"Everything that we know about Christ or experience with him is built up from below . . . The God who became man at Christmas and who has come to us on the front lines wants us to receive him as a man."

                                    Helmut Thielicke, I Believe

The Creed

Chapter Four

"who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the virgin Mary,"

"qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria virgine,

         "For He who is the only Son in heaven is by consequence the only Son on earth, and was uniquely born, born as no other ever was or can be."

                                    Rufinus, A Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed         

         "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."

                                    John 1: 14

         Because the birth of their child is to parents so often the occasion of unmitigated joy, new mothers and fathers often refer to it as the "miracle" of birth.  Given the enormous happiness of the event, we easily overlook their verbal imprecision.  Indeed we hardly notice it.  This is simply how new parents talk.  Their words and the joy from which it springs invite us to join the celebration, and we do.  In one case, however, the spontaneous language of parenthood was completely justified, for that birth was in fact miraculous, and to that occasion of great joy the creed now turns.
         As did its antecedent, this article of the creed directs our attention away from philosophical speculation to a historical figure, one who lived and breathed and walked among us, to Emmanuel.  This article of the creed is a statement of what happened when “the Word became flesh,” but not of how it happened.  The creed wisely and discreetly declines to dabble in the gynecology of the incarnation.  It refuses, for example, to explain away the first Christmas as an instance of either human parthenogenesis or asexual reproduction similar to that found in lower forms of life.  It says simply and truly that Jesus Christ was "conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary." 
         Furthermore, the creed does not make the artificial distinction many later theologians want to make between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.  In the creed, the Jesus of history is the Christ of faith.  If the Christ of faith is not the Jesus of history, he is a mere fiction.  The sooner we forget that fictitious figure, the better off we shall be.  This article, in other words, is the second in the creed's series of historical affirmations about Jesus Christ.  “We are,” Karl Barth says, “concerned with the story of a life” (Barth, Dogmatics in Outline 95).  In the article before us, we are concerned particularly with the beginning of that life.
         But that human life, though real, is by no means ordinary.  In Jesus Christ, we see not the conjunction of two human lives (that of the mother with that of the father) into one, but rather the conjoining in one person of two natures, both the human and the divine.  If Jesus had been God only, He would have remained what God always had been, and always must be, to fallen men -- terrifying; of that fact Isaiah had shattering first hand experience (Isa. 6: 1-5).  Had Jesus been God only, people doubtless would have fled from his holy presence.  But He was not and they did not.  The terrifying holiness of God was clothed in human flesh, hidden as it were behind human nature, and thus made to seem more approachable.  By contrast, however, had He been merely a man, He never could have spanned the gap between God and us, or given us access to our estranged Heavenly Father, for the Son could never give what He Himself does not have, namely, metaphysical access to divinity.  If he is not God, he cannot bring us to God. 
         This article of the creed clearly indicates that Jesus Christ did not have a merely human origin and that He cannot be explained simply in terms of his biological relationships.  He was conceived not from below only, but also from above, from God.  The incarnation, in other words, is something completely new.  By it God Himself breaks in upon human history, and He does so in an act of divine intervention, not merely as a natural development from within the creation.  His entrance into human history is not a story that begins in Bethlehem, but in Heaven.  In other words, Jesus has no human father; He was born by the free act of God and by the gracious will that prompted it.  Furthermore, in Jesus Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and his conception by the Holy Spirit makes that fact possible.  Consequently, Jesus Christ did not become the Son of God at some point in his earthly life; that is something He always was, from the very beginning.  Thus, "when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman" (Gal. 4: 4).  He came as rain to a parched land.  This redemptive invasion of earth by Heaven, of fallen humanity by sinless Deity, this taking upon Himself the bitter constraints of the human condition, is the central and pivotal event in human history, what Wordsworth once called our tainted nature’s solitary boast, that God should deign to become a man.  In the incarnation, something new came into this broken and diseased world, and it was not merely our medicine; it was the Doctor Himself.  In our reflection upon this historical event, we can clearly discern the finality of the incarnation, the zenith of the revelation of God, which is Christ.  God Himself has been here; no brighter light is possible.
