A nativity scene Photo: Eusebius@Commons / flickr CC
Born of a virgin?
Beth Allen offers a personal response
A physical impossibility! How could anyone possibly believe that? Why would anyone even want to believe that? Well, yes, it is what Friends used to call ‘the season the world calls Christmas’ but, surely, in the twenty-first century we don’t have to look at rubbish like this – why is the Friend even printing an article with that headline?
Why did the friends of Jesus in the early third and fourth centuries worry and think about this impossible thing? We can’t just say, ‘They were all gullible, pre-scientific and deluded’. The insight that they tried to preserve by insisting on this element in Christian thought was their conviction that God occasionally takes a creative, new and dynamic initiative and that the Divine acted powerfully in the life of Jesus. They expressed this by a strong assertion that God started the life of Jesus. I hope that Friends can unite with this underlying conviction about how the Spirit works, even if we would express it in different imagery. When we sit in Meeting we say we ‘wait upon God’, from the old Quaker phrase, we centre down and listen for the creative and recreative spark, for God’s initiative. Some of the actions we have taken in the last 350 years have been totally new initiatives, which have been of benefit to the world. We know from experience that, as we open ourselves to the Spirit and to each other, new life comes. Can we use our experience to illuminate the understanding behind the old story?
Creation
The Gospel of John is often called the Quaker gospel because the writer echoes so many of our insights and attitudes. Perhaps these interpretations of the Spirit’s work came in deep meditative worship, as insight and ministry comes to us in our quietness? John does not bother with Jesus’ birth – he starts earlier: ‘In the beginning was the Word…’ He begins with God’s creative action. He describes the children of God, ‘who were born, not of blood, or the will of the flesh, or the will of man, but of God’. John’s word ‘born’ does not mean physical birth but the inner rebirth that the first Christians, and the first Quakers, knew in themselves. So he too holds firmly to God’s initiative as the beginning of the new way of life that Jesus started off.
In arguing like this for an understanding of the reasons for an apparently peculiar belief, I do not accept every interpretation others have put on it. We still need to test our thinking and our understanding of what is, after all, another person’s insight. We can usefully test strange religious language and ideas in two ways. First, we ask: what concept of God does this idea or language imply? Is the concept adequate, is it big enough, does it meet our highest ideals? And second: does this idea or language about the Divine lead me and others to treat other people and our world better? Does it help us to live better lives?
So, to caricature, if we say ‘God cannot work through children or women’, we are working with a limited concept of God. We will be inclined to ignore or belittle the potential gifts of more than half of humanity and to disrespect them. Similarly, if we were to say or think, even unconsciously, ‘Nobody really understood God until Quakers came along, other people can’t understand the Spirit,’ this also implies a very limited concept, a God who did not really do much in the world until 1652. Thinking like this also leads us to patronise others. If virginity becomes overly important we limit our concept of the Divine in a different way. Our image of God reduces, so that God becomes unable to cope with the mess and confusion of our human condition, and we devalue sexuality.
The season
Within British Quakers, I have heard some of us explain Mary’s virginity as a symbol of the untouched capacity, whole and holy, within each of us – our potential ability to respond to the Divine. Others are happy to accept the whole story and consider that, for God, nothing is impossible – and they are free to think this. We do not have a creed of nonbelief! Other Friends read modern scholars, such as Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, and are content to regard the nativity stories as poetic myth. Some like the picture of Mary and Joseph with a brood of children, growing up all together in Nazareth. And many Friends happily carol their way through December and are relaxed as to the literal meanings. Some of us are delighted that, as Friends, we can give up all the burdens of the season – cards, presents, the lot – and some put its meaning into practice at Quaker Open Christmas. We can all come, in peace and quietness, to the creative spark within, which calls us to love each other in all our variety and to follow that dynamic, creative, love out into the world.
