“And Mary said unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee: wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God.” (Luke 1:34, 35)

Especially at this time of the year we are reminded of the birth of Christ. The Bible, especially the gospels of Matthew and Luke, inform us that this event was the result of a miracle. Accordingly, Christians throughout the centuries have confessed that He “was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.”

Current Questions and Contradictions

In our time this straightforward teaching and confession has, like every other major point of Christian teaching, been called into question and contradicted. We are widely told that in the past when people were naive and unaware of natural laws that they could easily accept such a teaching and make such a confession; in our time, however, the discoveries of natural science have shown the impossibility of such an occurrence as that described in the gospel and confessed by the church. Accordingly, many deny that Christ was born of a virgin mother. Others, within as well as outside of the churches evade discussion of the matter, alleging that it is really unimportant. Emil Brunner dismissed the doctrine of the virgin birth as a later and unnecessary “attempt to explain the miracle of the Incarnation” which along with the “doctrine of Verbal Inspiration” might in our time perhaps better be discarded (The Mediator, pp. 322–327, 361, 362). Under the pressure of such currents of opinion, there are indications that often even those who do not deny the doctrine have little sense of its meaning or importance. What difference does it make how He was born? If you only believe in Him as the Savior isn’t that all that matters?

Back to the Bible

In this as in many other “problems,” the Bible has a way of dispelling our confusion if we only read what it says. The Lord demolished what His Sadducean critics thought was an insurmountable objection to the resurrection with the observation, “Is it not for this cause that ye err, that ye know not the scriptures, nor the power of God” (Mark 12:24)? If we turn to the Luke (1:24ff.) and the Matthew (1:18ff.) accounts (both of which Brunner dismissed as probably unauthentic, p. 324) we immediately notice that the allegedly modern “problem” which would not have occurred to the “naive” ancient people, was the first thing that came to the mind of both Mary and Joseph! Both of them knew as well as anyone living today that a child has to have two parents. That profound discovery was not original with present textual critics—or gynecologists. Mary’s question was direct; “How shall this be, seeingI know not a man?” And the answer was equally direct: “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee: wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God.” Notice that an explanation was given for what was otherwise obviously impossible—“the Holy Spirit,” “the power of the Most High.” That was followed by a reason –not dreamed up by later theologians or philosophers, as Brunner and others would have it, but.given by the angel—the child to be born was to be in a unique sense (1) the “Son of God,” and (2) “holy.” The church confessions and explanations of this doctrine are simply a “saying again” of what the Lord through His angel first said about it. One who has a sensitivity to the Bible’s claims as God’s Word, and to what it teaches about the seriousness of sin and about Who the Savior must be and what He has to do, can readily see the relationships and importance of the event and doctrine being revealed. Our present day confusions and errors in these matters have a way of developing, as the Lord intimated, out of persistently ignoring “the Scriptures” and “the power of God.”

In Matthew’s gospel the revelation to Joseph parallels that to Mary. Joseph, becoming aware of his fiancee’s condition, naturally concluded that she had been unfaithful to him and intended to break off the marriage arrangement. He also was told that the child was “of the Holy spirit” and that this miracle was immediately connected with His unique role as the Savior who would “save his people from their sins,” thereby fulfilling the Old Testament prophecy of a virgin-born Messiah who would be called “Immanuel; which is, being interpreted, God with us.”

All this is elementary Christian doctrine, commonly confessed and taught in the Christian church. Today, as it is being questioned and denied, or, perhaps even more insidiously, ignored within the church as well as in the world, there is a great need to return to the Scriptures and to recover, understand, confess and apply the doctrine as the Scriptures teach it. That is the road to Christian reformation and revival in a church and society badly in need of them.

