A New Argument for the Truth of the Virgin Birth

A few months ago, I posted a defense of the historical reliability of the virgin birth accounts in Scripture (you can read it here). It was not an exhaustive treatment, and after some further research, I'd likely frame some of it rather differently. But instead of weakening my conclusions, I think I've stumbled upon a point that strengthens them. In the course of some apologetics dialogues with a parishioner, it became clear that one of the most-used skeptical arguments against the virgin birth not only doesn't fit the data; the data actually provide a fairly significant argument in favor of the virgin birth.

Many skeptics will frame their reconstruction of events this way: (1) the only significant prophecy of the virgin birth in the Old Testament, Isaiah 7:14, uses a word that doesn't necessarily imply virginity (and there was a stronger word for "virgin" available in Hebrew, which the text does not employ); (2) when the OT was translated into Greek in the Septuagint, this term was erroneously rendered with a Greek word that more strongly implied virginity; (3) when the early Christian community read Isaiah 7:14 from the Septuagint two centuries later, after the events of Christ's life, they assumed that the Messiah had to be born of a virgin; (4) so they made up a false narrative about Jesus's birth to fit the presumed meaning of the prophecy.

There's some surface-level merit to this argument, enough that it might sound pretty convincing to those unwilling to actually research its claims. But I did research its claims, and they don't really hold up. I'll lay out the textual issues with the "virgin" terminology below, going into a bit more detail than my previous post, but the real thing that sinks the skeptical argument--and this new insight is the one I want to highlight--is that Step #3 of their argument doesn't actually fit the facts. What we know about Jewish interpretation in this period suggests that while most did accept a reading of Isaiah 7:14 implying virginity, they did not read this as necessitating a miraculous virgin birth. In other words, there was no contemporary expectation that the Messiah would have to be born of a virgin. The only reason for early Christians to read the Isaiah 7:14 prophecy that way, then, is because they actually believed a virgin birth had happened.

Let's dig into the details. First, the terminology: Isaiah uses the term 'almah to describe the person who will bear this child, and the term does not necessarily mean "virgin" (though the vast majority of 'almahs would, in fact, be virgins). Some modern Bible translations acknowledge this by translating ‘almah as “young woman.” But it’s not entirely true to say that there was a better or clearer word for “virgin” in ancient Hebrew, and the issue comes down to a linguistic aspect called semantic range--the scope of different meanings and implications a single word can have, along with the complex connotations that ride along with the term. When translating a term from one language into another, it's simply the case that the semantic ranges for those terms usually will not be a perfect match. That means that if we're looking for a particular English meaning, like "virgin," it's linguistically unlikely that there would be a single word that maps exactly on the meanings and connotations that our word conveys. And that disparity is exactly what we find in this case.

Where our terminology of "virgin" highlights the presence or absence of sexual activity, the available Hebrew words tend to add in other social aspects alongside (though absence of sexual activity, in the case of both words and depending on usage, was also an assumed part of the semantic range). ‘Almah does not simply mean “young woman.” It specifically designates a young woman of marriageable age, usually applicable until the birth of her first child. So it included under its umbrella both unmarried women (culturally assumed to be virgins) and young married women who had not yet borne children. The etymology of the term plausibly indicates that it originally leaned more toward the former class than the latter, as it indicates a connection with the root words for something “hidden” and “enclosed,” often employed in literary allusions to virginity (as in Song of Songs). Even in later usage, it still tended predominantly toward young, unmarried women (so, virgins). But is it a straight-up word for our word “virgin”? No, because ancient Hebrew didn’t have a word that only meant that, in the absence of other social considerations. 

The only other candidate is betulah, but this is not an exact gloss for “virgin” either. A betulah was a young woman who was still under her father’s care. Culturally, then, it was assumed that all betulahs were virgins, and that was certainly a prominent implication of the term, but not its sole meaning. It included an aspect of social placement relative to her father’s house, an aspect which we just don’t have in our word “virgin.” Further, even the virginity aspect of betulah is not quite as exact a match as people make it out to be. In at least one place in the OT, a betulah is associated with having a husband—Joel 1:8, while translated in various ways because of this particular textual difficulty, literally says, “Mourn like a betulah in sackcloth, grieving for the husband [ba’al – “husband,” not “betrothed” or “bridgegroom”] of her youth.” This might refer to a young bride, no longer a virgin, who had to resort back to her father's care because of her husband's death.

So here’s where we start to see the difficulties. We want a word that maps exactly onto our linguistic concern for the “virgin” aspect. But there’s no exact fit; words just don’t work that way across languages and cultures. Both ‘almah and betulah would have carried a significant implication of virginity. And while one might be able to say that betulah maps a little more closely onto the semantic range for virgin than does ‘almah, I think that’s all you can say. It’s a matter of a few degrees, not a black-and-white contrast. This is important to understand: by choosing ‘almah instead of betulah, Isaiah was not choosing against a possible reading of “virgin.” Both terms can easily fit that bill, depending on usage and application.

Further, there are other significant reasons why Isaiah might have chosen ‘almah.  For example, one could make a case that in Mary’s situation, ‘almah is just the better fit for her social condition—definitely an ‘almah, but, at least on some readings, maybe not a betulah anymore—she was betrothed, and early traditions indicate that her own father had long since passed away. So why wouldn’t Isaiah 7 use betulah, which would indicate virginity in a slightly more unambiguous way? Maybe because it wasn’t the right word for what Mary was. If one wanted to stress virginity-as-such, then betulah would likely be the clearer term, but that runs into two problems: first, as already noted, Mary didn’t fit the other social elements of a betulah, and second, the prophecy does double duty in making reference to both proximate and future events, and in this case it seems pretty clear that the partial proximate fulfillment in Isaiah’s day was not understood as a virgin birth. For the prophecy to do what it was called on to do, it had to have some ambiguity packed in; there’s no way around that. So does that still leave the Christian interpretation of the passage leaning on a word that might-or-might-not clearly indicate virginity? Sure. But Hebrew just doesn’t give us a better word choice in this instance, to meet the purposes the term had to serve.

At this point, it’s instructive to note that the Jewish Septuagint translators, two centuries before Christ, chose to translate the term as parthenos—a reasonable translation choice, given the available overlaps of the semantic ranges between Hebrew and Greek, and one that leans fairly directly (though again, not entirely unambiguously) toward the implication of virginity. Most scholars today accept that this is the reason the Jewish translators of the Septuagint made this choice: they believed that the implication of ‘almah in Is. 7:14 included virginity, otherwise they likely would have chosen a different word. That’s something of a supposition, but it’s pretty widely held. We don’t have a lot of evidence for exactly how pre-Christian Jews read ‘almah in Is. 7:14, but the scant evidence we do have, including the Septuagint, leans in favor of the idea that they genuinely saw it as saying “virgin.”

But the fact that pre-Christian Jews apparently thought the passage spoke of a virgin does not necessarily imply that they believed the Messiah would have a miraculous virgin birth. All the evidence (or lack thereof) shows that that was not an idea that entered their minds. Most people get this element wrong, so it’s important to be clear, or else the lack of pre-Christian Jewish messianic expectations centered on a virgin birth might look troubling. Take, for instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include midrashes on Is. 7 that convey no sense of a future virgin birth. Could the fact that there was a lack of Jewish expectation of a virgin birth mean that we’ve been reading Is. 7:14 wrong all along? No, I think that framing it that way is actually looking at it backwards, and in fact the evidence before us paints a pretty strong picture that what happened here was, indeed, the virgin birth of Christ.

Let me explain. Our best readings, especially as based on the Septuagint, suggest that Jews in the centuries before Christ likely did read ‘almah in Is. 7:14 with an implication of virginity, but (from the Dead Sea Scrolls and elsewhere) that they did not assume that this indicated a miraculous virgin birth. They simply read the verse, quite naturally, as implying a prudent gap in the middle: “The virgin [who will then get married and have sex] will conceive and give birth to a son…” That’s a pretty natural way to read the verse, to be honest. God chooses a virgin, and it makes sense that he’d pair her up with someone, and they will have a baby. Pre-Christian Jews seem to have thought that ‘almah implied virginity from what we can tell, but there was no significant textual reason to jump from there right to a miraculous virgin birth—not unless you knew of one that had actually happened, that is!

