Moreover, the knowledge of the virgin birth is important because of its bearing upon our view of the solidarity of the race in the guilt and power of sin.
      If we believe, as the Bible teaches, that all mankind are under an awful curse, [Romans 3] then we shall rejoice in knowing that there entered into the sinful race from the outside One upon whom the curse did not rest save as He bore it for those whom He redeemed by His blood.
      How, except by the virgin birth, could our Savior have lived a complete human life from the mother’s womb, and yet have been from the very beginning no product of what had gone before, but a supernatural Person come into the world from the outside to redeem the sinful race? We may not, indeed, set limits to the power of God: we cannot say what God might or might not have done. Yet we can say at least that no other way can be conceived by us. Deny or give up the story of the virgin birth, and inevitably you are led to evade either the high Biblical doctrine of sin or else the full Biblical presentation of the supernatural Person of our Lord. A noble man in whom the divine life merely pulsated in greater power than in other men would have been born by ordinary generation from a human pair; the eternal Son of God, come by a voluntary act to redeem us from guilt and power of sin, was conceived in the virgin’s womb by the Holy Ghost.
      What, then, is our conclusion? Is belief in the virgin birth necessary to every man if he is to be a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ? The question is wrongly put when it is put in that way. Who can tell exactly how much knowledge of the facts about Christ is necessary if a man is to have saving faith? None but God can tell. Some knowledge is certainly required, but exactly how much is required we cannot say. "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief," said a man in the Gospels who was saved. So today there are many men of little faith, many who are troubled by the voices that are heard on all sides. It is very hard to be a Christian in these times; and there is One who knows that it is hard. What right have we to say that full knowledge and full conviction are necessary before a man can put his trust in the crucified and risen Lord? What right have we to say that no man can be saved before he has come to full conviction regarding the stupendous miracle narrated in the first chapters of Matthew and Luke?
      We desire, however, at this point not to be misunderstood. We do not mean by what we have just said that denial of the virgin birth is to be treated as a matter of indifference by the wise pastor of souls. The soul of man in its depths, indeed, is beyond our ken; our judgments regarding those depths are not the judgments of Him who "needed not that any should testify of man," because "He knew what was in man." Yet if we are to help our fellow-men

we must give counsel on the basis of the best knowledge that we in our weakness can obtain. And certainly even with that weakness we can say that perhaps not one man out of a hundred of those who deny the virgin birth today gives any really clear evidence of possessing saving faith. A man is not saved by good works, but by faith; and saving faith is acceptance of Jesus Christ "as He is offered to us in the gospel." Part of that gospel in which Jesus is offered to our souls is the blessed story of the miracle in the virgin’s womb.
      One thing at least is clear: even if the belief in the virgin birth is not necessary to every Christian, it is certainly necessary to Christianity. And it is necessary to the corporate witness of the Church. Sad is it when men who will not affirm this doctrine are sent out into the ministry to lead Christ’s little ones astray. Such men are learners, it is said; they will grow in knowledge and in grace; let us deal patiently with them and all will be well. Now we have all sympathy with those who are immature in the faith, and we hope that by the blessing of God they may be led into clearer and stronger convictions as to the truth of His Word. But the place for such learning, so far as the basic things are concerned, is not the sacred office of the Christian ministry. Let these men learn first by themselves, let them struggle, let them meditate, with such help as we and others can give them; and then, if God leads them aright, let them aspire to the holy ministry of the Word. But to send them out before they have attained such convictions, as official representatives of a Church whose faith they do not share—that is simply to trifle with human souls.
      Let it never be forgotten that the virgin birth is an integral part of the New Testament witness about Christ, and that that witness is strongest when it is taken as it stands. We are not averse, indeed, to a certain logical order of apologetics; and in that order the virgin birth certainly does not come first. Before the virgin birth comes the things for which testimony in the very nature of the case can be more abundant than for this. To those things no doubt the inquirer should be directed first, before he comes to consider this mystery which was first attested perhaps only by the mother of the Lord. But though that is true, though theoretically a man can believe in the resurrection, for example, without believing in the virgin birth, yet such a halfway conviction is not likely to endure. The New Testament presentation of Jesus is not an agglomeration, but an organism, and of that organism the virgin birth is an integral part. Remove the part, and the whole becomes harder and not easier to accept; the New Testament account of Jesus is most convincing when it is taken as a whole. Only one Jesus is presented in the Word of God; and that Jesus did not come into the world by ordinary generation, but was conceived in the womb of the virgin by the Holy Ghost.

