Lady Luck or Divine Providence?

Perhaps God has nothing to do with the weather at all and the climate of a given region is a natural phenomenon. As such, the weather is simply due to luck, an observation that begs the following question: what controls our lives Divine Providence or Lady Luck? At some point everyone has exclaimed, "What a great stroke of luck," or "We survived by the providence of God." As a Baptist, I have grown up with the concept of "the providence of God," but what exactly is luck and how do I reconcile it to a dominate idea in Western culture that God somehow regulates the universe?

            My brother-in-law had a great game of golf one weekend—even for him. He shot 67 for 18 holes, including a hole-in-one. His wife (my sister) chalked up the hole-in-one to his skill with the clubs. But he insisted, "No, any time you shoot a hole-in-one, it's luck." I thought about it for a moment and had to agree. If holes-in-one were due to skill there would be more of them. So, I suggested, "Perhaps it was divine providence." My brother-in-law replied, "No, it's luck. God doesn't care about golf." My brother-in-law is a Baptist Deacon, so I had to take him seriously. Golf is a game where you play against yourself, so the only reason for God to intervene in his game and bless him with a hole-in-one was to lower his golf score and make him feel rather smug. We usually like to think that God has bigger issues on his plate, which is what I think he meant when he said, "God couldn't care less about golf."

            What we seem to mean by luck is that sometimes things go in our favor and at other times they do not, including even the most trivial matters. We seem to conceive of luck as a pervasive random force in the universe that, for whatever reason, is erratic or whimsical in its application. If this is true, we do not live in a universe where everything is micromanaged by God. Hence, people who believe in God's providence must cope with the disturbing idea that God (if God there be) manages some things that happen, but, on the other hand, God allows other things simply to happen, as they will, without his oversight. Or perhaps we do live in a world where God micromanages everything and must be given the credit (or take the blame) for everything that happens. If God is to be given the credit for everything that happens, then we humans bear no responsibility for global warming, poverty, the breach of the ozone layer, or the failure of the levees in New Orleans in 2005. Somehow, however, we instinctively know that we cannot make God the scapegoat for all the misfortunes of the world. Most of us realize (I hope) that God is not responsible for the incompetent response of the Federal Government to the disaster in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, or the current bumbling administration presently making a mockery of the democratic ideals of the nation. Voters at least must share the blame for that debacle.

            Perhaps luck is only a more or less natural force in the universe, something like gravity for example. While the ancient Greeks and Romans personified it into a deity named Tychē (Greek) or Fortuna (Roman), we moderns have secularized the force. Nevertheless, the idea that some things just happen for no apparent reason is a disturbing concept for those who think that God guides a master plan for the universe. If things happen for no reason, then we have a universe permeated by a principle of randomness that suggests God may guide matters in the universe in most instances, but leaves others to happen without his guidance. Such a possibility raises the question how can we tell benevolent concern from random event? Perhaps we cannot.

            The Bible is full of bad things perpetrated by the biblical God on basically decent people. Many believers seem willing to accept that sometimes God does bad things to good people for reasons they cannot understand. Job thought so as well: "Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil" (Job 2:10 RSV)? Maybe we invented the idea of luck because such capricious behavior on God's part is simply inconsistent with the idea of a benevolent God. But if we invented luck, we could have invented God as well.¹

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Charles W. Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Eugene, Or: Cascade, 2009), 6–7. This essay first appeared before 2009 as a Religion and Ethics Editorial in the daily Newspaper, The Springfield News Leader.

The Human Genome, Gene Therapy, and the Irrelevancy of God

Roots. We all have them, embedded somewhere in our past. I don’t recall my birth father and have never visited his grave in Biloxi, Mississippi. My parents were married in 1932, when he was 41 and she 27. I was born in 1934, and he died in 1939. I never had a chance to observe him for the ways in which I might be a chip off his old block. Nevertheless, a good part of who I have become has been determined by who he was and his contribution to my inherited gene pool.

