"He Had to Be Made Like His Brothers in Every Way."

Also posted at our new Detroit Baptist Seminary blog, Theologically Driven 

My pre-Christmas series on the virgin birth focused on preserving (1) the preincarnate divine personhood of Christ and (2) his impeccability. But the virgin birth also guaranteed that Jesus would be fully man as well. Christ was tempted at every point like as we are, with only one exception—unlike us he had no sin nature (Heb 4:15): Christ as God did not and could not have sinned. But apart from this exception, Jesus was "made like his brothers in every way"; indeed, the author of Hebrews can countenance nothing less (2:17).

Surely, we exclaim, there must be some additional exception to this statement! But as we look at the proposed exceptions, none seems to meet the test of Scripture:

• Some suggest that Christ never got sick. But the author of Hebrews says that Christ was acquainted with our weaknesses (Heb 4:15). His earthly body was not glorified until after the Resurrection, and his vital connection with Mary would suggest that his body broke down just as ours from the effects of hunger, thirst, disease, and injury. There is no reason to think that he had any sort of “super-immunity” to shield him from these things. And when his body was subjected to the torture of the Passion, his horribly battered body ultimately stopped working: he died. We must insist, of course, that he had no personal sin or imputed guilt, but this does not mean that he escaped the inherited effects of sin on the human race in general.

• Some suggest that Christ never suffered the effects of clumsiness and was always perfectly efficient in all that he did. But this does not follow either. Like the rest of us he tripped and stumbled as he learned to walk. In the carpenter’s shop, he did not at first hit all his nails squarely, and perhaps even struck his thumb or forefinger on occasion. That’s an ordinary part of learning, and there is no reason to think that he escaped this process of maturation (Luke 2:52). Surely he developed a healthy work ethic, but there is no reason to believe that he was anything more than an ordinary, hard-working carpenter’s apprentice (Isa 53:3–4).

• Others have suggested that his body and blood were constitutively different from ours and even “divine” in nature—that there was something in their physical properties that made them intrinsically more capable of atoning for sin. But Hebrews 2:17 tells us that the palpable reason why Christ was able to make atonement for sin is his absolute identification with his brothers. His blood atoned not because of its constitutive superiority, but because of the sinlessness of the person who spilled it. In fact, if his body and blood are constitutively different from ours, his death does not help us at all. Our very redemption is jeopardized if we confound the divine and human natures of Christ.

One might look at the points above with consternation and conclude that I am denigrating the greatness of our Lord Christ by humanizing him overly much. On the contrary, Paul teaches us that the degree of Christ’s exaltation is coordinate with and dependent on the degree of his humiliation:

      [Christ Jesus], being in very nature God,

            did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own
      advantage;

      rather, he made himself nothing

            by taking the very nature of a servant,

            being made in human likeness.

      And being found in appearance as a man,

            he humbled himself

            by becoming obedient to death—

            even death on a cross!

      Therefore God exalted him to the highest place

            and gave him the name that is above every name,

      that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,

            in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

      and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,

            to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:6–11).

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.

The Virgin Birth and the Christian Faith--Part 2

We've already observed that a miracle of the magnitude of a virgin birth "fits" within the Christian theistic framework and sets it stunningly apart from the naturalistic worldview embraced by Western secularism. And for this reason alone we should confidently welcome it. Belief in such a miracle does not render us anti-intellectuals (as the unimaginatively narrow-minded scoffer claims); rather, it renders us consistent supernaturalists. Of all the people in the world, Christians should be most comfortable with a miracle-working God. A virgin birth should not embarrass us, but embolden us. This is the kind of exploit that our God alone can do. "What?" we should rather say to the scoffer in a spirit reminiscent of Jeremiah 10: "Your god can't do this? How humiliating."

