Chapter 9

Core Beliefs: Maybe, Maybe Not

All conscientious Christians worry from time to time about their ability to fulfill God’s call to share clearly and well their core beliefs with others. They worry that they may lack an adequate grasp of these beliefs to start with and/or that they may not know the right words to express the grasp that they do have. They worry that what they do believe may not be congruent with what they think their churches expect them to believe, and that their take on the Christian faith could get in the way of others’ developing their own. They worry that they may not understand a care receiver’s question(s) about faith, and that their inability to answer the question(s) satisfactorily might leave the care receiver in unnecessary distress. In general, our vulnerability to worries like these is a good indicator of a growing faith and a deepening sense of obligation to honor God by expressing his love effectively in concrete situations of need. When our worrying becomes excessive, though, it may be time to examine one or more of the assumptions that typically give rise to it.

One assumption is that “real” Christians know what they believe and never get confused about it. Closely related to this assumption is another, that they know what others should believe and how to point this out definitively and convincingly. Underlying both of these assumptions is a still deeper one, that Christian beliefs have always and everywhere been the same, that they will withstand every test of earthly time, and at the pearly gates everything in them will be confirmed firmly and finally to be true from everlasting to everlasting. The fact of the matter, however, is that from Jesus’ time to the present, his followers have held very diverse understandings of his message (and even of his identity) and, that in order to do these understandings justice the church that ministers in his name has learned to rely on a process of thinking that at its best makes room for and does not stifle wide-ranging, complex, and even contradictory-sounding affirmations of Christian truth. By way of examples: God is one and three; Jesus is God and man; Believers are raised bodily and spiritually; They are culpable and forgiven; The kingdom is here and not yet. The list of crucial conjunctions goes on and on.

Unhappily, Christians have not always shown a willingness to acknowledge and deal with this all-important fact about the so-called core beliefs of the faith. One telling sign of the church’s failures as the Shepherd of Souls in the name of a loving Jesus is the perverse delight with which some of its leaders have pronounced condemnations of people courageous enough to disagree with arbitrary Papal, episcopal, and/or conciliar determinations of what is and is not the True Faith. Their denunciations have succeeded only in dividing people into warring factions, whose mutual disrespect, and sometimes even hatred, makes acknowledging the divine image in each other all but impossible. The history of controversy among Christians over right belief (“orthodoxy”) is filled to overflowing with sadistically imposed pronouncements of accursedness along with terrifying images of amphitheaters, torture chambers, and battlefields. Even cathedral steps have been strewn with the bloodied and burned, whom their opponents managed only to expunge, never to love.

A tragic consequence of this jihadist approach to the establishment of core beliefs is the glee with which many disaffected people repudiate virtually anything and everything about the Christian tradition as arcane, parochial, obscurantist, patriarchal, world-denying, misogynist, and conscience-eviscerating. For them, the established churches are little more than walled-up fortresses of oppression which should be torn down as quickly as possible, in order to free the human spirit either to find or reject God on its own terms. At both extremes of opinion—the rigidly orthodox at one end and the debunkers (e.g., the “new atheists”) at the other—there is the same unwillingness and inability to honor diverse understandings of the Christian message as an essential part of loving God and the human nature—especially its rational side—which he is creating.

The Importance of Sound Doctrine

Once, I shared ideas like those expressed in the previous paragraphs at a weekend seminar with a group of highly read, thoughtful, and deeply caring laypersons. At my first pause to take questions, the group’s convener, Arnie, interjected a comment that occupied all of our attention for the remainder of the session:

Are you saying, then, that we shouldn’t ever criticize anyone at all for what she or he believes? That seems a little extreme to me, even though I’m probably the first to insist on following our own conscience on matters of belief, and not leaving it to someone else to tell us what to assent to. Nevertheless, some beliefs are Christian and some aren’t, right? And don’t we have to give at least some priority to the one over the other?

Arnie was right on target. It was, is, and always will be crucial to the church’s integrity and credibility that Christians sort out sound doctrines from misleading ones, truth from falsehood, beliefs that build up from beliefs that tear down, and what faithfully represents God’s good news from what distorts it. The fact that many abuses have arisen as a result of the church’s doing this work badly in no way implies that the church ought not to be doing it at all. The fact that human beings are saved by God’s grace, and not by what they believe or do not believe about him, in no way implies that one belief is as good as another and that Christians should never challenge anyone else’s interpretations of God’s nature, will, and works.

