Revisiting Tradition- Test Case: the Virgin Birth

A while ago I had a go at folk who don’t know their church history and Christian tradition. I specifically took aim at the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and the idea that Christians and Jews worship different Gods, arguing that the latter is an ancient (Marcionite) idea immediately recognised by the church to be false, and that the former is a Johnny-come-lately doctrine unknown before the post-enlightenment reaction to theological liberalsim. I ended by applauding Chesterton’s bon môt that tradition is “the democracy of the dead”, refusing “to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

Although the argument then raged, everyone seemed to miss the most obvious point to be made against me: So antiquity guarantees truth? So the dead are always right and have a veto on the living? Is this not just the reverse of what C. S. Lewis called modernist “chronological snobbery”? What about doctrinal development? More specifically, as a test case (alluding to a remark I made at the time in another post), wouldn’t that make suggesting that we may have a legitimate debate on the doctrine of the virgin birth an assertion of gross inconsistency, not to say hypocrisy? It would indeed. So let me acknowledge that there is more to be said than “Tradition, tradition, tradition!” - and begin to try to say it.

I start by quoting Chesterton again, who also said that “all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.” Indeed to insist on an unchanging and authoritarian tradition is to commit ecclesiastical suicide, it is to lock the church in a time warp rather than to launch it into the future. If tradition is the democracy of the dead, it is also the living faith of dead and not, as it sometimes seems, the dead faith of the living. If we cannot accept biblical fundamentalism, a fortiori we cannot accept tradition fundamentalism. Therefore we must speak not only of continuity but of instability. It has been well put that if the church is built on a rock, it is not set in concrete.

Next, let me run through several insights of serious (not just playful or nihilistic) postmodernist thinkers that problematise tradition: its inevitable cultural contextuality and the social location of its ideas and practices; the impossibility of ideological innocence; the volatile relationship between knowledge and power; the church’s bad record of marginalising dissenting voices; the fact that heresy is defined by the winners of the argument, and that - for example in the early church councils - their victories were due as much to imperial and ecclesiastical politics as to the disinterested triumph of truth: thus the need for suspicion as well as respect when engaging with traditon. None of this is to absolutise relativism, but it is to relativise absolutism - which is simply to resist idolatry. For what it’s worth, I myself am a Nicene and Chalcedonian Christian - but with an uneasy conscience, and believing that it was by grace that the muddle of men just happened to be trumped by the providence of God.

Then I want to stress the importance of human experience, including the evidence of the experimental sciences, as a factor - not the only factor, but a crucial factor - in engaging with tradition. I know there is a risk here of the tail wagging the dog, but it is a risk that has to be taken. For example, geologists tell us that the evidence demonstrates that the earth is rather more than six thousand years old, so we just can’t go on insisting in the face of the facts that it isn’t, and insofar as a multi-million year-old earth may affect our understanding of creation, well, we’ve just got to factor it into the equation and get on with it. The same goes for the theory of evolution by natural selection, the broad outlines of which are not in scientific doubt. If we repress what scientists tell us to be the case, we inevitably live intellectually schizophrenic lives - and besides, the repressed always returns, usually with a vengeance.

Finally, a point about “reading”: the impossibility, post-enlightenment, of textual naivete. If, with me, you want to contest the intellectual hegemony of modernism, you must do so in non-reactionary ways. And that goes not only for accepting the implications of scientific discoveries but also for deploying the insights of historical, cultural, literary, source, form, redaction criticism, etc. when it comes to reading the Bible. Again, the church has no monopoly on the truth, and it does itself no credit when it rejects the truth, even when it comes from non-Christian sources - and this isn’t liberalism, it’s Calvin!

