Category Archives: theology

On worshipping bag-ladies

Posted on by

This is a comment I left here which I thought might be worth sharing further.

What would it mean for you to worship a local bag lady? Presumably it wouldn’t necessarily mean changing the bag lady (ie giving her a house and an income and so on) because then the bag lady wouldn’t have the attributes that you’re worshipping. It would probably involve giving the bag lady things that ‘bag-ladiness’ held to be of value (bottles of scotch whiskey?) but, more fundamentally, it would involve taking on the attributes of ‘bag-ladiness’ yourself. In other words you would do things like: ceasing to wash, sleeping outside, pushing around an old shopping trolley with all your worldly goods in it and so on. And you wouldn’t do this because the bag-lady had told you to do it but – because you worship the bag lady, and see her as what is worth worshipping – you see the qualities of ‘bag-ladiness’ as of high value. And so, over time, you would turn into a bag-lady (or bag-chimp). In other words, and this is the axiom: you become what you worship. Those things which you hold to be of highest value in life, those are the things on which you will build your life, and your character and behaviour will then be shaped around them. Consider what it means to worship Mammon (ie wealth). For someone who actually sees money as the most important thing (which is what worship means) they will change as a person in order to accumulate wealth. That doesn’t mean that they will turn into a pile of gold, but it does mean that they will become avaricious and Scrooge-like.
Now mammon is seen as an idol from a Christian point of view because it is something that destroys life, it is what we call an idol. Idols can be worshipped (and they don’t have to be small statues, they can be ideas just as easily) and idols give what they promise – someone who genuinely worships Mammon will become more wealthy – but what they take in return is life, is integrity. As Jesus put it ‘what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul’. The difference between an idol and God, in Christian understandings, is that worshipping the living God gives life in return – joy, freedom, peace etc etc. So instead of becoming a bag-chimp, worshipping God enables you to be CELTIC CHIMP in an exemplary way.
We’ll probably come back to this as there is a fair bit more to say, but that’s enough for now.

Actually, I’ll say one more thing, because there is an inverse corollary: if you worship the living God, you become more alive, more integrated, more noble and spiritual etc – therefore, if you’re not becoming more noble, spiritual, integrated, alive… then you’re not worshipping the living God. Therefore if your experience of Christians is not recognisable by that description then it suggests something about who or what they are worshipping…

Muscles, metaphors, mysteries: on the grokking of God

Posted on by

This is a bit of an off-the-top-of-my-head sort of post, so doubtless I’ll say something I’ll later want to retract or amend, but I wanted to pursue the theme that Scott has been emphasising in comments, ie that atheists tend to see mystical language as ‘cobblers’. As this is pretty central to any religious tradition, it might help to set out briefly what is going on, at least as I see it.

Think of your muscles and all that you know about them; think in particular of your bicep, of how it works and how it moves. Now ponder the fact that the word ‘muscle’ is derived from the Latin musculus meaning ‘little mouse’. I found this fascinating when I first discovered it. I’d always thought ‘muscle’ was a scientific term with a very clear and distinct meaning – which it is of course – but it started out in life as a metaphor. In other words, as the language was developing and growing, and understanding was doing the same, and as people considered the parts of their bodies they remarked upon the physical resemblance between a mouse and the mass of flesh and tendon that they used to pick things up and hence: muscle.

Now this is an everyday process, especially in science. Consider the phrase ‘magnetic field’ – what is a field? It’s something that horses run around in, normally with a fence or hedgerows bordering it. It’s a confined space or area, and that is the sense in which the scientists began using the word ‘field’ to refer to the area that was influenced by magnetic force. Same with a gravitational field. In other words, in the process of exploring the nature of the material world the language that had previously been adequate needed to be developed and renewed in order to adequately account for and describe what was now being understood. Crucially, the understanding itself was developing in advance of the language. Have you ever had that experience when you wanted to say something and the word was on the tip of your tongue but you couldn’t get it out? And then the word comes and you feel release and ‘That’s what I wanted to say!’ Language itself is always catching up on the human life seeking expression, it’s a ‘static latch’ to use a MoQ term, and when it has caught up then the language is itself embedded in all the practices that humanity can invent. Language is not a transparent reflection of the world, it’s a constituent part of the world itself – but a part which is also derivative from and dependent on the human life and understanding which drives it. (I might say more about this another time – feel free to read my Wittgenstein essay here.) Which is a way of saying that poets are the most creative of human beings, and that the most creative scientists need to have some poetry in their soul.

