The Virgin Birth and the Christian Faith--Part 1

The literature of the ancients is dotted with virgin birth narratives. The Indian god Vishnu inserted himself into the womb of Devaki to be born as Vasudeva. The god Bodhisat "ceased to belong to the hosts of heaven of delight [and] descended into his mother’s womb mindful and self-possessed" to be born as the Vapassi Buddha, the first of six incarnations preceding Gautama. And Yahweh sent his "holy spirit" to impregnate a virgin with his son, who consequently assumed a new identity as Im-manu-el or "God with us." 


I crafted this last sentence deliberately to make a point, viz., that this is exactly how the Western world hears us when we talk about the virgin birth of Christ. They are incredulous that someone in the modern era could possibly still believe such biological absurdities (much less run for president!). Clearly there must be another, more credible explanation:

• A fabricated miracle story designed to give credibility to an otherwise lame religion.
• A puerile cover-up for a sexual scandal.
• A god-in-the-gaps explanation for a culture with primitive medical technologies.
• A Christian myth not intended to be believed as Historie but as Geschichte.

In short, they'll accept just about any explanation other than a divine disruption of the uniformitarian laws of science. But no other explanation will do. There is no possibility of us answering the fool according to his folly on this issue, or we will become horrifyingly like him (Prov 26:4). To be a Christian one must sever his ties with the secular worldview and embrace the Christian worldview.

And yet we may, in fact, answer the fool's folly. For unlike his worldview, which offers a patchwork of disparate explanations for the universe under the loose presuppositional umbrella of not-God (or some feeble divine stand-in), the Christian worldview alone makes sense of the whole universe in all of its parts. Properly presented, it puts the secularist to shame and makes him keenly aware that he is not so wise as he smugly pretends (1 Pet 3:15-16; Prov 26:5) We need not apologize for virgin birth, suppress it, or explain it away. Rather, we must embrace it. Announce it. Use it to facilitate that collision of worldviews without which no person will ever breach the doors of heaven. 


NEXT POST: Why a virgin birth and not some other miracle?