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 Charles Augi^stus Briggs 
 
 The Virgin Birth of 
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 CHARLES AUGUSTUS BRIGGS, D.D., D.Litt. 
 
 Graduate Professor of Theological Encyclopaedia 
 
 and Symbolics, Union Theological 
 
 Seminary, New York 
 
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 Wii/i Introductio7i by 
 
 WILFORD L. ROBBINS, D.D., LL.D. 
 Dean, General Theological Seminary, New York 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER, Inc 
 Bible House, New York 
 
^ MAY ^-^ 1968 
 
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 CHARLES AUGUSTUS BRIGGS, D.D,, D.Litt, 
 
 Graduate Professor of Theological 
 
 Encyclopaedia and Symbolics, 
 
 Union Theological Seminary, 
 
 New York 
 
 IVith Introduction by 
 
 WILFORD L. ROBBINS, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 Dean, General Theological Seminary, New York 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER, Inc., 
 Bible House, New York 
 
(/ 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 I ESTEEM the honor of being asked to write 
 a word of preface to Dr. Briggs's paper on 
 the Virgin Birth. I owe this privilege sim- 
 ply to the fact that I begged earnestly for its re- 
 publication in order that a copy might be given 
 to every student in the General Seminary. 
 Amidst all the writing on this topic which has 
 appeared of late no presentation seems to me 
 clearer, saner or more cogent than the argument 
 here put forth. The fame of Dr. Briggs as a 
 fearless and open-minded scholar assures us that 
 no objection on the score of Biblical Criticism has 
 been overlooked. Meanwhile, there is a rever- 
 ence in his whole treatment of the subject, a rea- 
 sonable deference toward the consensus of the 
 Christian consciousness, a sympathetic apprecia- 
 tion of time-honored theological definition, which 
 give a grateful sense of fairness and spiritual in- 
 tegrity. I am sure that my own feeling of obli- 
 gation to the writer will be widely shared 
 throughout the Church at large. 
 
 WiLFORD L. ROBBINS, 
 Dean, General Theological Seminary, New York. 
 
 Feast of the Purification B. V. M., 1909. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THIS discussion of the Virgin Birth was 
 first prepared for the Presbyterian Min- 
 isters' Association of New York in April, 
 1907. It was then carefully revised during a 
 winter of lectures on the Apostles' Creed, and 
 published in the American Journal of Theology, 
 April, 1908. I have been urged by many to re- 
 publish it in a more convenient form and have at 
 last decided to do so. I have made another re- 
 vision, but few changes, except to make my posi- 
 tion clearer here and there and to remove some 
 friendly objections. It would have cost little 
 more labour to have used all my material and 
 written a large volume. Nothing of importance 
 has been unconsidered, so far as I know. This 
 study is once more given to the public in the hope 
 that it may remove difficulties from the minds of 
 serious students and establish them in the Faith 
 of the Bible and the Church, of which I am con- 
 vinced the Virgin Birth constitutes an essential 
 part. 
 
 C. A. Briggs. 
 February 3, 1909. 
 
iH}t Itrgtn Itrttj of (iur Snri 
 
 THERE can be no doubt that there are 
 grave difficulties in the minds of many 
 educated men and women of this genera- 
 tion in the way of their acceptance of the doc- 
 trine of the Virgin Birth. However much older 
 men, trained in a different theological at- 
 mosphere, may regret it, and be unable to under- 
 stand it, we should not hesitate to recognize that 
 the situation exists. Therefore we cannot over- 
 come these difficulties by a mere appeal to the 
 authority of the Church, or in any dogmatic way. 
 We must squarely meet them by removing mis- 
 conceptions and so restating the doctrine that it 
 will no longer be open to reasonable objection. 
 
 /. The Fact of the Virgin Birth. 
 
 The doctrine of the Virgin Birth is historically 
 and dogmatically involved with the doctrines of 
 the incarnation and the divinity of Jesus 
 Christ; but that by no means implies that 
 
8 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 men may not hold to the divinity and incar- 
 nation of our Lord without the definite accept- 
 ance of the Virgin Birth. The apostle Paul is 
 firm in his statement of the divinity of Jesus 
 Christ, and in many passages he discusses the in- 
 carnation of the pre-existing Son of God from 
 several different points of view; but nowhere 
 does he directly or indirectly give us the least 
 hint that he thought of a Virgin Birth. The 
 author of the prologue of the Gospel of John is 
 still more emphatic in his doctrine of the divinity 
 of Christ and of the incarnation, and he seems to 
 approach very closely to the doctrine of the Vir- 
 gin Birth..-" If we follow the ancient reading of 
 vs. 13 in Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Justin Martyr: 
 "He who was born, not of blood, nor of the will 
 of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God," 
 we get something very near the Virgin Birth. 
 This reading from Latin texts of the third cen- 
 tury cited by TertulHan, one hundred years ear- 
 lier than the earliest extant Greek codices, and 
 from Greek texts, nearly two hundred years ear- 
 lier cited by Irenaeus and Justin Martyr, is fa- 
 vored for rhetorical reasons and by the fact that 
 it is the most difficult reading. But, on the other 
 hand, the external evidences of Greek codices and 
 Versions are overwhelmingly against it, and we 
 cannot reasonably build our faith upon it. So 
 that in fact while this gospel may possibly have 
 implied the Virgin Birth, this is at most a prob- 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 9 
 
 ability, and there certainly is no explicit statement 
 of it. 
 
 The authors of the Epistle to the Hebrews and 
 of the Book of Revelation teach plainly enough 
 the divinity of Christ, but there is not the slight- 
 est trace of a Virgin Birth in their writings. 
 There is no more reasonable connection between 
 the woman in childbirth of Rev. 12, and 
 the virgin Mary than the fancies of allegorists, 
 revived in recent times by mythologistic inter- 
 preters. 
 
 The Virgin Birth is known only to the Gospel 
 of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. What then 
 does this situation teach us as to the doctrine? 
 What else can we say than that the Virgin Birth 
 rests upon the authority of these gospels alone? 
 The other New Testament writings that set forth 
 the divinity of Christ and His incarnation, so far 
 as we know, did not connect these doctrines with 
 the Virgin Birth. 
 
 And yet, on the other hand, we cannot permit 
 the opponents of the Virgin Birth to pervert this 
 silence into authority against the doctrine. The 
 argument from silence cannot be used as a nose 
 of wax to prove anything you please. It has its 
 laws and its limitations like any other argument.* 
 If the other writers of the New Testament do not 
 indorse the doctrine there is nothing whatever in 
 their language that can be cited against it. In- 
 
 1 See my Study of Holy Scripture, pp. 101 ff. 
 
lO THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 deed sufficient reasons may be given for this si- 
 lence in the earUer writings of the New Testa- 
 ment. If the authors knew of this doctrinal fact, 
 they would have abstained from mentioning it 
 for prudential reasons, lest they should expose the 
 mother of our Lord to scandal during her life- 
 time — such scandals as did in fact arise so soon as 
 the Virgin Birth was declared, and which were 
 certain to arise, as any sensible person could fore- 
 see. The Jews did not assert that Joseph was the 
 father of Jesus, but that his father was a soldier 
 named Ben Pandera. This is evidently a fiction 
 based on Ben Parthena, son of the virgin, and 
 this implies the Giristian doctrine which it an- 
 tagonizes. Jesus Himself set the example of such 
 prudence when He refrained from declaring or 
 acknowledging His Messiahship until near the 
 close of His life, and even then forbade His dis- 
 ciples to make Him known.^ St. Peter, St. Paul, 
 and the early Christian preachers followed their 
 master in the same Christian prudence and reti- 
 cence in their early teaching and preaching. 
 
