Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Intro
Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of the Can I Say This At Church podcast
Today's topic is going to be uncomfortable and going to stretch you a little bit, but have an open mind. I had the privilege of having a conversation with Dr. Kyle Roberts about his new book titled: A Complicated Pregnancy: Whether Mary was a Virgin and Why it Matters. In this we talked about how this book came to be kind of that story and Kyle's faith and journey about what led him to research this topic, a topic that I don't know, many Christians think about much, we kind of take it for granted.
So a little bit of a backdrop about Kyle. Kyle is the Schilling Professor of Public theology in church and economic life at United Theological Seminary, in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Robert has published essays on Kierkegaard and modern theology has recently completed and co authored a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew at United Roberts teaches public theology, Christian ethics, historical theology, which is huge because the history in the Bible is just so important and can't be passed over. I'll stop talking. Let's get into this.
Seth
So, welcome to another episode of the Can I Say This At Church podcast. I am joined today by Dr. Kyle Roberts from United Theological Seminary in the Twin Cities he's in that's in Minnesota, correct Kyle?
Kyle
That's correct.
Seth
Awesome.
Well, I appreciate you very much being here taking time out of your schedule, I'm sure. Your semesters wrapping up site, I greatly appreciate you taking the time to to come on.
Kyle
No problem. I always enjoy talking about my book.
Seth
The book in question is, is called a complicated pregnancy Whether Mary was a virgin and why it matters, which is quite the long subtitle, but um, is this your first book? I don't believe that it is, correct?
Kyle
Correct. I wrote a book a few years back on Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and connection to the contemporary relevance for the church called Emerging Prophet characterized the postmodern people of God. And I've also recently completed a commentary co authored commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. So that'll be coming up next September. So you can have you back on and if you'd like, absolutely. Yeah, I will set before we let you go today,
Seth
For those that are unfamiliar with you, can you just briefly start with just a bit about yourself kind of how you came to the faith and how you came to be doing the work that you do today?
Kyle
Sure, so I was a pastor's kid. And my dad was a pastor. My granddad was pastor, very, you know, more conservative, Southern Baptist upbringing, went to evangelical seminaries for my theological degrees, taught at an evangelical Seminary in Minnesota for about nine years; it was my first full time teaching job. Over the years, particularly in in those years of teaching, and researching. My theology started to change a bit and become more progressive. I talked about that the beginning of the book a little bit. So I was on a theological journey, and, you know, things unrelated, necessarily to the question of whether Mary was a Virgin, but connected, same time and other ways, biblical authority, meaning of salvation, who Jesus was, and is for us, and all those kinds of things.
And so I switched to United started teaching at United about four years ago, which is an ecumenical, progressive, progressive or liberal, mainline Protestant seminary, so very different context. But a really good place to explore a question like this. And so that came about, I'd written a blog post, about three years ago, on this question, back then I took a different conclusion, more traditional conclusion to the question.
And then got a contract to write a book offer on the on the topic. In the midst of researching for that book, my mind started changed on the on the subject, realized the book was going to be very different than what I intended. Which after a little bit of conversation, the editor was okay with. And so here we are, the book is a product of have a twist and turn in my own kind of theological and faith journey. And I, you know, I let a lot of that story out kind of here and there throughout throughout the book.
Seth
So what would you then say is, I guess in your mind, a progressive, but still Protestant? Christian?
Kyle
Hmm.
Well, yeah, that's a huge question. Progressive, Protestant, Christian. Well, for one thing to be Protestant, means to be always reforming. That's the spirit of the Protestant Reformation, that received theologies, receive doctrines, while, while important, are always open to revision in light of what we may discover scripture to actually be saying or teaching.
So I think that what I've done is a very Protestant kind of thing to do. And that is to look at a theological topic or low sigh or, you know, even cherished theological phrase like born of the Virgin Mary, and reconsider it in light of contemporary knowledge. Science about, you know, biology and history, historical knowledge, but also just the diversity of Scripture itself on the topic, and the theological concept of the incarnation.
So I think to be a Protestant Christian is to be open to reevaluating, and to receive theologies while not dismissing the tradition, whimsically, or arbitrarily, but ultimately to if I can just refer to Kierkegaard one of my theological hero's, it's the follow Christ, not a doctrine. And so it's following a living person. Yeah. Yeah. That's discipleship. Yeah.
