"The Virgin Birth proclaims the union of human flesh and the divine; God is breaking the barriers between the divine and the human."

Walter Russell Mead discusses the Virgin Birth of Jesus.

People have to make their own decisions about what to believe based on the evidence that already exists. I would only observe that if you believe (as I do) that God made the universe and everything in it, and if you believe that he upholds the universe and cares passionately about the well-being of each individual person on earth, then to reject the Virgin Birth as a physical impossibility seems a little forced. Swallowing camels and choking on gnats, as Jesus might put it. But that’s me: this is exactly the kind of question that everyone needs to face on his or her own.

...Mary wasn’t a single mother raising her child alone; her betrothed married her in the usual way and accepted the child as his. The early church wasn’t facing a sea of rumors about Mary’s prenuptial behavior, and if it had been there are more convincing ways of scotching rumors than proclaiming a miraculous virgin birth. Saying that she and Joseph had been secretly married a few months earlier than the official date of the wedding, accelerating the wedding, or claiming that the baby was premature would have been much easier approaches than claiming a unique divine miracle. If sweeping aside inconvenient facts about Jesus’ birth was the goal, the story about a virgin birth was the worst method ever. It’s like a student saying that her term paper is late is because she was swallowed by a whale for three days and couldn’t get wireless reception for her laptop from inside its belly.

...No, the story wasn’t concocted to squelch ugly rumors. The story caused the ugly rumors to circulate in the first place. The early church’s insistence on proclaiming the unique nature of Jesus’ birth more or less forced skeptics to suspect Mary’s virtue. The Church proclaimed a stark improbability as undeniable fact, and that naturally led people to ask the questions they still ask today and to develop alternative explanations for something that they well understood was, absent divine intervention, a biological impossibility.

Some see the idea of the Virgin Birth as part of a wider Christian discomfort with human sexuality. Believing that the baby Jesus didn’t get started in the usual way, in this view, is the result of wanting to keep the holy separated from the sexual. Self-consciously “enlightened” people who find it comforting to suppose that other people are much stupider than in fact they often find this view a comforting one. Those silly Christians and their absurd sexual hang-ups!
No doubt there are and always have been people whose attachment to the doctrine is rooted in feelings of anxiety or guilt about sexuality, but historically the idea of the Virgin Birth hasn’t been seen this way. In fact, the opposite is the case. The Virgin Birth doesn’t separate the holy realm of divine things from the “unworthy” world of flesh and blood human beings with their messy lives. The Virgin Birth proclaims the union of human flesh and the divine; God is breaking the barriers between the divine and the human.

So if the idea of the Virgin Birth isn’t a uniquely lame attempt to cover up Mary’s indiscretions or the manifestation of a sick Christian attitude about sex, what is it trying to tell us? The Virgin Birth has always been connected with two other ideas: one about Jesus as being both God and man, and one about Mary as an individual and more broadly about the place of women in the world.

In the first place, they were making a statement about Jesus. By making the outrageous and inherently doubtful claim that Jesus’ mother was a virgin, the gospels are stressing that this particular baby was unique. He wasn’t like all the other babies; he had a special relationship with God from the start.
At various points during his life, Jesus would talk about this unique relationship and later theologians would make it a centerpiece of their reflection on the meaning of Jesus’ life and career. But the gospels go out of their way from the beginning to make the assertion that Jesus was not just another baby in just another manger. Jesus isn’t important just because he had a special message, the gospels are telling us. He is important because he is a special person.

One of the most common mistakes people make about the role of Jesus in Christianity is to think that, for Christians, the most important thing about Jesus is his role as a teacher. Moses was the lawgiver of the ancient Hebrews; Confucius taught the ancient Chinese how to live; the Buddha taught his disciples how to walk a path toward enlightenment; Muhammad through revelation and example showed his followers how to submit to God’s will. Non-Christians often think that Christians think of Jesus along similar lines: as the Great Teacher who pointed out the True Way.
For Christians, Jesus’ role as a teacher — significant and inspiring as his teachings may be — is the least important thing about him. Not to denigrate an important vocation, but moral teachers are anything but rare. Humanity has many inspiring teachers and prophets. As a species, we have a talent for giving good advice and at our best, the advice that we give is very good indeed. Love your neighbor as yourself. Put God first. Duty before pleasure. Don’t use people as things. Judge by realities, not superficial appearances. Be generous and merciful to the weak and the poor. Act like a parent to orphans. Treat strangers well. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Honor your parents.

...The gospel writers believed that Jesus came here on another mission. He didn’t come here to be one more cosmic wise man telling us the right thing to do. He came here to do something about the real problem our species faces: our failure to take up the good advice we so readily dish out. He came to deal with the gap that opens up between a God who demands moral excellence and a human race that is simply incapable of living right.

...Christianity is much more than a group of people trying to fulfill the teaching of a revered founder; it is a community of people gathered around a world-changing hero. Jesus did not fulfill his mission by giving the Sermon on the Mount; he fulfilled it by dying on the cross and by rising from the dead.

...The figure of the Virgin Mary marks a turning point for humanity as a whole, but also for the role of women in the world. She is the Second Eve, the one who said “yes” to God when he asked her to be the mother of his son. When God really needed help, the Bible teaches, he went to a woman, not to a man. And the woman said “yes,” and out of her faith and obedience came the salvation of the world.

...it’s enough to understand that when Christians say that Jesus was born of a virgin, there are two main points they are making: that Jesus is the son of God, connected to the author of the universe in a unique and special way with a mission that is fundamentally different from that of all the prophets and teachers who came before, and that the free choice of a strong and faithful woman opened the door to salvation for the whole human race. Jesus is unique, and women are free and equal in God’s sight: that is what we should take away from this story.

...God didn’t send Jesus into the world because he was satisfied with the status quo. God sent him here because things needed to change — and right at the top of the list of the things God wanted to change was the position of women. The change didn’t happen overnight, and even today we haven’t seen the full consequences of giving half the world its rightful due, but from the day that Mary answered Gabriel a new force has been at work in the world, and what we see today is the blossoming of a tree that was planted a very long time ago.

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