I SHOULD INDEX my archive, maybe I wouldn't get asked to go over things I've written about more than once before.
"Do you believe Jesus Christ was the son of God,"
I am angrily asked by someone who doesn't care for what I said about Sodom and Gomorrah.
Enough so I'd have capitalized "Son". What you're asking is do I believe the account of his conception and birth as told in Luke and Matthew (not that they're that consistent with each other) and as is implied in the preface to the Gospel of John (thank you Bishop Gene Robinson), I can report that I don't disbelieve it. I have defended the belief in it against, for example, Richard Dawkins. I believe I linked to that early piece from my first blog not that long ago.
I can say of the two overt accounts of Jesus's Birth, I prefer Luke's with low-life shepherds being told by frightening angels where to find him and, in the first acts of Christian faith by anyone other than Mary, leaving their flocks to find that God has chosen to burst into the material universe in a Barn. I like that one more than wise men bringing expensive presents.
As it is presented in two Gospels and implied in a third one, there is no possibility of science refuting it as a fact or as a possibility. I don't think it's one of the essential beliefs to believe in the divinity of Jesus - there is a different theory of that, that it was when he was baptized by John that he became the adopted Son of God but it was never anything like a widespread theory of Christology. I have absolutely no problem with the idea that God chose to incarnate himself into God's physical Creation, to bond his created creatures and the entire cosmos to God's self through being born in the flesh to human beings who could articulate that. I'd guess it was a part of the fulfillment of Creation to do that. As I mentioned, I've been reading Rahner, again.
I am comfortable with saying I don't really believe or disbelieve in the Virgin Birth as such. I don't think it was necessary for Mary to have been a virgin for God to have asked her to bear his Son. I don't share the patriarchal superstition that a Woman having had sex makes her a defiled person. The Bible doesn't claim Joseph was a virgin, none of the patriarchs and, certainly, none of the kings were. It says in the Gospel that God could have raised Sons of Abraham from the stones, he could certainly bring his Son into the cosmos through the agreement of a girl who had had sex before.
Though I have also recently defended the idea that Isaiah, in the original words of his prophesy, as come down to us in the Greek edition of the Old Testament may have predicted the Messiah would be born to a virgin instead of the Masoretic edition possibly meaning she would just be "a young woman." I don't think the text that calls the birth of the one who would be called Emmanuel a "sign" makes much sense as a sign unless there was something very unusual about his mother. A virgin giving birth to a son - which, humans being mammals, would rule out the stupid sciency snark about "parthenogenesis" - would certainly not be something you see every day and so would be a perfectly amazing sign. If it was to be understood as "a young woman" you could well ask which of the many thousands, tens or hundreds of thousand young women who gave birth would that be. Wouldn't be much of a sign, in that case.
I also don't think that prophesy, which, by definition, is inspired by God, is necessarily bound by the expectations and limited imagination of the one it is given to and who expresses it in words. If God can make use of individual humans to give People prophesy, God can make more use of them than the prophet, her or himself will fully understand. If you believe that prophesy is from God, through but not entirely from the prophet, a modern "enlightenment" scheme of things can't contain that.
The current academic practice of trying to imagine what might be considered a "typical" mind of a person living at the time of this or that Biblical figure was like so as to limit the meaning of their prophesy to what would be expected of that imagined, typical prophet, strikes me as making little sense. The Prophets, just about all of them controversial, rejected, outlandish and mostly murdered, were certainly not like modern academics who don't want to break outside of the boundaries of their ambient culture. They didn't prophesy with an eye on getting into reviewed academic journals. I think that's one of the reasons that modern academic treatments of these things fork no lightening. They weren't even like modern song writers who want to chart and so who stay in some bounds because it's their job. The Gospels note that lynch mobs tried to kill Jesus on a few occasions when they didn't like what he said. And he went to Jerusalem with the full expectation that he would be rejected for his outlandish, atypical words and that he would die a prophet's murder. The chilling prophesy of Simeon said to Mary that Jesus would "stand as a sign of contradiction and that a sword would pierce your soul." Those words as much as the Magnificat strike me to the bone.
