Category Archives: theology

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (8): Orthodoxy, belief, obedience

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I have a very high view of the importance of orthodox belief; I don’t see orthodoxy as something which is solely about a correct description of the world – on the contrary orthodoxy is weight bearing belief which gives life. That is, to be orthodox, to have orthodox belief, is to both see the world correctly AND (more importantly) to be enabled to live well within the world. In just the same way that a belief in the powers of human flight is likely to bring injury, so too is an unorthodox belief system liable to bring spiritual injury. Orthodox belief is not an academic matter for me; it is a matter of eternal salvation.

Moreover, I see the literal sense of the VB as orthodoxy – that is, I do see it as the historic inheritance of the faith once delivered to the saints. Generally speaking, I don’t see orthodoxy as something open to a ‘pick’n’mix’ approach, I do see it as something which is a seamlessly woven garment, which, once we start unpicking it, the whole thing starts to unravel. Yet that is precisely my difficulty with the VB. It is because I accept orthodox teachings about the incarnation and salvation that I can’t understand the VB. In other words, my dissatisfaction does not rest upon a more general embeddedness in a secular world-view, it is instead rooted in a commitment to the orthodox faith, as something both true and life-giving.

This is why this doctrine is a ‘thorn in my flesh’. All my instincts and experience tell me that it is essential to be orthodox, yet I can’t understand how to fit the VB into orthodoxy. Which highlights another aspect of the problem – belief is not voluntary. I can’t will myself to believe something that my overall reason cannot accept. As I said in an earlier post, if the VB is stripped of consequences, if it becomes non-weight bearing and simply a matter of curious fact, then the tensions that I experience become much less. Yet I see no way in which to maintain that as true.

Which brings us to the question of obedience. I’m happy to accept that my position on this topic is unorthodox AND that the teaching of the church is true. I see no contradiction between saying that and saying that I personally don’t believe it to be true. In a sense, that latter element then becomes more a description of my spiritual state than a statement of the truth of a doctrine. As I said in my sermon, having previously rejected orthodox views on matters like resurrection and incarnation, and slowly being persuaded of their validity, it would not surprise me if the same thing happened with respect to the VB. Part of the reason for writing this series is to try and elicit new perspectives (Barth??) which might ease the long-jam of my thought on the subject. In the meantime I’m stuck in the position I’ve had for some fifteen years now – I see the VB as marginal in Scripture and of dubious historicity; I see it as doctrinally suspect and liable to lead into significant error.

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (7): he took on flesh

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What are the implications for saying that the Virgin Birth must be true, even when the content of that belief has changed so much? One of the most malign, it seems to me, is the intensification of the gnostic tendency in Christian thought. That is, in the history of Christianity there is a strong streak of hostility to the body. I do not see this as a necessary feature of Christian belief, in fact I think the opposite is true – that is, the entire logic of the incarnation is that human flesh is capable of bearing divinity, that the image of God can be revealed through human skin. Yet there have always been more or less Platonic elements which have fostered the idea that the flesh gets in the way, that read Paul’s language about the flesh in a biological (rather than symbolic) way and so treat the flesh, and the desires of the flesh, as inherently sinful.

Now the Aquinas form of understanding the Virgin Birth, whilst it has a negative view of human sexuality (as that which passes on the ‘infection’ of original sin) need not have a negative view of human flesh as such. For it is still the human flesh that Jesus took on and sanctified, and as such we who share that human flesh are also able to be sanctified.

This is not possible if Jesus is biologically distinct from us. The whole process of fleshly existence is suspect, for our flesh is not capable of bearing the incarnation – special DNA is required. If the incarnation is not possible through the normal means of human reproduction then that means that God’s purposes are inhibited by normal human sexuality. It means that human sexuality is downgraded; it is inherently less worthy of respect, it is less capable of redemption and transcendence. This has led to untold harm and evil in human life, most especially our Western culture. I can’t help but believe that a faith which told of God being present through and from the normal processes of human sexuality would have a much more healed and healing understanding of sex than ours does – our church and our wider society.

