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!

The Holy Innocents

Traditionally on this fourth day of Christmas the church has remembered the massacre of the infants of Bethlehem, which Matthew's Gospel reports after the story of the visit of the Magi:

After they were gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Get up! Take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. For Herod is about to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night, and escaped to Egypt. He stayed there until Herod’s death, so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled: Out of Egypt I called my Son.

Then Herod, when he realised that he had been outwitted by the wise men, flew into a rage. He gave orders to massacre all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under, in keeping with the time he had learned from the wise men. Then what was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled:

A voice was heard in Ramah,
weeping, and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children;
and she refused to be consoled,
because they are no more.

I find this one of the most disturbing episodes in Holy Scripture.  Of course, the content is horrific - mass murder of babies and toddlers, driven by the king's paranoia and malice.  But it isn't just the content but the context.  This is the Christmas story, the story of the nativity of Christ.  It's a story full of light dawning, of salvation coming.  And yet right in the middle of the story is this darkest of episodes.

The way Matthew tells the story is striking.  The main perspective, if you like, tells the story of the deliverance of the infant Jesus from Herod's power.  It is primarily the story of God driving his salvific purpose despite the opposition of the wicked.  The flight into Egypt recalls the patriarchs journey to the same country - in their case not to escape persecution but to survive famine.  The main perspective is the thwarting of Herod's evil plan by God's providential care.  It's a story of the light continuing to shine against a terribly dark background.

But the citation from the prophet Jeremiah initially invites us to take a second perspective: that of the bereaved mothers of Bethlehem.  Herod's plan to murder the Christ is thwarted, but his malice is instead spent on unrelated children.  Taking this perspective is disturbing on two counts: firstly, could not the God who warned Joseph to flee also have preserved these other children? and second, was it not God's own salvation plan which led to this act of mass murder?  The text does not invite us to blame the evil on God, for it was Herod's sin which led to the massacre.  But if the Christ had not entered the world in Bethlehem, wouldn't the children have been safe from Herod?  They seem to have been collateral damage in the great war in the heavenlies, and that hardly seems acceptable.   I am reminded of Kirkegaard's question about Abraham: wouldn't it have been better for him not to be the chosen?  Would it not have been better for the little town of Bethlehem if the Christ had not been there?

The context of the Jeremiah quote points to a third perspective, to my mind even more challenging.  In its original setting, the first reference of this prophecy is to those bereaved by the catastrophe of the exile from Judah; and Jeremiah, on behalf of the Lord, promises comfort.  God's love for his children is still there, despite all appearance.  Indeed, the very exile is shown to be the work of his love, his discipline.  He will have a people for himself.  The best thing for them - the only true good - is to belong exclusively to him, and he will make it so, and in so doing he will turn their lament into joy.  Matthew, then, invites us to step back.  At the centre is the story of Christ, rescued and preserved.  On the periphery is the terrible story of the massacre and the suffering of Bethlehem.  But in the widest perspective, is there hope in the story?  Are we to see comfort for this grieving?  If so, for Matthew that comfort will come through the preserved child.

And here we perhaps hear another echo.  Long ago, another Joseph had been driven into Egypt by persecution.  And in time, that Joseph was able to say that although there had been evil intent on the part of the human actors, God had intended good through the evil.  We are invited, then, to see God's providence in the dark as well as the light in the story.  Not equally, not in the same way; not so that Herod is in any way absolved, not so that grief stops being grievous.  But that somehow, through this infant, even the evil will be turned to good and the darkness overwhelmed by the light.

Advent and Christmas

Working through the letter of 2 Peter over the last few weeks, one of the things I've noticed is that forward momentum in the Christian life, driven and energised by hope for the second coming of the Lord, is a much bigger thing in the New Testament than it is in much of the contemporary Christianity with which I am familiar.  For 2 Peter, it seems to me, you're either growing in Christian character or you're falling back into the orbit of the corrupt world; you're either straining towards the promise of a new heavens and new earth where righteousness dwells or you're scoffing at God.

Particularly striking at this time of year, as Advent gives way to Christmas: the way in which you look forward reveals something about the way you look back.

