The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord Part 3

And it may be added, further, that Mary's word at Cana of Galilee: "They have no wine," and her subsequent order to the servants: "Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it," (St. John ii. 3, 5.) are a clear indication that in the view of St. John she regarded Him as a miraculous Person, and expected of Him miraculous action.+ I think that, in regard to the Gospels, their relationship to one another may be summed up in the words of Bishop Alexander: "The fact of the Incarnation is recorded by St. Matthew and St. Luke; it is a.s.sumed by St. Mark; the idea which vitalizes the fact is dominant in St. John."^

-- + Gore, loc. cit.

^ Bishop Alexander's Leading Ideas, Introd., p. xxiv.

Consider next St. Paul's references to the Incarnation:--

"G.o.d sent forth His Son, born of a woman." (Gal. iv. 4) He does not say, "born of human parents."

"His Son our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh." (Rom. i. 3.)

"Being in the form of G.o.d, thought it not robbery to be equal with G.o.d; but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men." (Phil. ii. 6, 7.)

These are the pa.s.sages in which St. Paul refers to the Birth of Jesus Christ. Not one of them is inconsistent with the fact that He was born of a Virgin. But one can say more than this. Every one of these pa.s.sages infers that He who was born in time had existed before. They either a.s.sert or imply a Divine pre-existence.

He who was "made in the likeness of men" was already pre-existent in the "form of G.o.d," and was, in fact, "equal with G.o.d." This being the case, does it not prepare us for the further truth that, when He entered into the conditions of human life, He entered it not in all respects like us? I should mar if I ventured to abbreviate Dr. Mason's admirable words, in which he presses this argument--

"Like causes produce like effects. In similar circ.u.mstances, you may expect the same forces to operate in the same way. But when some new force is introduced, you cannot expect the same results.

The Birth of Christ, if He is what all the writers of the New Testament believed Him to be, was necessarily unlike ours in that one great respect. We had no existence before we were born, however poets and poetical philosophers may play with the notion.

But the New Testament writers believed that He whom we know as Jesus Christ was living with a full, vigorous, personal life for ages before He appeared in the world as man. They maintained that He was present and active in the making of the world, and immanent in the development of human history, which formed a new beginning at His Birth. They said He was G.o.d, the Only Begotten Son of the Eternal Father, who came down from heaven, and voluntarily entered into the conditions of human life. Admit the possibility that they were right, and you will no longer ask that His mode of entrance into our conditions should be in all things like our own. If you acknowledge that Jesus Christ was Divine first and became human afterwards, you cannot but say with St. Ambrose, when you hear that He was born of a Virgin: 'Talis decet partus Deum'--a birth of that kind is befitting to one who is G.o.d. We do not--no one ever did--believe Christ to be G.o.d because He was born of a Virgin; that is not the order of thought [and we have seen that it was certainly not the order of Apostolic preaching]; but we can recognize that if He was G.o.d, it was not unnatural for Him to be so born. No sound genuine historical criticism can deny that the Virgin-Birth was part of the Creed of Primitive Christianity, and that nothing that can be truly called science can object to that belief, unless it starts with the a.s.sumption, which, of course, it cannot even attempt to prove, that Christ was never more than man."*

Similarly Professor Stanton: "The chief ground on which thoughtful Christian believers are ready to accept it [the miraculous Conception]

is that, believing in the personal indissoluble union between G.o.d and man in Jesus Christ, the miraculous Birth of Jesus Christ is the only fitting accompaniment for this unions and, so to speak, the natural expression of it in the order of outward effects."+

-- * Guardian, November 19, 1902.

+ Stanton, Jewish and Christian Messiah p. 376.