Seth
And that's hard. I can tell you personally, especially after starting this, but it's one of the reasons I started this podcast is, I quickly found out if you kick someone's pillars of whatever their personal faith is, people get mad, fast.
Kyle
Oh, yeah.
Seth
Um, yeah, this, this book is definitely on that. I don't know what I was expecting going into reading it. And I still don't know where I'm at just recently finishing it. But I will say, I, it was not what I expected. And I greatly enjoyed it. So the topic at hand of discussing Mary's virginity, or the incarnation of Christ, especially this close to Christmas, is definitely something that people would question whether or not they could say at church. So you referenced your blog post. And I did read that from a few years ago. Was that just a whim? Was that a group effort of guys, we we need to get together? We need to talk about this. It's important, or was it just a, this is something rattling around in my head? What made you actually start down the conversation to begin with?
Kyle
Yeah, that was a conversation and dialogue that was initiated by the, the channel manager, the progressive Christian channel manager of Patheos, where I, I blog, and she, at the time was the manager, and she said, hey, let's, let's have these four people, you four people, write different perspectives, different takes on the Christmas story.
And so we all kind of came up with our different opening question, and then respond to each other's to each other's original posts. So I don't recall exactly what prompted this particular question for me. But it was one of those things that, you know, I hadn't looked at this closely before. I, it's just something I'd always assumed and not reflected upon, theologically or, you know, historically, so on. So I started digging into it. And, and the questions that emerged, I thought were very profound. And in the context of that one post, I wasn't able to explore them as deeply as I wanted to, which then, you know, led to the book project.
Seth
Yeah. I find it odd, and you said it a minute ago that you know, you went through seminary raised a pastor's kid you're trying to teach. And it isn't until you start teaching that you begin to, I guess, rethink things. I find it odd that, that nowhere in seminary, and I have other friends that have been in seminary, and they echo the same thing that you just you wait until you're on the other end, and you're like, why didn't we talk about this? 10 years ago?
Kyle
Yeah,
Seth
this would have been helpful.
Kyle
Now of course, that's not true for a lot of people who go to seminary and more, liberal seminaries, where they do encounter a lot of these sorts of questions and rethinking things. It just happened to be the ones I went to for whatever reasons, you know, of course, we explore different kinds of questions. But this wasn't one that was open to investigation, at least not from a, you know, we can actually, we can actually rethink this.
Seth 10:21
So, so to get to the matter at hand.
What I've been not trying to avoid, but afraid to start down the road of us. So you talk a lot about Mary, Jesus, and even Mary and other cultures in your book. And so I want to try to ride the line of just enough information, that people go out and get the book. So that's kind of my intention here. So what, what is the idea of a virgin birth, really intended, I guess, in your view to mean?
Kyle
Yeah, and so we first have to distinguish between a virgin birth and a virginal conception.
Because the virgin birth came to mean something a little bit distinctive. In the early church tradition, where the birth or the delivery of the baby was assumed by many theologians to be virginal, meaning that Mary remains biologically a virgin. Her hymen is, is untouched and Unviolated through the birth she she is a perpetual virgin, those kinds of things. And so the virgin birth took on a different significance or an added significance to the virginal conception. And that's this idea that the Holy Spirit does whatever the Spirit does, in Mary to make her, pregnant. To give life to this baby, Jesus says, I go to which would become Jesus Nazareth.
So that conception, was assumed to be miraculous, supernatural signified by the fact that Mary had not had sexual relations before she became pregnant. And so the two biblical accounts of Matthew and Luke, they don't really dwell on the significance of men, Mary's virginity other than a sort of, to say, to signal that God did something special and miraculous that there was an interruption of history and of nature, and of biology by God, to bring about the entrance of the Messiah, you know, of the Christ, into history in this remarkable way.
It really wasn’t in the gospels, as far as I can see or tell, it's not really about Mary's sexual purity. It's about God's God's power, and God's presence to his people. In the early church tradition, after the typical accounts, we then have this development, where Mary's sexuality or sexual purity specifically, it becomes the thing that's really highlighted in the story. And then she is this paragon of virtue paragon of purity, the ideal, you know, to which all Christians should aspire? And of course, we have Jesus too playing that role for men. And to and to some extent, Joseph also, but yeah, there are layers and layers of meaning that get added on to the original biblical accounts, the infancy Gospels.