We must further accept the virgin birth because it is described as historical fact in clear, unambiguous terms in our New Testament. Mary became pregnant "before Mary and Joseph came together" (Matt 1:18), by a miracle of the Holy Spirit (v. 20), while she was yet a virgin (v. 23). There can be no doubt here--unlike the ever-so-slightly-less-than-lexically-certain term used in Isaiah 7:14, the Greek term leaves no doubt about Mary's status--she had never had sexual relations. And so it can be said without confusion that this miraculously conceived child was not the biological son of Joseph, but the Son of God (Luke 1:35).

As others have very carefully argued this season, to deny this one piece of the Christ-narrative is to compromise all the other pieces and throw the whole of the Christian faith into doubt. Truly, one cannot deny the inerrancy of any part of the Gospel account without jeopardizing the whole. The virgin birth, as such, stands as a prominent test-case for the doctrines of divine supernaturalism and biblical inerrancy. No one can deny the virgin birth and remain truly Christian.

Some stop at this point with an "Amen" and an exclamation point. And indeed, this truth is an important one. But the importance of the virgin birth, it would seem, has greater significance even than the foregoing. Why? Because the miracle of the virgin birth preserves (1) the preincarnate, divine personhood of Christ, and (2) frees him from the ravages of a sin nature.

When Jesus Christ was conceived in Mary, his personhood did not spring into existence at this point in history. Rather the pre-existent second person of the Trinity was "sent" by the Father to "take on flesh." Had Mary and Joseph "come together" to produce a new child, that new zygote would have been, by natural procreation, a new person. Were this the case, then the pre-existent person of Christ would have been imposed upon and forced to co-exist with this new human personality as some sort of schizophrenic monstrosity, thus violating the cardinal Christological rule of "neither dividing the person nor confounding the natures" of Christ. Worse yet, any person that Mary and Joseph could have produced (and we know that later they did), would naturally have been sinful (a hereditary trait predicated of all persons conceived by natural procreation). And so Christ would have been not only a schizophrenic monstrosity, but also an evil schizophrenic monstrosity.

Without the virgin birth, then, the person of Christ would have been so confounded and corrupted that his death would have had no value in the least for the world. To appropriately turn a phrase used by the Apostle Paul of the resurrection, if Christ is not virgin-born, "our preaching is worthless,... your faith is futile; you are still in your sins" (1 Cor 15:12-19).

And so again, let us embrace the virgin birth. Not only because it reveals the supernatural power of our God, but because it magnifies the intricate wisdom by which he rendered redemption possible. It is a good thing not only to celebrate in this festive season, but also to ponder all that the virgin birth means to the Christian faith.

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?

Seminary: Learning to Fly in "Alternate Law"

This morning I followed a link over at Tim Challies's blog and read a brief account of the last moments of Air France 447's ill-fated flight over the Atlantic on June 1, 2009. More than two years after the fatal flight, the flight data recorders have finally been recovered and analyzed, granting closure to family and friends that were heretofore ignorant of the details of the crash. The account offers not only the final words of the pilots, but also a running commentary in lay terms about what actually went wrong.

Without giving away the whole story (which is riveting), the plane crashed because of a complex of pilot errors including, but not limited to, a complete failure by the pilots to fly the plane successfully outside of "normal law." When in "normal law," a plane's computer restricts the ability of a pilot to enact procedures that might crash the plane. In emergency situations, however, a plane may revert to "alternate law," in which restrictions are removed to allow the pilot to use the full range of his training to control the plane. When the doomed plane went into "alternate law," however, the reader discovers that...

It's quite possible that [the co-pilot] had never flown an airplane in alternate law, or understood its lack of restrictions. According to [a U.S. Airways flight instructor], not one of US Airway's 17 Airbus 330s has ever been in alternate law. Therefore, [the co-pilot] may have assumed that the stall warning was spurious because he didn't realize that the plane could remove its own restrictions against stalling and, indeed, had done so.

What an arresting comment. The 32-year-old co-pilot had likely never flown outside of "normal law." He thought that the computer would not let him crash. He relied on the computer so absolutely that when it was removed, he was incapable of making basic observations and analysis, or of flying the airplane.