         Looked at from a slightly different angle, the incarnation denoted here in the creed is the redemptive conjunction of a fallen and sinful race, on the one hand, with the God who rules the world in righteousness, on the other.  The incarnation is, so to speak, the marriage of heaven and earth.  As theologians have frequently observed, it cost more to redeem us than to create us.  Unlike creation, redemption (so far as we can tell) required incarnation, suffering, death, and resurrection.  For that purpose, and for that reason, God became a child and that child became a man, a man who willingly bore the sins of the world upon his shoulders.  In its characteristically concise fashion, the Apostles’ Creed simply states that the incarnation occurred.  The Nicene Creed, by contrast, also specifies its purpose, which was "for us men and for our salvation."
         The Apostles' Creed teaches us about the incarnation by means of two brief but pregnant phrases:  It says that Jesus Christ was "conceived by the Holy Spirit" and was "born of the virgin Mary."  Together, these two phrases indicate the dual nature of Christ's earthly existence, which was both human ("born of the virgin Mary") and divine ("conceived by the Holy Spirit").  In other words, in these two phrases the creed affirms the two-sided beginning of Jesus Christ's life and work among us, his divine conception and his human birth. 
         Some commentators, embarrassed by the divine conception and virgin birth of Jesus, assert that the ancient Church invented such notions because it realized that Jesus was so extraordinary that any normal origin seemed for Him to be completely inadequate.  Such commentators, rather than courageously and forthrightly denying the divine conception and virgin birth in the face of both the biblical and historical evidence, and rather than offering their view as it really is --  a form of a secular skepticism -- simply fabricate a third path.  They transform a biological miracle into a theological one.  The miracle, they say, takes place not in the body of the woman Mary, but in the imagination of ancient believers.  These commentators, knowingly or not, are playing theological sleight of hand.  They want the doctrine but not the fact of the virgin birth -- as if one could properly and effectively divorce theology from history, or vice versa. 
         This remarkable event must not be diminished, or somehow made more palatable to modern sensibilities, by sacrificing it to the gods of modernism, metaphor or myth, as if it never really happened.  The creed means precisely what it says:  When God sent his Son into the world for the purpose of our redemption and reconciliation, that entrance was accomplished in a special way.  According to the best and most ancient evidence, one simply cannot account for Jesus by the ordinary processes of human generation.  He has an origin from both inside and outside human ancestry.  If you want accurately and adequately to explain Jesus, you must make careful reference to the will and work of his Heavenly Father.  Knowing as we do how Christ's unique life was lived, and about the great triumph of its end, we are not surprised to learn that the Son of God entered human history by virtue of the same supernatural power by which he left it.  Together this miraculous beginning and its correspondingly miraculous end confirm that this man of history was not merely a man.  He was a man and more.
         Put differently, first century Judaism and Christianity were by no means favorable to wholesale adoption of pagan myths for their own purposes.  Rather, they were interested in, and intent upon, hearing the truth of God from God, in obeying it, and in passing it on to others; not in permitting others to pass their paganism on to them.  The birth of Jesus, therefore, must not be confused with those of mythical figures like Heracles, Perseus, or Bellerophon, in whose stories one finds occasional similarities with Christ's nativity.  The nature of the case requires that we not consider these accounts all of the same class.  They must not all be treated equally or all dismissed with a wave of the hand.  Unlike the birth accounts in pagan mythology, the two accounts of Christ’s virgin birth in the gospels are quite temperate and restrained.  They also have this remarkable characteristic:  They seem to come from the historical actors themselves.  That Jesus had no earthly father (or that his father was not Joseph, at any rate), of course, would be known first hand only by two people -- Joseph and Mary -- and we have preserved for us in the gospels an account from both their points of view, as it were.  The first, in Matthew, is from the perspective of Joseph and deals humbly with the entire incident in only about 8 verses.  The second account, in Luke, is from the perspective of Mary.  The intriguing thing about the second, as many biblical scholars have noted, is that it is far more Jewish in language and flavor than the rest of Luke’s gospel and might possibly have come from Mary herself, whom Luke easily could have known.  In fact, Luke indicates that his book has its origin in eyewitness reports (Luke 1: 1, 2).