 Much is made by modern opponents of the Vir- 
 gin Birth, of the representation that Jesus was 
 the son of Joseph, and that the Son of God was 
 born of the seed of David, according to the flesh 
 (Rom. 1:3). But how else could the New Testa- 
 ment writers speak, if Jesus were indeed the son 
 of Joseph by public and private recognition, and 
 
 »See my New Light on the Life of Jesus, pp. 91 ff. 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 1 1 
 
 SO the son of David and heir of the messianic 
 promises? He was the legal and acknowledged 
 son of Joseph, and that accounts fully for all such 
 statements. They do not imply that Jesus was 
 begotten by Joseph any more than the term "born 
 of a woman" (Gal. 4: 4) implies that Jesus was 
 born of a woman in the ordinary way. 
 
 It is indeed astonishing that reasonable men 
 should make so much of the four instances in the 
 gospels in which Jesus is said, not by the evangel- 
 ists, but by the people, to be the son of Joseph 
 the carpenter. Two of them are in Luke 4: 22 
 and Matthew 13: 55, gospels which definitely tell 
 us of the Virgin Birth previously, and therefore 
 they could not have been so inconsistent with 
 themselves as to assert and deny the Virgin Birth 
 within the limits of a few pages. Two of them 
 are in John i : 45, 6 : 42, the gospel which gives 
 us throughout the highest conception of Jesus as 
 the Son of the Father, the pre-existent divine 
 being. Mark, singularly enough, does not in the 
 parallels to Matthew and Luke give us "son of 
 Joseph," but simply "son of Mary" (6: 3). We 
 have in this situation a much better reason to 
 claim that "son of Mary" in Mark implies Virgin 
 Birth than to say "son of Joseph" in Matthew 
 and Luke implies that Joseph was his natural 
 father. 
 
 Much is made by some recent writers of the re- 
 cently discovered old Syriac text which in Matt. 
 
12 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 1 : 1 6 reads "Joseph, to whom was betrothed 
 Mary the virgin, begat Jesus called the Messiah." 
 It is quite possible that this may have been in the 
 original text, as Allen thinks,^ but even then, as 
 he shows, "beget" is used, not in the sense of nat- 
 ural, but of legal, sonship, for the reasons: (a) 
 that the genealogy of Matthew was composed by 
 the author on the basis of the genealogy of 
 Chronicles, and gives the official line as distin- 
 guished from Luke's genealogy, which was based 
 on private documents of the family of Jesus and 
 gives the natural line, (b) In several instances 
 the term "beget" is used when the natural mean- 
 ing is impossible for two reasons, one that there 
 is an occasional leaping over one or more names, 
 and the other that the one begotten is sometimes 
 not the real son, but the son of another Hne and 
 only the son by inheritance. Therefore "beget" 
 is at times nothing more than legal descent and 
 does not imply any more than that Joseph was the 
 legal father of Jesus. Furthermore, it can hardly 
 be doubted that the author of the gospel was the 
 author of the genealogy, and he could not be so 
 inconsistent as to say in vs. i6 that Joseph was 
 the natural father of Jesus and then in vss. 18-25 
 that Jesus was virgin-born and that Joseph was 
 only His legal father. 
 
 It did not come within the plan of St. Mark 
 and St. Paul and other writers of the New Testa- 
 
 3 Comment<M-y on 8t. Matthew, p. 6. 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 1 3 
 
 ment to state the mode of the incarnation but 
 only the fact. Indeed Mark carefully abstains 
 from any statement whatever as to the life of 
 Jesus before His baptism. Mark represents Jesus 
 as the Son of God, fulfilling- the predictions of 
 Isaiah and Malachi as to the advent of Yahweh, 
 and therefore implicitly as the Yahweh of the Old 
 Testament, the God of the Jews. He certainly 
 could not have thought of His entrance into the 
 world in the ordinary way of human birth. His 
 silence may most reasonably be accounted for 
 under the circumstances as an intentional silence 
 as to the birth and early life of our Lord, in order 
 to avoid an awkward controversy in the early 
 days of Christianity. 
 
 The same might be said of St. Paul. It is evi- 
 dent that he represents Jesus as pre-existing as 
 the theophanic angel of God of the Pentateuchal 
 history (I Cor. 10: 1-4), and in Godlike majesty 
 and glory before He entered the world by incarna- 
 tion (Phil. 2: 5-11), which he magnifies in sev- 
 eral passages without mentioning human father 
 or mother.*. This careful avoidance of the birth 
 of Jesus, except in the general phrase, "born of a 
 woman" (Gal. 4: 4) and "of the seed of David 
 according to the flesh" (Rom. 1:3) may have 
 been for prudential reasons ; for St. Paul clearly 
 teaches that Jesus Christ was the second Adam, 
 
 4 See my Messiah of the Apostles, pp. 520 fE. 
 
14 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 the man from heaven with a life-giving spirit 
 (I Cor. 15: 45-49), a spirit of holiness (Rom. 
 1:4), and that while Himself of the race of 
 Adam, He was apart from the race in that He 
 alone was possessed of sinless and incorruptible 
 flesh (Rom. 5: 12 if.; 8: 1-4; H Tim. i: 10). 
 St. Paul avoids telling us how Jesus Christ was 
 born son of Adam, and at the same time different 
 from every other son of Adam as Son of God. 
 But the Christian Church saw very clearly that 
 the necessary and inevitable consequences of his 
 teaching were, that such sinless, incorruptible 
 flesh could not be born of a human father by or- 
 dinary generation, but only of a pure virgin ; and 
 that such a holy and life-giving spirit could only 
 originate by the power of the Holy Ghost, as the 
 Gospels of Luke and Matthew tell us. 
 
 This avoidance of the doctrine of the mode of 
 the incarnation by most of the writers of the New 
 Testament, while emphasizing its reality, is an in- 
 teresting and significant fact. This situation, 
 which is so clear in the New Testament, ought to 
 teach us that it is quite possible that many men to- 
 day may be convinced of the divinity of our Lord, 
 and of the reality of His incarnation, but who for 
 various reasons are reticent as to the Virgin 
 Birth, and are not able to see its necessity to con- 
 firm these other doctrines. 
 
 The Virgin Birth does, however, rest upon the 
 authority of two of the holy gospels, and that 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 1 5 
 
 authority must be regarded as sufficient for those 
 who recognize their divine inspiration. It has 
 never been regarded by the Christian Church as 
 necessary that a doctrine should be sustained by 
 a large number of passages. It is sufficient that 
 the doctrine be clearly and unmistakably stated. 
 That is undoubtedly true of the Virgin Birth. It 
 is impossible by any mode of explanation to re- 
 move that doctrine from these two passages of 
 Holy Scripture. 
 