Toward the end of the discussion that Arnie’s question provoked, another member of the group, Sandra, summed up well what is at stake for Christians in, as she put it, “straightening out what we believe”:

It’s the vertical and horizontal all over again. My relation with God is a kind of up/down thing that is a lot more his doing than mine, and that I experience better if I don’t analyze things too much. But my relation with all of you, and you with me, is something else. It’s an earth-to-earth thing between us, that depends a lot on what we believe together. If we don’t believe at least some things in common, then we don’t have a lot to say as a community to people in the world looking for what we have to offer.

Fred added a qualifier to Sandra’s statement that rounded things out well: “I agree that we need common beliefs to keep the horizontal dimension of our lives together in order. But what I believe gives me a focus for my relationship with God, too.” Beliefs are indeed as important to individual relationships with God as they are to a sense of unity in a community of faith. Holding sound beliefs protects against both idolatry and schism.

As important as Fred’s concern is to the fullness of faith, it is Sandra’s that is the primary focus of this section. Her concern is for beliefs that bring people together rather than divide them, for beliefs that proclaim one gospel to the one world God is creating, through people who rejoice deeply over being of one mind and at peace with one another. Crucial for fulfilling this central concern throughout the whole church is a commitment to represent the whole of the gospel, and not just a part of it, in every witness that Christians make to it. Whenever this commitment flags, divisiveness is the inevitable result, a divisiveness that church leaders and institutions (religious and secular) all too often and wrongly attempt to crush by imposing upon people either beliefs or doubts that are as limited and limiting as the stance for which they are the supposed corrective. The point of these considerations for faith care in helping relationships is this: when preoccupation with getting beliefs right is motivated by the desire to be a part of a genuinely inclusive community of faith, it can properly be said to be inspired by God. However, when it is motivated by a desire to find grounds for condemning conscientiously doubting and dissenting believers and inquirers in the name of the allegedly true followers of Christ, it is just as surely inspired by God’s enemies.

Across the centuries, the church has made use of a particularly charged word in its distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable opinions about the Christian faith. The word is “heresy.” Theologically unsophisticated believers incorporate the word into their vocabularies about as easily as members of the Spanish Inquisition once did. One lay shepherd recently quoted delightedly a remark her care receiver dropped casually into their conversation: “Julie, you’re probably going to think I’m the world’s worst heretic, but I just don’t believe that anybody will go to hell for not believing that Jesus rose bodily out of that tomb.” The most widely understood meaning for “heresy” is as a synonym for beliefs officially designated as erroneous, offensive to God, and undermining of the church’s fundamental message for the world. People who hold such beliefs, it has been taught, must be made to change their ways or suffer punishment from both true Christians and from God. Wherever it has arisen, this understanding of heresies and heretics has compromised almost every attempt of the church to be a credible example of what a community of grace, joy, and peace can be like for all people. There is a second way of understanding heresy, however, that fully justifies the church’s concern to deal forthrightly with what Christians should and should not believe.

The second understanding shares with the first the notion that a heresy is indeed a “wrong” belief. However, it differs considerably in how it views a particular heresy’s “wrongness.” Upon this understanding, a heresy’s primary deficit is its incompleteness; heresies are partial truths, but not the whole truth, and it is in this sense that they constitute “wrong” beliefs. Rather than summarily dismiss beliefs with which they disagree as totally false, people who subscribe to this second understanding instead look for the truth that every heresy does indeed contain, even though that heresy renders at best only an incomplete picture of the truth to which it aspires. Heresies can be plausible and even convincing assertions about God and God’s saving work in Jesus Christ. But by either deliberately or from ignorance omitting something essential for faith, they confuse a part of the truth with the whole of it. In the light of an earlier chapter’s discussion of the essentially paradoxical nature of core Christian beliefs, one way to characterize a heresy is as a statement of belief with the element of paradox left out.

