A lot of things I write about are spinoffs of incidents in my life or conversations I have had with other people. The following is a variant of a conversation I have had recently with a great friend over coffee.
We were discussing various things in the Bible and one thing that popped up was the virgin birth. I have no doubt that someone else has said some variant of what's below and maybe a multiple of folks. For whatever reason it was the first time that I had thought of it.
There had to be a virgin birth. There wasn't any other way around it. While God could do anything he wants there are some things that he cannot do as they are contrary to his nature.
For one thing sex is for the marriage bed so for the Father to have sex with a daughter would not only be incredibly creepy it would be a violation of the ten commandments. So there's that.
For another thing, a soul is created at the point of conception so you cannot have a situation where a human soul is occupying Mary's womb and have God's spirit in the baby at the same time. This would be the equivilant of demon posession and God doesn't work that way.
When we become Christians God does indeed come into us but it is only through our willingness that he takes up cohabitation. If Jesus had an earthly father then a human soul would be there thus making it impossible for him to be God. If that had been acceptable then any of us could have been born God via posession and would have made the birth of Jesus arbitrary and trivial.
Going further, accepting the divine conception as truth, if Jesus had to ask God into his heart the way we do then he would have been born without a spirit and that doesn't work either. From the point of God's unique creation of the Christ child God stayed right there through the whole pregnancy.
I don't know how to describe it beyond this. Christ as an avatar doesn't sound quite right. What I do know is that there's no way around a virgin birth.
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