CS Lewis on the Virgin Birth

CS Lewis on the Virgin Birth: “The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into the pattern… With this we stand on the threshold of that miracle which for some reason proves hardest of all for the modern mind to accept. I can understand the man who denies miracles altogether: but what is one to make of people who will believe other miracles and ‘draw the line’ at the Virgin Birth? Is it that for all their lip service to the laws of Nature there is only one natural process in which they really believe? … Behind every spermatozoon lies the whole history of the universe: locked within it lies no inconsiderable part of the world’s future. The weight or drive behind it is the momentum of the whole interlocked event which we call Nature up-to-date. And we know now that the ‘laws of Nature’ cannot supply that momentum. If we believe that God created Nature that momentum comes from him. The human father is merely an instrument, a carrier, often an unwilling carrier, always simply the last in a long line of carriers—a line that stretches back far beyond his ancestors into pre-human and pre-organic deserts of time, back to the creation of matter itself. That line is in God’s hand. It is the instrument by which He normally creates a man. …But once, and for a special purpose, He dispensed with that long line which is His instrument: once His life-giving finger touched a woman without passing through the ages of interlocked events. …there was of course a unique reason for it. That time He was creating not simply a man but the Man who was to be Himself: was creating Man anew: was beginning, at this divine human point, the New Creation of all things.” (CS Lewis, Miracles, 95, 223-224)