Looking at heresies as partial truths differs in a second way from looking at heresies as total and dangerous errors. The latter situates heretical beliefs in the context of official deliberations within the institutional church and of catalogues (syllabi) of errors whose repudiation is necessary in order to escape divine and ecclesiastical punishments. By contrast, the former intentionally cultivates an openness to the ways in which heresies, understood as often attractive but always incomplete formulations of Christian belief, manifest themselves in personal faith and in everyday conversations under very ordinary circumstances between people who have few agendas to impose, axes to grind, or things to prove, in their struggles to make God’s Word more effective in their daily lives. Heresies are more interesting, less threatening, and easier to deal with when they are viewed as containing truth rather than as excluding it. They mislead us not because there is no truth in them at all, but only because they confuse the partial truths that they do convey with the whole truth of God. Julie, the caregiver mentioned above, exhibited a deep appreciation of this understanding of so-called deviant opinions when she said to her care receiver, “Maybe it comes down to flesh and blood not inheriting the Kingdom of God, or something like that. But without a body at all? That doesn’t quite get it for me, I guess. A ‘spiritual body’, perhaps?”

Contrary to what church leaders are often reluctant to admit, “deviant” opinions about God’s Word abound everywhere in the church, as they always have. And they cannot be dealt with responsibly by arbitrarily imposing one particular understanding of the gospel on fellow Christians and then expecting their disagreements with that understanding simply to go away. What is necessary, instead, is to learn a healthy respect for what each understanding of the gospel, our own included, does and does not contain of what is believed to be divine truth and to remain open to discerning more about that truth by exploring the many ways that Christian people across the centuries have sought to discover and apply it in circumstances very different from their own. This process leads inevitably to a deeper appreciation of the necessity for both-and rather than either-or language in bringing it fully to expression. The next section illustrates this process concretely.

Beliefs and The Gospel: Part and Whole

Throughout my ministry, I have been privileged to worship with many earnest, searching fellow believers—pastors, students, parishioners, counselees, friends—who gladly shared with me some of the hard-won and deeply-felt expressions of belief that anchored their personal faith. Six core beliefs from some of our conversations may be especially helpful to the present discussion:

God is a loving heavenly Father, not a stern-faced Judge who sends people to Hell.

Communion isn’t about taking a little bread and a little juice; it’s about meeting Jesus wherever we may be.

If you believe strongly enough, you can take whatever you most want to God in prayer, and God will give you everything you ask.

Everything in the Bible is inspired by God.

God helps those who help themselves.

Once saved, always saved.

It is difficult to imagine that any one of these strongly held beliefs could be put forward among most gatherings of Christians today without generating immediate and strong reactions. The reactions will be positive, negative, and in many shades between, and they will be accompanied almost certainly by heated discussion. However, for all of the intense feelings that beliefs like these inevitably churn up, there is one reaction to them that is almost certain not to occur: the denunciation of any or all of these statements of belief as “heretical.” One reason is that few Christians are any longer prepared to single out those with whom they disagree for the more extreme forms of punishment—e.g., humiliation, condemnation, and torture—that were more common in earlier areas. The other is that for most Christians, pronouncing a belief heretical, if it is to be done at all anymore, falls under the purview of church hierarchies and not of the larger body of the faithful.

These reasons are compelling, and naming any belief with which one differs a heresy will undermine constructive discussion under almost any conceivable set of circumstances. Nevertheless, it is just such beliefs as those quoted above that expose the inner essence and logic of all genuine heresies, whether designated ecclesiastically or nurtured personally: the confusion of a part of divine truth with the whole of it. These six passionately advocated beliefs, and so many others like them, share with one another a fundamentally non-paradoxical, either-or, and as a result partially misleading understanding of the nature of core Christian teachings. God is loving only, never a righteous judge. Jesus is everywhere, never here rather than there. There are never unanswered prayers along with answered ones. The words of the Bible are only God’s, not human beings’. God gives people only what they deserve, never what they have not earned. Salvation is a state of being infused by God, never a process that human beings can contribute to or frustrate. The only’s and never’s tell the story here, a story of reducing the mystery, grandeur, and paradoxicality of God’s nature, grace, and sustenance to unnecessarily simplistic affirmations that divide and diminish people rather than unite and enhance them as pilgrims following a common way and sharing a common calling.

A very different care receiver from Julie’s, Gennie, expressed her own faith-question this way:

I get so angry with my son when he starts picking apart the beliefs we’ve tried so hard to teach him. There’s only one way to be a true Christian, and that’s to believe what we’re supposed to believe, period. Take Jesus’ birth, for instance. He was born of a virgin, wasn’t he? I just don’t know how to get across to my son that believing this, and other things alike it, is what being a Christian is all about.

