A comment on the radic-lib take on Christianity.
Yikes! Part 7, A Real Doozy
A Gem on the Virgin Birth
One last time, patient reader, I inflict upon you an excerpt from Getting Christianity Right! by Robert Sessions, iUniversity Press, New York, 2007, p. 128. This is a gem, I promise, albeit of the outrageous sort.
In our time, if a man takes advantage of a woman who is unconscious or drunk or asleep, and causes her to become pregnant without her knowledge or consent, we call that act rape. But when the early Christian church tells the story of how its male God made Mary pregnant with Jesus, without her prior consent, the male-dominated church called that a “virgin birth.”
According to the writer of Luke, an angel of God appeared to Mary and told her that the baby from her pregnancy was from God. “Don’t be afraid, Mary. What God has done to you is for your own good and the good of the world.” … Apparently the moral question of God doing this to Mary did not occur to Matthew or Luke, for in their society women had less value and fewer rights than men.
Okay, so there are several troubling aspects of this excerpt, such as the assumption that "we" are more moral (and more intelligent!) than the early Christians. But what troubles me most is that every Christian school child knows what Dr. Sessions has written here is wrong. This is not at all the story the Christian Church tells, or ever did tell!
Instead, the Archangel Gabriel speaks to Mary in the future tense: “You shall conceive…” etc. And Mary’s beautiful, prior consent is emphasized and widely extolled as a model, the model, of Christian virtue. “Behold the handmaiden of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.”
There’s no way Dr. Sessions has simply erred; he is too learned and the story (Luke 1:26-38) is too well known. There is but one conclusion: he has lied.
Now the unfortunate fate of a liar, once found out, is never to be believed even if he should happen, sometimes, to be telling the truth. That's another way of saying the book belongs in the trash can. But ironically, this one insight (that a biblical scholar deliberately, outright lies) would be enough, all by itself, to make the whole book worth reading!
This discovery has also reinforced my impression of these radic-lib writers; in my experience with them, they do have agendas other than simple truth, and their agenda, as you've noticed in this instance, is usually related to gender or sexuality.
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