Thanks for your blog (I see it for the first time through Hugh Hewitt's web page), the article, and your Christian commitment.

Please forgive one who has been dealing with "reasonable" Christianity all his life. Reasonable Christianity led me into a life of misery, fear and slavery (fear not, no details), a life of defeat. By reasonable Christianity, I mean that Christianity meant to be thought reasonable by reasonable men. True Christianity is emminently reasonable within its own context, ie the context of faith, but raises enormous questions outside the faith. Reasonable Christianity requires no faith, only an average IQ and an ability to reason in accord with the fashion of the age. Trouble is, the carnal mind cannot receive the things of the Spirit.

Why am I boring you with all this? Because you care. So. Here's why Jesus' birth had to be a virgin birth... Jesus had to be without original (inherited) sin, the sin of Adam. If He were not without original sin, he would have not been without sin. Were He not without sin, He would have deserved death. Had he deserved death, His death on the cross would have availed nothing and no one. There it is, there ain't no more.

I pity Christians who desperately try and stuff Scripture into a bag (the human mind) made for newspapers and shampoo ads. The question is not " Can one be a Christian and not believe in the virgin birth?" Of course one can. The question is "What kind of faith remains if all one has is what unbelievers would beleive?"

Appreciate your work.

George E. (Chip) Rittenhouse

If your new-found version of Christianity has identified the human mind as a bag fit only for newspapers and shampoo ads, I wonder how much you have learned. You're posting this on the internet, an amazing achievement of the mind, and you're trying to make a logical argument, an appeal to the human mind.

I don't see how you can love man if you don't love the human mind...

Thanks for the link to the Christianity Today article. It was very interesting and well documented. However, in every detail it seemed to confirm Kristoff's article rather than refute. I can't see why you say you wish he'd done better research -- seems like he was right on target.

I don't think Kristoff was "fair and balanced" (hope I don't get sued). He did not offer any real arguments from the side that believed in the Virgin Birth. All Kristoff reported was that the research says the Virgin Birth is more myth or legend and did not look at the other side.