John G. Stackhouse Jr.'s Blog, page 2
March 12, 2025
Beware the Deal-Maker
February 26, 2025
Remembering Martin E. Marty (1928–2025)
Martin E. Marty passed away today, just a couple of weeks after his 97th birthday, of what his family termed simply “old age.” Their characteristically crisp and yet affectionate obituary can be found here.
I first came across Martin Marty in the bathroom.
I was in my early 20s, attending Wheaton Graduate School for my M.A., and visiting my former parents-in-law back in Ontario. Scanning the copy of Reader’s Digest my former mother-in-law kept there, I happened upon a brief article about contemporary religion in America. I don’t recall the article, just the odd name of the author: “Martin E. Marty.” Who in the world would call their kid “MartE Marty”?
Still, I was on the hunt for a Ph.D. program, and he taught at the school just downtown from suburban Wheaton. The name stuck.
Not long afterward, I was enrolled at The University of Chicago under his tutelage.
I called him Mr. Marty while a student, since everyone at Chicago was called “Mr.” or “Ms.,” a pleasant egalitarian custom going back to the legendary president Robert M. Hutchins. I was always “Mr. Stackhouse” and my professors were likewise title + surname.
(Only the MDs insisted on being called “Dr.,” anxious for their professional status the way only MDs are, God bless ‘em. Since Marty not only had earned a Ph.D.—also at Chicago—but been awarded dozens of honorary doctorates, it was amusing to think of a physician at a university committee meeting requiring he be addressed as “Doctor” while across the table sat “Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. … n” Martin Marty.)
Once I had graduated, he cheerily chirped one day, “Call me ‘Marty,’” which even his wife did, so I knew I had finally come into my professional majority.
Once I was identified as his student (and his influence helped me get my first two full-time jobs), people invariably asked, “How does he do it?” He was, after all, extremely well known in American religious studies, arguably the “go-to guy” for the mainstream press from 1959’s publication of The New Shape of American Religion until his retirement forty years later—and beyond. That’s an astonishingly long time to hold prominence in the academy, but everyone who knew about his prodigious output knew he deserved it.
The common joke as a reporter calling the Divinity School for a quote. The secretary replies that “Mr. Marty is unavailable at the moment: he’s writing his next book.”“Oh, that’s okay,” comes the reply from the knowledgeable reporter. “I’ll hold.”
Marty’s input was as amazing as his output. Student rumour had it that he read a book every evening. A few weeks before I was to graduate, my dissertation safely approved and submitted, I dared to ask—not him, but his wife, Harriet—whether the rumour was true. “Surely,” I said, “they just mean that he scans a book every evening to see whether he wants to read or review it. He doesn’t actually read an entire book every night?”
Harriet’s terse answer: “Ask him what’s in chapter four.”
Beat.
“Um, no, I don’t think I will…!”
Scholars older than I would ask me for his secrets. I would tell them he didn’t sleep more than six hours per night, and had “power naps” twice a day. I would tell them that he was marvelously disciplined and had no interest in movies or TV.
Of course, that hardly accounted for it. After a few years of these attempts at helping other academic egos feel better—“Ah! If I just slept less and worked a little harder…”—I gave a different answer.
“Think about how much better Michael Jordan is than a very good NCAA Final Four player. Now realize that Martin Marty is as much smarter than you and I than Jordan is than that player.”No one liked that answer. But I think it was the right one. I have known only a few people to whom I would attribute the title “genius,” and MEM is one of them.
He did so much speaking and so much writing that he made up little games to add a little excitement to the process. I saw him give no fewer than six speeches to six different audiences in which he conspicuously set the alarm on his wristwatch at the start of the talk and picked it up as he concluded . . . and the alarm went off.
He once wrote a book with the private requirement that it have exactly the same number of pages per chapter. He managed to do so—and it won the National Book Award.
Marty probably had ADHD, and he took neurodivergence to a whole new level. Like some ADHDers, he played music while he wrote: in his case, often one of the “B’s,” although his included Bartók, as I recall.
He didn’t have much in the way of private devotional time, he once told me. His mind raced too much. So he prayed every morning as he drove the almost-empty Stevenson Expressway from his home in Riverside, Illinois, to the U of C campus at 5:30 a.m. or so. And he said he depended strongly on churchgoing for his spiritual life. “I need church!” he said, just as directly as that.
Marty’s family were originally Swiss Reformed, and he showed some of the discipline of that heritage, but not its austerity. “He really believes he is forgiven!” his wife once told me, in good Lutheran fashion. And his bathroom was decorated with Luther paraphernalia: as he called it, “the tower room”—after Luther’s own celebrated experience. (Look it up. You won't believe me if I tell you.)
Marty had a gift for creative circumlocution. I once found out that he wrote a recommendation letter for me that said, quite accurately, “John Stackhouse prefers to make history rather than have history happen to him.” That’s been more true than ever these days….
Marty was not flawless in my eyes. He let a couple of loudmouths dominate my first year of doctoral seminars with him—mediocrities who clearly had peaked earlier in their careers and hadn’t yet gotten the news.
But he also expected much of doctoral students, and as gentle and solicitous as he was when students (or alumni) were distressed—then we saw “Pastor Marty” at work—he wouldn’t otherwise hold our hands. In my course with him on teaching, he made each of us offer a presentation and then required that we listen to the critiques of every other student in the class without saying a word in reply. He knew that if he let us talk, and we knew we could talk, we’d just spend the whole time listening to our classmates merely constructing clever defenses of our shortcomings. We had to sit and take it. It was a brutal, excellent experience.
One of my favourite Marty experiences was attending a conference of the much-missed Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College when I was now launched as a professor in my own right. It was splendid to come back to Wheaton (I had earned my M.A. there under Mark Noll) and to take Marty to dinner before he was to give the plenary address that evening.
As we were driving back to campus at about 6:45, for a session scheduled to start at 7:30, Marty asked me if I knew of a place he could grab a quick nap. Familiar with his unusual custom, I told him that the wings of the stage of the Barrow Auditorium, in which he would be speaking, were capacious and dark.
“Splendid!” he said. “I’ll just lie down on a tabletop there. And if it gets to 7:20 and you don’t see me, please come fetch me.”
We arrived, I dropped him off out front, and I parked the car. I went in, greeted a few old friends, and took my seat. At 7:15, a harried Edith Blumhofer, director of the ISAE, ran up the aisle to my seat.
“Have you seen Marty?” she gasped. “I thought he was with you!”
“He was. He’s sleeping up there off stage.”
“Oh, you!” she said, with evident exasperation at what she clearly took to be unhelpful joking.
Three minutes later she was back. “You weren’t kidding!”
“No, I wasn’t.”
And now we both had a Martin Marty story, one of hundreds that will be told this week and in many weeks to come.
Marty liked to josh that he wrote his column on the back page of The Christian Century to balance his friend and editor James Wall. I always was grateful that the most orthodox member of the Divinity School was my mentor—he balanced them, too—glad as I was to be taught by the likes of Langdon Gilkey, Brian Gerrish, and Bernard McGinn.
He was courteous and collegial—perhaps to a fault: many people wished he had used his bully pulpit to criticize and chide much more than he did. But Marty preferred to explain—and let people sort themselves out from there.
Except once. He wrote a scathingly satirical article sending up the typical liberal homily emphasizing justice-seeking and fellowship-building and niceness-encouraging. He concluded with this mock-humorous anvil, which I remember now only in paraphrase (he would have said it better):
“You’re welcome to use this sermon if you’re caught short of time this week. But one word of warning: There is not one word of the gospel in it. Not one.”
His namesake, another Martin, would have stoutly agreed.
Finally, I was deeply encouraged when, after a year of celebrating the centenary of Karl Barth’s birth (1986) in journal after journal and conference after conference, the late, lamented Reformed Journal opened 1987 with the cheeky cover well: “After the Party: Was Barth Really That Good?”
Marty had been asked to write for it, and his position exactly mirrored my own. Where Barth served the Church by reminding it of great truths of the gospel, the tenets of orthodoxy undermined by liberalism, he did it well: eloquently, boldly, and edifyingly. Where Barth innovated, however, that’s where Marty got off the train. As, it remains true to this day, do I.