However, that’s taking me away from my main point: our understanding drives the development of our language, and the language develops through metaphorical exploration and analogy, and the language slowly ‘hardens’ in meaning (so we know exactly what a muscle is, and for most people the thought of mice in relation to muscles never enters in). It hardens so much that people forget that once upon a time it was an image, an analogy, a metaphor. You could say that, once the language and practices associated have progressed to a certain point the poetry has vanished and the concept has been completely grokked.

What religious believers want to say about religious language is that, whilst some concepts may harden (and possibly thereby become idolatrous and harmful) the core of religious knowing can never be expressed in anything other than metaphorical language. This is mystical speech: the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. Once the language has been developed and understood the creative (poetic) flow of understanding has dried up, not necessarily to bad effect, but certainly in such a way that the ongoing exploration is impeded if the language is made absolute and unchangeable. In other words, what lies at the heart of the religious sensibility is not a conceptual truth but a relationship with reality as such, which is inexpressible in words. Or, perhaps better, it can be expressed in words, so long as the words are not mistaken for what they are pointing to, so the words must be consistently negated and affirmed in turn. (This is what I have learned from Denys Turner, amongst others, and I wrote more about it here.)

In other words, whilst it might sometimes be possible to grok muscles or gravitational fields, we will never be in a position to say that we have grokked God. Religious language is always on the boundary, on the cutting edge, always provisional and open to change. Yet, in just the same way as the understanding goes out beyond existing language, so too is the understanding fully in play in the religious sphere – in fact, I would say that the understanding is exalted in the religious sphere. Mysticism is not the abnegation of reason, it is the apotheosis of reason, where it is possible to understand reason more fully than ever before – to grok it, no less.

A final thought. Most of what is of human value emerges from that understanding which is beyond language. All the most wonderful things in human life were first conceived in imagination, as a faint glimmering or stirring in the soul, before they took material form and expression. To not see this, to see religious language (and many related fields like poetry) as sentimental ‘cobblers’ requires a very thorough grounding, training and education in certain mental practices and traditions. It results in what I have called ‘asophism‘ – a form of aspect blindness, and I can’t help but conclude that it represents a severe diminution of human life and potential.

Lane on the Virgin Birth

Posted on by

Very interesting article that Byron pointed me to available here.

A handful of quotations:

…this paper will be a critical examination of the significance given to the virgin birth in recent dogmatics. This approach is valid anyway as a partner to the exegetical approach but all the more so with a subject like the virgin birth. Undisputed direct reference to the virgin birth is confined to two brief New Testament passages (Matt. 1: 18-25; Lk. 1: 34f.). It follows therefore that the relation of this doctrine to other doctrines (the task of dogmatics) is at least as important as the exegesis of these two passages.

It is essential clearly to grasp the distinction between the Incarnation and the virgin birth. The virgin birth concerns the origins of the humanity of Christ. It states that Jesus, as man, had no human father. It does not state that God was his human father. The virgin birth is not like the stories of pagan gods mating with beautiful women. The miracle of the virgin birth is that of birth without a father, not of the mating of God and Mary. The doctrine of the Incarnation, on the other hand, concerns the deity of Christ. It states that this man Jesus was in fact God himself, the Logos, the Son of God come in the flesh. Jesus was divine not because he had no human father but because he is God become man. He is the Son of God (in the Trinitarian sense) not because of his human parentage (or lack of) but because he is the eternal Son of the Father, ‘begotten from the Father before all ages’. To summarise the distinction, the Incarnation means that Jesus is the Son of God become flesh, the virgin birth means that he had no human father. It is not hard to see how the two have come to be confused. The one states that God is his Father, the other that Joseph was not. It has been fatally easy to put these two together and to conclude that God was his father instead of Joseph, because Joseph was not.

When it is stated that Jesus did not need a human father because God was his Father the two levels are being confused. Such thinking, if pursued consistently, will lead to a grossly perverted form of either the virgin birth or the Incarnation or both.

The Incarnation would have been supernatural and miraculous even if the incarnate one had had an otherwise normal birth. His preexistence and his divinity would have been supernatural even if his humanity had had a purely natural origin.

The virgin birth teaches that the origin of his humanity was also supernatural.

But many today would not simply state that the virgin birth can coexist with such error. John Robinson, for instance, goes further and argues that the virgin birth must inevitably prejudice the genuineness of Jesus’ humanity and His solidarity with us. This claim can take two forms. First, it could be argued that the very fact of a virgin birth in itself removes Jesus from the arena of humanity. This charge is well answered by R. F. Aldwinkle who argues that ‘it is not the method by which a human being comes to be such which is decisive but the end product itself, namely a human being’. There is no ground for dogmatically asserting that the product of a virgin birth could not be fully human.