Actually, it isn’t. Believing as a Christian is not, in fact, a matter of learning what everyone else is supposed to believe and then assenting to it. It is a matter of keeping our minds and hearts open to the ultimate mysteriousness of God and the unfathomable richness of God’s grace. The opinions which have caused both believers and doubters the greatest harm are those that have sought to collapse one side or the other of what are essentially very complex, both-and statements that can be understood only by taking each side of each statement as seriously as one takes the other. Holding both sides of the statements in tension and exploring their depths together is what believing is all about. Believing as a Christian is a matter of willingly sacrificing uniformity of assent for the sake of honoring a God who cherishes the staggering diversity that believers in God have manifested at all times and everywhere. The closing section of this chapter seeks to make this perspective clearer by means of an extended discussion of the belief that Gennie is finding so important and of the resources that she and her caregiver, Antonia, might both find helpful.

Jesus’ Conception and Birth: the Facts and the Symbol

One particularly contentious issue across all my years as a teacher of the faith has been the question of Jesus’ supernatural origins. My struggle with it began early, when a parishioner took me to task for quoting a particular theologian in one of my first sermons. She agreed that what I quoted was pertinent to the sermon’s topic (the Holy Spirit’s gifts to the church), but she also thought that I should not have made reference to that theologian at all because he did not believe in the virgin birth. From that time to the present, wherever I go, one of the questions that I can still count on being asked is: “Doctor, do you believe in the virgin birth?” A second question almost always follows: “Do you believe that Jesus was God?”

Once I regarded most of my reluctantly-engaged-in conversations about the virgin conception and birth as tedious and as tangential to what I peevishly thought my listeners ought to be thinking about. Now, I look back on those sessions with belated appreciation for their helping me to see more clearly (a) that both the narrative and the doctrine of Jesus’ origins exemplify a distinctively different logic from the one we use to interpret and confirm beliefs about the physical world in general, and (b) that it is this very different logic that defines the character of all the core beliefs we hold as Christians.

Fact and meaning

Most core Christian beliefs appear at first glance to take a form very much like that with which we are familiar in our dealings with the physical world. In specific, they seem to be rather straightforward descriptive statements about agents, actions, recipients of action, states of being, and circumstances like those we are familiar with and curious about from our everyday experiences. To be sure, the realities to which they refer are anything but purely physical ones; core beliefs strive to direct our attention to transcendent realities that are higher than the heavens themselves. But the way in which we refer to “sacred” things seems little different from the way in which we refer to “mundane” ones. For example, proclaiming that Jesus was raised from a tomb by God does not seem all that different in form from announcing that a baby was delivered from his mother’s womb by a doctor. Both statements seem to be about observable matters of fact, about particular actions performed on someone by someone else with consequences that may or may not be easily predicted. And their truth seems equally determinable by some combination of direct evidence and the inferences that direct evidence permits.

A closer look at both of these statements, however, will show just how deceiving their surface appearances can be. One describes what a mortal physician did on behalf of a very much alive pregnant woman, while the other celebrates what the Creator of the Universe did on behalf of an entombed body! What makes the first an uncomplicated assertion of fact is (a) that the kind of act it describes is repeatable and directly observable, and (b) that any observer could make clear to anyone else how he or she might go about observing and confirming similar kinds of acts for themselves. What makes the second something quite different is that, in its context, it refers to an unrepeatable act that was neither observed in fact nor is observable in principle. What many people believed they observed following Jesus’ death was Jesus himself alive and well: “We have seen the Lord!” What they did not and could not observe, however, was God’s act of bringing Jesus back to life. Even if some of them had been with Jesus in the tomb itself, watching for the precise moment of his resurrection, they could only have seen Jesus waking up, as from a sleep. They could not have seen God’s act of awakening him. Why? Because, in the words of the Fourth Gospel, “No one has seen God at any time.” (1:18) Certainly, someone’s believing that God raised Jesus from the dead is itself an observable, describable matter of fact. What the belief states, though, is not and can never be.