Marty inspired his students to write for audiences academic and popular—combining, if we could, serious research with illuminating wit.
He taught us, as do all my good history teachers, to strive conscientiously to understand first before attempting any evaluation.
He inspired us to work hard, but also to love our families well, serve our schools with loyalty and dignity, and to do all we could to advance the Kingdom of God in both church and society.
And he loved us as he could and should: as a kind mentor, a steady and reliable encourager, and an intimidating example—one who, as a previous Chicago dean once remarked to a campus visitor, “should certainly be admired, but never emulated,” since none of us ever could possibly keep up with him.
The world has seen no one quite like Martin Emil Marty. It is duller, in every way, without him now.
February 17, 2025
Can You Believe This Guy?
A reader recently asked me about the Apostle Paul as an “unreliable witness.”
The phrase put me in mind of the literary device of the “unreliable narrator,” a staple of modern and postmodern fiction that adds at least a frisson of anxiety to a story, if not an outright subversion of it.
My correspondent, however, had something else in view: Paul’s credibility as apostolic leader of the early church. How can someone who claims to have been to heaven and back—whether bodily or otherwise (per II Corinthians 12:1–6)—be taken seriously as a magisterial teacher of doctrine and ethics?
If a present-day preacher were to make a similar claim, what sensible person would believe it, or him?
A few biographical snippets from the lives of formidable Christian teachers came immediately to mind. Martin Luther hurling his inkpot at the devil, who sought to distract him from his work of scripture translation. Blaise Pascal—scientist and philosopher—being so overwhelmed by a mystical encounter with God that he kept a brief account of this “night of fire” sewn into his jacket. And long before either of these two, the sober-minded theologian Athanasius commending to his audience an account of devils assailing Anthony, paragon of early monasticism.
Perhaps, of course, Luther didn’t actually throw the ink. (There is considerable doubt that he did.) Perhaps the story of Anthony is allegorical. Perhaps Pascal had an uncharacteristic experience that he wisely kept literally close to his chest.
Still, my questioner’s worry about unreliability would extend beyond Paul to the apostles as a group, and in a way even more challenging to estimates of their veracity. They didn’t claim just visions, but actual earthly encounters with the resurrected Jesus.
Maybe someone gets a knock on the head, or drinks the wrong thing, or is under tremendous stress of some kind, and he sees and hears things. Troubling, but understandable. Seriously commending to a broad audience the contention that one has had conversation with a dead man raised to life, however, ups the stakes considerably.
Christians of all sorts make a less spectacular, but no less radical, claim every time they talk about praying. The Christian belief is that prayer is nothing less than actual verbal address to the Supreme Being, who then responds in some way so as to guard, guide, and provide for that person.
Christianity, it appears, is unavoidably mysterious. Supernatural. Truly miraculous. Attempting (as many have) to reduce the Christian religion to a particular set of fond assumptions (“the universe is friendly”) and ethical ideals (“be kind”) is to reduce it to banality. The heart of Christianity is Christ, and Christ is supposed to have saved the world by his suffering and death, demonstrated eternal life to the world by his resurrection, taken his place as ruler of the world in his ascension, and promised justice and peace to the world by his imminent return. Nothing in that list is anything short of stupendous.
Meanwhile, Christians are supposed to be able to commune with him and his Father through conversation via the Holy Spirit of God dwelling in each believer. That Holy Spirit, moreover, regularly—I daresay routinely—transforms the world: heals wounds, sanctifies souls, enables heroes, comforts victims, reconciles enemies, empowers shalom-making, and sustains hope in a glorious age to come. Every element in this list is downright miraculous.
Furthermore, let's be clear that the strange experiences recorded in the New Testament are not mere freaks: weird doings that convey no significance. When one understands the Biblical story as Christians do, it actually makes sense that Jesus would come back from the dead, and that he would appear to his disciples to give them both reassurance and further teaching. It makes sense that Paul, the intellectual leader and primary missionary of the early Church, would have experiences that both expanded and confirmed his understanding of God. It makes sense that someone (in this case, John) would receive an extensive vision of heaven and of the world to come that would give hope and direction to the Christian church in his day and ever since.
Now, if you’re convinced that certain things just can’t happen, then of course you’ll doubt the credibility, if not the credulity, if not the sanity, of someone who claims firsthand experience of those things. Our general cultural familiarity with Christianity should not dull us to the extraordinary claims at its heart. And people who base their lives on such claims do deserve critical scrutiny as possibly being unreliable, even unhinged.
The world remains, however, a mysterious place—not so much “X-files” mysterious (although there are plenty of unresolved cases of that sort, from UFOs to out-of-body experiences), as “quantum theory” mysterious. The world is also politically mysterious, as you may have noticed, and psychologically mysterious, and romantically mysterious. Why do things happen as they do?
The world is even ethically and religiously mysterious: Why do people, and lots of them, act altruistically against all evolutionary advantage? Why have most people throughout history and across the globe believed in an invisible and generally undetectable Supreme Being?
It is possible—in fact, it is certain—that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The intelligent response to all this strangeness isn’t credulity, to be sure, but curious rationality. If my friend, a nuclear physicist, wants me to believe in the existence of electrons and tells me he can’t show them to me, I’m grateful for him at least to take me to Fermilab, outside Chicago, and show me their trails in a bubble chamber. “See? There’s evidence they’re leaving behind.”
Christians ask each other searching questions. If someone nowadays were to claim a vision or other supernatural experience, the Church should test that claim. One of the key tests of such a vision would be whether it coheres with what else we know of God through Scripture and the cumulative testimony of the Church over two millennia. It might well be so eccentric, or even contradictory, that sensible Christians won't take it on board as genuine. Being open doesn't mean being gullible.
If an acquaintance wants me to believe in anything apparently farfetched, then I do well to ask such basic questions as these: If there were such a thing, how would we know it? If there were such an entity, how would we responsibly conclude that it exists? If there were such an event, how would we responsibly conclude that it had happened?
Those are good questions for another day—or a book, actually, such as this one that pops into mind: Can I Believe? For today, it’s worth keeping a critically open mind even to someone who claims to have seen heaven and lived to talk about it.
Paul did. So did John. Jesus himself did, too.
But so did Muhammad. And so did Joseph Smith. Being neither Muslim nor Mormon, I draw the line here and not there or there, and for what I take to be good reasons. Where do you draw the line, and why?
January 29, 2025
Christian Nationalism: What Every Mother Should Know
Let’s be clear about one thing: Biblically speaking, Christian nationalism is a good thing. It’s good indeed—except when it’s bad.
Christian nationalism is in the American news all the time, of course, and because America is in the world’s news all the time, it’s now in all news all the time. Christian nationalism, however, is not merely an American phenomenon.
Christian nationalism is part of English identity. The King himself is the head of the Church of England and Christian bishops are on hand for every major state event.
Christian nationalism is part of other European identities as well, whether ceremonies in cathedrals, crosses in national coats of arms, or even the word “Christian” in the names of political parties and other institutions. (My favourite example of a Christian institutional name is the Banco di Santo Spirito—the Bank of the Holy Spirit—founded in the seventeenth century by a Roman Catholic pope and whose business signs startled me when touring several European cities years ago.)
Christian nationalism is essential to the “Mother Russia” ideology currently and cynically being fomented by Russian President Putin and his cronies at the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. It is also part of modern South Korean identity as a stark departure from Chinese and Japanese political and cultural domination.
It is present, albeit in a typically mild way, even in Canada—a country whose motto is taken from the Bible “He shall have dominion A Mari Usque Ad Mare” (Psalm 72) while a (slim) majority of Canadian citizens continue to identity as Christian. And our Aussie and Kiwi counterparts may have the most Christian flags in the world, as they sport the Southern Cross constellation alongside the overlaid crosses of St. George, St. Andrew, and St. Patrick in the British Union flag.
Just a minute, though. How can all these phenomena be lumped together under one heading, “Christian nationalism”? And what about the unsavoury elements apparent in at least some forms of it: national chauvinism, censorship, xenophobia, racism, sexism, curtailment of human rights, even theocracy?
I want now to address in particular Christian mothers. I do so for three reasons. First, despite the linkage in many minds of patriotism with machismo, it remains obviously true that identity and values, including those of the nation, are taught most early and most deeply to each of us by our mothers.