Who we are physically is heavily rooted in the combined gene pool of our parents. Such features of ourselves as the color of our eyes, hair, and skin, our height and gender, and our susceptibility to various diseases are all an outgrowth of our parental gene pool. Your inherited genes can even influence such things as mental abilities, personality traits, and predisposition to certain kinds of talents and abilities. If a person, upon looking in a mirror one morning, is pondering the image that stares back, s/he might check out some old family photos. On the other hand, s/he might consider gene therapy. As incredible as it may sound, gene therapy can involve replacing a defective gene in your present genetic code, silencing a faulty gene, or editing specific DNA sequences.¹

Depending on your politics and/or religious persuasion, gene therapy may sound like science fiction to the unpracticed ear but, like it or not, gene therapy has quietly moved into real life. Messing about in the human genome may evoke images of Dr. Mengele² or Victor Frankenstein (a character in Mary Shelley’s 1818 fiction novel Frankenstein), but if such treatment can improve the human situation, why not?

If you are religious in a traditional sense (an avid church/synagogue/mosque attender), gene therapy may also suggest that those involved in genome research are playing God. At bottom, such an accusation “refers to the powers that science, engineering, and technology confer on human beings to understand and to control the natural world, including you.”³ In aiming at the ability to create life in a petri dish such researchers encroach on a role that has traditionally belonged to God (Gen 1:1-31, for example). And in fact, they have successfully created a kind of artificial life, the first synthetic cell: “it is the first self-replicating cell on the planet [whose] parent is a computer.”⁴

If (or when) they succeed in discovering how to create life de novo, however, they will not have proven the non-existence of God but rather threatened the relevancy of the concept of God. If human beings can create life, even artificial life, and change the human genome so as to alter what God is believed to have accomplished through Mother Nature, God becomes something like a good luck charm to which many may turn in times of crisis—when the limits of human knowledge and ability are reached.

All of what I have just described evokes aspects of the biblical Tower of Babel story (Gen 11:1-9). The sons of men built a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.” And Yahweh, upon coming down to see the city and the tower, said: “this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (Gen 11:5 RSV). The story portrays Yahweh and his court (“Let us go down and confuse their language so they may not understand one another’s speech,” Gen 11:7 RSV) being intimidated by human accomplishments. Hence, God destroyed their ability to communicate and scattered them around the world (Gen 11:8-9). Apparently, Yahweh sensed that given their present course the sons of men would render the divine Self irrelevant.

Losing relevancy is a genuine, practical, existential threat to a God. Just consider how many Gods through history have fallen into irrelevancy and, eventually, into oblivion. Irrelevant Gods wait, one assumes, in a kind of mythical Nirvana to be rediscovered, to wait until someone calls upon them again and thereby renders them relevant. Or does irrelevancy mean actual death for a God? Has anyone out there ever heard of an irrelevant God being restored to relevancy to “run” the world again?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/cellular-gene-therapy-products/what-gene-therapy

And: en-wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-therapy

²en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele

³https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/playing-god

⁴newscientist.com/article/dn18942-immaculate-creation-birth-of-the-first-synthetic-cell/

Superstitious Survivals from the Ancient Past

What is superstition, anyway? According to one dictionary it is “any belief, based on fear or ignorance, that is inconsistent with the known laws of science or with what is generally considered in the particular society as true and rational; esp. such a belief in charms, omens, and the supernatural, etc.”¹ Hence superstitions are beliefs or actions that violate rational thought as conceived in a particular society—which makes superstition relative to what passes as critical thinking in a given community.

Since the rise of human reason in the 18^th century many of the superstitious survivals of antiquity have generally lost their influence in our scientific based Western culture—particularly with the rise of modern Western secular education. Yet many superstitions still survive in a kind of underground way in the modern Western world—similar to the survival of paganism in the ancient Roman world. Paganism was edged-out by Christian ascendancy around the fifth century. After 440 CE no pagans are listed among the elite of the City of Rome.² Yet the ancient religions and superstitions of the Greek and Roman worlds survived in the countryside away from the population centers of the cities, where Christianity had established itself.

            I was reminded of the fact that ancient superstitions still survive in modern society upon reading a sentence from Homer’s Iliad. In a speech Achilles made before the assembled Achaean warriors on the occasion of a pandemic caused by the God Phoebus Apollo over a slight by Agamemnon to Apollo’s priest, Chryses. The Achaeans were pondering why Apollo had sent his arrows of pestilence among them. Achilles suggested that they “should consult some seer (mantis), or priest (iereus), or interpreter of dreams (oneriopolos) to discover the cause.³

A seer in the ancient world (and in the Bible) is one who divines the future and answers other questions from various means, such as observing the flights of birds, for example.⁴ A priest in the ancient world (and in the Bible) is one who was authorized to perform the sacred rites of a religion, especially as an agent of mediation between people and God.”⁵ Oneiromancy, the interpretation of dreams, was prevalent throughout the ancient world (and in the Bible). Gods of the ancient world were thought to communicate with people through dreams (Matt 1:20-21; 2:13).

