Age, Free Will and Mary

“I confess that I just can’t see how Mary could make a free choice. Yes she could make free decisions but not a free informed decision.”

Unless the Mormon scriptures radically revise the account given in the Gospels, I think it’s clear that Mary did not make an “informed decision”. Only Christ could see the cross coming; Mary’s “Let it be according to thy will” is a leap of faith.

Also, note that whatever her age was, she was betrothed already. If she is of “marrying age”, then presumably she’s old enough to conceive without insemination as well.

I’m inclined to not be bothered by the fact that people used to get married at younger ages. In an important sense, there is a huge age difference between someone who is entering high-school in our society and someone who is finishing up an apprenticeship in medieval society, even if they are both “fourteen years old”. One of them is perhaps a fifth of the way through their life, the other, a third. One of them is not expected to be an adult for several years still; the other is expected to be an adult presently — and both of them have grown up being fully aware of this, have lived their lives in harmony with this trajectory, and live in a society which gives rise to and sustains these norms.

Humbert Humbert is a pedophile not because he is attracted to girls of a certain age, but because he is attracted to young girls.

Clark #3:

I’m not sure I completely follow your comment. Are you criticizing here an acontextually omniscient God? If so, I’m definitely with you. If not, I’m confused.

5: Clark, you definitely see the world differently than I do.

I’m not sure what you mean by “mature,” but it might just be rather arbitrary in God’s eyes. Once again, God wouldn’t make the age of accountability at age 8 if we didn’t have the ability to make mature choices such as enter into a binding lifelong covenant with God. Moreover, it’s pretty difficult to use psychology to say that people like Mary were not “mature” at age 14 (whatever that means). For one, the context was different. Maturity exists only in a context, including one’s relationship with God. God probably laughs at how ridiculously static our own moralistic (and scientific) standards are.

For what it’s worth, the single most important and life-altering decision I ever made was when I was fourteen. I think we do people a disservice by assuming they are unable to make decisions at that age. They are plenty mature enough to decide such things, in my opinion.

“I think the reason I brought it up as a more philosophical question is that while we can make the appeal to cultural understanding if God is omniscient then that appeal doesn’t work.

In other words we excuse a lot in ourselves and especially in the past (say racism) due to our epistemological limits due to context. However God simply can’t have those limits - at least not in the same way. God knows the good thus we have a problem of how God relates to context.”

I don’t want to “excuse” the fact that people used to get married at a younger age, as if our current practice is The Right Way and other societies simply (but non-culpably) got it wrong. I don’t think there is anything to excuse. In various societies, aging is handled in various ways; some have more to recommend them than others. In any society there will be ways to behave well and ways to behave badly; what is bad behavior in one society may be commendable in another, and vice-versa. (Suppose no one in Biblical times married until they were almost 30, as is becoming the norm presently — what would this have done for their birthrates, or womens’ chances at living through childbirth? These issues are not worrisome today, with our modern medicine.)

I think it is clearly false that American girls of 14 are mature enough to be wed, but I don’t think it’s obvious that females of age 14 were never mature enough to be wed. Age, in the relevant sense, is not a biological matter. The relevant issue is maturity, and this is culturally relative — a man of 45 would once have been an elder, and now he is merely “middle-aged”.

So, I think it’s rubbish to say that God non-contextually “knows The Good”, as if this was something floating free of various societal norms. There ain’t no such animal. If God is to judge Mary, then He is to judge her as Mary, as the Jewish woman who she was, and not as some tokening of the Form Of Humanity. So I don’t think there’s any philosophical issue here.

I’m not particularly inclined to “excuse racism” in the past. It’s a virulent thing, and deeply shameful. And especially in the past three or so centuries, there can be no appealing to ignorance to excuse anyone at all learned; those who had eyes could see that racist notions were groundless. Brandon over at Siris has written some good stuff on this, usually discussing Hume’s racism and Hume’s many upstanding (and unjustly forgotten) anti-racist contemporaries.