Second, polls tell us that Christian mothers in the United States are conspicuously supportive of Donald Trump. Not all of them are, of course. But it is surprising how many have decided, however reluctantly, that this Misogynist-in-Chief is fit to preside over their land and society.
Let’s see, then, if we can offer an alternative so that the Trumped-up brand of nationalism is not the only brand available to earnest parents trying to instill a proper combination of Christian and national values in their offspring. And if we can do that for American moms, we can help moms elsewhere also.
Third, mothers are busy people who have no time for professorial pronouncements full of circumlocutive silliness. They properly demand clear and simple ideas to pass along to their young charges. So if I can succeed in assisting this vital audience, I expect I can be of service to others as well.
In what follows, I am not going to distinguish between Christian nationalism and Christian patriotism. Political scientists and historians have argued over whether the former denotes an ethnic allegiance while the latter denotes allegiance to a political body, such as a state or empire. I also won’t get into the complexities of defining a nation, as social scientists enjoy arguing over the respective importance of language, territory, history, folkways, religion, and more.
An unexpectedly informative guide to some of these matters is freely available online: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Let’s take our definition from the article on nationalism by Croatian philosopher Igor Primoratz.
Paraphrasing him, we will define nationalism as love of one’s nation, identification with it, and special concern for its well-being. This love will include beliefs about and admiration for the merits of one’s nation. And this love will stem from a basic human need to belong to a group and be a part of a more encompassing narrative, to be related to a past and a future that transcend the narrow confines of an individual’s life and its mundane concerns.
Some Christians may immediately go on alert. They recall Paul declaring that in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Wouldn’t the universal familyhood of the Church preclude any particular sentiments, let alone preferential treatment, toward one’s own nation?
First, let’s notice that the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost did not suddenly render all Christians nationless, classless, or sexless. Christians continued to be Jews and Greeks. In fact, the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 responded to Paul’s concerns about Gentile churches being subjected to Jewish ways by recognizing the ethnic difference and authorizing different patterns of life for the two groups.
Christians also continued to be slave or free, and the New Testament tells them how to treat each other properly in those roles, just as it does “male and female” members of the Church.
Second, let’s notice what the Bible prophesies about that great day when the whole earth streams toward the New Jerusalem to worship the returned Saviour. We will do so led by national leaders who devote to the Lord not only ourselves but also the distinctive cultural treasures of each people: “Your gates shall always be open; day and night they shall not be shut, so that nations shall bring you their wealth, with their kings led in procession” (Isaiah 60:11).
Finally, let’s notice that the New Testament, following the command and practice of Jesus himself, urges Christians to honour our parents and also those put by God in authority over us. Political authority is explicitly discussed, but the similar commands to slaves, wives, and children are consistent with the teaching that all legitimate authority is to be honoured.
Paul puts the matter sharply—and financially: “And whoever does not provide for relatives, and especially for family members, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (I Timothy 5:8).
The social structures in which God has placed us—especially family, but also by extension one’s city and one’s nation—constitute our neighbours, and thus those whom we are immediately to love. Only God can love the whole world equally. We are to love those with whom God has given us a relationship.
Christian nationalism, therefore, is natural: loving one’s national neighbours in the name of the God who gave us to each other. Just as we properly seek the good of our families in ways or to degrees we do not seek the good of any other, so it follows that we seek the good of our city or of our nation as our priority. These are the communities God has immediately given us to serve.
Three major qualifications now must be added to this picture.
First, loving one’s country means helping it toward shalom—and that means judging and remediating its vices as well as celebrating and strengthening its virtues.
(Sorry. No decent mother would try saying that to her children. Let me try again.) Loving your country means helping it get better: fixing what’s wrong and improving what’s right.
I love you. I love you as you are, but I want you to be better. In fact, I want you to be the best possible version of yourself, and I will do everything I can to help you get there. That’s what Christian nationalism means also, what loving your nation requires.
(For Christians, of course, fundamental to becoming better is getting right with God through Christ and getting in step with the Spirit. Then all else that is good should follow, in the spreading outward of God’s rich goodness.)
Second, loving one’s nation does not mean ignoring our God-given mission to others. Just because we love our own family doesn’t mean we shouldn’t love other families. Just because we love our own city doesn’t mean we shouldn’t love other cities. Just because we love our own nation doesn’t mean we shouldn’t love other nations. Other nations are our neighbours, too. And in a world joined together by airplanes and ships and telephone lines and the Internet, we are all neighbours now.
To be sure, we can’t love everybody in the world equally. If we try to spread our little bits of money and prayer time and attention and emotion equally across our giant globe, we won’t do any good for anyone anywhere.
So we care for the neighbours closest to us—and for whatever neighbours God also brings to our attention. Maybe they are people we connect with through business, or sports, or music, or even just tourism. Maybe we hear about them, and we feel especially badly about their special needs, and we think God has given us what it takes to help them.
It would be a selfish family that cared only about itself. We mustn’t be that kind of family, and we mustn’t be that kind of nation.
Third, according to the New Testament, our proper, natural love for our family, our city, and our nation is put second—sometimes even put aside—in favour of loving one’s Christian family, the Christian city, and the Christian nation all over the world. Above all, we are to love God and love God’s new family created by the Spirit in the name of Jesus Christ.
In this new situation brought about by our membership in the Church, we care for our families and cities and nations as usual, but we also, and especially, care for one another in our local congregation. Moreover, we care for other Christians with whom we have what might be called the “neighbourly connections” God has caused to happen in our lives: denominational connections, or regional connections, or connections through international organizations.
Again, it doesn’t make sense to try to care for all Christians everywhere. God calls us to love our neighbours. So who are the ones God has brought near to us, has connected to us somehow? Those are the “nigh ones” God has placed nearby for us to love.
Before we conclude, you’ll have noticed that I haven’t gotten into whether and to what extent Christian principles, let alone particular Christian Scriptures (like the Ten Commandments) or all of them (!), should be written into the laws of the land. I haven’t made any remarks about what kind of politics is suggested by the Bible for Christian nationalists to seek for their countries.
That’s because, as a theologian, I see no particular political system suggested in the Bible for modern Christians to implement. That’s also because, as a historian, I’m impressed by how no political system gets it all right. I’m equally impressed that some systems seem to work better—that is to say, produce more shalom and especially for the most needy—in some times and places and not in others.
Christians will continue to disagree about the complexities of contemporary politics in the very various situations facing us around the world. We will have arguments about priorities and programs. And if we will at least occasionally shut up and listen to each other (also a Biblical principle of communication), we will improve those priorities and programs. We won’t get everything perfect, but we can do better—together. So let’s try.
Christian nationalism itself doesn’t imply any single form of politics for everyone everywhere at every time. Because God loves us and wants us to thrive, God’s Spirit instead will help each nation figure out what’s needed to make the next step forward toward maximal shalom—if we will truly consult God and treat each other lovingly as we deliberate.
If we don't behave like that, if we flatly disobey God by going our own way—even if we put crosses on our flags and include Christian slogans in our national symbols—we can expect not to hear the Spirit and be left to our own devices. Witness the current political landscape pretty much everywhere. But today is another day, so we can’t give up. Christian nationalism means pressing for national shalom however we can.
In sum:
Loving your family, your city, and your country is good.
Making an idol of your family, your city, or your country and disregarding everyone else is bad.
And loving God’s Church—which is God’s family, God’s city, and God’s nation—most of all . . . is central.
God will not bless our nation if we regard our own good and no one else’s. God calls all people to love their neighbours—not just Christians.
Furthermore, God calls nations to a standard of care higher than that of mere justice. Both Testaments tell us that love, both mercy and grace, are expected as well, even from governments—and especially toward the economically, politically, and socially powerless: in Bible terms, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner (i.e., “the stranger”).
In God’s sight, Christian nations are not better nations because they are Christian nations. They are better nations because they are better nations—by the Biblical standards of justice and love, by the producing of maximal shalom.
The Biblical test of Christian nationalism, therefore, is whether we love God and love our neighbours as, yes, we love ourselves. So, Christian mothers, tell your kids that God expects me to care for my family, my city, and my nation. Tell them also, however, that God will judge us if our love stops there. Then our Christian nationalism would be no longer Christian, but service to a very different spirit, a very different god.
