Respectful disagreement is possible, even about religion. Christmas is why I believe this to be true and Christmas is why I am not an atheist, pagan, or Muslim. As I sit and listen to the Messiah near the celebration of Christmas, I am persuaded that atheism is empty, paganism has insufficient gods, and Islam is unjust to God.
Atheism is (by nature) godless. This would be good if there were not a God, but God exists and Christmas was the historic demonstration of the fact. There is more intellectual power in a Christmas children’s pageant at your local church, than in all of the red-hot rhetoric of Internet atheism.
Christmas is the birth of the man Jesus and accounting for His wonderful life is such a strain that some atheists have decided He must be a myth! This is ludicrous, but a testament to His birth, life, death, and resurrection. He came so marvelously that story captivates even the a mind that wishes to reject Him. He is a story greater than myth, bigger than any epic, and every story foreshadowed the Gospel, retells it, or twists it. Atheism can deliver facts in Gradgrind mountains, but it does not know and can never know what should be as opposed to what is.
Christmas is the should be of history.
Paganism is god soaked in traditional forms. When the Church calculated the date of Jesus’ birth and held a party, pagan emperors got jealous and tried to appropriate the fun. Of course, anybody can have a party, and fun can be had, but a mead soaked banquet to celebrate the solstice just isn’t the same as the festival that could inspire Handel, move Rembrandt, and hallow a cave. Paganism can get the music right, but it cannot properly get the words. It hears God’s voice in nature, but misses the message Jesus came to give us. There is mystery in the cosmos, and paganism grasps this mystery (especially in the High Paganism of the Platonists), but the clarity of this mathematical universe is lost. The Word became flesh and in becoming flesh, we saw Him. This did not destroy the Mystery, because personhood always remains unfathomable, but it did show us God’s grace and Truth.
Christmas is the Holy Mystery with a divine clarity!
Islam rejects the Trinity: God in Three Persons. This seems easier, and so it is, too easy. One reason to know God exists is the profound love of something great which Plato understood pointed to something or someone. This love once it is felt cannot be satisfied with material things, mere ideas, or even gods. We long as human beings for a great Love and this poverty points to God.
This much my Islamic neighbors understand. They rightly long to submit to the will of God and who would not wish to submit to an All Good, All Merciful, All Knowing Being? Christmas reveals that God came and loved us and only this view of God is adequate to the love we feel for Him. Islam is right: God speaks through His prophets and we bless Him for them. Islam is wrong: God did not stay far off, but came and lived amongst us, became one of us, knows our pleasures and pains intimately.
This incarnation, taking on human nature fully, does not make God less, but it makes humanity more, giving us a way of loving God. The great God of the philosophers, God in His essence, is mysterious and nothing can truly be said of Him. He is totally Other, but God planted love for Himself in us (what better Being to love that Love Himself!) and so made a way for us to know God through the person of Jesus Christ. Islam keeps God utterly unknowable and this is a greater tragedy than any that can be conceived. We love God and yet He stays far away.
Christmas is the chance to know God and love Him.
Some day Jesus will come again. We will see Him and know Him. We can never know God in His full essence, but we will have eternity to explore more and more of God as Jesus reveals Himself to us. Christmas will never end and we know and love God in a jollification that will never grow tedious, because He will always have more to reveal.
Christmas is a foretaste of Paradise.
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