answer7
It is recorded in the same primary-source records that tell us of Jesus' public ministry, death, and Resurrection. There is not one whit of textual evidence that the Virgin Birth accounts are "later additions" to the New Testament documents--all of which, in the judgment of the world's foremost biblical archeologist, W. F. Albright, were written "between the forties and the eighties of the first century A.D. (very probably sometime between about 50 and 75 A.D.)." If the old Fosdickian canard is raised that the Virgin Birth appears only in two Gospels (Matthew and Luke), then one need only recall that the Sermon on the Mount likewise appears only in those two Gospels--but few people try to argue that it is unhistorical!
Agreed that God could have come into the world in different ways. But this isn't the question. The question is: How did He come into the world? To answer such a question, we must go to the historical accounts and allow them to speak.
Of course, what really bugs certain theologians about the Virgin Birth is the miraculous character of it. But one must face the fact that historic, biblical Christianity is a religion centering on God's miraculous intervention in the world. This advent was predicted through miraculous prophecy, and attested to by the miraculous creation of the Church by the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost (cf. Charles Williams' The Descent of the Dove). And the earthly life of our Lor dwas miraculous in its substance and in its culmination (the Resurrection). Why then boggle at His miraculous birth?
And if miracles get on our nerves, then we have Newtonian not Einsteinian nerves. For us, living in the wake of Einstein's revolution in physics, the universe is no longer a tight, safe, predictable playing field in which we know all the rules. Since Einstein, no modern has had the right to rule out the possibility of events because of prior knowledge of "natural law." Ironically, the theological demythologizers (who claim to be eminently up-do-date) are nineteenth- or even eighteenth-century "modern," for they live and think in a world where the Virgin Birth and the resurrection can be rejected a priori-- a[art from any historical investigation. Such a view is hopelessly unempirical and unscientific--to say nothing of being impossibly untheological. The New Testament writers, who had personal contact with the miraculous of Christ's life, were well aware of the distinction between myth and fact, and proclaimed the Virgin Birth as fully factual. "We," they write, "have not followed cunningly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eye-witnesses of His majesty" (2 Pet 1:16).
Agreed that God could have come into the world in different ways. But this isn't the question. The question is: How did He come into the world? To answer such a question, we must go to the historical accounts and allow them to speak.
Of course, what really bugs certain theologians about the Virgin Birth is the miraculous character of it. But one must face the fact that historic, biblical Christianity is a religion centering on God's miraculous intervention in the world. This advent was predicted through miraculous prophecy, and attested to by the miraculous creation of the Church by the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost (cf. Charles Williams' The Descent of the Dove). And the earthly life of our Lor dwas miraculous in its substance and in its culmination (the Resurrection). Why then boggle at His miraculous birth?
And if miracles get on our nerves, then we have Newtonian not Einsteinian nerves. For us, living in the wake of Einstein's revolution in physics, the universe is no longer a tight, safe, predictable playing field in which we know all the rules. Since Einstein, no modern has had the right to rule out the possibility of events because of prior knowledge of "natural law." Ironically, the theological demythologizers (who claim to be eminently up-do-date) are nineteenth- or even eighteenth-century "modern," for they live and think in a world where the Virgin Birth and the resurrection can be rejected a priori-- a[art from any historical investigation. Such a view is hopelessly unempirical and unscientific--to say nothing of being impossibly untheological. The New Testament writers, who had personal contact with the miraculous of Christ's life, were well aware of the distinction between myth and fact, and proclaimed the Virgin Birth as fully factual. "We," they write, "have not followed cunningly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eye-witnesses of His majesty" (2 Pet 1:16).