I think this element clearly undercuts the skeptical position. Skeptics frequently make the argument that the pressure of a messianic expectation connected to a virgin birth forced the earliest Christians to make up a story that fit that mold. But that skeptical argument no longer holds water, because there is no evidence for any such messianic expectation. The standard Jewish reading of the text, even when read as “virgin,” was simply not seen to necessitate a miraculous virgin birth, and so there would have been no pressure on early Christians to make up the story of the virgin birth just to fit it. No one had yet envisioned Is. 7:14 in that manner (at least, that we know of), so there would have been no pressure at all to use the passage as a motivator to fraudulently make up a whole infancy narrative. Once we realize that there were no significant expectations of a virgin birth, the whole concept of Matthew and Luke frantically scrambling to make up a story that fits that reading falls away into silence. Rather, the best explanation for the Christian attitude to the text is that the virgin birth actually happened, and then, in light of that event, Christian exegetes were able to see and make sense of Is. 7:14 in a way that no one had ever really considered before.

So again, it’s only after the virgin birth of Christ that Christians went back to this passage with new eyes and were able to perceive what had lain out there in the open all along. That’s actually the way most of the Messianic prophecies in the OT played out, and I don’t think it’s fair to the text to assume that this one should somehow play by different rules. The pattern matches God’s consistent habit of declaring his “mystery” through the ages, often by hints and allusions that will only fully make sense later on, and then revealing it all in Christ when the veil is taken away.

Are there other possibilities here that critics can appeal to? Sure, in the absence of evidence, the only limit is their imagination. Skeptics could try to impugn Mary by making the story a fraud she perpetrated to cover up an infidelity, or suggest the implausible notion that culturally distant ideas from mystery-religion myths had a formative influence on the earliest layer of Christian belief. All of those are pretty wild stretches, though—a grasping for alternative explanations because one simply doesn’t want to believe the plainest one: that early Christians were convinced the virgin birth actually happened, and that’s why they told the story. The main counter-narrative that has so often been told—that the expectation of a miraculous virgin birth forced early Christians to make up the story—simply doesn’t fit the available facts.

All things considered, when looking at early Christianity as it was actually situated in Second Temple Judaism, the best explanation for their reading of Is. 7:14 is that they honestly believed the virgin birth was true, otherwise there would have been no pressure or need to appeal to that passage at all.

Holidays and Pagan Roots - Should We Celebrate Christmas?

Holidays and Pagan Roots (Full Handout)

Here's the video and a link to the handout for this week's Q & A study at my church. Unlike other weeks, where I've provided the handout text in the blog post itself, this time I'm just posting a link to the entire thing. The reason is that I went a little overboard, and the thing is 14 pages long. It not only breaks down the arguments around Christmas traditions, but it goes into Easter and Halloween too for good measure. A good resource, hopefully, but a little long for a blog post. Clicking the link should bring you to the document, where you can save a copy for yourself if you like.

On Understanding the Heart of God - Is the Classical View of Divine Impassibility True?

I had a recent series of discussions with my brother, also a pastor-theologian, and it prompted a long reflection on questions that most of us probably don't think about often, but which have loomed large in the traditions of Christian theology. It started with a discourse on the nature of time and eternity after Thanksgiving dinner (as is customary, I'm sure you'll agree), but it soon migrated into a reflection on the impassibility of God--the idea that God does not suffer change, including the changeability of emotions. If you're wondering how those two abstruse topics are connected, well, it turns out that if you're defending a position like mine, which prefers both to think of God as truly possessing emotion in the fullest sense, and also to think of God as eternal (that is, being completely beyond time), then that seems to imply that grief will be a part of God's experience forever--and this my dear brother (together with most of the greatest theologians of church history) found difficult to swallow.

It's only with fear and trembling that I dissent from a near-unanimous opinion of the early church fathers (and my brother), but on the impassibility of God, something in their position doesn't seem quite right. And I'm not alone in this--a significant swath of modern theologians, even in theologically conservative traditions, have dissented from the classical idea of the impassibility of God, or at least sought to seriously modify the way it's emphasized. Joining me on this side of the field, for instance, are modern theological heavyweights like Paul Fiddes (a Baptist theologian who taught at Oxford) and Pope Benedict XVI. 

Divine Impassibility

So let's back up a step. What's the classical view? Well, the early church fathers taught that God's ontological nature is absolutely unchangeable. It is undivided, which means that all his virtues and attributes are fundamentally united, never changing in their balance or consistency. That seems to follow from both Scripture and good sense, and this sensibility offers several important reassurances to the believer. If God is unchangeable, then he is indeed a rock-solid foundation for our trust. He is the same God he always was and always will be, forever faithful. But the early church fathers thought this unchangeability necessarily included another aspect: that God is completely above the changeability of emotions. He is not subject to passing moods, capricious whims, storms of wrath, or fickle loves. He does not suffer or experience grief. All of these things, they thought, would imply that God's nature can be influenced, acted upon, and pushed around by circumstances external to himself, which would impinge on his sovereign freedom and absolute self-sufficiency. If God can be influenced by his creatures in a way that moves him from what he was to some new state, then he is no longer the eternally reliable foundation of our hope--he is changeable. Or at least, that's what they thought.

Now, there's some nuance here. The fathers would be quick to point out that what we think of as emotion is a lesser reality, and the corollary features of God's character--those which parallel our emotions--are higher and fuller and richer than we can conceive. Therefore it is proper to speak of God's love, for instance, and even, as Scripture does, of his wrath, his grief, and so on. But in doing so, the fathers would say that we must not imagine any of these things as we typically do. God's love is not a yearning, pining, desiring love, as if God was somehow made vulnerable, able to be hurt or diminished by another's choice. Rather, God's love is not emotionally vulnerable at all, but is supremely self-sufficient and infinitely giving, always willing the good of the other. God is a fountainhead of love in this sense--always secure in his own beatitude, and always pouring forth his unchanging intent to save and to bless. Even God's wrath is really just a manifestation of his love (i.e., his intent to do good), refusing to allow sin and evil to hold sway and to further corrupt his creation. Further, impassibilists will emphasize that God's love was made manifest in a special way in the Incarnation, in which he united himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to a passible human nature. In that human nature, the Son of God truly suffered, experienced grief, sorrow, and all the sweep of our emotions. But--and here's the crucial point--the Son of God did not experience any of that in his divine nature, which remained entirely serene, blissful, and unperturbed (because, remember--God can't be changed, even by the passion of emotions).

Okay, so that's the picture that the early church fathers, and all of classical theism, would give. And there's a lot to admire here. But if it feels somehow sneakily unsatisfying as an answer, there's good reason for that. 

Critique of the Impassibilist View

Think about the picture of God's love outlined above. It sounds really nice to describe it as always giving, characterized by the intent to do good, and so on. But if you think about it, that's not actually what we mean by love. We recognize all of those descriptions as characteristic of other virtues, like kindness, which are not generally thought of as higher, but as lower than genuine love. My love for my dog is characterized by the unchanging intent to do her good, but I don't love her as I love my children, for whom I make myself vulnerable at the deepest heart of who I am. Vulnerability is part of what we mean by love, and we intuitively recognize that as a higher form of love. A father who does not make himself vulnerable in love toward his children--who feels no pain at their rebellion, for instance--is not a particularly good father.

And if a classical theist would object here, "But that's exactly what God did do in the Incarnation--make himself vulnerable in the most unbelievable way possible!"--I would say, yes, absolutely! But when we look at the Passion of Jesus through an impassibilist lens, there are some quirks of the narrative that many Christians will find surprising. So much so, in fact, that an impassibilist appeal to the Passion can sometimes almost feel like sleight-of-hand. That's not to say that impassibilist scholars are trying to trick us, far from it--many admirably try to make the Incarnation the center of God's self-revelation of love (and properly so!), but the result often seems to come up with the same picture in the end: the Incarnation as a curious exception rather than the defining paradigm of a self-giving love that can, in fact, truly suffer for the sake of its love for humanity. In impassibilists' eyes, the divine nature does not change, and they read this to mean that it does not "feel" anything as we do--not even in the Passion of the Lord. God showed us his love in Jesus, yes--but the impassibilists end up having to portray that love as being bounded in this one limited historical episode, carefully boxed up inside Jesus's human nature but not touching his divine nature, or else God's unchanging nature could not be described as perpetually serene and unruffled. God's unchanging nature, you see, is still entirely invulnerable, even in the Passion. The Father feels no sorrow at the death of the Son, because the Father cannot feel sorrow--that would (it is thought) diminish him. To put it pointedly regarding your own condition before God: the impassibilist position is forced to insist that the Father feels no loss if you are lost, because the Father cannot feel loss. Sure, one might be able to say that God embraces our suffering in the crucifixion of Jesus, but even this appears to lose something of its meaning once we realize that the Father feels nothing of that suffering. In our relations with the Father, we do not experience the running embrace of the one who receives the prodigal home, but an infinitely unflappable Buddha in the heavens. In Jurgen Moltmann's incisive critique, he describes classical impassibility as showing God reigning serenely over Auschwitz. Is such a view really a higher view of God, or a lower one that rightly makes us shudder? One could easily imagine a great celestial machine that felt nothing and always sought the good of others--but would that be God? I think not.