January 22, 2025
Faith versus Fanaticism
Here’s a pointed question from a reader. Jared writes,
In your book Can I Believe? , you suggest taking one’s beliefs as a sort of “best guess for now” and being open to changing based on new information, because without the openness to change, it becomes a sort of fanaticism instead of faith. I have been wrestling with how to reconcile this with the “JESUS, ALL FOR JESUS” mentality that evangelicals tend to demand.
There is also the evangelical emphasis on relationship with Jesus, which tends to make being a Christian more of a commitment to a person—which strikes me as more like a marriage vow or an oath of allegiance to a king, which traditionally haven’t been “best guess for now, open to change later” situations. Do you have any thoughts on this?
In fact, I do.
Believing and Believing
Let’s notice right away that we don’t have a verb in English that derives immediately from the noun “faith.” There is no such thing as “faithing”: we believe—or we trust, or we confide in.
This particular use of “believe,” furthermore, is (confusingly) different from the other common use of that word that has to do with knowledge: “I believe that’s true.” We normally say, of course, “I think that’s true.” But when we use the construction “believe that” we are in the realm of asserting what we take to be knowledge—or, at least, what we take to be likely knowledge.
“Are you sure you left the back door unlocked for Millie to come in later?”“Well, I believe I did . . . . “
This use of “believe” is on the spectrum of “what we think we know—more or less.” The other use of “believe” is the one having to do with faith.
Faith also, however, connects with knowledge. We believe someone’s testimony, or we believe in something or someone, because we think we have adequate grounds to do so. “Doug’s a good guy, so I believe him.”
The two senses of “believe” thus frequently show up together: “I believe that this is the correct screwdriver for the job because Doug said so and I believe (in) Doug.”
Here is how faith works in everyday life. You sit down on a chair—you put your faith in it—because you think you know certain things about it: that the chair is intact, that it can bear the weight of your body, that no one puckishly sawed through one of its legs so that it would collapse under the next person who sat in it, and so on.
Likewise, you trust a babysitter to care for your precious offspring because you know certain things about her: she comes from a good family, she is great with the kids in Sunday School, and two other parents vouch for her.
We trust, we believe, and so we live—we risk—on the basis of what we think we know.
Believing as Relationship
My correspondent Jared asked about relationship in regard to faith and knowledge. So let’s get to the most important of such relationships: marriage.
The greatest risk, the greatest step of faith, we take in a normal human life (outside of religion: we’re getting to that) is to get married. We venture to get married, however, because we think we know what we need to know to do so: about marriage, about the other person, and about ourselves.
(We’ll pause for a show of hands from the married people: How many of you knew as much as you now think you should have known before you decided to marry that person at that time? [Pause for rueful laughter.])
Now, suppose at some point during the marriage that evidence appears that might indicate a wife behaving oddly, even badly. Maybe she’s working late—a lot. Maybe she seems evasively nonchalant about where and how she’s spending the extra hours. There are grounds for suspicion.
We would not admire a spouse who, at the first sign of such as-yet-unexplained behaviour, immediately filed for divorce. Loyalty is a virtue, and so is the common sense that there might be a benign explanation for her actions. Maybe she’s working overtime to pay for a vacation with her husband. Maybe she’s doing all she can to keep it a surprise.
Perhaps, however, the marriage is in fact on the rocks. Maybe through an affair, maybe through abuse, or maybe through neglect amounting to abandonment. (There is more than one kind of infidelity—literally, unfaithfulness to one’s vows.) There would come some point at which we would no longer admire a spouse who kept looking on the bright side and ignoring the accumulating mountain of damning evidence.
We would instead counsel him to face the facts and take the appropriate action. If he can work to save the marriage, good for him. But if his wife has truly ended it, then he is wise to acknowledge that reality.
Religious commitment is similar, and especially in the Christian religion. Giving our life to God is pictured in the Bible as indeed a form of betrothal: Israel to Yhwh in the Old Testament and the Church to Christ in the New.
Is Jesus My Everything?
It is always the case that we know only a fraction of what there is to know about marriage, our beloved, and ourselves when we declare our marriage vows. But getting married isn’t a fractional proposition. “Well, I would peg my knowledge of the relevant information at about 60%, so I’ll commit my life to my spouse at about 60%.” No, getting married is binary: “I do” or “I don’t.”
Likewise with the Christian faith. When you sign up, you sign up as your whole self. Conversion is about adopting a new way of life with a new God and a new community of likeminded God-followers.
Just as you can’t be 60% married, it makes no conceptual or practical sense to be 60% committed to the Lord. In this sense, the absolute language of both love songs and worship songs is appropriate, with all the extremes of “everything,” “all,” et cetera.
Let’s take a moment to clarify something important here. Christian hymnody, like Christian preaching, often speaks in this “love song” register. “You are my everything, I need nothing other than you, I give you my all.” We invite unnecessary confusion when we transpose the lovely, loving extravagance of love poetry into theological and ethical propositions.
In sober truth, we need more than just the Lord to live. Moreover, we shouldn’t give the Lord all our attention and loyalty. We need oxygen and water and food, for instance. We rightly give our attention also to our families, to our churches, and to our neighbours in mission. (Genesis 2 has the Lord recognizing that, even with God’s company and the companionship of the animals, it was not good for the first human to be alone—without a peer.) No, God isn’t literally “our everything”—even as we gratefully accept our sustenance from the hand of the Lord and we obediently serve others in the Lord’s name.
Nonetheless, when we say our vows in a service either of marriage or of baptism, they are absolute: “all for you.” Such language, such commitment, is appropriate. Indeed, you can’t be a proper spouse or disciple without such wholehearted affirmation.
Faithful, not Fanatical
Still, we must steer between hesitant skepticism—not fully committed—and stubborn fanaticism—committed no matter what. Fanaticism we might define, then, as insistence against compelling contrary evidence.
Maintaining a belief in a scientific theory (such as a flat earth) becomes fanatical when the evidence against it combined with the evidence for a contrary theory (a round earth) is vast—and should properly overwhelm alternatives. Maintaining a belief in the fidelity of one’s spouse in the teeth of a record of hurtful behaviour is not noble, but pathetic. And maintaining a religious commitment despite powerful and unanswered intellectual, moral, and experiential grounds to the contrary isn’t faith—it’s fanaticism.
Biblical faith is never fanaticism. Quite the opposite.
Israel’s Ten Commandments begin with the reminder that Yhwh is the One who brought them out of slavery in Egypt and so it simply follows that Israel should obey God’s instruction. Paul argues in I Corinthians 15, echoing the logic of Peter’s first sermon on the original Pentecost, that if God did not raise Jesus from the dead, then the Christian religion goes to pieces. But since God did, then commitment to Christ is valid.
In sum, we Christians want to invite our neighbours to consider thoughtfully the claims made in the Bible about God and particularly about God in Christ. We want to assure those neighbours that we are asking them to make a reasonable investigation into the truth of the matter. We are not asking them to leave their reason at the door and just plunge into some new spiritual experience, but to bring their whole selves into a new relationship with the true and living God.
We therefore need to assure them that we are not ourselves fanatics, people who ignore, suppress, and even punish those who raise good arguments against our doctrines. We are not psychological cripples who cling to a delusion to avoid dealing responsibly with reality.
We are not asking them to defy their reason, to commit to a religion and put their good sense on ice as they do. We believe Jesus to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
So we invite all comers to bring their best questions, their deepest doubts, and their gravest fears to him. We also simply and rightly acknowledge, as we hope our neighbours will similarly acknowledge, that if a better religion and a better deity appears, any prudent person would be wise to trade up. That’s what we’re asking them to do in conversion. We need to be willing, at least in theory, to do the same.
Commitment versus Certainty
For apologetic purposes, that is, we need to affirm that it is sensible for anyone to recognize problems with one’s worldview and to consider improving or even replacing it—and that we ourselves are at least theoretically open to that. We cannot ask our neighbours to be consider a change we ourselves are not open to considering.
Within the church, we do emphasize total commitment. Again, that’s appropriate to the kind of relationship we have with our God. But let’s be clear that our total commitment, our faith, rests on what we are convinced is reality, what we think we know.
