On the Virgin Birth

This question was posed:

> it is not necessary to believe in a literal
> virginal conception in order to believe in the Incarnation, which he
> certainly believed in. What do you think?

My answer:

I think that if we were busy about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, providing for those who can't provide for themselves, visiting the prisoners so that they do not despair, preaching the Good News and making disciples of all nations we would be much too tired to worry about where did Jesus get a Y chromosome.

Jesus is God incarnate. By definition we humans are not able to understand how that was accomplished. The issue is not who understood what or when about human conception, genetics etc. Personally, I am sick and tired of people trying to make the Bible be what it is not. Among the things it is not is a science book. We are the creatures, not the Creator and we need to accept the humility that imposes upon us.

The issue is can we trust God to do as He says or said He would? Speaking through Isaiah, God tells us that the messiah will be born of a person variously called a virgin or a young girl. Much has been made over the translation that it may (I can't read Hebrew) say young girl. Personally, I don't see the fuss. At that time any decent young woman would be a virgin until her marriage.

Once upon a time, all new human life was thought to come from women all by themselves without any help from anyone. Then it was figured out that only women who had sex with men had babies. Eventually, the pendulum swung too far the other way and men got all the credit for new life and women were but mere vessels, a field to be ploughed and sown. Such was the understanding in the first century.

As the framers of the Nicene Creed wrestled with elements of what we now call Christology, I am very sure that they too struggled with the idea that a woman who had not known a man sexually could not possibly conceive a child. They weren't stupid, after all. But let us remember that the references in the Creed to the virgin conception, are not made about Mary. They are made about Jesus. Just as calling Mary Theotokos is not a comment about Mary but about Jesus.

I am really a theological minimalist. My definition of orthodox Christianity is this:

-Loving God with all that we are, have or ever will be or have;

-Loving our neighbors as ourselves (which necessarily includes peace, justice, and care of the environment and anything so that people may simply live);

-Baptism and Eucharist;

-belief in every tenet of the Nicene Creed and the doctrines derived from the Creed.

It is my conviction that anything else requires us to reduce God to our finite human able to comprehend and once we do that, we have made Him too small to really be God.

I also think that we Christians have already spent much too much time over the centuries doing things Jesus did not command us to do, like our endless discussions of theology and what did the Bible really means about some passage as a distraction from doing that which the Bible is crystal clear about. We prefer theological discussions because in that manner we can continue to avoid looking at the way we each of us lives our lives in the ways that we think prevent us from feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, providing for those who can't provide for themselves, visiting the prisoners so that they do not despair, preaching the Good News and making disciples of all nations.