Christmas Theology

Five years ago I wrote a little piece on 'Advent Theology' - mostly trying to make the point that because our theology awaits Christ's final revelation, it is always provisional and subject to correction.  (I said other things too; it's only short, why not read it).

As this year's Advent season begins to fade into Christmas, I want to add something: as well as being Advent theology, all sound theology must be Christmas theology.

Christmas is the time of the baby in the manger, of the Word become flesh.  Christmas is the time of Immanuel, God with us, God as one of us.  Christmas is 'God draws near'; Christmas is 'our God contracted to a span' - not without his continuing to fill heaven and earth, of course!  At Christmas, we see his glory - the glory of the one and only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.  Though no-one has ever seen God, the one and only Son has made him known.  Christmas is when God, in a miracle of grace, becomes an object in our history, our space and time, counted amongst us as one body alongside other bodies, to be heard, seen, touched.

Christmas is the miracle of how we come to know God.

(There is another side to this miracle, a subjective component to match this objective - but that will have to wait for Pentecost theology).

So Christmas theology must be confident, restrained, and simple.

Confident, because God has really walked amongst us.  We are not making stuff up, neither are we speculating about God on the basis of some element of human experience, or our understanding of the nature of reality.  We are not constructing a Babel-Tower of philosophy to reach up to God; rather, he came down to us.  It is noteworthy that there is essentially no philosophy, no metaphysics, in Holy Scripture - there is instead witness, witness to what God has said and done in our midst.  Because of Christmas, we stand on solid ground as we theologise.

Restrained, because if God has come to us and shown himself to us, we are not free to seek him elsewhere.  We need not engage in metaphysical speculation, but far more strongly than that: we must not.  If God gives himself to be known, if he tells us that to see Jesus Christ is to see the Father, that it is in the face of Christ that we are to seek and see the glory of God, then we are not at liberty to look around elsewhere.  Christmas, by giving us a real basis for theology, gives us the only legitimate basis for theology.

Simple, in two senses.  In the ordinary everyday sense of the word, simple because the story is simple.  God lay in a manger.  This is a truth a child can understand, and perhaps one of the great virtues of Christmas as an annual celebration is that in invites us to see as a child again.  There is no sophistication here, no complex intellectual scheme.  There is just God, present as one of us.  But as if to contradict that, Christmas theology is also simple in the technical sense.  Simplicity, as an attribute of God, tells us that since God is One, and is not made up of parts, wherever God is and under whatever aspect we consider him, the whole of God is there and the whole of God is implicated.  God is not partly mercy and partly justice, for example, in the way that we might be divided and potentially conflicted.  God is all God.  And so Christmas theology looks to the manger and expects to see - and does see - true and full God in the truly and fully human baby.  Christmas theology tells us that we don't need to worry that we're missing out on some deep and hidden things of God by focussing on the incarnate Word; no, rather the deep and hidden things are right there, mysterious and yet revealed, in Christ Jesus.

A word, briefly, to those who love theology.  I think Christmas theology is a rebuke to us when we get caught up in and enjoy the technical apparatus of theology; when we delight in the complex discussions of Nicene Trinitarianism or Chalcedonian Christology or whatever.  It is noteworthy that many of the greatest theologians are on record as wishing that none of this technical apparatus had to exist; they would have preferred simply to use the language of Holy Scripture to bear witness to Christ.  If the abuses of heretics forced them to construct a technical vocabulary, it was only to safeguard the approach to the manger.  Whilst I think we ought to have a grasp of these things, especially if we are teachers of the faith, let's not delight too much in the technicalities, but get inside the fence which they represent to see God in Christ.  And in particular, let's not make them a fence against simple Christian faith, which is far more value than any of our complex distinctions.  Perhaps for theologians, the chief emphasis of Christmas theology is that we need to bow before the baby - a test of our humility!

Walking in darkness

 Isaiah 50:10-11:

Who among you fears the Lord
and listens to his servant?
Who among you walks in darkness,
and has no light?
Let him trust in the name of the Lord;
let him lean on his God.
Look, all you who kindle a fire,
who encircle yourselves with torches;
walk in the light of your fire
and of the torches you have lit!
This is what you’ll get from my hand:
you will lie down in a place of torment.