If you're not growing in Christian character (looking forward), you've forgotten that you were once washed from sin (looking back).

If you're scoffing at the idea of Christ's return and the final judgement (looking forward), you've forgotten the Majesty that has already been revealed in Christ (looking back).

It strikes me that if we're not looking forward to Christ's second coming, that is a sign that we've critically misunderstood Christmas.  If we think, with the classic liberal and with many a nativity play, of Christmas as simply a particular example of the everyday miracle of life (i.e., as a myth), we will expect that existence will simply roll on as it ever has done: a series of miracles, the world infused with the miraculous.  No second coming here.  If, on the other hand, we follow some apologists and more conservative theologians and make Christmas all about history - a one-off, uniquely glorious event - we will not necessarily be driven to expect any further events - or if we do, we must confess them to be logically somewhat disconnected from the first.  Maybe a second coming, but what has that to do with Christmas?

But if we see in Christmas the breaking in of the end, the ultimate, into our history - interrupting its flow, bringing into history that which history could never throw up of itself: redemption, salvation, new creation - if we see that in the story of the manger, then we must look for the full and final revelation of that salvation.  Redemption which does not redeem, new creation which gets lost in the old: these are impossible things.  If in the baby in the manger we see - let us get to the absolute point - Almighty God, then we must expect the glory of God to fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.  We must, therefore, look forward to his return, his full unveiling, the judgement of all the earth.

Which is more or less what I was trying to say about this time last year!

This particular God

Approaching Christmas, I'm pondering again what it means that God is revealed and known through the child in the manger.  I come back again and again to the particularity of it all.  The Christian claim is exactly this: that at a particular place and time, in principle a place which could be mapped and which stands in proximity to all sorts of other places which do not have this significance, and in principle a time which could be indicated on a clock and placed on a timeline with other moments, God the Creator was personally united to his creation in the person of Jesus Christ.

If the significance of that seems obscure, let me try to unpack it a bit.

When we say 'God' as Christians, we are not talking about a universal truth but a particular one.  That is to say, the meaning of 'God' is defined from this particular moment - with the human life which it began.  There is no generic god behind this event, no universal god, not even a god who - as one of the things which he decided to do - became incarnate at this moment.  No, God means this particular God.  No other.

That means that our knowledge of God must begin here, at the manger.  It's a scandal, because it means that knowledge of God is not generally open to everyone everywhere.  Knowledge of God is found in the face of Jesus Christ, as he lies in the crib and hangs on the cross.  There is no other way in.  Knowledge of God means knowledge of this particular history.  No other.

The implication is that God is a factor in our world.  The true God is not some sort of spiritual substrate, not a universal presence per se.  The God who exists is God-with-us, God in the particular history of Jesus Christ and therefore God in the particular history of my life and yours.  Living in the presence of God means living this particular life.  No other.,

But then there is also the fact that this particularity excludes other particularities.  A generic or universal god might be compatible with everything and anything, but this particular God excludes.  He is born in Bethlehem, and not elsewhere; the King of the Jews and not a generic monarch.  That means he excludes Augustus, and Herod.  His particular 'yes' is also a particular 'no'.  It means that justification before God means unity with this particular Saviour.  No other.

Advent makes Christmas

This comes with the usual qualifiers: you don't have to celebrate Christmas, and you don't have to observe Advent.  For various reasons, I think both are useful things to do.  But I'm happy that I can observe the season to the Lord, and you can abstain from observing to the Lord, and all will be well.  What I'm really talking about here is the concepts, or the realities, represented by Christmas and Advent - though I confess I don't know of any better way to keep them in the mind than the liturgical observances.  Anyway...

The Christmas story is constantly exposed to two great dangers.  On the one hand, there is the danger that it might be reduced to mere myth.  For those of us raised in Western culture, even in its post-Christian guise, the story is extremely familiar, and we were mostly exposed to it as children.  Thanks to the phenomenon of the nativity play, or the school carol service, the Christmas story has taken on a childish feel; all little donkey and no crying he makes.  Throw in some fantastical elements - angelic choirs, virgin birth - and you've got a myth.  A story of enduring significance, of deep meaning, perhaps even in a sense of great truth - but ultimately not challenging.  Not challenging because myths arise out of human experience, and can at the end of the day very easily be cashed out as something very human.  The Christmas myth tells us that, in a way, God dwells with all of us; the Christmas myth expresses the hope of universal brotherhood and peace on earth.  Annually we tell ourselves the story to remind ourselves of these deep realities.  We can live with the myth, even be enriched by it.

