RE: The Trinity
January 21, 2021 at 11:17 am
(This post was last modified: January 21, 2021 at 11:31 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Virgin birth is another belief that came later and managed to survive to orthodoxy. Many divergent paths from different people in different places at different times (and all of their different needs which produced the religious belief to begin with). Nearly all of them constructed in isolation and therefore not resolved against each other but firmly held as an article of faith. This was the stage set and the work to be done in creating a universal, or catholic, church.
I remember catching a poll years ago that indicated three quarters of americans believe in the virgin birth, it has a larger share of the demo than trinitarian doctrine even though trinitarian doctrine is officially part of most of those christians' denominations and the virgin birth is not. Shelby Spong brilliantly described it as the entrance myth to the resurrections exit myth. Neither of these two beliefs, nor trinitarian beliefs, were representative of early christianity. All make demands on the resolution of doctrine to internal consistency.
If jesus was not the product of a virgin birth, who was his father? The virgin birth at least contends to be an explanation of how he could be both god and man. It's essential to incarnation theology, which had (very literally) beaten the shit out of exaltation theology - the stable middle point between jews who believed in a very human jesus as a prophet (a belief that persists to this day and made it's way into yet another abrahamic offshoot), and something that we could call christians who believed him to be the savior...even if they hadn't quite worked out all the details yet. Between whatever force or community or impulse created the synoptics, and whatever force or impulse or community created john.
I remember catching a poll years ago that indicated three quarters of americans believe in the virgin birth, it has a larger share of the demo than trinitarian doctrine even though trinitarian doctrine is officially part of most of those christians' denominations and the virgin birth is not. Shelby Spong brilliantly described it as the entrance myth to the resurrections exit myth. Neither of these two beliefs, nor trinitarian beliefs, were representative of early christianity. All make demands on the resolution of doctrine to internal consistency.
If jesus was not the product of a virgin birth, who was his father? The virgin birth at least contends to be an explanation of how he could be both god and man. It's essential to incarnation theology, which had (very literally) beaten the shit out of exaltation theology - the stable middle point between jews who believed in a very human jesus as a prophet (a belief that persists to this day and made it's way into yet another abrahamic offshoot), and something that we could call christians who believed him to be the savior...even if they hadn't quite worked out all the details yet. Between whatever force or community or impulse created the synoptics, and whatever force or impulse or community created john.
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