As human beings, and unlike God, we don’t know most things we think we know for certain. Now, we can feel certain. We can be totally committed to believing this or that concept, principle, or person.
Certainty in this technical philosophical sense, however, means that I know that I couldn’t possibly be wrong, confused, deluded̛. Outside of self-evident propositions (such as “All bachelors are unmarried”) and states of mind (I can be certain that if I am feeling pain, I am in pain), we can’t claim certainty for what we think we know. (Think of the radical uncertainty depicted in The Matrix.)
That’s okay, though, since we routinely live without certainty. We don’t know for certain that our bank won’t cheat us, or that our dentist isn’t trying to kill us, or that our car’s brakes will suddenly fail. But we don’t, and shouldn’t, spend any time worrying about such things.
We believe Christianity is true (philosophically), and we believe in God (relationally), because we think we have grounds good enough to justify that faith. (Those grounds, by the way, aren’t just arguments, but experiences, too. Take a look at Can I Believe? for a survey of the various grounds, in fact, that have convinced people that Christianity is the true path of life.)
If those grounds shift, however, then the commitment made on those grounds might well have to shift, too. That’s just what it means to have faith, rather than practice fanaticism.
It is the general human condition that we make most of our decisions in life on the basis of what we take to be well-grounded faith. Faith in authorities and institutions, faith in textbooks and teachers, and faith in each other.
This is true even when it comes to making big commitments in life, and especially the biggest: marriage and religion. We shouldn’t be dismayed by this allowance of our human limitations. For the Bible itself declares that we walk by faith, not by sight.
So let’s just be honest and clear about the nature of faith—with ourselves, with each other as Christians, and with our neighbours whom we hope will join us in following the Lord.
FURTHER ON FAITH:
Can I Believe? Christianity for the Hesitant (Oxford University Press, 2020).
“Faith,” in The New Lion Handbook of Christian Belief, ed. Alister McGrath (Lion, 2006), 20-55.
Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (Oxford University Press, 2002).
January 10, 2025
Luke's Postscript to Christmas
Luke seems to end his story of Jesus’ birth with the presentation of the baby Jesus in the Temple by his parents, crowned by the prophecies and blessings of Simeon and Anna. The Gospel according to Matthew, of course, records one more story: the visit of the magi, the astrologers from “the east” (possibly Nabatea, in Arabia, possibly Persia in what is now Syria or Iraq) whom we know as the “wise men.” Jesus is likely one or two years’ old at the time of their visit—given Herod’s later order to slay all male children two years’ old and under.
Luke himself, however, is not quite done with the child Jesus.
There is precisely one story in all the Bible of Jesus as a boy. It is easy to see it as just standing by itself, a little lonely island of narrative between Jesus’ birth and the baptism by John after which Jesus starts his public work. It is often taught that way in Sunday School: an odd little story about an odd young Jesus.
Perhaps it is better, however, to view this tale as Luke’s Nativity “postscript,” his “one more thing” to say at the end of the birth narrative. It is a story that links the whole previous narrative to the man at the centre of the rest of GLuke.
Luke 2:41–52:
Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom.
After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. Thinking he was in their company, they travelled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him.
After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”
“Why were you searching for me?’ he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”
But they did not understand what he was saying to them.
Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.
We could spend a lot of time on this well-told story of Luke’s. Today, let’s focus on just a couple of surprises.
First, this little tale starts with an ordinary event: Jesus’ family traveling down south from Nazareth to Jerusalem for the Passover—the great feast during which Jews remembered God liberating the nation of Israel under Moses from Egyptian slavery under Pharaoh. It would have been a time when every Israelite would think about salvation and freedom.
Jesus is described as being “twelve years old” and “the boy Jesus.” He is on the verge of his teenage years, incipient adulthood, but still very much under his parents’ protection and guidance.
He was old enough, however, that when Joseph and Mary started walking home to Nazareth, they assumed he was also walking home with friends or family. At day’s end, they were looking for him to settle down for the night.
Jesus, alas, wasn’t in sight—and couldn't be found.
Like any anxious parents, Mary and Joseph headed right back to the big city to look for him. And they spent three terrible days (and, likely, sleepless nights) until they did find him: in the temple courts, discussing matters with the religious leaders who were headquartered there.
Everyone was deeply impressed—even “amazed”—at his questions and answers. Jesus would “amaze” people frequently in his life, but we might well recall that people can be amazed and still not like or approve of whatever amazes them. His parents were “astonished” also—but they weren’t happy!
Mary doubtless was, like all good parents everywhere, hugely relieved to find her missing boy. But what she is recorded saying is a rebuke: “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”
One other time in Luke’s Gospel Mary will expect Jesus to behave the way she wants him to, and he will surprise her (and, likely, everyone else) with his reply.
In Luke 8:19–21, Mary and Jesus' brothers stand outside a house in which he is teaching and ask for him to come outside to see them. It sounds like a legitimate request, just like the question she is posing to him here in the Temple sounds eminently reasonable.
Jesus replies to that request, however, with an implied rebuke of his own that sounds even a bit insulting: “My mother and brothers are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.” He realizes Mary and his brothers are not happy with him for some reason (not stated in the Gospel), they are not supporting his work, and he is setting them straight.
First things first, Jesus says. Obeying the commands of his heavenly Father—and their heavenly Father—must come ahead of any request of his earthly family, and especially of any request that implies he ought to be more concerned with them than with God.
Jesus does the same thing here, at twelve, as he replies to Mary: “Why were you searching for me?’ he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”
The original Greek text of Jesus’ reply is interesting. It doesn’t contain the normal word for “house.” Other English translations say something like “Didn’t you know I had to be about my Father’s business?”
What happens in the Greek is a kind of verbal gap: “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s?” Jesus is saying, “I had to be in my Father’s stuff, in his affairs, in his work, in his house. My priority is to be occupied with whatever is my heavenly Father’s. And in Jerusalem that’s going to be here, in the Temple.”
Then Jesus adds a rebuke of his own. Why didn’t you know that, Mother? “Why were you searching for me?” If I am not with you, then where on earth would I be? You know better!
But they did not understand what he was saying to them. Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart.
Luke records that his parents were confused by his reply. Jesus was normally so obedient—as Luke makes clear that he continued to be. So the issue here wasn’t a preteen acting out. What else was going on?
“His mother treasured all these things in her heart.” That’s what Mary had done also, according to Luke, after the shepherds had arrived. And Mary’s heart showed up again in this account as Simeon promised that her own heart would be pierced by the sharp edge of Jesus' challenging people to decide whether they would join him in God’s work.
Here was the first press of that blade on her soul, a powerful experience she would never forget—three days anxiously searching for her twelve-year-old firstborn!
Again, Luke makes clear that “the boy Jesus” is not being disobedient or disrespectful, as Mary understandably thought he might be. In fact, Luke concludes his story, and concludes (I think) his Nativity account with these words: “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.” Jesus was faultless, in the eyes of both God and his fellow humans, as he grew up properly to take on his life’s work—the work that Luke records beginning in the very next chapter.
Mary and Joseph had been spoken to by Gabriel himself before Jesus was born. Elizabeth had blessed Mary with confirmation of the annunciation that God was the origin of the baby in Mary’s tummy.
In Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary received shepherds who testified to them also of an angelic message. Then the magi came a year or so later to confirm it all—a message confirmed darkly by the Holy Family's having to flee to Egypt for a while to escape a murderously jealous King Herod, who also believed the prophecies, or at least was afraid the Jewish people would.
Still, all of that compelling testimony had come to his parents a decade before the little family went up to Jerusalem for that extraordinary Passover celebration. Ten years of ordinary life. Ten years for the excitement to die away and Jesus to be enjoyed as just an extraordinarily good boy.
Then he can’t be found on the journey home. Then he can’t be found for three whole days in Jerusalem. Then he is found at the temple, of all places—and he isn’t apologetic! Instead, he tells his parents that they should have known where he was and implies that their anxiety is their own fault.
They ought to have known better, Jesus says. And so should we.
After all these days of Advent and Christmas, we should be sure by now that Jesus is the Lord. We should be sure that God has come to save us. And we should be sure that our hope for a good life now and in the world to come depends on him and how we relate to him.
