Born Of The Virgin Mary...Continued from page 4

Most people I know who deny the virgin birth also deny the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Recently I read a biography of one of our American presidents who is now deceased. I will not publicly mention his name so as to not distract from the point I am trying to make. The biographer, who had full access to all of his personal papers, came across a term paper written by the president during his university days. In that paper, he declares how, as a young man he was raised in an evangelical Christian family. When he matriculated at college, he had a very basic, orthodox Christian faith. He believed that God, in the miracle of Incarnation, became a man in the person of Jesus Christ, fully God, fully man, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He believed that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins and rose from the dead in victory over sin and death. The biographer goes on to quote the very words of that president in that religion term paper. He clearly declares that, as the result of that particular course, he no longer held those beliefs. He wrote how he now believed Jesus was the best man who ever lived, a great example, who died a martyr's death. The resurrection did not happen physically but is simply a spiritual renewal in each of us when we take seriously His teachings and follow them.
What he wrote about in that term paper is not dissimilar to what many people who call themselves Christians believe today. They struggle with the possibility of the supernatural. They see themselves as empiricists for whom everything has to be explained on a factual basis. They believe that there are natural laws in the universe that cannot be broken. Virgins don't get pregnant, dead persons do not rise from the dead, loaves and fishes cannot be multiplied, and diseases are never supernaturally healed. The Bible is not the divinely inspired revelation to us, the only infallible rule in faith and practice. Instead, the Bible is the record of humankind's search after God. It is filled with myths and fables of primitive people that we dare not accept at face value in our contemporary, scientific, enlightened world.
Therefore, they do not believe the miracles. The Bible is not reliable. They question the miracle of the Incarnation.
The true naturalistic cynic is baffled that the orthodox Christian faith still exists. Nicholas Kristof, writing in the August 15, 2003 New York Times, used a report of Americans' increasing belief (83 percent) in the Virgin Birth as evidence of declining intellectualism. He wrote: "The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time."

The issue is whether or not the Bible is reliable. The issue is whether or not Jesus is God Incarnate, not just a wonderful, ethical man who was in some way adopted by God to be His prime example of how good, self-sacrificing and ethical a human being could be. The issue is whether or not miracles really happen.