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<\/a><\/p>\nMerry Christmas to all my readers, every one of whom I appreciate more than I can say!\u00a0 Christmas falls on a Monday this year, which turns our customary Monday Miscellany into a Christmas Miscellany, covering the following topics:<\/p>\n
God the Baby; the world Jesus was born into; and Christianity, paganism, and the gospel.<\/p>\n
Also, on Friday and next Monday on New Year\u2019s Day, this blog will come out from behind the paywall so all can participate in our annual custom of first reviewing the predictions that readers made for 2023, and then making new predictions for 2024.<\/p>\n
God the Baby<\/strong><\/h4>\n\nGregory Seltz of the Lutheran Center for Religious Liberty<\/a> gives a remarkable quotation from the late newscaster Harry Reasoner<\/a>.\u00a0 Dr. Selz gives as his source a 2020 column from Cal Thomas<\/a>, who notes that this was an on air commentary for ABC News given on Christmas Eve, 1973, the year of Watergate, economic recession, and war in the Middle East.\nChristmas is such a unique idea that most non-Christians accept it, and I think sometimes envy it. If Christmas is the anniversary of the appearance of the Lord of the Universe in the form of a helpless baby, it\u2019s quite a day. It\u2019s a startling idea, and the theologians, who sometimes love logic more than they love God, find it uncomfortable. But if God did do it, He had a tremendous insight.<\/p>\n
People are afraid of God and standing in His very bright light. But everyone has seen babies and almost everyone likes them. So, if God wanted to be loved as well as feared, He moved correctly here. And if He wanted to know people, as well as rule them, He moved correctly, because a baby growing up learns all there is to know about people.<\/p>\n
If God wanted to be intimately a part of Man, He moved correctly. For the experience of birth and familyhood is our most intimate and precious experience.<\/p>\n
So, it comes beyond logic. It\u2019s what a bishop I used to know called a kind of divine insanity. It is either all falsehood or it is the truest thing in the world. It is the story of the great innocence of God the baby. God in the power of Man. And it is such a dramatic shot toward the heart, that if it is not true, for Christians, nothing is true.<\/p>\n
So even if you did not get your shopping all done, and you were swamped with the commercialism and frenzy, be at peace. And even if you are the deacon having to arrange the extra seating for all the Christmas Christians that you won\u2019t see until Easter, be at peace. The story stands.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all right that so many Christians are touched only once a year by this incomparable story. Because some final quiet Christmas morning, the touch will take.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Remember Harry Reasoner?\u00a0 Remember when journalists occasionally would say something like this?\u00a0 This is the 50th anniversary of that broadcast, a time when the nation and the world were also in a very dark place.\u00a0 That one phrase will haunt me for Christmases to come:\u00a0 \u201cGod the Baby.\u201d<\/p>\n
The World Jesus Was Born Into<\/h4>\n
You think times are bad now?\u00a0 That our government is corrupt?\u00a0 That our country is dysfunctional?\u00a0 That violence in the world is out of control?\u00a0 Wait until you learn what was going on when and where Jesus was born.<\/p>\n
Historian Philip Jenkins will enlighten you about this in his post\u00a0 The Year Jesus Was Born<\/a>.\u00a0 I\u2019ll get you started, then click the link for the rest:<\/p>\nScholars differ on the exact birth-date of Jesus of Nazareth, though a fair consensus holds that it was not in the year 1. Many favor a date in or around 4 BC, and for the sake of argument, let us take that as accurate. If so, the birth occurred during or near a truly dreadful time in the history of what was already a troubled and turbulent land: arguably, the story has a special new relevance in the horribly violent conditions in that region today. Although these events are familiar to scholars, they are not at all well known by non-specialists. This is unfortunate, because memories of this crisis certainly shaped memories and perceptions for decades afterwards, and conditioned attitudes during Jesus\u2019s lifetime. If we don\u2019t understand those conflicts, we are missing the prehistory of the earliest Jesus Movement. And they do provide a necessary, if unsettling, context for the Christmas story we recount at this time of year. Was this\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0what that first Christmas was like?<\/p>\n[Keep reading. . .]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nChristmas, Paganism, and the Gospel<\/h4>\n
