From their earliest days, children who grow up in church learn that Jesus was miraculously born of a virgin named Mary. He did not have a human or earthly father but only a heavenly Father. This manifestly biblical teaching is largely assumed and rarely thought of by many Christians—except, of course, when Christmas rolls around. As believers, we know the virgin birth of Christ is true, even important. The virgin birth of Jesus Christ is a doctrine explicitly taught in Scripture (Matt. 1:18–25; Luke 1:26–2:6; Isa. 7:14; Gal. 4:4) and asserted in the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian Definition.[1]
1. Stephen Wellum notes, “Most correctly observe that term ‘virgin birth’ is something of a misnomer” since the Bible gives no indication the birthing process itself was miraculous (God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of Christ [Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016], 236, n.73). We more precisely refer to the virgin conception of our Lord since it was this that was directly performed by the Spirit. However, when properly understood the term “virgin birth” is not illegitimate, because Christ was born of Mary who was a virgin when she conceived Christ and because Joseph “kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son” (Matt. 1:25). Therefore, the terms “virgin conception” and “virgin birth” will be used synonymously here.
But if someone were to ask you personally why the virgin birth is important, what would you say? Think about it. Could the Son of God have become man, and further, a sinless man who could save us from our sins even if he had a human father? Is the virgin birth not just a clearly biblical doctrine but a doctrine essential to Christian faith, such that if a person rejects it, they cannot be saved? Maybe you find yourself hesitating, unsure of how to connect your confidence that the virgin birth of Christ is true to a confident understanding of why the virgin birth is true or whether it is absolutely essential to any genuine Christian confession. Even some recent theologians who affirm the truth and importance of the virgin birth suggest that the incarnation of the Son and his sinlessness could have been achieved apart from a virginal conception.[2]
Relatedly, if someone asked you whether we could call Mary the “Mother of God” because of the incarnation and virgin birth, what would you say? Do you immediately recoil at this notion, or do you rightly suspect that something important about our understanding of the identity of Jesus is going on here?
2. Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 688–691; William Lane Craig, “Is the Virgin birth Essential?” last accessed June 17, 2025. See also Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, 2nd ed (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 664–66. While affirming that the Virgin birth “makes possible” the sinlessness of Christ, Grudem suggests “it probably would have been possible for God to have Jesus come into the world with two human parents, both a father and a mother, and with his full divine nature miraculously united to his human nature at some point early in his life. But then it would have been hard for us to understand how Jesus was fully God, since his origin was like ours in every way” (664). Thus, for Grudem, the Virgin birth helpfully makes evident Christ’s unique identity, but it is not essential to the Son’s incarnation as such. However, the hypothetical he presents would result in an inevitably Nestorian Christology.
So what are we to make of the doctrine of the virgin birth and, relatedly, this title of “Mother of God”? In this brief article, I will demonstrate both that 1) the virgin birth was essential for the eternal Son of God to become flesh so that he might be our Savior and 2) that the incarnation of the Son demands that Mary be rightfully called “Mother of God.”
Our Sinless Savior
After our first parents fell, God gave to them his gracious promise that salvation would come from a Redeemer, the seed or offspring of the woman (Gen. 3:15). As the story of Genesis progresses, we see that sin infected each offspring of the man and the woman until “the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence . . . for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth” (Gen. 6:11–12). Through the transgression of the one covenant head, Adam, death reigned, and condemnation came to all his natural descendants (Rom. 5:12–21). We needed a new covenant head, a sinless one who would be pure—free from the curse and sin of Adam—and who could achieve righteousness before God for us.
3. Petrus Van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), 4:319; Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Sin and Salvation in Christ, vol. 3, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 294–95.
The virgin birth was essential for the Son to become the sinless new covenant head we desperately needed. David writes of his conception and birth, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5). Jesus later says, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh” (John 3:6). All who are born according to the principle of natural generation seen from Genesis 4:1 onward are under the covenant headship of Adam. “Through one man death spread to all men” (Rom. 5:12)—not to human nature, per se, but to all human persons, those individualized existences of human nature produced through natural conception after Adam.[3] Thus, those who are condemned in Adam and liable to sin are those human persons who are generated in Adam (covenantally) and by Adam (biologically).
4. Donald Macleod, The Person of Christ, Contours of Christian Theology (Leicester: Intervarsity Press, 1998), 41. Cf. Stephen J. Wellum, God the Son Incarnate, 239.
5. Van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 3:298; cf. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. George Musgrave, (Philipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1994), 2:342.
But the Son of God did not become man by such natural generation in Adam as all other humans have, and thus, he was not under Adam’s covenantal headship. He was the seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15; Isa. 7:14). The Son of God, the eternal second person of the Trinity, became man from the “outside” of Adam—not by natural descent but by miraculous conception by the Holy Spirit, taking humanity from the Virgin while not being in Adam covenantally.[4] The Son’s human nature came from Adam (Luke 3:23–38), but Christ was not born in Adam. Though Mary herself was a sinner, the Holy Spirit’s overshadowing activity preserved from any possibility of sin the substance taken from her and formed it into the humanity assumed by the Son so that the eternally righteous One would also be pure and spotless in this human nature (Luke 1:35).[5] Thus, for the Son to be the sinless Last Adam capable of being the covenant representative and substitute for a new humanity, the virgin birth was essential.
