The Big News of the Season

            Jesus was born of a virgin. It’s Christian dogma. If the first Adam was made from dust, there is nothing to prevent God from making the Second Humanity any way he wants to.  To deny such a possibility is to give in to a materialism which renders the world a dead and mechanistic machine.

        There are also religious people, who hold out hope for such miracles but who get squeamish about such dogma.  They generally think the mythical dimension of Christian truth can be pried away from God’s acts of historic redemption.  Hesitating about virgin birth suggests that they have doubts about the church’s historical claims.  Such folks are willing to defy the church’s primitive canon by reducing the faith to one more of Feuerbach’s socially constructed metaphors.

       For these reasons in recent centuries affirming the miracle of the virgin birth has functioned as an effective test of Evangelical orthodoxy. Yet, by using the virginity of Mary as a mere shibboleth, the church may miss the more profound miraculous sign in the story of the incarnation.  We haven’t grasped the message of Christmas if all we do is keep rationalism at bay.  Christians have to admit that the virgin birth is not included in Scripture’s creeds, and as such it did not function as a primitive test of orthodoxy.  The entire Pauline corpus makes no mention of virgin birth, and as such the virgin birth cannot be central to the most primitive form of historical Christian witness. 

     This is not in the least to suggest that Paul did not believe in the virgin birth; it is to insist that for Paul the important gospel matter was that Yahweh had returned to Zion in Jesus the Messiah-- that the Temple of the nation at last had been refilled with unveiled glory-- and that the name of Jesus was identical to that of Yahweh, the only name for a Jew which is “above all names.” What was central about the historical life of Jesus was that he embodied the very life of the God of Israel, sharing God’s name, and executing God’s will in redeeming Israel and then all creation.

    These are the big claims about Jesus.  Compared to this, the virgin birth is small potatoes. The ancient world was very familiar with widespread reports of kings being born of virgins.  Only after this faded from widespread public consciousness did the particular asexual means of Jesus’ birth seem to embody unique Christian claims. Just as one can find Hindus who are perfectly comfortable with affirming Jesus’ virgin birth, in the ancient world virgin-birth claims were made for historical figures without making any claim as astonishing as that made most explicitly in Paul or the Johannine literature.       

      In John the unique Christian claim is that the eternal communicative Wisdom which holds all creation together had interpreted himself by tabernacle-ing in Israel.   This One true God, who exists as eternal Word, uniquely entered the life of Israel as a human being.   This is no mere reproductive trick.  The incarnation is about the central mystery of creation.  Namely, it is about how the world exists within God’s own self-originating life, and how that self-sustaining, communicative Wisdom invests God’s self within the world.  For Christians this Transcendent mystery, this ever-near but elusive presence, is finally and singly interpreted in the concrete historical life of Jesus Christ.

      God redeems with vulnerable, baby-like presence.  The weakness of God is what ends up being stronger than all the political strength of mankind.  In a world of retaliatory political one-upmanship, the eternal Mystery which contains and permeates all things approaches us as vulnerable love.

     That’s the big news of the season—bigger than reproductive anomalies.