So I'm not convinced by the classical argument for divine impassibility, and for three main reasons: 

First, I think there's a logical weak link in here, when we assume that the apparent changeability of emotions is somehow a threat to God's ontological impassibility. It's absolutely true that his nature and character do not change. But are the states we refer to as emotions really an element of ontological nature, or something else? I think what we refer to as "emotions" are actually images of his unchanging nature, which we see refracted in different aspects because in its relationality, it looks different when in contact with different aspects of our reality. If that sounds like another way of saying impassibility, it's really more like saying that emotion is a reflection of the fullness of God's character, not (as classic impassibility would have it) a mirage meant to point to something rather different than what we even mean by emotion.

Second, and more importantly, I'm also unconvinced because the view above, for all its philosophical appeal, seems to stand in direct contradiction to God's self-revelation in Scripture. God portrays himself as passionately emotional--so much so, at times, that it's a little over the top (just read Ezekiel and the minor prophets). One gets the sense that there is vibrancy in the emotional life of the Godhead that is well beyond what we experience. Nonetheless, classical impassibility reads these instances in Scripture as anthropomorphisms meant to aid our understanding--we are meant to learn something about God from these texts, but apparently not that he experiences emotion. I alluded to the parable of the Prodigal Son above. Doesn't it seem to be a very strange story for Jesus to tell, if he does not mean for us to understand from it (among other things) that the heart of God toward us is a yearning, desiring, even a grieving one? It is of course possible to reconcile the impassibilist position to Scripture by arguing that any "emotions of God" text must be interpreted as anthropomorphic analogies (and indeed, that's a very faithful, and sometimes necessary, way of reading those texts)--but the ubiquity of the emotional language ascribed to God, even in the teaching of Jesus, seems to leave one in a difficult spot. If I can put it crudely, one almost has to accept that God is a rather poor communicator in the way he has inspired his Scriptures, if he intended us to discern that he is beyond all emotion. 

Third, I'm unconvinced because impassibility seems to me to be a relic of the Platonism that reigned in the philosophical circles in which the early church fathers lived and worked. It's an idea that predates Christianity, and it's also an idea that is calibrated to respond to a particular context: the capriciously whimsical, over-emotional gods of the pagan pantheon. One might expect such influences to push the classical view of God in a wide pendulum-swing in the opposite direction, which is what I think has largely happened here. Now, to be clear, that's not a full argument in itself. There are many parts of pre-Christian Greek philosophy which I embrace wholeheartedly and which, I think, are a good match for Scripture--the eternality of God being one. But the context in which ideas grow is important, and knowing this context should give us at least some pause. (And to the contrary objection, that my perspective arises from the post-Romantic context of modern Western sentimentality, well, let's just say I have some good books from the medieval mystics I can lend you which will disabuse you of that notion fairly quickly.)

My Position

So I don't buy classic impassibility. But neither does my position swing all the way to the other end, in which God is characterized by wild swings of passion and emotion. There are some middle grounds here, but they're tough to wrap our minds around. I'm actually arguing for one of the middle grounds--the ontological impassibility of God's nature, but with the sovereignly volitional vulnerability that the fullness of his love necessarily includes.

Let me go back to the nature of emotion as a refracted reflection of God's own nature, as it relates to our changing experiences. We have names for a wide variety of emotional states, some of which, according to Scripture, apply to God (love, anger, grief, etc.) and some of which don't (embarrassment, shame, despair and so on)--the latter naturally do not directly relate to God because they are, in fact, a manifestation of our imperfection and sin. Even those latter emotions, though, are pointers to the nature of God in their own way. Such emotions betray a recognition that we are not who we ought to be. We have a deep-seated desire to be holy and perfect--and so, in a roundabout way, even those emotions are refracted reflections of God's own nature, since he is holy and perfect and calls us to be so as well. But what about the ones that do directly apply to God? I would argue that they are all part of the fundamental unity of God's character, best understood as love--real, authentic, self-giving, and, yes, vulnerable love. Such love does manifest as wrath when the good of its beloved is threatened (as by sin). Such love does manifest as grief when its beloved is lost. But this doesn't make wrath or grief or sorrow or any of those things definitive of the character of God in a total sense--they are manifestations of his fundamental, unchanging love as it interacts with our changing circumstances, and it is love that defines God's character.

Does this entail, then, that God can feel loss (in an emotional sense, or at least something meaningfully analogous to our emotions)? Yes. But that does not mean that God is ontologically diminished in any way, merely that in his sovereign volition, he has made his heart vulnerable to us in love. The loss inherent in that love is not a sign of diminishment, but rather a sign of the fullness of his love. If it were not capable of loss, it would be a lesser form of love--and that would be an ontological diminishment, which is the very thing the impassibilists are trying to avoid. As argued above, a love that includes no possibility of grief or loss is easily recognized in our experience as a substandard sort of love--one that is unwilling to extend itself meaningfully to the other.

So does this mean that grief and sorrow are forever part of the heart of God (if we can even express it like that)? I think we have to say yes. The cross is the central movement in history, the one great visible sign of God's love, and if it means what it appears to mean, then it means that God's love is so vast that he has accepted sorrow and grief and loss into his very heart, all out of the vastness of his love for us. And again, I think it's a mistake to believe that ascribing a sense of emotional loss to God is a diminishment of God. To me, the opposite view would be the diminishment--a God whose love can only run in one direction, a love which does not really care for the other to the degree that it can be affected by the other.

Responding to Objections

Now, one cannot build one's argument only on intuitions about what love ought to be like--nevertheless, it may be instructive to note once again that these intuitions, over against the impassibility perspective, seem to match the way Jesus depicts the Father's heart, as in the Prodigal Son parable mentioned above. If our intuitions match the tone and tenor of Scripture, then it should take more than mere philosophical plausibility to overturn them. So let's examine a little more closely the impassibilists' causes for concern at my argument, to see if there are perhaps further considerations to which we should give due attention. Many impassibilists would think that my argument--in which sorrow and grief in some sense become an eternal part of the experience of God--is problematic, not least because it seems to suggest that God's beatitude can be diminished, making his "fullness of joy" dependent on creatures rather than on his own self-sufficient infinity. 

But I'm not sure this is a cogent response, for three reasons. First, it tends to use terms most closely tied to emotional states--beatitude, bliss, joy, happiness--as something proper to God, when the whole argument has been about denying the coherence of applying such states to God. How can one speak of God's joy or happiness at all, if God does not experience emotion in any form approaching what we understand emotion to be? Aren't those also anthropomorphisms according to the impassibilist line? I think the best we could do is to define impassible beatitude as "self-sufficient serenity." Maybe to some that's a greater good than genuine love, but to my ears that idea strikes more of a Buddhist chord than a Christian one. 

Second, I believe the response above also mischaracterizes my argument, by amplifying such things as grief and sorrow to an overriding and independent identity of their own, when my case posits that they are, in fact, merely sub-aspects of God's love. It is God's love that is forever full, and since the fullest form of love includes the possibilities of grief and sorrow, then yes, they are included here too--but that simply means that God's love is the richest it can possibly be. They are a part of his love, not something to be considered separately. Ask any parent who has loved a child and lost them whether it would have been better never to have loved that child, and, aside from perhaps the most extreme exceptions, you will get a unanimous response back: as Tennyson noted, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. That's the question about God's love--does he love in that way--a love vast enough to embrace perpetual loss, counting the beloved worthy even of that--or is it something a little more limited, like perpetual kindness?

