Every year Christians accuse society of trying to take Christ out of Christmas. This Christmas saw the war shift to inside our camp due, yet again, to an poor statement by Andy Stanley on the virgin birth.
Virgin Birth debate interrupts regular ‘War on Christmas’ program
The other war on Christmas — not the one over saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” — broke into a skirmish after a well-known evangelical preacher suggested he doesn’t have a problem with people who doubt the Virgin Birth.
Andy Stanley, founder of North Point Ministries, a network of six congregations across the Atlanta metropolitan area attended by 30,000 worshippers a week, said in a message Dec. 3 that one of the challenging things about Christmas is the “unbelievable” nature of stories in the Bible describing Jesus’ miraculous conception.
“A lot of people don’t believe it, and I understand that,” Stanley said. “Maybe the thought is they had to come up with some kind of myth about the birth of Jesus to give him street cred later on. Maybe that’s where that came from.”
Stanley, the son of former Southern Baptist Convention president and longtime pastor of First Baptist Church of Atlanta pastor Charles Stanley, called it “interesting” that only two of the four Gospels mention the Virgin Birth.
“Matthew gives us a version of the birth of Christ,” he said. “Luke does, but Mark and John, they don’t even mention it. A lot has been made about that.”
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