 It used to be urged by the opponents of the 
 Virgin Birth that it was a myth or a legend that 
 grew up gradually in the apostolic community 
 and was eventually tacked on to the gospels of 
 Matthew and Luke. Biblical Criticism has made 
 it evident that no such opinion is tenable. This 
 is only one of many instances in which Biblical 
 Criticism verifies and confirms Christian doctrine. 
 It is certain that these passages in Matthew and 
 Luke were in those gospels when they first came 
 from their authors' hands. It is also certain that 
 they were not altogether composed by these 
 authors, but were based on older sources, which 
 they edited, adapted, and explained. These 
 sources belong to the earliest layer of Christian 
 documents, such as the original Mark, the Logia 
 of Matthew, and the epistles to the Galatians and 
 Corinthians. They were among those sources 
 which, St. Luke tells us, he made use of in com- 
 posing his gospel. 
 
l6 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 Furthermore, these were poetic sources, in the 
 measures and strophical organization of Hebrew 
 poetry. They undoubtedly were composed in 
 Semitic originals, and were translated by the 
 authors of our gospels into Greek.^ This takes 
 them back to the Palestinian community before 
 the destruction of Jerusalem, when it was under 
 the superintendence of St. James, St. Jude, and 
 St. Simon, the half-brothers, or cousins of our 
 Lord. It may be shown by the most probable lit- 
 erary and historical evidence that these poems 
 were composed subsequent to the death of Mary, 
 between the years 55 and 64 a.d. They were used 
 independently by the authors of Matthew and 
 Luke, who both depend upon the same poetic 
 sources, but use them in a different way without 
 any relation to one another. 
 
 It is incredible that St. Luke, who tells us in his 
 preface that he "traced the course of all things 
 accurately from the first," and that he wrote to 
 Theophilus that he might "know the certainty 
 concerning the things wherein thou wast in- 
 structed" (i: 3, 4), could have used these poems 
 setting forth a doctrinal fact of such uniqueness 
 and importance without consulting with the im- 
 mediate family of Jesus, represented as it was by 
 the chiefs of the Palestinian community. How 
 can anyone think that Christian poems stating so 
 clearly the Virgin Birth of our Lord could have 
 
 5 See my Messiah of the Gospels, pp. 45 ff. 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 1/ 
 
 been written and circulated in the Palestinian 
 community during their presidency without their 
 sanction, and have attained such an authority as 
 to be recognized by St. Luke, after the most care- 
 ful and accurate inquiry, as valid sources along- 
 side of the Gospel of Mark and the Logia of 
 Matthew for the life of our Lord? Under these 
 circumstances we should recognize that the Vir- 
 gin Birth has the authority of the immediate 
 relatives of our Lord, who alone could by any 
 possibility know anything about it. It is there- 
 fore vain to appeal to the Gospel of Mark as giv- 
 ing the original teaching of the apostles with 
 reference to Jesus over against Matthew and 
 Luke who give a later tradition; for these gos- 
 pels get the story of the Virgin Birth from poetic 
 Palestinian sources just as truly as they get the 
 greater part of their narrative from Mark and 
 the greater part of the teaching of Jesus from the 
 Logia of Matthew. Mark does not speak of the 
 Virgin Birth because he says nothing about the 
 Hfe of Jesus prior to His baptism by John, as we 
 have seen. 
 
 Much is made by some critics of the repre- 
 sentation of Matthew that the Virgin Birth of 
 Jesus is in fulfilment of the prophecy of Im- 
 manuel in the earlier Isaiah. But this use of Old 
 Testament prophecies is a characteristic feature 
 of the Gospel of Matthew alone,^ which is not 
 
 6 See Messiah of the Gospels^ p, 319. 
 
l8 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 found in Luke, and which was not in the poetic 
 sources used by both evangelists. Therefore it is 
 absurd to make the prophecy of Immanuel the 
 source of the supposed myth or legend. 
 
 It is impossible on the principles of historic 
 criticism to explain the Virgin Birth as a myth 
 or a legend. It has not their characteristic feat- 
 ures.'^ The statement of this dogmatic fact is too 
 near the event, too close to the family of Jesus 
 for this to have been possible. Besides, the Vir- 
 gin Birth of our Lord, though it has analogies in 
 the mythologies of other nations, as the early 
 Christian writers recognize, yet differs from all 
 these in an unparalleled uniqueness in that all 
 these mythological births are by natural genera- 
 tion by God, who assumes the forms of man or 
 animals for the purpose, and therefore these are 
 not virgin births ; whereas the birth of our Lord 
 was by the power of the Holy Spirit without any 
 generation whatever, whether of man or God. 
 The efforts of some scholars to find a basis in 
 oriental myths are still greater failures, for the 
 reason that it is impossible to show in these early 
 Christian poems any trace whatever of such 
 myths, and because the early Qiristian poems tell 
 of the Virgin Birth in such a simple, artless way 
 that it is altogether unreasonable to think of 
 them as depending upon grotesque and highly- 
 colored oriental myths. 
 
 7 See my Study of Holy Scripture, p. 522. 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. I9 
 
 It must be plain to everyone that such a unique 
 event as the Virgin Birth of our Lord would 
 have been an insoluble mystery even to Joseph 
 and Mary. They needed special divine com- 
 munications, such as the gospels record, to en- 
 able them to think of its possibility. But they re- 
 ceived no explanation of it, and could not under- 
 stand its purpose. The gospel, in simple and 
 lucid terms, tells us that Mary "kept all these 
 things and pondered them in her heart." Joseph 
 and Mary could not report them to others. They 
 would have been laughed to scorn. It is there- 
 fore simple perversity to use the statements of 
 the gospels as to the relations of Joseph and 
 Mary and his brethren to Jesus as an argument 
 against the Virgin Birth. Mary's secret knowl- 
 edge that she had conceived Jesus by the power 
 of the Holy Spirit, and given birth to Him in her 
 virginity, would not prevent her from bringing 
 up Jesus as her child. She could not do other, 
 even under these circumstances, than look upon 
 the boy as her boy, and the man as her son, and 
 feel for him the natural maternal anxieties and 
 responsibilities. The virgin-born was yet a babe 
 in her arms, a boy under parental discipline, a 
 man under maternal solicitude and affection. His 
 sorrows were her sorrows, his joys her joys, his 
 trials pierced her heart. The same set of sacred 
 canticles that Luke used in giving us the "Hail 
 Mary" and the Virgin Birth gives also the words 
 
20 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 of Simeon to Mary: "Yea, a sword shall pierce 
 through thine own soul also." St. Luke found 
 no inconsistency here ; no more will any man who 
 is not anxious to find it. 
 