Third, let's tackle the question of joy, even if it is an emotional term (it just happens to be one of the emotional terms impassibilists like to use, so it's fair game). Does the God's love-grief necessarily diminish the fullness of God's joy? I don't think so. While it's admittedly hard for us to simultaneously hold together the emotional states of joy and grief (and thus hard to imagine what that would be like for God in the eternal state), experience teaches us that grief is very often the place from which the richest joy of all can bloom, either by a contrast which has deepened its meaningfulness (like the joy at the end of The Lord of the Rings) or by direct result (like the joy made possible by the grief of the cross). One could argue, in fact, that in our experience, grief and sorrow act as amplifiers of joy rather than diminishers of it, particularly if--in the words of Chesterton--grief is something "special and small" in comparison to the joy that results from the fullness of God's love. To use an everyday example, you could put it this way: like the sharpness of cheese beside a slice of apple pie, grief can accompany joy in a way that magnifies the whole. Further, we have to be careful not to instrumentalize the idea of grief as something that can act upon God apart from his will, as if it were stronger than him. The grief we're talking about is simply part of the unfathomably great love that God has chosen to express, so it is he, in his sovereign volition--not the grief--that has the mastery here. Grief does not act upon God as an external influence; God embraces this love-grief of his own accord. Now, this is probably all just an intuitional response, but we'll leave it at that--I simply don't see that God choosing to sing a melody of vaster love, one which entails a counterpoint of grief, is a necessary diminishment of his beatitude or joy. Rather, it just makes for a better symphony in the end.

But we still need to wrestle with the concomitant objection, that this all somehow makes God dependent on his creatures. If his emotional state, like joy or grief, is contingent upon external forces, a response to our actions--put another way, if it is something about himself that is shaped by others rather than himself--doesn't that shake the doctrine of his self-sufficiency, his supreme independence? Here the insights of Fiddes and others serve us well: this apparent vulnerability in God comes down to his own sovereign choice. It is his eternal, volitional act to become passible to us, to allow his heart to be moved by our choices. Nothing is taken from him; he lays it down of himself--and again, all of this redounds to the fullness of God's love. This is an expansive vision of the divine economy, and one that entails no ontological diminishment within the nature of God. 

God's Love as Maximal Perfection and Sovereign Volition

As I turn these things over in my mind, I keep coming back to the idea of God as the maximally perfect Being--the one whom, in Anselm's words, "nothing greater can be conceived." When we think of God's virtues as perfections, we usually imagine them by way of analogy, thinking of human virtues exalted and purified to their highest possible forms. To be maximally merciful is to exhibit mercy (which we know by its imperfect human expressions) in every applicable circumstance and in the fullest possible way. To be maximally just is to exhibit justice (which we also know by its imperfect human expressions) in every applicable circumstance and in the fullest possible way. In the same way, to be maximally loving is to exhibit love in a way that exceeds the highest forms of human love, not in a way that flips the human scale upside down. But love in the mode of classic impassibility appears to be the sort of love one might feel for a farm animal--always willing the other's good, but not the sort of vulnerable, passionate love one feels for a child. If we are to imagine God as the perfection of love, we must imagine this is as the perfection of what we mean by love--an even higher amplification, reaching perfection, of the highest forms of love we know, not a weird transmutation of something we would recognize as a lesser form of love, or mere kindness. Otherwise, we don't really mean that God is love; we mean something else, and we should choose a different word. The impassibilist view is a near enough fit for the God of Islam (in which, notably, God is not typically depicted as loving), but I'm just not convinced that it's a good fit for the God of the Christian gospel. 

To go back to the early church fathers--there were a few, if only a few, that verged slightly toward the case I'm presenting here (even if the vast majority went the other way). Origen--from whom Benedict XVI borrows for some of his view on the matter--was more willing to speak of God's emotions than were other patristic writers. And Maximus the Confessor--whose argument matches some of Fiddes's modern position--argues that the divine nature did actually, in a very real way, join itself eternally to the suffering and grief of the human nature of Christ, by a volitional choice. For Maximus, God's grief that I may be lost is an aspect of his love for me, eternally chosen out of his sovereign freedom in his act of creating me. So while Maximus might not portray God as always "feeling" that loss in the way we humans do, he would say that the grief of my loss is an eternal part of his love for me, freely and sovereignly chosen from before the world began. In this sense, then, any such grief is not enacted upon God by an external force; it is actively chosen by his own sovereign will.

Conclusion

Now, to be clear: in all humility, I'm really not sure I'm right on this. I'm just trying to give voice to my intuitions on the subject, as shaped by Scripture and instructed by the best logic my mind can follow. But we're talking about things that are far beyond our understanding, and it might very well be the case that the old classical view is a little more accurate than my way of putting it, and that I'm just misunderstanding the incomprehensible grandeur of the nature of God. Totally possible. But I think that's okay. I'm pretty sure I'm not giving in to mere modern mushiness or sentimentality, as impassibilists will sometimes impugn those who dare to disagree. My view hews close to Scripture and it shows up throughout church history far before "modern sentimentality" arises--just read Julian of Norwich for a clear view of a God characterized by a love so immense that it can only be understood in divine yearning and self-chosen suffering. 

For me, it comes down to a question of who I am going to worship. Either of the views above is permissible in Christian orthodoxy, but I must worship God according to the highest possible conception I can hold of him. And for me, that's a God of genuine love--the Father of the prodigal son. Until my conceptions and intuitions change, I must worship that God, because to my eyes, he is higher in love than the God of the impassibilists. He is more maximally perfect, and so he alone deserves my praise. (This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why I also prefer the classic view of the eternality of God--I feel like I can conceive of a greater Being than one which is limited to temporal sequence, and so to be maximally perfect God would have to transcend the limitations of time.) I'm not going to give my worship to something that seems to me to be inferior to another, greater Being. I hope and expect that God, in his mercy, accepts the highest worship I can possibly give, even if I (as is certainly the case) do not fully understand the scope of his nature.

Is the Story of the Virgin Birth a Historical Fraud?

Of all the traditional doctrines of Christianity, none elicits quite as much eye-rolling scorn from "the cultured despisers of religion" (as Schleiermacher put it) as the story of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. This is not surprising; to the crude and disenchanted minds of modern skeptics, anything that calls upon the supernatural is a target for derision--and even more so a supernatural act that turns the messiest, most carnal of human experiences (conception and birth) into something unutterably holy. A Christian can easily (and rightly) reply that with God, all things are possible. But to many doubters, the virgin birth smacks too much of the kind of religious fabulism that was common all across the ancient Mediterranean world. Why, then, should Christians believe the Gospels' story of the virgin birth? 

I recently preached on the prophecy of the virgin birth found in Isaiah 7:14. There I noted that the Hebrew word used, 'almah, was not a word that specifically meant "virgin" in the same way that our word does. Rather, it means "young woman," used of a woman of marriageable age until the birth of her first child. There is another word for an unbetrothed young woman, still in her father's care, which one might more readily go for if "virgin" is specifically what was meant. For this reason, some skeptics suggest that the Isaiah 7 passage was simply meant to refer to a contemporaneous event--the birth of a baby into either Isaiah's family or the royal household in Isaiah's time--but that it held no import for a future messianic figure. The problem with that, however, is that the text clearly implies something stunning is about to happen--indeed, something miraculous, which the birth of an ordinary baby would not fulfill. Further, the candidates often proposed (Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz? Hezekiah?) simply do not match all of the data in the text (the former does not appear to be the first child of its mother, and according to biblical chronologies, the latter would have already been born). Even more, the overriding context of the prophecy, as the prophetic hinge on which the whole section of Isaiah 7-12 turns, suggests a future Messianic connection--Isaiah 9 and 11 especially so.

So why did Isaiah use this particular Hebrew word, if a virgin birth was in view? Importantly, there is no single specific word for "virgin" in ancient Hebrew to call upon, merely the two terms applied to young women of marriageable age--and when one considers this, and Mary as a possible referent, then it immediately becomes clear that 'almah was the correct choice: Mary was betrothed and no longer under her father's care, so she could not have fallen under the semantic range of the other word; and further, in a case like hers, virginity would absolutely have been assumed. The word 'almah itself might lean ever so slightly in this direction, etymologically appearing to refer to a marriageable woman who is somehow "hidden" or "enclosed." All of this is worth knowing, but it still doesn't make for an open-and-shut case that Isaiah 7 makes reference to Jesus and Mary. The Christian argument is bolstered, however, by the fact that the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint (LXX), translates 'almah as parthenos--that is, virgin (at the very least, it leans much more heavily toward that part of the semantic range). This means that two centuries before Christ, the best Jewish textual scholars were interpreting Isaiah 7 as indicating a miraculous, virgin birth. (There's even a charming apocryphal story from later tradition--likely untrue, to be sure--which says that Simeon, of Luke 2 fame, was one of the LXX translators, who was told by an angel that he would remain alive until he saw Isaiah 7 come to pass--which would make him something like a quarter of a millennium old in the Gospel, and which gives some added poignancy, and even a little humor, to his great "Nunc Dimittis" canticle.)