IV

OUR LORD AS THE SECOND ADAM

But we may surely go further than this, and say that, in regard to St. Paul, his language as to the Second Adam seems to necessitate the Virgin-Birth. In St. Paul's view there are, so to speak, only two men: "The first man is of the earth earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven" (1 Cor. xx. 47.)--a new starting-point for humanity. This doctrine of the Second Adam, of this fresh start given to the human race by Jesus Christ, would seem to require His Birth of a Virgin, for the Virgin-Birth is bound up with any really Catholic notion of the Incarnation. For what is the Catholic doctrine of Incarnation? Do we mean by Incarnation that on an already existing human being there descended in an extraordinary measure the Divine Spirit, so that He was by moral a.s.sociation so closely allied to G.o.d that He might be called G.o.d? Do we mean that some preminent saint, called Jesus, responded with such "signal readiness" to the Divine Voice, "and realized more worthily than any other man 'the Divine idea' of human excellence, so that to Him, by a laxity of phrase not free from profaneness, men might thus ascribe a so-called 'moral Divinity'"? Then, I say quite freely, if that is what we mean, that the Virgin-Birth is, so far as we can see, an altogether gratuitous addition, an unnecessary miracle. That is, so far as I can understand it, the idea of Incarnation entertained by moderns who reject or question the Catholic Faith.

But let me say as clearly as possible that this is not, and never has been, what the Christian Church means by Incarnation. The New Testament does not tell us of a deified man: no, we begin with a Divine Person. "The 'I' in Him, His very self, is Divine, not human; yet has He condescended to take our humanity into union with His Divine Person, to a.s.sume it as His own." He who was from all eternity a single Divine Person took upon Him our nature, and was "made man;" and if this be so, what other entrance into our condition is imaginable save that which we confess in the Creed--that He was "conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary"? "The Creeds pa.s.s immediately from confessing Jesus Christ to be 'the only Son of G.o.d' to the fact that He was 'born of the Virgin Mary,' and neither of those articles of the Catholic Faith can be abandoned without disturbing the foundations of the other."*

-- * Swete, Church Congress Report (1901), p. 164.

If Christ was born naturally of human parents, He must, one would think, have taken to Himself a human personality; He must have existed in two persons as well as in two natures. But what we are to insist on in thinking of and teaching this mystery is this truth of the single Divine Personality of our Lord. The old Nestorian heresy (with certain important modifications) is being resuscitated among us. Nestorianism, new and old, begins from below, and speaks of a man who by moral "a.s.sociation"

became "Divine;" it speaks, that is to say, of a deified man.

The Christian Faith begins from above-it speaks of Him who from all eternity was G.o.d, taking upon Him our flesh. He took upon Him our nature, but He did not a.s.sume a human personality. He wrapped our human nature round His own Divine Person. On the Nestorian theory, G.o.d did but benefit one man by raising him to a unique dignity; on the Catholic theory, He benefitted the race of men, by raising human nature into union with His Divine Person.

Those who speak, somewhat incautiously surely, of Incarnation, while they deny or question the Virgin-Birth, should be asked to consider what they say and to reflect what their words imply. A man born naturally of human parents but taken up, on account of a wonderfully high moral character, into close union with G.o.d, can never differ in kind from any saint. He can never benefit the race of men save by way of example. His death can never effect our redemption, for it does not differ in kind from the death of a martyr. Being only a great saint himself, he cannot represent mankind either on the Cross or before the Throne. One man has been a.s.sumed into heaven. But this is wholly a different thing from the Faith of Christendom, which is that G.o.d has taken human nature into union with His Divine Person, in that nature G.o.d died upon the Cross, and in that nature He pleads before the Throne for the race of men. It is because Christ's Person is Divine, that His life means to us Christians what it does.

"No person," says Hooker, "was born of the Virgin but the Son of G.o.d, no person but the Son of G.o.d baptized, the Son of G.o.d condemned, the Son of G.o.d and no other person crucified; which one only point of Christian belief, the infinite worth of the Son of G.o.d, is the very ground of all things believed concerning life and salvation by that which Christ either did or suffered as man in our behalf."* "That," says Bishop Andrewes, "which setteth the high price upon this sacrifice is this, that He which offereth it to G.o.d is G.o.d."+

-- * Eccl. Pol., v. 52. 3.

+ Second Sermon on the Pa.s.sion.

"Marvel not," says St. Cyril of Jerusalem, "if the whole world has been redeemed; for He who has died for us is no mere man, but the Only Begotten Son of G.o.d."^ "Christ," says St. Cyril of Alexandria, "would not have been equivalent [as a sacrifice]

for the whole creation, nor would He have sufficed to redeem the world, nor have laid down His life by way of price for it, and poured forth for us His precious Blood, if He be not really the Son, and G.o.d of G.o.d." #

-- ^ Catech., xiii. 2.

