Even the Orthodox who I believe deny the immaculate conception due to disagreements with doctrine on original sin, recognize that the term Kecharitomene means Mary has been kept free from sin
To be more precise, we do not believe our glorious lady Theotokos and Ever Virgin Mary is guilty of voluntary sin. And our understanding of original sin is not that you are forensically guilty of Adam’s transgression, but rather that the fallen state of humanity is like a hereditary illness which results in most of us sinning with every thought, but through the grace of God, we can not only be forgiven for sin but given the ability to overcome the sinful passions, as St. Anthony the Great was able to do through great struggle in the desert, in the face of repeated onslaughts of different kinds of diabolical temptations and demonic attacks.
All Christians should pay attention to the Life of Anthony, because St. Athanasius, who wrote it, is also responsible for our 27 book New Testament Canon and also defended the faith against Arianism, the denial that Jesus Christ is God Incarnate, in His divinity of one essence with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and likewise consubstantial with us in His humanity (St. Athanasius in particular insisted on the term “of one essence”).
At any rate, regarding the Theotokos, she was able to resist sin because with foreknowledge that she would consent to give birth to Him in the person of the Son and Logos, God specially graced her, as indicated by St. Gabriel when he addresses her as “Kecharitomene,” which was not a title used for St. Stephen the Illustrious Protomartyr, who was the first Christian to win a crown of martyrdom and is greatly venerable, but the Theotokos who carried God in her womb is uniquely venerable.
I don’t understand what motivates people to try to deny or downplay the holiness of the Theotokos. The word “Holy” means something set aside and consecrated, and the the Blessed Virgin Mary was consecrated as the Holy Theotokos, the immaculate* vessel by which Christ our True God was carried, who gave birth to Him and raised Him as His only biological parent.
I also don’t understand why people would attack the doctrine of the perpetual virginity, a doctrine accepted and commended not just by all Early Church Fathers but also by Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer and John Wesley, and a doctrine which is plainly indicated by the same scripture its opponents use to try to attack it - many of these same people are opposed to the idea of holy celibacy and a monastic vocation despite the fact that St. Paul praised virginity and celibacy as being superior even to marriage, a theme echoed elsewhere in the New Testament. Now marriage is not wrong, but the idea that holy celibacy is wrong is unscriptural.
Perhaps our Lutheran friends
@MarkRohfrietsch @ViaCrucis or
@Ain't Zwinglian might have insights, or our Catholic friends
@Michie @RileyG @Xeno.of.athens and
@chevyontheriver or our Orthodox friends
@prodromos @jas3 and
@FenderTL5 , because I myself am utterly bewildered by this phenomenon.
It is not new however; antidicomarianism was documented by St. Epiphanios of Cyprus in the late fourth century, and was also a motivating factor behind the dreadful schism caused by the Christological error of Nestorius, who abused his position as the Patriarch of Constantinople to use force to try to suppress the veneration of Our Lady as Theotokos, and to justify this opposition to her veneration, developed a distorted Christology by manipulating certain speculations of Theodore of Mopsuestia into a radical Christology of separation and division between the divinity and humanity of Christ, one which compromises the idea of the Incarnation by leaning towards the idea of the Divine Logos and the man Jesus being two separate beings united by a single divine will (itself another Christological error, Monothelitism).