There was a prohibition of such practices in ancient Israel: there should not be found among you “anyone who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer” (Deut 18:10-12 RSV), but such figures were consulted anyway (1 Sam 9:9-12, 18-19).

These three supernatural practices still survive in modern Western society in various forms.  A psychic is a spiritual medium who answers questions dealing with matters beyond the physical world (check their availability on the internet). Priests are in the employ of certain modern religions. They are believed to have the power to mediate between God and people, particularly in the more ritualistic religious traditions (ascribing the divine presence to the elements of the Mass/Eucharist, for example). Dream interpretations are offered by psychics or mediums, who are believed to have the power to interface with the spirit world. Dream interpretation, however, has now also gone mainstream, and is a technique used by medically trained psychotherapists (hopefully not through the powers of spirits).⁶

Is Christianity’s Holy Spirit, perhaps, only another ancient superstition from the ancient past? It would seem, on the surface, that there is little difference between the ancient pagan belief that certain people communicated with and through spirit (not Holy Spirit) and Christianity’s belief that modern Christians communicate with God through Holy Spirit. Both groups access their Gods through the medium of spirit, what they both channel is a spiritual “reality,” and they are both pre-critical survivals from the ancient past.⁷ In what way is Christianity’s belief in Holy Spirit not also a survival from the ancient past? Why is it not also superstition, if pagan beliefs in spirit are superstition? If there can be one spirit (Holy Spirit), why can there not be more (pagan spirits)? Luke seemed to think so, when he described Paul as exorcising a spirit of the Pythia (Acts 16:16-18).

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4^th edition, 2002), s. v. “superstition.”

²Charles Hedrick, Jr., History and Silence. Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity (Austin: University of Texas, 2000), 57.

³Homer, The Iliad, Book 1, lines 62-63.

⁴See Charles W. Hedrick, “Prophecy, Divination and Fate,” The Fourth R 36.2 (March-April 2023), 15-18, 10. For other appearances of a seer in the Bible see 2 Sam 24:11; 2 kgs 17:13; 1 Chron 25:5; 2 Chron 9:29; Isa 29:10; Amos 7:12; Mic 3:7.

⁵Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1990), s. v. “priest.”

⁶National Library of Medicine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330585/

See also Charles W. Hedrick, “Does God Communicate in Dreams,” Blog: Wry Thoughts about Religion, May 16, 2013: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2013/05/does-god-communicate-in-dreams.html?showComment=1368794635348

⁷Hedrick, “Laying on Hands, to Pass on the Holy Spirit,” Blog: Wry Thoughts about Religion, July 8, 2021: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=the+holy+spirit

Once upon a time, a Man Became God

How in the world did that happen, do you suppose? Well, as with all good stories, there are several different accounts in the New Testament. The best known appears in two different versions (Matt 1:18-25 and Luke 1:26-2:20).¹ These narratives are blended and celebrated annually every December in Christian church and family settings. The narrative leads the reader to think that the God-Man (or man-God) was born naturally like all human children, as a flesh and blood child through the vaginal canal of his birth mother. The conception of the child by the birth-mother, however, is most unusual. Matthew says that the child’s mother conceived by a holy spirit (Matt 1:20) in fulfilment of Scripture. The child was to be called Emmanuel (Isaiah 7:14), which Matthew interprets as “God with us” (Matt 1:23). Luke also describes the child’s conception through a holy spirit that “comes upon” the mother and a “power of the Most-High overshadowing her,” suggesting that conception occurs in fashion similar to human conceiving, by a spiritual sperm.² This child, Luke opines, shall be holy and called a son of God (Luke 1:35).

