It is alleged that the Christians just borrowed the myths of the Babylonian Marduk, the Egyptian Horus or the Greek legend of Perseus and came up with the virgin birth of Christ. To the uneducated and those who have a desperate need to debunk Christianity this seems so obvious that it must be true. It just makes so much sense – after all virgin births don’t happen and Christianity is just made up anyway.
But on closer examination the whole case just falls apart.
Daily Archives: December 23, 2014
Jesus Creed: Good News—God Cannot be Contained
An excellent Christmas meditation from the Jesus Creed blog. See what you think.
Many today try to put religion in its place, controlled and contained, tolerated as long as it doesn’t impinge on fact or science.
Stephen Jay Gould gave as the first commandment of NOMA “Thou shalt not mix magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science.” Michael Ruse allows that scientists can be Christian as long as Christianity can be made compatible with unbreakable natural law. “Even the supreme miracle of the resurrection requires no law-breaking return from the dead. One can think of Jesus in a trance, or more likely that he really was physically dead but that on the third day a group of people, hitherto downcast, were filled with great joy and hope.” Alan Lightman refers to this overarching naturalism as the Central Doctrine of Science. “All properties and events in the physical universe are governed by laws, and those laws are true at every time and place in the universe.”
A simple deism, with God well contained, can possibly be compatible with science … or more accurately with natural materialism as a worldview.
This won’t do, of course. Christianity is a religion which – if true – cannot be contained. The supreme miracle of the resurrection requires law-breaking. But the biggest miracle is not resurrection but incarnation. There is a God and he is intimately involved in his creation in relationship with his creature.
Advent Antiphons–December 23
From The Book of Common Worship’s Times and Seasons (p.58).
These antiphons, or refrains, all beginning ‘O …’, were sung before and after the Magnificat at Vespers, according to the Roman use, on the seven days preceding Christmas Eve (17–23 December). They are addressed to God, calling for him to come as teacher and deliverer, with a tapestry of scriptural titles and pictures that describe his saving work in Christ. In the medieval rite of Salisbury Cathedral that was widely followed in England before the Reformation, the antiphons began on 16 December and there was an additional antiphon (‘O Virgin of virgins’) on 23 December; this is reflected in the Calendar of The Book of Common Prayer, where 16 December is designated O Sapientia (O Wisdom). The Common Worship Calendar has adopted the more widely used form. It is not known when and by whom the antiphons were composed, but they were already in use by the eighth century.
23 December – O Emmanuel
O Emmanuel, our King and our lawgiver, the hope of the nations and their Savior: Come and save us, O Lord our God.
–cf Isaiah 7.14
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