Anthony Costello has written a fascinating post on the conflict between Christianity and Paganism\u2013how this begins with the ancient Hebrews, how this conflict is a major theme of the Old Testament, and how the coming of Christ at Christmas killed paganism and for all.<\/p>\n
Read the whole piece.\u00a0 \u00a0I\u2019ll quote a few paragraphs\u2013without the connections between them, with some being from the scholars he quotes\u2013to give you a sample.\u00a0 But, having praised it, I then want to say a few words of criticism.<\/p>\n
From Anthony Costello, The True Meaning of Christmas:\u00a0 The Death of Paganism<\/a>, at Theological Apologetics<\/em>:<\/p>\nHistorian Paul Veyne characterized the pagan gods this way:<\/p>\n
\nThe pagan gods, by contrast [to the biblical God], live their lives and are not confined to a metaphysical [transcendent] role. They are part of this world, one of three races that populate the earth: animals, which are neither immortal nor gifted with reason; humans, who are mortal but reasonable; and gods, who are immortal and reasonable. So true is it that the divine race is an animal genus that every god is either male or female.<\/p>\n
Veyne,\u00a0A History of Private\u00a0<\/em>Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium<\/i>\u00a0(208)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nMoreover, for the most part, all cultures around the world had this basic understanding of the world: that the world was enchanted with god-like beings or divine, mysterious powers. This was roughly the same for the ancient Greeks, as well as the Algonquins. The philosopher,\u00a0Charles Taylor<\/a>, described this ancient, pagan world as \u201cenchanted,<\/em>\u201d \u00a0meaning that ancient cultures experienced the natural world as imbued with \u201cspirit agents\u201d\u2013 innate, mysterious powers that had their own wills and intentions, moods and attitudes. . . .<\/p>\nIn contrast to this pagan view of nature, there were a handful of ancient communities that believed roughly the opposite of this: that there was only one God. Further, this God was separate from and transcendent to the realm of nature, i.e., from the\u00a0cosmos.<\/em> Following logically from this, this God, and only this God, was eternal and uncreated and that the world human beings inhabited was not eternal or uncreated, and, likewise, neither were its gods. The most obvious and relevant example of a community like this were the Israelites. . . .<\/p>\nThe history of Israel is the history of a persistent spiritual and physical battle between the following: between Yahweh the Creator and others of His creatures who rebelled against Him; between the belief in one, big God and belief in many, little gods; between the one, revealed religion of the Israelites and the many speculative religions of the pagans; between God\u2019s people and not-God\u2019s people; between the transcendent and the immanent; between miracles and magic; between light, love and liberty and darkness, bondage and the power of death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
When Jesus comes, He will cast out devils and defeat all the powers of darkness.\u00a0 And by His death and resurrection, he founds His church, which will convert the world from paganism.\u00a0 I like his explanation of St. Peter\u2019s confession that Jesus is \u201cthe Christ, the Son of the Living God,\u201d and how Jesus promises that \u201con this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it\u201d (Matthew 16:13-19).<\/p>\n
The word translated \u201chell\u201d is actually \u201cHades,\u201d which is the name both of a place (the realm of the dead) and a god (the god of the dead).\u00a0 \u201cJesus\u2019 point here is crystal clear: He is going to initiate something new, a new dispensation of God\u2019s grace, the next phase of the battle plan that will destroy the \u201cgates\u201d of Paganism\u2019s main headquarters: hell, the realm of the dead.\u201d\u00a0 And he reminds us that \u201cgates\u201d are for defense, not offense.\u00a0 The figure of speech isn\u2019t that hell is attacking the church.\u00a0 The church is attacking hell!\u00a0 And the walled fortress of Hades will not be able to prevent the church from casting down its gates and sacking the city.<\/p>\n
My problem with this reading is that the destruction of paganism is seen as \u201cthe true meaning of Christmas.\u201d\u00a0 That would be what St. Paul said:\u00a0 \u00a0\u201cChrist Jesus came into the world to save\u00a0sinners, of whom I am the foremost\u201d (1 Timothy 1:15).<\/p>\n
Not only did Christ Jesus come, to save sinners, but he came for St. Paul, who thought of himself as the worst<\/em> of sinners.\u00a0 And by extension, He came \u201cinto the world\u201d at Christmas for me\u00a0<\/em>and for you<\/em>.<\/p>\nLuther said that the chief words in the Sacrament are \u201cfor you.\u201d\u00a0 Similarly, Christ coming into the world for you\u00a0<\/em>makes Christmas the purest Gospel.<\/p>\nI think Christ saves us by delivering us from the power of sin, death, and the devil, so this would include paganism.\u00a0 I am sure that Costello believes this.\u00a0 I just wish he would have foregrounded the Gospel more.<\/p>\n
Those in the Reformed tradition seem especially preoccupied with the threat of paganism, including the alleged \u201cidolatry\u201d of accepting anything<\/em> physical (water, bread, wine) as a means that God uses to manifest Himself.\u00a0 And their doctrine of the Limited Atonement keeps them from an unreserved proclamation to everyone that Christ came into the world \u201cfor you.\u201d<\/p>\nBut, another definitive Biblical text about the true meaning of Christmas is the first chapter of John\u2019s Gospel:\u00a0\u00a0\u201cIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . .And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us\u201d\u00a0<\/span>(John 1:1, 14).\u00a0 And the \u201cfor you\u201d comes a few verses later, when John the Baptist proclaimed \u201cBehold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!\u201d (John 1:29).<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Illustration: \u201cAdoration Of The Shepherds<\/a>\u201d [c.1615] by Bernardo Strozzi, via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"God the Baby; the world Jesus was born into; and Christianity, paganism, and the gospel. [Also, on Friday we’ll have a free post checking reader predictions for 2023. And on Monday, New Year’s Day, we’ll have a free post for readers to make their predictions for 2024.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":71150,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,20,21,39,47],"tags":[4342,14207,464,1076,1657],"class_list":["post-71015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bible","category-christ","category-history","category-holidays","category-religions","category-theology","tag-christ","tag-christianity-and-the-gospel","tag-christmas","tag-incarnation","tag-paganism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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Christmas is such a unique idea that most non-Christians accept it, and I think sometimes envy it. If Christmas is the anniversary of the appearance of the Lord of the Universe in the form of a helpless baby, it\u2019s quite a day. It\u2019s a startling idea, and the theologians, who sometimes love logic more than they love God, find it uncomfortable. But if God did do it, He had a tremendous insight.<\/p>\n
People are afraid of God and standing in His very bright light. But everyone has seen babies and almost everyone likes them. So, if God wanted to be loved as well as feared, He moved correctly here. And if He wanted to know people, as well as rule them, He moved correctly, because a baby growing up learns all there is to know about people.<\/p>\n
If God wanted to be intimately a part of Man, He moved correctly. For the experience of birth and familyhood is our most intimate and precious experience.<\/p>\n
So, it comes beyond logic. It\u2019s what a bishop I used to know called a kind of divine insanity. It is either all falsehood or it is the truest thing in the world. It is the story of the great innocence of God the baby. God in the power of Man. And it is such a dramatic shot toward the heart, that if it is not true, for Christians, nothing is true.<\/p>\n
So even if you did not get your shopping all done, and you were swamped with the commercialism and frenzy, be at peace. And even if you are the deacon having to arrange the extra seating for all the Christmas Christians that you won\u2019t see until Easter, be at peace. The story stands.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all right that so many Christians are touched only once a year by this incomparable story. Because some final quiet Christmas morning, the touch will take.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Remember Harry Reasoner?\u00a0 Remember when journalists occasionally would say something like this?\u00a0 This is the 50th anniversary of that broadcast, a time when the nation and the world were also in a very dark place.\u00a0 That one phrase will haunt me for Christmases to come:\u00a0 \u201cGod the Baby.\u201d<\/p>\n