            In John’s Gospel, there is a third version of the story in the prologue to John’s Gospel (1:1-18) for how a divine figure came to be man. The fragmentary narrative (John 1:1-2, 14) lacks in clarity. A figure, described as logos,³ who was from the primordial beginning alongside God and “what God was, the logos was.”⁴ Hence, the logos shared God’s essence, while being distinguishable from God (cf. Phil 2:6). In John 1:14 this spiritual figure “was made flesh” (cf. John 1:3).⁵ I take this to mean an incarnating or “enfleshing” of the logos in the sense of Phil 2:7: “taking the form of a slave, being made in the likeness of men, and being found in form as man…” How ever the author of the introductory poem to John may have conceived the event, it seems clear that conception and birth in the Matthaean and Lukan sense is not the process being described.

            A fourth version of the story appears in Rom 1:3-4 where God’s son is “born (genomenou) from the sperm (spermatos) of David according to the flesh,” and “appointed (oristhentos) son of God with power according to a spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead.” Jesus was a human being, a descendent of David, born of fleshly sperm, and was appointed, or declared, son of God by the spirit at his resurrection. His historical life was therefore not lived as the son of God. He was only advanced to that status at the end of his life at his resurrection.

            The early period of the Jesus movements was one of speculation about the identity and nature of Jesus. The historical matrix providing the spark that led toward the regarding of Jesus as son of God was plausibly the influx of gentiles into the gatherings of the Jesus followers.⁶ The cessation of early speculation about the nature of Jesus, which effectively weeded out other views and resulted in the dominance of the stories of Matthew/Luke, was occasioned by the early confessions of the church in the fourth century and at the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth,⁷ where Jesus was acclaimed as “very God and very man.” That declaration by the council is an uneasy solution, since it is challenged by other views reflected in the early Jesus gatherings and preserved in biblical texts. So, What is your thinking was Jesus a God-man or a man-God?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹They are not contradictory narratives but just completely different, but they both agree in the birthing process.

²See Charles W. Hedrick, “Early Christian Confessions and the Language of Faith,” The Fourth R 52.1 (January-February 2019): 15-20; idem, “How Do Divine Beings Procreate,” The Fourth R 36.6 (November-December 2023): 18-19.

³Logos is a central term in classical Greek culture. Its range of meaning in English is generally covered by two different ideas: speech and reason. See the entry logos in Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3^rd ed. Oxford: University Press, 1999), 882. And the discussion by Ernst Haenchen, John 1. A Commentary on the Gospel of John Chapters 1-6 (Robert W. Funk, trans. and ed.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 135-40.

⁴Here is the translation of John 1:1-2 in the Revised English Bible: “In the beginning the Word already was. The Word was in God’s presence, and what God was the Word was.” It is at once as much an interpretation as a translation.

⁵See Bauer-Danker, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (3^rd ed. revised; Chicago: University, 2000), 196-99, taking ginomai in the sense of Bauer-Danker’s second entry rather than the fifth.

⁶Hedrick, “Early Christian Confessions,” 13-20.

⁷Hedrick, “Early Christian Confessions,” 17, 20.

Pondering Jesus as “Fully God and Fully Human”

This statement is not from the New Testament, and as best I can tell, it is not a quotation from an early creed or council of the Christian church. It appears to be a modern adaptation of what was stated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451: that Jesus was "truly God and truly man."¹ This statement stands somewhat in tension with the early Nicene Creed (325), where it appears that Jesus was "true God of true God…of one substance with the Father." He had no beginning since "he was begotten by the Father before all the ages" and "for us men came down from the heavens, and was made flesh of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man."²

The Nicene creed affirms that he was originally God and later "became a person." It does not claim that he was human (in Greek, man/person is anthrōpos; human is anthrōpinos). His entry into human flesh, as described by the creed, is vastly different from human procreation or generation. If the creeds accurately describe Jesus, the only conclusion one can reach is that Jesus was not like us; that is, he was not human, at least not as we are. How many other people do you know who originated in heaven and whose birth was claimed to have been occasioned by insemination from a Holy Spirit (Matt 1:18//Luke 1:35)?

