Church Voices

So, recently I read that a guy I sorta knew in college doesn’t believe Christ was virgin born. Not a big surprise, unless you attended, as we did, Cincinnati Christian University. Now, I haven’t talked to him about why he came to this position, but I bet I can guess based on past experiences with others. Generally its a reaction to modernism, its unbelievable how powerful the phrase, “you don’t really believe that, do you?” is. Of course they’re all set and ready to explain how the word translated in Isaiah 7:14 really means young woman and not virgin etc. While I disagree with that analysis I’m not really sure what advantage going the non-virgin route offers.

For example, if you’re going to maintain any connection with Christianity whatsoever then you have to concede the existence of a creator God who is capable of creating the entire universe. Does it take some sort of leap of faith to believe that God is capable of arranging a virgin birth? Maybe at this point it would just be ok to chuck the Christian worldview completely and become an outright materialist, because once you dump the virgin birth a lot of other key issues go with it.

But lets hold off on that conversion to material atheism for just a moment. Does believing in a non-virgin birth pose any other problems? Well, first you have the fact that Matthew 1:22-23 explicitly links the passage in Isaiaah with Jesus as a virgin birth. What this means is the entire idea of inspiration is pretty much out the window, at least for Matthew. No big deal, you say, we can just toss out things like the virgin birth passage and stick with the historical passages that Matthew and the other gospel writers record. The problem is that sticking with that leaves you with a narrative in which a guy is born, lives, ticks everyone off, rises from the dead and disappears with no explanation as to why, or what was accomplished. Even something like John the Baptist saying, “Behold the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sin of the world”, which is simultaneously explicit and pregnant with meaning would have to be ignored. The other issue this brings up is the assumption that we can, two thousand some odd years later know better what was going on than someone who studied under Christ for three years and was a product of the same culture that produced the Old Testament scriptures. Personally, I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I know better than one of Christ’s disciples whether the Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14 meant virgin or not.

But, this also poses another problem. If Christ was conceived the old fashioned way we have to wonder exactly what makes him unique. Throughout scripture Christ is held out as unique, above even Moses (Hebrews 3:1ff), but if he was nothing more than the bastard child of a couple of crazy Jewish kids who didn’t use protection how can he be referred to as the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world? How can he legitimately refer to himself as I AM? And more importantly, how can he be a legitimate propitiation for sin if he was a created human? Because once you give up on the virgin birth divinity is out of the question due to one of the attributes of God that separates God from everything else is his eternal nature, his complete lack of being created to begin with.

But, lets explore the possiblity, for a moment, that Christ wasn’t virgin born, and so was fully human and not divine in the least. This opens up a whole bunch of worms. For example, when Paul writes that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God that’s just not true. After all if Christ could do it then why not everyone else who was just as human and non-divine as he was? Its my opinion that even if the explicit endorsement of the virgin birth were not found in Matthew and Luke it would be necesary to create a case for it in order to support the fitness of Christ as a propitiatory sacrifice which is tied directly to his diety.

But I guess there’s a reason it made it into the Nicene Creed to begin with.