While I dare not hope that those advocating a war on Christmas are in retreat, it does feel as if there are fewer instances of overt Christmas bashing this year. The recent Pew Research poll indicates that most Americans support the display of distinctively Christian decorations in public settings and, much to the shock of the intellectual elite, three quarters of those surveyed believe in the historicity of the virgin birth.
Reason, rationalism and the fantasies (like Santa) parents told their children conspire to convince some that a virgin could not possibly have conceived a child.
I am one of the overwhelming majority of Americans who still believes that a God who could create everything from nothing and raise a dead man from the grave could also, reasonably, miraculously conceive a child in the womb of a willing woman.
If you don’t believe it, well, you have to throw out the baby with your naturalistic, anti-mystical, closed universal rationale.
I don’t believe in the virgin birth, nor any of the other miracles attested to in the Bible, as an anti-intellectual leap of faith but as the outcome of a process of critical thought. Accepting the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible as the Word of God and therefore, authoritative and true, I accept the supernatural birth of Jesus. That is also how one arrives at the identification of Jesus as divine and thus, an acceptable sinless atoning sacrifice.
Those who seek to strip the virgin Mary of her purity are really seeking to strip Jesus of his divinity. You cannot have a divine Jesus without some participation by God the Father in the conception and of the Son. Therein lies the very nature of the incarnation we celebrate at Christmas.