I suppose the Mormon thing may be muddying the waters; I have no commitments to any doctrine of an “age of accountability”, and am an advocate of infant baptism, with Confirmation at ~13 (because this is the traditional age for Confirmation). But then I also hold to the orthodox notions of original sin, substitutionary atonement, etc which I recall Mormons tossed out with the rest. I also can’t think of anyone who married embarassingly young that I’d like to excuse (because I like them); Kierkegaard almost did, but there’s a heap of a lot of weird stuff going on with the whole Regina affair, and I don’t know what to make of it all. (and anyway she turned around and married someone else, so it can’t have been too terribly taboo at the time.) So as a matter of Mormon theology, I have no idea how you’re supposed to get out of your muddle. As a broader issue, Mary’s youth does not strike me as in need of theodicy.

Dennis: Yeah, I’ve noticed that in recent years Mormons & non-Mormon Christians seem to be more willing to engage with one another. I welcome this development. Interestingly, two LDS “apostles” were invited to the ecumenical meeting on Friday, up in NYC with Pope Benedict.

Clark: Michael, there is a theological doctrine that 8 is an age of accountability. Whether this is an absolute point or a general point is debatable. The main purpose of the doctrine is to have baptism at 8 and not earlier since we feel you have to be able to decide freely to be baptized as well as sin.

Glad to hear it is not (generally) considered to be as general as some folks indicate. Personally, I’d be in favor of raising the minimum age for baptism to 18, but that’s probably just me….

(My 10 year-old daughter, who has not been baptised and is not in any way Christian, just bought herself a cross necklace– “because it looked nice”. I’d be more comfortable if she had chosen a miniature silver electric chair or gallows, but I guess the store didn’t stock those….)

OK, sorry for the delay. I’ve been busy.

John’s right, of course. The older we get the more we become responsible. I think we reach a point of being basically informed enough. The bigger issue I was pointing out wasn’t just responsibility due to being informed but responsibility due to cognitive functions. I think by ones early 20’s that typically is fully in place.

Getting back to baptism I think the issue is whether a person has sufficient cognitive development and factual experience so as to be able to discern good from evil. So at that point they can sin whereas before that they can’t. This doesn’t mean they are responsible enough for making informed decisions about many aspects of life. Just that they can discern good from evil.

There was an interesting talk on conscience at the SMPT conference that brought up this distinction. They argued (rather well) that conscience was more about a kind of faculty for judgment and that it was different from the Light of Christ (which enabled the faculty)

Dennis (#11), I think one has to distinguish between whether God would be upset from people doing something versus whether he ought do it. That was my point. God understands that in our limited cognitive abilities, experience, and evidence that we will make incorrect decisions. But due to our processes we can’t be held accountable for those.

This is common sense - we recognize that if I think someone is my wife and run up behind her and give her a hug I’m probably not cheating on my wife.

My point is that God isn’t subject to such limits. So he excuses young marriages in the past not because it is an ideal situation but because the actors are so limited. But God’s not limited in any significant manner. So we can’t use that excuse on him.

God, it seems to me, is committed to doing the ideal act. I don’t see how we can work around that. He may end up with a less than ideal situation due to the actors involved and their circumstance. But I don’t think we can say that about Mary.

Put an other way, would something somehow not have worked had Mary been a 18 year old virgin rather than a 14 year old virgin? I don’t see why not.

Certainly I think there are a-contextual structures. At least is the loose sense of context. Obviously nothing is completely absent context - but let us say that it is invariant against the contexts we encounter.

As to your second point. If Mary had free will then she could have refused. That leaves two choices. Either God foreknew events in which case he could have had Mary born at the ideal time so that “right here and right now” couldn’t exist as a limit on God. Or God doesn’t have foreknowledge in which case he had to have backups which makes the situation equally problematic.

To your last point, the claim that marriage and pregnancy at 14 is ideal one could claim that. But I think there’s tremendous evidence that this is false.

Hello this is my first time posting but I have to say I enjoy the site and hope this make some sense

If I understand the original question which was; did mary have the ability at her age to make a decision in agreeing to by the mother of chirst, or did she not have the ability to make such a descision due to the lack of congnitive development.

