Dr. Blake Nelson wrote:
>
> --- "D. F. Siemens, Jr." <dfsiemensjr@juno.com> wrote:
> > Where Jesus' Y chromosome (or whatever may
> > substitute for it) came from
> > is relevant.
>
> To which question?
>
> > If it came from Mary's fornication,
> > then Jesus was a
> > normally begotten human being, innately endowed with
> > all the rights of
> > his fellows. If God then took him over, the deity is
> > acting as demons do.
>
> Well, this actually bundles a truckload of assumptions
> about, among others: 1) how God acts, 2) what it means
> for Jesus to be the Son of God, and 3) how Jesus
> expressed the will of the Father. Without expressing
> your assumptions it is difficult to give a fair
> reading, but the conclusion about the deity acting as
> demons do is clearly not logically (or theologically)
> required by anything you wrote as a preface.
>
> > This is not moral. Only if Jesus unconditionally
> > owes his existence to a
> > direct divine act may we have the hypostatic union
> > morally (and, I would
> > think, metaphysically).
>
> Even accepting that, what is the divine act? As I
> noted in an earlier post to Michael R. Jesus'
> followers do not appear to have proclaimed Him Son of
> God due to the circumstances of His birth. They
> proclaimed Him Son of God most significantly because
> God the Father Resurrected Jesus of Nazareth. Note, I
> hold rather orthodox views about the VB, but I think
> when one makes statements such as the one above, one
> puts at least the cart before the horse in how and why
> Jesus was proclaimed the Son of God and why the
> kerygma went forth. It did not go forth simply
> because of the VB.
>
> > As to the "mechanism" by
> > which this took place,
> > there are only partial answers to any miracle, and
> > an implicit IMO. But
> > then we have only partial answers and alternatate
> > possibilities to many
> > strictly scientific questions.
>
> To go back to my earlier point, if we DNA test Jesus
> and Joseph and find out his Y chromosome is the same
> as Joseph's -- how does that answer any question about
> Jesus' divinity? If the Y chromosome matches that of
> someone else, how does that answer any question? If
> it doesn't match someone else's (that we know of) do
> we DNA test all of 1st century palestine to find if
> anyone could be the father of Jesus? This is reductio
> ad absurdum. None of these tests answer the question
> of whether Jesus is divine -- although one can imagine
> the 1st century skeptic saying -- ah hah! Jesus and
> Joseph have the same Y chromosome, end of story.
>
> If Jesus is an heir of David in Joseph's genealogy,
> well, why wouldn't God give Jesus Joseph's Y
> chromosome. God the Father -- as far as I am aware --
> is never said to have His own Y chromosome. Again,
> there appears to be nothing of theological
> significance that is answered by this question or even
> a strict, empirical testing to answer that question.
On balance I have to agree with Blake here. The hypostatic union means that
divine and human are united in a single person, which is the Second Person of the
Trinity. That does not entail any particular belief about how such a union was
accomplished, whether or not it came about by a direct, rather than mediated, act of God
or, in particular, whether or not Jesus had a human father. It's true that it seems
easiest to picture (which, N.B., is not the same as "explain") how this might have taken
place in terms of virginal conception, but that is far from a proof that it did take
place in that way.
It seems significant that the 2 NT writers for whom belief in the divine
pre-existence of Christ seems clearest, Paul and John, don't give any indication that
they knew about Jesus being conceived of a virgin. (Gal.4:4 & Jn.8:41 might be hints in
that direction but that's highly debatable.) That raises serious questions about any
claim that virginal conception is necessary for belief in the divinity of Christ.
(BTW, I don't cross my fingers when I say "born of the Virgin Mary" in the
creeds.)
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
Received on Tue Dec 30 13:38:07 2003
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