In previous posts, I’ve answered six objections to the virgin birth, and I’ve offered six reasons for the virgin birth. In the effort to think about what the virgin birth means, we should also reflect on what it doesn’t mean. Here are four points to help us do that.
First, the virgin birth does not mean that Mary was sinless.
When the angel Gabriel said to Mary, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” (Luke 1:28), as well as, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God” (1:30), he was not recognizing some kind of pristine spiritual state or grace within her.
The Latin rendering of Luke 1:28, gratia plena, is misleading, because the angel is not saying Mary is “full of grace.” Rather, the Lord has shown her favor. The favor doesn’t come from within Mary. The favor comes from the Lord in the sense that he has set her apart for a special task.
The angel’s words did not indicate a grace-full status of Mary. Being the mother of Jesus was a unique and extraordinary privilege, but Mary needed the Savior she bore. Mary was a sinner. Her son’s sinlessness was not dependent on her spiritual state.
The angel told her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). The Holy Spirit—not a holy virgin—ensured the sinless nature of the Son. So while the biblical text teaches the sinlessness of Jesus, it does not teach the sinlessness of Mary.
Second, the virgin birth does not mean that Mary remained a virgin afterward.
According to Matthew 1:24–25, Joseph followed the angel’s instructions and took Mary as his wife, but they did not consummate the marriage until she had given birth to Jesus: “he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son.”
Mary was not a perpetual virgin, and there is no theological necessity for her to have remained one. Jesus had brothers and sisters (Mark 6:3). The people in his hometown—Nazareth—drew attention to his wisdom and wonders and said, “Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” (6:2–3).
The natural reading of Mark 6:2–3 is that the Nazarenes are talking about the immediate family of Jesus and thus his siblings. An unnatural reading of the text would be to label these brothers and sisters as “cousins.” The choice of “cousin” would be based on an earlier textual decision that Mary did not have other children and remained a virgin after Jesus’s birth.
However, once we see that a perpetual virginity is textually unnecessary and unsubstantiated, the reasonableness of her having children with Joseph is clear, and in Mark 6:2–3 this reasonableness is confirmed.
Third, the virgin birth was not the beginning of the Son of God.
The explosive opening of the Fourth Gospel proclaims the eternality of the Son: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1–3).
Language like John 1:1–3 was important for the details of the doctrine of the Trinity. The Son is called the Word, and the Word was present before the “beginning.” And since all created things were made through the Son, the Son himself cannot be a created thing.
The incarnation is not the beginning of the Son of God. To be clear, incarnation is the term for the Son taking to himself a truly human nature. But the person of the Son is eternal and thus preceded the incarnation.
Christologically speaking, the affirmation of the Son’s eternality is crucial for sound doctrine. If someone teaches that the incarnation was when God created the Son, they’re teaching false doctrine. The virgin birth was not the Son’s beginning.
Fourth, the virgin birth does not undermine or cancel the Son’s divine nature.
Not only was the Son divine before the incarnation, the Son remained divine after the incarnation. When the Son of God took to himself a truly human nature, that nature did not undermine or cancel the Son’s deity.
Christian orthodoxy confesses that Jesus is one person with two natures. We must avoid the temptation to read Philippians 2:7 as Jesus “emptying” his divine attributes. That is a heretical interpretation. If the incarnation involved the loss of—or temporarily setting aside—divine attributes, then the Son was no longer divine.
As an eternal and immutable deity, God is always all that he is. The attributes of God are not like “parts” that can be subtracted or added, or like “switches” that could be turned off and back on.
The incarnation is the assumption of a human nature and not a loss of anything divine. The waters of Christology are deep, but we must carefully and patiently and thoughtfully wade into these waters so that we can speak precisely about the Son’s person and natures without becoming heretics along the way.