Mom, I posted it again

Timothy Flanders is still at it; still posting emotive material to OnePeterFive. His latest now assumes "Protestants’ Assault on Mary". But I've already dealt with Flanders' mental fixation on violence and hate, and with his prose style and strategy. Within this latest piece, buried under all that externalised rage and frustration hides an argument. This argument, I deem worthy of extraction. I'll put it all in terms someone outside of his "cult" can engage.

(His words, man. I just blog here.)

Flanders argues for basic Christianity replacing the contest of wills between humans with a contest of humility. For the former, that archaic contest which The Hostage portrayed [and subtly undermined] in The Iliad, only one contestant may win the [laurel] crown. For the latter, everyone wins, in the sight of God: the tug-of-war becomes the hug-of-war. (So Shelby Silverstein put it, in his 1970s-era paraChristian fashion.)

This focus on humility (viewed from up here in AD 2020, and very possibly in AD 220) had its start with Mary's role as Christ's vessel and with Christ's own role as God come to relate to humanity. Christians are well familiar of the latter; and so is Flanders, citing it back to Paul's Philemon. Flanders would raise Mary's role to the same level.

Flanders further asserts that Mary's role served to inspire the Church herself as a hierarchy devoted to service, not to self-aggrandation. Why Mary in particular and not, say, Peter or even Jesus... he doesn't explain. By Late Antiquity this assertion does get made again and again but, never argued.

Those Christianities which raised Mary to the same level of Christ - but different - could, now, nuance that ancient baptismal formula. It wasn't quite that there was "no male nor female". But if not alike, man and woman were equal. Not for Christendom was the sarcastic comment that Gehenna housed mostly women, as in Muhammadanism. Not for Christians, the Jewish male prayer thanking G-d they were not made woman.

Where Christians have abandoned the Cult of Mary [I remind you - Flanders' words], this balance collapsed. As Flanders quotes Newman, Catholics who have honoured the Mother, still worship the Son, while Protestants, who now have ceased to confess the Son, began then by scoffing at the Mother.

Here we own an historical record of early Protestantism, and it is dire. Luther critiqued permanent celibacy - to which I am sympathetic. But Luther, either by cause or effect, demoted marriage as a sacrament. He proved unable, through sola scriptura, to resist even that barbarous relic polygamy. Men being physically stronger, in Germany this devolved into alpha male polygyny.