The Son of God Incarnate
Not only was the virgin birth necessary for a sinless Savior, but it was also essential for this Savior to be the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. The angel Gabriel spoke to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason [Greek: dio] the holy Child shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). In this passage, the virgin conception produced by the Spirit’s effective power results in this one born of Mary being the Son of God.[6]
6. This is not because the Spirit somehow worked as a father in this miraculous conception, nor because this holy Child began to be the Son of God at his conception. The Spirit did not communicate his own substance to the human nature of Christ, as human fathers do with their offspring, and the Son of God has always been who he is. Further, Gabriel’s statement is asserting that the person to be born of Mary will only have God the Father as his father in contrast to a human father (see Mary’s question in Luke 1:34). For more on why these ideas are false, see Van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 3:295, 299, 321–23.
7. Herman Bavinck, “The Virgin Birth of Our Lord,” The Bible Magazine, January 1913, 57.
8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:293.
Herman Bavinck provides further help here in understanding why just this kind of virgin conception was essential for the Son of God to be the person, the “I” of the assumed human nature. As previously noted, the incarnate Son of God did not descend from Adam by natural generation, and thus, was not in Adam like we are, but he came from outside Adam and assumed a human nature by his own work and initiative.
Bavinck states, “Christ was an eternally existing person. He was [or existed] before He was begotten and born [as a man]. So He could not be quite passive in the moment of conception and birth as we are.”[7] In other words, a new and merely human person (the “I” or a human subject born in Adam) is passively produced when soul and body are joined in an act of natural generation by a human father and mother. However, as Bavinck states, “[Christ] could not be procreated and brought forth by the will of a man. He was himself the acting subject who by the Holy Spirit prepared a body for himself in Mary’s body.”[8] Like begets like (cf. John 3:6), and if human father and mother are the active principle whose generative action produces a new human person, then the Son of God could not become a man and be the “I” of a sinless human nature this way. Rather, he himself took and formed a human nature and caused it to have its existence in him.[9] In other words, for the person of the human nature to be the Son of God, then he had to take to and for himself a human nature by his own power and activity —not receiving it from man and thus being another merely human person with a human father. Instead, entering into humanity from the outside, he remained who he always was, the eternal Son of the Father.[10] Only the Son of God in flesh could offer himself as an infinitely sufficient sacrifice for us. Thus, as Bavinck summarizes, “The supernatural conception, therefore, is not a matter of indifference and without value. It is most intimately tied to the deity of Christ, to his eternal preexistence, his absolute sinlessness, and is therefore of great importance for the faith of the church.”[11]
9. The assertion that Christ himself formed his human nature is in no way contradictory to the frequent biblical claim that his human nature was created or conceived by the Holy Spirit. This is because all three members of the Trinity act inseparably whenever they act toward creation, since they share the same single and simple divine nature. Therefore, saying that the Holy Spirit created Jesus’s human nature actually requires one to say that the Father and Son also created that nature.
10.As Bavinck states, if this conception were not of a virgin by the Spirit but rather was natural by a human father and mother, then Jesus may have been David’s son, but not his Lord (Reformed Dogmatics, 3:293).
11. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:290.
Mary as Theotokos
Since the Son of God became flesh in the virgin Mary’s womb, was nurtured therein, and was born of her in Bethlehem, we must say that Mary was the mother of the one who is God. In Luke 1:43, Elizabeth calls Mary “the mother of my Lord,” which in context is essentially the same as saying “the mother of my God.” When properly understood as originally intended by the church fathers, this title for Mary as theotokos (“God-bearer” or “mother of God”) has never been about making Mary the source of the Godhead—a blasphemous notion indeed! Rather, it is a biblical way of saying the essential truth that the one born of Mary was none other than the Son of God, who is true God.
Stephen Wellum helpfully states that “whatever may be said of Christ’s divine and human nature may be said of the person of the Son.”[12] Thus, since the Son who is true God was born of Mary (according to his human nature), we not only can but must be able to call Mary “the mother of God.” Theotokos is not so much a Mariological statement but a Christological statement. We need not slip into idolatry of Mary by saying this. But if we are to preserve true worship of Jesus Christ, we must say this.
12. Stephen Wellum, The Person of Christ: An Introduction, Short Studies in Systematic Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 183. This is part of his definition of the communicatio Idiomatum.
Not without reason is the virgin birth included among the essential Christian beliefs in the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian Definition. This doctrine lies at the very heart of the Christian faith. Without it, we have no sinless Savior who is both God and man. Further, because the virgin birth of the Son of God is true, the designation “Mother of God” for Mary should be embraced since it is the One born of her who is worshiped by this title rather than the bearer herself.
While pondering these incredible truths, we must remember that one cannot truly confess the Christ born of a virgin without receiving him and worshiping him. The eternal Son of God, begotten of the Father before all the ages, “for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven and became flesh by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,” as the Nicene Creed states. This is not a cold, sterile doctrine that has no significance for your daily life! The virgin birth means that you have a Savior who loves you enough to humble himself by becoming man for you and your eternal salvation. Our Mediator is true man, perfectly qualified to be our covenant representative and substitute, and true God, giving his once-for-all sacrifice infinite worth and effectiveness. We can trust him. The almighty triune God, through his glorious wisdom and power, has planned and executed a salvation too wonderful for our minds to fully grasp and contrary to anything we deserve. May his glorious name be eternally praised!
“By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness:
He who was revealed in the flesh,
Was vindicated by the Spirit,
Seen by angels,
Proclaimed among the nations,
Believed on in the world,
Taken up into glory.”
– 1 Timothy 3:16
