In 1930, the redoubtable scholar and apologist J. Gresham Machen published his 400-page defence of The Virgin Birth of Christ.

Towards the end of his book, Machen deals with the question of the importance of this doctrine.  Helpfully, he steers a path between saying, on the one hand, that belief in the Virgin Birth is essential to salvation, and, on the other hand, saying that it is of relatively little significance.

Machen maintained that belief in the Virgin Birth is not simply a matter of private judgement, but is, rather ‘essential to the corporate witness of the Church.’

Developing this:

1. The Virgin Birth is ‘obviously important for the general question of the authority of the Bible.’  It is generally conceded that Scripture affirms this doctrine.  Therefore, to deny it is to cast doubt upon the truthfulness of God’s word.

2. The Virgin Birth is important ‘as a test for a man to apply to himself or to others to determine whether one holds a naturalistic or a supernaturalistic view regarding Jesus Christ.’  For Machen, a denial of the Virgin Birth does not necessarily imply a denial of all of the supernatural aspect of the Christian faith.  Nevertheless, the Virgin Birth is a helpful litmus test to distinguish orthodox faith from those views which may espouse Christ’s ‘deity’ and ‘resurrection’ but desupernaturalise them and thus make them mean something altogether different.

3. The Virgin Birth is an organic part of the Christian view of Christ.  Specifically, as Gavin Ortlund observes:

‘Machen suggested that the virgin birth protects us against various Christological heresies, enables us to uphold a full doctrine of the incarnation, and guards and illumines the nature of Jesus’s sinlessness.’

Ortlund summarises Machen’s position:

‘Machen did not go so far as to insist that an affirmation of the virgin birth is essential for personal salvation. “Who can tell exactly how much knowledge of the facts about Christ is necessary if a man is to have saving faith? None but God can tell.” Nonetheless, Machen distinguished between what we must affirm for individual salvation and what we must affirm for the health of the church in our generation: “Even if the virgin birth is not necessary to every Christian, it is certainly necessary to Christianity.”’

Based on Ortlund, Finding the Right Hills to Die On: The Case for Theological Triage, p82-84.