            The predecessors of the later church that created the creeds, however, were not unified in describing the origin or nature of Jesus in the late first and early second centuries.³ During this earlier period the religious marketplace brimmed with competing ideas about Jesus. One could understand Jesus simply as a human being "who was descended from David according to the flesh and appointed Son of God…" (Rom 1:3-4). In other words, he did not originate in heaven but was commonly human like us. God chose to elevate him to divinity like the Roman Senate did for the Roman Emperor:⁴ declaring that the genius (an indwelling guiding force or spirit) of the emperor deserved to be worshipped.⁵

Before the creeds in the earlier period, the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) described his career basically as a Jewish thaumaturge (worker of miracles), faith healer, and Galilean wise man. That is something very different from being God from the beginning and later becoming flesh as the Gospel of John has it. While John is similar to the synoptics, its prologue (John 1:1-18) prompts the reader to see Jesus as having a divine origin before he became enfleshed.⁶

John presents the reader with the other end of the spectrum: the belief that Jesus, as the Word was, "from the beginning," with God and "was God" (John 1:1-2). He only later "came to be in flesh" (John 1:14).  A slightly earlier description declared that although he was equal to God (Phil 2:6), he came into being in human likeness and was found in human form (Phil 2:7). He was exalted by God for his death on the cross (Phil 2:8-9). One strange idea, reflected in Paul's letters, suggests that some thought he had a special kind of flesh that was only similar to sinful flesh (Rom 8:3), such as we human beings have. His flesh would not see corruption (Acts 2:25-31/Ps 15:8-11 Septuagint, not the Hebrew).

The point I wish to make is that after the third century the view that emerged from the debates became the standard. No longer was there an opportunity to ponder Jesus with impunity. The issue was settled. If you did not share the view of the group that called themselves "orthodox," you were a "heretic" (which only means that you do not share the orthodox view).

If the pondering of the earliest followers of Jesus (as recorded in the New Testament) is your standard for determining who Jesus was, there are several options available for you to consider. A number of ideas were in the air. Here is another that I recently stumbled across: Jesus was a human being, descended from David. He became the pioneer of a certain kind of faith in God, and established that Way of faith for others to follow by being perfected through his own sufferings (Heb 2:10, 12:2).⁷ So what do you say about Jesus, and how do you explain all the other views?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/council-of-chalcedon

²The italics are mine; the source is Bettenson and Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church (3^rd ed.; Oxford, 1999), 28.

³For a survey of the diversity of views in the pre-creedal gatherings of Jesus followers, see C. W. Hedrick, "Is Belief in the Divinity of Jesus Essential to Being Christian," Unmasking Biblical Faiths (Cascade: 2019), 221-33 and "Early Confessions and the Language of Faith," The Fourth R 32.1 (2019), 15-20.

⁴Hedrick, "Belief in the Divinity of Jesus," 223-24.

⁵E. Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (3^rd ed.; Eerdmans, 2003), 209.

⁶Hedrick, "Belief in the Divinity of Jesus," 221-24.

⁷Hedrick, "Belief in the Divinity of Jesus," 221-33 and "Early Confessions and the Language of Faith," 15-20.

Does God know Everything?

The big word describing God’s knowledge is omniscient, all knowing—so the Christian theologians tell us. God must be all knowing because s/he is God. Of course, there is no way to verify that to be the case because we have no access to God except through the human mind. In the human mind God is whatever everyone thinks God is. Another practical way to address the question is to ask if the Bible ever depicts God as not knowing something, or being surprised. The Bible, I was taught, is the basic grammar for Christian living and belief. In my religious tradition the Bible is the “go-to” book for information about God. Hence, the question: does the Bible depict God as unknowing; that is, as lacking knowledge of minutiae of the past and details of the future?

We are fortunate, for many have read through the Bible and gathered together passages that depict God as not knowing things. Here is one of the many collections of God’s lack of knowledge in the Bible.¹ The passages noted by the collector are as follows:

Gen 3:9-13: God does not know where Adam is, does not know who told Adam he was naked, does not know that he ate of the tree with forbidden fruit, and does not know why Eve did what she did.

Gen 11:5-7: The Lord had to come down in order to see the Tower of Babel to know what was happening.

Gen 18:20-21: The Lord had to go and see what was going-on at Sodom and Gomorrah.

Gen 22:12: The Lord did not know that Abraham truly feared the Lord until Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac.

Isa 5:4: God does not know why his garden yielded wild grapes.

Jer 31:34: God promises to forget the sin of the Israelites.

Jer 32:35: God confesses that he did not know that the Judahites would sacrifice people to Molech.

