"Behold, you will conceive...and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name Jesus." (Luke 1:31)

< Back

COLLEGE CHAPEL TALK
THE VIRGIN BIRTH

By the Rev. Ormond Odhner

The Virgin Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ is the very corner-stone of New Church theology. This is more the case with us than with any other church, for we have been given the revelation that the soul of every living thing is from its father and creates a being of the same order and nature as the father. This is taught many times in the Heavenly Doctrine for the New Church, and it follows that without the Virgin Birth, Christ was not, is not, and cannot be God.

The Virgin Birth was, perhaps, the greatest of all miracles. And, as a miracle, it remains, even for us, a mystery, a thing beyond full understanding. In the Heavenly Doctrine, however, we are told certain things about it that are within the comprehension of our finite minds—enough to see its absolute necessity.

Mary was betrothed or engaged to Joseph, but they had not yet come together. In the Word women represent the affection of truth. A virgin woman means such affection not yet conjoined with any truth—a pure, virginal affection of truth—and a betrothed virgin is this affection longing for, ready for, conjunction with truth.

In the Heavenly Doctrine it is said, without further explanation, “It was necessary for [the Lord] to be born of a virgin in legitimate marriage with Joseph” (God the Savior 38). (Note that with the ancient Jews, betrothal was the legal marriage.) But why was this necessary? Was it simply that the Child needed the protection of a father, or, more importantly, the environment of a loving home? In the spiritual sense, it is clear that the Lord can only be born in us in that pure, untouched affection of truth, not yet conjoined with any truth, but longing and ready for such conjunction.

Mary, we know, is now in heaven. She was not regenerated by the miracle of the Virgin Birth, for no one is ever regenerated by a miracle. Regeneration takes place in freedom, and it was in freedom that Mary, following her doubts that a virgin could bear a son, acquiesced to the message of the angel, saying, “Let it be to me according to your word.”

Mary was a good woman, and yet the only reason the Lord assumed the human by birth (rather than continuing to appear to people through the human forms of angels) was so that He might take on the hereditary evil of the whole human race, in order to meet and conquer the hells on the same plane on which they had conquered people.

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the Power of the Highest will overshadow you,” the angel had said to Mary. Every living thing receives its soul from its father, and that soul forms the offspring into the same kind of being as the father. Yet a person’s soul is not life. There is only one life: the Lord’s, and it can be neither created nor divided. So we read that “The conception of a person from the father is not a conception of life, but only a conception of the first and purest form capable of receiving life” (Divine Love and Wisdom 6). The soul of a person, then, though immortal and fashioned of spiritual substances, is still a finite, limited thing. Not so with the Lord. His soul was not a created, finite vessel capable of receiving life; it was the Divine life itself, infinite and eternal. With human beings, the soul, in its final formation in the father, also receives his hereditary and actual evils. Hereditary evil from the father is thus a part of the soul itself, and cannot be eradicated.

The Lord did not have hereditary evil from a mortal father. All the hereditary evil, which He took on, was from His mother, Mary. And even with human beings, the hereditary evil from the mother can be gotten rid of or eradicated. With the Lord, this heredity from Mary was completely removed, even as all other mortal, finite limitations received through her were also removed, until He was no longer in any respect her son.

The Lord could do this because, being born of a Virgin, His Soul was the Divine Itself. So we read, “The Holy Spirit which came upon Mary signifies the Divine Truth, and the Power of the Highest which overshadowed her, the Divine Good” (The Canons of the New Church, Redeemer, iv). The infinite Divine was His Soul, and thus that that holy Thing, which was born of Mary in Bethlehem, could become the Son of God.

Printable Version