And what we get handed then looks very different from what's actually there in the original gospel texts. Yeah, I found it fascinating just from a, just just from a historical, theological perspective, to see how doctrine develops, changes morphs, and layers of meaning get added and added and added over time, which at some point, you go, Okay, wait a minute. Let's, let's look at this again, rethink what's actually going on?
Seth
Yeah, and there seems to be a lot of that, especially in today's day and age, it's odd that I feel like I'm not the only person having these questions. It seems to be so many people, and I think research from you know, Pew, and other organizations embraces that, that I'm not the minority. I just happen to have a laptop. But that purity theme, I mean, that's still the, that's still the bar today, it seems like, you know, for everything, the, you know, your women stay this way, because that's the way it needs to be and I'm fine with that, especially because I have two daughters, and I'm fine with that as a father. You make a case that, that the early church has, for some reason, sanitized the aspect of the, the actual birth.
And I read through those a little bit, I'd like you to talk a little bit cuz I'm still slightly confused, in the reason for the sanitation. But I also think, being that I was president for all three of my children. There is a lot of brokenness, but also a lot of beauty, when those babies come out, and maybe I'm biased, because I was technically the first person before my wife to see them. But I don't feel like I'm bias. I mean, there's a lot of glory in that.
Kyle
Yeah, you know, my first chapter is called Beautiful Blood, and it's my own experiences, being there in the delivery room, and, like, having an aversion to blood, myself, but no problem with it, right there when the baby was born, and because it is, you know, you see it and see it all in a very different light, through the splendor, the wonder the joy of, of this child coming into the world, that's your own.
And there was an this early debate about whether Jesus, as a baby, when he was born, actually experienced, the blood of the birth experience, the biological messiness, so to speak, of delivery. And some theologians just really thought that there's no way Mary would have experienced pain. There's no way Jesus would have, as a baby, been solely delivered via biological fluids, it would have been a sort of pure, miraculous, Supernatural, like, appearing of Jesus outside, you know, like, like a smooth transition, that Jesus was protected.
From biology, and what I argue there is that that's a very gnostic, or dosetic. The tendency, which is to say that the body is inherently flawed, human body is kind of thoroughly, deeply sinful, and that God would not have been sullied by the disgusting elements of the human body. So there's probably some psychology of disgust going on there, you know, which you talk about a bit, but also just the theology that was supposed to carry over from kind of Greek philosophical dualism, which elevates spirit over body, and if God is spirit, then the worst parts of the body must have elevated him.
And despite themselves, you know, the early church theologians didn't want to be docetic. They wanted to critique that kind of perspective.
Seth
Right.
Kyle
But I think they ended up falling in the same traps that that they accused others of falling into. And so it's hard to say what all the reasons for that on and you've got an Augustine view of the intertwining of sex and sin. And so Jesus surely would not have been born through, conceived through, human sexuality because then Jesus would have had transmitted to him the, you know, the original sin, which descended all the way from Adam and Eve through procreation, so sex and sin, were all tied up in the body and was inherently flawed. And so you've got the sanitized delivery, and then a spiritual country? Uh huh. But that's a short way of putting a long complicated story.
Seth 19:06
So, it when you reference Augustine, and I will say my literal inerrantist, version of the Bible, and I went full disclosure, I went to Liberty at one point and, and that is gone. And so I feel like once I no longer and I no longer read the Scriptures that way. But if you read Genesis, not as six days and everything is so literal, it read it more as I think the author is intended to be read. I don't see how, obviously Augustine is extremely smart guy. So I don't see how they can come to that conclusion that it was is there a vested self interest and then doing that for the time in history that they lived in?
Kyle
In general, are you thinking of Augustine’s theology of original sin?
Seth
Yeah,
Kyle
Yeah. Well, I think there you do see the, the way that personal experience, shapes theological and biblical interpretation. Augustine himself, you know, kind of lived a fairly wild party life, let's say before he his conversion to Christianity, and still, you know, struggled with a lot of guilt over that, and kind of deep, deep sense of emotional sense of his own depravity. And so he may have read a lot of that into his view of human nature and the soul, and all of that.
So you do see how personal context and experience can shape the things you emphasize. But he was working with a faulty translation of Romans 5, which led him to interpret the spreading of sin to all men, all people, in a way that the more accurate translation would not have resulted in the same conclusion. And so, again, that little piece that bit is there in the book as well. But yeah, he was brilliant, he was obviously brilliant. And, you know, it's, it's amazing to read his work and, and just how prolific he was, and how thoughtful so much of his theology was, but it's also a good reminder that we are all influenced by our context and our worldviews and our buying our experience. Yeah. And our bias.