[SN: I think this is very weak]

Barth argues that the virgin birth points to the Incarnation in the same way as the empty tomb points to the resurrection. In each case the sign is less than the thing signified but points to it. The relation between them is that between sign and thing signified, not between cause and effect. The virgin birth did not cause the incarnation any more than the empty tomb caused the resurrection. Thus the virgin birth is to be seen not as the cause or the means of the Incarnation but rather as a sign pointing to it. The virgin birth, as a supernatural birth, is a sign of the importance and supernatural character of the One born. It is also a sign to us of God’s initiative in the Incarnation.

[SN: my argument is that the sign now points away from the incarnation]

As the Augustinian approach became orthodoxy it was naturally impossible to conceive of Christ being the product of sexual intercourse. The virgin birth thus became necessary for his sinlessness. Such a view of sex is certainly discredited today, and not only among Protestants.

Karl Barth saw in the virgin birth the expression of a wider truth that is fundamental to his theology. It shows that ‘human nature possesses no capacity for becoming the human nature of Jesus Christ, the place of divine revelation’. While it does become his nature, this is not because of any attributes that it already possesses but rather because of what it suffers and receives at the hand of God. The virgin birth, therefore, is a further denial of man’s natural capacity for God, a favourite theme with Barth.

[SN: this is the symbolic truth of the VB which I’d accept]

…‘lawless desire’ is unnecessary and [Jesus] did not submit to it but rather pointed forward to the future world where there will be no marriage. This ascetic teaching is based on the doctrine of the virgin birth. Such teaching became common in the following centuries. It is not surprising that this development occurred. The Gospel came to a world where the physical and sensual were despised and where asceticism was exalted. It was natural for such ideas to take root within the Church. It was also natural that the virgin birth should be used to support them. Here we have to acknowledge the truth of Barth’s comment that it might have been better for the Christian doctrine of marriage had there been no virgin birth. This does not mean that the virgin birth is untrue; it simply means that, like most doctrines, it is open to abuse.

Is it any more necessary for the virgin birth to have been a historical event than it is, say, for the Good Samaritan to have existed? There are two reasons why it is important for the virgin birth to be historical. The Matthaean narrative is specially inhospitable to a mythical interpretation. Matthew’s aim is apologetic ― to answer the charge of illegitimacy and to point to the fulfilment of prophecy. Neither of these concerns would be satisfied by a mythical, non-historical virgin birth. The appearance of a child before the consummation of marriage cannot be explained by a mythical sign. As Robinson argues, the alternative to the virgin birth is not conception within wedlock ‘for which there is no evidence at all’, but illegitimacy. Secondly, the role of the virgin birth as a sign goes if it did not happen…

If the virgin birth is a fitting sign rather than an absolute necessity does this mean that it is unimportant? It is true that the doctrine of the virgin birth is not as central as the Incarnation, the cross or the resurrection. It appears with these doctrines in the creeds, but it cannot be assumed that all of the doctrines of the creeds are of equal significance. The descent into hell is clearly less significant than the resurrection. That the virgin birth is less central is supported by the paucity of reference to it in the New Testament and by the fact that very little theological use is made of it there. But less central is not to be confused with unimportant. Its inclusion in the creeds clearly implies that it was felt to be important. The Church should proclaim the virgin birth because it happened, because it is scriptural and because it is a pointer to Christ and to his work.

~~
Some closing remarks. The rigorous distinction Lane makes between VB and incarnation is helpful but he seems confused as to whether the VB indicates the humanity or divinity of Christ, and much of the article supports my wider point about the marginality of the doctrine, ie it is a stripping away of all the consequences, so that it loses the capacity to become ‘weight-bearing’. His last paragraph (above) is a non sequitur – I want to ask why did the Fathers believe it to be important, what was it that they believed, and is it possible for us to affirm the same today?

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (12): Summary and conclusion

Posted on by

I want to bring this sequence to a close by spelling out the main planks of my argument. The spark for the series was Neil’s comment that I should resign my orders.

These are the main points that I would want to make:
1. The accounts of the VB are marginal in Scriptural terms.
2. The VB is marginal in doctrinal terms.
3. The nature of what is believed in accepting the VB has changed since the accounts were written, and that applies to both those who retain an acceptance of the Scriptural accounts in a literal sense, and those who reject it.
4. What the doctrine actually achieves in practice today is to undermine more important doctrines like the incarnation, and hence salvation. That is, the doctrine serves to prevent people coming to Christ, and the insistence upon a literal belief in it (in order to be saved) is a contemporary equivalent of tithing mint and dill and cumin.