 From the nature of the case the report as to 
 the Virgin Birth of our Lord could only emerge 
 from His own near relatives after His divinity and 
 His incarnation had been made evident, not only 
 to the family of Jesus, but also to the entire apos- 
 tolate and the Christian Church. It is hardly 
 conceivable that Mary would have kept alto- 
 gether secret the fact as to the Virgin Birth of 
 our Lord after it had been made evident that He 
 was the Messiah and was indeed divine. Her 
 natural modesty and holy purity would have 
 withheld these most delicate facts from the 
 Christian public, but inevitably she would have 
 confided them to her confidants and especially to 
 the chiefs of the Christian community. They 
 would most certainly have been kept esoteric as 
 long as the virgin mother lived, in order to save 
 her from scandalous misrepresentations ; but after 
 her death, when the Christian Church had be- 
 come firmly established under the headship of 
 James and Simeon, the reasons for such reticence 
 would soon pass away ; and so soon as it was 
 necessary to combat the Ebionites, who denied 
 the divinity of our Lord and asserted that He was 
 the son of Joseph and simply a human Messiah, 
 it became necessary for the chiefs of the Church 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 21 
 
 to make public the doctrinal fact of the Virgin 
 Birth, which in itself made the Ebionite position 
 untenable, and speedily forced them to become 
 truly Christians, or to leave the Church. Thus 
 the doctrinal fact of the Virgin Birth was made 
 known just about the time when we could rea- 
 sonably expect it. One would be unreasonable to 
 ask for it at an earlier date. 
 
 We may therefore say with the utmost confi- 
 dence : there is no valid reason, so far as Biblical 
 or Historic Criticism is concerned, to doubt the 
 doctrinal fact of the Virgin Birth. 
 
 //. The Doctrine of the Virgin Birth. 
 
 The doctrine of the Virgin Birth became im- 
 bedded in the primitive Roman Creed, which 
 cannot be dated later than the middle of the sec- 
 ond century. But it is evident that the Roman 
 Creed was only a gradual development of bap- 
 tismal creeds based on the trinitarian formula 
 going back to the apostles themselves. Every 
 clause of that creed is biblical and apostolic in its 
 character. Not one of its statements can be re- 
 garded as a later development of Christian doc- 
 trine. There is not the sHghtest trace of any evi- 
 dence in the Christian Church of the second cen- 
 tury to impeach the doctrine of the Virgin Birth 
 apart from Ebionite and Gnostic sects. It was 
 only natural that the Gospel of the Roman physi- 
 cian^ St. Luke, should influence the Roman 
 
22 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD, 
 
 Creed, rather than the Gospel of John, which was 
 more influential in Asia. 
 
 It is quite true that the primitive form of the 
 Nicene Creed does not contain the statement of 
 the Virgin Birth, but that cannot be used as an 
 argument against it, or against its importance. It 
 was precisely the same situation that we meet in 
 the New Testament in St. Paul and St. John, 
 who are the chief dogmatic writers, and who 
 therefore must be the basis for any dogmatic 
 creed. The fathers of Nicea did not, under the 
 circumstances of the Arian heresy, feel the need 
 of stating the Virgin Birth, which was not in- 
 volved in that controversy. They had one defi- 
 nite purpose, to overcome and destroy Arianism. 
 It is clear, however, that in the East as well as in 
 the West the doctrine of the Virgin Birth was 
 considered essential; for the Synod of Antioch, 
 which condemned Paul of Samosata in 269 a.d., 
 said in its official acts : 
 
 We confess and proclaim that the Son, being 
 with the Father, God and Lord of all createtj 
 things, and being sent by the Father from heaven 
 and incarnate, has assumed man, wherefore the 
 body, taken from the Virgin, containing all the ful- 
 ness of the Godhead bodily, has been, without 
 capability of change, united with the Godhead, and 
 has been deified. 
 
 When the Creed of Nicea was enlarged and 
 presented to the Council of Chalcedon (a.d. 451) 
 as the faith of the Fathers of the previous Coun- 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 2^ 
 
 cil of Constantinople, the Virgin Birth appears as 
 an essential part of the historic Nicene faith in 
 that form of the Creed which for nearly fifteen 
 centuries has been the Creed of the entire Chris- 
 tian Church. No one thought of questioning it 
 during these centuries, whether at the division of 
 the East and West, or of Protestantism from 
 Rome, except a few Anabaptists and Socinians, 
 until recent times. 
 
 I know that there are some excellent scholars 
 and historians who give an interpretation of the 
 article of the Virgin Birth which weakens its im- 
 portance. They tell us that Virgin Birth is one 
 thing, and that born of the Virgin Mary is an- 
 other thing ; that the latter term was used merely 
 to emphasize the reality of the birth of our Lord 
 over against Docetic heresies, which denied his 
 entrance into the world by birth. This is cer- 
 tainly a novel interpretation. It cannot be sus- 
 tained either by grammatical exegesis or by his- 
 toric interpretation. It is quite true that it was 
 necessary to emphasize the reality of the birth of 
 Jesus Christ into the world. But that might have 
 been done by saying: "born of Mary," a phrase 
 as old as Ignatius, or "of Mary of Nazareth," or 
 "Mary, the wife of Joseph." When they said 
 "Mary, the virgin," they distinctly recognized 
 that the mother of our Lord was known in the 
 Church as "the virgin." It seems to me alto- 
 gether probable that this meant what the Roman 
 
24 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 Church has always claimed that it meant: that 
 Mary was not only a virgin when she gave birth 
 to our Lord, but that she always remained a vir- 
 gin. She was consecrated to be the mother of 
 God : how could she ever be the mother of merely 
 human children? But whether the traditional 
 Roman interpretation be true or not, certainly 
 the very least that we can put into the term, Vir- 
 gin Mary, in the old Roman Creed, is that she 
 was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus our 
 Lord. 
 
 There are some who urge that all the articles 
 of the Creed have received new and different in- 
 terpretations from those which were designed by 
 their authors. This is true in the sense that they 
 have received fuller and richer explanations, and 
 that they have been relieved of misinterpretations ; 
 but it is not true in the sense that any of them 
 has lost its real original meaning. It is always 
 necessary in any doctrinal statement to distin- 
 guish between the form and the substance of doc- 
 trine, between that which is essential and that 
 which is unessential and temporary. What if we 
 mean by Creation something different now from 
 what the Fathers meant? We do not deny that 
 God made the world. What if our conceptions 
 of flesh and body differ from those of the an- 
 cients? We no less hold to the Resurrection of 
 the body. Our opponents would have us inter- 
 pret the phrase, "born of the Virgin Mary," in a 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 2$ 
 
 sense which excludes the Virgin Birth altogether, 
 or makes it a mere detail of the reality of the 
 birth. That is not interpretation: it is denial of 
 this article of the Creed. 
 
 There is no fact, no Christian doctrine that is 
 more emphasized by early Christian writers than 
 that of the Virgin Birth of our Lord. It was in- 
 deed the burning question from Ignatius to Ter- 
 tullian, from the close of the first century to the 
 middle of the third century. Ignatius, Justin, 
 Irenaeus, Hippolytus, TertuUian, overlapping one 
 another in linked succession, in their combat with 
 Jew and Ebionite and Gnostic, show through 
 their writings that the Virgin Birth was the doc- 
 trine which overthrew Jew and Ebionite on the 
 one side, in its assertion of the divine origin of 
 our Lord, and Gnostic on the other side, in its as- 
 sertion of His true humanity as born of the Vir- 
 gin Mary. It is therefore a perversion of history 
 for anyone to say that "born of Mary the 
 virgin," means any less than what St. Luke gives 
 us, or than Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, Hippolytus 
 and TertuUian battle for. 
 
