A blatantly supernatural story

A friends’ walk leads to a discussion on the plausibility of the virgin birth. Surgeon David Cranston seeks wisdom about a phenomenon that defies rationality.

David Cranston

David Cranston is emeritus Professor of Surgery at Oxford University. As well as publishing academically, he has has also authored books on John Radcliffe, and mentoring.

A two sided altarpiece painting shows an angel kneeling on on one side and a Madonna on the right hand side.

Kneeling, the Archangel Gabriel greets the Virgin at the moment of Christ's Incarnation. The Annunciation, Paolo Veneziano.

Getty Museum.

I am a member of a couple of walking groups. Many of my friends like golf and have been trying to encourage me to play and, although my golfing friends have tried hard over the years, I do agree with Mark Twain who thought of golf as a good walk spoiled.

My walking groups have rules. Both tend to be in the morning, with a pub lunch. One group set up in 2004 is strict - main course only, beer no wine. The other started in 2022 is laxer with two courses with beer and wine allowed.

The walk and lunch allow time for discussion free of mobile phones, iPads, internet and computers and consequently with full, rather than partial attention given to the discussion.

Religion and politics are allowed. At one lunchtime, discussion on Christmas led to one senior lawyer remarking that the term ‘virgin’ in the pages of the gospels may just mean a ‘young woman’. He went on to say:

“That would alter the interpretation of the New Testament somewhat!”

He said it as if it was a relatively new discovery.

Actually, it is quite old, because the first person to think that was Joseph, Mary’s betrothed husband.

Matthew explains in the first chapter of his gospel that when Joseph found that Mary was pregnant, because he was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.

In those days betrothal could only be broken by divorce. Joseph knew he was not the father.

On one occasion CS Lewis was in discussion with a colleague who stated that:

‘The early Christians believed that Christ was the Son of a virgin, but we know that this is a scientific impossibility.’

Lewis asked him to elaborate, and he went on to say:

“In those days the belief in miracles arose at a period when men were so ignorant of the course of nature that they did not perceive a miracle to be contrary to it.”

Lewis replied that this was nonsense and replied:

“When St Joseph discovered that his fiancée was going to have a baby, he not unnaturally decided to repudiate her. Why? Because he knew just as well as any modern gynaecologist that in the ordinary course of nature women do not have babies unless they have lain with men. No doubt the modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which St Joseph did not know. But those things do not concern the main point – that a virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And St Joseph obviously knew that. In any sense in which it is true to say now, ‘the thing is scientifically impossible,’ he would have said the same. The thing always was, and was always known to be, impossible unless the regular processes of nature were, in this particular case, being over-ruled or supplemented by something from beyond nature.”

Lewis goes on to elaborate:

“But once and for a special purpose, God dispensed with that long line which is his instrument. Once His life-giving finger touched a woman without passing through the ages of interlocked events. Once the great glove of nature was taken off His hand. His naked hand touched her. There was of course a unique reason for it. That time he was creating not simply a man, but The Man, who was to be Himself: He was creating man anew: He was beginning at this divine and human point, the New Creation of all things. The whole soiled and weary universe quivered at this direct injection of essential life – direct, uncontaminated, untainted, through all the crowded history of Nature.”

And Donald McLeod, a Scottish theologian, in a Christmastide sermon some years ago said:

“The virgin birth is posted on guard at the door of the mystery of Christmas, and none of us must think of turning past it. It shows it stands on the threshold of the New Testament. Blatantly supernatural, defying our rationalisation, informing us that all follows belongs to the same order as itself, and if we find it offensive there is no point in proceeding further. If the virgin birth falls, the integrity of the Gospels is undermined.”

There are many things in life that we may not be able to explain. Just because we cannot believe something it does not mean it is not true. There are many things in this life that are unbelievable. I guess it all depends on our understanding of the nature of God.

Review

Belief

Books

Culture

28 May 2025

4 min read

Could Lamorna Ash become a Christian in a year?

Moving, funny and beautifully written, this young writer’s quest for faith has lessons for all of us.

Lucy Denyer

Lucy is a writer and editor.

Lamorna Ash.

When two of Lamorna Ash’s university friends decided to leave behind their lives as standup comedians and train to become priests, Ash was fascinated. She interviewed them and wrote an essay about it for the Guardian but, by the time her piece came out, knew she was “not finished with Christianity.”

“Perhaps it was naive not to have anticipated how spending my days alongside two fresh converts… would have some cumulative effect on me,” she writes. “Through these encounters, it was as if the very corner of the sky had been pulled back. I couldn’t see what was going on behind it, but I understood it was there for them… they taught me how to believe in the belief of others… their stories became the starting point.”

And so Ash bought a second hand Toyota Corolla, stocked the glove box with CDs and set off on a Christian road-trip around the country that started with a Christianity Explored course and ended with a series of meetings with people who were consciously ‘dechurching’, taking in Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Quakers, Anabaptists and a YWAM community along the way. She books in ‘desert times’ on Iona; in Walsingham; at a silent Jesuit retreat. She walks, and talks, and tries to pray and thinks. Throughout her travels, Ash carried a ‘jokey’ question in the back of her mind to frame her research: could she become a Christian in a year?

The result of her quest is this book: tender, fascinating, moving, funny and beautifully written. Throughout my reading of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever I kept thinking of people I would like to give it to, Christian and non-Christian alike. Ash has achieved a remarkable feat: to make faith and its pursuit a compelling subject regardless of whether you’re a believer or not.

Primarily, this is because she has not - joke question aside - set out with an agenda, other than to more fully understand what makes believers tick (and, she admits, because it is something to write about). Though she is scathing about Rico Tice, whom she finds performative and evasive, and finds the dogma of the Christianity Explored course too rigid and inflexible for her liking, she is sympathetic towards and interested in her fellow Christianity Explored small group companions - and is self-aware enough to admit that during this time she “played the worst version of myself: hackles raised, on alert, unable to let a conversation pass without some interjection”. Though she finds the intensity of Youth With A Mission’s community - along with the fact that many of the staff are married to each other - a bit much, she is individually drawn to some of the people who work there, and reflective about what and why they’re doing. As someone who has grown up with faith, it is fascinating to see what we often take for granted held up to scrutiny by someone who is not there to be deliberately combative, but to try and understand.

“I am still too close to it to tell you definitively all the ways the encounters… changed me,” Ash writes. “What it felt like at the time, though, was that each conversation was leading me to places in my own mind I had never visited before.”

There are elements of Ash’s book I am intrigued by, but sceptical of: her suggestion, for example, that the Bible should not stop where it does, but might be continually added to, “like a divine Wikipedia, updated in perpetuity.” Her theological understanding is not, perhaps understandably, advanced. She is a self-confessed product of her era: young, progressive, queer, and her readings of and understandings of other people are framed through that lens.

But despite its failings, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever remains compelling because of its curiosity - a curiosity that Ash wonders might be the place “where God exists”; its attempts, however stumbling, to understand faith rather than just dismiss it. It is an atheist Quaker who teaches Ash “how I might approach Christianity: it was supposed to be a challenge.” You will have to read it to learn where Ash herself ends up, but her book extends the challenge to those of us who might benefit from a similar scrutiny of what we believe - not to fall out of faith, but also to understand it, and God, more.

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