The past has consequences, which is why China’s recent totalitarian past overshadows its present and determines its future. That totalitarian past lays bare the fallacy of what Steven W. Mosher calls "the Tiananmen temptation" — the comforting but mistaken notion that the forces of reform are leading China in the direction of capitalism and of political freedom. The Tiananmen temptation assumes that the Communist Party in China is moribund and that democratic revolution is on the horizon.
      It is not.
      As Mosher correctly observes, the Chinese Communist Party now has a firmer grip on power than ever. Inside China, dissident groups were crushed so badly that not long after the Tiananmen debacle they simply ceased to exist. In their place stand a legion of "young superpatriots," who believe the world can sustain only one Hegemon, and they intend it to be China (p. xi).
      The role of Hegemon, Mosher explains, is an intrinsic and deeply imbedded element of Chinese national identity. Global hegemony is the chief goal of Chinese foreign policy and of Chinese relations with the West, which is why the recent domestic debate in the US about whether to contain China or to engage it is so misguided. The Sinocentric view of the future is not to ally itself with a Hegemon from the West, but to displace it. We are, in Chinese eyes, a power in decline. They intend to use American power to defeat America, much the way the Soviet Union intended to hang us with our own rope and bury us with our own shovel. Clearly, America’s mortal enemies are not all in the past. As Confucius said long ago, just as there cannot be two suns in the sky, there cannot be two emperors on earth. As long as the world’s superpower is not China, a giant stalks us from the East.
      Mosher pens a fascinating and instructive account of the history of Chinese hegemony, from the ancient Zhou kings and the rulers of the Seven Powers down to Mao Zedong and the rise of modern communist tyranny with its four infamous so-called absolutes: (1) the dictatorship of the proletariat, (2) the leadership of the Communist Party, (3) Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, and (4) the socialist road. That the history of Chinese hegemony, whether in its partial or plenary form, has been a saga of blood and destruction is 

simply beyond dispute.
      According to Mosher, most China experts tend to minimize both the possibility and the extent of Chinese aggression. Though nearly all such experts agree that China intends to get Taiwan back under its sway, they do not understand that China deeply resents a US-dominated world, a world they wish to avoid at nearly any price (p. 97).
      Mosher discerns three periods or phases of Chinese hegemony: (1) Basic Hegemony, which includes the recovery of Taiwan and control over the South China Sea; (2) Regional Hegemony, which extends the Chinese empire even across the Middle East; and (3) Global Hegemony, the consequence of a contest in which China overthrows the Pax Americana and replaces it with the Pax Sinica (pp. 99-116).
      Mosher explains in compelling terms and in careful detail why the current US policy of "Wuwei," or deliberately doing nothing, is doomed to fail. Those who advocate Wuwei argue in a paradox, he contends: They argue that China will change only if we don’t try to change it (p. 118).
      But as foolish as is the policy of Wuwei, with its plethora of historical and diplomatic fallacies, it is much to be preferred to the Clinton administration’s flip-flopping on the road to what it euphemistically called our "strategic partnership" with China, but which Mosher more aptly describes as a "promiscuous embrace" (139). The Clinton administration seemed resolutely to ignore the warnings of writers like Arthur Waldron, who insisted that China, almost by definition, poses a threat to her neighbors and to the US (p. 129).
      Mosher argues that we must do our level best to contain the rising Hegemon, an evil empire that worked to subvert the American elections of 1996, and that practices forced abortion, religious oppression and the selling of prisoners’ organs. To do so, we need to take a page out of our Cold War playbook and "prevent China from gaining effective sway over its neighbors, limit its influences further afield, and thwart the emergence of a Eurasian superpower that would threaten America’s global interests" (p. 141). Among other things, this policy would require us to bolster our national missile-defense system, to re-build our naval and air force presence in Asia, and to continue, restore, or strengthen our alliance with Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines.
      According to Mosher, "it is time for the Great Wall of intimidation that the Hegemon built to come tumbling down" (160).
      Indeed it is.

Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World, is available from the Schwarz Report Bookshelf.

Islam vs. Western Civilization
by William S. Lind, John F. Schmitt, Gary I. Wilson

As Americans, we have traditionally been part of Western, Judeo-Christian culture, the culture that has grown up over the last 3,000 or so years from Jerusalem and Athens, Rome and Constantinople. The last major threat the West faced from another culture was the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683.
      Why was the West immune from other cultures for the past 300 years? Because the West, and the West alone, invented modernity. Starting about 500 years ago, Western culture began asking a new question: How do we use the forces of nature for practical ends? From systematic (scientific) exploration of this question came ships that could cross oceans and navigation to guide them; the harnessing first of steam power, then electricity, then internal combustion; and medicines that permitted Europeans and North Americans to live anywhere in the world. Modernity also brought weapons: "Whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not."
      By the beginning of the 20th century, modernity had given the West world domination. Those portions of the non-Western world that maintained their nominal independence were nonetheless subject to Western dictate, as the Boxers discovered in China. Only one non-Western nation was modernizing successfully: Japan.
      Then, in the course of less than a century, we, the West, threw it all away. How? By fighting three immense Western civil wars: World War I, World War II and the Cold War. We do not usually think of these as civil wars, but in cultural terms that is what they were. Japan played a small role in the first and a larger role in the second. But even in World War II, the Allies’ "Germany first" strategy showed where the center of conflict lay.
      The damage was incalculable. Tens of millions of Western lives were lost (remember that even under communism, Russia was still part of Western culture), countless marks and pounds and rubles of capital went up in flames and smoke. Most damaging, the West’s faith in itself was shattered. After 1918, the modernity that had brought the Somme, poison gas, and "total war" could no longer command men’s allegiance.
      As is commonly the case with civil wars, the entity fighting them—in this case not a country but a culture—emerged greatly weakened vis-a-vis its neighbors. And those neighbors—Chinese culture, Hindu culture, Islamic culture—have benefitted directly from the wars, 

especially the Cold War, as both Western parties pumped weapons, capital, and the other technical fruits of modernity into them. Most important, these non-Western cultures had not lost their nerve, their faith in themselves. On the contrary, the receding, demoralized West left them invigorated and renewed, positioned to combine the technological creations of the West with the fundaments of their traditional ways.
      Now we, the West, find ourselves increasingly under siege, no longer the world’s master, merely one contender among many—one sinking down as others rise. Chinese culture, the West’s most successful competitor over time, may face us only with a peaceful challenge. China has never desired to rule over non-Han peoples, beyond a few border buffer states. [ed. now debatable]
      The most immediate challenger is Islam, and here the challenge is not likely to be peaceful. Islam is today expanding outward in every direction from its traditional heartland: south into black Africa, east into southeast Asia and the Philippines, north into Europe. And also West: the fastest-growing religion in the United States is Islam.
      Islam’s thrust northward into Europe, the heartland of Western culture, is worth a closer look. Islamic immigration into France has been so massive as to reverse the verdict of the battle of Tours; southern France now has more mosques than churches. North African immigrants are now pouring similarly into Spain. In the Balkans, Moslem aid, including weapons and fighters, is flowing into Bosnia. Islamic states realize, as we do not, that the Bosnian Moslems are strategically on the offensive, beginning a new Islamic thrust toward the Danube. Most disastrous for the West is the situation in the former Soviet Union. There, our entire flank from the Black Sea to Vladivostok is collapsing under Moslem (and further east, Chinese) pressure.
      What is America’s response? We condemn European measures to control immigration, threaten the Serbs with war on behalf of the Bosnian Islamics, and caution Russia against any attempt to reassert control to her south. At the very least, this represents a failure to comprehend a changing strategic situation. Some call it a cultural death wish.
      The third idea that shapes our understanding of fourth generation warfare ties in our situation here at home. In the United States of America, our traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture is collapsing. It is not collapsing because it failed. On the contrary, it has given us the freest and most prosperous society in human history. Rather, it is collapsing because we are abandoning it.
      Starting in the mid-1960s, we have thrown away the values, morals, and standards that define traditional Western culture. In part, this has been driven by cultural radicals, 

