Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.
Luke 1:34-35
A Facebook friend posted a column by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof titled, “Was Mary a Virgin? Does It Matter?” In the column, Kristof reports a question and answer session with the popular Evangelical writer Philip Yancey.
We might argue about the first question, but there can be no doubt about the second. The answer is a firm “No.” It does not matter at all whether Mary was a virgin.
Not surprisingly, from his perspective within Evangelicalism, Yancey sees it differently. The virgin birth is central to his understanding of Jesus as the Son of God. But to his credit, he stops short of saying that is essential to being a Christian. At the close of the interview, when Kristof asks him whether he can call himself a Christian if he is skeptical of the virgin birth, the miracles and a physical resurrection, Yancey says, “I would rephrase the question and toss it back to you: Are you a Jesus follower?”
Earlier in the interview, Kristof explained some of his frustrations with the Christian right:
“One of the problems I have with the evangelical church is that it seems more dazzled by the miracles than the message. Particularly in the age of Trump, conservative pastors weaponize God to support a president who is trying to cut Medicaid and school lunches for the poor. Shouldn’t conservative Christians believe as much in the good Samaritan as in the Virgin Birth?”And Yancey basically agreed. “I grew up in what I now call a “toxic” fundamentalist church in the South,” he said, “and I view with dismay the contemporary mixing of politics and religion, including some of the policies you mention. Churches often end up on the wrong side of issues — such as the blatant racism I heard from the pulpit as a child.”
Believing in the virgin birth has no impact on how we live our lives. You can believe in the virgin birth and still be a racist. On the other hand, if you believe in the Sermon on the Mount it has to make a difference in how you live your life.
In his wonderful commentary on The New Testament, William Barclay calls the Virgin Birth “one of the great controversial doctrines of the Christian faith.” Wisely, he says, “the church does not insist that we believe in this doctrine.”
Today, when much of the Christian Church has become captive to the biblical literalism of the Religious Right, it is important to reflect on Barclay’s perspective. When he was writing, in the middle of the last century, Barclay was one of the preeminent biblical scholars, and the very embodiment of orthodox scholarship. His work defined the center of Christian biblical scholarship and theology.
We may choose to believe it, says Barclay, based on a literal reading of this passage as well as Matthew 1:18-25. And, he writes, “It is natural to argue that if Jesus was, as we believe, a very special person, he would have a very special entry into this world.”
But there are also excellent biblical reasons not to take the story literally. First, the genealogies in both Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’s ancestry through Joseph. Second, when Mary and Joseph finally find Jesus in the temple (Luke 2:48) she tells him that “Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” Third, there are other references to Jesus as Joseph’s son (Matthew 13:55, John 6:42). And finally, the rest of the New Testament (Mark, John, and Paul’s letters) knows nothing of this story.
Barclay sets the story in the context of Jewish belief. “The Jews had a saying that in the birth of every child there are three partners—the father, the mother and the Spirit of God. They believed that no child could ever be born without the Spirit.” So these stories are “lovely, poetical ways of saying that, even if he had a human father, the Holy Spirit of God was operative in his birth in a unique way.”
This is more than an academic discussion because it goes to the very heart of how we understand the Bible. The insistence of literalism in this case suggests a literalistic approach to the Bible as a whole. When Christians (especially pastors and Sunday School teachers) insist on a belief in the Virgin Birth, they invite prioritizing literalism over religious meaning.
And, as Kristof points out, when we focus on literalism, it's easy to lose the meaning altogether.
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