is Mary of Nazareth.
According to Roman Catholic dogma, the decisive moment in Mary’s timeline transpires prior to her birth— the immaculate conception. For Protestants, to the extent they pause to ponder her at all, the key event in Mary’s life is the annunciation of her son. The church fathers, however, do not specify a single threshold in Mary’s life. As Sergius Bulgakov notes, “Mary’s whole life is a series of steps in an uninterrupted ascent from earth into heaven.” Questions about original sin and Mary’s freedom from it lead Catholic belief to focus upon her own conception. By contrast the fathers view Mary’s entire life as the instantiation of the journey to holiness, a continuous growth in sanctification.
Mary is the image of the human creature as intended by God. Mary is the one about whom Wesley inquired. Just so, says Bulgakov, she is the ontological basis for our holiness.
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