people who hate our Judeo-Christian culture. Dominant in the elite, especially in the universities, the media, and the entertainment industry (now the most powerful force in our culture and a source of endless degradation), the cultural radicals have successfully pushed an agenda of moral relativism, militant secularism, and sexual and social "liberation." This agenda has slowly codified into a new ideology, usually known as "multiculturalism" or "political correctness," that is in essence Marxism translated from economic into social and cultural terms.
      This new, cultural Marxism has had remarkable success 

in discrediting America’s common culture and substituting for it cultural fragmentation based on ethnic groups, gender, sexual identity, and class. If this trend continues, Americans will increasingly find they have less in common with each other as Americans. National identity will weaken. Other, mutually hostile identities will strengthen, until the nation comes apart: region vs. region, minority vs. minority, and gang vs. gang. When a nation comes apart at its cultural seams, eventually it turns on itself and fights. The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil.
      —Marine Corps Gazette, December 1994

The new terrorists of the bin Laden school largely come from the latest violent movement: Wahhabism. Founded by Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1703-1792), Wahhabis from the start were willing to kill civilians who opposed them. They did just that in the city of Qarbala in 1801, leaving 2,000 ordinary folks dead. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Wahhabis opposed the "decadence" of the Ottoman Turk empire. Now they are out to overthrow "the American empire," and have trained a generation of students for that pursuit through a network of madrassahs (religious boarding schools) funded by Saudi oil money.
      The instructions some of the Sept. 11 terrorists carried with them clearly reflect Wahhabi emphases and interpretations: "Read al-Tawba and Anfal [traditional war chapters from the Quran] and reflect on their meanings and remember all of the things that God has promised for the martyrs...Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty, and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out, ‘Come hither, friend of God.’ They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing."
      The Wahhabi wing of Islam and the "national liberation" wing of Marxism are able to make common cause by attacking a free enterprise system in which people prosper by fulfilling the needs and desires of others. That some of those desires lack virtue is all the excuse Wahhabis need to join the neo-Marxist assault on capitalism. Islam has a respect for private property but it also pushes for unicity, and when the latter overcomes the former, Wahhabi Marxists (such as bin Laden’s crew) and dictatorships (such as that of Saddam Hussein) emerge.
      —World magazine, Nov/Dec 2001, p. 24

We are not fighting a war on terrorism. Terrorism is the means by which our enemy chooses to wage war against us, but we should not confuse its tactics with the nature of the enemy itself.
      The enemy has an ideology. It has a command structure. It has troops. And it is clear in its aim—nothing short of the destruction of our civilization.
      The enemy is militant Islamic fundamentalism. The command structure is made up of hundreds of mullahs around the world, including some living in this country, who preach death to the infidels.
      Its troops include not just the thousands of trained terrorists but the millions of others who support the mullahs and finance the terrorists through their donations to radical Islamic groups. To pretend otherwise risks not only our own defeat, but that of the moderate Moslem world as well.

Threat Extends Across the World
In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington presciently described "a quasi war develop[ing] between Islam and the West." Even before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Huntington noted, "many more Westerners have been killed in this quasi war than were killed in the ‘real’ war in the Gulf."
      The direction of Islam as a religion has become increasingly threatening to nonbelievers, not just in the West but throughout the world. Its threat extends beyond the Middle East to Asia and Africa, even to the United States, where some fundamentalist imams spread their hateful doctrines protected by our 1st Amendment.
      Not all, or even most, Moslems are our enemies, certainly. Indeed, the moderate Islamic nations are on the front lines of this war and have been among its first casualties, starting with the Iranian revolution in 1979. Some of the most brutal tactics of the fundamentalists have been