Seth
Yeah. I said it was perfect was a guy the other day, I think I read it from Walter Bruggemann. And I'll probably have to edit this out, because I feel like I've said it often is, I read somewhere that he wrote that we all read Scripture with our vested self interest at hand, like there's not a way to not do that. And we just have to be able to check that.
So the, you talk a little bit about curse theology, and that is something that I'd never heard before reading it. Can you explain what you mean a bit by that and you were referencing I think, from memory? A guy named…Ambrose Father….Father, somebody? Can you go through that a little bit?
Kyle
Yeah, reverse the curse. Yeah, so it's a curse of the fall, that suffer the sins of Adam and Eve in the garden. So you've got the fall, they, they, you know, listen to the serpent, they disobey God. And then there's this curse, that Genesis three, God lays out for them. And one of those curses is, of course, that the man will, and his descendants will struggle to, to reap produce from the soil, and, you know, will essentially struggle with work and, and harvesting food.
And, you know, that's the gist of it. And then the woman will, the curse of the woman is as the pain of childbirth. So this is I guess another answer to your earlier question, why early theologians were averse to the to Jesus, having gone through the pain, having gone through a normal biological birth or delivery, is that the idea here in the reverse the curse theology, is that the curse of Adam and Eve, frustration with produce and the land. And for women, the pain of childbirth, gets reversed, with Mary, and with Jesus. So you have this restoration. You've got Jesus bringing redemption, to the world to humanity, overcoming the effects of sin, you know, bringing the grace of God into the world, changing the dynamics of our experience of life, through salvation. And then Mary herself experiences that salvation from Jesus, even as she gives birth to Jesus. So the Celtic work of Jesus is applied to Mary kind of retroactively, even before she delivers Jesus, and you know, in the birth. So therefore, she experiences no pain, because that that curse has been removed. That’s a fascinating theological move,
Seth
Well that’s good for Mary. Because I know my wife was not was, was not happy. Not happy at all.
So is there anywhere else? I guess. And this might not be a fair question. So as I did a bit of research, and I did not know this before this, this research, and you allude briefly to it. So, Christ is apparently not the only, “person” or deity that's been born of a virgin. So do you feel like that was co opted by the early church fathers as a way to make sure there was there was do praise?
Kyle
Well, the church fathers have the two Biblical gospels already. And so they didn't come up with the story. I mean, you know, Origen and Irenaeus and Augustine and so on, they already had the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. But yes, it's true that when you look at comparative religious texts from wherever, whether it's Egypt, or, you know, that Babylon or the Greco-Roman mythologies, even stories about historical figures, like Alexander the Great, and Plato, you know, they all had some kind of miraculous, supernatural conception of some sort or other.
Alexander the Great’s mother supposedly was struck in the womb by a lightning bolt from Zeus. And there's Alexander in the womb, and, you know, all kinds of stories like that. So you do have to think about that, and wonder what that means, what the implications of that are for how we read, you know, the genre, this, this? These are the origin stories of Jesus. At one point, I thought about putting something like that as the subtitle you know, the origin of Jesus, you know, the Son of God? Because it's a powerful way of communicating the significance of an important life. Yeah, a religious figure. And that's…that's just what they did. So it makes a lot of sense that this amazing person, Jesus of Nazareth, who did all those wonderful things, said all those, you know, great truths, died on a cross was resurrected from the dead. That over time, as the stories about Jesus were circulated among the early Christian communities, and naturally would have developed a story about his birth, that would have been remarkable. It's not like, we look at that today from the way we, we emphasize facts, actuality, history, kind of a straight reporting. Well, we have fake news and all that these days.
You know, we're not a mythological society and that respect. But that's the way they did it back then. And so that story would have come about probably naturally, organically, as the stories about Jesus get told and retold. But what it came about later, after the stories of his life and teachings and resurrection, and death and resurrection, it was a later edition. We don't have it in the Gospel of Mark the earliest the Gospels, we don't have it in Paul's letters, the earliest of the New Testament writings. And so it's seems pretty clear that that's an addition to the story of Jesus, that comes along to help underscore his significance.
