Supernatural Materialism
A Tradition of Christian Hubris, Part Two
(Audio at end)
Absent Fathers
Another side effect of the virgin conception narrative—in fact a direct one, the way it’s told at least—is that Joseph, Jesus’ father, has no role to play in Jesus’ life, beyond protecting the family from Herod by taking them off to Egypt.
In the nativity story, Jesus is fatherless because God is his Father. This extends into the bare bones description of his life, in which his human father becomes an irrelevancy. Whether Joseph died early (if he was an old man, then it would make sense), or whether for some other reason, he does not reappear after the early scenes in Matthew and Luke, and not at all in the other Gospels. Is this symptomatic of something that is baked into the very origins of Christianity?
Certainly, we can observe, as a critical symptom of our seemingly anti-Christian culture today, the abolition of fatherhood as a meaningful standard, or principle, by which to develop virtue, via the natural observation of an older man acting as God’s image.
Jesus has no such father (figure); he must imitate God directly, without a human model as intermediary. This does fit well enough with Rene Girard’s interpretation of the figure of Jesus and the Gospel narratives, of Christ as the divine solution to mimetic rivalry and violence, because he does not imitate anything but God, the father, and we can then imitate that.
But this is perhaps another reason why it is crucial—at least at this stage in our evolution—to not read such facts in Jesus’ biography too literally. We do not need to be literal sons of God—i.e., without biological fathers—to imitate Christ and make God our model for behavior. This is very different from making the church—or the Pope, for Catholics—stand-in for our fathers. It’s this confusion, or blurring, of lines that potentially turns faith into an instrument of enslavement.
When millions of Christians believe something they cannot explain, simply because it is in the Gospel (or rather, in two out of four of them), a belief in something that is seemingly impossible, as well as contradictory, becomes central to Christian faith. Faith then becomes a means of relieving cognitive dissonance, and the church the means of supplying the faith to do it.
The church—internally and externally, this is more a case of complicity than conspiracy—wields power over its members via a kind of gaslighting: by coercing, pressuring, seducing, or cajoling people to believe something they do not understand, and that may or may not be (literally, biologically) true, in exchange for a guarantee of salvation.
For the record, I do think there is something mysterious about the incarnation of Jesus, including the conception by Mary. But to create such an extravagantly embellished, fleshed out, and crystalized (or ossified) narrative around just a few lines of text effectively seals up whatever truth is implicit in that text, inside an edifice of assertions and dogma.
The Temple, as such, becomes a sepulcher within which to bury truth, and to capture souls by luring them to worship forever on the outside.
Sexual Abstinence as Spiritual Purity?
Returning to the virgin conception as an unnatural imposition of a morality that didn’t exist at the time of Christ’s birth. Since this pseudo-Christian stigmatization of sexuality partly came out of the idea of a virgin conception in the first place, it’s a somewhat circular question as to how it came about.
No doubt, the idea that people have had a problem with sexuality, and with sex, for thousands of years is hardly controversial. I am not opposed to the idea of purity itself, or to the need to purify ourselves. The idea that, for Jesus, whoever he was, to have been the way he was, depended on his mother being unusually, or even uniquely, pure—or at least receptive—seems reasonable to me—but only as long as we include his father, who art on earth.
It also seems demonstrably true, in 2026, that the misuse of sexual energy is perhaps the primary and most profoundly pernicious way in which corruption can enter into our lives—our bodies, hearts, minds, and souls—and into society as a whole. (This is even a major reason for the return to Christianity today—why even someone like Richard Dawkins is advocating it—as a seemingly necessary bulwark against an increasingly grotesque licentiousness in the culture, and the corresponding “moral hazard.”)
But does it follow from this that sex itself is impure or the agent of impurity? Wouldn’t this render moot the goal of purifying our sexuality, and destroy the very possibility of a pure act of procreation, outside of divine intervention?
(It’s ironic that people still cling to the euphemism “making love” to this day, as if to cover over fear, shame, and confusion around the sex act. Anal sex is also, I presume, now considered making love! No wonder some people yearn for the days when Sodomite was synonymous with sinner.)
But one thing we know for sure is that, without sex, none of us would be here. This makes sex on a par with God as the source of all that is and ever shall be—at least until we enter some post-sex heavenly realm (a possibility which is largely irrelevant to this discussion).
If pure sex is an oxymoron, then only no-sex—the complete absence and rejection of sex, as in the case of the Virgin Mary—amounts to purity. This is an unhealthy—because unrealistic—ideal that has been incepted into our culture, partly by the idea of the virgin conception, and one that contradicts what we do know about that time, which is that, for an 11 or 12 year old girl to be betrothed to a man within the Jewish religion and remain celibate would have been, not just an anathema, but an abomination.
This implies that there isn’t a clear theological explanation for the idea of a virgin conception within realms of Judaism, and it does lend it some kind of historical validity, since such a radical new idea went strongly against the grain, so to speak. But this certainly doesn’t make it any clearer or easier to understand what exactly that idea means, theologically speaking, much less historically or metaphysically.
Faith vs Credulity
Credulity and faith are difficult to separate in a conventional Christian framework of understanding. Deep inquiry and a striving for the truth, on the other hand, require skepticism and a healthy sense of incredulity, potentially anathema to the Christian mindset.
After hundreds of years of “It is absurd, therefore I believe it,” is it time for Christians to counter the tradition with a more logical and independently-minded position: “If it seems absurd, let’s not be too quick to believe it”?
There may be no two people, either in history or alive today, who have believed exactly the same things about Jesus the Christ. Certainly, there is no way to know which things to believe, based only on the evidence of the Gospels, and all the inconsistencies therein. Was it magicians, kings, or shepherds who visited baby Jesus? Did the family flee to Egypt or not? Did Joseph and Mary live in Bethlehem or Nazareth? Did the resurrected Jesus appear to the apostles in Jerusalem or Galilee? Was Jesus’ ministry three years or only one? And so on.
With the different genealogies of Luke and Matthew, for example, the only solution is (as per Brown’s suggestion) that “sometimes a genealogy is not a genealogy,” i.e., sometimes, what reads as a historical account was not meant as a historical account, not in the way we think of that. This leads us to the unavoidable possibility (or certainty) that the ancients did not think, perceive, interpret, or describe reality in the same way as we do today, and that what to us is “allegorical,” for them was “literal,” because they didn’t draw a clear line between the two.
Things perceived physically are what today we call facts. But in an earlier time, if physical perceptions of events were mixed up with things perceived metaphysically or “supersensibly”—i.e., with what we today call supernatural, spiritual, mythological, or delusional—then imposing our own criteria for “literal” or real upon that previous time and perceptual mode is only going to lead to greater confusion.
The rich irony of this is that, by insisting on the literal, biological truth of a virgin conception, Christians risk becoming material reductionists!
I think this is the problem with the modern Christian mindset in a nutshell: in trying to keep up with the times, it has become an unintentional, and unconscious, refutation of itself, even a parody. And potentially, a complete inversion.
Christians need to believe that Luke and Matthew were straight-shooters who could never get anything wrong (much less deliberately distort facts). Yet at the same time, they want to see them as people more or less like they are, fellow Christians who saw the world more or less in the same way as they do today.
But there may simply be no way to have this communion wafer and eat it.