Should Christians Defend the Virgin Birth?

Should Christians Defend the Virgin Birth? August 27, 2016

Over at the Zondervan Academic Blog, Jeremy Bouma interacts with the section in WCOB where I talk about the virgin birth. He uses the provocative title: “Should Christians Defend the Virgin Birth?”

You only have to watch the famous episode of Not the Nine O’Clock News where they mock the virgin birth (“No, don’t laugh, they can do it in a test tube these days”) and Jane the Virgin to realize that the idea of virgins having babies is a little #awkward when it comes to beliefs about how babies are made.

Bouma points to two things I address in WCOB: First, Bird is “inclined to understand the nativity stories as a clarification to Jesus’ divine sonship rather than the necessary grounds for it” (102). Second, Bird rejects attempts to make the virgin birth story “a late creation intended as a christological parody of stories about ancient persons who were supposedly born of strange and supernatural circumstances” (102).

On the “meaning” on the virgin birth (or virgin conception), I reject the idea that it is to preserve the sinless of Jesus since we get DNA from both of our parents. So, the significance of the virgin birth is:

  1. “makes it clear that Israel was the vehicle by which God’s deliverance was brought into the world” (105)
  2. “underscores the dominant role of the Holy Spirit in Jesus’s ministry” and him bringing about redemption (105)
  3. “provides clarification to Jesus’s identity as the preexistent and eternal Son of God made flesh” (106)
  4. “means that God’s new world was at last becoming a reality” (106)
  5. “teaches us about the victory of God and the vanquishing of Satan” (107)

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