Summer hours continue. Daily Episcopalian will publish every other day this week.
By Derek Olsen
In one of my various blog rants on the latest Episcopal sanctoral calendar, Holy Women, Holy Men, I received a comment on Mary. It was brief and suggested only that Mary be referred to as “blessed” but not as “virgin.”
Interesting, I thought. What’s the angle? Despite my request for more explanation, no further comments were forthcoming. I was a little disappointed—it was a conversation I was looking forward to having; I doubt that my mind would be changed, but it’s always worthwhile to dig around the issues a bit.
There are two basic arguments that take place around the appellation “virgin” as applied to the mother of Our Lord. The first argument that denies the title of “virgin” to Mary concerns her capacity as mother of Our Lord–in other words, this argument is a denial of the virgin birth of Christ. The second argument takes issue with the Church’s (apparently) post-Scriptural designation of Mary as “ever-virgin.” That is, the second need not touch on the virgin birth, but, instead, suggests that Mary and Joseph had intercourse and, presumably, natural children of their own in addition to Jesus.
I tend to think of the first question—concerning the virgin birth of Christ—as a rather cut-and-dried issue. On one side, you have the Scripture, the creeds, and the faith of the Church; on the other, you have modern biology. According to our biological canons, we all know that human parthenogenesis is not medically attested. Lizards, yes; sharks, yes; humans, not so much. As a result there are two basic positions: either 1) we have miracle or 2) we have a miraculous explanation of a less-than-miraculous situation. Not surprisingly, this issue sometimes becomes a litmus test for examining the intersection between reason and religion, and both sides get negatively caricatured by their opponents.
Personally, I’m a biologically-aware individual (Dad’s a geneticist; my brother is an organic chemist) and a fully-trained New Testament scholar. I’m for the ordination of women and the church blessing of same-sex marriages. I’ve got all the progressive educated modern-person credentials you could want. And I’m a believer in the virgin birth.
Matthew and Luke are insistent that Jesus was born of Mary when she was a virgin. Then we have the creeds. As I understand them, the creeds are the Church’s documents that serve to nail down potentially questionable points of interpretation. That is, if the creed touches on an item, it’s because there was a controversy about how to read and make sense of it. To put it another way, the creeds are silent on the non-controversial matters—like what Jesus taught and did. Instead, it identifies precisely those points where “reasonable” people might waffle or seek a less literal meaning.
Make no mistake; even in the first three centuries of the Church, they knew how this looked. Don’t think that people in the 1st century world didn’t understand the birds and the bees; they knew precisely how babies got made—maybe not on the biochemical level, but in the acts that mattered. This was no less scandalous then than now. Yet the Church insisted on it then and does so now as well. I know how babies get made too (I have two of my own…). Yet I choose to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin; that there is more to this world than what our modern empirical materialism would have us believe.
That’s also not to say that I believe that all of the events reported as miracles throughout Scripture either literally occurred or were supernatural departures from the order of things—but this is a big one; the Incarnation is in a whole different category than, say, Balaam’s speaking donkey or Lot’s wife turning to a pillar of salt.
To put it another way: how can you reasonably claim that God created the universe, or even that the universe came into being through God-sponsored processes—yet God is unable to fertilize a single egg cell? It seems to me that universe-creation is the much bigger feat, yet many modernist-types are willing to grant that while scoffing at a virgin birth.
Thus, the first challenge to Mary’s virginity seems to come down to a point of faith. Do we believe the observations and explanations of modern science in all cases over the faith handed down, or do we give faith the benefit of the doubt in the face of scientific knowledge in cases of importance—like the Incarnation and Resurrection? Furthermore, the settled consensus of the Church on who and what Jesus is and all the consequences thereof are based in the notion that Jesus is true man and true God. If it wasn’t a virgin birth—if something else supplied the other half of the zygote equation—then all you’re left with is a gussied-up form of Adoptionism and a lot of well-tested and experience-based theology that suddenly you have to account for in some other way.
Derek Olsen recently finished his Ph.D. in New Testament at Emory University. He has taught seminary courses in biblical studies, preaching, and liturgics; he currently resides in Maryland. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X/Y dad appear at Haligweorc.