 The battle for the Virgin Birth continued 
 through the third and fourth centuries, though 
 subordinate to more profound and subtle Christo- 
 logical problems. As it was necessary to main- 
 tain the reality of the birth of the Son of God 
 over against those who held that the Son of God 
 attached Himself to the man Jesus, either at his 
 
26 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 baptism, or when he first appeared in the temple, 
 or after his birth; so it was just as necessary to 
 maintain the Virgin Birth over against a more 
 subtle form of Docetism which thought that the 
 Son of God attached Himself in the womb of 
 Mary to the child conceived by Mary ; for in all 
 these cases alike the same situation emerges that 
 the m.an Jesus is a separate and distinct being 
 from the Son of God, the union between them 
 being only external or ethical, not at all vital and 
 organic. Over against any such doctrine not 
 only do the two gospels that teach the Virgin 
 Birth cry out, but also St. John and St. Paul, and 
 the entire apostolic teaching. For St. John does 
 not tell us that the Son of God took possession of 
 the man Jesus, whether prior to his birth or later ; 
 but that He became man, and so became just as 
 truly man as He had been truly God. So St. Paul 
 tells us that the pre-existing Son of God was born 
 of a woman, and that He who was in the form of 
 God took to Himself the form of man, and that 
 this pre-existing divine person suffered and died, 
 rose again and reigns with the name above every 
 name. If only two writings teach the Virgin 
 Birth directly, yet the whole New Testament 
 cries out with one voice, without dissent, against 
 any such idea as that the pre-existing Son of God 
 merely attached Himself to the man Jesus. 
 
 All those New Testament writings which em- 
 phasize the pre-existence of Christ think natur- 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 2^ 
 
 ally of the divine side of the Incarnation, and are 
 only concerned with its reality on the human side. 
 It is significant that the two gospels, which alone 
 give the Virgin Birth, have nothing to say about 
 the pre-existence of Christ. Interested in the life 
 of Jesus, naturally they are most concerned with 
 the mode of His entrance into the world. There 
 is no inconsistency here, but only complementary 
 teaching, both being necessary to the completed 
 doctrine. 
 
 It is true that I said in my sermon on the Vir- 
 gin Birth,^ alluding to the previous discourses of 
 the series : "All that we have thus far learned of 
 the incarnation from the teaching of Jesus and 
 the writings of St. Paul, St. John, and the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews, would stand firm, if there had 
 been no Virgin Birth; if Jesus had been born of 
 Joseph and Mary, having father and mother as 
 any other child." I see now that this language 
 was not sufficiently guarded, and so it has been 
 misinterpreted by many. I said this in a sermon 
 in which I strove to maintain the reality and im- 
 portance of the Virgin Birth, and I meant by this 
 statement nothing more than what I have said al- 
 ready in this paper, that the express teaching of 
 these passages of St. Paul and St. John does not 
 give the Virgin Birth, and therefore cannot be 
 used for or against it, or even against the opinion 
 that Joseph was the father of Jesus. But when 
 
 S See The Incarnation of Our Lord, p. 217. 
 
28 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 it comes to making logical deductions from these 
 statements and reconciling them with the pre-ex- 
 istence and divinity of Jesus Christ, and con- 
 structing a consistent dogma, it is an entirely 
 different matter. These passages then also cry 
 out against a human father, because a child be- 
 gotten by ordinary generation would yield us an 
 individual man, a separate and distinct person 
 and being, from the second person of the Trinity ; 
 God and man, not one person and being, the God- 
 man. 
 
 In these days when the authority of the Church 
 counts but little to many minds,, and when even 
 the authority of the Holy Scriptures is questioned 
 by not a few Christian scholars, it is inevitable 
 that the whole range of Christian doctrines will 
 •come into the field of Cfiticism, and that these 
 will be compelled to maintain themselves against 
 every variety of attack ; most of all, the funda- 
 mental doctrine of Christianity, the Divinity of 
 Jesus Christ, and the related doctrines as to His 
 Incarnation and Virgin Birth. 
 
 There are those who persuade themselves that 
 they may hold to the Divinity of Christ without 
 belief in a real Incarnation ; or that they may be- 
 lieve in the Incarnation without the Virgin Birth. 
 I have already recognized that a man may doubt 
 or deny the third without, in his own mind, deny- 
 ing the second, or the first. And yet, from a his- 
 toric and dogmatic point of view, he surely has 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 29 
 
 put himself in an untenable position, which he 
 cannot long maintain. Historically and logically, 
 the Divinity of Christ and the Incarnation are 
 bound up with the Virgin Birth, and no man can 
 successfully maintain any one of them without 
 maintaining all. 
 
 The early Unitarians departed from the his- 
 toric faith in the Holy Trinity at first into semi- 
 Arianism, then they divided between Sabellian- 
 ism and Arianism ; but it was not long before 
 most of them abandoned altogether the Divinity 
 of Christ, and recognized Him only as the great- 
 est of all the prophets. The departures from the 
 Nicene Faith in recent times have taken another 
 direction. Some have advocated a more subtle 
 Nestorianism ; but the most recent fad is to make 
 Paul of Samosata the wronged apostle of their 
 creed. According to this ancient heretic the man 
 Jesus was inhabited by the Son of God, and was 
 divine in the sense that God dwelt in him and in- 
 fluenced all his mental, moral, and physical activi- 
 ties. This theory gives nothing more than an 
 ethical union of deity with humanity. It is true 
 that they try to bridge the chasm between the 
 creator and the creature by denying that the 
 creature man is of any different nature from his 
 creator; and therefore the ethical union may be 
 conceived of as so close that no practical differ- 
 ence exists. But in this they simply add pantheis- 
 tic tendencies to an ancient heresy, and do not 
 
30 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 thereby improve it, but really make it all the more 
 dangerous. Difficulties, numerous and of great 
 magnitude, spring up on every side, much greater 
 in many respects than those involved in the Faith 
 of the Christian Church. They still name Jesus 
 Christ, God, and think of His entering the world 
 by incarnation, yet not in the historic sense of the 
 Bible and the Church, but only in a sense which 
 Bible, History and sound reason all alike con- 
 demn; for Jesus thus inhabited by the Son of God 
 is really no longer divine as the one only unique 
 Son of the Father, the second person of the Holy 
 Trinity, but the first-born son of an innumerable 
 family of sons of God — all gods as truly as Jesus 
 Christ Himself, when they shall eventually become 
 as fully inhabited by God as Jesus was. The in- 
 carnation of the Son of God is then only a pre- 
 lude to an indefinite number of incarnations of 
 sons of God in all perfected Christians. Of 
 course from the point of view of this error. Vir- 
 gin Birth is no more needful for Jesus than it is 
 for the Christian brethren. It is evident that these 
 scholars use "Son of God," "Divinity," and "In- 
 carnation" in unbiblical and unhistoric senses, 
 merely as a cloak to cover doctrines which are as 
 wide apart from the Nicene Faith as earth from 
 heaven. 
 
