652 Faith informed by Reason

Mark Roberts has just finished up an excellent 9 part series answering the Christmas cover stories of Time and Newsweek. Meacham, the writer for Newsweek has no where near the credentials or experience that Roberts has, but the complaint from most believing Christians is that he didn't even attempt to present the other side (often the case with liberals, whether in politics or religion). Roberts takes great care to explain and be fair to the case of the scholars with whom he disagrees. Meacham just pretends that being a liberal Episcopalian makes him some sort of expert on Biblical doctrines and faith. Roberts concludes:

"If I believed as does Marcus Borg and others like him, that vast portions of the gospels, including the Nativity narratives, were made up, I honestly don’t know whether I’d still consider myself a Christian or not. And if I believed that the resurrection was merely a meaningful symbol and not a historical fact, as Borg believes, I expect that my faith would be insipid at best.

On Christmas Eve I will stand up before a packed sanctuary and proclaim the good news of Christmas. And what is this good news? It’s more than the virgin birth. It’s even more than the fact that Jesus is light and Lord. The core truth of Christmas is that God has entered human life in they baby Jesus. By a mysterious process that we won’t ever understand, and that Matthew and Luke don’t even try to explain, God became human in the womb of Mary.

This is the core truth of Christmas. If I didn’t think this really happened, if I thought that the early Christians invented this crazy idea, then I wouldn’t be able to preach the good news on Christmas Eve, or at any other time either. Of course I can’t prove that the Incarnation really happened, but I can show that it’s reasonable to believe it. Ultimately, however, it is a matter of faith, not faith without reason or faith opposed to reason, but faith informed by reason."