thought, by contrast, assumes something like "Lessing's ditch": that one cannot get from the contingent truths of history to the timeless metaphysical truths of religion. Acceptance of the Incarnation, however, seems to presuppose that we can know about the transcendent through ordinary contingent means, such as the testimony of others and evidences drawn from our own experience.
             The Christian experience of faith involves in some way knowing God through an encounter with the historical person Jesus Christ. The starting point for Christian thought, then, entails an implicit rejection of the rule (perhaps derived from more abstract conceptions of the deity in classical Greek thought) that we cannot bridge the gap between empirical truths and wider metaphysical realities. Religious truths are not first of all "necessary truths," like the truths of mathematics, but rather, according to Christianity, revealed to us in encounters with the divine person within our history.
             Christians who believe in the Incarnation are then working within a framework of a universe that is open to spiritual phenomena that go beyond those that people of all faiths or of no formal faith can agree on. While Christians may be as skeptical as anyone about any particular claim of a miracle, a revelation, or spiritual phenomenon, they would not rule it out on the modern premise that such things d
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