What is true about this particular affirmation of belief is true about other core beliefs as well, such as the beliefs that God created the world out of nothing at all; that God is present everywhere at every moment of time; or that all things will come to their appointed end according to a pre-ordained, divine plan. These may look like ordinary descriptive statements whose truth can be established on the basis of indisputable evidence and credible, convincing logical reasoning. But once we set out to compile evidence and formulate arguments for them, their “ordinariness” begins to slip away from us before our very eyes, primarily because we can neither image, conceptualize, or verbalize in any ways familiar to us exactly what it is that each of these beliefs is asserting, factually. They remind us forcefully that, given who we are as finite and imperfect creatures and who God is as the infinite and perfect Creator, there must always be an incompleteness to everything that merely human interpreters of the faith can ever say about the divine nature, will, and work in the world. God’s being and rule forever exceed all that finite creatures can ever imagine, think, and say on the basis of their own perceiving, reasoning, and understanding, and because this is so, no humanly articulated belief ever does full justice to God’s greatness, goodness, and graciousness. It is only from a perspective such as this that we can possibly hope to fathom the great mystery contained in one of our faith-tradition’s central affirmations, that God became flesh and dwelt among us.

“Behold, a virgin shall conceive . . . ”

On the face of it, the affirmation that Jesus was born of a virgin named Mary seems to be about an impregnation without human sperm and a delivery without a broken hymen, both extolling the greatness of God and the uniqueness of the resulting offspring. The question for faith, however, is whether it is at this surface level or at some other level of affirmations like these that God speaks most fully. The witness of the apostolic tradition as a whole, and the Jewish foundations upon which its witness rested, strongly suggest that the second possibility provides the better answer.

Although the traditions upon which the doctrine of the virgin birth is based are clearly laid out in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, they are mentioned only rarely elsewhere in the New Testament. By way of the most important examples, neither Peter, Paul, Mark, John, nor the authors of Ephesians, Colossians, Hebrews, and the Pastoral Epistles pay any attention at all to the traditions about Jesus’ birth that seemed to be so important for Matthew and Luke. Indeed, if Paul’s single reference to Jesus’ birth at Galatians 4:4 (“ . . . born of a woman . . . ”) is any indication, their emphasis fell not so much on Jesus’ divine origin as on his very human one. For them, the distinctive fact about his origin may have been simply that his mother was young rather than old.

For Matthew and Luke, of course, the emphasis is not on the human, but on the divine origin of the Nazarene, and their testimony must be taken seriously. Taking the respective narratives seriously, however, does not entail construing them as either (a) composed of statements whose primary meaning is the literal description of a supernatural occurrence, or (b) statements the assent to which is essential for genuine faith, or (c) both. A closer look at the context for both the Matthean and Lucan accounts of Jesus’ conception and birth should make this plain.

Clearly, Matthew and Luke drew freely upon varied efforts of early Jewish Christians to present the details of Jesus’ life against the background of ancient prophecies about a coming Deliverer (Messiah) of Israel from all her enemies and from every kind of harm. Most typically, these efforts sought to demonstrate Jesus’ Messianic identity by showing how everything he said and did and everything that happened to him fulfilled exactly what had been prophesied through the centuries about what God’s chosen Messiah would be like. A prominent feature in at least some of these demonstrative arguments—obviously, in those favored by Matthew and Luke—was the idea that Jesus fulfilled the Messianic prophecies not only by his death and resurrection—the primary emphasis of Paul and his followers—but also in his conception and birth. Especially important for this purpose, as the first chapters of Matthew and Luke indicate, was a particular Isaianic prophecy: “ Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14, KJV)

Revered as this passage is in Christian circles, however, it simply cannot bear the weight that Matthew and to a lesser extent, Luke, placed upon it originally. What makes this conclusion inescapable is the fact that the text itself had so little significance in pre-Christian times to the very Jews for whom anticipating the coming of a Messiah represented the very heart and soul of faith. Of the hundreds of Old Testament passages that shaped the Messianic expectations of the Jewish people from the Exile in Babylon to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, Isaiah 7:14 was one of the least frequently relied upon, if indeed it was relied upon at all. In spite of the hold that this particular prophesy has had on Christian sensibility and belief, Messianic prophecy in Old Testament times showed little if any anticipation that the Messiah would be one who comes into the world through a supernatural conception.

As a whole, then, the apostolic tradition strongly challenges the view that the doctrine of the virgin conception and birth expresses a core belief for all Christians, the assent to which is essential for faith. It also calls into question the view that the doctrine’s primary purpose is to assert as fact a supernatural happening under the conditions of time and history. In specific, and contrary to the standard Christian interpretations of Isaiah 7:14, the Hebrew text of this passage speaks of a young woman (alma), and not a virgin (betula), giving birth to the coming Deliverer. It is true that in one Greek translation of the passage a hundred years before Jesus’ birth (the Septuagint), the mother of the coming Messiah is referred to explicitly as a virgin (parthenos). However, later Greek translations of this passage do not repeat the practice; instead they use neanis, the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew alma. Further, the Septuagint rendering itself offers little support for interpreting Isaiah 7:14 as the Christian tradition frequently does. What its Greek says literally is that a woman, who is now a virgin, will at some future time conceive. It does not say unequivocally that at that future time, also, the woman will be a virgin.