Premise 1 even at the early age of 12 a person can have the cognitive skill needed to make such a decision… (thank to my wife for showing me this) in a text book on early childhood development it states that there are 4 stage of devolvement. The last two are of importance from age 8-11 the child starts to develop the ability to think with reason and rational analysis. From age 12-adulthood the child enters the fourth stage which is the development of abstract thinking…in essence able to think in logical sequences to arrive at a conclusion.

Premise 2 when a child is in a stage the skill learned can be groomed and development can be ,thru nurturing, enhanced… but not by ones self. In the same textbook it talk about the “rings of learning” think of it as a target. The bulls eye is what a child or adult is able to know… the second ring is what the child/adult can know through the guidance of others… and the third ring is what a child/adult may or may not be able to know but can only be achived through the guidance of another.

Premise 3 Because of 1 and 2 It is logically possible for Mary to be able to have had the skills need to make such a choice.

Premise 4 I will presume that if God gives some one a choice…in actualility that person does have a choice between different things. (this is the weakest part of the argument)

Premise 5 God did give Mary a choice… so presumable Mary had the ability to choice whether or not to be the mother of Christ.

Therefore because of 3,5 it would be a safe assumption to say that Mary did have the ability to make the choice and that her free will was still intact.

John, couldn’t he have an angel ask Mary (or whomever) to hold off for a little while? That is give her an opportunity to make the decision in an informed fashion?

Mike, I think it’s generally conceived that this fourth phase develops over time. It’s not “wham” at 12 and you have it. There’s still a fair bit of cognitive development. Also there’s not an exact correspondence to these categories of development (which I believe are fairly old) and then cognitive features. So I’m not sure I agree with your premises.

One could adapt your argument and simply say God miraculously gave Mary the cognitive development most of us don’t achieve until later. But that seems to avoid the central issue. Why do that if God could simply have her be slightly older? The idea that there was a shortage of 17 year old virgins in Palestine seems rather dubious on the face of it.

The seminal paper on marriage in the Ancient Near East is Martha Roth’s “Age at Marriage and the Household.” It’s available on JSTOR. (Which is sometimes rare for these things) It appears like most marriages were arranged, the men reasonably old, and the women typically teenagers. However I don’t think the age is quite enough to allow your point Daniel. Here’s the relevant paragraphs. (From page 747)

Nonetheless, we can infer for both population groups a pattern of age differences for spouses at first marriage that is comparable to the Mediterranean model of historic Europe: males typically married in their late twenties or early thirties, and females in their mid to late teens.

If my understanding of the demographic profile is correct and there is more than a decade age difference between spouses, a hypothetical reconstruction of the moment of marriage would find the actors staggered among the age-groupings of society. A bride will be in her middle or late teens, with a father in his fifties and a mother in her early to mid forties. The bride’s husband would be about thirty and her mother-in-law about fifty, almost the age of her own father. Her husband’s father, on the other hand, will rarely be alive at that time; if living, he would be at least in his middle sixties.

Interestingly my wife is about 10 years younger than me. Ditto with my brother and his wife.

Rich,

I generally agree with your comment, but I do think one can reasonably argue that Mary DID have a choice regarding the conception of Jesus. If, at the time of the angel’s first appearance to her, she would have run away screaming, plugging her ears, while shouting “No! No! No!” the Lord may have reconsidered his choice…

Michael, in Open Theology, which at least a few Mormon theologians like Blake Ostler subscribe to, omniscience doesn’t include the future since it is logically unknowable (or for some ontologically unknowable). It’s a fairly significant position among Protestants as well. (I don’t know about Catholics or others)

I think it’s still a definite minority position even among Mormons though.

I should add that the idea for this post actually came in part from an exchange at the SMPT conference over the issue of free will and Mary at a panel discussing Blake Ostler’s book. His theology is pretty much a systematic theology working out the implications of Open Theism in an LDS context. Libertarian Free Will is key to his thought.

Rich, I don’t think it clear that Mary’s marriage was already arranged. Rather it seems like Joseph was arranged after she found out she was pregnant. There’s no reason to believe she would be married that early without the pregnancy which God was responsible for.