I would want to emphasise that my rejection of the VB is not because I reject all miracles as impossible (I don’t), nor does it mean that I reject the resurrection (I accept it), nor does it mean I reject Scripture as a whole (I see it as God-breathed).

Several other things have become clearer to me in the course of writing this sequence:
– I really don’t take the birth narratives as literally true! I have avoided looking at the area too closely for quite some time, but I can’t avoid the conclusion;
– I remain persuadable that I’m wrong, but the persuasion needs to deal with my own objections, not generic ones (like Wright’s chapter does);
– my root problem is that I see no way to render an acceptance of the literal truth of the birth accounts compatible with an acceptance of the humanity of Christ (I think this was possible before) – and therefore, if the VB has to be believed in a literal sense, then I don’t belong where I am. Fortunately such a commitment is not required of Anglican clergy (what is required – and what I wholeheartedly affirm – is here);
– the contrast is between what is given more authority: Scripture or doctrine? I see the doctrinal effect (which I see as seriously negative) as carrying more weight than the negative consequences of abandoning a literal interpretation, not least because I don’t see it as either intellectually or theologically coherent to affirm something like inerrancy. However, it’s perfectly possible to judge these things differently without being an inerrantist. Wright, for example, a) gives more importance to the literal account, and b) sees no difficulty in reconciling the account with doctrinal truth. In this he is completely in tune with orthodox tradition, and I am not – which means I’m probably wrong;
– I am more convinced than before of what I originally wrote here: “My problem remains how to reconcile Jesus’ humanity with his special creation; or, put differently, I don’t see why God’s creative activity _has_to_ conflict with the normal processes of reproduction. Incarnation isn’t dependent on it; indeed, I suspect that the story was developed in order to support the doctrine of the incarnation and now works to accomplish the precise opposite. Either way it’s an extremely marginal belief and not essential to faith.”

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (11): Tom Wright

Posted on by

The first thing to say about Tom Wright’s perspective (taken from his book with Borg) is that he agrees with me (and the Pope) that the VB is marginal, beginning his chapter by saying “Jesus’ birth usually gets far more attention than its role in the New Testament warrants”, and ending it by saying “If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two chapters of Luke had never existed, I do not suppose that my own Christian faith, or that of the church to which I belong, would have been very different”. Quite so.

He goes on to point out that attitudes to the VB function as litmus tests for orthodoxy as a whole, especially attitudes to the Bible and miracles (a point I’ll come back to in my concluding post) and admits that their historicity is suspect, saying “as a historian I cannot use the births stories within an argument about the rest of the gospel narratives.”

His more substantial point, however, on which the remainder of his chapter is based, seems to be a) you’ll only disallow miracles if you’re corrupted by Modernist attitudes [I agree, but this is one of Wright’s principal targets in the essay and my position is unaffected by it], b) this is how God chose to do it, c) who are we to disagree? concluding by saying “Nor will the high moral horse do any better, insisting that God ought not to do things like this, because they send the wrong message about sexuality or because divine parentage gave Jesus an unfair start over the rest of us. Such positions produce a cartoon picture: the mouse draws itself up to its full height, puts its paws on its hips, and gives the elephant a good dressing down.”

I think Wright is confused here, and the confusion runs through the whole chapter. The weight of his point depends upon the truth of b); in other words, is the elephant God, or is the elephant a fallible human being? It is the attitude to Scripture which is the fundamental plank of Wright’s case, ie these narratives must be understood to be literally true, which drives him to the conclusions he reaches in this chapter. However, it’s possible to show that, even on these terms, Wright is inconsistent (see below).

After a quick appraisal of the theological emphases in each account, which Wright ascribes in traditional terms to the differences between Joseph and Mary’s recollections, Wright gets to what, for me, is the heart of the matter. He writes “It will not do to say that we know the laws of nature and that Joseph, Mary, the early church and the evangelists did not”. This misses the point, however (my point, at least). It is not that these people didn’t understand the link between sexuality and procreation (which seems to be the burden of Wright’s point), it is that they understood the ‘humanity’ to come through being ‘born of woman’, not, in material terms, in equal parts from both father and mother.

