Truth Unites - Do Christians Have to Believe in the Virgin Birth?

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Do Christians have to believe in the virgin birth? In this video, I give three reasons, drawing on Scripture and church history, why the virgin birth is not optional but essential to historic Christianity.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Do Christians have to believe in the virgin birth that Mary became pregnant with Jesus miraculously, while still a virgin, through the power of the Holy Spirit? Some people admire Jesus and accept parts of the gospel story, but honestly struggle to believe in miracles like this. In this video, I want to give three reasons for why the virgin birth is not just an optional part of Christianity, but is essential, and to do so, I'm drawing from this older book by J. Grusha Machen, which I highly recommend. I also want to recommend this more recent book by Ryan Putman, which is an outstanding resource, amazing book here. Links to both in the video description.

Reason number one, disagreement about the virgin birth concerns the truth of scripture, not just its interpretation. Some theological disagreements, and if you watch my channel, you know I'm emphasizing in this direction a lot. Some theological disagreements result from good faith differences of interpretation. Okay, I have a book called Finding the Right Hills to Die on. I'm trying to work through issues from Genesis 1 to Revelation 20, The Creation Days to the Millennium. You got a lot of issues in the Bible where sincere, good faith Christians are seeking the truth, attempting to interpret Scripture,

to the best of their ability, and they disagree on how to interpret the text. But 100 years ago, when the Virgin birth is this raging, contested issue, it's a flashpoint in the fundamentalist, modernist controversy, the theological liberals are going one way, the so-called fundamentalists, the other. This was not an issue of interpreting the scripture. In this context, note how Maitchen put it, there is no serious question as to the interpretation of the Bible at this point. Everyone admits that the Bible represents Jesus as having been conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. Maybe you can find an outlier here or there, but he's speaking of his opponents in that context. And he's saying they admit that the Bible does teach this,

but they're just saying we don't believe that the Bible's true on this point. So that's a different kind of dispute. Because in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, this doctrine is pretty clear. You've got, you know, Mary just saying, I am a virgin, how can I get pregnant, and so on and so forth. And it's also widely accepted, I will say universally with a few exceptions among heterodox groups. But even finding its way into the Apostles and Nicene Creed, this is just a very important. a historic Christian doctrine that really never came under fire until the modern era. And this would be a point of difference between the virgin birth, or more strictly, we can say

the virginal conception of Christ, versus the perpetual virginity of Mary, which is much more ambiguous. While the virgin birth has this solid scriptural foundation, the perpetual virginity of Mary doesn't have that scriptural foundation. If anything, the scripture seems to push in the opposite direction, though it doesn't address it explicitly, the perpetual virginity of Mary seems to come into the tradition in large part because of the apocryphal second century text, the proto-evangelium of James. And there is plenty of space for good faith interpreters of scripture and the tradition to disagree about that issue of whether Mary remained a virgin. But whether she was a virgin when she conceived Jesus is crystal clear in Matthew and Luke and the early

creeds, and therefore a denial of that typically functions as an undermining of biblical authority. Second, rejection of the virgin birth typically results from an anti-supernatural worldview. So when Christians disagree about speaking in tongues, or baptism, or church government, or the nature of hell, which has been big in dispute recently, or what Sabbath rest should look like and so many other issues, the disagreement usually doesn't come from a hostile worldview. That is antithetical to Christianity. But in the modern era, it was an embarrassment about or disbelief in the supernatural that arguably was the primary motive for rejection of the virgin birth. I don't want to say, I know what's going on in any one person's heart, but that seems to be on the table that

basically we don't believe this because it's miraculous. And at least, I mean, sometimes that's explicit. Here's a statement, and that continues up to the present day, by the way. Here's a statement. I'm going to put this quota up on the screen. Note the adverb here. A beautiful but obviously contrived tale is the virgin birth, which may have been used to cover a scandal. So that's a contemporary progressive Christian. And the question there that we can ask is, why do you put the adverb obviously? Why is this obvious? I think the response that I would give and that I would encourage all Christians to give to that is simple. God can do miracles. And to be a Christian, you actually must accept a lot of miracles. Christianity is an inherently supernatural religion.