Rich 29,

Well, you bring up an interesting speculative question. I don’t think that either one of us could demonstratively state whether a person could run away from an angel…

I suppose, even if Mary couldn’t have moved, she still could have rejected the angel’s command (even if it was AFTER the angel left). But to go too much further on this matter is to raise speculative questions regarding the nature of Mary’s conception, and I’d prefer not to go there (given the conception’s sacredness, in my mind).

Michael 27,

Clark (28) pretty much responded for me on this one. But God’s rethinking his choice is not a strong issue for me (in the point I was trying to raise). Most Latter-day Saints would be fine with Mary having free will AND God knowing what she was going to do. Thus, theoretically, Mary would have the ability to do otherwise but God would simply know Mary so well that he would have confidence in whatever it is she chooses. (Not saying I hold this view, though.)

Due to time constraints, I have not been able to follow this entry. But I thought I would briefly (all too briefly and inadequately to boot) share with you the Eastern Orthodox view on this topic as discussed by Vladimir Lossky in his book _The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church_. Quoting Nicolas Cabasilas, Lossky states:

“The incarnation was not only the work of the Father, by His power and by His spirit, but it was also the work of the will and faith of the Virgin. Without the consent of the Immaculate, without the agreement of her faith, the plan was as unrealizable as it would have been without the intervention of the three divine Persons Themselves. It was only after having instructed her and persuaded her that God took her for His Mother and borrowed from her the flesh, that She so greatly wished to lend Him. Just as He became incarnate voluntarily, so He wished that His Mother should bear Him freely and with her full consent.”

The Eastern Church understands that God cannot save humanity against their will and, thus, He cannot force their Savior upon them. It is for this reason that Mary must be free to accept or reject being the Theotokos. In other words, if Mary was not free to reject being the Mother of God, then, none are saved. As Lossky explains,

“In the person of the Virgin, humanity has given its consent to the Word becoming flesh and coming to dwell amongst men, for, according to the patristic phrase “if the Divine will alone was the creator of man, it could not save him without the concord of human will. The tragedy of liberty was resolved by the words ecce ancilla Domini.”

I’m pretty dubious about these apocryphal texts - especially given the ages they often put for Joseph.

Regarding your earlier point the issue isn’t whether God could “reason” with Mary about events. It is whether Mary is cognitively mature enough and experienced enough to be able to reason in a fashion we’d call free.

Rich’s point (which I’ll admit I’m quite embarrassed about now) is a good one though. If Mary and Joseph were already engaged then the event of the pregnancy is much less significant as a place where God could be imposing a choice.

I think as a thought experiment the situation still remains. One big issue in the FLDS case is that the women, even if a free choice were offered, are unable to make an informed free choice because of (a) indoctrination and (b) age. Yet, isn’t that completely the case with Mary as well?

One interesting question might be if divine intervention that is clearly divine could ever allow a free choice. Now Mormons have reason to say yes given that Laman and Lemuel saw and angel and still acted otherwise. However the issue of expectations and training especially with regards to God is a very interesting one to me.

The idea that Joseph was to care for Mary would make sense were they not already engaged when the announcement is made - as Rich noted. So I suspect this later tradition is a kind of apologetic.

Regarding Jonah - he was an adult and thus open to a very different sort of judgment than a 14 or 16 year old girl. As to Satan, one would presume he’d be in a far better position to judge than any of us here in mortality.

There is no reason to doubt that the marriage went on as planned prior to the birth of Christ. The consummation of the marriage probably didn’t occur until after the birth of Christ.

As to Mary’s “free will” the angel told her she would deliver the messiah. She didn’t seem to have any problem with the idea of child birth. Her only question was as to how this would be accomplished since she was a virgin. She was probably raised in a tradition which said the highest glory of a woman was to give birth and keep a righteous household. There is no reason to suppose that this event would be objectionable to her. She could have run out screaming, assuming she could run in the presence of an angle; but why would she? Given the cultural constraints surrounding her thinking process, there is no reason to suppose that she could even take the screaming alternative as it probably would not have occurred to her.