Wright goes on to outline his substantial position, in three stages:
1. Acceptance of incarnation and resurrection opens up the possibility of something like the Virgin Birth. I agree with this point in principle.
2. “There is no pre-Christian Jewish tradition suggesting that the Messiah would be born of a virgin. No one used Isaiah 7.14 this way before Matthew did… Why, for the sake of an exalted metaphor, would they take this risk – unless they at least believed them to be literally true?” I think this is an interesting and a strong point, but one which isn’t conclusive; that is, it depends upon other factors being more or less probable relative to the unlikelihood of Luke and Matthew inventing the stories.
3. The previously existing models for a VB are all pagan in nature, and it is unlikely that a Jewish mentality would have told the story of a VB for Jesus unless it was true. Wright argues “This theory asks us to believe in intellectual parthenogenesis: the birth of an idea without visible parentage.” I’m not convinced by this, although I can see the logic of Wright’s argument. Two thoughts occur to me. One is that the influence from the Hellenic world had already had a few centuries to shape Jewish thought, and so the Jewish world-view was not so virginally pure as Wright needs to suppose (consider what language the stories are written in, after all). The second is that, despite a very well written and witty defence of his historical credentials, Wright by no means has the unanimous support of his peers on this point. It is a matter of weighting the probabilities and it seems to me that on this point Wright is letting his desire to retain a conservative account of Scripture condition his historical judgement.

Which seems a harsh point, and one I am not qualified to render, but for one thing – the argument that Wright makes with regard to apocalyptic language, which is a point I fully agree with and one which seems to have a very large role in his overall historical reconstruction of Christ’s life and mission. Wright says (in the first of his major books) “Within the mainline Jewish writings of this period, covering a wide range of styles, genres, political persuasions and theological perspectives, there is virtually no evidence that Jews were expecting the end of the space-time universe. There is abundant evidence that they knew a good metaphor when they saw one, and used cosmic imagery to bring out the full theological significance of cataclysmic socio-political events. There is almost nothing to suggest that they followed the Stoics into the belief that the world itself would come to an end; and there is almost everything to suggest that they did not.” In other words the writers of the time were perfectly able to use language creatively to make a theological point. Why then are Luke and Matthew not able to do something similar when writing their birth narratives? Where I think Wright is confused is that he seems to be applying different criteria in these two areas, and the reason for applying different criteria appears to be his desire to preserve a traditional understanding of the VB. Yet he hasn’t made that case; it may well be possible to do so, but, at least to my understanding, he hasn’t achieved it here.

One more post…

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (10): Marcus Borg

Posted on by

This is a quick summary of Borg’s points to do with historical plausibility in the book he wrote with Tom Wright. To begin he writes “I do not think the virginal conception is historical… they are not history remembered but rather metaphorical narratives using ancient religious imagery to express central truths about Jesus’ significance”.

Borg has three main grounds for doubting the historicity of the narratives:
1. The narratives are late, only being mentioned in two places. It’s clearly possible to write a gospel without it, so either the other authors “didn’t know about it or didn’t consider it important enough to include. Or the tradition didn’t develop until quite late and the reason most New Testament authors do not mention it is because the stories did not yet exist”.
2. Reinforcing the first point are 5 principal distinctions between Luke and Matthew:
– significantly different genealogies (Matthew emphasises Jewish Kingship and traces the lineage from Abraham through Solomon; Luke emphasises outreach to the gentiles and traces the genealogy from Adam through the prophet Nathan);
– different homes for Mary and Joseph (Nazareth in Luke, with trip to Bethlehem; Bethlehem alone in Matthew);
– different birth visitors (wise men in Matthew, shepherds and angels in Luke);
– Herod’s plot (in Matthew, with accompanying flight to Egypt, but absent from Luke);
– use of the Hebrew Bible (Matthew uses prediction-fulfilment formulae five times; Luke echoes the language without treating it as the fulfilment of a prophecy).
In Borg’s words “these are enough to make the point that we have two very different stories”.
3. “The stories look like they have been composed to be overtures to each gospel”. In other words they exemplify the themes which each evangelist wishes to emphasise, ‘King of the Jews’ for Matthew, mystical prophet reaching to the world for Luke. “In short, the stories look like the literary creation of each author.”

I don’t want to say much about Borg as I basically agree with him. I’ll say more about Wright’s chapter in the next post.

TBTM20080116

Posted on by


Q: If you don’t accept Greek metaphysics, eg the viability of applying ‘ousia’ to God, what is the purpose of the creed?
A: In the language of the time, it was ruling out mistakes. We need to keep an eye on the mistakes, not necessarily preserve the language used to eliminate the mistakes.

