As noted yesterday in this blog, Time and Newsweek have offered their customary “holiday controversy” issues, this time focused on the “virgin birth” and their writers’ (barely concealed) incredulity that 79% of the American public actually believes the biblical account.
Of course, being major newsmagazines means that they know better. And neither widespread confidence in a thing, nor the restatement of a traditional view (no matter how beautiful, true, or significant) are worthy of stories (let alone cover stories). So another “real” “in-depth” look at the “struggle between faith and history.”
Bunk. Once again, story editors looking for controversy turn to academicians who are universal in their skepticism, without (as Christianity Today pointed out) letting theologians and historians who have found ample, credible reasons for affirming faith weigh in. So allow me to offer a most basic post from a very accessible and credible source, IVP’s Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels:
The Gospel story is rather about how Mary conceived without any form of intercourse through the agency of the Holy Spirit. As such this story is without precedent either in Jewish or pagan literature, even including the OT ….There are also serious problems for those who maintain that the virginal conception is a theological idea without basis in historical fact. It is difficult if not impossible to explain why Christians would create so many problems for themselves and invite the charge of Jesus’ illegitimate birth by promulgating such an idea if it had no historical basis… It is also evident that both Luke and the First Evangelist felt under some constraint to refer to the virginal conception, even to the point of awkwardly alluding to the concept in their genealogies. (If one doubts the veracity of the virgin birth) one must also explain why this idea was accepted so widely by Christians in the early second century. (J. B Green, “Birth of Jesus” Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, elec.edition).
Of course, the point of the virgin conception (as NT scholar Ray Brown more accurately called it) is not to be some theological litmus test. While I am glad that nearly 8 of 10 Americans believe it, that neither makes it so, nor helps us understand why it is so significant.
And while the major newsmagazines see early church propaganda for bolstering Jesus’ claims to divinity, the church instead used it to proclaim something far more profound: A savior who was both divine and human, fully God and fully experienced the entirety of human existence. A God who not only came to earth, but entered into the very center of human existence.
The significance of this event should not be minimized. It indicates not merely that Jesus was God’s Son through the Holy Spirit (Brown, 1973), but that Jesus was a unique person who was the product of both the divine and the human in a manner unlike any others before or since…The doctrine of the virginal conception also stresses that Jesus was fully human, participating in the whole human life cycle from womb to tomb. (ibid.)
The virgin birth assures the full mystery of the incarnation. It means that God did not just take on human garb and play creature for a bit (like the ample tales of royalty walking around in commoners’ clothes to see how the simple people live), but instead Divinity left behind the status and powers of being the Creator and became fully one of the creatures. God didn’t just walk a mile in our shoes, he felt the blisters on our feet.
Tomorrow, the early church and my own challenge to defend the doctrine when I was seeking ordination.
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