Rich

First off Aurelius, Im not challenging your religion and its belief. If that is what you wish to believe then so be it. In my estimation what you are discussing is the traditions of your church and defending them by scriptural interpretation.

Nevertheless my thinking is not bound by your traditions. With regards to marriage, Mary was engaged prior to the angle giving notice of her that she had been chosen to bear the Messiah. At that time engagement was a lawful state from which one had to file a divorce petition in order to absolved the union. The only reason for engagement was in preparation for solemn marriage. Marriage was the only moral state by which a man and a women may enter into legal sex relations. The social and cultural expectation was that this union would produce a child. So when Mary entered into the engagement she was acknowledging that she would marry Joseph and that children would be produced from that union. This is how her culture taught her and this is how, in all likelihood, she would see it. So from the beginning of the engagement the expectation was that it would lead to marriage and children.

In Elizabethan writing, the definition of of ‘know’ was, among other things. a reference to sexual intercourse. This is in compliance with interpreting Mt 1:25 meaning they did not have sexual intercourse until after Jesus was born. After that time there was no reason not to have other children. There was only one Messiah and that was Jesus. Mary was simply the earthly vessel by which the Messiah was brought into the world.

Interestingly enough, and you can see this in the development of the Catholic church at the end of the empire and beginning of the middle ages, there was a growing split between clergy and laity. As the clergy became a more corporate body it became to be seen that there were things reserved only to the clergy. Approaching the Christ was one of them. In medieval theology, it was the student’s goal to study until he could be one with Christ. That was the goal but it was hardly achievable. The laity was discouraged from approaching the godhead directly. Instead they were directed to approach them indirectly through the intercession of Mary. Approaching the godhead directly was reserved for the clergy.

“As for your (false) dichotomy between accepting and screaming, of course, this is utterly absurd. She could have just declined. There is no need for her to run screaming from the angel.”

Come on Aurelius lighten up. None of that was meant to be taken seriously.

“By your reasoning, since the culture believe it was good for males to marry at 18 (Pirke Aboth 5:12)”

I’m sorry but I don’t find anything in Pirke Aboth (or Avot) 5:12 that mentions marriageable ages for men. This is what I found:

“There are four types of student. One who is quick to understand and quick to forget–his flaw cancels his virtue. One who is slow to understand and slow to forget–his virtue cancels his flaw. One who is quick to understand and slow to forget–his is a good portion. One who is slow to understand and quick to forget–his is a bad portion.”

If you don’t mind I think I will go with Clark’s reference “Age at Marriage and the Household.” Here men married in their late twenties and early thirties. Here is something to think about. According to Jewish custom, in order to qualify to be a rabbi, and Christ was called by that term, the man had to be at least 30 years of age and married. Now I’m not speculating on that at all. but it is interesting.

Rich

Oh regarding the marriage and sexuality issue. I think that Aurelius is right in that it isn’t spelled out. That is one can rationally believe Mary remained a virgin and that Jesus never married. However I think given the language and cultural expectations the prima facie reading is for a traditional marriage. The only reason most don’t take it as the prima facie reading is due to the traditions that developed. But it isn’t clear when these traditions developed or why.

“Oh regarding the marriage and sexuality issue. I think that Aurelius is right in that it isn’t spelled out. That is one can rationally believe Mary remained a virgin and that Jesus never married. However I think given the language and cultural expectations the prima facie reading is for a traditional marriage. The only reason most don’t take it as the prima facie reading is due to the traditions that developed. But it isn’t clear when these traditions developed or why.”

I have no problem with what you said. Aurelius has every right to the traditions of his church as I do. And he has the right to interpret scriptures based on those traditions. I am not bound by his traditions and need not interpret the scriptures based on those tradition. Given how language was used in the 17th century, my interpretation of that scripture was a reasonable interpretation. I recognize that Aurelius doesn’t see the interpretation of that text as I do. That’s fine. I simply don’t have to feel threatened because his interpretation differs from mine. Nor should he feel threatened because my interpretation doesn’t agree with his. I am certainly not trying to prove him wrong. I am simply presenting an alternative interpretation and explaining why I hold that interpretation.

Rich