Loading...Here now is the eighth of my twelve favorite Christmas posts of years gone by, in our celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas. This one is from 2014.
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A few days ago I raised the question of why anyone should think that you have to believe in the Virgin Birth in order to be a Christian. The reality is, of course, that many Christians do not believe in it, but recognize that it is a story meant to convey an important theological point – a point that could be true whether or not the story happened – that Jesus was uniquely special in this world, not like us other humans, but in some sense the unique Son of God. Just as the moral of a fairy tale is valid (or not) independent of whether the tale happened, so too with stories like this in the Gospels, whether you choose to call them myths (in a non-derogatory sense), legends, tales, or simply “stories intending to convey a theological truth.”
It is interesting, and not often noted, that Matthew and Luke – the two Gospels (in fact, the two NT books altogether) that recount the story of the Virgin Birth – do so for different reasons and draw different conclusions from it. The stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 are very different from each other, and appear
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“My point: for Matthew the virgin birth principally shows that Jesus’ birth was a fulfillment of the divine plan, as revealed by the fact that up & down the line it fulfilled prophecy.”
Before I read that the Scriptures that St Paul writes about was the OT only. I assumed since the God’s Spirit or “divinely inspired” meant IT made sure that the Gospels aligned with the OT predictions.
“not a contradiction between the 2accounts. But it is a very big difference. What mattered to Matthew was the fulfillment of Scripture; what mattered to Luke was the divine ancestry of Jesus. Later readers would simply combine the 2accounts, as if they were saying the same thing,”
I’m stuck on this point. Until Y2k, I learned the Gospels were 1 story & hell with the differences!
This is unacceptable: “God worked a miracle so that when Mary was conceived, she did not receive a sin nature from her mother”!
As for climate change: there were huge differences in each of the 4 seasons living in Shanghai & Beijing, less so in SF Bay Area
Since I’ve chosen to remain a practicing Christian, I’m pretty much required to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus as doctrine. I’m fine with that since there’s no easy way to disprove it (no way to get a DNA sample). But no, I don’t find it plausible at all.
I don’t think you’re required as a Christian to believe it. Paul, for example, doesn’t say anything about it. And I know a ton of Christians (including activie ministers) who don’t believe it “literally.” It just depends what *kind* of Christian you want to choose to be (and why that kind!)