On Being Born of a Virgin
Q. What do we mean when we say that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and became incarnate from the Virgin Mary?
A. We mean that by God's own act, his divine Son received our human nature from the Virgin Mary, his mother.
It seems particularly appropriate to discuss the question of Christ’s being born of a virgin as we approach the commemoration of his birth, and especially as we are coming off of the third Sunday of Advent on which Mary receives particular attention through our recitation of her song the Magnificat. With this teaching, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth of Christ, we also hit upon one of the key fault lines in contemporary Western Christianity. After all, affirmation that Mary gave birth to Christ as a virgin is the third of the five fundamentals, that set of affirmations that the nascent fundamentalist movement used to throw down the gauntlet between it and what it perceived as heretical “modernism” within Christian thought.
The doctrine of the Virgin Birth often seems to be among the most difficult for contemporary Christians, at least in the mainline and more liberal traditions. Even for people who seem to arrive at a place where they can accept the bodily resurrection of Christ, the climax of Christ’s incarnation, the miraculous character at the beginning of his earthly life feels like a bridge too far. Perhaps some of the cause for incredulity is a lingering association with fundamentalism and other forms of rigidly demanded inerrancy. Perhaps much of it also stems from the ways in which the elevation of Mary’s virginity as a necessary condition for the sinless Christ to enter the world was tangled up with a denigration of human sexuality as in and of itself sinful. There may be a sense among many that affirming the Virgin Birth means affirming that sex is somehow a necessary component in how Original Sin is transmitted.
Perhaps the biggest reason people in our world today struggle with accepting the doctrinal status of Christ’s virgin birth is that, once one begins to question the necessary connection between sin and sex, it is not altogether clear what the real significance of this doctrine is. For those of us formed with modern conceptions of the laws of nature and the scientific character of historical inquiry and yet also adhere to a traditional vision of the Christian faith, the notion of the bodily resurrection may strain credulity, but it is also (rightly) seen as the sine qua non of the Gospel, the event without which the proclamation of Jesus would make us pitiable fools. Thus, the resurrection is, as it were, “deserving” of the credulity expenditure it calls for from us. It’s not then that the Virgin Birth is more demanding of our credulity—in fact it seems less so. Once one accepts that God, the creator of the world from nothing and the reworker of the entire foundations of this universe through the resurrection, the idea that God could suspend the normal course of nature, a course this God set up, to create an individual human seems like small potatoes. But the bigger issue here is what’s the bang for your credulity bucks. Doesn’t the line about the Virgin Birth in the creeds seem a little out of place and even pedestrian compared to the grandeur of creation, redemption, restoration, and glorification?
This out-of-placeness, though, should perhaps give us pause to reconsider whether we’re in fact missing something. The Virgin Birth is included in both of those bedrock documents of Christian belief, the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. Mary is one of only two non-God characters listed in both these summaries of God’s relating to the world, with the other being Pontius Pilate, important because of his relationship to the unquestionably important event of Christ’s suffering and death. Christ’s birth is the only part of his earthly life included in the Creeds before those events related to his passion. This should give us a sense that this doctrine perhaps deserves more of our attention than we may give it and in fact may raise to the level of deserving more of that “credulity capital.”
There can be no doubt that originally the doctrine of the Virgin Birth was strongly related to early Christian squeamishness about human sexuality. Christianty arose in a hellenistic context in which the most sophisticated philosophies were radically suspicious about the human body, seeing all things material as associated with ignorance and evil. That this most intimately bodily experience, associated as it is with taking pleasure in physicality, would come under security is to be expected. In fact, Christianity was, if nothing else, dramatically more body-positive than almost any of its Greco-Roman competing philosophies, making a point of taking the radically pro-bodily stance that the material world is God’s good creation and that God would restore our physical bodies to us in the Resurrection. However, no matter how much the impetus for this doctrine was in a specific aversion to human sexuality or in tying together sex and sin, there is a deeper truth that seems to be indicated by both parts of the claim that Christ was born and that it was of a virgin.
The birth of Christ itself is important because it is in this that we get the authoritative assertion that he is truly human. Essential to the human experience for all humans born after Adam and Eve is being carried by a human mother and being born in some way. Something that simply appeared in the midst of us as a fully formed adult, child, or even baby, even if it had human DNA, would in some critical way not be fully human, or at least could not be said to have the full human experience. Insofar as Christ’s redeeming work requires his taking into Godself the totality of the human experience, this includes being gestated and born.
At the same time, Christ came not to simply undergo all of human life as it is now, an undergoing that may show God’s solidarity with us but does little to free us from the corrupting effects of Sin and Death, but furthermore to create a new humanity freed from these forces and their corruptions. Here is where the from a virgin becomes significant. It was perhaps overzealous of early Christians to associate our being born into a world of Sin and corruption with sex itself, but it is not incorrect to see that the normal course of being born into the world means being born into a web of Sin and distortion. Crafting new and renewed humanity requires a break with this “natural” course of events. There is then the significant symbolic character of Christ having a human mother but no human paternity. In a world, like the ancient Mediterranean, of hierarchical power arrangements with men at the top, it was significant both for reaffirming God’s Lordship, rather than that of a human father, in our new humanity. Moreover, given that these hierarchical power relationships are often deeply corrupted by oppressive dynamics, the Virgin Birth represents the assertion not only that God is Lord, but that God is Lord and not the paterfamilias or that paterfamilias writ large, Caesar.
Ultimately, then, the Virgin Birth is about affirming the full humanity of Christ, but affirming it as a new and renewed humanity. It is not enough simply to affirm the continuity with the world that is necessary for the incarnation that comes along with affirming Christ’s birth—we must also affirm it’s discontinuity, a point brought out in Christ’s being born of a virgin.
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