Machen on the Virgin Birth

Unique among the leading church reformers earlier in this century was the Presbyterian, J . Gresham Machen. Himself deeply troubled by the Liberal attack on the Christian faith, he through his own student struggles with these Liberal subversive beliefs, was raised up to become one of the most influential Christian leaders in our time in opposing them and seeking restoration to the Biblical faith. As we think about the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ, it may be helpful to us to recall what an unusually large place the study, defense and explication of that beleaguered doctrine took in the career of Machen. Ned B. Stonehouse’s biography of Machen tells us how he wrote a thesis on the subject as an undergraduate in Princeton Seminary about 1904 in competition for a study fellowship. He won the fellowship and had his paper published in the Princeton Theological Review. That study later became the basis of one of his regular seminary courses and finally in 1903 was expanded into his major scholarly book on The Virgin Birth of Christ. Work on this Biblical doctrine was thus spread over much of his teaching and reforming career. In the 400 pages of his book he covered the subject from almost every angle, and confronted and answered all kinds of critical arguments, those we meet such as Brunners and many more that we have never encountered.

The structure of his book can be briefly outlined. Machen’s stated purpose was to investigate the origin of the beliefin the virgin birth of Christ. Broadly speaking, the first eleven chapters deal with its explanation as a fact, and the next three deal with the attempted explanations of it as an error, followed by a final chapter of “Conclusions and Consequences.”

The argument begins by showing that the belief in the virgin birth of Christ was common in the early church of the second century and was expressed in its earliest creeds. It proceeds to show that the account of it is an original part of the gospel of Luke. The hymns of Mary and Zacharias in the first chapter of Luke confirm the early Palestine origin of these accounts. Careful study of the birth accounts show them to be an original part of the third gospel and show that they come from and fit their time in Palestine. Attempts have been made to explain away Luke’s account of the virgin birth as a later addition (“interpolation”) into an original gospel that did not have it. Careful and extensive study of the gospel makes it evident that such theories cannot be made to appear plausible.

Turning to the gospel of Matthew, detailed study leads to the same kind of conclusions about the unity of the book and the proper place of the virgin birth account in it. The study of both gospels shows their complete independence but not that they contradict each other, A study of the individual narratives and the criticisms of them shows that there is nothing in the first chapters of Matthew and Luke which would lead one to question their history unless one is dogmatically opposed to recognizing anything supernatural. Furthermore, neither a comparison of the birth accounts with secular history of those times nor with the rest of the New Testament raises any significant objections to their credibility.

If one denies the fact of the virgin birth he may try to explain the existence of the belief in it as arising from either Jewish or pagan sources. But that the Jews could be held to have originated such a theory cannot be made to appear plausible. Equally implausible have been the efforts to show a derivation of this belief from pagan sources. As the author puts it, “Only superficiality can detect a similarity here to the coarse and degrading stories which are found in the surrounding world” (p. 380).

Conclusions and Consequences

Especially impressive is Machen’s last chapter in which he draws conclusions from his extensive study. He believes that his study has shown that explaining the virgin birth belief is an insoluble problem unless one accepts it as true. “The story of the virgin birth is the story of a stupendous miracle, and against any such thing there is an enormous presumption drawn from the long experience of the race.” But, “view Jesus in the light of God and against the dark background of sin, view Him as the satisfaction of man’s deepest need,as the One who alone can lead into all glory and all truth, and you will come, despite all, to the stupendous conviction that the New Testament is true, that God walked here upon the earth, that the eternal Son, because He loved us, came into this world to die for our sins upon the cross” (p. 381). “The story of the virgin birth . . . is an organic part of that majestic picture of Jesus which can be accepted most easily when it is taken as a whole” (p. 382).