I think if the Birth of Jesus was as enormous an event in the history of Creation as the Gospels and Epistles present it as being, and which I believe, that disruption in the normal course of history might have given rise to prophesy bigger than a prophet's imagination or expectation. Prophesy is bigger than just political science, it is more than reporting, it is more than mere human reasoning. As I said the other day, I've got no use for religion that isn't supernatural and think it's a mistake for anyone to insist that religion stick with our naive 19th century concept of naturalism. Even modern physics doesn't do that.
I do think the Resurrection is more evidenced. Some like William Lane Craig put a lot of stock in the empty tomb accounts and the unexpected nature of the kind of Resurrection that was claimed in the Gospels, Acts and the Epistles. Some like Karl Rahner put more in the reports of those who encountered the Resurrected Jesus - including, by the way Paul though he doesn't claim to have seen Jesus from before his death and Resurrection. I think the reported extra-natural nature of the Resurrected Jesus in those descriptions is especially interesting. He is certainly described as being more than merely the resuscitated corpse atheist snark centers on. I can say I more believe in the Resurrection of Jesus than I do the Virgin Birth narratives and I think it's more essential to a belief in the ultimate significance of Jesus. I don't think it can be considered apart from his teachings if those teachings have the transcendent significance I believe in. I think it's continuous with those teachings. I mentioned I am reading Rahner again - and he is not easy to get - and some of his theories about Jesus in regard to his concept of the spiritual nature of material existence are very interesting to think about. Especially since I've railed against the vulgar, naive conception of materialism that is rampant among both non-believers and among believers (cargo-cult Christmas, is a definite "sign" of that). Though I don't suppose we're really going to know in this life, hoping to know more about that in the life to come.
In the coming days I intend to read Luke and maybe Matthew on the Birth of Jesus, I am listening to the O Antiphons with their use of Hebrew Prophesy, which may be spot on or may not but which are, in that case, not seriously dangerous. I will rejoice in the coming of Jesus, who I fully believe is a God sent Man at the very least. I don't believe anyone can really understand the final significance of the idea of God being incarnated. I will be listening to many different settings of the Magnificat, the Canticle of Mary, even with its mention of Abraham, knowing what a dodgy figure he and his wife are presented as being, his son (who also pimped his wife, if they were a back-woods family here, people would figure that would figure), his equally disreputable grand-kids who are credited as the foundations of the religious tradition I have chosen to believe in and follow. I don't think the origins of our shared Jewish monotheism in those flawed vessels is any less credible than the divine incarnation of Jesus through the consent of Mary.
I am more curious to know what it means that Moses prophesied the coming of Jesus as the Gospels say (Luke 24:27, for example) no doubt that includes the entire Torah, Deuteronomy, especially though I haven't gotten into that. I wish they'd expanded on some of those details in the texts but I'm guessing they were relying on people familiar with the Bible as it existed then, the Jewish Bible, would be able to figure some of that out in ways we, today, might need side column references for.
I will listen to O Magnum Mysterium that talks about the great Sacrament that the Birth of Jesus was witnessed by animals in a barn, having grown up on a farm knowing that would have meant God was born a human among manure, soaked bedding, stench, flies, filth, not the prettied-up pretty manger scenes as erected on public property so as to give the Roberts Court a chance to obliterate the work of earlier courts and keeping ACLU lawyers busy. If they put up something more like what is described in Luke, as probably most of those earliest readers and hearers of that account would have known it was, with manure and urine soaked bedding and flies and stench, the Bible thumpers would be the first ones to object. Too real for them and their devalued devotion.
I will not be giving presents, since giving that up I've come to enjoy Christmas so much more than I did when I did the present giving thing. I hate American cargo-cult Christmas, it turns what should be a sacrament into mammonist sacrilege. If I were close enough to a church, I'd go to midnight mass again. I haven't done that in too many decades. Preferably one with a Roman Catholic Woman Priest though a defrocked male one who is in a faithful, loving Gay marriage might do, too.
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