I come back to these verses often, because it seems to me they are a standing rebuke to much of our contemporary culture, within and without the church, and because they describe an aspect of the life of faith which we would rather forget.  Isaiah is writing to the exiled people of Judah, to those who have suffered disgrace and who have no obvious earthly hope.  But his words in these verses reach even further across the centuries, to speak to us in the here and now.

The prophet describes two groups of people.  Both groups are in the midst of darkness, but they react to the darkness in very different ways.  One - perhaps from a human perspective the most sensible, practical group - set about making light.  Fire!  Torches!  Drive back the darkness!  The other, in a move which does not seem humanly speaking to be very wise, walks on in the dark.  We might expect that their ultimate destinies would reflect their choices, and so they do - but not in the way the image would lead us to expect.  It is not those who prudently make themselves lights who avoid danger; no, they will lie down in torment.  It is those who walk in the dark, leaning on the Lord, who avoid stumbling and falling on the way.

In a pragmatic, technological society like ours, the first question which naturally comes to our minds when confronted with an issue is 'what ought we to do?' - how can we address the problem?  How can we fix it?  Whether it's public health issues, or personal issues, this is just how we're wired to think.  This is just as true, I think, within the church as outside it.  How do I fix this feeling of being spiritually dry?  How do we reverse the decline in church attendance?  What do we do?

And there is a very real danger that in every case we are just scrambling around lighting torches.

It is hard for us to shift our sense that things just ought to work, and that there must be something we can do to fix it if they don't.  But this is not a sound instinct.  Life is not a machine.  The life of faith, in particular, does not mean relentless activity to drive back the darkness, as if it were some sort of strange intrusion.

Rather, our posture is to be: fear the Lord, listen to his Servant.

The Servant, of course, is the Lord Jesus Christ - and the rest of the chapter makes clear why it is that the life of faith must consist largely of walking in darkness.  It is because in this world Christ our Lord suffered, submitted himself to humiliation, walked the path of the cross.  He walked the way of darkness.  We ought to follow him.

It is not that we should never try to solve any problems or fix any issues.  It is just that that is not to be our first response.  First we bow before the Lord, acknowledge his sovereignty, hear again the message of the Lord Jesus, consider again that this is just the way of the cross.  Because sooner or later we're going to hit problems we can't fix - ultimately, death! - and we will not be ready to go into that great darkness unless we have become accustomed to walking in the dark, leaning on the Lord.

Why follow Torrance?

In my previous post I attempted to sketch out T.F. Torrance's approach to theological knowledge.  Here I just want to outline a few reasons why I think this, or something very like it, is a good model for thinking about how to do theology.

1. Christ is central.  It is a sound theological instinct to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ in every aspect of thinking about God, to take every thought captive for obedience to him.  In Torrance's structuring of theological science, Christ is the focus at every level, and indeed he is the link between doxological piety and theological reflection.  He is our assurance that we are dealing with a real, objective truth - he is God in his revelation.  He is the one who ensures that our thoughts do not fly off into ungrounded speculation.  It is all about the Lord Jesus Christ, all the way through.

2. It doesn't leave behind or disparage the pre-conceptual knowledge of God in Christ.  It can be easy for theologians, who have wrestled with 'the Trinitarian grammar', to look down on the 'simple faith' of the average worshipping community, and to regard the piety of the average Christian as something that needs to be supplanted by a refined conceptual apparatus.  There is no supplanting in Torrance; rather, it seems to me, his system rightly puts theological science at the service of doxological piety.  The real knowledge of God, if you like, does not happen only as we progressively ascend the levels of theological purity; it happens on the ground, in praise and worship and preaching and sacrament.  There is no superior knowledge of God open to the theologian; just the same knowledge expressed conceptually.

3. It maintains that we do have real knowledge of God in himself, but that we approach this knowledge through God's revelation.  I think this is key.  In Torrance's stratified model, knowledge of God is not restricted to knowledge of the economy - that is to say, the work of God toward us in creation and redemption.  Rather, through the economy, we are enabled to see and understand something of God's life in himself.  God is not collapsed into his works, but neither is his life separated from his works.  It is the fact that Christ himself is truly God as well as truly man which makes this connection possible.  We see, as we reflect on Christ, the real inner life of God - the processions which stand behind the missions.  But we are not encouraged to speculate about this; we are encouraged to learn about God where God has elected to teach us, in the face of Jesus Christ.

For these three reasons, and probably more, I think Torrance is helpful here, and I'd commend his scheme to anyone.