On the other hand, there is the danger that the Christmas story might become for us mere history.  This is more of a danger for those of us who take the biblical accounts seriously, who claim in some sense to 'believe' the Christmas story.  In a culture which largely reads the Christmas story through the lens of myth, we feel the need to stand up and say 'no, this really happened'.  There was an actual baby, real shepherds, wise men (not kings, it doesn't say they were kings!) with tangible gifts.  At the end of the day, I think this approach also strips the Christmas story of its challenge.  The birth of Jesus becomes simply one thing - albeit a fairly remarkable thing - alongside all the other things whic have happened.  We mark it every year by asserting its historicity, quibbling over any legendary elements that might have crept in over the long years of re-telling, establishing the core of 'what really happened'.  But it's still just a thing that happened, in the past.  Past occurrences don't confront or challenge me.  Of course events in history may have shaped the present world, but they are themselves trapped, back there and then.  We can live in the knowledge of this history, perhaps informed and enlightened by it.

The emphasis of the Advent season is not, despite popular perception, on counting down to Christmas.  It's actually about waiting for something more significant than an annual celebration: it's about waiting for Jesus.  Advent reminds us that he is coming, and that the one who is coming is the one who previously came.  It puts us in an eschatological frame of mind.  That is to say, we're thinking about ultimate things, the end, the final judgement, the redemption and restoration of creation.  And it turns out that is the best frame of mind to approach Christmas, because according to the New Testament the incarnation of the Word of God is not merely myth - a universal truth of humanity - or merely history - an important event in the series of world events; rather, the Christmas story is the story of the end of the ages.  It is a genuinely new thing, the first really new thing there has been since the creation of the world, not contingent on anything that has gone before, not arising out of the human condition or out of human history.  It is eschatology through and through.

And that is challenging, because it means that Christmas calls us, as we consider the baby who came, to also look to the horizon and see the King who is coming.  It tells us that the world is changed, whether we can see it or not, and that we are called to live in the tension of the salvation that is fully accomplished but not universally seen, the now and the not yet.  It confronts us with the fact that the child in the manger is our contemporary, that he is now on the throne of the universe.  He is not merely a factor in our being as human, or a factor in our history as a race, but he is the factor in our present being, the One who determines who we are and what our world is about.  He is the Lord.

The Story

We are about to tell the story again.  You know, the story of The Girl Who Met an Angel.  The tale of The Shepherds and the Sky-full of Song.  The Little Donkey Story.  The Princely Presents.

Every year we tell the story.  For most of us, whether consciously or not, this story has been a big part of our story.  For some of us it is at the heart of our story; it would be one of the first stories we told to explain who we are.  For others it is background, barely noticed cultural wallpaper, a childhood memory.  But the story is still there.

Some of us will fret over the story telling.  For some the telling itself is a problem: the spreading of a dangerous myth.  Others will ask the truth question: how much of this story is real?  Could we draw a line on a map from where we are now to the place this story happened?  Can we count the years since the angels sang?  Is it a true story?  For others that question is answered, one way or another.  For some of those the story has become a collection of facts, something to get right at all costs (it doesn't actually say anything about a stable, you know...)  For some, the lack of truth makes the story safe, something that happened in fairyland, a children's tale that doesn't touch us.

One way or another, we all ask how to fit this story into our stories (or how to keep it out).

But what if this story really is The Story?  What if it doesn't want to be fitted into our stories?  What if we are just supporting characters in The Story That Contains All The Stories?

What if the song the angels sang in the sky above Bethlehem was the exact same song they sang when the first stars twinkled into existence - just another verse?  What if they are still singing that song now, and will sing it when the Bethlehem-Baby comes as Judge of All?  What if The Story stretched from the past when there was only the Three, and into the future when the One will be all in all?  What if The Story reaches highest heaven and deepest hell, and the manger is the centre of it all?

