Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Cosmos The In Lost

Home
Catholic
The Story of the Virgin Birth Runs with the Grain of Christianity

The Story of the Virgin Birth Runs with the Grain of Christianity

Last updated on: December 29, 2015 at 12:17 pm by Artur Rosman

The Story of the Virgin Birth Runs with the Grain of Christianity 2015-12-29T12:17:23-07:00 Artur Rosman

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Without the purity as a goal not only Mary Magdalene but the rest of the Gospel falls apart (Viktor Vasnetsov, Mary Magdalene, 19th c; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100).

Mary Magdalene would not be a saint if, as Giles Fraser would have it, striving towards purity through self-denial is unimportant to the Gospel. Progressing away from sin with the help of grace is essential to Christianity. The Virgin Mary’s immaculate example is fundamental to spiritual progress. Therefore it runs with the grain of Christianity. Christianity without the Madonna is fallow. I’m grateful to Fr. Fraser, because, just like most postconciliar Catholics, Christology tends to overshadow Mariology in my own spiritual formation. Fraser’s failed Guardian piece on the Virgin Mary is an opportunity to refocus.

Giles Fraser is successful in popularizing theology to a post-Christian audience. He makes theology sound like an adventure to both complacent believers and unbelievers who think being religion is a coping mechanism. This talent is especially on display when he argued the Crucifixion and Resurrection are such startling realities that they should scare his liberal Anglican co-religionists away from church. Such a Pauline ability to bring out the unusual and offensive side of Christianity is very special talent Fraser shares with Terry Eagleton. I sincerely appreciate the Anglican padre’s grating of his late-modern First World audience.

If you want a truly strange and innovative account of John’s Gospel then look at Barker instead.

However, his “The story of the virgin birth runs against the grain of Christianity” grated in the wrong way. It was almost cheesy:

The earliest polemic against Christianity focused on the circumstances of Jesus’s birth. “We have not been born of fornication,” says a hostile gathering to Jesus in John’s gospel [Ch. 8]. The implication being: we weren’t, but you were. In the second century, the Greek writer Celsus wrote the book On True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians about how Jesus was the illegitimate low-birth offspring of a spinner called Mary and a Roman soldier called Panthera. The implication may also have been that she was raped. Various later rabbinic texts refer to him as Jesus ben Pandera. All of which was intended as an insult: Jesus was a bastard. Obviously the son of God couldn’t be a bastard. So, the argument goes, Jesus was not the son of God.

What he did there is like someone expecting to get an accurate account of the Yankees by only consulting Red Sox fans. That’s only the baseline story, alas, the interpretation only gets worse:

The idea that Jesus was born of “pure virgin” could well have been a reaction to these insults. That Mary’s womb was “spotless” was perhaps a cover story designed by Jesus’s supporters to explain a more God-like nature for his arrival. But here’s the problem. For what separates Christianity from other religious traditions is that – the birth narratives aside – Christianity deliberately refuses the familiar distinction between the pure and the impure. Jesus was born in a cowshed; from lepers to prostitutes, he deliberately courted the ritually unclean; and he spent most of his ministry tearing down barriers between pure and impure – not least, those of the Temple – that separated the “ungodly” from God himself.

Where to start?

First of all, there is no infancy narrative in John’s Gospel, therefore such an interpolation is unlikely.

Second, the argument between Jesus and his Jewish co-religionists in John 8 revolves around spiritual birth, not physical birth.

Third, the Gospel of John begins with the highest Christology of all the Gospels. It retells the Creation story of Genesis by presenting Jesus as the Divine Logos through whom all things came into being.

Finally, in contrast to the sinfulness of humanity, Jesus is said by John to be a pure light shining in the darkness of sin.

All of this, not only the Virgin Birth, rightly sounds offensive to contemporary ears. It seems that such a God wouldn’t want to have anything to do with humanity. The apparent paradox of John is that such a God is heavily involved with humanity. This only sounds odd because we tend to think of sinfulness as inherently human. However, the Gospel writers, and most Christians until very recently, thought otherwise: Sinfulness destroys and divides humanity; we only become ourselves by the grace of becoming Other Christs.

The cover hides the gems inside.

Herbert McCabe ties all of these threads together in the Faith Within Reason essay on the Immaculate Conception. Our Lady’s virginal purity is a foretaste of our future incorporation into the Body of God:

Not that our past life could be cancelled or forgotten, but that our past sinful deeds will come to be seen as God always saw them, through their forgiveness, as felices culpae–happy faults, as we call the sin of Adam, at the Easter Vigil, as themselves part of the whole mysterious story of grace by which God has brought us forgiven sinners to himself in Christ. It is this future glory of the human race that we celebrate during the season of Advent, when we look to the future coming of the Kingdom of God, as we thank God, make eucharist to God, for the coming Immaculate Conception and Assumption of our Virgin Mother Church, prefigured and promised in the Virgin Mother Mary.

The story of you, me, and Mary Magdalene wouldn’t exist without the Virgin Mary and her Son. It is a story about a proleptically paradisaical purity. Or, at least, there would be no alternative story to the slaughter bench of human history, to the Massacre of the Innocents. The story of the Holy Family is subversive and more worthy of Giles Fraser than the one he told.

The most popular Beatles song to date after the release of their entire catalog onto Spotify is the deeply Marian “Let It Be.”

I like to think this means that the seeds of Marian piety are deeply implanted even in our Post-Christian culture.

Previous Post

December 27, 2015

How Is Sarah Silverman Right About Jesus Being Gender Fluid?

Next Post

December 29, 2015 Priest from Philippines Should've Been Suspended for Singing not Hoverboard

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category #WhyRemainCatholic Abortion Advent Anti-Catholicism Arts Atheism Beauty Benedict XVI Bible Book Review Catholic Cinema Comedy Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey Czesław Miłosz Dariusz Karłowicz Devil Easter Eastern Orthodoxy Economics Environment Family Famous Atheists Who Weren't Atheists Guest Post Hans Urs von Balthasar HHS Mandate History Imagination Interview Islam Jean-Luc Marion John Paul II Judaism Just War Lent Literature Little Sisters of the Poor Liturgy Martyrdom Music News Paganism Patristics Phenomenology Philosophy Pierre Hadot Poetry Poland Pop Culture Pope Francis Poverty Prayer Protestantism Rabelais Race Remi Brague Rene Girard Russia Sam Rocha Science & Religion SCOTUS Secularization Sexual Abuse Sexuality Silence Solidarity Stratford Caldecott Synod14 Terrorism Top 10 Uncategorized Walker Percy War Weakened Edition World War II World Youth Day WYD Krakow

Select a Month July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What does the Hebrew word 'Shema' mean?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Rejoice Obey Bless Hear