Anyway, after my sermon, I encountered a question relayed from a skeptical family member of one of my parishioners. They enumerated several reasons why a skeptic might legitimately think that the virgin birth story in the Gospels was an early Christian fraud, dreamed up because the Gospel-writers thought (maybe erroneously, thanks to the LXX translation) that the Messiah had to be born of a virgin. Why doesn't Paul mention it? Why isn't it prophesied in other places in the OT? Why do only two of the four Gospels mention it? This got me thinking about the solid textual and historical reasons that Christians have for believing this wild and beautiful story, so I wrote out a few notes in response, which might prove helpful to others, too.

While in strict historical terms, one cannot definitively rule out a possible interpretation of the virgin birth tradition as being an invention of early Christians in response to a misunderstanding of Isaiah 7:14, there are several quite good reasons for thinking otherwise:

 Old Testament foreshadowings: While only explicitly prophesied in Isaiah 7, there are several other possible allusions to the virgin birth throughout the Old Testament.

-   These begin as early as Genesis 3, in the “curse” narrative, where the prophesied “seed” who will crush the serpent’s head is said to be the seed of the woman. This is extremely unusual language; in almost every parallel construction referring to biological descent, reference is made to the seed of the man, not the woman (for cultural and, frankly, biological reasons—women didn’t have “seed”). To have the Messianic figure identified as the seed of the woman implies that the identity of his mother and the nature of his birth—presumably lacking a biologically male father-figure—will be exceptional.

-   In Jer. 31:22, as part of a longer section which refers to the coming of the new covenant, there is this intriguing line: “For the Lord has created something new on earth: a woman shall encompass a man.” [This is sometimes translated differently in modern versions, because the literal meaning of the Hebrew words makes almost no sense given the surrounding context (unless, that is, it’s a reference to the virgin birth), so some versions stretch the translation to try to make it fit other themes in Jeremiah.] The word for woman here is the term for the specifically biological/gynecological aspect of female identity, while the word for man is the word for a hero, a strong one, a mighty man. This appears to indicate, then, that in bringing forth his new covenant, God will do something new, something never before seen on earth, and that the miracle will center on a woman’s physical body encompassing (as in pregnancy) a mighty hero. If the virgin birth story is not true, then this is an exceptionally weird verse that makes little sense in its broader context; but if the virgin birth story is true, then it makes perfect sense and would seem to be a reference to that very event. Since this verse’s Messianic meaning is most clearly seen in the Hebrew, not in Greek translations like the Septuagint, the earliest Christians did not seize on this as a proof-text for the virgin birth; it went pretty much unnoticed until Jerome’s time in the early fifth century. This is important, because it means that here we have a plausible prophecy of the virgin birth that cannot be accused as having been a misunderstood passage that motivated early Christians to invent a virgin birth story for Jesus; rather, it stands as an independent witness to the plausibility of the traditional reading of Isaiah 7.

-   Other possible allusions to the virgin birth also exist: for example, the fact that Jesus’s progenitor David regularly uses references to his mother’s womb in his psalmic prophecies (rather than, as would be more culturally normal, references to his father’s house); and the Messianic “Servant” character in Isaiah 49 giving emphasis to divine action in fashioning him in the womb. None of these are definitive, of course, nor as clear as Isaiah 7, but there enough hints strung out throughout the OT canon that they give some support to the plausible reading of Isaiah 7 as pointing toward the virgin birth of Christ.

 Paul: While it’s true that Paul makes no direct reference to the virgin birth, to take this as evidence against the virgin birth is an argument from silence, so not particularly strong. An argument from silence is only compelling if there is silence where one would reasonably have expected something else. In Paul’s case, this is not so—Paul’s writings are not interested in providing a narrative of Jesus’s life—where they mention it, they focus only on the Lord’s Supper, the cross, and the resurrection (Paul also mention’s Jesus’s ancestral pedigree at least once, but there his main concern is about Jesus’s connection to the Davidic line). Paul’s silence would only be instructive if it came as part of a passage in which Paul was mentioning Jesus’s birth or his early life.

-   Many scholars think that Paul does make reference to it obliquely, even if not directly. In Gal. 4:4 he writes that Jesus was “born of a woman,” which would be a strange way of putting it in that culture unless he believed there was something exceptional with regard to Jesus’s parentage and birth.

-   Acts shows that Paul is also intimately acquainted with the evangelist Luke (and in a couple places he even quotes lines that match exactly with Luke’s Gospel), so given the prominence of Mary and the virgin birth in Luke’s writings it’s hard to imagine that Paul would somehow be unaware of that tradition.

-   Furthermore, the doctrine of the virgin birth is usually tied to a high Christology—i.e., seeing Jesus as divine. Some of Paul’s letters are usually counted as the earliest NT writings we have, and yet Paul’s Christology is remarkably high, which suggests that a high Christology was part of the early Christian movement from the beginning. The argument that Paul’s failure to mention the virgin birth says anything that would cast doubt on the traditional Christian view of Jesus is therefore highly questionable.

Gospels: Some skeptics will point out that the earliest Gospel, Mark, also has no narrative about the virgin birth (nor does John, which, although probably later, is the only “independent” Gospel account in the canon, while the other three lean on each other in various ways). Nevertheless, Mark seems to assume that knowledge on the part of the audience—in Mark 6:3, Jesus is called “the son of Mary,” which is a very unusual way of speaking of someone in that culture; reference would usually be made to the father. It’s also the only reference to Mary in Mark’s Gospel, which probably means that her place was so well-known in the early Christian community that no further comment was needed. And, like Paul, Mark seems to portray a higher Christology than one would expect if Jesus’s origin was merely human. John, for its part, has a wildly high Christology, and while it doesn’t reference the virgin birth directly, some take the verbal escalation in the conversation in John 8:41 as implying that the crowds had some questions about the legitimacy of Jesus’s parentage from Joseph (as one would expect if the virgin birth story were true), to say nothing of Jesus’s repeated insistence throughout the Gospel of John that he has come down from heaven and that God alone is his Father. Matthew and Luke, of course, form the main source material for the virgin birth narrative, and it’s worth pointing out that Luke tells us that some significant research went into the Gospel, and the content of chapters 1-2 suggests that one of Luke’s sources might very well have been Mary herself. All that to say, while the Gospels may not be as early as Paul’s earliest documents, they are still the earliest narratives of Christ’s life available, and all appear to testify to a unanimous conception in early Christianity that Jesus’s birth was miraculous and that he himself was divine.

Early Christian Unanimity: The other early Christian documents also appear to be unanimous in holding to the virgin birth narrative, which is not necessarily what one would expect if it were an invented story. If it had been invented, one would expect pushback from alternative traditions in the earliest sources, such as by James or Jude, who certainly would have been in a position to speak on the matter if an erroneous version of their own family’s history was being circulated. Yet James and Jude make no attempt to rebut the virgin birth narrative, nor even to cast doubt on Jesus’s identity in any way (an argument from silence, to be sure, but one where the silence may be telling). The immediate post-NT documents attest to this unanimity and deepen it, with specific references to Mary and the virgin birth in ways that affirm and expand upon the traditions in Matthew and Luke. This can be seen in the letters of Ignatius, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Odes of Solomon, the Protoevangelium of James, and the writings of Aristides, Melito, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus (all first- or second-century sources). To my knowledge, the earliest alternative narrative does not show up until the late second century, some hundred and fifty years after Christ, when the critic Celsus brings up a rumor that Jesus was fathered by a Roman soldier, Pantera. The lateness of that alternative theory, compared to the unanimity of the earlier Christian tradition, does not give it much of an air of credence. Further, the very fact that the alternative theory was a theory of illegitimacy, suggests that even the early skeptics accepted as common knowledge that there was something unusual about Jesus’s parentage. The first appearance of the more obvious alternative theory—that Jesus could have been Joseph’s biological son—comes into view just a few years later, when Irenaeus castigates the heretical Ebionites for holding that theory. (The Ebionites were a schismatic sect that appears to have broken away from the orthodox Jewish-Christian group known as Nazarenes; for their part, the Nazarenes are believed to have descended in continuity from the original Jerusalem church, and patristic writings show that they held a high Christology, including the virgin birth). All told, then, the evidence for compelling alternative theories of Jesus’s parentage in the earliest sources is severely lacking, and the unanimity of the traditional Christian reading is significant.