So to my test case. Let us grant that, until the enlightenment, the church took the virgin birth quite literally. I know some scholars suggest that Matthew and Luke themselves knew that their stories were metaphors, but let’s assume they are wrong (I want this to be a strong test case). Nevertheless - and here I am following Hans Frei - though pre-enlightenment Christians made no distinction between the narrative meaning and the historical reference of the text, supposing that the conception and birth of Jesus took place just as described, post-enlightenment Christians now know that the matter is not so straightforward. Intellectual honesty has forced us to question such a precritical approach to the text. We have learned not to elide the question “Did it happen?” with “Is it true?”, not to confound reading a text realistically with affirming its empirical accuracy. Frei’s most interesting insight is that neither conservatives nor liberals get the point: it’s just that while conservatives proceed in denial of scholarly insights, liberals proceed by throwing out the baby of literary realism with the bathwater of historical positivism, now looking to the text for a symbolic meaning totally detachable from the story in which it’s embedded, as if the story were just the vehicle of an idea rather than the irreducible thing itself. No, Frei says, let the story work on us, draw us into its world, redefine what is real, reshape our own reality, but through what Ricoeur refers to as a “second [i.e. post-critical] naivete”.

I myself do not dismiss a literal interpretation of the virgin birth - and certainly not, as most liberals do - along with all miracles - on allegedly scientific grounds (though I must admit to having a difficulty over what the genome of Jesus might look like were Joseph not to be his biological father). I am troubled by certain biblical problems - e.g. the otherwise deafening silence about the virgin birth outside Matthew and Luke, or difficulties relating to Jesus’ Davidic descent. I also find certain theological problems bothersome - e.g. the uneasy juxtaposition of the virgin birth of Christ with his pre-existence (Paul, John and Hebrews, who speak most about the latter, say nothing about the former), and what many otherwise quite orthodox theologians (like Brunner and Bonhoeffer) have identified as the implied docetism of the doctrine (my genome query might be relevant here). And there is also, historically, the ethical scandal of the way that the church has used the virgin birth to denigrate healthy female sexuality.

But for me, the main point is made by Rowan Williams. He writes: “Luke and Matthew obviously believed they were recording real events, yet that is not how they would have seen their main job. Now that we can see how useful the story of the virginal conception was to them doesn’t mean that it can’t be true. But the more we become aware of the storytelling conventions by which such narratives grew in the first century [e.g. midrashic techniques], the harder it becomes to reach a firm judgement on the historical ground of all this.” Against those who hold that the divinity of Christ hangs on a literal interpretation of the virgin birth, Rowan adds: “We should be cautious about making this story . . . a necessary condition for believing in or speaking of God in our midst in Jesus.” And, of course, the Archbishop would find it unseemly for one Christian to unchurch another Christian over the issue. So to really put the cat among the pigeons, I would go so far as to say that if it were true (as the early Jewish calumny had it) that Jesus was born a a bastard, while it would obviously demolish my belief in a literal virgin birth, it would in no way affect my faith in Jesus as Immanuel, true God and very God among us. Indeed might it not add a kind of symmetry to the life of our Lord: as he went out of this world by a scandalous and shameful death, so he came into this world by a scandalous and shameful birth? Not a parthenogenetic conception but the unique origin of the human Jesus in God - that, for me, is the essential thing about the narratives of the virgin birth.

And there I’ll stop. My main point has been that it is perfectly possible to affirm the catholic tradition while at the same time critically testing it, reappropriating it, readjusting it, not on the basis that we now know better but that we may now know more, and that whatever we do know must not be excluded from the discussion, otherwise we threaten the very catholicity we claim to affirm. For tradition is a discussion-starter, maybe even a discussion-controller, but it is not a discussion-ender. Simply as a matter of fact, the church has had different views - and indeed changed its mind - about many things - doctrinally about hell and the second coming, ethically about usury and slavery. The church is a conversation rather than a conclusion. Its boundaries should be negotiable and permeable, and its vocation to keep faith with the past through change rather than immobility. How can it be otherwise when the God of Advent comes to us from the future as well as the past - a God who is vulnerable, open, and full of surprises?