ABSTRACT
Three of the four Christian gospels begin their narratives of the life, teachings, and deeds of Jesus Christ with pregnancy and birth. They tell an evocative story: a poor, unwed mother forced into a long and difficult journey by colonial powers, no place to rest, the birth of her fabled son attended by sheep, stars, and foreigners. Of course, the nativity is much more than a story of one child’s birth, more even than the story of a god’s birth. It is a story of origin for a whole religion. Throughout the centuries, the narrative account of Mary’s pregnancy, journey, and the night her son was born has been cherished for its intimacy, its theatrical quality, its familiarity, and its metaphoric power to dramatize the divine inauguration of Christianity. But as we shall see, it is also an origin story with a guilty shimmer; it is a tall tale of sorts. And it is all the more fertile – gravid, even – for the ambiguity and multiplicity it bears. The “birth of Jesus,” sealed canonically into no less than three accounts, also cannot be collapsed to a single interpretation or doxa. At the intimate storied origin of Christianity, multiplicity leaks out. But we need a different sort of theological reasoning than what we commonly employ to get at the complexity nestling there. Theological reasoning comes out of a human desire to stretch intellect toward the farthest reaches and most intimate recesses of existence; it takes up the linguistic and conceptual tools that establish plausibility within the specific cultural frameworks in which it functions. Theology is a map, after all, not a terrain. It seeks to trace, or simulate, a landscape of spirit that always exceeds its grasp. The stories that fertilize theology embody its spirit and shape its possibilities. This means that greater attention to those stories’ ambiguities and parous sojourns can loosen traditional Christian theology’s cramped grip on solemnity, its tired habits of barren purity, and so help restore to that theology its own lush capacities for wisdom.