Seth 29:17
Is there any historical evidence for Christ being born of a virgin?
Kyle
Being born of a virgin or
Seth
Mary being a virgin? I probably said it not right
Kyle
No, the only evidence would be, you know, these gospel stories. And you can make arguments on either side of will, you know, how, how did they get there? And why are there some similarities between Matthew and Luke? You know, Raymond Brown is probably the best source on the sources of issues. And he goes through all of the arguments, the debates, the rationale for and against kind of thinking of these stories as historical. And ultimately, he argues that it's inconclusive either way. Yeah. Now you basically have to make a, you know, you have to make your own judgment, of course, I think for for and it's not like he says, It's inconclusive, equally. I think he just says that there's not a, you know, open and shut case closed sort of thing that there's room to make, you have to make a judgment. I think that the bulk of the evidence leans toward the virgin birth stories as not being literal, historical; and so we have freedom to interpret more through the grid of the ancient context in which they were written, which is more mythological, than the meaning being more theological. Sure.
Seth
So you, you alluded it to it a minute ago. And I think it hinges on what you just said. So, you know, Mark, and john, they don't even really mention Jesus, until he's an adult and in his ministry, and Paul, who most of the churches today govern the I think that's all they preach is Paul for the most part, and I didn't really talk about it. So does I guess, to use a Pauline term a Christology, or the the crux of Christianity hinge on whether or not Mary's a virgin?
Kyle
Absolutely not, I would say.
In fact, you know, if you think of what Christ means, Christ means Messiah or, you know, the smeared one, the anointed one with oil, and to be the Messiah, Jesus had to have come from the line of lineage of David. And how did it you? How would the lineage of David have gotten all the way to Jesus, who would have gotten there through Joseph, who was descended from the line of David, according to our genealogies that we have, it wasn't Mary. And so if the line, biologically is descended through, ultimately through Joseph to Jesus, how does that get there? If Joseph was not involved biologically, in the conception? So I think, Paul, who really, you know, has this high Christology? I think, for Paul, the Incarnation is really important, but also the origins of Jesus's lineage. I think he assumes a normal human conception by Joseph, that you know, Joseph and Mary. Now, it's impossible to say for sure, but what else?
Seth 33:00
What Scripture would you base that assumption on?
Kyle
Well, I think for one, there's just complete lack of reference to a virgin birth, or to Mary by name, as the mother in any of Paul's writings. But in Romans, 1:3 we have the the seed of David, descended from David. That's one example. And there's another Galations and a few other places that kind of trace Jesus back through as the Royal Messiah through this messianic line. And so that's in my Bible chapter, a couple of texts there.
But theologically speaking, the Incarnation figures pretty prominently in Paul. And the real crux of the argument of the book for me; and a real turning point for me, was when I began to understand that if Jesus was truly the incarnation of God of the Word, the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, becomes flesh becomes human is Jesus of Nazareth, then it really doesn't make a lot of sense from a contemporary standpoint, that that that the mechanism would be a virginal conception.
Because Jesus had to be fully human. Like you and like me, that's the point of the incarnation. Right? And so to be fully human, how do you get to be fully human? You are conceived in a way that all humans are conceived. That's what makes us human, that we've got a male biological father, and we have a female biological mother. And the two come together, we know how that how that happens. I think most your listeners do. The sperm meets the egg, you know and there's fertilization and a life emerges.
And so to get a human to have an incarnation seems to me. Now, you could say, well, God can do whatever God wants. And you know, I agree with that. I agree with that in principle, but you know, just thinking about what, what the Incarnation means, and what is it what it entails? Seems to me, we almost have to choose, and really do have to choose, in some respects, between a real incarnation of Christology and holding on to a virgin birth or virginal conception. Yeah. And so I want to go with the incarnation.
Seth
What would you say to people that say, “if you're going to throw out the virgin birth, and we're just gonna have to throw out the resurrection”, because I've gotten that, actually today from a friend of mine saying, you know, well, if you're gonna throw out one then we can't trust anything. So why not just be atheist?
What would you say to that?
Kyle
Yeah, it's, I think it's, it's the most natural, and probably most important question that comes up. When I talk about this book to believe in Christians. I have a couple of responses to that. And one is that, you know, this is a slippery slope argument. Alright, if you want to start down that slope, you know, where you're going to end up? You're gonna be in the pit of hell, you're here, you're going to lose all of your beliefs.