The World Jesus Was Born Into<\/h4>\n
You think times are bad now?\u00a0 That our government is corrupt?\u00a0 That our country is dysfunctional?\u00a0 That violence in the world is out of control?\u00a0 Wait until you learn what was going on when and where Jesus was born.<\/p>\n
Historian Philip Jenkins will enlighten you about this in his post\u00a0 The Year Jesus Was Born<\/a>.\u00a0 I\u2019ll get you started, then click the link for the rest:<\/p>\n
Scholars differ on the exact birth-date of Jesus of Nazareth, though a fair consensus holds that it was not in the year 1. Many favor a date in or around 4 BC, and for the sake of argument, let us take that as accurate. If so, the birth occurred during or near a truly dreadful time in the history of what was already a troubled and turbulent land: arguably, the story has a special new relevance in the horribly violent conditions in that region today. Although these events are familiar to scholars, they are not at all well known by non-specialists. This is unfortunate, because memories of this crisis certainly shaped memories and perceptions for decades afterwards, and conditioned attitudes during Jesus\u2019s lifetime. If we don\u2019t understand those conflicts, we are missing the prehistory of the earliest Jesus Movement. And they do provide a necessary, if unsettling, context for the Christmas story we recount at this time of year. Was this\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0what that first Christmas was like?<\/p>\n
[Keep reading. . .]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Christmas, Paganism, and the Gospel<\/h4>\n
Anthony Costello has written a fascinating post on the conflict between Christianity and Paganism\u2013how this begins with the ancient Hebrews, how this conflict is a major theme of the Old Testament, and how the coming of Christ at Christmas killed paganism and for all.<\/p>\n
Read the whole piece.\u00a0 \u00a0I\u2019ll quote a few paragraphs\u2013without the connections between them, with some being from the scholars he quotes\u2013to give you a sample.\u00a0 But, having praised it, I then want to say a few words of criticism.<\/p>\n
From Anthony Costello, The True Meaning of Christmas:\u00a0 The Death of Paganism<\/a>, at Theological Apologetics<\/em>:<\/p>\n
Historian Paul Veyne characterized the pagan gods this way:<\/p>\n
\nThe pagan gods, by contrast [to the biblical God], live their lives and are not confined to a metaphysical [transcendent] role. They are part of this world, one of three races that populate the earth: animals, which are neither immortal nor gifted with reason; humans, who are mortal but reasonable; and gods, who are immortal and reasonable. So true is it that the divine race is an animal genus that every god is either male or female.<\/p>\n
Veyne,\u00a0A History of Private\u00a0<\/em>Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium<\/i>\u00a0(208)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Moreover, for the most part, all cultures around the world had this basic understanding of the world: that the world was enchanted with god-like beings or divine, mysterious powers. This was roughly the same for the ancient Greeks, as well as the Algonquins. The philosopher,\u00a0Charles Taylor<\/a>, described this ancient, pagan world as \u201cenchanted,<\/em>\u201d \u00a0meaning that ancient cultures experienced the natural world as imbued with \u201cspirit agents\u201d\u2013 innate, mysterious powers that had their own wills and intentions, moods and attitudes. . . .<\/p>\n
In contrast to this pagan view of nature, there were a handful of ancient communities that believed roughly the opposite of this: that there was only one God. Further, this God was separate from and transcendent to the realm of nature, i.e., from the\u00a0cosmos.<\/em> Following logically from this, this God, and only this God, was eternal and uncreated and that the world human beings inhabited was not eternal or uncreated, and, likewise, neither were its gods. The most obvious and relevant example of a community like this were the Israelites. . . .<\/p>\n
