Christmas is a call to faith: but it is not a flight from the facts. And the ultimate mystery of Christmas faith is the Emmanuel Factor: God with us. And he has no way of doing that without implicating and embroiling himself in human history. The very first book of Christian history – the Book of Acts in the New Testament – has more recorded names and places than it does miracles.
The intellectual feud between fact and faith converges around the story of a stable in Bethlehem where God is reputed to have come to us in human flesh.
And it is hard to believe.
For the story calls us to much more than abstract agreement. It demands personal assent.
Mary herself couldn’t take it in. “How can this be?” she asked.