About these passages the collector, Mr. Stewart, says that they “seem to be passages that teach the limitation of God’s knowledge.” Although he states that he believes in the “inerrancy of Scripture,” Mr. Stewart carefully explains away the plain meaning of the words of the text to bring these passages in line with current conservative theology. In other words, for Mr. Stewart the text does not mean what it plainly says. Here are a few more depictions of God’s lack of knowledge of past and future events:

Gen 6:5-6: God had forgotten the covenant that he had with Israel.

Exod 4:24: God could not find a way to kill Moses.

Exod 33:5: God did not know what to do with the Israelites.

Jer 3:6-7: God did not know that the Israelites would not return to him as an obedient people.

Jer 26:1-3: God did not know whether the Judahites would listen to him or not.

Jonah: 3:1-5, 10: God did not know if the people of Nineveh would repent and had to break his own word and stay the destruction of the city of Nineveh (3:4).

            In all of these passages the writers depict God anthropomorphically; that is, as having the characteristics of a human being. Generally, God is believed to be stronger than us, wiser than us, more gracious than us, etc., yet God is still described in the Bible as limited in knowledge, as are we. The descriptions are not as crass as the depictions of the ancient Gods of Greece and Rome, but the Judeo-Christian God is still described as not knowing certain things. The inevitable conclusion is that the frequently ungodlike descriptions of God in the Bible disqualifies the Bible as the standard for determining the character of God (if God there be).² The Bible claims that the Judeo-Christian God created human kind in his image (Gen 1:25-27). In reality human beings through time have created their Gods in whatever ways seemed good to them. The character of the Christian God at its worse is based on how he is described in the Bible, and at its finest on the idealistic ideations of the Christian mind.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Blue Letter Bible Ministry: https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_362.cfm

²Here are two more essays about the ungodly descriptions of God in the Bible: Hedrick, “Could God have a Character Flaw?” Unmasking Biblical Faiths (Cascade, 2019), 182-83; Hedrick, “Hérem: God’s Holy War,” Unmasking Biblical Faiths, 192-94.

How do Divine Beings Procreate?

I suppose the short answer is: “anyway they wish!” The question in the title may seem silly to some, but I find it to be a serious question that has largely gone unnoticed, as far as I am aware.¹ First some disclaimers. Divinities are not beings, since they have no existence in time and space, as rocks and people do. If any characterization is appropriate, divinities are spirit, if they are at all. If they are spirits, they are not existing in time and space. By spirit I mean to suggest that they are wholly other than the beings, creatures, and things of this universe. In one sense they are eternals; even if they fall out of fashion, they are still there waiting to be rediscovered. Personally, I have no independent knowledge of the nature and character of spirits, I only know what I have been told by others and what I have read. And that includes information as to how they procreate.

As it turns out, literary evidence exists for examining what people thought concerning the origin of divinities in western religious traditions. The Gods of the ancient Greeks, for example, were generally thought to procreate on a human model, by means of a male and female of the divine species, or with human partners, but the fertile imagination of the Greeks devised even more novel ways for how their Gods procreated.² The “birth” of Aphrodite, for example, was a kind of spontaneous generation: one tradition of her birth was that “she rose naked from the foam of the sea.”³ There are stories about the “sperm” of the Gods as well. The Goddess Athene was set upon by the God Hephaestus. As she tore herself away, Hephaestus ejaculated on her thigh a little above her knee. She wiped it off with a piece of wool and threw it away. The wool with sperm fell on Mother Earth and impregnated her. Erichthonius was born as a result.⁴ So Greek Gods were known to reproduce by means of sperm, and people were also quite aware that human births occurred from the pairing of the male sperm with matter provided by the female.⁵

The story of Onan (who spilled his sperm on the ground, Gen 38:7-10), rather than father a child (in levirate marriage) with his brother’s wife (Tamar), suggests that the issue in the story was the identity of the child in the family as the son of Er. Hence, in the final analysis inheritance was the issue: the recognition of the child as the son of the dead brother (Er).