The history of Israel is the history of a persistent spiritual and physical battle between the following: between Yahweh the Creator and others of His creatures who rebelled against Him; between the belief in one, big God and belief in many, little gods; between the one, revealed religion of the Israelites and the many speculative religions of the pagans; between God\u2019s people and not-God\u2019s people; between the transcendent and the immanent; between miracles and magic; between light, love and liberty and darkness, bondage and the power of death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
When Jesus comes, He will cast out devils and defeat all the powers of darkness.\u00a0 And by His death and resurrection, he founds His church, which will convert the world from paganism.\u00a0 I like his explanation of St. Peter\u2019s confession that Jesus is \u201cthe Christ, the Son of the Living God,\u201d and how Jesus promises that \u201con this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it\u201d (Matthew 16:13-19).<\/p>\n
The word translated \u201chell\u201d is actually \u201cHades,\u201d which is the name both of a place (the realm of the dead) and a god (the god of the dead).\u00a0 \u201cJesus\u2019 point here is crystal clear: He is going to initiate something new, a new dispensation of God\u2019s grace, the next phase of the battle plan that will destroy the \u201cgates\u201d of Paganism\u2019s main headquarters: hell, the realm of the dead.\u201d\u00a0 And he reminds us that \u201cgates\u201d are for defense, not offense.\u00a0 The figure of speech isn\u2019t that hell is attacking the church.\u00a0 The church is attacking hell!\u00a0 And the walled fortress of Hades will not be able to prevent the church from casting down its gates and sacking the city.<\/p>\n
My problem with this reading is that the destruction of paganism is seen as \u201cthe true meaning of Christmas.\u201d\u00a0 That would be what St. Paul said:\u00a0 \u00a0\u201cChrist Jesus came into the world to save\u00a0sinners, of whom I am the foremost\u201d (1 Timothy 1:15).<\/p>\n
Not only did Christ Jesus come, to save sinners, but he came for St. Paul, who thought of himself as the worst<\/em> of sinners.\u00a0 And by extension, He came \u201cinto the world\u201d at Christmas for me\u00a0<\/em>and for you<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Luther said that the chief words in the Sacrament are \u201cfor you.\u201d\u00a0 Similarly, Christ coming into the world for you\u00a0<\/em>makes Christmas the purest Gospel.<\/p>\n
I think Christ saves us by delivering us from the power of sin, death, and the devil, so this would include paganism.\u00a0 I am sure that Costello believes this.\u00a0 I just wish he would have foregrounded the Gospel more.<\/p>\n
Those in the Reformed tradition seem especially preoccupied with the threat of paganism, including the alleged \u201cidolatry\u201d of accepting anything<\/em> physical (water, bread, wine) as a means that God uses to manifest Himself.\u00a0 And their doctrine of the Limited Atonement keeps them from an unreserved proclamation to everyone that Christ came into the world \u201cfor you.\u201d<\/p>\n
But, another definitive Biblical text about the true meaning of Christmas is the first chapter of John\u2019s Gospel:\u00a0\u00a0\u201cIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . .And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us\u201d\u00a0<\/span>(John 1:1, 14).\u00a0 And the \u201cfor you\u201d comes a few verses later, when John the Baptist proclaimed \u201cBehold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!\u201d (John 1:29).<\/span><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Illustration: \u201cAdoration Of The Shepherds<\/a>\u201d [c.1615] by Bernardo Strozzi, via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
God the Baby; the world Jesus was born into; and Christianity, paganism, and the gospel. [Also, on Friday we’ll have a free post checking reader predictions for 2023. And on Monday, New Year’s Day, we’ll have a free post for readers to make their predictions for 2024.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":71150,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,20,21,39,47],"tags":[4342,14207,464,1076,1657],"class_list":["post-71015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bible","category-christ","category-history","category-holidays","category-religions","category-theology","tag-christ","tag-christianity-and-the-gospel","tag-christmas","tag-incarnation","tag-paganism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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