For what is at stake in saying that God cannot incarnate through sexual union? What is being preserved? I can understand someone wanting to uphold the authority of Scripture hanging on to the doctrine, yet if they also see these malign consequences then the doctrine must surely lose its capacity to ‘bear weight’. For as soon as it does start to bear weight, then it seems that these malign consequences follow. Instead of being a faith that celebrates the possibilities of our creatureliness, that exalts in the possibility that God is seen in flesh, we have instead a repressed and repressing gnosticism, that cannot bear that flesh would bear the divine – and this hatred of the body is then reinforced and promulgated: a faith of flagellation rather than a faith of carnival.

And this too has evangelistic consequences.

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (6): What has not been assumed…

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In the last post I described Aquinas’ understanding of conception (taking him to be a representative of the mainstream Christian tradition). What I want to do in this and the next post is consider what happens to the implications of the doctrine of the Virgin Birth if you change the understanding of conception lying behind it.

Aquinas’ argument leaves Jesus’ humanity intact – he is of the same stuff as us. Yet if we take a different understanding of conception, ie one which involves DNA from two parents being fused to create a new individual, where does that leave Christ’s humanity? One might easily say ‘God created half of Jesus’ DNA’ – but what are the implications of accepting that? One is that Jesus possesses ‘special DNA’, he isn’t part of the common flow of DNA mixing – and therefore he is special and unique. That might not sound surprising, but the particular form of the uniqueness is no longer what it was for someone like Aquinas.

Consider, for Aquinas, the special and unique thing about Christ was the ordering of his human material, in such a way that it was without sin. In other words the distinction between Jesus and the rest of humanity was between the one who was sinless and the ones who are embedded in sin. This is a spiritual distinction, a moral distinction, a distinction which – at least in principle – is a consequence of voluntary actions, either of Adam and Eve originally, or of ourselves as we take part in the normal human activities of a sinful world. In other words there is no absolute distinction between Jesus and the rest of humanity – indeed, he shows us what being human really is, what being human was intended to be and, if we accept this, then through grace we might be able to share in what he has accomplished. Hence “to all who received him, to those who believed in his name he gave the right to become children of God – chidren born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or of a husband’s will, but born of God”.

None of this is possible if we understand conception differently. For if Christ is the product of ‘special DNA’ then the distinction between his humanity and ours becomes absolute. No longer is it something over which, even in principle, any human being can have any choice. A barrier has been established between the humanity of Christ and the humanity of the remainder of the human race. No longer is the barrier one to do with sin and choice and responsibility; now the barrier is one of biology and DNA. Jesus is different from us, not primarily because he was sinless (though that remains the case) but because his sinlessness proceeds from his biological distinction – in both sense of that word.

Jesus’ humanity is no longer the same as our humanity – and what that actually means is that Jesus is no longer human. He seems to be human; he acts on earth as if he was human; but it is a charade. Jesus is Superman, with an in-built genetic advantage. As such, he cannot be our saviour. For what he has not assumed, he has not healed. He has not assumed our mortal flesh, consequently our mortal flesh is not redeemed, is not raised up, is not capable of bearing divinity. I’ll say more about that in the next post.

For this one, what I would end with is a quotation from “Thirty years of honesty”, a prior version of which I read at University, and this quotation has always resonated with me, as it sums up all that seems to evangelistically unhelpful about this doctrine (my emphasis in the text). A ‘woman’s voice from a vicarage’ wrote to John Robinson saying:

The orthodox teaching has always maddened me; so many other humans have sacrificed themselves for us, endured more sustained and prolonged torture, without the comfort of being ‘the favourite son’… Any of us knows the impossibility of the struggle; what you have helped to remove is my constant annoyance that Christ always had an unfair advantage.

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (5): What was actually believed?

