The Virgin Birth of our Lord

The Virgin Birth of our Lord by Herman Bavinck

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This is a short essay that discusses, and defends, the Christian doctrine of the Virgin Birth on essentially fideistic grounds.

Herman Bavinck was a Reformed Protestant theologian who wrote between approximately 1880 and 1920. Accordingly, this essay justifiably feels dated in structure, argument and verbiage.

The first and main target of the essay is the “scientific” approach to Bible interpretation of the then rising critical Bible studies school. Bavinck calls this approach “analytic.” This analytic approach starts from a blank slate and seeks to build up to doctrine from an initial standpoint without any assumptions. A competing approach, according to Bavinck, is the “synthetic” approach that starts with knowledge and assumptions about the subject, which it uses to understand the subject. In this case, that assumption would be that Jesus Christ was God.

From the synthetic approach, Bavinck argues that the virgin birth - while not scientifically explainable or justifiable - is absolutely fitting and necessary from the standpoint of theology.

“Likewise He never says in abstract terms, that He has existed and will exist in all eternity, but He existed before His appearance in human form, yea, before Abraham, and He knows that all things are subjected to Him, that the Father has committed all judgment unto Him, and that He shall return the same at the end of the days to judge the living and the dead. With this statement of Christ Himself are in full agreement all the teachings of the apostles. Christ was in the beginning with God, is Creator and Governor of the world, the Saviour of His people, the Judge
of the whole earth. The Ego of Christ has assumed a human form of existence, but it did not begin to exist with His conception and birth, and it does not cease to exist with His death. It exists before and after, it exists apart from time and space, it is eternal, the beginning and the ending, which is and which was, and which is to come, God blessed forever.

VII.

This is the unanimous teaching of the whole Bible. One can accept or reject this testimony; that is a question of belief. But the testimony is harmonious, universal, indisputable, and incontestable; it is the testimony of the Holy Ghost to our Lord, both in the Scripture and in the church of all places and times. If this is the true case, then there is shed from this Divine Sonship of Christ a new light on all His words and deeds, on His acts and His facts, on His death and resurrection; and also on His Virgin Birth.  Scripture says that the Christ must die and must rise from death, that it was not possible that He should be holden by it. And in the same way it may be said, that He could not be made flesh but by supernatural conception. Viewed in the light of the Divine personality, and the eternal existence of Christ, the Virgin Birth is quite necessary; it is not a strange fact in His life, not a superfluous addition without significance for His own person and for our belief, but a natural and necessary event in the life of our Lord, as natural and necessary as His death and His resurrection. It is in full harmony with the whole. ​The Virgin Birth was not in the first place necessary for His sinlessness. God was mighty to purify the womb of Mary and was mighty also to purify the act of generation. But Christ was an eternally existing person. He was before He was begotten and born. So He could not be quite passive in the moment of conception and birth as we are. He was sent by His Father into the world, but He came also Himself with full consciousness and will. Just as He had the power to lay down His life, so He was mighty to take it up in His conception for the first, and in His resurrection for the second time. During His earthly life, He always had  His life in His hand, every day and every hour, and so He held it also in His conception and birth. He was Himself made flesh; He has Himself assumed our human nature. He has not become Lord and Christ, Prophet, Priest, and King, the eternal Son of God, as many now represent, by His earthly life and work, by His death and resurrection, but He was all that because He Himself existed before; and the words and deeds of His earthly life have shown and proved that He was what He said and eternally had been. He is declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead. Now, if He was all that. He could not be conceived as we, quite passively, and could not come in this way into existence, but because He existed. His conception was His own deed. He assumed consciously and freely our human nature.”

Bavinck concludes with the following:

“Rejection of this mystery is therefore not an innocent thing. One cannot defend such a rejection with an appeal to the apostolic silence about it. Even though we believe the supernatural birth of Christ, we do not mention it every time in our daily preaching. The central facts of the Gospel are the death and the resurrection of our Lord, not His supernatural birth and incarnation. The cross of Christ has therefore been the focus of the apostles, and ought to be ours also in these days. But, though we do not mention this mystery every day, it is quite another thing to deny and reject it That the Christian church has never done. From the very first, where Mary has told the mystery of her heart the church believed her. There has not been any opposition to this doctrine but from the side of the Ebionites and the Gnostics, not on critical and historical, but on dogmatic grounds. And just so in these days, the rejection of the Virgin Birth is generally combined with the rejection of the apostolic testimony about the resurrection and ascension, the Messiahship and Divine Sonship of our Lord.”

What is interesting to me is how this Calvinist argument maps on to the doctrine of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary. I suspect that Bavinck would not have denied this doctrine, but many Evangelicals today find it to be a superfluous and irrelevant doctrine.

I wonder what Bavinck would say?