How Jesus Explains One of the Weirdest Stories in the Old Testament

(Note: This is an original piece of biblical exposition. I've written and spoken about it on a couple of occasions, but never in a full article like this. It's an interpretation that has not been noted before in the history of Christian exposition so far as I can tell, but I believe it holds up. I'm working toward producing an article on this topic for a peer-reviewed theological journal, and I'll certainly post here if that happens.)

Tucked away in Genesis 15 is one of the strangest stories in the Bible—a bizarre theophany in which God appears to Abram as a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch, together making their way down a blood-soaked avenue between bisected animal corpses. This story is easy to overlook, both for its strangeness and for the fact that it falls between the Melchizedek story on the one hand, and the Hagar/Ishmael story on the other, and so is obscured by better-known arcs in the Abrahamic narrative. But this curiously unsettling story is actually something quite important—something that, if we had eyes to see, would unveil for us an enacted parable of the gospel itself. Its imagery, passing before Abram’s wondering eyes some two millennia before the Incarnation, portrays in visible form the very ideas that later Christians would call upon to articulate the mystery of Christ. The strange story of Abram’s covenant shows the gospel of Jesus Christ, painted in terms that would later find their echo in the great creed of Nicaea.

To careful readers of Scripture, the importance of Genesis 15 is plain to see. It ritually establishes the covenant between God and Abram, and it includes repetitions of the divine promises: to give Abram an heir and possession of the land of Canaan, as well as to redeem his descendants from their future bondage in Egypt.

Truth be told, some of the story’s strangeness finds easy explanation in our knowledge of the biblical world. While the rite which is portrayed seems both curious and macabre to modern readers, it is not unknown. God asks Abram to take one of each of the main kinds of sacrificial animals—bull, goat, and sheep (as well as some doves)—and to cut their bodies in two, arranging the bisected sections so that they are lined up on opposite sides of each other. This creates a blood-soaked pathway between the corpses.

To ancient readers of this passage, this would be a recognizable scene. We have evidence of a similar (though much later rite) described in Jeremiah 34:18-20, as well as contemporary attestations from elsewhere in the ancient Near East. This was the act of “cutting a covenant,” the solemn rite in which the two parties of a covenant would pledge themselves to the covenant stipulations. Each party to the covenant was to walk down the bloody pathway, with the implication being that if either party broke those stipulations, the penalty was the very one depicted by the outpoured blood at their feet.

This brings us back to Genesis 15, in which Abram has set up the scene of the covenant rite just as God requested it, and then—presumably waiting for God to show up so they could proceed with the ritual—Abram falls into a deep sleep, and a great darkness comes upon him. These are clues that the theophany is at hand: the deep sleep echoes Adam’s deep sleep as God was bringing forth Eve from his side, and the darkness foretells a similar darkness that enshrouds Mount Sinai when the presence of God is there. When the narrative of the ritual scene resumes, we come to the strangest part of all: “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between the pieces” (Gen. 15:17, ESV).

There are two unexpected and curious things about this. First, there’s the fact that Abram is not a party in the covenant rite. He does not walk the bloodied pathway. And second, the symbols themselves are bizarre: a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch. What could this mean? Any good set of commentaries will tell you that the basic symbology of these items—both related to fire—show them to be a theophany. Fire is a frequent image of God’s presence throughout the biblical narratives, from the pillar of fire in Exodus to the tongues of flame at Pentecost. The fire pot and the torch are thus both meant to represent God.

The fact that there are two such symbols seems to indicate that God is taking the place of both parties in this covenant rite. Remember, it was supposed to be the two persons entering the covenant with one another who would pass between the animal corpses: in this case, God and Abram. But instead, it is God and God, even as Abram and his descendants are declared to be the heirs of the covenant promise. And here we come to the first wondrous insight, which thunders with the message of the gospel: by playing both roles, God is pledging to take upon himself the punishment for any transgression of the covenant. Should Abram or his heirs violate this covenant of promise in any way, it is not Abram on whom the penalty will descend, but it will fall on God himself, for he is one who walked the avenue of sacrifice in Abram’s place. The punishment that should have fallen on the rebellious covenant-heirs will fall instead on God. This is nothing less than the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Yet we still have to reckon with the specificity of the images involved. God could have appeared in a plainer and more obvious form—say, as two pillars of flame—but instead he chooses a smoking fire pot and a burning torch. Why? These are two common household objects, which everyone in the ancient world would recognize. The element of fire certainly binds the two together, but there is another aspect by which these images are related: the burning torch is drawn from the fire pot’s flame. The first image, that of the fire pot, is the central source of fire for an entire household, used for cooking and heat and always kept alive in a bed of glowing embers. Every other fire-bearing implement, in one way or another, draws its flame from there. The torch, then, shares the very same nature as the fire pot does—the flame itself—but it is customarily lit from the fire pot, and not the other way around.

What we have here, then, are two divine images, which share the exact same nature in all of its qualities, but one is the Begetter and the other is the Begotten. This is not only the way that the New Testament describes the relationship between the Father and the Son; it is also the way that the Nicene Creed articulates the divine nature of Christ: “Light from Light.” It is perhaps no accident that the very function of a torch was as a bearer of light, bringing the flame from the fire pot’s heart out into the darkness of a benighted world. The mystery of the Trinity, which we still speak forth in the words of Nicaea, written seventeen hundred years ago, was played out before the patriarch’s eyes all the way back in the pages of Genesis.

Come back once more to the story of Abram’s covenant, then. We not only have a double theophany, in which God himself takes Abram’s spot. We can now describe the scene in even greater detail: the person of the Godhead who takes Abram’s spot in the ritual is none other than the Son of God. Here God the Father and God the Son walk the covenant pathway together, pledging themselves forever to Abram and his heirs, and it is the Son, moving second through the pieces, who assigns the penalty to himself should any of the human parties fail. Jesus pledges to take the punishment that should have fallen on us. This is a passion-play of Calvary, acted out by God himself two thousand years before the fact. Is it a strange story? Certainly. But even in its strangeness, we catch clear-eyed glimpses of a stranger story still to come: that the eternal Son of God, the Light from the Father’s own Light, would bear the curse of our darkness so that we might inherit the promises of God.

Bible Study Series on the Book of Revelation

This page offers a new Bible study resource, with links to videos of studies in the Book of Revelation, as originally offered to my local church. These videos are not polished or high-level productions; they are simply the recorded livestreams of my in-person midweek Bible studies. With Facebook no longer hosting archived recordings of livestreams for more than a month, I needed a new place to offer these files, and demand was high for this particular series. (The first three chapters of Revelation are unrepresented in the videos below because those Facebook files had already been removed by the time I realized I needed to download them, but I've uploaded a few old audio sermons on those passages to represent that material.) This page will continue populating with new links to Bible study videos on a weekly or biweekly basis, until the series is complete.

Audio sermons on Rev. 1-3 (from a different sermon series of mine): 

Rev. 1; Rev. 2 (Letter 1); Rev. 2 (Letter 2); Rev. 2 (Letter 3); Rev. 2 (Letter 4); Rev. 3 (Letter 5); Rev. 3 (Letter 6); Rev. 3 (Letter 7)

Revelation 4

Revelation 5

Rev. 6 - Eschatology Intro

(Eschatology Handout)

Revelation 6

(Whiteboard display)

Revelation 7

Revelation 8

Revelation 9

Revelation 10-11

Revelation 11-12

Revelation 13

Revelation 14

Revelation 15-16

Revelation 17

Revelation 18

Revelation 19

Revelation 20 (the Millennium)

(Millennium handout & whiteboard display)

Revelation 20 (Final Judgment)

(Whiteboard display)

Revelation 21

Revelation 22

On the Unity of the Church

This essay is a follow-up to my previous series on the question of whether there is only "one true church" from among the Christian denominations (and if you haven't gone back and read it, I'd encourage you to do so). The apparent conclusion of that series answered the question in the negative: The claims of various denominations to be the "one true church," to the exclusion of all others, do not seem to stand up to the light of careful scrutiny with regard to their historical, biblical, or experiential arguments. Now, there's still some openness to that conclusion--it might the case, for instance, that the issue isn't a simple black-and-white question, and that there might be one church, above all others, that possesses the fullness of God's grace, whereas other churches only cling to a partial inheritance of that blessing. While that possibility remains, I've yet to see any significant evidence toward that end, and so I maintain my skepticism for now.