So removing the miracles from Christianity is like cutting out the heart, brain, and five other vital organs from a body. You end up killing the body. You have to have, you have to be open to just say, yeah, sometimes miracles happen. C.S. Lewis's book, Miracles, by the way, gives a great defense for why it's rational to believe in miracles. I love the way, my friend Glenn Scrivener puts it. Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. Materials believe in the virgin birth of the cosmos, choose your miracle. Now, the virgin birth is a particularly helpful litmus test to distinguish supernatural views of Christianity from these modern revisionist views that try to take all the supernatural out

because there are many people who will affirm Christ's deity or even Christ's resurrection in a sense, though it's recast into something completely different to what it means. but the virgin birth. I mean, this is just a litmus test. Almost nobody says, well, yeah, I believe in the virgin birth, just in this metaphorical sense. You don't see that as much. Here's Machen again. The question of the virgin birth is important as a test for a man to apply to himself or to others to determine whether one holds a naturalistic or a supernaturalistic view regarding Jesus Christ. Here's the third reason. This is the one that's most interesting and that's worth exploring even further beyond this video. Keep going with this one.

The virgin birth is organically connected to the broader person and work of Christ. The virgin birth is not an arbitrary stunt that just happened to occur. So we just affirm it, we check off the box because it's there, but it doesn't really mean anything. While God could theoretically have become incarnate any way he wanted, that he did so by means of conception in the womb of a virgin is fitting. And it is fitting with respect to Jesus' sin. It is fitting with respect to his full divinity and full humanity to ward off these various Christological heresies that come up. And it is fitting with respect to the unique and supernatural

character of the incarnation. The incarnation means God becoming man. Here's how F.F. Bruce put it several decades ago. There are those indeed who acknowledge our Lord's incarnation without believing in his virgin birth, just as others, Muslims, for example, believe in his virgin birth, but not in his incarnation, but it is undeniable that his incarnation and virgin birth are intimately bound together in the historic faith of the church. So intimately bound together, that means you can't pull at one without it affecting the other. So if you, in other words, you can't just pluck out the incarnation without your Christology as a whole being affected. Here's mention again, the New Testament presentation of Jesus is not an agglomeration,

but an organism, and of that organism, the virgin birth is an integral part. An agglomeration is a collection of distinct entities. So think of it like this. The virgin birth is not like the first easy jenga block that you can quietly slide out while the tower still stands. Rather, it's more like a load-bearing beam in a house, and removing it will lead to structural compromise, even if it's not immediately visible to your eyes the moment it happens.

Two conclusions from this. Number one, this is a great example of the need to stand against pressure. Looking at what people were fighting about about the virgin birth 100 years ago, the thing is, the virgin birth is not as unpopular today. In many ways, the things that are unpopular about Christianity are completely different today, but there are things that are unpopular. We will face pressure points, testing points, between the spirit of the age and the truths of scripture in our day. And they can differ on your context. That's why you actually need humility and

the Holy Spirit's help to even know what those are and what it looks like to be faithful. And sometimes we can almost have a worldly kind of courage where it's like, yeah, I'm going to stand against those errors. We actually need wisdom to know in my context, what am I tempted to? Because there's different contexts. But I talk a lot about theological triage and urging humility and caution around tertiary issues and even some level of circumspection around secondary issues and how important that distinction is between secondary and tertiary and all of that. But part of the role of theological triage is to make us courageous and clear around the primary doctrines. Think of Luther at the diet of verms and the simple words, here I stand. How I love those words. When Luther said,

Here I stand, I think interpreted charitably, he was not being stubborn. He was standing a against pressure. And studying the Virgin Birth is a reminder that you and I will have our own moments like that. I believe that. Every Christian will have moments like that, where we have to say, here I stand, and like Gandalf against the Balrog in the Lord of the Rings, you just do not budge, no matter what. We will all have to do that, theologically, to be faithful to Christ. That's why triage is so important to help us know what are those issues. The second conclusion from the Virgin birth that I think is edifying to consider is that the virgin birth reminds us that salvation lies with God's initiative, not ours.

That it's actually tremendously good news that we have a supernatural religion, that we have a God who can break into history. If you have a universe without miracles, this is going to tend toward moralism, because now it's up to us. But a supernatural God who can act in history is a God who can save. And we believe Jesus was born as a virgin in order to accomplish a full salvation for us, living without sin, dying, rising from the dead, now is our intercessor coming again one day. The cash value is, if you are lost or weary or in need of hope today as you watch this video,

consider the Christian message to you that you don't have to fix your life, you don't have to save yourself. You don't even know, you don't even need to know what needs to be fixed. there is a God who has come, who has done everything that we cannot do. And wonderful news that Christianity says, salvation is a free gift. You can't earn it. You simply receive it by faith and repentance, surrendering your life to Christ. So Merry Christmas. If you're watching this around the time of year that I'm recording it,

and may the virgin birth of our Savior be a reminder for us, both for courage and of the very comfort and consolation of the gospel that we, receive.