Kansas Democrat Adam Hamilton Says Christians Do Not Have to Believe Jesus’s Mother Was a Virgin

( Breitbart )

Democrat Kansas U.S. Senate candidate and woke Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton claimed the Virgin Birth is an optional belief for Christians and is only insisted upon in “fundamentalism.”

Hamilton, who is the senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, indulged in the heresy last year on his podcast, Making Sense of Faith with Adam Hamilton.

“Now, we’re all children of God, but in a different way, Jesus was the son of God. And in the early church, they began to talk about Mary as ‘theotokos,’ which was a term that meant ‘God-bearer,’ that God actually entered into her womb through this child. Now, how did the biology of that work? How did the conception of that exactly work? I don’t think it’s trying to explain that,” Hamilton said. “I believe in the virgin birth because these stories tell it, and it’s one of those places where, in a sense, I suspend my logic to be able to say, ‘You know what? I don’t know exactly what happened, so I’m going with this story.’ I choose to trust and believe in the virgin birth.” 

“But interestingly enough, throughout the rest of the New Testament, other than Matthew and Luke’s gospel, it’s not mentioned anywhere. We don’t find the virginal conception mentioned in any of Paul’s letters, the Book of Acts, anywhere else,” he continued. “…But if it was so important, if you had to believe in the Virgin Birth story in order to be a Christian, we would have found Paul talking about it — so whether Paul has not thought about it, or whether he didn’t know the stories, or he just didn’t feel like he needed to reference them.”:

So I say to people who tell me, “I’m not really sure I can believe in the Virgin of birth.” I’m like, “That’s okay. I just want you to follow Jesus.” He didn’t come to his disciples and say, “Hey, let me tell you the story about how I was conceived. And now if you believe that, you can be one of my disciples.” He never said that. He just said, “Come follow me,” … So, for me, I recognize the challenges of that, and I also … choose to believe this. What I really believe about it isn’t a biology lesson; it’s a theology lesson and who I think Jesus is. …There was a period of time — so Christian fundamentalism, in part, was a reaction to, like sort of liberalizing, and a willingness to read the scriptures and read them metaphorically, you know, those kind of stories. And so when Christian fundamentalism took off, one of the fundamentals was the Virgin Birth. You have to believe in the Virgin Birth or you can’t be a real Christian. And I think, again, I believe in the virgin, uh, original conception of Jesus. I choose to believe that, but I understand how that’s a struggling point for some people to begin with, and, again, I think Jesus would not have said, “Look, you need to understand exactly how I was conceived in order to be able to follow me.”

The Virgin Birth is notably part of the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed and is essential to understanding the miraculous nature of Jesus’s birth and his ability to be both fully God and fully man at the same time. Jesus being born of a virgin through the Holy Spirit is clearly laid out in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke and is also foretold in the Old Testament book of Isaiah, meaning the Virgin Birth is the fulfillment of a prophecy from 600 or 700 years before. 

Hamilton also previously said the Bible contains “hundreds” of errors. In a 2022 sermon, he suggested Muslims, Hindus, and adherents of other faiths would reach Heaven and recognize Jesus after death.

In 2015, Hamilton questioned how much “latitude” Christians have to push back on the Bible, including whether they can say the Apostle Paul was “wrong.”

The Church of the Resurrection under his leadership partnered with Kansas City PrideFest to sponsor a “Drag Queen Story Time & Gay Pride Festival,” according to previous reporting by Breitbart News. 

Hamilton has voiced his support for legal abortion, Black Lives Matter, and affirming same-sex marriage within the United Methodist Church — all while presenting himself as a moderate.

Hamilton is running for the U.S. Senate in Kansas against incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS). The race is projected to be extremely close, with RealClear Polling showing Marshall an average of 0.7 points ahead.