A couple of Decembers ago, in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof interviewed William Lane Craig about the Virgin Birth. Craig is a philosophy professor at Houston Baptist University. His entire response was to say that it really happened, and to point out the historical sources: Matthew and Luke.
I rolled my eyes in frustration. Claiming that the Virgin Birth “really happened” neutralizes it into the absolute irrelevance of a distant historical event which means nothing to us today. It is an artifact, and nothing more. It is merely asserted to have happened by some smug, self-righteous, credulous Christians. As if deciding that it happened is all that matters.
The “did it really happen” argument is pointless because there is no way to answer it. Even if proof could be available one way or the other, it misses the meaning of the stories. Indeed, I wonder if the real point of historical arguments isn’t to neutralize and deflate the truth.
For deeper and higher truths
may only be communicated by means of
myth, story, image, symbol, ritual, metaphor, and poetry;
we don't find them in history.
These are exactly the means of discourse that Modernity has ruled out of hand as lies, superstition, fiction, and fairy-tales. (Actually, even many fairy-tales communicate truth to us more effectively than a lot of historical analyses.)
To reduce a story to mere history is to kill it. It is to render it a dead past event, something dissectible and disposable. The demythologizing project of Modernity was always intended to undercut truth, so that self-serving propaganda may be inserted in its place. And the most effective way to do that is to evaluate a story based on its “historicity.” Thus the “did it really happen” question is taken for the only measure of truth… and it just so happens that it is unanswerable. In this way the Modern Age systematically replaced truth with fake news. That is, we devalued the myths and stories that convey truth to us, and replaced it with the glorified advertising copy which often passes for historical analysis. What we call history — and often science — is always filtered through the subjective, ego-centric, thoroughly biased consciousness of the observer. In the end it’s all entertainment.
Once we have hit the impasse of, “yes, it did happen,” vs. “no, it couldn’t have happened,” we have nowhere else to go. And we have failed to listen to the story itself.
In terms of the Virgin Birth, it is not about history or gynecology. One person who understood the story well was 19th century anti-slavery activist, Sojourner Truth. When challenged by male religious professionals who attempted to silence her, she pointed to the story of the Virgin Birth. Christ comes into the world by God and a woman, she said; a man had nothing to do with him. Therefore, one meaning of the story is that God’s entry into the world is an explicit contradiction of a world order that privileges maleness. It is an inherently anti-patriarchy narrative.
And that’s just one political meaning of the story. There are meanings that go even deeper into human consciousness and destiny. Meister Eckhart talked about how it shows God being born in each of us. Karl Barth noted that it tells us that humans do not have the power to bring God into the world. And then there is the whole question of the Incarnation, and its meaning in terms of the relation of Creator to creation. “God became human so that humans might become God,” is the way the early Christians talked about it.
And so on. All of which is lost if we focus exclusively on the tiny, pointless, and unanswerable question of whether it "actually happened" or not.
Caving in and allowing the Modern world to define truth for us is what is killing faith and the planet. I used to think that Christianity was courageous for applying historical analysis to its core documents and history. Maybe. Certainly we may have gained a lot of helpful knowledge about the context of the Scriptures. Certainly we have liberated the gospel from some forms of self-serving institutional oppression. But at the same time we have lost way too much in this exchange. And too often what we were left with was even worse, if more subtle, forms of institutional oppression.
Fortunately, we did not lose the stories themselves. In spite of attempts to extract and dissect, slice and resect pieces of the Scriptures, the texts remain. And the faith remains. Because in the end reality wins. Truth is. Propaganda, fake news, advertising, and “history” all collapse for lack of any purchase in reality. But the Word of the Lord endures forever. (It is not by accident that the attitude of some scholars to the text is identical to the way the petrochemical industry comes at the planet: Extract, waste, consume, and profit.)
The late Phyllis Tickle related how she once talked about the Virgin Birth story at a conference. One of the young servers at the hotel overheard her, and approached her later to observe that the Virgin Birth story is “too beautiful not to be true, whether it happened or not.”
Exactly.
+++++++
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