 The Christ of the Bible and the Church is not 
 merely a divinely inhabited man, but the God- 
 man. The deitv and the humanity are insep- 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 3 1 
 
 arable, and eternally united in one and the same 
 divine person. Mary the virgin, the mother of 
 Jesus, was the mother of God because she gave 
 birth, not simply to a man, but God, who had be- 
 come man in her womb when she conceived Him 
 by the Holy Ghost. Christ is not God in the sense 
 that He is the elder brother of an indefinite num- 
 ber of gods ; but in the sense that He is, and al- 
 ways will be, the one only unique Son of the 
 Father, the second person of the Holy Trinity. 
 Only by a Virgin Birth could such a God-man be 
 born into the world. A birth by human genera- 
 tion would give us only an individual man, in- 
 habited by the Son of God, and so two distinct 
 persons, the second person of the Trinity and the 
 person of the man Jesus. That cannot in any way 
 be reconciled with the faith of the Bible, or the 
 Church. It is simply the revival of ancient errors 
 rejected by the Church once for all and forever 
 nearly fifteen centuries ago. 
 
 These opponents of the Virgin Birth of our 
 Lord are masking behind Biblical Criticism and 
 New Theology. But Biblical Criticism gives 
 them no countenance. The chief biblical critics 
 of our day are against them. And the new theol- 
 ogy, so far as I know it, knows them not. How 
 absurd to revive errors exploded fifteen centuries 
 ago, and call them new theology. Let these op- 
 ponents tell us something new and worthy of at- 
 tention and we will give heed to them; but it is 
 
32 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 vain for them to suppose that they can dress up 
 ancient errors and ask us to accept them as new 
 theology. 
 
 Some months ago I was conversing with a 
 number of gentlemen on an ocean steamer and 
 explaining to them the doctrine of the Virgin 
 Birth. The next day one of them came to me, 
 and said : "I have had a talk with a biologist on 
 board. He said : 'I wish I had Dr. Briggs in my 
 laboratory. I would show him that there could 
 be no such thing as a Virgin Birth.' " This biolo- 
 gist was careful not to make this statement to me. 
 If he had, I would surely have said to him: "My 
 dear sir, I have no need to go to your workshop 
 to know how a man-child is born into this world, 
 and I am very sure you cannot show me how the 
 God-man must be born." It should be said that 
 St. Luke, who gives us the fullest statement as to 
 the Virgin Birth, was a physician as well as a 
 historian, and undoubtedly aware of the biological 
 processes connected with conception and genera- 
 tion. Doubtless modern biologists know more 
 than he did about those subjects; but the 
 ancient Jewish, Greek and Roman physicians 
 knew as much as the moderns of everything 
 connected with conception and generation that 
 can in any way have to do with the doctrine 
 of the Virgin Conception and Virgin Birth. 
 If St. Luke saw no biological difficulties, and 
 if the greatest physicians the world has produced 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 33 
 
 have not hesitated to accept the doctrine, it is vain 
 for any modern biologists to object to it. They 
 do not, in fact, object from biological reasons, but 
 because they are unwilling to accept the super- 
 natural, or any kind of divine interposition in the 
 world. 
 
 We say born of a virgin. What we mean, 
 however, is that his mother was a virgin at his 
 birth ; she had not known man. It is more 
 properly, therefore, Virgin Conception than 
 Virgin Birth. We say Virgin Birth because we 
 mean to imply that the mother retained her vir- 
 ginity from conception to birth. 
 
 Of course, if Jesus Christ were merely a man, 
 or the second person of the Trinity had simply at- 
 tached Himself to an individual man, there would 
 be no reason for the birth of such a man in any 
 other way than by generation from a human 
 father. But when you begin with a divine per- 
 son, and ask how that divine person was to be- 
 come man and be conceived in the womb of a 
 woman, Biology has no information whatever to 
 give you. The Bible and the Church teach that 
 Mary conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit ; 
 that there was a theophany at the conception, a 
 divine overshadowing of glory, such as there 
 was at the Transfiguration, and at the taking 
 possession of the ancient temple and tabernacle 
 by the Glory of God. Whether that was so or 
 not, Biolog\' cannot tell us of its own knowledge. 
 
34 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 All the physical sciences combined cannot deny it, 
 because it is altogether beyond their sphere of in- 
 vestigation. It is a mystery of dogmatic fact, 
 for which we require sufficient evidence. That 
 evidence is given, by those best qualified to know, 
 in the gospels ; and it is sustained by the pro- 
 prieties of the case, for it is evident that in no 
 other way than by the conception by a virgin 
 could God become really incarnate. He could in- 
 habit an individual man conceived in the ordinary 
 way, but He could not become man, taking to 
 Himself all that is essential to human nature 
 while remaining Himself divine in His per- 
 sonality, and constituting, not an individual man, 
 but an individual God-man. 
 
 We have in the gospels two births in close con- 
 nection, that of John the Baptist and that of 
 Jesus. John the Baptist was born in just the way 
 that our opponents would have it that Jesus was 
 born. John the Baptist was born in a remarkable 
 manner, as was Isaac of ancient times, of old peo- 
 ple, and of a woman who had been barren from 
 youth to old age. John the Baptist was "filled 
 with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's 
 womb"; that is, he was divinely inhabited from 
 birth. The birth of Jesus is distinguished from 
 such a birth. He was not simply filled or in- 
 habited by the divine Spirit from birth : He was 
 conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost in the 
 womb of the Virgin Mary, This antithesis be- 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 35 
 
 tween John and Jesus in their births, according 
 to the gospels, shows how impossible it is to re- 
 gard Jesus as merely a divinely inhabited man 
 without altogether discarding the gospels. 
 
 I was told recently by one of the younger mem- 
 bers of the ministry, who is unsettled as to the 
 Virgin Birth and the Nicene Faith, that modern 
 philosophy does not regard the doctrine of two 
 natures in one person as possible. It is evident to 
 anyone who has gone over the history of Phil- 
 osophy that great confusion prevails among 
 modern teachers. I cannot see that there is any 
 such thing as a consensus as to what modern 
 Philosophy is. I certainly know of no consensus 
 of philosophic opinion that is inconsistent with 
 the formula of Chalcedon. The Faith of Chal- 
 cedon was formulated and has maintained itself 
 on the basis of the two greatest philosophic sys- 
 tems the world has ever seen, those of Plato and 
 Aristotle. All modern Philosophy builds upon 
 them. New philosophers arise of various degrees 
 of importance, but after they have had their say 
 the world generally swings back toward either 
 Plato or Aristotle, or both. Moreover, the greatest 
 philosophical theologians of our age, who have 
 been entirely familiar with the best modern 
 Philosophy, have maintained the Virgin Birth 
 of our Lord. But in fact Philosophy has no more 
 to say on this question of the Virgin Birth, and 
 the two natures in one person, than has Physical 
 
36 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 Science, because the question is beyond her 
 sphere. She can tell us something about human 
 personality and the faculties of the human mind, 
 heart and will, and of the relation of these to the 
 human body. Philosophy can speak guardedly 
 about metaphysical relations ; but Philosophy has 
 no knowledge of the divine person, or of the 
 nature of the divine mind, affections, and will, 
 except so far as these are reflected in man, and 
 nature, and Holy Scripture; and all this, as any 
 thinker must admit, can only be very inadequate. 
 Christian Philosophy, when she builds on Chris- 
 tian Theology, may help much to-day, as she has 
 ever in the past, in the explanation of the myster- 
 ies of our religion ; but when she disregards Holy 
 Scripture and Christian Theology, and attempts 
 to scale the heights of speculation by herself, she 
 is impotent to tell us anything whatever of the 
 Holy Trinity, or the mode of the incarnation of 
 the Son of God. It is altogether beyond the 
 range of Philosophy to say that the second person 
 of the Trinity may not take a human nature to 
 Himself, as the Faith of Chalcedon implies, with- 
 out taking therewith human personality. 
 