The meaning of Jesus (Marcus Borg & Tom Wright)

Posted on by


Stimulating and interesting. Borg isn’t as much of a liberal as I have previously supposed, although I still find Wright more persuasive on most points. Borg makes a telling point about Wright’s methodology being ‘flat’, ie Wright pays no systematic attention to the high probability that Matthew (and Luke to a lesser extent) used Mark, and that therefore some of the material in Matthew or Luke is less historically reliable. I think that there are ways to respond to that, particularly for theological purposes, but historically Wright’s stance seems problematic. I have his more substantial books on my shelf, as yet unread, so he may not be vulnerable to that criticism.

In any case I’d happily recommend this book to someone just starting to engage with the issues. It’s pretty clear and it gives a good feel for the shape of most of the debates.

A quick poll

Posted on by

Having spent most of today asleep in bed – and deciding to give in to this lurgi/flu/sinusitis/Vogon infection rather than keep suppressing it by force of will (also known as accepting Mrs Rev Sam’s advice) – I’m having a quick potter around some blogs, and discover that my old tutor Stephen thinks that I am a heretic for saying that Jesus (when incarnate) was not “God, as such”. What I have in mind is a kenotic Christology: “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross” (Phil 2, NIV)

In other words, whilst the logos is wholly God as such, coinherent etc, Jesus of Nazareth, as the incarnation of the logos, did not possess all the attributes of the Godhead (eg omnipotence, omniscience and so on). You could say: it was only the second person who became incarnate, not all three (though I’m aware that is problematic in other ways). So far as I’m aware, that is the mainstream Christian understanding (and is how it is possible to reconcile Jesus’ divinity with his humanity) – but am I wrong? I’d be most grateful to know what other people believe on this (because if I AM a heretic on this one then I’ve got some soul-searching to do!!!).

When I feel better I’ll write up a long post on the incarnation, because it’s been brewing all the while through my stuff on the VB. Not today though.

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (9): a response to some comments

Posted on by

Tim commented on a previous post referring to an argument from CS Lewis, paraphrased as ‘This “unfair advantage” view has always seemed to me like a drowning man refusing to be rescued by the man with the lifebelt around him because, he says, “It’s not fair – the lifebelt gives you an unfair advantage”.’ I have a suspicion that, for once, CS Lewis isn’t entirely orthodox.

As I understand it, it’s essential to Christianity that Jesus not have a biological distinction from the rest of humanity. In part that is because of the ‘what he has not assumed he has not healed’ point about salvation, but it is also because we are expected to follow in his footsteps. What is the point of being taught to do something that it is not possible to do? And wouldn’t it be cruel to have such an expectation laid upon us?

Thing is, Jesus is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith (Heb 12.2) and the first-born of many brethren (Rom 8.29) and we are expected to do greater things than Christ (John 14.12). What prevents us from doing such things is our sin; if we receive grace through faith then that obstacle is overcome and we are liberated to do ‘all the good works that thou hast prepared for us to walk in’. In other words there is no biological or innate physical obstacle preventing us from becoming like Christ; the obstacle is our sin, and that is the principal distinction between Christ and the rest of us, that he was like us in every way except that he was without sin (Heb 2.17, 4.15). So at best the lifebelt image refers to our faith, not to our actions; at worst it is dependent on a faulty understanding of discipleship.

Tim and Paul also castigated me for not spending more time on exegesis. I think this is a mistake. There is a big issue here, and some smaller issues. I’m going to intercut Tim and Paul’s words with some of mine (in italics) as we go through, before digging out what I think is the main difference. Tim first:

The question is not whether it is possible for God to do or not to do something, but whether in fact he has chosen to do or not to do the thing in question. I agree with this.

What you need to do, Sam, as I keep on saying, is to do some exegesis for us of the passages in Matthew and Luke which describe the virginal conception of Jesus, showing us why they do not in fact mean what the church has always assumed they meant. I’m not sure it’s possible to do this; more crucially I’m not sure it’s important to do so. There are two questions: a) do Matthew and Luke describe a virginal conception, b) what did Matthew and Luke understand by that? On a) I’m not sure that anyone would argue that they are not describing a virginal conception (I certainly wouldn’t), but on b) we get stuck into questions of biblical criticism, in other words, can we take Matthew and Luke to be describing something that we would call ‘a matter of fact’ or are they being theologically creative (which to my mind doesn’t rule out divine inspiration) and describing something consistent with their overall understanding of the incarnation? If the latter is true – and, despite going against Tom Wright for once, that is what I believe – then the question that I want to explore is ‘does their story still achieve what they wanted it to achieve?’ – because the whole point of my argument is that as a culture changes a story can end up meaning something rather different to what it originally meant.