My first argument is that really, we're probably all already on a slippery slope. If you look at various ways we interpret parts of Scripture. Not all of that is probably literally, we don't apply it all literally. Most women don't wear head coverings in church, for example. A lot of us, and probably many of your listeners, for sure, I would guess, don't take a literal interpretation of Genesis 1, you know, read and understand the emergence of the universe, as having taken place in 6 - 24 hour days. So we've kind of already are doing that sort of thing. Now, this is asking a lot of people perhaps to this getting close to Jesus. It’s about Jesus so that there's a more anxiety probably that's triggered around letting go of that. That so that's my first response is we're already on a slippery slope.
My second response is that there's a difference between the Incarnation and the resurrection, that I think is significant about my argument, particular. Which is that to argue that we should or could leave behind a literal understanding of the virgin birth, on the basis of a theology of the Incarnation is to say that Jesus, in the incarnation, experiences human life in the same way that we do, that it's consistent with the incarnation theology for Jesus to have been conceived in a human way. The primary thrust of my argument is not De-mythologizing. It's not on the basis of science alone or history alone.
So when you get to the resurrection, I don't think that there's any contradiction or conflict with the notion of the incarnation, and the resurrection stories. Because in the resurrection, Jesus becomes what human beings, all of us, may one day eventually become. That is a transformation into a resurrected body. So there is no inherent conflict between the notion of a resurrection and the notion of the theology of the incarnation. That to me, is the big distinguisher between these two doctrines. And that's why I don't think leaving the virgin birth behind, leads you automatically to leave the resurrection behind to
Seth
Yeah, so I have two more major questions. And I passed over big portions of the book on purpose, I want to make sure we don't, we don't break it all down. But I do have two more questions. And I'd like to ask the harder one first, and end with I think, hopefully, a less tense one.
So Mary, obviously is young. And I know tracing through my own genealogy. I found many, if you go back to many generations of husbands marrying the same wives, a lot of women being married at 14 having a baby dying at 18. And, you know, just a lot of that. So being that I'm the father of two girls, I can't see how it would be appropriate. If now is the time that Christ came and my daughter was approached as a 12 year old of which she's currently five; so I've got some time, and that being okay. so I've had some, some some feminists people asked me, you know, say that, that that just doesn't sit. Right, that it's being taken advantage of someone that probably doesn't know any better, just psychologically, not knowing any better. So I was hoping and you touch on it briefly in the book was hoping you could you could give it a little bit on that now.
Kyle
Yeah, it's a it's hugely important question. And that is, it's one that as a society as a culture we're facing right now we're dealing with the questions of consent, and power differential and, and, you know, sexual relationships and so forth. We obviously just had the kind of Alabama Yeah, Senate Senate election and Roy Moore, and you had somebody tweeting, in defensive of Roy Moore, you know, Joseph was an older man and Mary was a teenager. So what's the big deal?
Seth
He should lose his internet privileges, that was horrible.
Kyle
So I think it's, it's absolutely as I point out in the book appropriate to raise the question of consent, one because of Mary's likely young age. That's, this is what happened in the first century context of Jewish world that if you were marriageable, if you were of age, so to speak, then you were marriageable, right? Lives were shorter, and so on, everything was kind of sped up. So there is that context and I think we have to keep that in mind.
At the same time, the story is such that it raises questions for us now, looking back, you know, the messenger, the divine messenger, Gabriel, and in one story, named and another, comes to Mary and basically announces, proclaims, that she will bear a child. That her body will be used by God. And and, you know, there's no question there. It's not a request, as I read it, it's an announcement. And I think that should trouble us a bit, it should make us think a little bit about, about what was going on there, the meaning of that, how we read that story today. What that communicates to young girls, especially. I think we need to understand, first of all, it was a different time, a different context.
