Fides Contra Ratio, or How or Why I Believe in the Virgin Birth
18 December 2006
As we begin the end-run of Advent, I’d like to talk about one of the more absurd Christian beliefs: the Virgin Birth. This belief is central to the upcoming season of Christmas, while also being one of the hardest creedal bits to swallow, especially to our modern minds. Whether or not a Christian believes in the perpetual virginity of Mary, that she was a virgin at the time of Christ’s birth is almost universally held.
I believe in the Virgin Birth. I do not know if the Virgin Mary had other children or ever had sex with Joseph. Maybe she did. Even if she did, I believe she is still a virgin. Does that make sense? Not really.
Early in college, when I wrestled with doubt and had my faith severely impaired for a bit by a philosophy professor, I embraced a statement attributed to Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.” I don’t know if I actually believed this statement at the time when I often thought about and repeated it. I don’t know if this sentence can actually be helpful when one is faced with the realization that one’s belief(s) is/are simultaneously deeply held and seated, but also absurd and irrational, but I thought it explained something to me about faith. What I thought it explained, I no longer remember.
That said, the Virgin Birth not only makes the Incarnation God’s entry-point into simultaneous full divinity and full humanity, but it demonstrates that through God all things are possible. The counterintuitive and the irrational can become true. Faith, in the face of all evidence and reason to the contrary, is not necessarily wrong. A virgin cannot conceive a child, by definition, and yet one Virgin did.
Ever Virgin? Why not? It’s no more absurd than the Virgin Birth.
Did she have other children with Joseph? Perhaps. I wasn’t there.
Can these two things be true? Perhaps, fides contra ratio.
18 December 2006 at 11:36 am
Jorge -
Thanks for this morning’s post. It is exactly what I needed to hear at this point in Advent. Your words bring me to a place of mystery and faith and grace.
Blessings,
Rich
19 December 2006 at 9:47 am
I agree with your main point (as you knew I would) and almost with your second but not your third.
That Mary never had sex with Joseph or anybody else is not doctrine (and may come from the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, a source of other small-t traditions about Our Lady) but universally understood and accepted in Catholicism (‘opinion’ as in ‘theologoumenon’, pious opinion, means something weightier anciently than its modern meaning), mentioned in passing I think in the decrees of Chalcedon (but not defined as a doctrine) as well as enshrined in liturgical prayers. (Scriptural allusion: the gate for ever shut once the Lord has passed through in Ezekiel 44.)
AFAIK classical Protestantism agreed with the church on all three. I think the idea that Jesus had literal half-brothers and sisters, let alone denial of the virgin birth, is very recent among Protestants.
20 December 2006 at 11:09 am
That a virgin could also be a mother is as humanly impossible as sinners becoming children of God.
However, that a virgin could also be a mother is much more “fitting” than sinners becoming children of God.
Some of us Christians– remaining sinners– have no qualms about calling ourselves the friends and children of God … but have qualms about the Virgin Birth.
That bass ackwards.