However, in this essay I'd like to flip it around and make the case that the answer to the central question--Is there only one true church?--should actually be Yes. There is only one church, and it is the Body of Christ, composed of all faithful believers everywhere. And further, our visible divisions ought not to be an obstacle to our fundamental unity. We are mystically united in Christ, through the Holy Spirit, and we have significant ways of giving practical evidence of that unity here and now.

The argument for the metaphysical unity of all Christians in the mystical Body of Christ is not difficult to understand, and it has been the fundamental conception of the church in some denominations (like Anglicanism) for centuries. It simply follows the Apostle Paul's argument in Eph. 4:4-6:

"There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all."

Essentially, since the Holy Spirit is undivided, then if he indwells one's church, the true believers in that congregation are part of the undivided church. Since there is only one Christ, there is only one Body of Christ; and if we are members of it, then we are part of the one true church. And since the Holy Spirit gives evidence of being present and active across the whole swath of orthodox Christian denominations (as argued in the closing section of my previous essays), all such churches should be regarded as part of the one true church. We're basically just doing the same thing that Peter did when he recognized the Spirit's work in Cornelius's family--since God has accepted them, how can we maintain a division that keeps them apart from us?

A critic from one of the ancient apostolic churches might argue at this point: "Isn't the visible unity of the church important, though? The early church was single and undivided, a unity held together both by shared faith and a network of offices established by the apostles, held in complete communion with one another." This appeal to history does say something valuable, but it's not as robust an argument as the critic assumes. There exists a counterexample that calls the whole premise of the objection into question. You see, we actually have evidence of a part of the ancient church, recognized as being authentically Christian, but which appears to have maintained an entirely separate life from the "Great Church" tradition (the tradition that eventually became the Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches). That is to say: we have evidence of a separate "denomination" existing in early Christianity. This was the Nazarene sect (not the modern Church of the Nazarene), essentially a Messianic-Jewish tradition which persisted across the first four centuries of Christian life. References to it are sparse because the group appears to have been small, but recent scholarship has revealed that the early church fathers regarded it as separate, but not heretical. It was a direct outgrowth of the early Jewish followers of Jesus, and while it may have been the same community from which the Ebionite heresy eventually emerged, a significant orthodox remnant of that community faithfully maintained a truly Christian set of doctrines. It had a robust Jewish-Christian theology, entirely acceptable to the wider church, yet it did not have any known aspects of visible communion with the Great Church tradition beyond their shared doctrine. Differences in language and culture, together with their existence in geographically isolated areas on the margins, appear to have kept them effectively separate. So, yes, there is historical evidence of a separate-but-equally-the-true-church denomination, existing from the earliest days of the faith, until they were gradually absorbed back into the larger structure after the public Christianization of society in the fourth century, probably reintegrated as part of the culturally-similar Syriac churches. 

Even aside from the Nazarenes, you could argue that a form of denominationalism has always been a part of Christianity from the very start, when linguistic and cultural divisions were causing factions in the Jerusalem church. There are evident differences between the Hellenistic form of Christianity and the Jewish form as early as Acts 6, and these are repeated in Acts 15, Acts 21, and in the curious disjunctions between Paul's letters and that of James. There is no overt hostility or excommunication of one another, but there is clearly a development of different ways of expressing and practicing the Christian faith. Beyond the New Testament period, these gaps persist. One can see major divisions in practice between Greek-speaking and Syriac/Aramaic church traditions; other similar fractures in culture accrue in regions which spoke still different languages: Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Georgian, Latin, and so on. These differences weren't just issues of style, either: they affected major questions of doctrinal practice. The Syriac liturgy of Addai and Mari, for example--recognized even by the Roman Catholic Church as an accepted and authentic form of ancient Christian worship--has no words of institution in its Eucharistic prayer, which in any other context is considered an indispensable element of Catholic practice. The culturally-different churches of early Christianity quickly developed their own ways of worshiping, which, while recognizably Christian, differed in some non-trivial respects from the way Christians worshiped elsewhere. All that to say, the argument that denominations did not exist in early Christianity is a little too much of a blanket statement to match the truth of the matter. The roots of denominational division were often clearly visible long before any official schisms took place.

OK, one might say--even if it's true that we Christians all share some kind of metaphysical unity by our incorporation in the mystical Body of Christ, isn't our lack of visible unity still a tragic thing? Well, yes and no. Certainly, the hatreds and persecutions that have arisen over division in the Body of Christ are tragic. But I'd like to argue that if we put aside the polemics for a moment, to pause and to "hear what the Spirit says to the churches," we'll begin to see with fresh eyes the great harvest of the fruit of God's work among our sister denominations and the beauty of our diversity. I also want to suggest that we have ways of demonstrating visible unity close at hand, for anyone willing to use them. Three in particular suggest themselves to me: recognizing Eucharistic unity, credal unity, and the unity of brotherly love.

First, Eucharistic unity. This one may come as a bit of a surprise, since it's usually listed as one of the main things that divide Christians. We squabble about our different beliefs regarding what is really happening in the elements of communion. Are they actually transforming into the flesh and blood of Jesus? Or is Jesus somehow spiritually present (but not physically) in the bread and wine? Or are they a purely symbolic memorial of his sacrifice? This was one of the great fracture-points of the Western Christian tradition, and it remains a sore point to this day. 

It's not an unimportant question. Indeed, in many ways it stands at the absolute center of our corporate Christian life. But as I've reflected on the question over the course of my life, I've gradually come to the conclusion that we're all coming at it backwards. What we believe about the Eucharist will certainly frame our devotion around its practice, but is our belief about what happens actually the operative agent of what occurs? We all have faith in God's miraculous power at work in his church, and we practice the Eucharist as scripture and our traditions have handed it down to us. It seems to me that under those conditions, it will be what God intends it to be. If God's intention was for it to be a symbol of Christ's sacrifice, then that is what it actually is, even in Catholic churches that like to imagine there's a metaphysical transformation going on. Conversely, if God intends for it to be the literal presence of the flesh and blood of Christ, why wouldn't that actually be what happens, even in a Baptist church, seeing as they are instituting the service of communion exactly as Jesus and the apostle Paul commanded it to be done? Granted, there's no prayer of epiclesis in the New Testament, and so that part is absent from the Baptist rite, but as we've seen, even the omission of the actual words of institution in some ancient liturgies is not an insurmountable hurdle. Might it not be the case, if transubstantiation were God's intent, that a faithfully orthodox church, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, would receive the efficacious change of the elements as a result of their usage--being exactly faithful to the New Testament prescription--whether they were aware of that change or not? I'll admit that I don't know for sure what is happening behind the scenes in communion, and that the early traditions are generally more sacramental than the normal Baptist conception, but I don't think the theological logic of any of that means that God's gifts are not actually present in the precise way he intended, even in a Baptist church like mine. There's at least an off chance that we'll get to heaven and find out that our communion has been the true flesh and blood of Christ the whole time (or, on the other hand, that the Catholics will find out that it has been a symbolic memorial the whole time). 

In short, I think the differences in our perceptions of communion do not actually add up to a difference in our actual reception of communion, and so our mutual participation in the highest rite of the faith ought to be a sign of our unity, accomplishing in each one of us everything that God intends we should receive from the rite. Indeed, this idea of the Eucharist as a sign of Christian unity is at the center of the first post-apostolic interpretation of the rite. In the ancient Christian text known as the Didache ("The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," and repeated in the later Apostolic Constitutions), there's a very early Eucharist liturgy which, interestingly, makes no claims about any of the things that later generations obsess over, like symbolism-vs-transubstantiation in regard to the body and blood. It includes neither the biblical words of institution nor a prayer of epiclesis. Instead, this is what it says (and it's worth considering it in full):

"Now concerning the Eucharist, give thanks this way. First, concerning the cup: 'We thank thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David Thy servant, which You made known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory forever.' And concerning the broken bread: 'We thank Thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which You made known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory forever. Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills [i.e., in the form of grain], and was gathered together and became one, so let Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy kingdom; for Thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ forever.' But let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist, unless they have been baptized into the name of the Lord; for concerning this also the Lord has said, 'Give not that which is holy to the dogs.' But after you are filled, give thanks this way: 'We thank Thee, holy Father, for Thy holy name which You did cause to tabernacle in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality, which You made known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory forever. Thou, Master almighty, did create all things for Thy name's sake; You gave food and drink to men for enjoyment, that they might give thanks to Thee; but to us You did freely give spiritual food and drink and life eternal through Thy Servant. Before all things we thank Thee that You are mighty; to Thee be the glory forever. Remember, Lord, Thy Church, to deliver it from all evil and to make it perfect in Thy love, and gather it from the four winds, sanctified for Thy kingdom which Thou have prepared for it; for Thine is the power and the glory forever. Let grace come, and let this world pass away. Hosanna to the Son of David! If anyone is holy, let him come; if anyone is not so, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen'" (Didache 9-10).

