Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, when Christians all over the world will gather to celebrate the nativity of Jesus Christ our Lord. The eternal Word becoming flesh is fundamental to the Christian faith; we would not be able to receive salvation apart from it (Gal. 4:4-5). One important aspect of Christ’s incarnation is his birth from Mary, a virgin. We re-tell this historic event each year, though many of us neglect its significance. Why did Jesus have to be born of a virgin? There is more than one answer to this question, but today we’ll look at one that has profound implications in the debate on abortion and the personhood of the unborn.
Jesus had to be born of a virgin because he is not a human person. Kallistos Ware summarizes the traditional doctrine:
“…Christ’s birth from a virgin underlines that the incarnation did not involve the coming into being of a new person. When a child is born from two human parents in the usual fashion, a new person begins to exist. But the person of the incarnate Christ is none other than the second person of the Holy Trinity. At Christ’s birth, therefore, no new person came into existence, but the pre-existent person of the Son of God now began to live according to a human as well as a divine mode of being. So the virgin birth reflects Christ’s eternal pre-existence.” – The Orthodox Way, pg. 76-77