         By its affirmation that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit, the creed here echoes something that it taught in its first article, that God is a creator, that He is the maker and giver of life.  Just as the Holy Spirit was active in the creation of the world, brooding over it and, so to speak, impregnating it with life from God (as John Milton depicted so memorably in Paradise Lost), even so the Spirit was active in the world's re-creation, overshadowing a young Jewish maiden and impregnating her with life from above.  In the first instance creation took place on a cosmic scale; in the second it took place within Mary only, though this time for the purpose of redemption.  In both cases, however, the same divine love was at work -- in the former instance to make our world, in the latter to remake it.  In the beginning, woman was formed from the first Adam.  In the new beginning, the second Adam was formed from a woman.  In this light, therefore, we must recognize that creation itself is invaluable, especially as a signpost pointing us toward God and as a divinely ordained means of reconciliation:  What comes from God, rightly used, leads back to Him again.  Thus, the divine conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit must be seen neither as anti-matter nor anti-sex.  It stands not in opposition to matter or to sex, but to sin and to its effects.  The incarnation is accomplished on behalf of the created order, not against it.
         Belief in the virgin birth of Christ has been a characteristic of the Christian faith from the beginning.  Consequently, its religious significance has been a wellspring of inspiration for both devotion and art for many centuries.  The virgin birth has been the historical and theological impetus behind some of our culture's most enduring and arresting expressions of beauty and piety, whether by painter, poet, sculptor or saint.  To attack this doctrine so strongly and vehemently, therefore, as so many moderns now do, might well say more about us and the sex-saturated and sex-crazed age in which we live than it does about the virgin birth itself.  After all, we are defined as precisely by our doubts as by our beliefs.  Because our age has made a god of sex, and because we dislike having our gods sidestepped or avoided, our age's most flagrant theological doubts seem to center on the virgin birth that characterizes the beginning of Christ's life on earth, not on the resurrection that characterizes its end.  But this was not always so, for the miraculous birth of Jesus is as old and enduring as the gospels themselves, being told us twice by the four evangelists, and having been enshrined as a fundamental part of nearly every creed of stature from the second century onwards.  Interestingly, Luke's version, which comes from his own careful study of previous accounts (Luke 1:1-4), implies that the virgin birth was a point of Christian belief even before our gospels were written.  There never was in apostolic times, so far as we have evidence to tell, any community of belief dedicated to Jesus, the son of Joseph, only to Jesus, the Son of God.
         I shall treat the Holy Spirit Himself at length later, and shall not anticipate here what I intend to say there.  Here I say only that this article of the creed carefully distinguishes Christ’s conception from his nativity, and it attributes that conception wholly to the will and initiative of God.  In Christ’s conception not only is the will and action of Joseph excluded, but so also is that of all humanity, even Mary.  Jesus's conception was something done to her, not by her.
         Because Mary is the one by whom the Savior was born, the Orthodox church calls her "the Receiver of Life."  They also call her "Hodrigitia," or "the Guide," because as the one who raised and nurtured Christ she is the one who showed the way.  Thus, while some mothers raise presidents, prime ministers, poets, and saints, one raised the Savior of the world, the man whom God Himself had become.  The hand that rocks the cradle not only rules the world, it helped to save it.  She whom God nurtured, nurtured God.  As the mother of Jesus, Mary was entrusted with a unique and sacred charge.  She gave to our Lord physical life (his body grew from hers), as well as significant portions of his intellectual and spiritual training.  The theological significance of that fact, however, lies not so much in its praise of Mary as in its reference to the Son of God’s genuine incarnation and his full humanity.
         Both too much and too little can be made, and has been made, of the mention of Mary in the creed.  The Mary stories in Scripture show that the mother of Jesus was a humble and pious young Jewish woman, not the supernatural Queen of Heaven into which she was transformed by various later elements in the ancient and medieval church.  Passages like Luke 11: 27-28, in which Jesus calls those who hear and obey the word of God more blessed even than the woman who had the privilege of raising Him, make one think that some well meaning Christians make more of Mary’s motherhood than did her own Son.  Thus, as are the scriptural mentions of Mary, the mention of her in the creed is modest and discreet.  She was a chosen woman, not a goddess.  In the words of Bishop Goodwin,
  