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Pursuing this theme; I am thinking about doing something extensive – and positive – about the doctrine of the incarnation, partly in response to this post, but for now I think I can do without it. So briefly: the doctrine of the incarnation is that ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth’ etc. The Virgin Birth relates to that doctrine as a ‘how’, not a ‘what’. That is, it is an explanation of how the incarnation was possible, it is not the doctrine of the incarnation as such.

So how did this ‘how’ work? Here is Aquinas on the subject: “in conception the seed of the male is not by way of matter, but by way of agent: and the female alone supplies the matter. Wherefore though the seed of the male was lacking in Christ’s conception, it does not follow that due matter was lacking.” (ST III Q28 Art 1)

In other words, the material of humanity was supplied by Mary; the form of Christ’s humanity was supplied by the Holy Spirit. Consider plasticine – it can be shaped in all sorts of different ways, yet still remaining the same substance. So too, for Christ, he was of the same stuff as the rest of us, it’s just that his stuff was ordered and shaped in a different way, ie without sin, which is passed on as an ‘infection’ through sexual intercourse. Here’s Aquinas again: “Now it was not possible in a nature already corrupt, for flesh to be born from sexual intercourse without incurring the infection of original sin.”

This seems to me to be coherent as a way of explaining the ‘how’ of the incarnation. Humanity reproduces through the planting of sperm (that which gives form and shape) in the ‘field’ of the womb, which field supplies the matter of our human nature. Original sin is passed on through sexual intercourse, and thus, in order to be without sin, a conception is required which bypasses such intercourse. What is needed is to replace the sperm with a different force providing form and shape to the matter of humanity – this is supplied by the Holy Spirit. Thus the doctrine of the Virgin Birth explains and supports the doctrine of the incarnation, that Jesus Christ was fully human (all of his material was the same as our material) whilst still being wholly divine (a sinless image of the Father).

The trouble is, we don’t understand conception in the same way any more. And to believe the same thing in a different context is no longer to believe the same thing. In other words, when weight is placed upon this doctrine the consequences that follow from it are not the same consequences that flowed hitherto. As I see it, a doctrine that once explained and supported the doctrine of the incarnation now accomplishes the precise opposite – which will be the subject of the next two posts.

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (4): Weight-bearing words

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I want to draw a distinction between two sorts of belief (I’m sure this isn’t original to me, and I’ve used this distinction many times before).

Some forms of belief are simply knowledge, they are extra pieces of mental furniture inside our heads.
Other forms of belief are directly action-guiding; that is, they involve a response of the whole body and provoke a whole repertoire of behaviours.

I call the second form of belief ‘weight bearing’; they are forms of language that actually ‘do work’ in people’s lives. (When I spoke about understanding the grammar of religious faith it’s this second aspect that I have in mind – so often atheists deal with religious belief as if it was entirely the first sort of belief).

Examples of the first sort of belief are (for me) details of quantum physics. I can read in the newspaper or in books about scientific experiments that are establishing different forms of sub-atomic particles, like the Higgs Boson and so on, but this is simply extra information. It doesn’t have any impact whatsoever upon my life. If tomorrow the scientists turned round and said – actually we’ve got this wrong, the Higgs boson is actually two different things (and both at the same time 😉 – then I’d find it interesting but no more.

An example of the second sort of belief, however, would be: my 1 year old daughter would be hurt if I dropped her on her head. That is action-guiding in a very strong sense, and I actively try to be as careful as possible when holding her. There is no disconnect between mental idea and human behaviour.

Or, a different way to bring out the distinction, consider the difference between ‘Mrs Smith is committing adultery’ and ‘your wife is committing adultery’ (and female readers can reverse the gender). One has an impact upon a life, the other does not.

Now what sort of belief is the Virgin Birth? If it is the first sort of belief then I don’t really have any sort of problem with it – it’s simply an historical curiosity. It’s like pondering the likelihood that Jesus had black or very dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, and was unlikely to have been more than about five and a half feet tall. Those thoughts are more or less true – but nothing hinges on them.

The trouble is that weight has been placed upon this doctrine – it has been made to do work – and that is where my concerns are really focused.

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (3): Creed

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I wasn’t going to do one specifically on the creed, but Tim’s comment is worth taking up. He said in response to my last post that my list of core doctrines was “a personal list, not the church’s list. The church’s list is found in the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed – and the Virgin Birth is found firmly among the essentials listed there.”

Well in one sense that is straightforwardly true; however I’m not that concerned with making a personal list as it would completely undermine the broader point I’m trying to make. So I need to do two things: 1) argue that the list I gave (modified if need be) actually IS the church’s list, and 2) argue that the virginity of Mary is not crucial to the purpose of the creed – which is really the burden of the series as a whole. Yet a little more could be said.

My list has four doctrines in it: resurrection, incarnation, the Trinity and creation. If there is another major doctrine to be included (eg it could be argued that the doctrines of salvation, Fall and atonement and so on, should be covered separately) then the list can be expanded or modified (are there others? I’m very open to expanding the list). However to say that the virgin birth is a doctrine of equal importance to these others, simply because it is mentioned in the creed is, to my mind, insufficient.

The creed itself is structured in a particular way, and was formed to counteract certain heretical views. So there is a Trinitarian structure, there is the element of God as creator, God as incarnate in Christ and God as Spirit, with a few addenda for completeness. So the broad themes are (obviously) harmonious. However, the major part of the second section of the creed is concerned with establishing the metaphysical status of Christ over against the Arians and other heretics – in other words it is very conditioned by the particular circumstances of that time. Consequently understanding the role of the virgin birth has to be pursued within that framework. Which is what I’m going to move on to in later posts.

One more thing can be said. The creed is not sufficient for Christian faith. In particular, it is virtually silent on Jesus’ life and teachings – and I’m quite sure that an Anabaptist Anglican wouldn’t want to downplay those two things relative to the metaphysical gymnastics in the creed!! (grin) The creed serves as a bulwark against particular forms of error, but as a guide for practical Christian discipleship it is manifestly inadequate on its own.

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (2): Doctrine

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This was going to be in two parts – Scripture and Doctrine – but I realise that the latter has many more elements in it that I would like to unpick, and I think a sequence of short posts spread over time will be more helpful. So there will be another five or six after this one.

What are the most important doctrines in the Christian faith? I would say the following are the most central and distinctive:
1. The resurrection – the unique event, incomparable, sui generis – upon which all else rests. Without it our faith is in vain, with it the world turns around and we are free. Sin is conquered, liberty is proclaimed to the captives. Et cetera.
2. The incarnation – a consequence of the resurrection, whereby Jesus of Nazareth is proclaimed Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The purpose of all creation, that through which the entire cosmos is formed and led – this has come amongst us, full of grace and truth. The primary revelation of the nature of God. That which cannot be reasoned or deduced – our eyes are opened from the outside – God comes to us and shows us the light. Thus, incarnation includes salvation – or (following Finlan) theosis is more foundational than atonement – and, I would argue, language of the Fall belongs as a subset of this doctrine, rather than independently.
3. The Trinitarian nature of God – that God is found in relationship – that we are invited into that relationship which exists apart from our own desires and understandings, and that in that relationship we find our most authentic and telic existence.
4. The doctrine of creation – that the world and all that is in it is created by this triune God – that we are creatures dependent upon the eternal sustenance of the Creator – we are held in being, held up by love.

Seems to me that these are the central and most distinctive Christian doctrines. In what way does the notion of the Virgin Birth affirm them, or deny them? Historically the link has been with the doctrine of the Incarnation, which is what I’m going to focus in on in more detail with future posts. But I would say that at most the Virgin Birth helps to affirm Incarnation, but has nothing to do with the others – and even that helpful role is now open to question.


