St Luke's Church Eccleshill - Articles from "The Link"

With the new blue services book about to be launched at St Luke's, here are some thoughts on the changes...

From Holy Spirit or Virgin Mary?

During September we will switch to new service books based on “Common Worship”. Some people have expressed some nervousness about this, and wondered why we need new books. One answer is that all Church of England churches have to make the change as the red books (ASB 1980) become illegal. But we ask you not to worry, as the new services are not very different from the old ones.

One change you will notice is in the wording of Christ’s incarnation in the Nicene Creed (the one used at Communion). Instead of the old words:

"... by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and was made man",

the new version reads:

"... was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and was made man".

Some people have been worried that maybe this new version promotes the Virgin Mary, making her an equal partner with the Holy Spirit instead of leaving the initiative with Him? Is the Church of England maybe going Catholic?

The Nicene Creed was originally written in Greek, and translated into Latin. The Latin translation reads:

“... et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine ...”,

and the Book of Common Prayer translates this literally as

“...and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary...”.

But the Greek original only has one preposition in this clause instead of the two different ones, and a literal translation of the Greek into Latin would have “et Maria” (“and Mary”) instead of “ex Maria” (“out of Mary”).

Some people think that the change from et to ex was a copying mistake by a secretary at an ancient synod. Others think that the Western Church was trying to avoid the impression that the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary were equal partners. The genetics of reproduction were not understood in those days, and it was usually thought that the male provided the “blueprint” for the child while the female provided the material out of which the child was made: maybe the Eastern (Greek-speaking) Church would have tacitly understood this, whereas the Western (Latin-speaking) Church would have wanted it clarified?

The words in the new Common Worship service go back to the Greek original, and are not intended to indicate a change of doctrine. We still believe that Jesus is God’s Son in that he bears the complete character and personality of God his Father (unlike all other people, who only bear aspects of God’s character). The wording of the Apostle’s Creed, which also expresses this truth, is unchanged.

John Hartley

In the preparation of the article above, I would like to acknowledge the help I received from two items in "The Round", the parish magazine of the Church at St Andrew the Great, Cambridge. These two items are reproduced below:

Easter 2001, page 22 (as part of a review of Common Worship):

The Greek clause about the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Nicene Creed has been literally translated by appearing to give the Virgin Mary the same role in salvation history as the Holy Spirit ("[he] was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary..."). This is a literal translation of the original Greek (assuming that the original writers intended the preposition ek to have exactly thesame meaning when governing the two nouns). So the theological or philosophical distinction of their roles (which is made in Cranmer's English translation) involves the translation of the Greek preposition ek by two different English prepositions ("And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary...").

Harvest 2001, page 15:

Further to the editor's review of "Common Worship", Andrew Woode has kindly pointed out that Cranmer almost certainly was working from the Latin version of the Nicene Creed. ... We are not sure why the Latin text has two different prepositions whereas the Greek original only has one. It could be something as simple as a scribal error ...

Or the change from et to ex might have something to do with the ancient distinction of male and female roles in reproduction being expressed in terms of "formal" and "material" causes. (Roughly speaking, themodern equivalents of "formal" causes are artists sketches, engineering blueprints, or (in biology) the genetic code. The "material" cause is the matter out of which something is made.) But we can't at the moment see how the Latin prepositions would hint at those philosophical distinctions.

It is now known that the ancient philosophical understanding of reproduction is wrong as the biological discoveries of the last 100 years have shown that a female is both a formal and a material cause of her offspring (the male is still a formal cause). However, the ancient philosophy forms the background to the historic (and even Reformed) interpretation of the incarnation of the Word of God. The Gospel (and creedal) writers might have wanted to distance themselves by the language they used from any hint that a human male agent was involved. One other thing to give us pause is that this classification of causes was first made by writers in the Greek language, not the Latin one.

If anyone can shed any light on these matters, we would be most grateful.