         "Legend and invention have been busy, as we know too
         well, with the history of our Lord's mother.  It must be
         confessed that there is much poetical beauty in the fables,
         which the loving zeal of Christian hearts have woven for
         the illustration and glorification of her life and death; but
         in reality there is nothing outside the Gospels and the book
         of the Acts of the Apostles, which has any claim to authenticity;
         and with the brief incidental records there found we must
         rest content" (Goodwin, The Foundations of the Creeds 116).

To be sure, those "brief and incidental records" bring before us a woman whose purity, conduct and character set her apart as an object for admiration and imitation.  But those accounts must not be read as an instance of, or endorsement of, mariolatry.  Mary, in both Scripture and the creed, is not the exalted mediatrix between the Trinity and the human race.  She is a pious young Jewish woman, a rejoicing and grateful sinner, one who exults in her redemption:  “My spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior” (Luke 1:47).  In this she is our example.  She need not be, and should not be, exaggerated beyond her historical reality.  What she was is quite sufficient. 
         No doubt Mary's pregnancy was unexpected, highly embarrassing, and nearly disastrous for her relationship with Joseph, her fiance.  One can only acknowledge with great gratitude that in her predicament Mary did not destroy her unborn child the way so many expectant mothers do today who find themselves in the same difficult straits.  To have done so would have been horrific both in itself and in its consequences.
         Nor ought we to overlook the contribution of Joseph, Jesus's foster father, the man whose contribution so often remains unacknowledged.  His intention to keep the law of God and to divorce the woman whom he loved, but whom he had the strongest possible reason to conclude was sexually promiscuous, his subsequent compassion for Mary in her time of undeserved embarrassment and ridicule, and his willingness to uproot himself and his family in order to flee to Egypt for their safety, all bespeak a man of conviction, of compassion, and of action.  When Joseph, who knew full well how children were made and who knew equally well that the child was not his, discovered that his betrothed was pregnant, he made up his mind to separate himself legally from her, though because of his love for Mary it probably tortured him to do so.  Despite what I can imagine were Mary's many heart-wrenching and tearful protestations of innocence and anguish, Joseph remained resolute in his desire to follow the law of God.  He did not relent until he was instructed to do so by an angel.  The story behind these few words of the creed has its poignant, even heroic, dimension, something of which we ought to remind ourselves from time to time.
         Theologically, here is the point:  Like his divinity, Christ's humanity is genuine and complete.  In Helmut Thielicke's memorable words, “God comes into our life completely human and near us; nothing human is foreign to him”  (I Believe, 86).  Christ's humanity is like ours in all respects save one -- He is not fallen.  His human nature is what human nature truly ought to be; ours is what human nature was never meant to be but has become.  In other words, where Jesus differs from us, his humanity, not ours, is the real item.  His humanity is not merely as real as ours, it is more authentic.  He is the one true human, the only person who ever was what a human being ought to be.  As Vance Havner once observed, Christ is the only normal person; we are so subnormal that to be normal is abnormal.  That being so, we judge real humanity according to the yardstick that is Christ, not Christ according to the twisted beings we now are.
         The spirituality pertinent to this doctrine requires amplification.  Christ's birth from the young woman Mary means that He shares our humanity, not our sin.  Scripture repeatedly indicates Christ's sinlessness.  But his sinlessness was not ready-made, so to speak, for He was, like us, both subject to growth and perfected by suffering.  He learned obedience (Heb. 5: 8).  He grew in wisdom, in stature, in knowledge and in favor with God and man, Luke indicates in his gospel (2: 40).  Christ's was no cloistered human virtue.  He endured the blows of life in a fallen world and under their impact grew to be the evil-shattering personality we meet in the sacred text.  Under the blows of life Christ did not collapse; He grew.  From his example, therefore, we can and ought to benefit.  By contemplation upon God's self-emptying and self-effacing action in human history, our own love for God is (or ought to be) enkindled.  Because God has drawn near to us, we ought also to draw near to Him.
          

       "Nothing limits his humanity, but the limits proper to humanity itself.  Whatever there is in man of strength, of justice, of wisdom: whatever there is in woman of sensibility, of purity, of insight, is in Christ without the conditions which hinder among us the development of contrasted virtues in one person.  Christ belongs peculiarly to no one people, to no one time."

                                    B. F. Westcott, The Historic Faith

date modified:
6 July 2006