Difficulty accepting the virgin birth?

If you're like me, you probably have some difficulty with the concept of the virgin birth recorded in the gospel of Luke. As a piece of religious phraseology, it's unproblematic. (If you grew up hearing about it in church, it may not strike you as particularly odd.) The problem comes in when you actually think about it. 

What does a virgin birth mean? It's not, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms. It's simply an inconceivable combination of terms. (Imagine your daughter coming home with news that she's pregnant, but she's never had sex.) For a virgin to conceive, you would have to have a miracle, an improbable event that cannot be explained in logical terms or described in natural ones. I think that's precisely the conclusion we're supposed to arrive at when we read the Scriptures.

Luke strengthens this position in the way he presents Jesus' genealogy in the second half of Luke 2.

Luke 2:23: "When He began His ministry, Jesus Himself was about thirty years of age, being, as it was supposed, the son of Joseph, the son of Eli."

 Luke 2:38: "[Cainan was] the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God."

If you compare the beginning of the genealogy with the end of it, you find two sons whose birth (or coming into being) are the direct result of God's activity, not the natural order of things. One son of God, Adam, was created out of dust. Another, Jesus, was created out of ... we know not what. But both came into being in the natural world through the supernatural agency of God.

Now, Jews and Muslims do not accept the claim of the New Testament that Jesus was the son of a virgin, any more than they accept the claim that He was the Son of God. However, many go further than this to suggest such a thing could not be, that it is a discreditable claim and represents a low view of God. One Muslim friend told me the standard teaching in Islam is that Christians believe God had sex with Mary.

This viewpoint is as un-Christian as it is un-Jewish and un-Muslim. Numbers 23:19 says, "God is not a man that He should lie." I would add that "God is not a man that He should lie ... with a woman." God is, however, the kind of being who can create a man. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all hold that He did it once in the Garden of Eden. He created Adam, not through human intercourse, but through divine intervention (i.e. a miracle). Christians simply assert that he did the same thing second time when Mary "conceiv[ed] in her womb and [bore] a son ... Jesus" (Luke 1:31).

Dickens on the death of a young person

The following words from Charles Dickens (in Oliver Twist) help me on this, the first anniversary of my nephew's death:

"It is not always the youngest and best who are spared to those that love them; but this should give us comfort in our sorrow; for Heaven is just; and such things teach us, impressively, that there is a brighter world than this; and that the passage to it is speedy."

Boehner and Reid ... A Word from G.K. Chesterton

With his typically larger-than-life insight into contemporary affairs, G.K. Chesterton said this ... roughly a hundred years ago:

"The present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were originally aiming at [viz. happiness] ...  There is nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders ... This dazed and floundering opportunism [of politicians] gets in the way of everything. If our statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done." (from What's Wrong With The World)

The "other" Christmas text

Most of the time, the gospels of Matthew and Luke comprise our go-to texts for the Christmas story. That was certainly true for me when the Navs were gathered for our year-end Christmas party, and I'm sure it'll be the text(s) our family reads on Christmas eve.

However, I've been meditating on 2 Corinthians 8:9 recently, and it's become my new favorite "other" Christmas passage:

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that by His poverty, you might become rich.

Merry Christmas to all the poor-made-rich because of the One who was rich-made-poor!

All Hope Gradually Abandoned

Acts 27 describes the Apostle Paul's transit to Rome to stand trial before Caesar. The ship he was on ran into very foul weather, a circumstance which Paul had dimly foreseen. After three days, the ships tackle had to be thrown overboard, and we read:

Since neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small storm was assailing us, from then on all hope of our being saved was gradually abandoned. (Acts 27:22)

That phrase -- "all hope of our being saved was gradually abandoned" -- grips me. I've been there. I've worked with people who are there. I think our culture lives here. The darkness is great, the storm is unrelenting, and the threat is real. There's no prospect of help, because having a prospect means you can see something, some possibility, however unlikely, of a way out.

That's what hope means.

But all hope of our being saved has been gradually abandoned.

Then, a star appears over Bethlehem. (No one really even notices.) And a baby is born in a manger.

Dickens on the cares of childhood

Here is how Charles Dickens conveys the whole compass of a child's concerns. In the scene, young David Copperfield is playing with Em'ly, the orphaned niece who lives with Copperfield's housemaid:

"As to any sense of inequality, or youthfulness, or other difficulty in our way, little Em'ly and I had no such trouble, because we had no future. We made no more provision for growing older, than we did for growing younger." (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Chapter 3, "I Have a Change")

Reflections on reading David Copperfield

I've just finished reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, a monumental undertaking that took me four months. Not because David Copperfield was difficult or dull, mind you, but because it was long. Exceedingly long. (And because I read it in chapter increments after midnight most of the time.)

Among other things, I learned that it's best to read David Copperfield on a Kindle. Not only does this make you look exceedingly cool, it also keeps you from knowing exactly how big the book really is. You blithely begin clicking "Next Page" on your Kindle, and you feel like you're flying. Before you realize it,  you've clicked yourself 78 "pages" into a Dickens novel and you're only 1% through the book. But you're hooked. The only consolation is that you don't have to carry around a Penguin Classic paperback that's roughly the thickness of a cinder block. (And the people on the bus assume you're reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest or The Wall Street Journal.)

David Copperfield is one of the finest novels I've ever read. As I begin to reflect on the significance of the book (a process that generally takes me a day*), I set it alongside other Dickensian productions like Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities**. I am struck by Dickens' portrayal of:

• the uplifting power of love between man and woman
• the strength of the lex talionis (the law of retribution in kind) in the universe
• the beauty of personal integrity
• the worth of each individual
• the distortion unrighteousness introduces on the soul by small degrees
• the possibility of noble sacrifice (or the blessedness of bearing necessary hardship)

I think I could go on, and I think I probably should. This short list, however, will help me arrange my thoughts for the future as I run back over my marginal notes and highlights.

For now, let me say that I think all people with a love of literature, Dickens, life, or humanity should read David Copperfield. But not before reading a shorter work by Dickens (let it be A Tale of Two Cities), and not before purchasing a Kindle so you look cool while being ... not cool.
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* The process generally only takes me a day because I begin reading another book and stop reflecting altogether. 

** I put it alongside those two books because they're the only other Dickens novels I've read. (Unless you count the Muppet rendition of A Christmas Carol.)