Thresholds for a sensible conversation with an atheist

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I’ve been musing – in between sneezes and christmas pudding – about what is needed to have an intelligent conversation with an atheist; that is, a conversation which has some chance of fostering growth in understanding on either side. There are general things to do with civil debate and openness to changing of minds, but there are some more specific needs as well. So I thought I’d jot these down (I’m sure an atheist could come up with some reciprocal ones from their side!).

1. The atheist needs to either understand, or be willing to be taught, the concept of idolatry. This is not new-fangled ‘liberalism’, this is the main root of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In brief, God is not a member of a class – any class. That class can be ‘existing things’ or ‘beings’ or ‘good’ – all of these fail to capture God. So often the understanding of God being rejected is not one that a moderately trained theologian could accept. As Denys Turner puts it, the atheist hasn’t even reached the ‘theologically necessary levels of denial’. A usual response at this stage is to say ‘well you and the theologians might believe that, but most Christians (Muslims/Jews) don’t!’ Well, that may or may not be true, but it’s a juvenile clouding of the issues. If we’re going to have a serious debate then we need to engage with the best exemplars of the tradition, the ones with most influence. It would be like saying that science is evil because of Mengele’s experiments.

2. Related to this, the atheist needs to have a broader sense of historical perspective that that dominated by post-Enlightenment controversies. If the arguments for the existence of God or the truth of Christianity are all centred on, eg, literalistic claims in Genesis vs geological evidence then we’re not going to get very far. Those arguments were generated by the scientific revolution, that is, the theological force of Ussher or Paley is within an already scientific epistemology. If that epistemology is not accepted – in other words if there is an epistemology with much broader and deeper roots in the Christian tradition being employed – then those arguments are frankly not very interesting. A different way of saying this is that you don’t have to be a fundamentalist to be a Christian – indeed the overwhelming majority of Christians in time and space are NOT fundamentalists, and it would be helpful if this were acknowledged by the atheist.

3. Putting that same point in a different register: the atheist needs to understand the grammar of religious faith, that is, that religious faith doesn’t function as an inadequate precursor of scientific investigation. The role that the language of belief plays within the life of a Christian is not at all like that which the language of science plays in the life of (say) a biologist. It is integrated with a much broader way of life. Unless that is understood then the conversation never begins. Practice gives the words their sense; religious believers do things with words!

I think if these three elements were in place then a much more interesting conversation could result. I’d be interested to know what the equivalent requests would be from the atheist side. Possibly: “don’t assume you have to believe in God to be good”?

The marginality of the Virgin Birth (1): Scripture

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Neil (OSO) objected to my brief post on the VB where I said “it’s an extremely marginal belief and not essential to faith”. Well. Whilst I’m on the subject, let’s dig in a bit more. Or: I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb! I think there are two broad grounds for saying the the VB is a marginal belief, the first is Scriptural, the second doctrinal. The Scriptural side is short and sweet, which means I can fire this one off immediately. The doctrinal one may have to wait until after Christmas (dependent on how my sermon preparation goes today…)

The VB is testified to in 2 places in Scripture, the prologues to Matthew and Luke. It is not mentioned in Paul, Mark or John or any of the other writings. As such – given that we can be confident that they both had copies of Mark’s gospel in front of them – we can say that the account is a late development in Scriptural terms.

Yet the Scriptural point goes rather deeper than this. It’s not simply that the story is only mentioned in late strata, it’s that there is no ‘echo’ of the story at any other point. To bring this out, let’s compare the Scriptural witness to the Virgin Birth with the Scriptural witness to the resurrection.

The resurrection is testified to throughout Scripture, from the earliest to the latest, and, more crucially, it is testified to implicitly as well as explicitly. The text might rightly be described as saturated with the resurrection. It is the precondition for there being testimony about Jesus at all. Any recognition of Christ as Lord is dependent upon the resurrection in that without it he is simply a criminal condemned to a shameful death, and bearing the curse from God that results. Without the resurrection there is no gospel.