If we have learned nothing else from all the surprises of Christmas, it should be this: to not be surprised when we are reminded that everything focuses on God, not on us; that our life must be centred on following Jesus, not on fulfilling our own little plans; and that we need the Spirit of Jesus every hour both to empower us to “grow in wisdom and stature” as Jesus did and to focus our attention on what always centrally matters: our Father’s business.
It was a tough surprise for Mary and Joseph to find Jesus after all that searching in the Temple. It was a tougher surprise to have him rebuke them for not remembering who he was and what he was born to do.
Let’s not forget what we have learned, either, but instead treasure up all these things in our hearts, as Mary did. That’s what Christmas (and Luke 2, as Charlie Brown’s friend Linus Van Pelt reminds us each year) is all about.
December 28, 2024
Catholic versus Orthodox, West versus East: Christmas Tells Us Who Is Right
This title is baldly oxymoronic: theological clickbait. But a few minutes’ reflection on the deep and abiding differences between the emphases of Western and Eastern Christians at Christmastime tells us something important and vital not only about those churches but also about their Christ and the salvation Christ brought.
Essays in Wheaton College professor Timothy Larsen’s fine Oxford Handbook of Christmas briefly set out the respective theological emphases of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches at Christmas, emphases echoed by Lutheran and Anglican churches respectively—at least, according to the experts penning the respective essays on each communion.
In brief, the Catholic/Lutheran/Western emphasis is on the Nativity of Jesus as the event marking the Son of God becoming the divine-human person who would grow up to sacrifice himself as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Catholic and Lutheran services therefore focus on the Atonement, the Cradle both foreshadowing and being overshadowed by the Cross.
Indeed, it was striking for this Protestant to read a Catholic scholar (Anne McGowan of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago) describing Roman Catholic services thus:
The official Christmas liturgies of the Roman rite . . . do not dwell extensively on the Christ Child born in Bethlehem but rather on the salvation of humanity ultimately made possible through the Incarnation. Therefore, the celebration of Christmas in Roman Catholic worshipping communities involves situating Christ’s birth in the broader context of his death and Resurrection . . . .
… Roman [liturgical] texts for Christmas largely bypass narrative details about Christ’s birth, emphasizing instead “the marvellous consequences of that event for the regeneration of a human race fallen but destined for glory” and doctrinal reflections on its significance. (McGowan quotes fellow liturgical scholar Patrick Regan.)
Kirsi Stjerna, of the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in California, represents her tradition thus:
In the spirit of Luther, Lutheran proclamation at Christmas never moves far from the Holy Week’s remembering of the crucifixion but rather maintains the tension between life and death as the place to reckon the miracle of the Resurrection and eternal life, the promise of which became incarnate through Mary’s womb.
The Orthodox/Eastern emphasis—echoed by at least a considerable number of Anglican churches especially of the Anglo-Catholic and Broad Church varieties, if not so much the Evangelical tradition—is on the Incarnation itself. The Nativity of Jesus is the coming forth of the great union of the divine and the human in one person, the union that solved the great problem of Greek thought: the utter gulf between God and humanity, Creator and creation, immortal and mortal.
As Mary B. Cunningham of Nottingham University puts it, following the often-cited sermon of Byzantine theologian Gregory Nazianzen and hymn-writer Kosmas the Melodist,
God has taken on mortal flesh and thus renewed, or recapitulated, the original creation. . . . Heaven and earth are reunited and death gives way to eternal life. . . .
. . . The emphasis is . . . on the story of salvation from the Fall to Redemption in the Incarnation of Christ. (Note: “Redemption in the Incarnation.”)
Martyn Percy, formerly of Christ Church, Oxford, likewise speaks of “the distinctive theological emphasis that Anglicanism is probably best known for—namely, for its focus on the Incarnation.” (Again, Anglicans of the Evangelical party might both agree that Anglicanism in general might be known for that emphasis and yet stoutly insist on a balancing emphasis, at the very least, on the Passion of Christ.)
The Eastern Church thus typically criticizes the West for giving the Incarnation short shrift. Easterners see Westerners reducing the Nativity as to merely the preliminary requirement for what really matters in their soteriological scheme: the suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.
Why, the Easterners might press, are there not just one but two gospel accounts of Jesus infancy? And why do they hardly so much as hint at Jesus as Suffering Servant, but instead echo Old Testament themes of Israel’s redemption and global shalom under Messiah’s glorious reign?
The Western Church could respond that while, yes, there are two Gospel Nativity stories, all four Gospels speak of Passion Week. Moreover, all four Gospels are heavily weighted toward that week, with multiple chapters offering detailed description of those world-changing days.
Why, the Westerners might press, is the Cross, not the Cradle, the universal symbol of the Christian religion. Why else do crosses abound on and in, and provide the very architectural footprint of, churches in the East as well as everywhere else?
As a bemused Protestant in grateful awe of both of these traditions, I’m initially inclined to the view that the West is quite right. The centre of gravity in the Gospels is indeed Passion Week. For their part, the rest of the New Testament documents say next to nothing about the birth of Jesus, and the Incarnation itself is celebrated largely as the West construes it. The doctrine of the Incarnation is foundational metaphysics in the service of a soteriology focused on the adult Jesus: this happened in order for that to happen.
On its own, the Incarnation accomplished nothing toward our salvation, and salvation is the central mission of the Son of God as Jesus Christ. Put sharply, if Jesus had been merely born and then gotten killed in Herod’s sweep of Bethlehem babies, we would be yet in our sins. And the ubiquity of crosses in Orthodox iconography and architecture confirms that Orthodox believers themselves agree that of course the Cross matters centrally in the economy of Salvation.
I’m yet also inclined to the view, however, that the Orthodox might have the last word. In their doctrine of salvation, they emphasize theōsis, the gift of God’s own goodness of which believers receive through the Holy Ghost. By thus partaking of the divine nature (II Peter 1:4: a verse central to Orthodoxy and almost unknown in Western churches) we become more godly. And to become fully and finally the image of God in communion with God is the final telos—the whole point, we might say—of human creation and salvation.
Christ did not come, after all, only to atone for our sins. He rose in new life as the first fruits of resurrection and then he ascended as Lord to God’s right hand. He now waits to return to establish his everlasting reign on a new earth over his renewed people. For us sinners to be able to walk into that new world with Jesus and to be fit to take up everlasting residence in it, we have to be more than forgiven: we need to become godlike in our purity, in our goodness, in our Spirituality.
Again, the Incarnation on its own does not infuse us humans with God’s nature. The Holy Spirit, downstream of Calvary and of Pentecost, does that. And our Eastern brothers and sisters generally agree.
The Eastern instinct to celebrate, even to focus upon, the union of the divine and the human in the Nativity nonetheless is a good instinct. We Westerners need to get beyond Passion Week, key as it is, to remind ourselves and declare to the world all that Jesus did plus all the Holy Spirit does to be well and truly and fully saved. And a central element in the fullness of salvation is our partaking of the divine nature, Christ in us, our being filled with the Holy Spirit such that we bear only and ever his fruit.
The Incarnation is indeed the place to start, where Christ’s mission truly starts. It is worth dwelling on—not hurrying in Advent and Christmas too quickly to Lent and Easter.
For more on these themes, check out the TBM minicourse “Salvation Theology 102.” For now, let’s be glad for an Event so rich that no community of the global church can embrace it all, let alone articulate it all. Let us rejoice in, and truly learn from, the great prayers and songs and art of Christians eastern and western, northern and southern, ancient and modern, to celebrate and to proclaim a Christmas Story as best we ourselves can. And let us delight in others telling it their way, too.
December 22, 2024
Advent IV: What Is Biblical Love?
Perhaps at no time in Advent is the distinction between the generic “spirit of Christmas” and the particular Christian Nativity more clear than when it comes to the definition of the theme of the fourth week: love.
If we look at the accounts in both GMatthew and GLuke, we will notice this contrast. No one in either gospel is just sitting around enjoying someone else's company. People’s feelings are occasionally described, but mostly feelings of fear or amazement, not warm affection.
In fact, GMatthew and GLuke show us mostly the interactions of strangers. Besides what we can assume between Mary and Joseph, where indeed is love as affection—the default definition of love in the social celebration of the season?
