Monday, December 24, 2012

Two Conversations

 Twice this Christmas season I have found myself in conversations on a topic I don’t believe I have ever engaged in before, not in casual conversation anyway. Each conversation was with a friend – one a Christian the other an atheist. The topic: the virgin birth of Jesus.

During the first conversation (the one with the Christian), I heard my friend say something along the lines of “I don’t believe in the virgin birth. That really doesn’t make any sense to me, but it doesn’t matter because it’s not really important to the story of Christ anyway.” I knew my friend had been raised a Christian, attended church regularly and was not “new to the faith,” so in the instance in which he spoke those words, in fact, before he got them fully out of his mouth, my mind darted in two directions. First, why would someone who’d been a Christian for quite a while think that the virgin birth doesn’t make sense? Second, why would that person think that it didn’t really matter anyway?

Fortunately, time allowed the two of us to explore this topic a bit, so I asked him why the virgin birth doesn’t make sense to him. He looked at me a little surprised to find I must believe in this “ancient legend” of a virgin birth and that I apparently hadn’t thought through this before. His response was simply, “It’s not possible…that’s not how babies come to be.” I smiled as he went on to explain that in the past people weren’t as enlightened as they are now and he felt they made up this story of a virgin birth as part of declaring Jesus unique and from God.

Over the next several minutes, I led my friend through a series of questions to begin to explore what he believed. We discussed whether or not he believed God exists and if so, what God’s nature is. My friend agreed that God exists and that all else that exists was created by God (though he was quick to point out he didn’t believe the Creation Story is the literal story of how it happened, to which I let him know I agreed in that I didn’t think the Creation Story was ever intended to be a literal account of how God created the universe, rather an affirmation that God did indeed do so, and that it was good…at one point, very good). At this point, I asked him how it is “impossible” (to use his word) for the God who created the entire universe out of nothing to create a baby in a woman’s womb without the aid of a sperm cell? He looked at me like I’d just given him a V-8 face palm and answered something like, “Well, I guess that’s not so impossible after all.”

The conversation continued, and after confirming as a Christian he believed the Bible was the inspired word of God and is reliable, we discussed the prophecy related to the virgin birth, the scandal among certain people in Nazareth and Bethlehem surrounding the Mary’s pregnancy, and the tension and angst it brought to Joseph (and the fact that Joseph, though not having a full understanding of the biology of human reproduction, certainly understood “where babies come from” and that Mary’s pregnancy did not happen that way, so he was going to divorce her before God’s intervention via a dream).

We then discussed why he felt the virgin birth didn’t matter. He explained that he basically saw Christmas as a nice story, but that the only story that really mattered is the story of Easter. I told him I felt our Christmas hymns and songs, our nativity sets, and scenes from plays and movies may make the Christmas story seem like a nice story, but that when we cast those aside and read what actually happened in the context of Roman oppression, when we consider the stigma and ridicule that accompanied Mary’s pregnancy, the journey to Bethlehem late in her third trimester, the place and conditions of Jesus’ birth and the subsequent decree from Herod that resulted in the deaths of so many babies in Bethlehem, I have a hard time finding a “nice story.” I find “nice” in only a couple of brief scenes in this story. My friend said he’d never thought about it like that, but that it made sense and seemed much more realistic than how he had perceived the Christmas story.
More importantly, in our final few moments together, we discussed why the Christmas story, and in particular the virgin birth, is so important. Certainly, Easter is the central story of Christianity. It is the focal point of all that is written in the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. However, if Easter is the story of a good man named Jesus being raised from the dead after being unjustly executed for largely political reasons, then there is no salvation or hope, except perhaps for that man named Jesus, to be found in that story. However, if God came to earth in the form of a man, being both fully human and fully divine, and if God in that form experienced fully the range of human emotion and frailty, yet He lived a sinless life, and then at the time of His choosing He offered himself as a sacrifice, a love offering, for all mankind, then the Easter story has the power to save and to transform us. The virgin birth is essential to fulfilling those “ifs.”

Jesus had to be both fully human and fully divine. If Jesus was not fully human He could not experience the full essence of what being a human is, including experiencing suffering and death. If Jesus was not fully human, the sinless life He lived would not have been meaningful in that it would not have been done on the same terms in which we all live. If Jesus were not fully divine, then His death and resurrection would be insufficient to atone for the sins of all people. (Maybe I’ll explore this last point more in a post closer to Easter.) The virgin birth is critical to the story for only by it is the baby Jesus both God and man.

As our conversation closed, my friend admitted he’d never really spent much time thinking through or studying these things. He had heard others he respected make the statement that the virgin birth was not real and was not necessary and they seemed reasonable and presented a “more sophisticated way” to understand the Christmas story, so he’d accepted them. It seems he fell in the same trap I know so many fall into: drawing “reasonable” conclusions before considering all the facts and applying logic to those facts, resulting in a set of “reasonable” conclusions that are contradictory and create an incoherent understanding.

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I tell this story, not to toot my own horn, but to share with whoever reads this certain things God has been teaching me. In fact, many of the thoughts I shared here are things I’ve learned in recent years, so the only horn I’m tooting is God’s. I toot God’s horn to thank Him for opening my eyes to certain things (even if only in small glimpses) and for allowing me the chance at times to be a vehicle through which He opens others’ eyes. Whatever words I speak that help open others’ eyes are words given me by God.

And now for the second conversation…

Tomorrow…

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