Category Archives: virgin birth

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.


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.

Do you believe in the Virgin Birth?

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Lots of people give their answers (including Rowan) here.

Doug’s been writing some interesting stuff on this recently (here is the latest).

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.

Is the Virgin Birth a frame?

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Adrenaline gets you through the morning, but then it’s pay back time!! cough cough cough…

Anyhow, something I’m ruminating on at the moment.

Over at the Better Bibles Blog – often over my head but a great read – is an argument in favour of avoiding literal translation in order to convey the overall sense in more idiomatic English. Quote:

Words like experiment bring along large and complex agglomerations of associated concepts. Linguists call these associated concepts FRAMES. When we communicate, we use words to refer to frames, often in ways that seem quite tangential, and then we get to refer to parts of the frame, at no mental cost….Now when it comes to translation, the really good translators think in frames. They recognize the equivalence, or near equivalence in the frames, or the absence in one language of the frame and then use the normal linguistic tools of the target language to refer to the corresponding frames or the relevant part of the frame.

Now the example used is ‘Moses’ seat’ – ie the reference to the authority which the Pharisees have, as symbolised or represented by their occupancy of a physical chair. So:

In the Greco-Roman world the frame that goes with the piece of furniture we would call a chair includes power, wealth, and authority. In Matt. 23:2, the chair is mentioned as a way to convey the notion of Moses authority. It’s not about the furniture.

My question: is the Virgin Birth a frame, in this sense? In other words, is the description of the Virgin Birth, in Matthew and Luke, something which needs to be culturally translated in order to be understood in our own times? Is the essential part of the story not the literal truth but the symbolic point (incarnation)? Is the story fundamentally culture bound in the same way that talking about Moses’ seat is?

For my previous wrestling with the VB see here and here.

Da Vinci Code: the real challenge to the church

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Final Learning Church session of the ‘academic year’ last Saturday, and it was on ‘Debunking the Da Vinci Code’. Not that difficult… Then on Sunday beloved and I went off to watch the film, which was fine – less anti-Christian than the book, if anything; competently directed and acted. I suspect most of the criticism of it (as a film) is driven by the media’s desire to have something different to say about the phenomenon, not from any unprejudiced assessments of the film’s merits themselves.

Anyhow, what I wanted to say was something which I emphasised in my LC talk, which is that the Da Vinci Code phenomenon is holding up a mirror to the church, and I believe we should pray and ponder seriously how we should respond. In particular, I think that the implications are much more radical than what the church, in its various parts, has undertaken so far.

My point is this: all of the dramatic charge in the Da Vinci Code comes from echoing the Reformation-era controversies against the Roman Catholic church; in particular, however, it is seen as radical and controversial to argue that Jesus was human. (Same thing that drove the reaction to The Last Temptation of Christ).

Why is this at all interesting? The orthodox teaching is that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine – therefore, anything which is simply spelling out an implication of his humanity, ie that he could have been married to Mary Magdalene, is perfectly in tune with Christian doctrine. There is nothing shocking about it.

So why do people believe that there is?

The implication is that church teaching is functionally docetic. Whatever we might officially say, the wider world hears the church presenting Jesus as someone who was wholly divine, and who only seemed to be (Greek: dokei) human.

In other words, the world hears the church teaching that Jesus was a Superman figure. Jesus put on his humanity in the way that Kal-El puts on a pair of glasses, in order to pass amongst us. Yet his true and authentic nature is other than human.

It is a catastrophe that the church has allowed this to happen. It is a rebuke to the church: it is a prominent signal of the church’s failure to communicate the truth of the gospel and to allow itself to be caught up in ephemera and adiaphora – all the things which are ultimately of no importance, which have obscured that which is of paramount and eternal importance.

Underlying this is an understanding of God which sees the Greek philosophical attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence etc) as determinative, and as standing over against the human, where the human lacks all these attributes. Christianity is about the overthrow of that conception of both the divine and the human – that is precisely what the Incarnation is about – demonstrated symbolically by the tearing of the curtain in the temple. In other words, being a Christian is about allowing Jesus to teach us what divinity and humanity are – it is not about importing our understandings of divinity and humanity, and trying to use them to understand Jesus.

Given that the world hears the church teaching a heresy, and yet – as the response to DVC demonstrates – there is a tremendous search for the truth about Jesus, and a fascination with Him – what is the church to do?

It must stop using language that is interpreted docetically. When we claim that Jesus is the Son of God, however orthodox we may understand that language to be (and it is!) we must never forget that it is heard docetically. I suggest that in all of our conversations with non-Christians we should abandon that language. Completely. All that it does is reinforce error. Our language instead should emphasise that Jesus is truly one of us, that we should begin to approach Him on that basis, and that we should then allow Him to teach us about our humanity, and about our own divinity – our inheritance as children of God, fellow-heirs with Christ.

We must begin from the wholly orthodox truth that Jesus was fully human, and build from there, allowing his humanity, as we enter more deeply into it, to teach us about his divinity, and therefore what divinity truly is.

We do not need to abandon orthodoxy – that is the liberal error – but nor is the aggressive reassertion of orthodoxy sufficient, for the consequence of that is simply to apply fertiliser to the weeds of DVC and its ilk.

We must allow our language to be broken up and recreated. It is not our words which will lead us to God. It is the Word. To be true to him requires a letting go of words, however wonderful and meaningful, and an embrace of the Word. He will lead us into the truth, if we let Him.

Musing still on VB

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Doing some research for the Learning Church process on the creed (the talks are going reasonably well but the material is seriously dense) and I came across this passage from Joseph Ratzinger, quoted in Nicholas Lash’s ‘Believing Three Ways in One God’: “…the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity would not be affected if Jesus had been the product of a normal human marriage.” Lash goes on to spell this out: “Confessing Jesus to be Son of God most certainly does not entail denying that he was any other father’s son.”