And I’m sorry, but all this stuff about it being a late doctrine that is only found in a couple of places does not qualify as biblical exegesis. Agreed; the point is that it is comparatively minor.

After all, one could argue that St. John’s doctrine of Jesus as the Word is also a late doctrine only found in – well, one place I would add Colossians to this – but orthodox Christianity has made that the centre of its theology of the incarnation. And rightly so – for it makes explicit what is elsewhere implicit; it’s a necessary doctrine, it’s not at all marginal.

The Eucharist is rarely mentioned in the New Testament, but we have made it the centre of our worship. Er… every gospel plus Paul? I’m not sure how you get ‘rarely’ from that, most especially given the dramatic focus upon it – plus vast reams of supporting evidence from other scriptures and archaeological investigations. But this is a side-issue.

Paul:

I, too, would value you doing some exegetical work about Luke and Matthew’s writing. Whilst interesting, and true enough, to conjecture about the place of body-dysphoria in the neo-Platonic muddle in much of Christianity, it is, as Tim says, NOT THE POINT of relevance to the orthodoxy or otherwise of the doctrine.
I’m not sure I agree with this. Orthodoxy for me isn’t simply a matter of matching up with what the early church believed; it’s a belief that the early church correctly articulated a truth which was independent of them. To be orthodox, then, is to be in tune with that higher truth (= the living Christ). My argument is that, because of a change in the wider culture, what had previously functioned as orthodoxy (ie a transparency to the higher truth) has now become toxic (opaque to the higher truth). In other words, the church can agree on something and still be wrong (which is a remarkably Protestant principle for me to be advocating, especially with you two!)

The statement of the doctrine at the heart of the Nicene Creed places its importance way ahead of the concerns of either Aquinas or Augustine – both of whom, by the way, could be easily and consistently read as body-haters, in spite of holding to the ‘old orthodoxy’ you assert. Yes – but being placed in the creed is a different form of authority than being placed in Scripture.

What Luke and Matthew meant, what kind of thing they were writing, and writing about, is at the heart of this – not Thomist or Augustinian theology and philosophy. Again, I’m not sure I agree with you, because my argument is about what the church has understood the doctrine to mean (and I was taking Aquinas as a representative of church tradition – which he remains for the majority of Christians). But I’ll come back to this.

Tim again:

Sam, you can’t have it both ways. A couple of exchanges ago you said that you didn’t think it was possible to figure out exactly what Matthew and Luke meant by their belief in the virginal conception. Now you say that it’s no longer possible to believe the same thing they believed. How can it be no longer possible if you don’t know what they believed? The difference between certainty and probability. I don’t think it’s possible to be certain of what was in Luke’s and Matthew’s minds, but I think we can have some indications. One of which is the point about Luke being a gentile doctor, which I mentioned in the comments, and which had never occurred to me before. That means he would almost certainly have had the Aristotelean understanding of the processes of conception.

But if we’re going to go the creedal route (and I’m not backing off for a moment on my request for you to do some biblical exegesis to back up your viewpoint) then look – the creators of Chalcedonian Christology obviously believed in both the full humanity of Jesus and the Virgin Birth. Yes.

So the little problem you are raising – about how Jesus could be fully human if he wasn’t formed in a fully human way – had obviously occurred to them too, no? It was at the centre of all the creedal discussions.

Surely you don’t think that the entire Christian world has been waiting with bated breath for twenty centuries for scholars of the last generation to notice this difficulty? No, I think the problem (as I have articulated it) is a consequence of the revolution in our understanding of conception, and was literally inconceivable(!) prior to that. The concerns I am raising simply don’t exist if you accept Aristotle’s understanding. What has happened in the West is that the doctrine of the virgin birth – and of incarnation – has been rejected as ‘superstition’, as a result of the more general scientific revolution, and I don’t think there have been many people (though I’m hopeful I’m not the first) who have argued from this perspective. I’m wanting to disentangle incarnation from virgin birth, in order to jettison the latter (a literal belief in the latter) as something which was once helpful but is now damaging. It’s a bit like the booster stage of the space shuttle launch – if you hang on to it for too long it gets in the way.

Personally I don’t think you can ever get away from the paradox. We say that Jesus was fully human, a man like us, but we know full well that in many ways he was not a man like us. First, we’ve never experienced sinless humanity before. How does that play itself out when it comes to involvement in social sins? Jesus paid taxes, therefore he was embedded in the matrix of social sin that taxation represents, eg paying the salaries of the Roman legionnaires occupying Jerusalem. I’m not sure that inhibits his divinity (though that might be worth discussing).