Based on this tradition--likely the earliest post-apostolic Eucharist liturgy available to us--the first Christians were not much concerned with the question of whether the bread and cup actually became the body and blood of Christ (and if it was a point of doctrine, it was apparently not one requiring an emphasis in the ritual itself). If it leans in any direction on that question, it appears to be more toward a low-church conception than a high-church one, but it's left largely undefined--the closest we get is a description of the elements as "spiritual food and drink," which could be taken either as symbolic or sacramental language. What does jump out clearly from the text, though, is an emphasis on communion as an expression of the church's unity. The beautiful imagery of the individual grains from fields on the hillsides all coming together to form one loaf is presented as the great hope for Christian unity and the ultimate redemption of the church. It would be well to reacquire this early point of emphasis in communion. Just like disparate grains scattered across the hills, the various denominations of Christianity are separated by wide gulfs of culture, language, and differences in style. And yet, by the miraculous work of God's Holy Spirit, we are made one in Christ, just like the grains coming together to form one loaf. I believe that our common practice of the Eucharist is, in fact, one of the very things that binds us together, far more so than we have ever perceived. Christ's command to take, eat, and drink--a command given to "all of you"--has taken us, this wayward rabble of wildly different disciples--and made us one communion in his Body.

If Eucharistic unity is the first form of practical unity which lies open for us to recognize, another one is creedal unity. Just as in the first great church age, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed can be the irenicon it was always meant to be. It remains, to this day, the standard summary of Christian dogma on Trinitarian doctrine and Christology, agreed upon by all. You might ask, "Well, what about non-creedal types (like you Baptists), who insist that Scripture alone is the only rule of faith?" It's a fair question, but it misunderstands the doctrinal position of the non-creedal churches. Most of these, in fact, have come around to a recognition that creeds are necessary tools, even if we don't call them that (we tend to call them "Statements of Faith"), and if you apply for a job at a non-creedal evangelical ministry, you might be surprised to find that you are being asked to assent to a Statement of Faith (that is, to a creed). I've lived my whole life in the evangelical world, and never ran into anyone who disagreed with any single line in the classic Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. If they did, they wouldn't be an evangelical anymore, nor really even a Christian. The creed is a summary of core biblical doctrine, and so us Bible-only types recognize the biblical truth within it and generally have no trouble agreeing with it.

The creed also remains a source of unity for the apostolic churches and communions, despite their differences. Major creedal ruptures tended to happen after the fourth century (in which the creed was produced), so it still stands as a representative of the more-or-less "undivided" age of Christianity. Even later disputes that focus on the actual text of the creed, like the Catholic/Orthodox feud over the Filioque, are potentially easily overcome once we explain exactly what we mean by the lines we confess (for example, the Orthodox can say that they are referring to the manner of the Spirit's eternal procession from the Father; the Catholics can say they are referring to the historical procession of the Spirit in the divine economy as it played out in the Gospels and Acts). Such disagreements really do, it turns out, fall under the much-abused category of mere semantics, despite each side's continued declamations against the opposing one. 

My suggestions, then, are to frame our unity on these two aspects that really do matter to us all: the rite that stands at the center of our worship, and the statement of faith that serves as the classic exposition of our doctrine. That's not to say that we have to start doing these things together, as the ecumenical movement has so often tried to do (with relatively little effect), but simply that we can recognize our unity in these things. To be a member of the one true church is to receive God's purpose for us in the rite of the Eucharist and to confess together the biblical truths found in the creed. A Nicene church that practices the Eucharist by (at the very least) an obedience to the form as mandated in the New Testament should, in my opinion, be regarded as truly the church of Jesus Christ. This doesn't require a formal, institutional union, but a recognition of mutual brotherhood in the communion of the faith. My third practical suggestion follows on this: to seek a unity of love with one another, foregoing the fever dream of full institutional unity for something that is, quite probably, closer to what Christ commanded. The rule of love is what Jesus points to as the center of our unity: "Love one another as I have loved you."

But what about Jesus's prayer for Christian unity in John 17, praying that we would be one as he and the Father are one? Doesn't that imply a deep, real, abiding unity that goes beyond merely loving one another? Well, it depends on how you frame the matter. I would say first that there's nothing "mere" about loving one another. Further, given my prior arguments, I must insist that there already is a deep, real, abiding unity across the churches, because of the Holy Spirit's abiding presence. We really are one, in the deepest and truest sense.  One day the veil will be lifted from our eyes, and we will see just how deeply we were a part of one another this whole time. But I would also say one more thing: I think we're mangling the analogy in Jesus's prayer if we take it to mean that unity-in-the-manner-of-the-Trinity means a full visible and institutional unity, such that there would be only one "denomination." After all, it's an indispensable point of Trinitarian doctrine that there is a real distinction of persons in the Godhead--they are all God, but they are not each other. The Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Father, though both are fully and undividedly God. To interpret Jesus's analogy as implying a full institutional unity of the church appears to make a serious error of Trinitarian theology, dissolving the distinction of the persons into the unity of the divine nature. A more natural reading would suggest that the various denominations can remain themselves, as they are, while acknowledging the underlying metaphysical unity we already hold together in the Holy Spirit (thus, as the Father and Jesus are one: distinct in person, united in essence). The outward and visible sign of our unity would then be our love for one another, which is itself the defining quality of the Trinity's inter-relationships, the radiance that suffuses their union. And again, this is no "mere" loving one another, as if it's somehow a lower standard than institutional unity. If anything, it is probably a great deal harder. We Baptists need to learn to love our Catholic brothers and sisters, and the Orthodox need to learn to love the Pentecostals, and the Anglicans need to learn to love the Methodists, and so on. It won't be easy, but if my personal experience is of any value, it's more than possible.

As a closing thought, I would direct readers back to an essay I wrote years ago, on "The Beauty of Denominationalism." It strikes me that Jesus chose not just one successor, but twelve--twelve men with very different personalities, who all had to figure out how to love each other and get along together. This is our calling, too--our life as the church won't be made better by absorbing evangelicalism into Roman Catholicism, any more than it would have been had all the other disciples given up their identity, authority, and mission, so that Peter could just do everything for everyone. Rather, what we see in the apostolic missions of the book of Acts is that Peter and the other disciples, along with Stephen, Philip, Paul, Barnabas, and James, all exercise their own functions from the strengths of their differing personal qualities, and the whole church is strengthened as a result. I see the same thing in the panoply of denominations: we're better for having the Lutherans' untiring drumbeat on the refrain of grace, the Reformed emphasis on the glory of God's sovereignty, the Pentecostals' joy and expectation of the Spirit's work, the Anglicans' commitment to the beauty of moderation, the Anabaptists' patient adherence to the rule of peace, the Catholics' delight in the communion of saints, and Orthodoxy's rich vision of personal sanctification. If we were all subsumed into one institution, even if allowance was made for some differences in practice and culture, it would necessarily result in a gradual adjustment toward uniformity and a loss of some of these distinctives (a case in point is the way that Uniate churches--formerly Eastern Orthodox communions which joined Roman Catholicism--are now regarded by their old Orthodox family). An institutional uniformity that makes us less than what we are, I'm afraid, could be a tremendous loss to the whole Body of Christ. 

This isn't an argument for relativism, by the way--I'm not saying that Baptists and Catholics can both be right on everything, because that would just be nonsense. Take the question of the scope of the Pope's authority, for example. One of us is likely right, and one is likely wrong. No, this is an argument for recognizing that where God has not seen fit to grant us abundant evidence for settling a few secondary theological issues beyond the primary core we hold in common, the best response is charity for our differences and a commitment to loving each other in the midst of them. That's what brothers and sisters do.

This, ultimately, is the reality that I inhabit. I've fallen in love with the whole church, and I won't give any of it up. I have roles as both a Baptist and, weirdly enough, also as an Anglican (yes, really), and even as a monastic oblate in a 1500-year-old Catholic institution. These roles are not mutually contradictory--I am a Christian, a member of the mystical Body of Christ, and thus I am an heir of the whole church tradition, every part of it. Those who willfully dispossess themselves of fellow members of that Body merely end up impoverishing themselves, because we really are one in Christ.