used against fellow Muslims in Egypt, Morocco, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
      Nonetheless, the response of virtually every moderate Moslem leader to the threat posed by fundamentalists has been to accede to the fundamentalists’ interpretation of Islam, and to further the Islamization of all social, cultural, and political institutions in their countries.
      Even Turkey, which since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s policies of secularization in the 1920s and 1930s has been the most pro-Western Moslem nation, has become more Islamist in the last few years. As Huntington observed, every Moslem country in the world is more Islamist today than it was two decades ago, with the exception of Iran—but only because Iran was the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution.
      Despite what our leaders keeping telling us, Islam is not inherently a peaceful religion. Unlike Christianity, in whose name wars have been fought but without any Scriptural basis to support those wars to be found in the teachings of Jesus Christ, Islam can find explicit justification for its jihad or "holy war" within its sacred text.
      The Koran instructs believers to "slay the idolaters . . . make war on the leaders of unbelief—for no oaths are binding with them—so that they may desist. Will you not fight against those who have broken their oaths and conspired to banish the Apostle? They were the first to attack you. Do you fear them? Surely God is more deserving of your fear, if you are true believers. Make war on them: God will chastise them at your hands and humble them."
      The Koran is filled with elaborate instructions on the conduct of war, the methods of executing the infidels, the rewards that will accrue to those martyred in a holy war.
      The very nature of fundamentalism is to take these instructions literally. And there is plenty of historical precedent. For nearly 1,000 years, Europe was under nearly constant siege from Islamic invaders, from the first Moors who conquered Spain in 710 to the last Ottoman attack on Vienna in 1683. So long as the trend within the Moslem world today is toward a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, the West will continue to face a new threat to its survival.
      —Human Events, October 22, 2001, p. 9

An obscure sectarian divide in U.S. Islam is gaining more attention as the nation tries to understand the world’s second- largest faith.
      Wahhabism, a strict form of Muslim orthodoxy backed by Saudi Arabia’s wealth and its members’ missionary zeal, may have overshadowed alternative strands of Islam here, its critics say.
      Others say Wahhabism, which is more likely to claim it is "true Islam" and expect other Muslims to conform, is merely part of the faith’s diversity.
      "Wahhabism is identifiable only with American Muslims in Saudi religious organizations," said Sulayman Nyang, a professor of Islam at Howard University. "But it doesn’t influence American Muslims linked to" other branches of Islam.
      Said to be the strictest of four legal schools of Islam, it was revived by a religious leader named Muhammed Abd al-Wahhab, who joined forces with the military founder of the Saudi dynasty.
      Mr. Nyang said it grew from a sect backed by the Saudi royal family to a world movement, especially during the Cold War. "The royals, in alliance with the United States, used Wahhabism in the Middle East to drum up support against secular socialism," he said. "So there’s unintended consequences."
      Wahhabi Islam hopes to enforce a more literal interpretation of the Koran, Islam’s holy book, in social custom and criminal law, said Khalid Duran, a Muslim scholar who is of the Sufi, or more mystical, persuasion.
      "What we see today is some leaders demanding a rigidity that is really not Islamic," he said. "They want to show off as being more pious. They are all Wahhabis, though the term is a little bit loose."
      He said they call themselves "Islamist."
      He said Muslims abroad use the Wahhabi term 

negatively "to mean fundamentalist, fascist," and that in Western countries it can be divisive in its missionary zeal.
      But Azizah al-Hibri, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said Wahhabism is merely part of religious diversity working itself out in America, not a major split among the faithful.
      "The problem is that some ideas have more funding than others," she said, responding to the point about Saudi funding of Wahhabi schools, literature and religious teachers.
      But she said its influence in the United States, imported with immigration, has softened over the years.
      "It has a strong presence, and that makes it an issue for people who are not Wahhabi. But it’s not a split in Islam. It is part of the marketplace of ideas."
      Wahhabism also has been characterized as an ardent political critic of Muslim regimes that secularize and of sects that are less legalistic, such as Sufism.
      One Sufi leader, Sheik Hisham Kabbani, who founded the Islamic Supreme Council of America as an alternative to Wahhabi influence, stirred an explosive debate on the issue in 1999.
      In a State Department hearing, he said that 80 percent of the nation’s mosques had been taken over by imams (Islamic clergy) with Wahhabilike loyalties.
      Estimates of the number of mosques, or prayer centers, in the United States range from 1,200 to 3,000.
      For his testimony, Mr. Kabbani was denounced by a coalition of established Muslim political groups here, and called a "hippie" or "guru" by orthodox Muslims who look askance at Sufism.
      Mr. Nyang of Howard University said the sheik spread the Wahhabi label too liberally across U.S. Muslim leadership.
      Mrs. Al-Hibri rejected the sheik’s charge that policy groups such as the American Muslim Council (AMC) harbor Wahhabism. "The AMC is not Wahhabi," she said.
      —The Washington Times, October 11, 201, p. A 14