Simon Cox Blog: The Virgin Birth: What’s the Problem Exactly?

Wednesday, 20 December 2017

The Virgin Birth: What’s the Problem Exactly?

Why evangelicals don’t fuss over this doctrine.

I’m taking a break from a strict logical progression in this series because of the holy day we’re already thinking about this week. I thought it better to discuss the evangelical distinctive that has immediate relevance to Christmas.

Before we explore that topic, let me reiterate the purpose and scope of this series. We continue to receive feedback that this attempt to rehabilitate the term evangelical is foolish, as the term has been irretrievably damaged by our current political ecosystem. This is not, however, an attempt to recover the term as such. My aim is only to explain what we mean by it and the type of Christian and lived Christian faith it has represented and continues to represent in Christian history. And one thing it has certainly meant is a belief in the virginal conception of Jesus Christ in the womb of Mary—what is normally shorted to “the Virgin Birth.”

This was one of the most-discussed doctrines in 20th-century American evangelicalism, especially in its fundamentalist context. Fundamentalism itself was a response to the skepticism engendered by the rise of historical-critical scholarship coming out of Europe. Many leading Christian scholars were doubting not merely six-day creationism but also classic Christian doctrines like Jesus’ bodily resurrection and his virgin birth, that is, the miraculous in general. The response of conservative Christians in America coalesced in a book called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (today’s Biola University). It was eventually a 12-volume work that not only defended orthodox Protestant beliefs but also critiqued higher criticism, liberal theology, “Romanism,” ...