JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

But the biblical accounts of the virgin birth are not examples of such mythology. None of the
gospel writers tell us about a Jesus who is somehow superhuman but less than God, a
combination or mixture neither quite human nor quite divine.
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One of the most common heresies of our time is the belief that Jesus had a human body
but a divine soul or mind, will or spirit. "Outside" or "externally" He was a man, but "inside" or
"internally" He was God. This kind of half-and-half Jesus is not the Jesus of the Bible or of
Christian theology. This understanding of Him was espoused by a heresy in the fourth century
called Apollinarianism.
Matthew's and Luke's accounts of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ are not given for the
purpose of providing a biological explanation of the two natures. Rather the Word became flesh
purely by the will and word of God. God spoke, and Mary heard and responded. The proper
analogy here is not the physical process of conception and birth but God's creation of all things at
the beginning when He simply spoke and it was done.
The doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ is not an explanation much less a proof of
what happened and how it happened when God came to us in the form (nature) of a man. The
doctrine is only a way of confessing the mystery that it did in fact happen.
Any person who believes Genesis 1:1 that "in the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth" should have no problem with anything else, with any other miracle. If God can create
this universe out of nothing, surely no miracle is too great for Him to perform. To stumble over
the doctrine of the virgin birth is ludicrous once one accepts Genesis 1:1.
Some have argued that a virgin birth provides no help in explaining the sinlessness of
Jesus. Since Mary herself was sinful (which has been the historic position of the Church, except
for the Roman Catholic Church since 1854 when they introduced the "immaculate conception" of
Mary and then in 1950 began to teach the "assumption of Mary into heaven") it is held that the
taint of corruption would be conveyed by one parent as really as by two. It only takes one parent
to pass on a sinful human nature.
Such an argument overlooks the most important factor—the fact that Jesus was
"conceived by the Holy Spirit." What happened was a divine, creative miracle wrought in the
production of this new humanity which secured, from its earliest germinal beginnings,
freedom from the slightest taint of sin. Paternal generation in such an origin is superfluous since
the birth of Jesus was the birth of a divine Person—already existing in His divine nature as
the logos—but now entering this new mode of existence as divine and human: Godhood and
Manhood. Only a miracle could effect such a wonder!