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Page 6
[Sidenote: John's Logos.]
[Sidenote: An Anthropomorphic God.]
More, too, is made of His life before the Incarnation. The pre-existence
of Christ is an essential element in Christianity. "His eternal relation
to God is the only way of conceiving Him which answers to His real
greatness."[4] The Christ was present and active in the creation. John's
use of the word "Logos" is right. "Logos" is not merely a result but a
Force. It is not only the speech, but the speaker. Let us admit once for
all that the fact, much belabored of the critics, is a fact. Let us not
be afraid of the word which expresses it. God must be anthropomorphic if
He exists. We can come nowhere near to thinking out any other kind of
God. Christ has the value of God to devout Christians because in the
fullness of His moral perfections He expresses God so far as we can know
Him and man so far as man can hope and grow.
[Footnote 4: Denney. Studies in Theology.]
[Sidenote: How Son of God.]
Is His Sonship different from ours, or only an expansion of the fullness
and perfection of our sonship? This last seems to me a most important
question. If He was born as we were born--that is, as to the beginning
of His earthly life, there can be no pre-eminent sense in which He was
the Son of God. He was either a happy accident of natural birth or a
"sport" in evolution.
[Sidenote: The Virgin Birth.]
This brings us to that doctrine which is the greatest challenge to the
doubter: "Conceived by the Holy Ghost; born of the Virgin Mary,"--a
doctrine fiercely fought by Harnack and yet by no means to be dismissed
as he dismisses it. His teaching on this point seems to me the result of
his theory of Christianity. If one seeks to rid Christianity of the
supernatural, here is the place to begin.
[Sidenote: Dignity of the Story.]
[Sidenote: A Greater Puzzle.]
But who will not feel the force of the position that, granted God was to
be incarnate, the story of Christ's incarnation is the noblest and most
probable? He is not born of a man's lust nor of a woman's desire--but of
the submission of untainted womanhood to the direct creative power of
God. The alternative to this is the Divinest man in all the world born
of sinning and not yet married parents. If the new doctrine of heredity
be true that men may inherit good as well as evil, we still have an
astounding fact to account for; namely, the birth of such a child from
such conditions, that is, with all the good kept in and all the bad left
out.
[Sidenote: Parthenogenesis a Fact.]
When men speak of a virgin birth as incredible and impossible and as the
weakest of all Christian doctrine, do they know or have they forgotten
that parthenogenesis (virgin birth) is a fact in nature; existing, for
example, in as highly organized insects as the honey bee? There are
other insects which are parthenogenetic at one time and sexually
productive at another. There are also hints of it in human life known to
anatomists which can not be fully discussed here.
[Sidenote: Among the Bees.]
[Sidenote: A Small Departure from Nature.]
The virgin queen bee produces males in abundance, but can not produce
females until she has made her nuptial flight and met her mate in an
embrace invariably fatal to him. Nor does she ever need to meet
another. From that time on, she is the fruitful mother of every kind of
bee life the hive needs; the undeveloped females called neuters and
those who become queens by being fed on royal food. Virgin birth is
therefore imbedded in nature's order. To occur in the human species
nature need call in no novelty. Christ, if born of a virgin, was born
with the smallest possible departure from the order of nature. A process
known in a lower form of life was carried into the higher to produce the
unique being called for by the spiritual needs of mankind.
* * * * *
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