A few years ago around Christmas, I thought it might be interesting to see how the unique birth of Jesus was treated in a general encyclopedia of religion. I had one on my shelf and began to look through the index. No entry under "virgin birth." Thinking I hadn't got the proper term, I searched for other possibilities. No clues. Finally, I just opened to the beginning of the chapter on Christianity. In the forty pages that followed, there was no mention of the virgin birth.
It's certainly not news that many people who embrace religion to a degree, feel that they can't give up belief in the accepted physical order of things. So there's a tendency to de-emphasize, or even entirely dispense with, events that seem impossible according to physical theories —or simply to revise them into something more plausible. (An example of the latter occurs in a Bible commentary that downgrades the account of Jesus walking on the water to Jesus wading through the surf.)
Yet the virgin birth is much more than a dispensable doctrinal point or a miracle to be accepted on faith. In fact, an understanding of its logic is at the very heart of Christianity and Christian healing today. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy gives a thought provoking exposition of the subject: "The illumination of Mary's spiritual sense put to silence material law and its order of generation, and brought forth her child by the revelation of Truth, demonstrating God as the Father of men. The Holy Ghost, or divine Spirit, overshadowed the pure sense of the Virgin-mother with the full recognition that being is Spirit. The Christ dwelt forever an idea in the bosom of God, the divine Principle of the man Jesus, and woman perceived this spiritual idea, though at first faintly developed." Science and Health, p. 29.