 The Church adopted this formula, because it 
 alone was consistent with biblical statements as to 
 the humanity and divinit}^ of Jesus Christ — a 
 formula not altogether adequate, it is true, for it 
 makes a statement with reference to one of the 
 greatest mysteries of our faith, but a statement 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 37 
 
 made necessary by historical circumstances, to 
 harmonize the statements of Holy Scripture and 
 apostolic tradition, and to ward off dangerous 
 errors. It is quite true that modern Philosophy 
 may justly object to many statements that have 
 been made by theologians ancient and modern, as 
 to the human side of the formula of Chalcedon. 
 It may say that it sees no reason why original 
 sin may not be transmitted through the mother 
 as well as through the father. Quite true : theo- 
 logians have sought out many ways of accounting 
 for this, other than the immaculate conception of 
 the blessed Virgin. It is not necessary for us to 
 overcome this difficulty in our minds ; for it 
 would certainly be presumptuous for anyone to 
 say that God could not overcome it, even with- 
 out a miracle. 
 
 It may be said that personality and individuality 
 may come from the mother as well as from 
 father and mother. If that were so, it would not 
 by any means imply that when the second person 
 of the Trinity became man, He assumed the per- 
 sonaHty and individuality of man from the virgin. 
 The personality was in the divine nature of the 
 second person of the Trinity when He assumed 
 human nature. Why should anyone suppose that 
 He must assume another and a human personality 
 with the human nature, even if such a thing were 
 possible in the passive element in the conception ? 
 The Son of God became man according to the 
 
38 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 purpose of the Incarnation, He was not obliged 
 by any moral or physical necessity to become any 
 more of man than He chose to become. 
 
 The conception was by the power of the Holy 
 Spirit, and not by any kind of parthenogenesis, as 
 some of our opponents would state it. The 
 Qiurch has never thought of any such thing as 
 parthenogenesis. The doctrine based on St. 
 Luke as given in the Apostles' Creed is: "Who 
 was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the 
 Virgin Mary," and in the Nicene Creed: "Who 
 for us men and for our salvation came down from 
 heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of 
 the Virgin Mary, and was made man," A par- 
 thenogenesis would give us an individual man 
 with a human personality, and therefore be just 
 as much against the Christian Faith as the natural 
 fatherhood of Joseph. Hippolytus says:® "The 
 Word was the first-born of God who came down 
 from heaven to the blessed Mary and was made 
 a first-born man in her womb." Irenaeus says :" 
 "Why did He come down into her, if He were to 
 take nothing from her ?" Tertullian says : "This 
 Word called His Son, under the name of God, 
 was seen in divers manners by the patriarchs, 
 heard at all times in the prophets, at last brought 
 down by the Spirit and power of God into the 
 
 9 Com, Luke 2 : 7. 
 
 10 Eaer.. iil, 22 : 2. 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 39 
 
 Virgin Mary, was made flesh in her womb."" 
 Athanasius says: "When He was descending to 
 us He fashioned His body for Himself from a 
 virgin."^^ 
 
 The gospels make the Holy Spirit the active 
 agent; early Fathers make the second person of 
 the Trinity; but what matters it? In all divine 
 actions, the three persons of the Trinity co- 
 operate. In all these cases it is clear that the 
 conception of the holy seed by Mary was by 
 divine power, and therefore we are not to think of 
 it as of an ordinary conception, or that that which 
 was conceived was identical with what mothers 
 conceive under other circumstances. What Mary 
 conceived was different from that which any 
 other mother ever conceives, for it was not mere 
 man, but the God-mian, and even as man different 
 from every other son of Adam as possessed of 
 sinless, incorruptible flesh and a holy, life-giving 
 spirit ; and if so, it is folly to insist that the human 
 nature then conceived must have had human per- 
 sonality and individuality, for that personality and 
 individuality must be centered in the divine per- 
 son, the active agent in the incarnation. 
 
 The doctrine of the Bible and the Church is 
 that the second person of the Trinity entered the 
 womb of the Virgin, and became incarnate there, 
 when she conceived, by the power of the divine 
 
 11 Haer., 13. 
 
 12 de incarn., c. 8. 
 
40 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 Spirit, the God-man. If God is immanent in 
 nature, especially in the person of the Logos, or 
 second person of the Trinity, surely there is no 
 valid philosophical objection to the opinion that 
 the divine presence, which was really there, as in 
 all things, took to Himself that primal human 
 nature, which was appropriate to the mother's 
 womb to be nourished there until the birth. He 
 who manifested Himself to man in so many the- 
 ophanies, as the biblical narratives record, now 
 brought the theophanic manifestations to their 
 culmination in a permanent incarnation. 
 
 Under the general conception of the Virgin 
 Birth there are many possible explanations that 
 may be made ; doubtless some that no one has yet 
 proposed ; and it is quite possible that we may 
 never learn the real method of the conception of 
 Jesus. Neither the Bible nor che Church requires 
 anything definite here. Only we cannot admit 
 any such definition of the conception of Mary as 
 excludes the divine activity, or represents that 
 Jesus must have been conceived by Mary just 
 exactly as every other man child is conceived 
 when begotten by a human father, with a distinct 
 individuality, to which the second person of the 
 Trinity could be united only externally or ethi- 
 cally, as a second and distinct being. 
 
