Christmas Method, Christmas Meaning

A Palestinian maiden hears it announced that through her the Saviour is to be born. Awed by the announcement, humbled by it, she says, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). Isaiah had said that the virgin would conceive and bear a son (7:14), and it was so. Matthew narrates it in detail (1:18–25); so does Luke (1:26–2:40), with trappings of pastoral beauty.

Always some have been unable to see what the late Karl Barth liked to call “the Christmas miracle.” Many of them are thinking about the requirements of biology. Some think the virgin birth refers to a co-habiting of God with humankind, as in pagan Greek thought. But it was no biological event. Even if non-paternal human births had taken place, they would have nothing to do with the high and sheer miracle by which Mary conceived through the Holy Spirit. This was the method of Christmas.

After I had read a paper on the virgin birth at a theological society meeting, a university professor stood to offer his peculiar defense of the doctrine. He said that female rabbits have been known to be shocked into conception, without the male, and that Mary might well have conceived through the shock caused by the angel’s announcement. This man sought to support the doctrine by denying the sheer miracle involved.

At Christmas time, across the centuries and across the world Christians have believed that an honored maiden conceived through the Holy Spirit, in an inexplicable way, and that in the normal time the eternal Son of God was born into human life.

We call this the “virgin birth.” The phrase is time-honored, and we should still use it. But “virgin conception” would better express what we mean, for the miracle was in the conception, not in the birth itself. The phrase “virgin birth,” with stress on “birth,” was used in the earliest centuries to teach the reality of Christ’s humanity as opposed to the Gnostic teaching that Christ was only “poured through” the womb of Mary and therefore had a human body only “in seeming.”

Scriptural support for the virgin birth as the method really is unassailable. James Orr, at the century’s turn, was convinced of the “integrity” of the virgin-birth narrative (The Virgin Birth of Christ, p. 227). So was J. Gresham Machen, a generation later. More recently, writers on the theme such as William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury, and Edwin Lewis of Methodism were likewise convinced. Karl Barth could say: “No one can dispute the existence of a biblical testimony to the Virgin Birth” (Church Dogmatics, II, 176).

The doctrine has been impugned by such scholars as Emil Brunner (The Mediator, p. 324; Dogmatics, II, 355); Gustaf Aulen (The Faith of the Christian Church, pp. 121 ff.); John Baillie (The Place of Jesus Christ in Modern Christianity, p. 119); Rudolph Bultmann (Theology of the New Testament, II, 30); Paul Tillich (Systematic Theology, II, 127, 149); and Nels Ferré (The Christian Understanding of God, p. 192). Yet it has had supporters in our time from many outstanding theologians, in great part because of its unassailable delineation in Scripture.

Take that beautiful passage in Luke 1:5–2:52. It is included in a second-century harmony of the Gospels, and in all the Greek manuscripts of Luke, and in all the language versions. Those who assail the supernatural conception need to realize that all extant manuscripts include the phrase “as was supposed” in Luke 3:23, where we read, “And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph.…” And if the virgin birth was a pagan idea, as many impugners suppose, why is the Lucan story couched in what Machen can call “the most strikingly Jewish and Palestinian narrative in the whole New Testament” (The Virgin Birth of Christ, p. 119)?

Matthew’s telling of the miracle is also unassailable. The whole of Matthew 1:18–25 is for the express purpose of describing the miraculous character of the birth.

That Joseph is included in the genealogies of Matthew (1:16) and Luke (1:27) is understandable when one considers the high view of adoptive fatherhood in the Jewish mind. It is so high, actually, that dead men could have sons in a sense. In Old Testament law, if a man died without an issue, his brother was to take the wife and rear a son for the deceased one.

The meaning of Christmas is tied up with the “method,” the virgin birth, to be sure; for if Joseph had been the actual father, the meaning would have suffered. But the meaning of this birth at Bethlehem is a subject all its own. The birth means that the Son of God pitched his tent among us men—here in this “spoilt and fallen world.” He who was discontinuous with human life, and above it, entered into human life, its blood and sweat and tears—but not its sin.

We men cannot go up to heaven and see what God is like. This fact is clear enough, but the doctrinally interested evangelist states it: “And no man hath ascended up to heaven” (John 3:13). Yet though no one from here could go there, one from there could come down here. And one did.

In all the theophanies of Abraham’s career, that “beforehand” man still had not seen God. A person could not see God and live, though Moses at one time was permitted to see God’s back. No man has seen God at any time, John says (1:18). But on that first Christmas, God the Son entered into human life; and by sojourning here, he made God the Father known. It was possible for the Son to reveal the Father to us because there never was a “time” in the Father’s life when the Son was not also existing, the Word being “in the beginning” (John 1:1) even as “God” was (Gen. 1:1). Moreover, the Son existed “with God” (John 1:1), not in separation from the Father; “with” here means “near to” and suggests rapport. Furthermore, the Son who did this was on the same level of being with the Father, since John also declares that “the Word was God” (1:1).

A man looking for something under the one street light on a city block explained to a passerby that he had lost his keys somewhere along the block. On he looked, but only under the light. When asked why he did not search over the whole distance, he said, “This is the only place where the light is.” It is not to be denied that there is a certain faint revelation of God in the natural world. The heavens declare God’s glory. “The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead …” (Rom. 1:20). But what man as sinner most needs to know about God is that he is merciful, anxious to forgive, a God of love for sinners. On what golf course, or mountain stream, is this observed? Creative ingenuity, yes; but not love and mercy. The only place where there is adequate light on what man needs most to know is in the Christ revelation, narrated and interpreted in the Holy Scriptures.

The first Adam lived the human life badly. The Second Adam, Christ the Lord, “founded in God,” born at Bethlehem “of a woman” (Gal. 4:4), lived our human life perfectly. And finally, in death the Roman way, he spelled out God’s love in drops of blood, became a once-for-all sacrifice, and was raised from the dead. All this and more—much more—is part of what Christmas means.

Many in our time want to maintain the meaning of Christmas while they deny its divinely chosen method. They impugn the virgin birth, yet still bow down before the Christ. Indeed, their declared intention is to do Christ honor by assaulting this miracle. But the late Edwin Lewis was surely right in saying that to surrender Bethlehem’s “stone of offense” precludes a high view of Christ. He wrote, “The evidence is overwhelming that when men begin to surrender belief in the Virgin Birth … they are also getting ready to surrender that belief regarding Christ Himself [the Incarnation] which is the vital center of the whole body of faith” (A Philosophy of the Christian Revelation, 1940, p. 186).

Similarly, Karl Barth warned against “parenthesizing the miracle of the Nativities and wanting to cling to the mystery as such” (Dogmatics in Outline, p. 100). To him, the virgin birth is the “miracle that is a pointer to the mystery [the Incarnation]” (Credo, p. 70); the virgin birth “advertises what takes place” (p. 60). It is connected with the Incarnation “as sign with thing signified” (Church Dogmatics, II, 184).

In Isaiah 7:14 both the method and the meaning of Christmas are foretold. A miraculous birth by the “virgin” (almah) would take place, and the one born would be called “Immanuel,” meaning “God with us”—which is indeed the special significance of this event that causes the world to wear a halo.

J. Kenneth Grider is professor of theology at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. He holds the M.A. from Drew and the Ph.D. from Glasgow University and did post-doctoral work at Oxford and Claremont.

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