Importance of the Doctrine

How important is belief in the virgin birth of Christ? Machen was convinced that the many who, though they said they personally believed it, considered it non-essential, were wrong. Because the New Testament plainly teaches the virgin birth, those who deny it are denying the authority of the Bible “in any high sense” of the word. He observed that men use the “word ‘authority’ in very loose senses” and so some would consider it “authoritative in the sphere of religion” but not “in the sphere of history or of science.” Machen pointed out that this principle, consistently carried through, really separates one’s faith from a real Christ. It becomes a religion in which man really saves himself and merely uses the stories (true or untrue) about Jesus to illustrate what man can do. It is also plain that this religion which removes the faith from history does not seriously reckon with sin. (As we have earlier observed, the Luke account explains the miracle of the virgin birth in connection with the deity and sinlessness of Christ; this humanistic religion can readily deny or dismiss the event because it senses no need for such a Divine and sinless Savior.) Machen urged that the Liberals frankly admit what they were doing instead of pretending to hold the authority of the Bible while denying what it taught. “Let us stop speaking of the ‘infallibility’ of a book that we hold to be in considerable measure untrue. Really the issues are too momentous, and human souls are too deeply concerned, to permit of any such trifling as that” (p. 387). “The Bible teaches the virgin birth of Christ; a man who accepts the virgin birth may continue to hold to the full truthfulness of the Bible; a man who rejects it cannot possibly do so. That much at least should be perfectly plain.”

Machen saw the question about one’s view of the virgin birth as a valuable test to determine which of the two really opposite religions a man held, Christianity or Liberalism. Could not the question about the deity of Christ serve as such a test? It might seem so, but this can be a test only if one accepts the old definitions of God. If one “reinterprets” the name “God,” as many do, to mean merely the highest thing in one’s scale of values, he may say that he believes “Jesus is God” and be able to add, “And so are other people.” Could not belief in the resurrection be used as such a test? Again the same objection applies, because “resurrection” is commonly redefined so that a man may say “I believe in the resurrection of Christ,” but pressed for further explanation, may add, “But, of course, I do not mean a literal resurrection.” The question about the virgin birth, however, (like that about the “inerrancy” of the Bible, we may add) is likely to show very clearly on which side a man stands with respect to the question whether his religion is really t he revealed Christian faith or the humanistic Liberalism that still likes to pass itself off as Christian.

But belief in the virgin birth is important in itself, not only because it is necessary if one really accepts the authority of the Bible, and because it shows whether one really accepts the supernatural religion it reveals. It is important as essential to accepting the full doctrine of the incarnation, the coming of our Savior God in the flesh as man. “How, except by the virgin birth, could our Savior have lived a complete human life from the mother’s womb, and yet have been from the very beginning no product of what had gone before, but a supernatural Person come into the world from the outside to redeem the sinful race?” “Deny or give up the story of the virgin birth, and inevitably you are led to evade either the high Biblical doctrine of sin or else the full Biblical presentation of the supernatural Person of our Lord” (p. 395).

Is belief in the virgin birth necessary to salvation? Machen went on to observe that we are not able to say with how little or with how defective a knowledge of the gospel the Lord may save someone; but “belief in the virgin birth . . . is certainly necessary to Christianity” and “to the corporate witness of the Church. Sad it is when men who will not affirm this doctrine are sent out into the ministry to lead Christ’s little ones astray.” This is “to trifle with human souls.” “Only one Jesus is presented in the Word of God; and that Jesus did not come into the world by ordinary generation, but was conceived in the womb of the virgin by the Holy Spirit.”

This is not an easy or popular book, to be read by everyone, as are Machen’s Christianity and Liberalr ism and What is Faith? Itis too big and detailed for that. But it remains over the passing decades one of the few definitive works on the virgin birth. Machen tried to meet all of the critical arguments and to meet them fairly. The famous theologian Adolf Harnack, early confronted by Machen’s thorough criticism of his own views, praised Machen’s work “for its thoroughness and declared that his ‘admirable study was deserving of every attention’” (Stonehouse, p.l80). Especially in our time when the Liberal attacks on this Biblical doctrine are often not so much argued as assumed and are repeated as the consensus of scholars, our students, theologians and ministers need to know and profit by Machen’s classic work. His valiant stand against the current of unbelief and for the full truth of the Gospel may greatly help us who are called to maintain that stand and bring that Gospel today. Against the inundating flood of unbelief and indifference we need to confess, and mean every word of it:

Christ, by highest heaven adored, Christ, the Everlasting Lord! Late in time behold Him come, Offspring of the Virgin’s womb. Veiled in flesh the God-head see; Hail th’ Incarnate Deity, Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel.