Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 518

Indo-Pak Peace Hopes First Casualty of 2016

When India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi dropped in to visit Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over the holidays, there were some who hoped that a new era in India-Pakistan relations was in the cards.

That optimism died as quickly as most New Year’s Resolutions when four gunmen attacked an Indian air force base (called Pathankot) near the Line of Control between the two South Asian rivals in disputed Kashmir. Kashmir is a Muslim majority province claimed by both countries ever since the partition of British India into Muslim and Hindu states in 1947. For many Pakistanis, the loss of the most fertile and populous districts of Kashmir is an injustice that must be avenged. For many Indians, giving up a strategically important region that has been defended in three wars would be madness.The latest eruption of violence, which nobody in either country thinks would be possible without continuing support by parts of the Pakistani security apparatus, isn’t all that dramatic in itself. The intended target was probably not the air base at all; those who organized and supported the strike were aiming to scotch any prospect that Indo-Pakistani relations would actually improve.Pakistan’s civilian government has very little influence over the military; relations with India are one of the subjects that the military considers too important to be left to the country’s civilian politicians. The attack at Pathankot air base looks like a message from the people who actually run the serious bits of Pakistani foreign policy that no change in the long standoff with India will be allowed.

God’s Dilemma

F ive years ago at this time, New York city was paralyzed by a blizzard; thankfully, I was visiting family outside the city when the snow fell and was able to hole up in my house upstate where I teach at Bard College. There was plenty of snow up there, but around Bard, people know how to deal with big snowstorms. The streets were clear, the stores open, and it was a quiet New Year weekend grading termpapers and otherwise tending to business.

A fresh fall of snow is a wonderful thing. For the first few hours, the snow is pure and fresh; then the people (and the dogs) come out. Gradually, the snow is trodden down, plowed into icy heaps, and begins to turn various unsightly colors as the soot from passing cars and various other substances defile it. After a few days, it is an ugly, unsightly mess, and one longs to see it cleared away.New years can be like that, too. They start out clean and pure and we make resolutions to keep them that way. Then, over time, the old habits creep back and before long, we will be needing a fresh start once again. That’s not a bad metaphor for human history. Think of South Sudan, newly independent after decades of war with northern Sudan. It was going to be a new beginning, a bright new world. But it wasn’t long before new wars broke out as bitterness, jealously, and tribal rivalries poisoned the life of the new polity.Think of the Arab Spring. Or think of the Internet—so bright and shiny with the promise of a more peaceful and democratic world not long ago, and now increasingly a venue for espionage, hacking, the worst kinds of sexual exploitation, and cyberwar. Human nature doesn’t change when it goes online, and all the problems of the “real” world are popping up in cyberspace.God has a problem. It’s us. We keep messing things up.Over the last few days, we’ve been delving into the meaning of Christmas; it’s led us into a discussion of the Christian concept of God. There are many qualities that can be used to describe the Deity; Muslims often speak of the “,” and it’s an instructive and beautiful list on which any monotheist can profitably meditate.But at the end of the day, for Christians, the heart of the matter is this: God is love. Love doesn’t just describe God’s relationship to the creation; it describes God’s essence—his inner life and being. This as we have seen is the origin of the Christian idea of the Trinity: Love is so intrinsic to the divine nature that we cannot conceive of his unity as solitude.From a Christian perspective, God’s act of creation is an expression of love. God made the world because He wants an abundance of beings and sensibilities to love, to be with, to share life with, and to make happy.That is where we come in. We have no way of knowing whether there is life on other planets, much less what, if anything, it thinks and whether it has religious aspirations, but among those life forms we know anything about, people have a particular place in God’s plan.The Bible tells us that God loves animals and even plants. He knows when any sparrow falls and the Psalmist says, “The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their meat in due season. Thou openest thine hand and satisfiest the desire of all things living” (Psalm 145:15-16). God clothes the lilies of the field, Jesus says, more gloriously than King Solomon in all his robes (Matthew 6:28-29).But people have a special place in the Creator’s heart. Made in God’s image and given both personality and intelligence, we were created because God wanted beings with whom he could share the kind of love that animals and plants can’t give. Strange as it may seem, the Maker and Ruler of the universe seeks out the pleasure of our company and has made himself vulnerable to us; we can please God and we can hurt him by the ways we treat him, treat ourselves, and treat one another.All this means that human beings present God with an extraordinary problem.On the one hand, God finds us irresistibly lovable, beautiful, and, where God’s love is concerned, needy: How could we not be? Beings made by love out of love are inescapably drawn to the perfect Love from which they come. No matter how grizzled and grumpy we become with the passing years, or how pimpled and snarky we turn in our adolescence, God looks at us with the kind of tender solicitude and hopeful anxiety with which we look at small children.Yet at the same time, like many angelic-looking children, we’re a fairly nasty bunch of characters, more Lord of the Flies than Little Lord Fauntleroy. Just pick up a newspaper or go to your favorite news site: genocides, starvation, vast contrasts of poverty and wealth; terror, arms races, environmental destruction; the rich and the poor cheating and stealing from one another, with the rich generally doing best because they’ve got more power to abuse; nations nursing ancient wounds as hatreds fester.Or back off from these entrenched historical evils and look at what goes on in families, neighborhoods, and among friends. Abused children grow up to repeat the cycle. Children of alcoholics and addicts grow up with psychological wounds that predispose them to repeat the same sad behavior. Widespread epidemics of cheating in school, cheating on taxes, cheating on expense accounts, cheating on spouses. It’s a bit like the national debt; each generation gets the bill for its parents’ shortcomings—and passes that bill with some additional charges down to their own heirs.Christians talk about this situation under the heading of original sin, saying that our species has been a big, dysfunctional family since the dawn of time, and that each of us repeats and adds to that cycle of abuse and betrayal in our own way even as we suffer from the damage done by those who came before. Other religions object to the kind of metaphysical structure that Christians give to the concept, but virtually everyone intuitively gets this picture of a human race somehow at war with itself and fundamentally out of whack.This flawed race trapped in a cycle of cascading pain and wrong is what, and who, God is bound and determined to love; the question is how can He do it?From the Christian point of view, this is not a trivial problem. People aren’t just messy and incomplete. We are actively evil. As Reinhold Niebuhr puts it, we place ourselves at the center of the moral universe instead of God and our neighbors. We aren’t just victims of an unjust society and a tragic history; we make choices that perpetrate and even deepen injustice and add new dimensions to unfolding tragedies of our time.God is so loving that He can’t leave us to perish in our misery and mess. He wants us with a love that will not be denied. Yet at the same time, God is too just, too all-seeing to overlook what’s going on.Think of a God’s-eye perspective on someone who beats and abuses a child. God sees the helpless victim and burns with anger; yet He also knows that the perpetrator was once an innocent victim. He felt all the fear and pain of the young child who has grown up to become an abuser, feels all the pain of the adult who has grown up twisted. Knowing the future, as God does, He perhaps can see a time ahead when today’s victim is tomorrow’s bully. He can see the fanatical Nazi as a child growing up in a culture wrenched out of shape by defeat, inflation, and change. He can see the Ukrainian mafioso as the product of a society that suffered genocidal violence at the hands of both Soviet and Nazi oppressors. He sees the genocidaires of Rwanda and Darfur as victims in their own way of societies gone deeply wrong, yet He also hears the cries of their victims.It is not just the spectacular sinners, with their hands drenched in blood, whose victims cry out for justice. The quiet, respectable sinners—those American whites, for example, who could have done something about racial injustice but chose to turn a blind eye—have responsibilities that a just and loving God cannot ignore.God cannot love the victim of violence or exploitation without loving and indeed demanding justice; but He cannot love anybody at all unless He finds a way to deal with the reality that no human being can withstand strict moral scrutiny. To hold everyone to a strict standard is to condemn the whole world, but to wink at the real evil that people do is to give up not only on the moral standard of true justice but also on God’s determination to create independent creatures who are capable of serious moral choice. Christians believe that God refused to choose between his love and his justice. He refused to overlook the evil of the world and say things were OK when they weren’t, but He also refused to walk away from the whole ugly mess.Instead, God chose to engage. He would draw closer to us, but not do so in a way that took evil lightly. Specifically, God chose to become a human being, to live with us, and ultimately to take on Himself the punishment that justice demands. The baby in the manger wasn’t just there to look cute and beam rays of forgiveness to shepherds and kings. He was born to suffer rejection and injustice, to be tortured and scourged, humiliated and mocked, to face an unjust trial before an oppressive foreign ruler, to feel the full weight of the wrath of God due to all the evil in the world, and to die a cruel death while being ridiculed and mocked by those He came to serve.God resolved the dilemma between love and justice by taking them both all the way. The Creator of the world took the hit we had coming. The anger, the condemnation, the judgment all fell on Jesus, who bore it all out of love. That, for Christians, is what makes Christmas such a special time of year. God really knows us; He knows the worst things about us and isn’t fooled by our rationalizations and evasions. And He still loves us enough to be born among us and to pay the price for all we have done.Unlike all the other prophets, preachers, and visionaries who came into the world, Jesus did not just come to remind us of the importance of a moral law we cannot keep. He did not just come to tell us, eloquently and wisely, what we have known all along. He came to deal with the flaws, the weakness, and the twisted selfishness that stand between us and God. He came to deal with the reality that no matter how much we might wish to live the right way—we haven’t and don’t.He came to show and live out God’s radical commitment to his creation. People aren’t just a hobby to God. Infinite Love made us to share an infinite intimacy and will go to infinite lengths to restore that bond no matter how deeply or how horribly we have failed. That love is not blind; it knows what messes we make of our lives and how we wound and damage others. But even so, God is determined to be with us.That is why there was a baby in the manger. That is why we celebrate this time of year. God knows exactly who we are, loves us anyway, and will do whatever it takes to make this relationship work.

Top Hits of TAI in 2015

As the new year begins, be sure to revisit our top five essays and reviews from the print magazine, as selected by editor Adam Garfinkle. If the holiday season has left you feeling the need to reinvigorate your brain, these are a great place to start.

Best EssaysJoshua Mitchell, “Age of Exhaustion“How the triumphalist mutation of liberalism and the anti-liberal politics of identity have together brought us to the age of exhaustion.Stephen Sestanovich, “Could It Have Been Otherwise?“Russian-American relations are in ruins. A look back at decisions made after the Cold War can help us understand what went wrong—and whether the United States had other options.R. Jay Magill, Jr., “The Problem with Political Intimacy“Why American politicians so enthusiastically reveal their personal lives to us—and why they should knock it off.Jerry Z. Muller, “The Costs of Accountability“The ballooning demand for misplaced and misunderstood metrics, benchmarks, and performance indicators is costing us big.Rasha Al Aqeedi, “Caliphatalism?“An Iraqi exile eavesdrops on life in her old hometown of Mosul. Best ReviewsSteven Teles, “Nudge, or Shove?“Cass Sunstein’s “libertarian paternalism” doesn’t just sound oxymoronic; it actually is. Liberalism deserves more forthright advocacy.Harold James, “Capitalism Da Capo“Authors tapping into the renewed interest in the history and nature of capitalism are stumbling over an unexpected problem: There’s no agreement on what capitalism is.Robert D. Kaplan, “Wat in the World“Aleksander Wat’s life and work stand as warning that the totalitarian temptations of the 20th century have yet to run their course.Jeremy Mayer, “Reading Coates, Thinking Obama“Ta-Nehisi Coates has managed to write a book on America’s racial dilemmas without involving either Barack Obama or Martin Luther King, Jr. Or has he?Francis Fukuyama, “Waltzing with (Leo) Strauss“A new book arguing for the ubiquity of esoteric writing in pre-modern times redeems Leo Strauss from his many detractors.

One for All

Back in the beginning of the Christmas season, I wrote about the way the Gospel Christmas narratives “roll the credits” by giving genealogical tables that link Jesus to Jewish history. In contemplating Christmas, we should never forget that the first Christmas was first and foremost a Jewish event. Mary, Joseph, the innkeeper, the shepherds, the baby: They were all Jewish. And as the baby Jesus moved toward adolescence and adulthood, it was Jewish religion, Jewish literature, Jewish culture, and Jewish history that shaped his personality and his mind. As Adam Garfinkle reminds us, New Year’s Day has long been celebrated as the Feast of the Circumcision, the day on which the baby Jesus, in blatant disregard of everything Andrew Sullivan holds dear, underwent the traditional rite that, from the time of Abraham, was seen as proclaiming the special relationship between the Jewish people and God.

These facts are so familiar to us that it’s sometimes easy to miss the troubling questions around them. A couplet by the rather distasteful British journalist William Norman Ewer sums up what some have felt as they contemplate these circumstances:

How odd of God

To choose the Jews.

Ewer seems to have been making the kind of slyly anti-Semitic joke that was all too popular at the time, but there is a real question here—not so much about why the chosen people should be the Jews as about why there should be a chosen people at all. Why would a universal God who presumably loves all people equally choose one people with whom to have a special relationship? How can we reconcile the claims of this special relationship with God’s commitment to universal justice?

For many centuries, the question of the chosen people was more theological than political. But with the rise of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century, that changed. As Jews from all over Europe and the Middle East immigrated to Palestine, a new Jewish state rose up on territory last controlled by Jews almost 2,000 years ago.The rebirth of the state of Israel has turned theological questions into political ones. There are those, Jewish and gentile, who believe that the Jews have a God-given right to all of the land of Biblical Israel. There are others, Jewish and gentile, who argue that the Palestinians have a natural claim to a land which, until the 20th century, had not had a Jewish majority since ancient times.Does God love Jews more than Palestinians? Do the promises God made to the ancestors of today’s Jews as reported in the Hebrew Scripture have any relevance to the problems in the Middle East today? Should they?This is not the place for a political analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute; for the record, I have always believed in a two-state solution so that each people can live in a state of its own with safe and recognized frontiers. But these days, we often forget the context in which the state of Israel was founded. The “Jewish Question” was just one piece of the much bigger national question that inflamed European and Middle Eastern politics in the last 200 years and led to countless riots, revolutions, massacres, ethnic cleansing, genocides, and wars. In 1800, Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East were essentially divided between three multi-ethnic, multi-confessional empires: the Holy Roman Empire, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. By the year 2000, none of these empires existed and the territories they once controlled were divided into dozens of ethnic nation states. Tens of millions of people were killed in the political struggles and global wars that this process required. In Europe, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s (with the characteristic mix of vicious warfare, ethnic cleansing, and episodes of genocide that marked the entire process) were, hopefully, the last outbreak of this madness. In the Middle East, the Palestinian-Israeli struggle is left over from this process; so are the struggles for independence among the Kurds, and from Afghanistan through Syria to the Maghreb, unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions continue to stoke conflicts.Conflicts in former Soviet territories like the Armenian-Azerbaijani struggle, the wars that have ripped through Georgia since 1989, the hideous wars between the Russian government and restive nationalities in the Caucasus, the murderous conflict in Syria: These appalling eruptions of communal hatred in our day are the latest episodes in the long and bloody story of nationalism.Looking around the world today, nationalism remains a powerful and even uncontrollable force with the ability to plunge the world into new horrors as devastating as anything in the 20th century. In much of Africa and Asia, ethnic conflicts and quarrels over boundaries between angry nation states are constantly simmering; any random incident can produce huge crises or bloody wars from Korea to the Congo.So when we speak of God “choosing” the Jews, the most perplexing problem is less about the specific people God chose than a question about why God would contribute to the formation of these national and cultural identities that have been responsible for countless wars.The Jews are not the only people who think they’ve been chosen. American presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama have often spoken about a unique American role in God’s plans for the world. From Joan of Arc to Charles De Gaulle and beyond, French nationalists (religious and secular) have believed in France’s unique global destiny. Russians and Poles have seen themselves each as the suffering Christ among nations, whose struggles help to redeem mankind. The Serbs cast their history in the heroic light of defending the gates of Christian Europe against the Muslim Turks. Many Turks believe that God has called their country to play a leading role in Islam. Many Arabs see the role of the Arab people as unique in a similar way; in what language after all was the Quran revealed?People seem pulled in two directions. On the one hand, we form strong group identities and these identities are the basis of our political loyalties; on the other, we recognize universal values and acknowledge a duty, at least in the abstract, to help people everywhere regardless of their race, language, color, or creed.It’s a puzzle. Human beings need roots in a particular culture and family and those roots shape them; at the same time, human beings have values (like freedom and democracy) and ideas (like the Pythagorean theorem and the laws of thermodynamics) that demand to be recognized as universal. We seem perpetually torn between “cosmopolitan” and “local” values: universal ideas and the customs of the country.This tension plays out in politics all the time. At the extreme, the well-being of the group is elevated to the highest good of all: National and racial egotism gone psychotic was the root sin of Nazism. The moral and physical ruin that resulted still makes the question of nationalism a painful one in Germany today; Hitler’s insane and distorted nationalism discredited the normal and inescapable feeling of collective identity and loyalty that seems indispensable to the effective functioning of a civil community.In Europe and many other parts of the world today, many intelligent people look back in horror not just on Nazism but on the whole bloody history of nationalism. They look at the pogroms, incidents of ethnic cleansing, intensely murderous rivalries between ethnic nation states competing over the same pieces of ground; then they look at the increasing need for a globally integrated economy to have global standards and global institutions. They hope to build a transnational or post-national society that rests on universal principles and global institutions more than on the customs and claims of the world’s many peoples.They’ve got a point. It is self-evidently true that our global economy and the many interests the world’s countries have in common demand more complex forms of international cooperation than ever before. And the more I travel and read, the more I learn about the destructive passions that simmer just below the surface of even the most “civilized” national communities.But I don’t think the world is going to learn Esperanto anytime soon. That is, the pull of national and religious identity is too strong to be ignored—and the pull of cosmopolitan civilization and universal institutions is ultimately too weak to call forth the kind of economic and political solidarity that some kind of world government would need. Germans don’t want to pay the bill for early-retiring Greeks in the EU; they have even less solidarity with Uganda and Laos.We are stuck with nationalism and other irrational but deeply held identities and values; we must learn to work through them rather than against them. We think of the trade off between local identities and universal values as a modern problem, but it is deeply rooted in human experience. In the ancient world, where tribal and family affiliations were very strong, many cultures shared a strong belief in the moral duty of hospitality to strangers, whatever their tribe. Day-to-day life revolved around your own group of close associates, but the duty of hospitality required a willingness to look beyond these limits to recognize the common humanity and worth of all people.This is where we still are as a species; our lives are bound up and committed to those around us who share our language, our culture, and perhaps our blood—but we know that this is not enough and that when the opportunity comes, it is our duty to rise above these limits and act on our duties to the whole human race.The question of our divided loyalties between the particular and the universal is deeply embedded in Christian history and the Christmas story. Christmas is, above all, the feast of the Incarnation. The Incarnation is the idea that God became man (from the Latin word for “flesh” as in “carnivore” and “carnal”); if the universal God was going to become a human being, he needed to become one person in particular. Human beings aren’t blank slates; as we grow to adulthood, we are shaped by the culture that surrounds us. For God to become fully human, he had to have this experience as well.God’s choice was to ground his Son in the history and tradition of the Jews, a people whose history and literature reflected by that time centuries of struggle with the demands of monotheistic, Abrahamic religion.  This was not, Christians believe, out of any idea that the Jews were better than other people or the only people in whom God took an interest. Indeed, the Biblical record of the Jewish Scriptures is largely a record of God’s disappointment with the all-too-human failings of the people He chose.But neither the designation of Israel as the “chosen people”  nor the birth of Christ into a Jewish family were intended to limit God’s concerns to one people. Although Christians and Jews disagree about many things, they agree that God’s special relationship with Israel was always intended to be bigger than Israel.The relationship was with Israel but it wasn’t ultimately about or at least only about Israel—God was working to build a people through whom He could reach out to the rest of the world. From a Christian perspective, part of this larger role for the Jewish people is fulfilled through the life and work of Jesus. It was from Judaism and the Jews that Jesus learned who He was and what He had come to do. The long struggle of the Jewish people to understand who this God was who had called them, a struggle that continues long after Jesus and has its own dynamic and features quite independent of Christian thought, helped create a culture that shaped not only Jesus Himself, but the band of close associates who took his message to the world. And when Jesus then through his ministry of teaching and healing, and above all through his Death and Resurrection, set out to change the world, the work that He did for people everywhere was a fulfillment of the purposes, Christians believe, behind God’s establishment of a special relationship with the Jews.God’s choice of one people was a necessary part of his love for all. If God intended to rescue Everyone, to bring the fullness of both his love and his justice to bear on the human condition, God would have to become Someone; this someone would have to be somebody from somewhere. The person would have a family and friends, would speak some particular language, and work with a particular set of ideas. Saving all meant choosing some.Without those deep roots in Jewish life that sustained Jesus and the first Christian believers, there could be no Christian faith; yet the first thing the young church had to do was to spread beyond its Jewish origins. As it grew, it encountered not only the Greco-Roman world of the Mediterranean basin, but the ancient cultures of Iran, the Arab world, Ethiopia, Armenia, and beyond. At a very early stage, the written records of the Mediterranean church migrated from Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus and the Jews of his time) to Greek, the most common language of the eastern Mediterranean world. All or part of the Bible today has been translated into literally thousands of languages, and people from all of the world’s major (and most of its minor) language and culture groups pray to the God of Israel, acknowledge a Jewish savior, and turn their thoughts to Bethlehem at this holy time of year.But even as the church looks to Bethlehem, it looks beyond. The liturgical calendar (the church calendar used, with some variations and differences, by Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Methodists, among others) makes sure we don’t forget the universal mission of the church as we celebrate Christmas. December 26 in the Western churches commemorates the death of St. Stephen, one of the first Greek-speaking Christians who was also the first person to be killed because he believed in Jesus.In the English-speaking world, the “Feast of Stephen” is known mostly because of its connection with the “Good King Wenceslaus” carol; it was “on the Feast of Stephen” that Good King Wenceslaus looked out and saw that the snow lay “deep and crisp and even.” The multiculturalism goes on; St. Wenceslaus is the patron saint of the Czech Republic. For thousands of years, the Catholic and Orthodox churches have worked to find and celebrate “national” saints and festivals that will help the people of each country and region find something of their own in the Christian faith.The imagery of the Christian faith similarly changes around the world to reflect local traditions and tastes. In Cuzco, Peru, there is a painting showing Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper; the main dish is the local favorite of roast guinea pig. Christianity has generally tried to “incarnate” itself in the world’s different cultures and traditions, using familiar language and ideas wherever possible. This can be controversial. In the famous “Chinese rites” case, St. Francis Xavier’s attempt to allow Chinese Christians to continue observing certain traditional Chinese rites commemorating their ancestors was condemned by Pope Clement IX in 1715. At other times, it’s non-Christians who object to Christian appropriation of words or concepts they consider their own. In Malaysia not so long ago, a Catholic newspaper fought a court case in an effort to use the world “Allah” to describe the Christian God in its pages against the objections of some Islamic clerics who feared this use of a familiar Islamic term could aid Christian efforts at proselytization. (In Malaysia, it is  to attempt to persuade Muslims to change their religion.)The twentieth century saw an explosion of Christian missionary activity and Christian conversions outside the old Christian “heartlands” of Europe and the Americas. The century also witnessed the extraordinary rise of locally based and locally led churches in “mission territory” around the world. In China, sub-Saharan Africa, and south and south-eastern Asia, the twentieth century (and especially its last half) saw not only the greatest numbers of conversions to Christianity in world history; it witnessed an unprecedented flowering of locally based leadership developing forms of worship and organization that adapted the old faith to new cultural milieus as never before.Where all this is leading one does not know; in Europe, Christianity sometimes appears to be on its last legs, even as it flourishes in parts of the world where it was almost unknown just a century ago. Just as Europe’s political domination of the world ended in the twentieth century, its cultural dominance in world Christianity has faded away. A little more than two thousand years after the first Christmas, Christianity is both more universal and “cosmopolitan” than ever, and yet it is also more deeply rooted in more cultures than ever before in its past.To Christians, the changes and renewals sweeping over the Christian world mean that the Christmas event isn’t over yet. The mysteries of Christmas and the Incarnation continue to unfold before our eyes. The world’s cultures are being transformed by their encounters with that mysterious Jewish rabbi and the universal message He carried. But while people all over the world turn to one Lord, they turn to Him in hundreds and thousands of tongues and traditions.The Christmas story doesn’t tell us how to reconcile the virtues and the vices of universal cosmopolitanism and local loyalty. But it suggests that we can somehow try to be true to both ideals: to be loyal members of our nations, our families, our tribes—and also to reach out to the broader human community of which we are also a part. One baby in one manger, from one family and culture, but bearing a message that would reach the whole world in the fulness of time. That is, Christians think, how God arranged things.And if some Christians these days eat guinea pig, some felafel, others turkey, and others dim sum as they celebrate the birth of the Child, that is pretty much how it is supposed to be. A child born to one nation grew up to be a savior for all. In going from his very particular and individual roots to reach out to the whole world, Jesus gives us all a pattern of how being deeply embedded in one culture and one nation can lead to a universal vision and mission. That part of his work is perhaps more important today than ever before; as the New Year begins, we should reflect on the need for people who are grounded in their own culture but capable of reaching out beyond it.

Puerto Rico’s Rolling Catastrophe

Puerto Rico bondholders are in for an unpleasant start to 2016 as the island announces that it will default on some of its debt payments on New Year’s Day. The NYT: 

In a briefing for journalists, Gov. Alejandro García Padilla said only some of the payments would be halted immediately. They include $35.9 million due to holders of bonds issued by its Infrastructure Financing Authority, and $1.4 million due to holders of its Public Finance Corporation’s bonds.

In a stark example of the financial version of musical chairs that has been playing out on the island in recent months, the government will divert a total of $174 million from lower-grade bonds to pay holders of the legally protected general obligation bonds. That diversion, known as a “clawback,” technically amounts to a default even though some of those creditors will not see a difference in their payments on Jan. 1.

Puerto Rico was already in default, and no one seems to have expected that it would make this payment in its entirety. But the official announcement underscores the fact that there is no end in sight for the island’s crisis. The appetite in Congress for a bailout or bankruptcy protection appears to be minimal, and it seems likely to stay that way for the near future unless and until Puerto Rico’s woes start to hit the mainland in a major way—a prospect that is not inconceivable, but which advocates of a no-strings-attached bailout have every incentive to exaggerate. So in the short term, the island will probably be forced to continue grinding it out on the backs of its own taxpayers.

In the medium term, as we have said before, there is a role for Washington in bringing Puerto Rico’s crisis under control. The guiding principle of U.S. government involvement should be “relief for reform“—that is, Puerto Rico should be eligible for meaningful assistance in servicing its debts if and only if it can make profound structural changes to the decrepit blue model governance system that landed it in this mess. Finally, in the long term, the island may face an even more radical choice: either remain a colony or pursue either outright independence (where it could rise or fall on its own in the debt markets), or, after top-to-bottom reforms, statehood (which would relieve it of various hurdles to solvency, and allow for state and local bankruptcies). Neither of those second two options would be easy, but the depth of the current crisis shows that the status quo has fundamentally failed.

Venezuela’s Supreme Court Rules Against Opposition

The big win by Venezuela’s opposition in this month’s election, which yielded a two-thirds supermajority in the country’s parliament, is threatened by a constitutional court ruling against three of its incoming lawmakers, temporarily barring them from taking office. The news comes after the parliament last week put more than a dozen Socialist loyalist justices on the Supreme Court. Bloomberg has more:

The court’s electoral branch said it’s authorized to review electoral challenges that could overturn the results in eight races, according to decisions posted on its website. By winning 112 of the National Assembly’s 167 seats in the Dec. 6 national ballot, the opposition’s so-called supermajority would allow it to change the constitution, impeach ministers and even push for a referendum on removing the president.

After President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist PSUV party lost control of the legislature for the first time since 1999, the Venezuelan leader vowed that Congress would continue to pass laws before its term ends. That has heightened tensions with opposition leaders who want to roll back measures they say have stoked inflation, fueled corruption, and led to shortages of basic consumer goods.

Calling the move a “judicial coup,” the opposition said it would bring all 112 lawmakers to inauguration ceremonies next week. It’s the latest in a quickly escalating conflict over the country’s political future and violence cannot be ruled out. Maduro controls the courts, the bureaucracy, and the army. He won’t let go of power quickly or easily. Maduro’s electoral defeat is both good and bad, as the stage may be set for a messy 2016.

Russia Caps 2015 With Record-Setting Oil Production

Moscow is set to round out 2015 with a post-Soviet oil production record, as it’s on track to pump 10.86 million barrels of oil per day this week. Bloomberg reports:

The country’s crude and gas condensate production for the whole of December is on track to average 10.783 million barrels a day, almost matching November’s record of 10.785 million, according to Bloomberg estimates based on the data. […]

Russian companies have been helped by a weaker ruble that reduced the cost of services such as drilling, and a tax system in which the state bears most of the risk and reward from price movements. […]Russia’s December output was boosted by the OAO Novatek-led Yargeo venture’s Yarudeyskoye field, which started producing on the first day of the month, according to a statement from the company. Output from the deposit will rapidly reach 70,000 barrels a day, the company said Dec. 1. Novatek didn’t immediately reply to a query about current output form the unit.

Like any other petrostate, Russia finds itself in a bind with today’s oversupplied oil market: The crude that was fetching more than $110 per barrel in June of last year can’t clear $40 per barrel today, leading to a massive loss of revenue. Because the Russian national budget relies heavily on oil and gas sales, this has national security implications, and there are no easy fixes. For now, Moscow has little choice but to ramp up production to try to offset bargain prices by selling more—a strategy also being employed by OPEC’s 13 members—and, as a result, it’s nearing those post-Soviet records.

Of course, this only exacerbates the global oil glut, and if it doesn’t immediately depress prices, then it surely works to depress any sort of rebound. And that’s the state of the oil market today: Private firms (read: U.S. frackers) are finding new ways to stay profitable at $36 per barrel while petrostate producers fight tooth and nail to protect their share of a market in which supply overwhelms demand. 2015 was a rough year to be in the business of selling oil, and with Iran ready to boost its exports when Western sanctions are lifted, next year looks to be even worse.

White House to Introduce New Iran Sanctions

In response to Iranian ballistic missile tests and research, which officials believe included cooperation with North Korea, the Obama Administration is set to impose its first financial sanctions on Iran since the nuclear deal. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The planned action by the Treasury Department, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal, is directed at nearly a dozen companies and individuals in Iran, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates for their alleged role in developing Iran’s ballistic-missile program.

Iranian officials have warned the White House in recent months that any such financial penalties would be viewed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a violation of the nuclear accord.Senior U.S. officials have said the Treasury retained a right under the agreement to blacklist Iranian entities allegedly involved in missile development, as well as those that support international terrorism and human-rights abuses. Officials view those activities as separate from the nuclear deal.

The Iran nuclear deal is the foundation stone of President Obama’s Middle East policy. He has paid an immense price for the deal at home and abroad. The highest price, moreover, has been paid by the hundreds of thousands dead in sectarian strife and the millions forced out of their homes in Iraq and Syria as the U.S. avoided any actions in those countries that might have threatened Iran’s willingness to sign on the dotted line.

But now the deal is being tested by Iran’s determination to persist with ballistic missile developments in defiance of the U.N. Security Council resolution on the matter. The defiance is so open and blatant that the Administration has no choice but to propose new sanctions.Given its past track record, what the Administration is likely to do is to split the difference. It will try to find sanctions that look tough enough to limit domestic criticism but are unoffending enough to minimize the risk that Iran will repudiate the nuclear deal. The message to Iran will be that the U.S. remains constrained and that Iran can go on testing the boundaries of compliance without fearing any serious U.S. pushback in the 12 remaining months of President Obama’s time in office.However, the WSJ also reports that Iran sent to Russia 25,000 pounds of enriched uranium this week. That will, the story notes, reduce Tehran’s capacity to make nukes and it has strengthened America’s position. This is a good time for a tough line on missile sanctions that would force Iran to pay a real price for its weapons development programs. A U.S. failure to take advantage of this opportunity, on the other hand, will likely lead to more and not less Iranian adventurism in the region. All in all, it’s a bad start for Administration policy in the Middle East for the new year.

Hollywood’s Yiddishe Grandma

At synagogue luncheons around the country, there is much anxiety about the state of American Jewry. Most Jews don’t keep the Sabbath or regularly attend synagogue, and fewer and fewer can read Hebrew. And as someone will kvetch every now and then, practically no one speaks Yiddish. Amidst these reports of the Jewish community’s demise, it takes some chutzpah to put on Di Goldene Kale (The Golden Bride), a 1923 Yiddish operetta. Would it play to an empty house?

Jewish immigrants and their children flocked to Yiddish-language theater in the early 20th century, but the productions fell out of fashion in the 1940s and have seen few revivals since. Yet despite its seventy-year absence from the stage, Kale has much in common with contemporary entertainment classics. Any Seinfeld or When Harry Met Sally fan will find Kale surprisingly familiar. Among other standard elements, there are jokes about financial insecurity, gripes about the stress of schlepping around New York, and sets of loving, but rather clueless, parents. Even the language is surprisingly intelligible: American English has assimilated many Yiddish words and certain Yiddish cadences have found their way into American comedians’ accents (don’t worry, there are subtitles too). Yiddish operettas may be dead, but their legacy lives on stage and on the screen.

If the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene’s resurrection of Di Goldene Kale (which ends January 3) is any guide, there’s no reason for the Yiddish operetta to live only through its descendants: the original is very entertaining in its own right. The lyrics are clever, the tunes upbeat and catchy. And as far as this production goes, the performances are lively and sharp. The entertainment value of this Kale is sufficient reason to buy a ticket. But, from the politics of American immigration and capitalism to questions about Jewish communal identity, the operetta gives viewers a lot to think about, too.

The basic plot is as silly and complicated as those of traditional European operas and contemporary American sitcoms. It’s a mish-mash of old-world romance and new-world adventure, centering on the exotic experience of going to America and becoming a new person. The play begins with a wealthy father and his American son returning to the shtetl in Russia to find a wife. The prospective bride in question—the golden bride—has recently come into money herself thanks to a large inheritance, and is in high demand among the shtetl boys as a result. Alas, the two petit rentiers have fallen in love with other, poorer people rather than with each other. Their parents prove to be surprisingly understanding, but the real trouble comes when the golden bride, who already has a true love, promises to marry whichever suitor can locate her long-lost mother. Beyond perhaps being opportunities for Freudian analysis, such plot devices are ultimately unsophisticated. Luckily, they serve as a canvas for the discussion of more substantive topics.

Though Kale starts out with simple lessons from the shtetl, it becomes richer and more prescient once the characters reach America. From the beginning, the characters are conscious of the ultimate emptiness of money, despite their greediness. The shtetl innkeeper sings:

“A little wife, beautiful as gold, charming and pious,

Kisses her rich, old man and hugs him,

With her little fingers in his pocket she searches for…the dollar.”

The message couldn’t be clearer: the desire for material prosperity corrupts even the most sacred relationships. True for the shtetl, true for New York, NY. But the latter has put many more dollars in many more pockets. 

The second act portrays the corrupting influence of America as more complex and less strictly material—and thus, more dangerous. At the wealthy father’s mansion in New York, one of the unwed couples discusses how they hope to be famous actors one day. The lovers decide to test their talents, playing an estranged husband and wife. It’s a clever meta-theatrical moment: he pretends to be a drunk, and angrily asks for a divorce. She pretends to be pregnant. When her mother walks in on them, the pair stay in character and the mother fails to see that it’s all a farce, believing that her daughter is indeed married and about to give birth. The scene is comical yet awfully dark, harkening back to a lyric from Act 1 about the fast-paced and unanchored American society: “In America, in two weeks’ time you fall in love, you get married, you get divorced, and you get married again.” Such commentary is undeniably prophetic: the institution of marriage looks distinctly unstable today. And, as a much-discussed 2013 Pew study demonstrates, intermarriage is quickly weakening the bonds of the Jewish community. (Notably, four in ten respondents said having a good sense of humor is “essential to their Jewish identity”).

The experience of watching this play in 2015 is heartening and disheartening at once, and it requires an imaginative recreation of a context now largely lost. The opening number, for example, is about how everyone wants to make money. The song is funny and, given anti-Semitic tropes, pretty edgy. But almost all immigrants came to America looking to get rich, and Irish and Italians were once considered money-grubbing, too. The focus on money probably has less to do with a specifically Jewish experience or self-parody than the aspirations of all foreigners who arrived on these shores. The stereotype has stuck around for Jews in a way it has not for other groups, but only in part because the anti-Semitic caricature of the Jewish moneylender has such a long history. It is also the price of Jewish comedy’s success; everyone today has heard a self-mocking Jewish joke.

The play’s political context is even more distant, yet all the more poignant to revisit. Jews have traditionally sought to forestall the destructive effects of materialism by advocating an alternative to the market economy. A reminder of these political tendencies comes toward the end of Di Goldene Kale in the form of an anthem about a “new Russia”. The song seems out-of-place today, but in the 1920s and 30s, talk of a “new Russia” would have seemed consistent with a play looking to reassure its audience that life in both the old and new worlds was headed in the right direction. It wasn’t, of course, but early audiences did not know that. Nor did they know that just a year later, in 1924, the Johnson–Reed Act would effectively close America’s doors to new Jewish immigrants. Part of the impetus for the Act was the widespread suspicion that Jews were Soviet spies—fears which were, with only a few exceptions, groundless. Crowds of boisterous immigrants once sang along to a communist ballad in a crowded Lower East Side theater, but everything about that scene is gone: the poverty of the Jews, their close-knit community, their knowledge of Yiddish—and the world’s hopes for a communist Russia. A modern viewer, looking back over a cold war and a world war, observes that the play was far more prophetic about families than it was about the future of nation states and economic systems.

The communism vs. capitalism debate is mostly over in American politics, but the immigration debate still rages. For its part, Di Goldene Kale still has something to say about the immigrant experience. The United States is a nation of immigrants, a place where persecuted peoples may freely practice their religions. But America has also been a place where groups lose core parts of their heritage. Anti-Semitism and suspicions of dual loyalty have done far less to shrink the Jewish community in America than the assimilationist pull of an open society. As Jean-Paul Sartre observed in Anti-Semite and Jew, the liberal democrat accepts the Jew, but only by denying the sincerity of Jewishness. The dynamic may be less acute in America than it is in highly secular France, where Jews and Muslims alike are viewed with suspicion. But it remains a tenet of the American experience all the same. It is better to be accepted than to be rejected, but the cost of acceptance may be one’s own identity.

Di Goldene Kale is the story of the anxieties and dreams of the American Jewish diaspora, some of which have changed, but some of which have stayed the same. Comedy provides a safe way to explore subversive ideas and spin out scary scenarios, assured as we are of a happy ending. In 1923, Immigrants feared American society would corrupt their children, and the ending of Kale is meant to dispel those fears. The little play-within-a-play mentioned earlier does the same: at the end of the performance, no one is pregnant and no one is getting a divorce. Fears of the community’s demise are legitimate (and rather fun to mock), but premature: the foundation of Jewish life—marriage—remains intact.

In many ways, these immigrants were right to be worried: like all Americans, Jews have become materially wealthier but less embedded in strong communities and less committed to religious observance. Jewish history since Kale apparently confirms many of the fears about marriage and cultural cohesion. Yet doesn’t the success of this revival also challenge them? The National Yiddish Theater’s lighting is state-of-the-art, its costumes and sets of high-quality, its players well-trained. Money (the pursuit of which, contra Marx, reflects our preferences more than it shapes them) can buy all these nice things, it’s true. But it didn’t have to, and no one had to purchase tickets. At least for now, a not-insignificant number of Jews are still here, they still feel anxious, and they still get the jokes.

Meaning in 3-D

Now it gets tough. Yesterday’s post looked at what divides Christians and other theists from atheists; today we cut deeper and look at what separates Christians from believers in other religions.

And the truth is that nothing separates Christianity from other religions like Christmas. That little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying so demurely in the manger is the biggest trouble maker in world history, and the shocking claims that Christianity makes about who He is and what He means irritate and antagonize people all over the world.If Christians saw that little baby as nothing more or less than a beautiful symbol of human innocence and love, there would be no problem. Even recognizing Him as an important teacher and religious leader does not raise many hackles. Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet and the predicted Messiah; as we have seen, Islam has no trouble with the idea that he was born of a virgin, and the Virgin Mary is a popular and well-respected figure for Muslims. When it comes to his moral teaching, much of what Jesus says is unexceptionable. The Golden Rule (“do unto others as you would have others do unto you”) has its analogs in many religious traditions. Jesus’ summary of the moral law (“love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself”) is both drawn from and perfectly compatible with Judaism and is also something that people from many different religious traditions can take to heart. Many non-religious people (and non-Christians like Mahatma Gandhi) have been inspired by Jesus’ example and teaching. If Christians were simply celebrating the birth of a moral teacher on Christmas, there would be little controversy about it.But that’s not how most Christians see the baby in the manger. They don’t think He is a symbol; they don’t think He’s a messenger. They think He is the real thing. He is the meaning of meaning, the truth made flesh, the only begotten Son of God. As a grown man, He would tell people that “I and the Father are one.” Most of the people we call Christians believe He was right, and speak of the baby Jesus and the man He grew to be as one of the Three Persons of God.For both Muslims and Jews, it is hard to know which is more blasphemous: saying that the One God is Three Persons, or saying that Jesus of Nazareth is God made man. Either way, to many people this is an ugly theological scandal, a fundamental betrayal of the essence of monotheism. It’s an atrocity to worship a creature, a human being, however noble, as God; it’s an atrocity to mingle polytheism with monotheism; it’s an atrocity to blur the bright line between Creator and creation by mixing the two together in the person of Jesus.The Christian betrayal of monotheism, from this perspective, is damaging and deep. Monotheism isn’t just about the proposition that God is one and indivisible; it is also a statement about God’s transcendence. The One God is incomparably greater than and infinitely above above human beings. While God is compassionate and caring, there is an infinite distance between the Creator and the created, between God and man. For most members of the other monotheistic religions (except for some mystics often viewed with suspicion by the mainstream), getting into a right relationship with God involves acknowledging and accepting this truth.The Christian idea that Jesus is God, non-Christian monotheists feel, is a direct assault both on God’s unity and his transcendence. It is a betrayal of exactly the steps that separate monotheism from polytheism and paganism. Before Moses and Mohammed, people worshiped gods who were both numerous and close to mankind. Coming to see God as one and one only and as infinitely distant and above all other spirits and forces—to say nothing of human beings—is the giant step that separates the monotheists from the pagans.It is a moral step as well as a philosophical one. The polytheism of the Greeks, the Romans, and many in the ancient Near East was a kind of moral polygamy. There was a war god and a love goddess, a god of thieves and a god of doctors. The old pagans in the Greco-Roman world were postmodernists before modernism was born; they had no Grand Narratives, no overarching single moral vision. Monotheism meant accepting and making explicit that there was a single moral standard binding on all people at all times. Pagan beliefs were less morally serious; everything from ritual prostitution to the sacrifice of babies to a fire god could be found in the pre-Abrahamic rituals of the Middle East. Drawing a bright, clear line between the moral chaos and philosophical incoherence of idolatry and the absolute claims of morality and truth was the distinctive, world-changing contribution of monotheistic religion to human understanding. To both Muslims and Jews, Christianity can look like an uneasy and messy compromise between ancient paganism and true worship of the One God. It feels to many like a falling away from the high ethical and philosophical achievement of monotheistic religion.For many Muslims, shirk, the improper association of the created with the creator, is the ultimate in blasphemy. For many Jews, to worship a human being as God is idolatry—one of the worst sins there is. Christianity’s core belief that the baby in the manger is God made man is a flagrant assault on the central principles of monotheism as understood by the two other Abrahamic faiths.And, as both Jews and Muslims (to say nothing of Unitarian Christians) have pointed out for many centuries, this Christian idea that Jesus is in some way God immediately opens up dozens of tough theological questions. Christians have squabbled and often shed blood over the many different ways theologians have tried to define and explain the Trinity—and the Incarnation of God in Christ. There has never been a time when all the world’s Christians reached an agreement about the meaning of these great doctrines. Words like Homoousion, and Filioque continue to divide the world of Christianity over what to many people seem to be arcane points of doctrine.The reason Christians argue endlessly over the nature of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation, many maintain, is because these doctrines are nonsensical to begin with. In any case, the fact that these distinctive Christian ideas lead believers into endless tangles of controversy and contradiction is real.This little Yule Blog isn’t going to settle these great controversies and it’s above my pay grade even to explain them. My goal is much more modest: to help Christian and non-Christian readers understand what classical vanilla Christians mean when they identify the baby in the manger with God on high. That means taking on the most controversial and complex idea in Christianity; the doctrine of the Trinity is wrapped around that baby in the manger even tighter than the swaddling clothes.In the old days, almost every educated American, whether he or she were Christian or not, would have some idea about what this doctrine meant. Not all Americans were Trinitarians; in addition to Jews and the very small number of Muslims in the United States at the time, Unitarians, Mormons, and a great many free-thinkers also disapproved of the concept. But understanding this idea and at least something of its history seemed important enough for the sake of understanding American history and culture, English literature, and world history, literature, and art that even secular institutions of learning made some effort to ensure that students learned about the Trinity.That isn’t happening much anymore and many people who think they are extremely well-educated don’t know much about these ideas and many schools don’t teach them as part of a general cultural curriculum. Unfortunately, this means that young people will have to pick up their knowledge of core religious ideas from disreputable bloggers like yours truly.Like all Christian ideas, the concept of the Trinity is rooted in the Bible. The New Testament books speak of God in Three Persons. There is the Father (“Our Father who art in heaven” as Jesus prayed in the Lord’s Prayer), the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit, sometimes called the Holy Ghost in older English translations. (The English world “ghost” is related to the German “Geist,” and in earlier times had the same range of meaning that the German word preserves.) In subsequent years, Christian scholars and theologians tried to make sense of this language and gradually moved toward the idea of the Trinity as we know it today: One God, Three Persons. The Quicunque Vult, or the “Athanasian Creed” is an early document that gives some idea of the complexity of the Trinitarian idea as theologians hammered it out; it is enough for our purposes to know that most Christians believe that the God of the Bible is best described as one God in Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.The question of how one God can exist in Three Persons has perplexed inquiring minds for a very long time. St. Patrick famously explained the doctrine of the Trinity to new Irish converts by showing them a shamrock (a.k.a a clover leaf): three lobes, one leaf. Others have used examples like a triangle: three sides, one figure. None of these are exact, and Trinitarian theology is one of the most complex and arcane branches of Christian thought. As a mere lay blogger, I don’t have the theological chops to present a technically sophisticated and theologically nuanced presentation of the doctrine, so I’ll try to start from a different place—from this question of meaning that we have been tracing through Christmas.I wrote earlier that theism is rooted in the intuition that the meaning we experience in our lives and our interactions with other people adds up to something real. Love, for example, isn’t just a biologically conditioned feeling of affinity that encourages us to protect our children and other members of the tribe, assuring that our genes will be passed on in this brutally competitive world. Love in the Christian view may well be rooted in our biology, but it points beyond chemicals to ultimate realities; it reflects the basic nature of the universe and in the end love will have its way.Like the other monotheistic religions, Christianity moves from the idea of meaning to the idea of a personal God, but Christianity goes a step further. It identifies God with one particular aspect of meaning: love. “God is love,” says one of the letters that make up the New Testament (1 John 4:8). This is the phrase that Pope Benedict XVI chose for the title of his first encyclical letter, but this is very far from some kind of unique Catholic idea; it resonates through the history and theology of all the Christian denominations like nothing else.Christians really mean this. When they say “God is love” they don’t just mean that God is a Being who loves. They aren’t just saying that God is nice, or that He is compassionate and forgiving. They mean that what we think of as “love” is the core of his nature, the key to his being.(A quick aside on a translation problem. Ancient Greek, the language in which the New Testament was originally written, had three basic words that are often translated as “love” in English. One word stands for erotic love and desire; one means friendship; the third (ἀγάπη, in English letters, agape) means benevolence. It has often been translated into Latin as the word “caritas” and our modern English word “charity” comes from it. Agape love is philanthropic, wishing well to people and seeking their good without being motivated by a thought of return, or by physical desire.)Love, agape, isn’t something outside God; love is the nature of God. Love is by nature communal. It isn’t solitary; it is directed outwards. From the standpoint of love, life isn’t life if it isn’t shared. So, to be God is to love—and to love is to be in community and relationship. God, Christians believe, made the world out of and for love.But God wasn’t incomplete before there was a world; God was love before there was a creation for Him to be in love with. Yet to love is to be in relationship. Ultimately I think, what Christians mean by the doctrine of the Trinity is just this: Because God is love, community and relationship are rooted in the depths of his being. Community is intrinsic to God. His unity is communal. He is one and He is three.Among the many classes of people who dislike this idea, two are particularly prominent: rationalists, and convinced monotheists who don’t buy the Christian package. For rationalists, the idea that God is many and God is one is a contradiction of the most elementary principles of logic. This was the part of Christianity that many of the Founding Fathers and other enlightened and educated people of the Age of Reason had the most trouble with. They wanted a God who was logical; the Trinity didn’t fit. Logic was clear: A is not non-A; one is not three.Today, this is less of an issue for most people. We have all grown so accustomed to living with conflicting paradigms and grand narratives that we are less strictly logical than many of our ancestors were. This isn’t always a good thing; a healthy dose of Aristotelian logic would clarify a lot of the confusions that vex our political and cultural discourse today. But still, it makes the concept of a Trinity less difficult for contemporary minds to accept. Two hundred years ago, “enlightened” minds generally accepted the existence of God without much trouble, but boggled at the concept of the Trinity. Today, those minds have more trouble accepting the existence of God; if they do accept that existence, the problem of the Trinity doesn’t usually loom as large as it once did.This is partly because our scientific paradigms have changed. The science of 1800 was pretty open and shut: A thing was either true or false, and the whole point of science in those days was to take vague folk beliefs and inherited ideas and subject them to ruthless experiment and logical analysis. These days, physics tends to broaden the mind; after even casually wrestling with modern physics, many people are more comfortable than they used to be with the idea that the basis of existence may violate human expectations and logical categories. If light can be both particles and waves, maybe God can be both unitary and communal. If we perceive three dimensions but it is necessary to think of many more to construct a mathematically sensible model of how the universe works, we are less insistent that the concepts we use match everyday assumptions.(There may be another reason why Americans in particular are predisposed to accept the idea of a Trinity. We have one federal government, established under one Constitution, divided into three branches. If we can be Trinitarian in our politics, why not also in our theology?)The remaining objection to the Trinity from the other Abrahamic monotheisms is still vibrant and influential. This is not a religiously polemical blog—at least I’m trying to keep it from turning into one. I can understand why people from other religious backgrounds and traditions see the Trinitarian idea as chipping away at the transcendence and the uniqueness of God, and I respect their concerns. Christians, obviously, don’t share this objection. For Christians, to say that the divine unity is so unimaginably deep, rich, and transcendent that what humans understand as community is inextricably bound up with God’s unique being is to stress God’s transcendence, not to undermine it. Belief in the Trinity doesn’t, from this perspective, undermine one’s belief in the Unity of God: It gives our idea of God’s unity a depth that emphasizes just how unique and unimaginable the Creator really is.For Christians, God is a different order of being than we are, and one of the ways in which He is different is that for Him there is no contradiction between the singular uniqueness of who He is, and the fact that his essence is community, relationship, and love.Christians see this communal nature of the One God as a further affirmation of the basic intuition of theism: that our experience of the meaning in life points us toward the divine. People are social beings and much of the meaning and transcendence we find in life is related to our participation in social units ranging from the family to the global human community. We are individuals, but we only become our fullest selves in relationships. This is one of the ways that human beings are made in the image of God. ἀγάπη is hardwired into us; we are not really ourselves unless we stand in relation to others. God similarly can only be Himself in loving; since God can never be less than fully Himself, we must understand his being as complex enough to give full scope to this aspect of who He is.This at least is an introduction to the way Christians think about the nature of God. The Three Persons mentioned in the New Testament, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are often seen as expressing the complex love that is the nature of God. The Father is seen as the source of love, the Son as the object of that love, and the Holy Spirit as the love that exists between the two. This is the Love that made the world, not because It was incomplete or lacking but because It wanted to share.In any case, Christians believe that the baby in the manger was the Second Person of the Trinity, taking on human flesh and come to live among us. As John Milton put it in his 1629 Nativity Ode:

That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,

And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,

Wherwith he wont at Heav’ns high Councel-Table,

To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,

He laid aside; and here with us to be,

Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day,

And chose with us a darksom House of mortal clay.

It is a terrible scandal, but there is no way to separate the Trinity from Christmas. God is One; God is Three; the baby Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, come to earth to save sinners and open the door to a new kind of relationship between human beings and God. When Christians sing Christmas carols, buy gifts for each other, give holiday money to charities, or go to church, this is what they are celebrating and this is what they believe.