We are about to tell The Story again.

Incomprehensible

Just a last quick Christmas thought before the decorations come down tonight.

I don't think we understand the incarnation.  To put it more strongly, I don't think we can understand the incarnation.  Think about what we say: we say that God became a man, took on flesh, clothed himself in our nature.  I think it's quite possible to understand some or all of these words and concepts - but is it really possible to grasp what they actually indicate?  Can we really have any understanding of what it means to say that God becomes a human being?

It's interesting to read the history of christological controversy in the early church as an attempt to understand this - and it is interesting that orthodoxy, as far as I can tell, always comes down on the incomprehensible side.  The heretics are trying, as a rule, to simplify things, or at least to bring them within the realm of things we might be able to grasp.  What is Arianism, after all, but an attempt to make the incarnation a bit less incomprehensible?  Arius does it by making the incarnate actually something less than God, and in so doing seems to avoid the apparent category mistake of the orthodox, who insist that it is actually God, the invisible God, who appears in the human nature of Christ.

Or the various disputes about the natures and will of Christ.  The monophysites want to make Christ a mix of divine and human (actually, whether they wanted to do this is debatable; certainly their theological descendants would repudiate this project.  But that is the tendency which the orthodox thought they saw in monophysite thought).  Although that is still pretty hard to understand, it does at least mitigate the harshness of saying that Christ is at once infinite and finite, invisible and visible, God and man.  A blend is easier to comprehend, but it is heretical.  On a less ontological and more psychological point, the monothelite want to give Christ but one will, the divine will standing in for the human.  Simpler, sort of makes sense.  But the orthodox insist that Christ has two wills, divine and human - even though this makes it more or less impossible for us to imagine or comprehend his inner life.

The point is that we don't understand, and that has to be okay.  If we understood, it wouldn't be God-in-the-flesh.  Our concepts can do nothing more than point us to the reality, which is Christ; that's why in Christian theology the story is prior to the concepts, which can only serve it.

Heidelberg Christmas

Q. What does it mean that he “was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary”?

A. That the eternal Son of God,
who is and remains
true and eternal God,

took to himself,
through the working of the Holy Spirit,
from the flesh and blood of the virgin Mary,
a truly human nature

so that he might also become David’s true descendant,
like his brothers and sisters in every way
except for sin.

Q. How does the holy conception and birth of Christ benefit you?

A. He is our mediator
and, in God’s sight,
he covers with his innocence and perfect holiness
my sinfulness in which I was conceived.

(Heidelberg Catechism questions 35 and 36)

Incarnational science

Karl Barth spends a few pages at the very beginning of his Church Dogmatics insisting that theology has a right to consider itself to be a science.  Of course he does not mean an experimental science, which is more or less the only definition of science that we have in English.  Nor does he intend that theology should be forced to conform to the norms and methodologies of a general 'science', whatever those might look like.  Theology must do its own thing, but it is (or can be) none the less scientific.

I would suggest that there is one key reason why we should consider theology a science, and that is that it has a definite object.  Theology is not speculative - or at least, in so far as it is speculative, it is bad theology.  Theology is the investigation of a particular object, namely God.  As a discipline, it is bound to this object.  It examines and describes, but it does not invent.

Now God is never merely the object of our investigations; God is never merely an object at all.  Like any other person, God is also subject.  Indeed, as divine Person, God is always subject, and always sovereign subject, in all of his interactions with anything outside himself.  But he gives himself as an object.  He allows himself to be investigated.  He makes himself available as the source and object of theological science.  He does not give himself away - he is very capable, for example, of recalling the errant theologian back to his truth.  He remains the sovereign subject.  But he is also there, there for us to see and investigate and learn.

To put it in theological terms, God in the incarnation has come to us.  Because he was here, as a human being amongst human beings, there is a definite historical referent behind our theological talk.  We cannot just say anything about God, as if he were a mysterious noumena, without shape or form or limit.  God gives himself as object in this particular person at this particular time.  Therefore, he can be known; therefore, there is theology.  Because of Jesus, theology is a science.

