Born of a Virgin?: Reconceiving Jesus In The Bible, Tradition And Theology

by Andrew Lincoln

Indeed, as Kelsey himself asserts, ‘what Jesus’ humanity is must be the same as what any other human being’s humanity is’. This is semantically required if ‘humanity’ is not to be used in a systematically ambiguous way and it is theologically required because, if Jesus is not an authentically human creature, the way he images God cannot be paradigmatic for other human creatures.

It is, of course, also theologically required if God is to reconcile humanity through Jesus’ full solidarity in that humanity. The possession of human DNA, as Kelsey has made clear, is basic to this view of humanity and yet, if we retain a virginal conception, even one in which half of this DNA is supplied miraculously, there remains at very best both a semantic and a theological ambiguity about the humanity of the Word become flesh. On the other hand, taking seriously the strand of New Testament witness whereby Jesus is the seed of David through Joseph requires no semantic and theological gymnastics and no contested body–soul dualism in positing Jesus’ full humanity.

It is the fully human personal body, Jesus of Nazareth, and not a hybrid or semi-divine figure, in whom the divine Word is incarnate. To claim that his divinity is seen in a miraculous conception is not only to propose a divine strain within the human subject that constitutes his humanity in a different fashion from that of other humans, akin to the infusion of superhuman powers into a hero, but also to suppose that the divine Logos or principle took the place of some aspect of the human life of Jesus. It is to predicate divinity of the human subject instead of predicating humanity of the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity.

Chalcedon insisted that Jesus is one with God and fully human and that he is both of these at the same time without separation or confusion. It did not realize that a literal virgin birth in fact introduces a confusion of the two. The birth of Jesus initiated by God without a human father but with a human mother confuses the categories of divine and human by identifying the divine aspect of Jesus with his conception in space and time and makes an exception to what was confessed about his full humanity. It replaces an aspect of normal human existence for Jesus with a divine property.

Of course, those who formulated The Definition would themselves have seen no tension between their reflections on not confusing the two natures and a virginal conception, because their biological understanding was different from ours. As we have seen, their notions of procreation and reproduction were such that they could think of Jesus as a fully human subject simply on the basis of his mother’s role in his conception and birth. What they wanted to safeguard was the claim that the whole of Jesus’ human life has its origin and subsistence in his unique relationship to God.

If sin is a distorted resistant response to God, then Jesus’ wholly dependent and faithful response to God entails sinlessness. If sin thereby also involves a distortion of our true human identity, Jesus lives out his identity authentically and thereby shows that to be human and to be without sin are not incompatible.

This is a necessary identity because, as Tanner puts it, ‘a human being’s dying on a cross is not saving unless this is also God’s dying; and God’s dying does not save us (it is not even possible) unless God does so as a human being’.38

In the New Testament witness Jesus is seen as the Son who is sent by the Father in the power of the Spirit, and so the Logos or Word as the second hypostasis is also seen as the Son.

While all that the human creature Jesus does in his dependence on God as Father can be attributed to the second hypostasis of the Son, not all that the Son is and does as the second hypostasis can be attributed to Jesus in his faithful human sonship. The Son as the second hypostasis remains on the Creator’s side of the Creator–creature divide, while the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth as the Son is clearly a creaturely humanity. The two relationships of sonship come together but cannot be collapsed into each other without remainder.

What was proposed was that the problems with taking Matthew 1 or Luke 1 literally in their talk of a virgin birth do not require a rejection of the authority or truth of Scripture at these points but rather lead to the recognition that Scripture’s truth comes in culturally conditioned forms, in this instance through the literary form of ancient biography with its legendary features where claims about figures being born without a human father were means of asserting their extraordinary significance. In the case of Jesus, then, the stories of virginal conception express the convictions that only God’s sovereign initiative could ultimately explain his life and that this God was wholly present in his fully human life from its inception. Similarly, the credal statements need to be seen as conditioned by the assumptions and categories of their day.

If the Apostles’ Creed’s statement that Jesus ‘descended into hell’ can be reinterpreted in the light of the shift away from an ancient cosmology as a way of depicting his full experience of death and its consequences or the Nicene Creed’s statement that ‘he came down from heaven’ can be taken in a non-literal fashion as utilizing ancient cosmological mythology to articulate the notion of incarnation, there should be no impediment to reinterpreting the virginal conception in the light of the shift away from an ancient biology.49

Whether the credal statement is ‘conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary’ or ‘was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary’, the important point of such an affirmation is that, through the divine Spirit, Jesus is the incarnation of God’s Son.

requires no more adjustment to say those words and then, when asking ourselves what we mean by them, to say something like: ‘It points to the mystery of the divine being experiencing a fully human life from its start.’ And this, after all, is precisely what the framers of the creed, in the conceptuality of their own time, were intending to convey.

As Nicholas Lash puts it, ‘“I believe” does not express an opinion, however well founded or firmly held, concerning God’s existence. It promises that life and love, mind, heart, and all my actions, are set henceforth steadfastly on God, and God alone.’

But in its place in the Church’s worship recital of the creed also functions as ‘a proclamation of belonging’ to the community of the Church.