How does it relate to childhood temper tantrums? Quite frankly, a lot of the problems I go through on a daily basis are a result of my own sinfulness – and in this, Jesus is not a man like me and cannot sympathise with my weakness. And his consciousness of the Father’s presence, his awareness of himself as the Son of God, his miracles etc. etc. – all serve to distance his experience from my experience. Ah. I’m totally with you on sin being what separates us from Jesus – but sin alone. On things like the Father’s presence, the ability to perform ‘miracles’ and so on – I see no barrier to us doing what he did. (This is what I feel called to explore through the charismatic stuff by the way)

Shared our humanity to the full – yes indeed, but let’s not pretend that his humanity was not impacted in any way by his divinity. The problem you raise seems to me to be just one instance of the tensions we face in holding to the paradox of both our Lord’s humanity and also his divinity. Hmm. I think you’re placing his humanity and divinity on the same playing field, as if they are contesting the same space. I don’t understand it like that.

On another subject, Luke may have been a Gentile writing for a Gentile audience, but in some ways he is as Jewish as Matthew – especially, funnily enough, in his birth and infancy narratives with their conscious placing of Jesus in the stream of OT salvation history. But surely, as Tom Wright points out, Luke and Matthew must have known the risk they were taking in telling the story of a virginal conception in the context of the Greek and Roman myths that their Gentile audiences (and Jewish too, no doubt) would have been aware of. Why would they take that risk, if they didn’t think the truth of the historical record was at stake? Well, it might be to do with slander about Jesus’ paternity; but as you say – they are consciously telling the story with a theological aim, which is one of the reasons why the historicity of the two stories is suspect.

Midrash? Well I remember NT Wright’s criticism of John Shelby Spong at this point – I believe it was in the book ‘Who Was Jesus?’ (it’s at the office and I’m at home!) – in which he asked how much midrash Spong had actually read or read about. I remember Wright answering just the point you are advancing, quoting from a Jewish scholar who claimed that the nativity stories are nothing like traditional midrash. But I can’t claim to have studied this, so must leave it to you real scholars! I’m in the same boat – although I will look up Wright in that book and in his book co-authored with Borg. I’ll put the two links here that I mentioned in the comments, Doug here (also here which outlines theology I really like, and here), and also this post with more detail on the inconsistencies in the two accounts.

What is becoming clear to me, however, is that behind these disagreements lies the disagreement about the status of Scripture as such. In other words, as Paul argued, “What Luke and Matthew meant, what kind of thing they were writing, and writing about, is at the heart of this – not Thomist or Augustinian theology and philosophy.” This assumes at least two things, it seems to me, neither of which I actually agree with. Firstly, it puts Scripture as the highest authority, through which tradition and reason have to travel in order to reach Christ (I think that is the historic Anglican position by the way, so I think Tim’s recent disagreement with me on it is justified). Second, however, is the disjunction that is implied between ‘theology and philosophy’ and ‘Scripture’ which I don’t think is supportable (and this is why I think that in the end the two of you are both Protestants and I’m not! 😉 )

For what is at stake in disagreeing over this? There is agreement over things like incarnation, resurrection, Trinity, salvation etc – all those things which I see as the major doctrines. What seems to be at stake is whether Scripture is not giving us the literal truth in this story. I want to argue that this story is to be understood symbolically in the context of contemporary beliefs – and for the underlying point to be affirmed. You two seem to be arguing that ‘what Scripture says’ is the be-all and end-all. As it happens I really liked Tim’s point that “if they believed that the virginal conception had actually happened (and I would contend that they did – along with C.S. Lewis, N.T. Wright, and the vast majority of the Christian tradition), then you have to start with the historicity of the event and ask what consequences it has for your theology and philosophy, rather than starting with your theology and philosophy, saying ‘This doesn’t make sense’, and then modifying the record to fit your conclusion.” I do think that’s a really strong point, it’s just not strong enough for me in this case. Which is a different way of saying: I give weight to the doctrinal consistency and benefit flowing from particular beliefs; it matters what we believe and, in the end, I just don’t see this as being true, in a weight-bearing and life-giving sense. And because I don’t place Scripture above the other elements, I’m happy to say either a) Scripture is mistaken, or b) these passages are not to be interpreted in a literal fashion.

Which – rather depressingly – makes me a raving liberal. Ho hum.

(Then again, virtually nobody takes everything in the bible to be literally true. See here with a H/T to Michael for pointing me in his direction).