The same cannot be said for the story of the Virgin Birth. It is not a precondition for communicating the gospel – or else Mark and (most especially) John would have needed to give an account of it. Paul would have made some mention or reference to it; given all the things that he DID talk about it would be odd if something so allegedly central were not referred to, particularly given his appeal to a gentile audience (after all, it’s the sort of story that such an audience could expect to understand swiftly). Indeed there is at least an indication that Paul believes things in contradiction to the VB – consider Romans 1.3, when he says of Jesus that he was “as to his human nature a descendant of David” – how does that reconcile with Joseph not being involved in his paternity? There is no clear prophecy of it in the Old Testament either – despite Matthew’s attempts to find one, again, in contrast to other features of Christ’s life, death and resurrection.

One can ask – if the story is removed from the New Testament, how much damage would be caused? (For comparison: if the resurrection were removed from the NT, consider how much damage would be caused!) For we would not need to remove all the details of the two (different) birth accounts; we would merely need to remove the word ‘virgin’ and the sentences reinforcing it. Would anything else be removed at the same time? Well, all the accounts about Joseph can be left in place. All the language about Mary saying ‘yes’ to God can still be in place, and the Magnificat is untouched (hooray!). If, for example, we hypothesise either an illegitimate union between Mary and Joseph, or, perhaps, a rape of Mary or something like that – ie something which gives rise to some ‘scandal’ and which needs to be overcome by angelic support to both Mary and Joseph – then I don’t see what of any substance is lost. We can still talk about God’s being the prime mover in a situation, and there’s no need to abandon any parallelism with the Genesis account of the spirit moving over the face of the waters.

To my mind, nothing is lost, and potentially a great deal is gained. But the gains can’t be considered without going into the doctrine, ie what is at stake in this insistence that the story of the VB is true? That’ll come later.

A sermon on the Virgin Birth

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I preached this three years ago, on the texts that have come round again for tomorrow morning. After the service I was told that I was ‘very brave’, but reading it through again I’m not sure that I was…

20041219A virgin shall conceive

I like to think of myself as quite a conservative sort of Christian. That is, although I came into the church through the liberal door, I have found that the more I study the faith, the more comfortable I find myself with the classical formulations, and the greater weight I place on the Church Fathers and how they understood what Christianity is all about. However, although I’ve come quite a long way from my liberal beginnings – to the extent that I would now find it quite an insult to be labelled as a liberal – there is still one area where I can’t quite overcome that liberal inheritance. And our readings this morning bring my one remaining qualm directly to the surface.

Let’s begin with Isaiah. In our Old Testament reading this morning the Prophet Isaiah is predicting the birth of a child to a young woman. The political context is quite fraught, and I shall give a rapid explanation – those of you who have been coming to the Learning Church sessions will recognise some of this. Isaiah is writing in the 8th century BC, and this is a time when the united kingdom under David and Solomon had split into two Jewish kingdoms, Israel in the North and Judah in the South. Assyria was the rising local superpower, and Israel and the neighbouring state of Damascus were seeking Judah’s assistance in fighting against Assyria. The king of Judah, called Ahaz, didn’t want to go along with this, and so Israel and Damascus besieged Jerusalem, to try and engineer regime change and the installation of a more favourable ruler. Now the issue confronting Ahaz is whether he should seek a political alliance with the Assyrians, to defend his own position, or whether he should trust in God for protection – and as you can imagine, Isaiah is quite clear about the choice that should be made. Isaiah says to Ahaz that a young woman will give birth to a child, and before that child has come to maturity, the powers that threaten Ahaz will have been defeated. What Isaiah is doing is setting a time frame for how long Ahaz would have to wait – and, indeed, less than twelve years later, before such a child would have reached maturity, the kingdoms of Damascus and of Israel have been defeated by Assyria. So in Isaiah, there is no sense of the birth-process being somehow miraculous; indeed, had Isaiah wanted to make a point about virginity, he would have used a different word. That is, he uses the word ‘alma, meaning young woman, instead of the word betula, which would have specifically meant virgin.

