The Virgin Birth and the Christian Faith--Part 3

I wasn't planning to do a "part 3" on the virgin birth, but a recent kerfuffle in the blogosphere has raised an interesting concern that my previous posts have ignored. While I've been intent on addressing the secular/modernist concern that says too little about the virgin birth, I've neglected another class of religious thinkers, viz., those who say too much about the virgin birth--and sometimes with serious implications. Note the following:

•       As the link above reports, some suggest that any genetic connection of Christ with human parents would destroy his sinlessness, and thus propose that God inserted a "fully formed zygote cell" into Mary such that Christ "didn't inherit anything from either Mary or Joseph." Mary as such becomes nothing more than a surrogate mother of an alien humanoid that has no real solidarity with the human race. Were this the case, Christ's sinlessness would surely be preserved, but a crucial purpose of the incarnation would be jeopardized, viz., the solidarity of Christ with humanity necessary to redeeming it (so Rom 5, Heb 2, etc.). This is a troubling concern.

•       Others, noting this tension, suggest that when Christ's mother Mary became "full of grace," she was miraculously rendered sin-free sometime prior to Christ's conception, thereby insulating her child from sin. This Roman Catholic solution, however, leads to other tensions, most notably that Mary becomes a co-redemptrix and co-mediatrix with Christ in direct violation of the NT Scriptures (1 Tim 2:5-6, etc.). See a recent post by Bill Combs that addresses this concern.

•       Others erroneously suggest that Christ is saved from sinlessness because he was born of a woman only, and not of a man. The suggestion here seems to be that while women may be infected by sin, only men are "carriers" of the "sin gene." This is a popular (and clever) theory, but it rests on little by way of biblical support.  

•       Others, more reasonably, find it necessary for the Holy Spirit to miraculously block the transmission of sin from Mary by a miracle additional to that of the virgin birth. While this proposal is plausible, I am not convinced it is necessary. Since sin and guilt are predicated of persons and not of natures, it seems reasonable to suggest that Christ's preincarnate person (room for which is provided by the virgin birth) would alone be adequate to insulate him from original sin. Surely the Spirit did something to preserve the holiness of the child (Luke 1:35); I'm convinced that His facilitation of the virgin birth alone was adequate to that end. 

To conclude, we must be cautious in our holy zeal to preserve the reality of Christ's virgin birth not to damage the delicate hypostatic union by saying more about the virgin birth than Scripture allows.