Keeping the facts from spoiling Christmas

One Advent Sunday morning, I happened to overhear an interchange between two friends in a hallway on my way to the worship service. I had just finished teaching a class on the seasons of the church year, and was reviewing in my mind how I had dealt with the history of celebrating Christmas. Otherwise, I might have missed picking up on the conversation altogether:

Anne: What a downer! Here we were, primed and ready for Christmas, and our teacher suddenly decides to tell us that the Christmas story is just that—only a story! That’ll make a nice conversation around the lunch table today! I sure hope the kids are getting a different version of things.

Sue: (Laughing) What can you expect from a religion professor?!

Anne: Probably just about what I got! But she did start us thinking about some things that at least I hadn’t thought about before.

Sue: And that’s all she said she was trying to do. Maybe she did come on a little too strong, though.

Anne: This Christmas thing is really a pretty big deal for me. Did you know that I was baby Jesus in our church’s Christmas pageant when I was two months old? It “took!” I’ve been hooked on it ever since.

Sue: I’ve never been in one, but I’m just as hooked on pageants as you are. I get a lot out of seeing not only real live people up there on the stage, but people I know. They all make Jesus’ humanness and vulnerability so vivid to me.

Anne: When I was in that manger, I guess it didn’t matter a whole lot whether my Mom was a virgin or not!

Sue: Maybe it didn’t matter to the shepherds and the wise men either.

It is because I am a loyal veteran of Christmas pageants myself (alas, as a spectator only: I never got my own part in one) that I cherish so deeply the memory of this brief conversation. What pageants do best—and live Nativity scenes do even better—is to keep the focus more on the baby and less on his mother. They prepare viewers better to discover their Lord’s divinity by contemplating his weakness rather than his power, his dependence rather than his sovereignty, his entering into rather than his rising above the human condition, the flesh he became as well as the Logos he was. Certainly, the story of Mary’s conception and birth played and plays an important role in shaping one early understanding of Jesus’ divinity as present from the very beginning of his life as well as after the resurrection. Paradoxically, though—and this is what I heard my two friends saying so well to one another that morning—his divine nature is sometimes most evident in his very acts of emptying himself of it. (Philippians 2:6-8)

Clearly, there is far more to the affirmation that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary than the description of an occurrence on the plane of ordinary human history. At best, what the affirmation says can only hint very enigmatically at what it intends to mean. The faith that still gives rise to it is a faith that, when logic’s limits are reached, willingly relinquishes clarity for the sake of honoring mystery, in particular, the literally indescribable mystery that God Godself became flesh and dwelt among us. It is the very transcendence of its subject (the Son of God) to its language (a humanly constructed proposal for others’ assent) that has made the doctrine of the virgin conception and birth so vulnerable to overly imaginative as well as overly literal renderings that sacrifice both historical accuracy and intellectual credibility.

In sum, then, core Christian beliefs convey far more than the mere declarations of fact that are also embedded in them. Indisputably, for example, Jesus experienced terrible pain at the end of his life “under Pontius Pilate”—this fact is beyond reasonable dispute. That Jesus is “God’s only Son,” however, can neither be established nor disconfirmed by objective historical investigation of facts alone; this is a quite extra-ordinary “fact” that only faith can finally determine. The particular assertion that has been the subject of this section is that Jesus was born of a woman named Mary and the confession of faith in her own virginity and in Jesus’ divinity that surrounds it. It is the confession, and not the facts embedded in it, that point to the ultimate ground of all existence, to the reason why there is anything at all and not just God, to the delight that the Creator takes in all the works of his hands, and to that love alone which binds and knits all things together. Like all core beliefs, what the Christian tradition says about the meaning of Jesus’ conception has always transcended whatever facts that the belief itself contains—even parthenogenesis as an empirically established possibility. Overly literal descriptions of only the facts themselves inevitably get in the way of those genuine encounters with God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit that are finally expressible, in St. Paul’s words, more by sighs than by words.