Apparently, it's led someone to think that I don't consider the virgin birth to have happened historically, in the way Matthew and Luke write it.
Barth's famous discussion of the virgin birth is in Church Dogmatics I/2, the section on "The Miracle of Christmas". Barth always insists that acts of divine revelation are "not historical", and I agree with him. But by that, neither he nor I mean these events never happened. All we mean is that revelation is a unique event, an act of God. It's not part of the normal historical sequence, it doesn't belong to a chain of cause-and-effect, and so there's no use trying to verify or disprove it on historical grounds.
So in the case of the virgin birth, Barth argues that it's not subject to the methods of historiography. Its truth isn't for historians to decide. But he certainly believes -- as do I -- that it really happened, that it happened in time and space, within the real material human world. It involved Mary's body, her real flesh and blood. In this section of Church Dogmatics, Barth's brilliant critique of Brunner rests on the assumption that the virgin birth really happened. His point is just that it happens as revelation, as an act of God.
Which was my point in talking about the virgin birth theologically.
You can't get your head around the virgin birth by criticizing it. The virgin birth must be confessed to be believed. It's not an explanation or a conclusion that you could arrive at from other premises, historical or philosophical or whatever. It's a truth grasped in the humility of faith.
This is what my Liberal Protestant friends miss. Theological meaning is to be had because we Christians confess something radical has taken place within human history. But its verifiability isn't limited to historical processes. You can't get to the Christian faith by learning history or philosophy or science. No matter what the Enlightenment said.
The creed isn't some conjuring trick, whereby we say a magical formula and create a new idea. Rather, the creed itself is a confession that we are convinced God has acted in human history in the person of Jesus Christ. And that his actions have rippled into the lives of those around him, including Mary.
For what it's worth, I have a problem speaking too much about the virgin birth at all these days. Who do I take myself for? Am I really so much smarter than St Matthew and St Luke? Am I qualified to correct the church's creed, the sum of the gospel, just because I've read two or three books on the topic? Would my own personalized ready-made faith -- in which everything is arranged just as I like it, and everything difficult or offensive is removed -- really be an improvement on the faith of the church? Wouldn't I be like the proud young carpenter who, on his first day on the job, scorns the silly traditions of other carpenters and gets to work building his own three-legged table -- only to discover that the rest of the world knew what they were doing when they made them with four legs?
I used to be a lot more cynical than I am now. I set off, as a college graduate, to bring the church into the twenty-first century, and move away from all these stories. But, as one of the saints has said, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now". Nowadays, to be honest, I'm just very grateful to be a Christian at all. Three-legged tables are fine, as far as they go. But you can rely implicitly on the ones with four legs; that's the kind you want when you're sitting down in the comfort of your own home, day after day, a table just like the one your grandfather used, and just like the one your great-grandchildren will use too, long after you've left the world and gone to that big dinner table in the sky.
It's a good thing to be a Christian. I know that sounds banal to so many of my enlightened Enlightenment friends (or, as Schleiermacher rightly called them, my "cultured despisers"). It's a good thing to believe something that you didn't invent for yourself (I know that grains against everything we Americans genuinely value). It's a good thing to have a certain framework, a story that tells you what kind of place the world really is, so that there are some basic questions that are already settled, that you don't have to go on wringing your hands and wondering about. It's a privilege, a real privilege, to be able to join your voice to the church's confession: "... and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate" -- and all the rest.
If you ask me, a faith like that is as good as the Christmas in which it believes: As reliable as every December 25th, but full of as many surprises as every day of the year.