Maybe the shepherds were good buddies and maybe the magi were friendly colleagues, but the Bible doesn’t say so, maybe they weren’t, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Love as affection is not the love of the Biblical stories. The Nativity wouldn’t make it into The Hallmark Channel’s “Countdown to Christmas.”
In the Biblical stories, everyone is busy. They are busy doing God’s work. Angels bring messages. Mary believes, and bears Jesus. Joseph cares for Mary and her baby. The shepherds watch their sheep, go see the promised Saviour of Israel, tell everyone they know about it, and go back to watching their sheep. The magi travel over “moor and mountain” to see Jesus and worship him, before disappearing from history. No one becomes fast friends with anyone else making promises to get together again in the new year.
When the adult Jesus was asked to pick out of the more than 600 Biblical commands the one that was the greatest, he took everyone back to Sabbath School, reciting what every Jewish kid knew: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” No surprise there.
The surprise was that Jesus then said, “And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:39–40). Jesus welds together love for God with love for those around us, the “near ones,” our neighbours. In fact, Jesus says that everything else in the law of God—the directions that God gives his people for optimal living—hangs on these two instructions.
Jesus later tells his inner circle that loving one’s neighbour well—and particularly the circle of fellow believers—will mark out the Christian community as truly Christ-ian. By loving each other as he himself loved them, they would look like him—and conspicuously. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:39).
John himself bangs away on this theme throughout his major letter in the New Testament, such as with this very direct injunction: “We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister” (I John 4:19–21).
If we worship Jesus and then focus only on the family (so to speak)—especially those family members for whom we have “love as affection,” then we haven’t loved as Advent demands. The love God expects is the love Jesus himself modeled for us: the love of a domestic servant (John 13’s account of footwashing), the love of a slave who willingly gives himself up to suffering and death (Philippians 2:7–8).
To be sure, we must not now perpetuate a dark tradition in Christian teaching: that Jesus’ example of self-giving suffering requires us to suffer whatever some abusive person or situation visits upon us. Jesus both commanded and endured not just mild humiliation and discomfort (“turning the other cheek”) but disgrace, torture, and execution—which he prophesied would come to many of his followers as well, as it surely did.
Still, however, Christmas reminds us that Jesus’ humility was in the service of the will of God. Jesus took a low place not because taking a low place is somehow meritorious in itself but because taking that place is the way to get done what God wants done. Jesus did not merely submit himself to enemies—he escapes murderous intentions more than once in his public ministry—but does only what will further the will of God.
Love is about shalom-making, not sin-enabling, even as the former sometimes requires the latter—from turning that other cheek to acquiescing in martyrdom.
We are in deep waters here, so for now let’s just say this: Don’t feel obliged to remain in an abusive relationship no matter what. Acknowledge that we do sometimes have to remain in painful relationships for a while—if only because pain is part of every significant relationship we will ever have. Love costs some pain, always.
But we should remain in the cause of blessing, not mere acquiescence in sin, let alone in the name of some spiritually veiled masochism or self-pity. Make shalom: make things better. If suffering will make things better, then suffer. And do so in the strength and loving company of the great Suffering Servant. But if it won’t, then don’t.
Jesus did not submit to suffering and death until the time was right—when his Father said so. Indeed, the Nativity story itself shows God warning Joseph to take the Holy Family to Egypt out of harm’s way. No good would come from little Jesus being slaughtered alongside the rest of Bethlehem’s innocents.
This, then, is what love looks like in the Biblical stories of the Nativity: people praising God and looking after each other, however much they happened to like, or even know, each other. The tradition of charity to everyone around you at Christmastime goes back a long way, and it is an authentic implication of the original Christmas story. Charity at Christmas is indeed a good start to the church year—a whole year of loving God and our neighbours.
Wouldn't it be great if love became a distinguishing mark of Christians? It used to be.
The fourth-century pagan emperor Julian is famous for chiding his own administration for lack of charity (not a Roman strength) in the face of Christian kindness to others: "For it is disgraceful that . . . the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well."
Less famous, but equalling telling, is the sharp remark made by the notable atheist Bertrand Russell early in the twentieth century. When pressed by journalists why he and a rich friend of the same political persuasion didn't give away their considerable wealth, he replied: "I'm afraid you've got it wrong. Clough Williams-Ellis and I are socialists. We don't pretend to be Christians."
(As an exercise in humility, think of what Christian denominations are known for nowadays: the stereotypes about Roman Catholics, or Eastern Orthodox, or Baptists, or Pentecostals, or Mennonites, or Anglicans. Each of those groups has given much to the poor in the past. But what is the public impression today? Who among Christianity's 50,000 denominations have a widespread reputation for charity? One: the Salvation Army. Let's do better.)
As Advent gives way this week to Christmas, therefore, let us live the life of the age to come, the life made possible by the first coming of Jesus Christ and the life to be fulfilled by the second. Live toward that hope. Live enjoying God and his world. Live making peace. And live to love: to bless, to increase shalom.
Yes, hope, joy, peace, and love come to us as gifts of God. But they also come as commands. So let’s get hope-ing, joy-ing, peace-ing, and love-ing, in the name of the One who came at Christmas to show us how and why—and to make it possible for us truly to do so.
December 17, 2024
Fact-Checking Christmas: True or False?
We're pretty serious here at ThinkBetter Media. But, overcome by Yuletide mirth, we offer the following quiz—even as our pedagogical intent is only slightly veiled...
True: The Iraqi government declared Christmas a "one-time holiday" in 2008, but in subsequent years this provision was not officially renewed at the national level, being applied in recent years only in the Province of Kirkuk.
Then in 2018, the government’s cabinet approved an amendment to the Law on National Holidays, raising Christmas to the rank of a public celebration for all citizens,
both Christians and Muslims. In 2020, a unanimous vote in parliament, which implements this amendment, means that Christmas is an officially recognized public holiday—"starting in 2020, and continuing into the future.”
See here.
Scholars disagree. Turkey is, after all, a New World bird. So the two European countries
that give us most of our Christmas lore—Germany and Britain—couldn’t have eaten
turkey in olden days.
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, features a “prize turkey” as
Ebenezer Scrooge’s fine gift to the needy Cratchit family. Turkey-eating got a boost as
cheap turkeys from Canada (!) replaced beef more and more in the English celebration
in the 1930s and after. Now turkey is the standard in that country—while Americans fret
over the similarities of the meals for two cold-weather festivals only weeks apart:
Thanksgiving and Christmas.
In fact, early in the twentieth century, women’s magazines in the U.S. were promoting carnivorous alternatives, from venison to veal and from steak to pork.
False. According to scholar David Nash, Professor of History at Oxford Brookes
University, the governing attitude of declared atheists, mild-mannered agnostics, and
anonymous religious “nones” is . . . indifference. Only the radical, rabid atheists of the
Richard Dawkins type tend to object.
True. Likewise, charities push hard for year-end giving, sometimes emphasizing the
tax break disappearing on December 31, sometimes simply reiterating the custom of
charity at Christmastime. This is a custom that goes back to English lords blessing their
servants with a special meal, small gifts, and (most blessed of all) time off.
True. Plum pudding was a common accompaniment to the roast beef typically
served—not unlike the way cranberries came to set off turkey—and it contained meat
and suet, along with dried fruit stewed in broth, spices, and wine. Mince pies were
mincemeat pies in like fashion.
Nowadays, plum pudding is strictly a (meatless) dessert, and is made the Sunday
before Advent, with each family member stirring it while making a New Year’s wish and
fortifying it periodically with whisky or brandy until Christmas Day.
True—although the “tradition” dates back only to the 1970s. This is one of a thousand
examples of postwar Japan taking elements of the occupying Americans to suit its own
cultural norms. Indeed, the Japanese Christmas is most like the Western Valentine’s
Day, as its central ritual is the exchange of expensive gifts by young lovers.
False. The two French desserts don’t go back behind the 1920s. The “Feast of the
Seven Fishes” echoes the longstanding Catholic fasting from meat during Advent, but
the feast itself is a twentieth-century product also (appearing recently in popular culture
on the streaming series “The Bear”).
