Q&A: Our prayer group is having difficulty accepting Mary’s Assumption into heaven, since it is nowhere found in the Bible. How can the Church teach something which is not Biblical?
Father J. Patrick Gaffney, SMM
The Assumption . . .
That the Assumption of Our Lady is not found formally, explicitly, in the Bible is true. However, it is found in the Bible virtually, i.e., in root, in seed.
The Word of God is living and flowers through the life, teaching and prayer of the Christian Community. From the earliest times, Christians held a belief of Mary. A belief whom Scripture depicts as the faith-filled Mother of the Lord. A belief in the fullness of her personality, one with her Risen, Victorious Son. In other words, Scripture in its full context, i.e., as lived, prayed and taught within the Body of Christ, the “pillar and ground of truth” (1 Tim 3:15), does reveal the Assumption. Taken out of full context, the bible would be, at best, ambiguous concerning the Assumption.
. . . Not in the Bible?
But Scripture is not to be understood out of context! And the Church, exercising itself to the fullest as the presence of Christ the Truth, has declared infallibly that this constant belief of the Church in the Assumption is a Spirit-filled understanding of the Word of God. The Pope does not, then, invent the Assumption. Rather, Pius XII infallibly promulgated a truth which the Church, rooted in the Bible. A truth that has joyfully seen flower from its prayerful living and teaching of the Scriptures. Scripture as prayed, lived and taught within the Christian Community is what is known technically as Scripture/Tradition.
Basing himself on the Old Testament role of the Queen Mother, the biblical scholar, Father George Montague, writes in his excellent book, Our Father, Our Mother, “Mary’s assumption … is nowhere recorded in the New Testament. However, that the church should come to this belief appears a most logical consequence of meditating on what it meant in biblical terms for God to have chosen her as mother of the King who was enthroned in glory by resurrection from the dead.”
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Painting: The Assumption of the Virgin: Italian Renaissance Artist and Painter Titan (1515 -1518)
This painting resides in Venice in the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.
Editors Note: Additional articles on the Assumption may be found on this website: The first, authored by Pope John Paul II, may be found here and is entitled: The Assumption of Mary: by Saint Pope John Paul II. The second article was written by Fr. Gaffney, SMM for The Queen: Q&A section of this website and is entitled: The Assumption of Mary: Relevance for Today? and may be found here. A third article, by Fr. Donald Macdonald, Taught By God: Toward an Understanding of the Assumption, may be found here.
