Abstract

The doctrine of the Virgin Birth is just one part of the story that Christians tell about the identity of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. But when theologians consider this doctrine, which holds that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary, they also come up against issues of gender, obedience, religious knowledge and religious experience. How is Mary defined here? What role does she take on in the story? What can we say about her own faith and knowledge? In this talk, I will consider two nineteenth-century responses both to this doctrine and the figure of the Virgin Mary. In the work of the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, which I will contrast with that of the dramatist and essayist Heinrich von Kleist, we find striking suggestions about the relationship between a person’s gender, their religious belief, and their sense of what is ‘real’.