Meanwhile, lutefisk does indeed go back a long way—so long, in fact, that most
younger people in Scandinavia deplore it. For at least a generation, it has been
shunned as a repellent reminder of an impoverished past. Only midwestern Americans
of Scandinavian descent seem determined to keep the custom alive.
8. In Bellevue, Washington—a prosperous suburb of Seattle—parents and children set up a tree at a public school decorated with mittens and bearing the good wishes of the recipients of those gifted mittens. They prudently avoided calling it a “Christmas tree,” but instead named it a “Giving tree.” A complainant lodged a protest with the principal, however, that the tree (actually: a coil of silver topped by a star) “represents some part of Christianity.” The tree was quickly replaced by a “Giving Counter.” True or false?
True. Dr. Gerry Bowler, who has written a fine, scholarly book on Christmas
controversies, lists no fewer than several dozen sanitized alternatives to the dread term
“Christmas tree” that have been used to avoid controversy, among my favourites of
which are these: a “Multicultural Tree,” “A Festive Bush,” a “Seasonal Conifer,” and
(dear to my heart as a former professor) “The Finals Tree.”
False. So far. The “Seinfeld” situation comedy show, with its impressive 10 Emmy
awards, alerted the world to this pseudo-festival. (Season 9, Episode 10: “The Strike.”)
Celebrated on December 23 (when no one else is doing much) as an alternative to the
perceived pressures and commercialism of the Christmas season, Festivus was created
by author Daniel O'Keefe, whose son Dan co-wrote the “Seinfeld” episode that
popularized it.
In the spirit of the “show about nothing,” the holiday features a Festivus dinner, an
unadorned aluminum Festivus pole, practices such as the "airing of grievances" and
"feats of strength," and the labeling of easily explainable events as "Festivus miracles."
True. Just barely. The script mystified network executives at CBS and they initially said
they would not order any more “Peanuts” specials.
Over 15 million viewers tuned in, however, which was fully nine per cent of the
American population that year. That’s equivalent to 30 million today, and about a
quarter of the number of people who watched Super Bowl 2024, the most-watched
Super Bowl in history. CBS changed its mind, and Linus went on to recite Luke 2 to
three generations of happy audiences.
False. But Haddon Sundblom, who painted the famous Coca-Cola Santa that globally
fixed his appearance in the minds of billions, also painted the Quaker Oats Quaker.
They could easily be brothers. Just google them.
Who knows? The scriptural story gives no number of the magi, nor does it name them. The Bible does give the number of gifts and their substances.
The middle ages solidified the story around the number three, giving them the names Gaspar (or Caspar), Melchior, and Balthasar. (The Eastern churches generally number them instead at twelve.)
One strong tradition is that they represented the three ages of man, while another said they represented the three known continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Hence the conspicuously swarthy features of the third, and the belief among many Chinese Christians that one of them was from the Middle Kingdom.
As the two traditions connect, Balthasar is usually seen as black, the youngest, and the bearer of myrrh. (I will leave for homework the interpretation of that connection of traits.)
St. Francis of Assisi is credited with staging the first outdoor crèche (French for manger or crib) as a teaching aid in the thirteenth century, although likely such tableaux had been presented before. No one seems to know, however, when the adoration of the magi got added to the shepherds’ visit. But that conflation produced a single scene in the popular imagination—despite the apparent time gap of as much as two years between the events recorded in GMatthew and GLuke—in Nativity scenes ever since.
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December 15, 2024
Advent III: What Is Biblical Joy?
“Joy to the world! The Lord is come!” Isaac Watts’s glorious lyric matched with one of Georg Frideric Handel’s best melodies has long been one of the great anthems of the Christmas season.
Watts rhapsodizes on the announcement of the angels to the shepherds: “I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:10–11).
Christian parents, Sunday school teachers, and other concerned folk take pains throughout December to focus children’s attention on Jesus: “the reason for the season.” And when it comes to contemplating the theme of joy during Advent, those concerned folk are exactly right to do so.
It is spiritually crucial for us to distinguish between “the joy of Christmas” and the joy hymned by Watts and first announced by the angels. The joy of Christmas can be almost anything you like—literally, anything you like.
Gifts? Check. Feasting? Check. Partying? Check. Good feelings? Check.
Lights? Check. Decorations? Check. Dress-up clothes? Check. Ugly sweaters? Check.
Ancient tradition? Check. Rich symbolism? Check. Family fun? Check. Good memories? Check.
Music? Check. Dancing? Check. Church services? Check. Movies? Check.
Love? Check. Peace? Check. Kindness? Check. Forgiveness? Check.
Romance? Check. Reconciliation? Check. Reunion? Check. Revenge? Check (at least, according to the Grinch).
Despite all the ways Christmas can indeed be blue, there is also a lot to enjoy. But precisely none of these is the joy themed in Advent.
The great Jewish leader Nehemiah, centuries before Jesus’ birth, put things exactly right on a different holy day, a different holiday. The people of God had gathered to hear the scripture in the capital city they were rebuilding after the exile. As they listened, they broke into tears as God’s Word pierced their hearts.
Nehemiah, however, reframed the situation: “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of Yhwh is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10).
The joy of Yhwh is your strength. There is no better verse to take quite literally than this one.
When I was a well-churched kid, I wondered how the joy God gave was somehow different than the joy I got from, say, playing hockey or playing the trumpet or playing a game. Was the joy of the Lord some deep spiritual emotion currently beyond my adolescent capacities? A mystic mood to which I could only aspire?
Later, I came to learn that the English word “enjoy” means both “take pleasure in” (our usual definition) and the more basic idea of “have the experience of.” And this double meaning is key to the joy of Advent.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism, one of the great teaching aids in the history of the church, starts like this:
Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
The chief purpose and destiny, the chief telos, of the human being is to glorify God—we are God’s image, made to extend godly goodness in the world, and thus we glorify God—and to experience/delight in him forever.
The delight is not separate from God, as a kind of feeling he sends our way like a generous relative mailing us a Christmas gift. The enjoyment of God is in the experience of God.
The “joy of Yhwh” is Yhwh!
Those who write about joy consistently distinguish it from happiness. The latter, it is commonly understood, is a fleeting response to stimuli. I pass a tough test or I eat a good sandwich or I hear a catchy song and I therefore feel happy.
Joy, we are told, is a deeper, constant thing. But I never understood quite what those people were talking about until I realized that this joy comes from Jesus in the form of (not to put too fine a point on it) Jesus. The company of Jesus in the Spirit whom the Father sent in his name—so the Holy Spirit is indeed “the Spirit of Jesus” (Acts 6:7; Philippians 1:19)—delights me. His being present to me is indeed his present to me.
The Bible has dozens of mentions of rejoicing, and the vast majority have to do with the people of God rejoicing in the presence of God and God’s mighty works on their behalf. Paul himself exhorts his flocks to rejoice in the Lord—a phrase he uses no fewer than three times in a single epistle (Philippians).
Think of how you feel when sitting in the same room as a close friend or a beloved family member. Their just being there simply makes you feel joy.
And there’s nothing simple about it. All the years of experiences with them—all the fun you have had together, all the challenges you have faced together, all the arguments you have resolved together, all the affirmations you have exchanged together—have sedimented into deep, dense delight in their sheer presence: joy.
The angels tell the shepherds something different than much of what the priest Zechariah and the virgin Mary celebrated in their songs earlier in Luke’s gospel: all that God would do for his people in the coming of the Messiah. The angels shrink the focus of joy down to its true centre, not what God would do, but . . . God: “Today . . . a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.”
If we don’t cultivate a sense of God’s presence during Advent and then the following twelve days of Christmas, if we don’t keep realizing God is right here right now—in the kitchen or in church or when we wrap presents or when we eat Christmas dinner—we will have to settle for the mere joy of Christmas. That will be more or less pleasant enough, but what a loss—
—like settling for “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” with its celebration of stores and gifts and snow and decorations, instead of Watts’s and Handel’s “Joy to the World,” with its celebration of . . . the Lord.
Another Christmas? For most of us, at least, it’s worth making the customary efforts to enjoy. Get the lights up, the wreath on the door, the cookies in the oven, the gifts under the tree, and some music on the speakers.
But the joy of the Lord coming to earth to save us all—and remain with us forever?
Let heaven and nature sing!
