Born of the Virgin Mary...Continued from page 4
John A. Huffman Jr.
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.
The bottom line is that the Bible says the God of all creation broke into human history in a supernatural way in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God Incarnate. The preexistent God took human form, conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit. This is just one of many miracles in the Bible.
To deny it is to declare that Jesus was a bastard child of a promiscuous Jewish teenager from Nazareth who, according to her culture, should have been stoned to death for her behavior. Or, at the best, Jesus was the love child of an engaged couple who lied to cover up their activities, coming up with a fantastic story of angel annunciations and a virgin birth. Or, it happened just the way the Bible says it happened.
Let me put it in the words of the late Clayton Bell, pastor of the Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas, who writes in his book, Moorings in a World Adrift:
I believe in the virgin birth, not because I understand how it happened, but because I trust the witness of Matthew and Luke. I believe in the virgin birth because I find this consistent with believing in "God the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." I find it easy to believe that the early church was so morally pure and so righteous in its teaching that it would not have perpetrated upon the world such a doctrine if it had not been true. I also believe in the virgin birth because I find it extremely difficult to believe the contrary ? that Mary was a morally loose woman and that Jesus was a bastard. I cannot believe that. In light of the life and ministry and teaching of Jesus Christ, and in what we know of the gospel record, I find it much easier to believe that Jesus was indeed "conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary."