The Philosophy That Opposes Birth and Being Born

Last updated on: January 17, 2018 at 4:00 pm By Gene Veith

In researching policies that are “antinatalist”–that is, “anti-birth,” discouraging having children–I found that there is actually a philosophy known as Antinatalism, which teaches that procreation is immoral and that it is better never to have been born.

This school of thought, held by a number of prominent philosophers, makes the following argument: (1) It is immoral to cause suffering. (2) In human life, suffering is inevitable. (3) Therefore, creating human life is immoral.

A corollary is that since suffering makes something evil, a life that contains suffering is also evil. Since all life includes suffering, life itself is evil. Conversely, it would be good not to live. The best condition would be never to have been born.

This philosophy looms behind arguments for abortion (though at least one antinatalist philosopher is pro-life), euthanasia, and the view that “We don’t want to have a child because of the way the world is today.” You can also hear it from some environmentalists and advocates of population control. Individuals who are suicidal think this way. You can hear this mindset in the despair of those who believe that their lives have no meaning and therefore no value.

But are the arguments of antinatalism valid? Is the philosophy that it is immoral to give birth and that it is better never to have been born true?

The article linked above notes the parallels between the antinatalist arguments and the theodicy arguments against the existence of God. Just as a good God would not create a world that contains suffering, a good human being would not create a new life that would experience suffering.

But the “problem of suffering” in theodicy is an argument against the existence of God, not an argument that creation should not exist! Antinatalism says that human beings should not be parents, that the person they would bring into being would suffer and therefore ought not to exist. The antinatalist would have to say that God should not have created anything.

This tangled thinking does show a weakness in the theodicy argument against God’s existence. Parents do exist. Good, loving parents exist. That their children will experience suffering of some kind does not invalidate the parents’ existence, nor their goodness and their love for their children. Similarly, the suffering that can be found in creation does not invalidate God’s existence, nor His goodness and His love.

The first premise of the antinatalist is not valid: Morality and suffering are not always incompatible. The fact of suffering certainly cannot disprove the existence of God. At most it could question the goodness of God, but only if goodness is defined in that circular way of never allowing suffering.

Christianity teaches that God is good nevertheless, that suffering is part of the world’s fallen condition that the incarnate God took upon Himself on the Cross where He bore both the world’s iniquities and its griefs (Isaiah 53:4-5). Morality has to do not with the absence of suffering, but with battling it. God does this in His work of redemption, and He calls Christians in their vocations to alleviate the suffering of their neighbors. Furthermore, God in His providential workings makes all things work for good and will eventually wipe away our tears in a new order of existence.

To believe that requires faith, of course, but in any event the problem of suffering is not, as the antinatalists would have it, an indictment of either existence or the act of creation.

But does the fact of suffering make life not worth living?

There are many kinds of suffering that our flesh is heir to: toothaches, cancer, heartbreak, loneliness, rejection, the death of a loved one, and on and on. But life also includes kinds of pleasure: sunsets, good food, sex, friendship, discovery, beauty, loving, being loved.

How can a moment of suffering invalidate a moment of pleasure? Cannot we just as easily say that the moment of pleasure invalidates the moment of suffering? How can these be quantified and balanced against each other?

Certainly, some people suffer horribly. Their lives are so painful that the pleasures they have experienced are overwhelmed by the pain. But isn’t the problem their suffering, not their lives, as such?

One of the worst kinds of suffering is the death of a loved one. What if a doctor were able to take away that pain by giving you a drug that would erase the memory of that loved one from your mind, thus making the suffering go away? Would you take that drug? Isn’t your suffering at the loss part of your love for that person? Isn’t the love worth the pain? Certainly the suffering that you feel now would not invalidate your love, render it meaningless, or make you wish that you had never felt it.

Nor would such suffering be reason to blame your parents for giving birth to you. Nor would such suffering prove that it would have been better not to exist at all. In fact, if it is better never to have been born, then death is better than life. If this is true, why are you mourning the death of your loved one? Why does the fact, the prospect, and the process of death make you suffer, if not living is so much better than being alive?

The philosophical basis of antinatalism is thus exceedingly weak.

And yet, the Bible speaks of cases in which it really would have been better not to have been born and predicts the antinatalist mindset. Jesus says this of Judas: “The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born” (Matthew 26:24).

And after this betrayal, as He was led to Golgotha, Jesus turned to the mourning women and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’” (Luke 23:28-29).

The repudiation of one’s life is an aspect of God’s judgment. The repudiation of childbirth is a sign of the last days.

Illustration by rebeccadevitt0 via Pixabay, Creative Commons License

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The Postmodern Exposé

Last updated on: January 6, 2018 at 3:17 pm By Gene Veith

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Michael Wolff, the author of the inflammatory exposé of President Trump’s administration, says that everything in the book might not be actually, you know, literally true.

Here is what he says in the Author’s Note to Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, p. 10:

“Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.

“Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”

Wolff is, in other words, a postmodernist writer, a “new journalist” of the sort that erases the boundary between fiction and reality. Since objective truth is unknowable, so they believe, all we have are subjective perspectives on the truth.

An author, whether of fiction or non-fiction, creates a narrative that is an imaginative construction, addressing the imagination of the readers, who reconstruct that narrative in their own imaginations. The journalist, historian, or other non-fiction author can still claim to approximate objective reality, by putting together other people’s subjective perspectives and by assembling isolated facts into a pattern, but their work too remains a “construction.”

Note that postmodernists do claim to believe in empirical “facts,” even as they deny that these are sufficient to establish larger “truths.” Wolff claims to have recordings of the interviews that were the basis of his book. I think what he is saying is that what they told him might not be true. He has no way of telling, but he published their accounts anyway.

Now this should undermine our confidence in his book. It turns out that Wolff has a reputation for inaccuracy. In fact, even liberal journalists consider him “a shoddy and dishonest journalist.”

So let’s assume that everything in Fire and Fury is a lie. It’s all fake news, fantasy, made up. Some questions remain:

(1) Who let this guy into the White House?  I wouldn’t let an outside reporter into a faculty meeting, church council, or family dinner. Let alone the inner councils of our government! You need a certain element of privacy in order to conduct business, hold frank conversations, and build an atmosphere of mutual trust.

This would be true even of a legitimate, respected, unbiased reporter. So who would give a visitor’s pass that opens up the West Wing for 18 months (!!!) to a writer with the reputation of being a “shoddy and dishonest journalist”?

(2) Who would say these things to a reporter?  If you don’t like your boss, you can think whatever you want in the privacy of your mind, or you can vent to your spouse and your most intimate friends whom you trust not to say anything. But who would vent to a reporter who is going to publish what you say? That is unprofessional, non-vocational, and stupid to the highest extreme!

We are assuming, though, that these accounts are all lies. So who would make up lies to a reporter? That goes beyond what we just said was the highest extreme!

And who would say these things, true or not, under your own name, to a reporter who has that “shoddy and dishonest” reputation? Shouldn’t you have checked who this guy is? Why would you put your career in the hands of someone who is likely to distort what you say?

Wolff is chronicling what he considers the ineptness, infighting, and chaotic dysfunction of President Trump’s White House. Even if everything he records is fake news, at least one aspect is self-authenticating. The White House staff demonstrates its ineptness, infighting, and chaotic dysfunction just by giving Wolff access and talking to him!

The most serious charges in the book are its portrayal of President Trump as incompetent, mentally unstable, and morally depraved. We can’t believe those accusations on the basis of Wolff’s “constructions.”

But what if a staff member really came to believe that the boss was this bad? Doesn’t that justify telling a reporter? I think the right thing to do if you could no longer, in good conscience, serve your employer would be to resign. From outside the administration, you could, perhaps, work against it. You might write your own inside-the-administration book, but even then you should not betray confidences or violate professional ethics.

Let’s be fair. The presidency may be one of the most difficult and complicated jobs there is. Donald Trump had no experience in government at any level.  Of course it is going to take him awhile to figure out what he is doing.

And his staff was mostly inexperienced. Apparently, in dealing with journalists, they did not know the magic words: “off the record.” Wolff took full advantage of this naiveté.

But the infighting was so vicious–as confirmed by other accounts–that individuals were obsessed with scoring points against each other and maybe lying about each other. Such malice seems to have descended into betrayal, not only of their colleagues but of their president.

Which brings us to another question:

(3) Who would hire and preside over a staff like this?  In days of yore, under monarchies, it was said that when things went bad, no one ever blamed the king. You blamed his advisors. Those of us who have supported President Trump would still like to think that way.

But even if we dismiss everything said in the book as the lying rants of disaffected “advisors” spilling their guts to a dishonest reporter, we have to be concerned about the president’s leadership, ability to inspire loyalty in his own people, and his obliviousness in letting this book happen.

OR, we could play the postmodernism game ourselves and construct our own explanatory paradigm, creating a narrative according to which everything in the Trump administration is going just fine.

Photo of Michael Wolff by Eirik Solheim from Oslo, Norway (IMG_0196) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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The Day Even Non-Believers Honor Jesus Despite Themselves

Last updated on: December 25, 2017 at 9:25 am By Gene Veith

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It’s Christmas, hailed in at least one secular song as “the most wonderful time of the year!” This is a Christian holiday. But why do so many non-Christians celebrate it?

Nine out of ten Americans celebrate Christmas. (And the 10% who don’t includes strict Christians who reject the holidays in the liturgical calendar on principle.)

Around three-quarters of Hindus and Buddhists in America celebrate Christmas, as do a third of Jews and a significant but undetermined number of Muslims. Even 87% of atheists, agnostics, and other “nones” celebrate Christmas!

Today 55% of Americans say they consider Christmas as a religious holiday, with the rest considering it only a “cultural” holiday.

Many observers conclude that the Christian meaning of Christmas is declining, so that December 25 is or is fast becoming a purely secular holiday.

But is that possible?

“Christmas” comes from the two words “Christ,” whose birth the day commemorates, and “mass,” a worship service. The very word “Christmas” testifies to Christ and the day’s Christian meaning.

Some secularists recognize this and so draw back from the Name. They don’t say or want to hear “Christmas,” so they substitute some version of “holiday.” But that word means “holy day.” So why is the day “holy”?

I realize that the original meaning of words does not necessarily constrain contemporary usage. But the actual meaning of Christmas–the birth of Christ the Savior–continues to inform the other meanings that people assign to it.

“Christmas is about family,” some say, but that sense points back to birth, which defines family, to Mary, Joseph, and the Baby Jesus.

“Christmas is about good will and kindness to our fellow human beings,” some say. But all of those feelings of benevolence, the philanthropy and generosity associated with the season are remnants of the Christian ethic. The Christmas Angel proclaimed that the birth of the Savior heralds, in the words of the culture-shaping King James Version, “on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:14). And the warm feelings Christmas still inspires even among secularists is a cultural memory of what the love inspired by Christ feels like.

Furthermore, the decorations and customs that even secularists and other non-Christians employ to celebrate their “winter holiday” are Christian symbols. Lights symbolize the Light of the World (John 1:1-9; 8:12). Evergreen trees symbolize everlasting life. Holly gives us the Christmas colors of green and red, reminders of Jesus’s crown of thorns, with its drops of blood, flowering into life.

Santa Claus is a shell of St. Nicholas, who championed the Incarnation at the Council of Nicaea. December 25 is immediately after the solstice, so that days start to lengthen and light starts to conquer the darkness (John 1:5). Christmas dinner is a carry over of the “feasts” that marked the liturgical calendar, in this case the celebration with food that followed the fast of Advent.

As for gifts. . . .Receiving gifts expresses the heart of the Christian message. Christ is a gift. Salvation is a gift. In worship, we receive God’s gifts. In our “secular” lives, we receive God’s gifts. Our daily bread, our families, our abilities, our friends, our communities, our belongings, all of what even non-Christians sometimes refer to as their “blessings” are gifts from God’s hand. That we have a God who gives gifts means that Christians worship a God of grace, who bestows unmerited favor, and who went so far as to give us Himself by coming down from Heaven, to be born in a manger, and to give His life for us.

If receiving gifts is emblematic of receiving God’s grace, giving gifts is emblematic of the Christian life, as we become, in Luther’s words, “little Christs” to each other, by loving our neighbors with grace of our own and serving our neighbors by giving them the gifts of our vocations.

What has happened, I think, in the “secularization of Christmas” is that people, having turned away from Christianity, continue to follow its outward forms. It’s like someone who goes to church and goes through the motions of worship, while oblivious to everything that it means. They retain the externals, but they have lost the meaning.

And yet they are honoring Christ even though they are doing so unwittingly and against their intention.

I think of this Christmas text from the Apostle Paul:

⁵Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, ⁶who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,⁷but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. ⁸And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. ⁹Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2: 5-11)

I have heard it said that when Jesus comes again and the dead are raised, both the save and the lost will fulfill this Scripture, whether in victory or in defeat.

But already, in observance of His first coming, every knee is bowing to “the name of Jesus,” if not to His person, and every tongue is confessing that Jesus is Lord, even if their hearts are far from Him.

Secularists love the beautiful presents under their trees, but all they know is the external wrapping. We Christians should encourage them to open all of their gifts.

Illustration by QuinceMedia via Pixabay, CC0, Creative Commons

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My New “Publications” Page & an Interview with the Author

Last updated on: December 17, 2017 at 5:13 pm By Gene Veith

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A week or so ago, I noticed that several hundred readers had accessed the Publications tab on this blog. Going there myself, I found that all of the Amazon icons and links I had set up were broken, due to software changes over the years. “All of those Christmas shoppers were disappointed!” I lamented to Patheos. So the folks at Patheos rebuilt the whole page, including not only links and book covers but Amazon’s editorial descriptions!

So thanks, Patheos! The list includes 26 titles, including books I co-wrote with others and books I edited.

It doesn’t include books for which I was “general editor”–Amazon lists some titles under my name that were part of the “Focal Point” series for Crossway that I headed, but I had little to do with those other than recommending them and working with the authors. This list only includes edited works for which I made significant contributions. Nor does it include books that I wrote an introduction for, or journals that included an article of mine, though you can find these under my name on Amazon. Or books published under different editions and sometimes with different titles.

Still, 26 books is quite a few. I’d wager that no one owns all of them. I don’t think my mother has them all! I’m not sure that I have them all!

Looking over all of them made for a good retrospective of my career, something I’ve been doing a lot of now that I am retired–from teaching and administrating, though I’m still writing.

To mark my newly launched page Publications – Cranach and to give you some background to make sense of the list, I will conduct an interview with myself:

You have written books about a vast range of topics–from landscape painting to country music, postmodernism to 17th century poetry, technology to theology? What’s with that? Aren’t you supposed to specialize in something?

My first book was a revision of my dissertation, the book on Reformation spirituality and the poetry of George Herbert. My academic specialty became Christianity and literature. From that I branched out just a little to Christianity and the arts. Then Christianity and culture, which can cover just about everything. Then theologies of culture, which led to my writing on vocation. Then explaining theology to culture and vice versa. So for all of the variety in my writing, it actually does hang together, sort of, under the rubric of Christianity and culture.

Which is your favorite?

Probably Spirituality of the Cross. It seems to have had the most profound impact on readers, including leading some of them to Christianity. My books on vocation have also been helpful to people and were fun to write, especially Family Vocation written with my daughter. I have a special place in my affections for Reformation Spirituality: The Religion of George Herbert. That set up my academic calling as a teacher of literature. The research that went into that book, during graduate school, eventually led me to Lutheranism.

Which books have been the top sellers?

Spirituality of the Cross, Postmodern Times, and God at Work.

Which are your most important books?

Well, Spirituality of the Cross has had some eternal consequences, so I’ve heard.

Modern Fascism is extremely important in explaining a deadly ideology that is coming back but that few people understand. National Socialism and Fascism are not conservative movements at all. They are best understood as attempts to liquidate the “Jewish” element in Western culture, by which they mean the influence of the Bible!

I also had the opportunity to introduce different topics that would eventually attract a lot of attention. My Postmodern Times was among the first books to offer a Christian critique of that mindset. (And it still holds up, though it needs an update. Someone asked me how I predicted the rise of “terrorism” as the form that postmodern war would take. I had forgotten that I said that back in 1994.) The book I wrote with Chris Stamper, Christianity in a .Com World was one of the first Christian treatments of the new technological culture that was emerging.

And my books on vocation–God at Work, Family Vocation, and Working for Your Neighbor— have helped to bring back an extremely important Christian teaching, one that now is receiving much more attention from writers, think tanks, pastors, and laypeople.

What’s Sword of Rob Roy? A novel? A children’s book?

It’s a primer! I was asked by a publisher putting together a reading curriculum to contribute one of the books. My book had to teach short vowels, R’s, B’s, the diphthong “oy,” and I forget what else. There was also a word list from earlier books that I was supposed to include as a review. I think “sword” was one of them.

Remembering the boring primers of my childhood–“See the dog run. Oh, oh!”–I resolved to try to make the story as exciting as possible. And thinking of the oft-ignored interests of little boys, I worked in as much violence as I could. I went back in history and told the story of Rob Roy, whose name had the requisite letters.

Writing with so many restrictions was actually very challenging and fulfilling, as with a poet working with an ultra-strict form such as the sonnet or haiku.

Some of these titles are kind of obscure.

When you first get started in the writing game, you struggle to find a publisher, collecting rejection slips and coming close to giving up. But once you get published, it gets progressively easier. To the point that eventually, publishers ask you to write a book for them.

Some of these books, such as Why God Gave Us a Book and A Place to Stand, are projects that I was asked to write for a series. Honky Tonk Gospel grew out of an article I wrote for World Magazine that Baker Books asked me to expand into a book. (Which I did by collaborating with a colleague who knows more about the subject than anyone I know, Tom Wilmeth.)

You have the Concordia on your publications page. Are you saying you wrote the Book of Concord?

No! Concordia Publishing House, realizing that despite its name it didn’t publish the Concordia, resolved to put out a contemporary-language version of the classic Concordia Triglotta, which gives the Lutheran confessions in the original Latin, the original German, and old-fashioned English.

I was assigned Luther’s Smalcald Articles and Melanchthon’s Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope. I studied the Latin and the German to the best of my ability, and then worked on the English–shortening the sentences, updating the language, and clarifying the obscurities. I also tried to convey something of the style of these two great theologians–Luther’s passionate personal voice and Melanchthon’s intellectualism.

Enough for now.

Yes. I had better not get into the habit of talking to myself.

Photo from Pexels.com, CC0, Creative Commons

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Is This Still Christianity?

Last updated on: December 11, 2017 at 8:55 am By Gene Veith

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There is Christianity. There is liberal Christianity, which stretches the term considerably. There is heretical Christianity, which is outside the pale but at least claims to still be Christian. At what point, though, does a religious expression cease to be Christian altogether? Consider the “Transgender Day of Remembrance” Communion service at the ELCA’s Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, on November 15.

You can watch the service here, on YouTube. If you don’t want to watch all 59 minutes, I’ll give you just a few highlights.

Instead of beginning “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” two of those terms being construed as sexist, the invocation in this service is “in the name of Creator, Christ, and the Holy Breath.”

There is a confession of sins, but it expresses our failure to be wild and free. The absolution tells us that all shackles are broken and that God accepts us as we are.

The service avoids male terms for God–He, Him, Father, Lord–but then goes all in for gendered language to refer to God. When it comes time to say the Lord’s Prayer, it is addressed to “Our mother who art in heaven.”

God is thereby transgendered!

We could go on, but let’s stop there.

Worship services begin with an “invocation,” which means “calling upon.” We first call upon the God we are worshiping. We then worship “in His name.”

Is “Creator, Christ, Holy Breath” the same God as “the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”? It is certainly not the same “name.”

Is a worship service “Christian” if it refuses to call upon and to name the “the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”? Or is it worshiping a different deity, one made up to better suit the worshipers’ sensibilities and therefore, by Biblical standards, idolatrous?

An increasing number of “progressive” Christians are now using invocations like this, generally addressing not a Person but functions: e.g., “In the name of the Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.”

The reason Christians speak of “the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is because Jesus tells us to baptize in this name.

Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20).

Invoking the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit at the beginning of a worship service reminds us of “the name” in which we were baptized.

Are worshipers Christians if they repudiate the name and the God into which they were baptized?

I’m told that “progressive” Christians are now baptizing “in the name of the Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.” Is that a valid baptism?

Are they following Christ if they refuse to do as He tells us to do? Rejecting “the name” of the Triune God that He reveals to us. Refusing His command to “pray like this: Our Father. . . ” (Matthew 6:9).

Aren’t they accusing Christ of sexism, patriarchy, male oppression, genderism, and other faults when they criticize and replace His language?

Isn’t the Gospel at least evident in this service of acceptance? I don’t see it. The Gospel is about the forgiveness of sins. There can be no Gospel if there are no sins to forgive. The confession follows the form of repentance and forgiveness, but its content takes a curious turn, as if being hung up on righteousness is the sin, and the new life is one of doing whatever one wants.

The service and the kind of religion it expresses are certainly Gnostic: the body doesn’t matter, what we do with our bodies doesn’t matter. The Gnostics often used Christian language and imitated Christian rituals, as here, but changed the content and the meaning.

The Gnostics retained those elements of Christianity while rejecting the Bible. They explicitly repudiated the Old Testament, condemning “the Old Testament God” of being cruel and judgmental, not to mention responsible for all our woe because He is responsible for creating the physical world and trapping our souls in physical bodies. This is recalled in the service when it blames Christians and the church for their cruelty and judgmental attitudes towards the transgendered, whose soulds have also been trapped in the wrong bodies.

As for the New Testament, the Gnostics repudiated the Gospels and the Epistles–which were often directed specifically against their teachings, for example, that Jesus did not come “in the flesh” but was merely a pure spirit–and instead they presumed to write their own Gospels and their own Epistles. Just as these neo-Gnostics presume to make up their own theological language.

There were “Christian Gnostics” who were declared heretics and cast out of the church, but there were also Pagan Gnostics, who devised their own elaborate mythologies without bothering to try to appropriate Christian and Biblical narratives.

I suppose someone could make the case that these are Gnostic heretics, rather than pagan Gnostics, though it doesn’t make too much difference. It seems to me that this service is no longer Christian at all, that it is a worship service of a different religion.

I would urge people who believe this way to just go ahead and drop all pretense of being Christian. If you really think Christianity is so oppressive, the Bible is so patriarchal, Jesus is so sexist, and the Gospel so misguided, why bother with it? Go ahead and write your own sacred texts, develop your own theologies untrammeled by Christian teachings, and start your own “worshipping communities.”

Before you do, though, please read the Bible one more time, specifically the Prophets, who warn God’s people what will happen when they forsake the God of Abraham and Isaac for deities of their own invention and when they adopt the sexual immorality, baby-killing ethos, and religious syncretism of the surrounding cultures.

Illustration, a Gnostic/Alchemical figure: “The Grand Hermetic Androgyne Trampling Underfoot the Four Elements of the Prima Materia” (1417), [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

HT: Paul McCain

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The Season of Christ “Coming to” Us

Last updated on: December 5, 2017 at 9:22 am By Gene Veith

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The season of Advent has begun! The word comes from the Latin, meaning “coming to” (from ad “to” + venire “to come”). The season is about Christ “coming to” us.

He came to us at Christmas, of course, so Advent anticipates that celebration. By reading and reflecting on the Old Testament prophecies of Christ, Christians put themselves in the point of view of the ancient Israelites, yearning through all of their troubles, for the promised coming of the Messiah.

Advent has other levels as well, all reflecting on Christ’s coming to us.

He is coming to judge the living and the dead. So Advent anticipates Christ’s second coming, when He returns, raises the dead, and establishes the new heavens and the new earth. So we too, like the Israelites, are looking ahead to that day.

We meditate on Christ’s coming to us in the past (the first Christmas) and in the future (His second coming), which we put together by looking forward to the near future celebration of Christmas in a few weeks. But we also meditate on Christ’s coming to us in the present! He comes to us through the Sacraments and through the Word.

Advent is parallel to Lent. Both are penitential seasons, times to repent of our sins and to reflect on our need for Christ.

Christmas has spilled over into Advent, with the joy of that feast giving Advent too a joyous flavor, as opposed to its traditional solemnity. If Advent is supposed to be a “preparation for Christmas,” what that means today is not fasting, self-denial, and meditating on the Bible’s prophecies. Rather, our “preparation for Christmas” means buying presents and putting up the decorations.

I am not sure that is all bad. But we can filter the excitement about Christmas coming and the logistical preparations that have become necessary through the lens of penitence.

All of the Christmas lights that are going up can be a reminder of how Christ comes to me in my darkness.

The evergreens that deck the halls can be a reminder of how Christ comes to me bringing life though I am dead in my sins.

Buying presents can be a reminder that Christ’s coming to me brings the gift of salvation, despite my sinfulness. This, in turn, can motivate me to give to others, as I love and serve my neighbors in my various vocations.

And yes, the stress and strain and frenetic activity that often accompanies our “preparations for Christmas” can also be reminders of our lost condition, which is our lot, except that Christ comes to us.

Photo of Advent Wreath by Myriams-Fotos, via Pixabay, CC0, Creative Commons

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