Why Is the Virgin Birth So Important?

What makes the virgin birth essential to the Christian faith? Today, Stephen Nichols examines this miraculous event in Scripture and its significance for our understanding of Jesus Christ.

NATHAN W. BINGHAM: Dr. Stephen Nichols, the president of Reformation Bible College, and also a Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow was our guest this week on the Ask Ligonier podcast. Dr. Nichols, why is the virgin birth so important?

DR. STEPHEN J. NICHOLS: Firstly, the virgin birth is important because it’s in the Bible. So, if something is in the Bible, and we understand God’s Word to be authoritative—to be inspired and, therefore, inerrant—then what is in the Bible is important, and we must take it seriously. And we don’t have it submit to us; we need to submit to what it says. So, the virgin birth is prophesied back in Isaiah 7:14, which is a very important prophecy of the coming Messiah, and then it is recorded for us both in Matthew 1 and in Luke 1.

It is really the first miracle in a chain of miracles of the incarnate Christ. The virgin birth is that first miracle, of course, as Christ is incarnate then, and God becomes flesh. And that’s what the incarnation means: to take on flesh, to become human. And so, the virgin birth begins it, and then during Christ’s public ministry, we have all these miracles that are performed, and then we have what is the final miracle of this life of Christ on earth: the resurrection. So, from the virgin birth, through His performing of miracles, and to the resurrection, we have the whole of these miracles done by Christ or representing Christ. And miracles are very important in the Bible. Of course, they serve to help the person who is the beneficiary of the miracle—so, the blind can see, and the lame can walk, and those who are hungry can have the lunch of the loaves and the fishes, to be sure—but the main purpose of miracles throughout the Bible is to verify or confirm the messenger and the message. And Jesus is a unique messenger within the pages of Scripture, and He has a unique message within the pages of Scripture. And so, we start with His virgin birth, this unique birth of Christ, which is a way of signaling, of announcing this unique One who has now come onto the stage of human history: This person is here.

I think we also see in the virgin birth the two-nature Christology. Theologians will call this the hypostatic union, from the Greek word hypostasis, which is an understanding of person. And the idea here is that Jesus is two natures—truly human and truly divine—in one person. This comes to us from church history of the Nicene Creed (325) and the Chalcedonian Creed (451). And those creeds themselves are just simply summarizing wide swaths of Scripture of who Christ is.

So, in Christ, we have the divine and the eternal nature, but we have the human nature, and that’s through Mary. This is very important. Not only do we see this in the chronologies of Jesus in the Gospels—we see it in texts like Matthew 1 and Luke 1—we also see it in Paul at Galatians 4:4, where Paul stresses that Jesus is born of a woman. So, that human nature: Jesus was really born, He really lived, He really got hungry, He really got tired, and the ultimate evidence of His human nature is He really and truly died.

I think also related to this is that while Jesus has a human nature and is like us, as Scripture teaches, He is also unlike us in that He has a human nature but not a sin nature. We can read about this in Hebrews 7:26 and actually look at it in the context there. But we see there that Jesus’ human nature is not passed on from—Joseph is not involved here. And so, the sin of Adam is what is passed on to Adam’s posterity. Paul is very clear on this when we get to Romans and text like Romans 5 and Ephesians 2 and so forth. So, the virgin birth is important for that.
But let me end this with a little historical note. Back in the turn of the twentieth century and the rise of liberalism and the rise of what we call German higher criticism and especially the—you just call it the attacks on the Gospels. And so, these scholars—Germans first and then the Anglo scholars joined in—were saying that we can’t trust the Gospels, that the Gospels are full of teachings from the second-, third-, fourth-century Christian groups that are pushed into these historical texts. And so, scholars wanted to separate what they called the “Jesus of faith” from the “Jesus of history,” and really where they aim their sights was at the virgin birth: “This is how mythological people would describe the entrance of a unique person into history, but it’s not rooted in history.” Well, this idea of the virgin birth or this doctrine of the virgin birth became what’s known as one of the five “fundamentals” and was really crucial in this debate in the 1910s and 20s.

And coming out of all this, J. Gresham Machen, who wrote a very scholarly book called The Virgin Birth, which was published in 1930, wanted to not just simply assert what the Bible teaches but really argue that this is the only way we can understand the Gospels and the virgin birth. And right at the very end of the book, Machen likens denying the virgin birth to having a halfway conviction to who Christ is. He says that the New Testament presentation of Jesus is as a whole; it’s like an organism. And then Machen says this: “And of that organism the virgin birth is an integral part. Remove the part, and the whole becomes harder and not easier to accept; the New Testament account of Jesus,” Machen continues, “is most convincing when it is taken as a whole. Only one Jesus is presented in the Word of God; and that Jesus did not come into the world by ordinary generation, but was conceived in the womb of the virgin by the Holy Ghost.”

It is important. The virgin birth is important because what we have is the presentation of the whole Christ to us in Scripture. And again, we don’t ask Scripture to submit to us; we submit to the authority of Scripture.