So where has Matthew got his text from? For clearly, in verse 23 he is quoting Isaiah as referring to a virgin conceiving a child. The answer to this is quite straightforward. In the third century in Egypt, following the expansion of Greek culture after Alexander the Great, the Hebrew bible was translated into Greek, and it was the Greek text that Matthew was quoting from, not the original Hebrew. And the Greek text translated the word meaning ‘young woman’ with the word parthenos, meaning virgin. So, in the translation from Hebrew to Greek, the element of virginity has been brought in, and it is this which underlies Matthew’s text. For it is very important to Matthew to establish the way in which Jesus is the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies. Five times in these early chapters Matthew uses the expression ‘this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the prophet’. Matthew is talking to an audience of Jewish Christians, and he is very concerned to establish the connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament – think of the Sermon on the Mount echoing Moses on Mount Sinai for example – and this is guiding his interpretation here.

So where does that leave the doctrine of the virgin birth? Well, within Greco-Roman culture the story of the origins of an heroic figure was quite a well-established form. Hercules, for example, was given the story that his mother was impregnated by Zeus, and this accounts for his superhuman strength. And of course, in our own day, the same understanding can be seen in children’s comics. Think of Superman – his wonderful powers require an explanation, and that is given by his origin on the planet Krypton. The real truth about Superman is that he is not one of us.

Which brings me to what my real qualms about the virgin birth consist in. For the standard liberal argument against it is to simply say ‘that sort of thing doesn’t happen’. That doesn’t carry much weight with me, largely because I don’t give science and scientific explanations the importance that our culture does – they are much too partial and prejudiced to be substituted for religious truth. If the living God could raise Christ Jesus from the dead – which is something, let me be clear, I’m quite happy with – then I can’t see any reason why the much less difficult matter of a virgin birth should be beyond Him. No, my worries come from a different direction.

One of the images in the New Testament which means the most to me is the tearing of the curtain in the temple. I read this as the abolition of the dividing line between God and humanity, that in Christ, the one who is both fully human and fully divine, this division is overcome, and all of the religious obstacles that had been put in the way of a living relationship with God – all of the Pharisaic legal traditions, the money changing in the temple, the religious purity laws – all of these have been overcome through Christ who is, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. But Jesus can only do all this if he is in fact human in the way that we are human. The church father Gregory of Nazianzus put it like this: what he has not assumed, he has not healed. In other words, if Jesus was like Superman – who appeared to be from earth but was actually from the planet Krypton – then he cannot save. He cannot take on the burden of our sins and he cannot show us the way of life. For where Supermen can go, mere mortals cannot go. So my worry about the virgin birth is not at all that it was impossible. My worry is that it diminishes Christ’s humanity, and that means that he is no longer my friend, he is no longer the one who can speak to me as a brother; instead he is an alien, totally other. I can’t reconcile my faith with that.

However. I should reiterate that my worries on this score make me unorthodox, and that means that not only am I officially wrong on this, but, if the past is any guide, in a few years time I will, through God’s grace, have gained understanding of the mystery of the virgin birth, and accepted it. If that proves to be the case, I promise to come before you again and explain the how and why.

But in the meantime I struggle with texts like the one we had this morning from Matthew. I wrestle with my doubts, I try and reach some sort of understanding that will make the texts come alive with meaning for me, in the way that the tearing of the curtain in the temple speaks to me. What gives me joy is that I work in a church which isn’t afraid of this sort of exploration, that instead teaches us that our reason is a gift from God, which, if we let it, will lead us further into the mystery of our salvation, and the truth of the Incarnation of the Son of God, whose festival we shall be celebrating together at the end of this week. And surely that is the right way, for in Christ all truth finds its expression, and if we hold fast to truth, we will always come back to him. For Jesus Christ is our Saviour, the one ‘declared to be Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead’. May he guide us into all truth, throughout this Christmas time, and always. Amen.