 I have in my sermon on the Kenosis^- distinctly 
 stated the limitations to which the God-man sub- 
 
 12 The Incarnation of our Lord. 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 4I 
 
 jected Himself in His life in this world, and have 
 urged, after Dorner, the doctrine of a gradual in- 
 carnation, perfected only at the resurrection and 
 ascension. I certainly cannot see any inconsis- 
 tency between such a Kenosis and the formula of 
 Chalcedon. All these supposed inconsistencies 
 are in the minds of our opponents, or of those 
 who in the supposed interests of Christian 
 liberty of opinion weaken the doctrine of the 
 Virgin Birth so as to empty it of reality. I have 
 fully recognized the difficulties that beset the 
 denial of human personality to Jesus. I have 
 given what seemed to me a possible solution of 
 the difficulty: 
 
 Complete personality of the Godhead, in the hu- 
 man sense, was in the unity of the divine nature. 
 There is only one divine person in this sense. 
 Therefore it was necessary that the Son of God 
 should take up into Himself all those elements of 
 personality which g.re necessary to the integrity of 
 an individual, as a distinct and separate being, 
 which He did not have as the Son of God, and 
 which, therefore. He must have as a son of man. 
 Accordingly we are compelled to think of a divine- 
 human personality for the God-man; that is, of 
 certain elements of human personality in which 
 the human nature was centered, as in organic 
 union with the central divine personal distinction 
 of the Word of God. 13 
 
 t 
 
 The formula of Chalcedon as the necessary un- 
 folding of the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is not 
 
 13 Incarnation, p. 201. 
 
42 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 responsible for any particular theory of human 
 personality, or for any of the particular explana- 
 tions of the difficult problems involved, whether 
 those of Leontius of Byzantium, John of Damas- 
 cus, whom Christian theologians have generally 
 followed, or any other ancient or modern divine. 
 There is room here for considerable difference 
 of opinion, and fresh study in which Philosophy 
 may be helpful. All that the Church doctrine 
 requires as it faithfully adheres to the teaching 
 of Holy Scripture, is that we should recognize 
 that the unity of the God-man is in the per- 
 son of the Logos ; that there are not two distinct 
 beings, God and man, in Jesus Christ, united only 
 by an ethical union of indwelling, but one unique 
 being, the God-man, with a single, not a dual per- 
 sonality, or individuality. 
 
 The modern mind uses by preference the in- 
 ductive method. I have used this method all my 
 professional life, as much probably as anyone 
 else in the field of Holy Scripture and other 
 departments of Theology. But it is not 
 the only method. All legitimate methods 
 should be used for the discovery and the 
 verification of truth and fact. It is evident that 
 the inductive method has its place and im- 
 portance; but it ought not to be so exaggerated 
 as to make men skeptical of other methods. We 
 cannot limit our knowledge, especially in The- 
 ology, to what induction gives us. We can never 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 43 
 
 know God save very inadequately by the in- 
 ductive method. We may be scientists, and in a 
 measure philosophers and historians of a certain 
 grade, without going beyond it ; but it is impos- 
 sible to be biblical scholars or theologians resting 
 on that method alone, and it is difficult even to be 
 Christians. The Holy Scriptures have vindi- 
 cated their divine authority for nineteen cen- 
 turies, and the Creeds of the Church formulated 
 on their basis for nearly so long — the Apostles' 
 Creed since the middle of the second century, the 
 Nicene since the early fourth, the Faith of 
 Chalcedon since the fifth. It is vain to suppose 
 that Christians will abandon their faith in Holy 
 Scripture and the Creeds simply because in- 
 ductive reasoning does not yield their doctrines, 
 or because Physical Science and Philosophy can- 
 not vindicate them. If they could, the Christian 
 religion would be reduced to the level of com- 
 monplace, and its divinity be open to suspicion. 
 
 The evidence for the Faith of the Church in 
 the Virgin Birth is as strong as anyone could 
 reasonably exact. What stronger evidence 
 would men have? It was impossible to present 
 any evidence that Physical Science, Philosophy, 
 or ordinary investigation in any department of 
 knowledge could altogether verify. We may 
 surely ask scholars to be reasonable, and not 
 exact impossibilities. 
 
 It has seemed to me for a long time that 
 
44 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 modern preachers and writers have exaggerated 
 certain features of the human nature of our Lord. 
 This is, it is true, a reaction from the exaggera- 
 tion of the divinity and neglect of the humanity 
 in former times. But this reaction has already 
 gone too far. It was not essential to the hu- 
 manity of our Lord that He should be like the 
 ordinary man in all respects. He did not assume 
 the grossness, coarseness, vulgarity, and sinful 
 tendencies of common humanity. He was, as the 
 older theologians said, "the common man" ; that 
 is, His humanity was the real, complete, har- 
 moniously developed humanity, having all the 
 humanity which is in common, all that is essen- 
 tial to mankind, but having His own uniqueness, 
 as the second Adam, the ideal man, the norm of 
 our race. 
 
 It is necessary to a true biblical and 
 historical Faith that the humanity and the divin- 
 ity should be more comprehensively studied. It 
 is not merely the Virgin Birth that is in ques- 
 tion, in the interest of the more complete 
 humanity of our Lord ; it is also the doctrine of 
 original sin and the sinlessness of Jesus ; it is 
 also His bodily resurrection and ascension, and 
 the giving of His body in the Eucharist. It is, 
 moreover, the whole nature of the atonement and 
 Christian salvation with its doctrine of sacrifice 
 and propitiation. All of these doctrines are 
 trembling in the balance in those very minds 
 
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 45 
 
 which doubt or deny the Virgin Birth. Those 
 . who give up the Virgin Birth will be compelled 
 by logical and irresistible impulse eventually to 
 give up all of these. 
 
 Jesus Christ was man, but not an individual 
 man altogether like other men. He was unique 
 in His humanity, because He is the only God- 
 man, and so became the common man, able to 
 sympathize deeply and thoroughly with all man- 
 kind — men, women and children. The center of 
 His complex being was not human but divine. 
 Jesus Christ became man to identify Himself 
 with man and nature forever, and so be and re- 
 main closer to man than any of his fellow-men 
 can be. If Jesus were only loosely connected 
 with the divine being within Him, if the union 
 were merely an ethical one, then there could not 
 have been any real sacrifice for the sins of the 
 world ; His death would be only that of a martyr 
 and His blood have only educational value. H 
 the Son of God were only loosely joined with the 
 man Jesus, a resurrection of His body would be 
 useless, and if no resurrection of the body, then 
 no giving of His body in any sense in the holy 
 Eucharist, and that most sacred sacrament of our 
 religion would become merely a love feast. A 
 second advent and a world judgment also disap- 
 pear from the scheme of such a Theology. And 
 what have we left? A religion such as the bril- 
 liant Hamack gives us in his Essence of Chris- 
 
46 THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF OUR LORD. 
 
 tianity, a quintessence indeed, as Loisy justly 
 calls it, but with all the life and glory of Chris- 
 tianity squeezed out of it, a religion such as never 
 has existed, and never can exist, except in 
 speculative brains. 
 
 I do not mean to say that men may not hold 
 to many, if not the most, of the essential doctrines 
 of our religion without belief in the Virgin 
 Birth ; but I do say that the very same influences, 
 which lead some men to discard the Virgin Birth, 
 lead others to discard, some, one of these doc- 
 trines, some, others; and that these are really to 
 the logical mind all linked together in one mas- 
 sive chain, a comprehensive whole, the historical 
 Faith of the Christian Church ; not of any one 
 denomination of Christians, but of them all ; not 
 as special to any particular age, but as the one 
 Faith transmitted from Christ and His apos- 
 tles; not merely dogma, but the vital experience 
 of all generations of Christians for nineteen 
 centuries. 
 
DATE DUE 
 
BS2423.1.B85 
 
 I he virgin brith of Our Lord 
 
 inmi^'r.l?^?S^?!^eminary-Speer Library