# De Sancta Trinitate, dial. A. (quoted Liddon, B. L., p. 477).

How different is all this from the language of those who would deny or question the Virgin-Birth! With them the Resurrection is denied as a literal fact; the whole meaning of the Atonement as being a real sacrifice for sin, a real propitiation, is eviscerated of its meaning, and is reduced to a moral appeal to man; and finally, we find that whereas Christians have been thinking and speaking of Christ as truly G.o.d, who in becoming man "did not abhor the Virgin's womb," modern writers really mean a very good man who does not, however, differ in kind but only in excellence of degree from any saint; and by Incarnation they mean that moral union which a good man has with G.o.d, only ill.u.s.trated in the case of Christ in an altogether unique degree. If, however, the Incarnation be what Christendom believes it to have been; if the Son of G.o.d did really take flesh in the womb of Mary, and became man, not by a.s.suming a human personality, but by a.s.suming human nature, by entering into human conditions of life,--it is indeed difficult to imagine any other way of such an Incarnation save by way of the Virgin-Birth, by which the entail of original sin was cut off, and humanity made a fresh start in the Eternal Person of the Second Adam. And if He is indeed sinless, the sinless Example, the sinless Sacrifice, how could He be otherwise born? Adam, at his fall, pa.s.sed on to the human race a vitiated nature, which we all share--a nature bia.s.sed in a wrong direction. It descended--this vitiated nature--from father to son to all generations of men. If this entail of original sin was to be cut off, if there was really to be a new Adam, a second start for the human race, how could it be contrived otherwise than by a Virgin-Birth? The Son of Mary was indeed wholly human--completely man--but "in Him humanity inherited no part of that bad legacy which came across the ages from the Fall."*

When a modern writer says, "We should not now, h priori, expect that the Incarnate Logos would be born without a human father,"+ we may reply that we are hardly in a position to expect anything a priori in the matter; but when once we have learnt that this Incarnate Logos was to be the Second Head of the human race--the sinless Son of Man--and that in Him humanity was to make a fresh start, it is indeed difficult to see how this could be without the miracle of the Virgin-Birth.

-- * Liddon, Christmas Sermons, p. 97.

+ See Contentio Veritatis, p. 88.

I should like to say, in conclusion, that I cannot disguise my conviction that just as in the early days we find no denial of the Virgin-Birth except among those who denied and objected to the principle of the Incarnation (on the ground, apparently, of the essential evil of matter), so, conversely, that the attempt now being made (or the suggestion put forward) to separate the Incarnation and the Virgin-Birth will prove to be an impossibility. Once reject the tradition of the Virgin-Birth, and the Incarnation will go with it. For a few years, indeed, men will use the old language, the word "Incarnation" will be on their lips; but it will be found before long that by that term they do not mean G.o.d manifest in human flesh, but they mean a man born naturally of human parents, who most clearly manifested to men the Christian idea of a perfect human character. Such a conception as this brings no solace to human hearts. No saint, however great, could be our Saviour; no saint could have atoned for sin; and a.s.suredly no saint could be to any of us the source of our new life--the well-spring and fountain of Divine grace.

NOTE ON ISAIAH VII. 14

THE word for "the Virgin" in the Hebrew text is ha-almah. It is an ambiguous word, and does not necessarily imply, though it certainly does not necessarily exclude, the idea of virginity.

Etymologically it means puella nubilis--a maiden of marriageable age.

In four* out of six other places in the Old Testament where it is employed, it is used of virgins. Its use in the two other pa.s.sages+ is doubtful, but does not with any certainty imply virginity.

-- * Gen. xxiv. 43; Exod. ii. 8; Ps. lxviii. 25; Cant. i. 3.

+ Prov. x.x.x. x 9; Cant. vi. 8.

The Septuagint translators, some two hundred years before Christ, translated the word he parthenos.

Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, in the second century of our era (apparently in order to vitiate the Christian appeal to this pa.s.sage), translated the word neanis.

THE END