In the Christian tradition Matthew (1:18-23) and Luke (1:26-35) imagined that Yahweh, the ancient Israelite God, procreated by a human female, as did the ancient Greek Gods on occasion. Paul also appears to think that Jesus was born naturally, for he was “born of a woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4). Only in Matthew and Luke is Mary referred to as “virgin” (Parthenos), a term that applies to the period before she became pregnant. Her description as virgin can only apply before her pregnancy—that is, prior to her divine encounter (Matt 1:18, 20).⁶ In Matthew, Mary’s pregnancy was from a holy spirit (an attribute of God).⁷ In Luke (Luke 1:34-35), Mary’s pregnancy was going to happen in the future from holy spirit and power of the Most-High (Luke 1:35).⁸ There must be some connection between the deity, the woman, and the child for him to be acknowledged as the child of the deity. Aristotle associates both these terms (spirit and power) with the process of human procreation.⁹ For Matthew and Luke spirit and power are attributes of God. Because of the way Matthew and Luke narrate Jesus’ generation (birth through a woman), it is reasonable to suppose that conception might have involved a kind of spiritual “sperm” (so to speak). At least, the author of first John appears to believe that God used spiritual “sperm” in producing the children of God:

Those born of God do not commit sin, because his sperm [sperma] remains in him, and he is not able to sin because he has been born of God (1 John 3:9).

The question boils down to this: what did Matthew and Luke think occurred in the generation of Jesus? Not being a mind reader of paper characters in a text, I have no idea. But the historical context and the way they describe Jesus’ birth suggests that spiritual “sperm” is a likely possibility, if not a probability.

The author of the Gospel of John has no birth narrative, but the narrative speculates that the origin of the Word is lost in the fog of “the beginning” (John 1:1-5, 9-14).¹⁰ The Word is both distinguishable from deity and yet identified with deity (John 1:1). The Word comes to be in flesh (John 1:14; cf. Phil 2:7); that is, he was not born so there is no issue of “sperm,” spiritual or otherwise.

What is lost or gained in considering the question? I personally think nothing is lost but that something may be gained. It fills out the image of the human model of procreation Matthew and Luke chose to use. The spiritual “sperm” inseminating Mary and producing the child was holy Spirit (Matt 1:18) or holy spirit and power (Luke 1:35), or so Matthew and Luke must have reasoned and wanted (or allowed) the reader to think.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹One welcome exception willing to peel back the mystery of Matthew and Luke’s myth of origins is Robert Miller’s, Born Divine. The Births of Jesus &the Other Sons of God (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2003).

²See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (2 vols in 1; George Braziller, 1959). Hesiod, The Theogony: https://users.pfw.edu/flemingd/Hesiod%20Theogony.pdf

³Graves, The Greek Myths, 1.49; 11.

⁴Graves, Greek Myths, 1.96-97.

⁵Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 1.xviii; Peck, Aristotle: Generation of Animals (Loeb), 71-89; see also Richard Smith, “Sex Education in Gnostic Schools” in Karen King, ed., Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism (Philadelphia, Fortress, 1988), 345-60; and https://journals.openedition.org/cliowgh/339

⁶Matthew does not narrate this event; in Matthew it occurred prior to Matt 1:18, 20.

⁷Robert J. Miller argues that “Matthew’s use of ‘begotten by the holy spirit’ does not imply a virginal conception”; that is, it does not rule out human sperm. See Miller’s conclusion: “Did Matthew Believe in the Virgin Birth?” The Fourth R 21.6 (November-December 2008), 7-8, 26. Luke, on the other hand, reports “that Jesus was born in the manner of pagan sons of God, the offspring of a human mother and divine father. . .” (p. 26). In both cases insemination would have happened by spiritual “sperm.” Miller notes, however, that Luke is “cautious to describe God’s role in a non-physical way” (p. 4). On the other hand, it appears to me that Luke’s language is mildly evocative of a sexual encounter; in Luke 1:35: “a holy spirit will come over you and the power of the Most-High will overshadow you. For a more complete discussion of the issues involved see Miller’s book Born Divine.

⁸Luke does not narrate this event; in Luke it occurred somewhere between Luke 1:34-35 and 2:1, off stage as it were.

⁹Aristotle associates dunamis (power) and pneuma (sprit) as being involved in the process of the generation of animals. Dunamis is the physical substance in the semen by which impregnation is effected (p. lii). Pneuma is a substance used as the instrument in the generation of offspring (p. liii). See Peck’s introduction in Generation of Animals, xlix-lix.

¹⁰Unlike the “Word,” whose origin at the beginning is not described, Lady Wisdom was specifically described as being created at the beginning (Prov 8:22-31).