There are certain things I believe about Jesus. I believe John 1.1 (on which I’m preaching tomorrow) – that Jesus is the Word made flesh. I adore the passage in Colossians, that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, he is ‘before all things and in him all things hold together’. I believe that Jesus was – as Son of David – inheritor of all the Old Testament prophecies, that he became King of Israel and that those prophecies come true in him – ie they are fulfilled in him.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I have a very ‘high’ Christology. I’m not a liberal – according to Sven’s test I’m 100% Chalcedon compliant(!) – and I certainly don’t think that Jesus was “just” a good man, tho’ he was indeed that, of course.

Put differently, I do think that Jesus embodies the purpose of creation – he shows it forth in human form – and that this Divine purpose is personal and human, thus fitted to become incarnate in the shape of a particular man. I think this purpose was hidden before the foundation of the world, and that it was revealed in Jesus at a moment that could be described as evolutionarily appropriate.

Thing is, I just can’t reconcile any of the above with the Virgin Birth.

Another quote, from Ignatius’ letter to the Ephesians, quoted in Frances Young’s ‘The Making of the Creeds’: “For our God Jesus Christ was conceived by Mary according to God’s plan, of the seed of David and of the Holy Spirit.”

This ‘seed of David’ stuff is pretty explicit in the Old Testament. It comes from the original promise to Abraham, and it is pretty directly male – the mother doesn’t get much of a say or interest in the process. So how does a birth in which the ‘seed of David’ isn’t involved fulfil the promise?

In one sense, tho’, that’s still trivial. The fundamental point is ‘what he has not assumed he has not healed’ – ie, the VB undermines Jesus’ humanity. It seems more and more to be a simple category mistake – in just the way that Lash outlines. Being the Only-Begotten Son of the Father is not something that takes up the same sort of ontological space as being the first-begotten son of Joseph the Carpenter from Nazareth.

Now Jon the Jedi left a helpful comment last time I wrote about this topic which was essentially challenging me not to feel bad with my doubts – why work myself up about it? Why not just let it go?

Part of me thinks that this is right – it’s probably the way in which I will eventually go – but I’m too much of a conservative to feel happy with it. Stepping outside the framework of the creed – hmm, not sure I like that. (Next week’s learning church is going to be all about how far we can use the creed today – and in particular whether we should sign up to the whole package. I tend to think that we should).

Two final points.

First, belief is not volitional. This is the mistake that the fundies make, assuming that refusing to share their beliefs is a matter of bad will, rather than the incapacity of a rational mind to wrap itself into contortions. You can’t force yourself to believe something which you cannot accept to be true. That’s dishonesty, and I think Simone Weil had that right (paraphrase from memory) – if you leave truth in order to pursue Christ, you end up leaving Christ as well. If you believe firmly – as I do – that Jesus IS the truth, then you are set free to pursue truth wherever it leads.

Second, it’s fairly clear to me that a belief in the Virgin Birth in today’s society is a different beast to belief in the Virgin Birth in the society of the early church. I don’t know sufficient details to make a conclusive argument, but I’m pretty sure that in the early church the VB was an argument used to assert the humanity of Jesus. It made more sense then – there was no notion of DNA or equal contributions from two human parents. Today, it seems to have the opposite effect to what is doctrinally correct. And at the end of the day it is precisely that doctrine that I would wish to affirm.

In other words, where Ratzinger wrote: “…the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity would not be affected if Jesus had been the product of a normal human marriage”, I would say: the doctrine of Jesus’ humanity is only confirmed if Jesus had been the product of a normal human marriage.

So there we go.

The Virgin Birth

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I struggle with a literal account of the Virgin Birth. Once upon a time I was 100% heretical – rejected Jesus’ incarnation and divinity; resurrection was a spiritual experience; giving sight to the blind was psychosomatic etc etc. Over time and with further study all of those heresies have fallen away, leaving my questions about the Virgin Birth feeling rather lonely and missing their old friends. Yet those questions don’t go away. I’m aware I’m unorthodox on this, but belief isn’t volitional. In particular, I find it deeply depressing to be lining up on the same side as John Spong (nothing personal) – but I’m sure God’s grace is active here as everywhere, and though I am a stubborn mule God will eventually prevail.

These thoughts were prompted by an interesting article here, where I disagreed with “without a Virgin Birth, it seems that the Incarnation falls by the wayside”. If someone could persuade me that that was true, then I’d be more sympathetic to the VB. Yet John’s gospel is by some measure the most incarnational of the four, and as John not only does not have the VB but there is even a suggestion that he is opposed to it, it seems perfectly plausible to have Incarnation without the VB.

In my memory is a letter quoted in a book on reactions to John Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’, from a “housewife” who said (paraphrase) that she had always found it difficult to relate to Jesus because she saw him as a Superman figure, with special abilities, and therefore not all that relevant to her life. From reading Robinson she had felt able to move closer to Him.

So the key issue for me is how to reconcile the VB with full-blooded humanity. Christ has to be one of us – and I can’t see how the VB allows him to be one of us. He must be one of us for ‘what he has not assumed he has not healed’.

I’m aware that I’m wrong – all the other heresies have been consistently overcome through the application of theological understanding (in other words, once I’ve realised what is being claimed, the objections tend to dissolve). I just haven’t got there yet. In so far as I ‘believe’ it, it is because I accept and trust the authority of the church, which has proven its truth to me in every other area. But I just don’t understand it – and that drives me nuts.

Ah well. I’ll keep plodding on.