This kind of scenario happens all the time. Sometimes it is comical (a meteorologist announces sunny skies from his vantage in a windowless room, unaware of the rain falling outside); sometimes dangerous (a visiting trucker in the steep hills of Pennsylvania has no clue how to do an emergency gear down, maneuver on icy roads, or drive without cruise control).

It happens in seminary too. Sometimes students arrive with neither the ability to construct a footnote nor any intention of learning (we have Zotero after all). Others, similarly, have neither the ability to parse a verb nor any intention of learning (because we now have BibleWorks, Logos, and Accordance). Most have stunted ability to read a book and don't even know it (hasn't Control/Command F always been available to extract the key supporting sentence from that annoying forest of context?). Basic familiarity with and memorization of Scripture suffers (give me ten seconds and I can locate that key verse on my iPod thanks to OliveTree).

Much of the time, ministers can get away with this approach. Pastoral ministry usually operates, after all, in "normal law." But not always. And it is in those emergency situations that nothing can substitute for the intangible skill, forged by countless hours in the classroom and library, to operate in "alternate law." In a nutshell, that's why seminary exists.

The Inconsistency of Gender-Inclusiveness

I like the translation philosophy of the NIV. I've gone on record defending it especially against those that suggest the NIV translation philosophy violates inerrancy or inserts undue "interpretation" into the translation process. But while I've not been put off terribly by the gender-inclusivism in the 2011 translation, I'm not particularly enthusiastic about it, either. Probably the biggest reason for this is the constant bruising of my grammatical sensibilities every time the new translation fails to maintain noun/pronoun agreement and instead uses the so-called (and oxymoronic) "singular they." Maybe I'm alone in this, but I find the practice incredibly distracting.

A few weeks ago I complained about this to a good friend, griping about the perceived need to bow the knee to political correctness and the radical feminist agenda. He responded quite aggressively, asserting that it was not political correctness that fueled the NIV translation policy of gender inclusiveness, but rather contemporary usage. Chastened, I resolved to start suppressing my internal grammar alarm and get used to this new era of noun/pronoun disagreement.

But after an experiment with the NIV 2011 the other day, I've decided that my initial reaction may not have been so wrong after all. After stumbling over two occasions in which the NIV translators inexplicably failed to be gender inclusive, I decided to read the entire book of Proverbs looking for this phenomenon. Excepting references to "sons" and "kings," which are consistently regarded as male in the NIV 2011, I discovered the following 13 passages where the translators of the NIV 2011 retained the generic he/him/his:

•   6:11 (correction, v. 13)—the troublemaker/villain

•   6:14–15—the one who plots evil.

•   6:30–31—the thief

•   18:9—a slack worker

•   19:24—the sluggard

•   21:24—the proud/arrogant person or mocker

•   21:25-26—the sluggard

•   22:16—the one who oppresses the poor

•   23:6–7—a begrudging host

•   25:13—a trustworthy messenger

•   25:21–22—your enemy

•   26:4–5—the fool

•   26:14–16—the sluggard

Does anyone but me notice a pattern here? If not, let me state the obvious: the NIV 2011 translators felt that it was fine to retain the generic he/him/his on twelve occasions where the referent was negative. But on only one occasion (25:13) did they retain the generic he/him/his on an occasion where the referent was positive. IOW, the generic he/him/his is fine when we're referencing the bad guys, but when it's the good guys, we need to make sure it's the good guys and gals. Now my sample set is not exhaustive by any means, so this could end up being an anomaly, but my preliminary conclusion is that the NIV translators do not seem to be motivated exclusively by the pull of contemporary English usage. Instead, what they really seem to be worried about is offending radical feminists.

I still plan to use my NIV. But I'm not sure that the translation committee is being completely objective on this issue. If they were it would seem that they would be consistent in their gender inclusiveness.