And second of all, this is another reason why deconstructing the text, the story is really important. Did it really happen this way? We don't know. What if it happened to her in a very different way than the story communicates. And I think that that helps us help people to kind of destabilized the text in a way that opens us up to more liberative as possible abilities. You know, perhaps instead of emphasizing the, the passive acquiescence of Mary, to the divine figure, to use her body, for God's purposes, we emphasize instead the Mary of the Magnificat who proclaims for wonder that God has chosen her to be a part of the process of the historical, and cultural, and political, and economic, redemption of her people. You know that that's a different take. And one that often gets overlooked with the Mary did you know theology
Seth
My worship pastor and I, we go back and forth on that song, I lead the worship at my church, and I'm all the times I'm like, I can't sing this song. They, if they told her, this is a big deal. Of course, she knew. Come on now. But he's like, what we're singing anyway. I can't. How does your people that say, you know, that's fine, we can entertain this, but then that negates all of the prophecies and say, Isaiah or some of the other prophecies that say, you know, Christ had to come from a virgin or Christ had to come from here. So what would be an answer to those that say, to that prophecy question?
Kyle
Yeah, well, Biblical prophecy is really, this is one thing I actually did learn in seminary. Prophecy is really mainly not foretelling the future, but forth-telling God's coming judgment. You know, if you people don't shape up, and change your ways, God's going to unleash a torrent of Godly discipline on you through the Assyrians, or Babylonians, or whatever.
The Isaiah 7:14 passage that you are thinking of that Matthew then takes up and uses is actually a Greek translation of the original Hebrew text. The original Hebrew text doesn't have the word virgin in it, and it didn't certainly didn't have the birth of Jesus in, you know, foretold in mind. It had its own more immediate context in mind, and would have been fulfilled long before Jesus came onto the scene. So the word there that was then translated Virgin in the Greek is originally young woman or young madien, and it doesn't have the same connotation with the same reference point.
So Matthew was doing some creative utilizing, which Biblical writers often did, you know, they would use texts from the Hebrew Bible, incorporate them into their own kind of for their own theological purposes. And it was natural and right to do that for them. But then we, you know, when we read that now, we understand that that's what was going on that that this wasn't actually a for a specific foretelling. The other thing that I would quickly add, is that, you know, I, I am not arguing and I don't argue that Jesus was not born in, in this context, and that, that nothing about the infancy narratives are historical.
What I try to point out is that there's probably a middle ground between sort of complete literal fact-icity. You know, mythological elements, somewhere in between is the truth. You know, that Jesus was born, Joseph and Mary, were the parents probably, biologically, Jesus probably then was born or spent some time in Bethlehem. So, you know, who knows what the actual historical events are. But I try to just set us free to have a more flexible manger scene. Which we do anyway, because we're already picking and choosing between events and stories, and Matthew and Luke, which don't sync up perfectly, they don't match up. So we have to already do that work of picking and choosing our infancy narrative, our manger scene. I'm just suggesting we may need to do more of that than we’ve already done.
Seth
Yeah, and I think churches today and movies today, my family and I just went to see the star. I don't know if you've seen it, it, it navigates in between the two. And I didn't really realize it until recently. Like, it tells the story from the point of view of the donkey, which is cute for a kids movie, and it sticks fairly close, but it navigates like, it's one huge story. And it takes pieces of this and pieces of that and puts it all together. Which is I guess it's fine. It's intended for a much younger audience. So, I would like to be respectful of the rest of your afternoon. So before we go, the name of the book this right now we're for A Complicated Pregnancy, where would we direct people to get that and then as well as your next book that you reference it to beginning, kind of go over that a little bit. And when we can expect that and how we can find you and communicate with you going forward?
Kyle
Yeah, the book Complicated Pregnancy is available on Amazon. So you just put in the title and my name, and it’ll come right up. That's the best way to buy it, or at least it's the cheapest way to get it they always have a sale going on. You can also get it through the directly to the publisher fortress press. You'll pay full full retail there. But yeah, those are the two and then my previous book, if anyone's interested in Kierkegaard and post modernism and all that it's called Emerging Prophet. And it's also available on Amazon, or you can find both under my author page there at Amazon, the commentary will be out not until next fall. So that'll I'm sure be Amazon as well
Seth
And that is on Matthew.
Kyle
Yeah, it's on Matthew. Okay. And in and I'm blog I blog a little bit still. So I'm a systematic theology on path Eos. So you can just Google that and, and contact me through email, as well. KyleARoberts@gmail.com if you have questions, and be happy to respond.
Seth
Fantastic. Well, I will say, like I referenced at the beginning, this is a big topic, and I was I'm still a little nervous about it. Um, but I am. It is, it's worth discussing. It's worth it's worth deconstructing and thinking about. So again, thank you for your time. I've greatly enjoyed it.
Kyle
Thank you, Seth, for having me on. It's fun to talk about.
Outro
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