The theological method will be decided by its object.  Because its object is God as he gives himself to us in Jesus, its method must be the study and exposition of the witness to Jesus contained in Holy Scripture.  Because its object is the God who establishes the church as his community of witness, its method must be community based.  Because its object is the the God who is also always subject, its method must be driven by prayer and worship.

But it is not speculative or open-ended.

Because of Christmas, theology has definite content, just as the manger of Bethlehem had definite content.

New

"I will create new heavens and a new earth", God says.  But how will he do it?  What will it look like?  And is that even good news?  After all, we're pretty attached to the old earth.  We're made out of it.  Will there be space for us in this new heavens and new earth?  Will everything that we love be swept away to make room for it?

How does God make everything new?

For starters, he doesn't wipe out the old.  Quite the contrary.  He comes to visit it, pitches his tent here, takes on flesh, takes to himself that very old dirt and calls it his own in a new way.  In the womb of the virgin, a new life begins, which is in some senses just the same old life.  Still dust, still fragile, still surrounded by sin and destined for suffering.

But new.  This new life is God's life, God's life united to ours.  This is where the new heavens and the new earth appear: in the womb of Mary, in the manger of Bethlehem.  Behold!  God is doing a new thing!  Here it is.  Here he is.  Tiny now, but here is all of heaven and earth.  Here, everything old is made new.

And he who was seated on the throne said "Behold, I am making all things new".

In the darkness

"Christmas is about light shining in the darkness; the light still shines and we still acknowledge that." - Gregor Duncan, Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway.

It is so very, very dark out there.  Just as dark as it was back then, before the child and the manger, before the virgin and the angel.  Darkness.  Disaster, unforeseen and inexplicable.  Human evil, human suffering, the groaning of creation.

When will the little light, kindled in the stable at Bethlehem, be spread through the whole earth?  When will it drive away the darkness?  When will the shadows retreat before its brilliance?

Joyous light of glory of the immortal Father,
Heavenly, holy, blessed Jesus Christ...

What is all our celebration but to turn our backs for one day on the darkness and huddle around the flickering light...  And to believe?

To believe in the one day, the not yet, the light of the New Jerusalem which never dies - no sun, no moon, no night; the glory of God and the Lamb...

Yet in thy dark streets shineth...

Yes, the everlasting light is shining, still shining.  If we only had eyes to see...

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Christmas Paradoxes

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;

Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.

In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed

The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Christina Rosetti

Our God is so great that it doesn't belittle him to become a tiny baby.

Our God is so powerful that it doesn't weaken him to be totally dependent on a mother.

Our God is so holy and separate from sinners that it doesn't defile him to take on our nature.

Our God is so utterly free and unrestrained that it does not frustrate him to lie helpless in a manger.

Our God is so sovereign over time that it does not test his patience to learn how to talk and walk.

Our God is so glorious that it does not diminish him to be unknown and tucked away in  a stable.

Our God is so transcendent that it takes nothing from him fully to enter in to humanity.

Our God is Jesus Christ, and no other.

The Christmas Spirit

And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God."

Christmas is about the Incarnation of the Son of God, the breaking in to human history of Immanuel - God with us as one of us.  Christmas is the basis of all our knowledge of God.  I think that without it I would be an atheist, or at least agnostic.  If God had not shown himself to us, in real space and time and history, I'm not sure I would have spotted the signs of his presence throughout creation.

But Christmas is also about the Holy Spirit, and his own pre-eminent work.  Throughout Scripture, the Holy Spirit is portrayed as that person of the Godhead who is working within the creation, sustaining it and renewing it.  And here he is sanctifying one part of genuine created reality for the greatest purpose of all: the coming in of God himself, not only to be near humanity but to be a human being.  As Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit, so he will be empowered throughout his life by the Spirit, and will eventually offer himself through the same Spirit to the Father, suffering and dying, before being raised again by the power of that same Holy Spirit.

There is a sort of vague 'spirit of Christmas' which is abroad, a generic festivity and merriment.  But the true Spirit of Christmas is very specific, very personal.  He is the Spirit of Jesus, the man who is God.  And that should mean more merriment, deeper festivity, real celebration.