The familiar Christmas story tells us that Jesus was conceived in a human mother without any human father—that He was conceived by “the power of the Most High” (Luke 1:35). Many modern people object that such an event is an impossibility. Even some Christians attempt to downplay the importance of Mary’s virginity in the Gospel accounts.
But the Bible also makes clear that the manner of Christ’s conception is no mere story. Luke, for instance, wrote his Gospel after a process of careful investigation of eyewitness accounts (Luke 1:1–3). As a physician, he understood the birds and the bees. Nevertheless, he reports the virgin conception as a fact confirmed by those who experienced it. In fact, it is a touchstone that reveals our thinking about the whole story of the Gospel and how the power of God works in the world.
A Marginal Doctrine?
Many purportedly Christian thinkers pronounce the doctrine of the virgin conception both untrue and unnecessary. They argue that if we’re to bring the Gospel to an unbelieving world, we ought to abandon it as a needless stumbling block. The essential thing, they say, is the Bible’s message of love and the ethical mandates of passages like the Sermon on the Mount.
This is the theological equivalent of keyhole surgery, as if we could make a small incision, remove this gallbladder of a doctrine, and be on our feet again in a day or two. The end result will supposedly be a more palatable version of Christianity. But both of those presuppositions—that the doctrine is easily removed and that it will make Christianity easier to swallow—are questionable.
How far, after all, does the logic extend? The virgin conception may seem marginal—but the same reasoning for dismissing it applies to the clearly central claims as well: “Babies are not born of virgins—and actually, dead men don’t come back to life. Why make people stumble over the issue of the resurrection?” Now our surgery is removing the heart, propping up a corpse, and calling it a living faith.
That’s not to mention the folly of coming to the plain teachings of Scripture and attempting to judge them marginal, therefore unimportant, therefore dispensable. The fact of Mary’s virginity was important enough for God to tell us about it—actually, for more than one Gospel writer to put it down! (In addition to Luke 1:35, see Matt. 1:18). At the very least, the virgin conception demonstrates that the child in Mary’s womb was to be unique, signals that He would be the fulfillment of prophecy (Matt. 1:22–23), and explains how He can be like us and yet “without sin” (Heb. 4:15).
If we keep fashionably silent about the virgin conception, about the incarnation, about the atonement, about the resurrection, we will end up peeling the onion of Christian doctrine down to nonexistence, reducing our faith to an easy-to-swallow, bland, inoffensive, but ultimately unsatisfying mess of pottage. Go to the churches that have attempted to proclaim such a message, and you will find them largely emptying or already empty. There’s little surprise that a gospel that confesses no miraculous power in the world would demonstrate no miraculous power to bring men and women into fellowship with God and with each other—especially across the lines that increasingly divide our fractured world.
No Tepid Defense
If some deserve blame for trying to rid Christianity of the virgin conception, others should take responsibility for the limp defense they have offered for it. Evangelical Christianity is often especially guilty of answering the Bible’s critics with clichés or affirmations rather than well-reasoned arguments.
We will not win people over to saving faith in Christ Jesus by dismissing their concerns fatuously or by ignoring their problems easily. Our friends and neighbors have serious questions about the nature of Christianity, and understandably so. It may be foolish for us to throw a doctrine like the virgin conception away—but it would also be foolish for us to pretend there’s nothing surprising about finding it hard to believe! We need to address our friends’ and neighbors’ doubts.
Many of the modern arguments against the virgin conception have their roots in the philosophy of David Hume, who posited that before accepting that an event took place in the past, we need to be persuaded that it still takes place in the present. This is the philosophy of empiricism, which tells us to believe only what is demonstrable through experimentation. If an event is repeatable, it is verifiable. The virgin conception (not to mention the resurrection and every other miracle in the Bible) cannot be repeated under scientific observation—and so, in this view, it must be doubted.
We will not win people over to saving faith in Christ Jesus by dismissing their concerns fatuously or by ignoring their problems easily.
Luke the physician knew very well that he couldn’t repeat the virgin conception, nor the resurrection, nor any of the other miracles. They were unique historical events, intrusions into the normal order of things. If they were not, there would be little point in recording them. If Jesus were just another man born to a Galilean couple who one day died and stayed dead, what kind of good news would that have been?
The empiricist doubts miracles because they are unrepeatable, but the argument is ultimately circular. It draws the premise from the conclusion: “Virgin conceptions do not happen; therefore, Jesus was not conceived of a virgin.” But you cannot say they never happen unless you have already decided that, for Jesus, it didn’t happen. If you only wish to say that they do not normally happen—wonderful! On that we can all agree.
For our own part, we cannot begin with the conclusion. Instead, we go to our source of truth, God’s Word, which makes these claims about Jesus, and we subject it to the kind of testing that such unique claims deserve. We consider the well-documented textual reliability and historical veracity of the New Testament. We consider the credibility of the apostolic claims, often made against the reputational interests of those making them. We consider the personal and social transformation that drove the growth of the church in its early days. We consider, too, the power of the message in our own lives—in the cleansing of our consciences and the renewing of our minds. How are we to account for these things if not for the God-Man entering our world to something unique in all of history?
And then, when we come to the virgin conception, we ought to say, “Such things do not normally happen—but it is the same with everything in the story of Christ! ‘If Jesus Christ be God and died for me,’1 no claim the Bible makes to me can ever be too incredible.”
Childlike Trust
The essential condition of coming to understand challenging doctrines like the virgin conception is not our sophistication but our simplicity. The reason that many remain in unbelief is that they are waiting for every doctrine to fall into line in such a way that there is no embarrassment for believing each one.
But this is not, we must admit, the way of Jesus. He said that God has “hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children” (Matt. 11:25; Luke 10:21). The person who says, “I’m far too smart to accept that,” is actually, in a way, right: No man or woman will ever come to faith until they have come like a child (Matt. 18:3)—not in childish ignorance but in childlike trust—and cried with the man in Mark 9, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (v. 24).
The essential condition of coming to understand challenging doctrines like the virgin conception is not our sophistication but our simplicity.
In our sophistication, let us not abandon what the Word of God has put to us plainly—whether the virgin conception or any other doctrine. If we have come to trust God with our very salvation, our eternal souls, surely we can trust Him on wonders such as this.
This article was adapted from the sermon “The Angel and the Virgin — Part One” by Alistair Begg.
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C. T. Studd, quoted in Norman P. Grubb, C. T. Studd: Athlete and Pioneer (1933; repr., Harrisburg, PA: Evangelical Press, 1943), 145. ↩︎
