The Christmas story is a story about a supernatural event, a miracle — God, Himself, bursting into history. Angels, God’s messengers, supernatural beings, announce a new reality — a reality beyond nature and beyond human understanding — God, Himself, has come to earth in human form as a baby.
The Christmas story proclaims that God, a being outside of nature, intervenes in human history to save mankind and to exercise His authority on planet earth.
Suddenly, the glory of the Lord shone all about them.
But, the idea that a force outside of nature, God, can burst into history at any moment has a dark side. Apocalyptic thinking relies on such a view of God, and such thinking often leads to deadly results. According to an article in New York Times, “Waiting for Armageddon,” 50 million Americans believe that these are the “last days” and that, once again, as at that first Christmas, God will intervene in history: Christ will suddenly appear in the sky, in glory, and history will be forever changed.
These “last days,” according to these believers, may involve mass deaths, nuclear annihilation, incredible wars and destruction — but, in the end, God will intervene and everything will be OK. Such irresponsible and irrational thinking almost glories in anticipation of the negative; such thinking hampers motivation to do the hard work needed to create a positive future — the hard work needed to build a more just, a more safe, a more wonderful world.
Such irrational thinking begins with a literal belief in the Christmas story — with a belief that a force outside of history, outside of nature, burst into reality some 2000 years ago — and projects that story of the supernatural to a scenario where supernatural intervention saves mankind from the annihilation of the “end times.” This is a very dangerous way to think.
Certainly irrational thinking, religious radicalism, is a huge threat to the survival of future generations, to the survival of the earth itself. Thoughtful Christians need to find an understanding of their Christian faith that is worthy of a 21st Century understanding, one that does not promote irrational thinking and religious radicalism. Finding a way to understand the Christmas story is a good start. There needs to be an understanding grounded in an appreciation for awe inspiring mystery, but also grounded in a reality worthy of a 21st Century understanding.
A 21st Century understanding of the Christmas story, it seems to me, should inspire us to contemplate that human life itself is mysterious, beyond our understanding, and perhaps, even beyond our capacity to understand. A 21st contemplation of the story of Christmas must deal with the concept of human destiny. The Christmas story is the story of the birth of a baby, a baby who grew into his potential. We don’t need choirs of angels to know that every baby has a great potential beyond our comprehension — a potential to do good, a potential to help raise humanity to new heights of compassion, justice, truth and love. The Christmas story is a story of great hope; it says that in every baby the human race can start anew.
Assuming the Christian message that God appeared to humans in some way in the form of Jesus, the main issue is what did God do and what are we supposed to do about it? The answer is that Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, rejected the temptations of wealth and power, cured the blind, sick and even the dead, told us to love God and our neighbor and forgive wrongdoing, ate with sinners and welcomed the outsiders, confronted the powerful, and did not resist being killed. Despite this he was not marginalized, but became one of humankind’s most influential figures, to the extent that believers later determined that God overcame his death and that through his life God reconciled to an fallible and often evildoing humanity.
What are we to do in the 21st century? “Go and do likewise.” Regardless of who preaches the invocation at Obama’s inauguration, Christianity in America is a mile wide and an inch deep. Our political leaders are more like the conniving and murderous King Herod, for whom the babies of Bethlehem were “collateral damage” to his efforts to kill his rival for power. If Jesus appeared in Iraq and some powerful clerics there asked the US occupation powers to get rid of him, is there any doubt what would happen? Most of what Jesus preached is counterintuitive to Americans. We worship wealth, power and celebrity much more than anyone worships Jesus or his God. Few look at themselves before they judge their fellows. In particular, few value the outsiders and social outcasts (in the gospel they are often “Samaritans,” a nation despised by Jesus’ followers. Today they might be homosexuals or undocumented immigrants, or whoever is in the opposite side from you in the culture wars) and believe that they may be ahead of us in line for divine rewards.
Today few of us have any real faith in what Jesus taught. The many ambiguities of the Bible, works by many authors and editors written over a thousand years in cultures different from our own, gives us much leadway to care more about sexuality, or male authority, or contradictions between religious poetry and modern science and the anxieties that it creates, or a God who sometimes favors one person or nation over another in ways that do not make sense, or demands, condones or commits cruelty and violence. We experience all of this in a world in which people are no longer rooted in traditions, when knowledge and technology are running ahead of our ability to live together in peace and well being, when inadequacies in human power, knowledge, goodness and loving are clear, where humankind is careening into a dangerous, unprecedented and uncertain future, and where everyone will eventually die. We have questions without clear answers. What kind of God might there be and what does it matter to us? Can a God be good and powerful and loving? Is God like a parent, a boss, an emperor, a friend, some combination of these, or something totally different? What kind of relationship are we to have? How much does God control, how much do we control, and how much is just out of control? How are we do live? Can we give it away without getting something in return? Should we take risks of serious losses? Is it “us” against “them”? What is good? What if anything happens after we die? Why should we believe or have faith in anything?
As Bock says, it may be beyond our capacity to understand these things. Certainly we get from the Bible much sense of goodness and tragedy, even when we recognize the many abuses of religion that have happened in human affairs, and which continue to happen. Still we know that new babies turn into new people who can seek goodness and integrity from whatever is out there. We can too, asking ourselves do we really believe this and if so what are we going to do with this so as to live our lives accordingly.
Stan, you ask, “Why should we believe or have faith in anything?”
What I am proposing in this post is that we have faith in human perfectibility. According to Christian dogma, Jesus was totally human. We are reminded every year at this time that he started as a helpless baby, just like we all start, and he grew into his potential. It is a good question to wonder if Jesus’ growth into his potential was inevitable, or not. But we can hardly imagine that his growth was easy or automatic because, anyone who is totally human has huge tasks to accomplish if he or she is to reach their potential. Our world must produce a new generation of leadership with the leadership qualities shown in Jesus — willingness to challenge authority, passion for justice and healing, principled thinking, etc. We are failing to develop the wholeness of human potential. I’ve set for myself a big goal this year to organize my thoughts on education and organizational theory and write my book.
The Bible story makes clear that the upbringing and education of Jesus was not left to chance, but that destiny placed him with parents who provided a good example and a good environment for his personal growth. Education is all about environment.
The world can become anew with each new generation of babies. The only hope for the world is that humanity itself can change, and that more and more babies can grow into their human potential. It’s an idea worthy of this Christmas season.
Of all the major religions, Christianity is arguably (at least as it has developed culturally) the least in tune with human perfectability. In fact you have doctrines like original sin and even the Calvinist “total depravity” which seem to have in part developed from an aversion of Biblical writers to “the flesh,” (ideas that often seem rooted in aversion to women and sexuality.)
Obviously the wars, genocides, and abusive governments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have done little to disprove these doctrines of human fallibility and evil. In fact these wars are often articulated as struggles between ideologies of human perfectability, Naziism and Communism in particular, and the more “tragic” view of Christianity.
It is not clear where this tragic view is to get us. When a prominent evangelist gets caught in a scandal of sex and corruption, or a church institutionally protects priests who abuse children, this allows them to throw up their hands.
At Christmas, Christians argue that historically a saving act happened with the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, where God has saved God’s people. Most orthodox Christians will say that humankind has a sinful nature and can only be “saved” from this by the merciful intervention of God, recorded historically through the crucifixion of Jesus whereby God bore God’s punishment for humankind’s sins.
Since God’s people don’t really behave like they have been saved in any real sense, some have pushed this out to say that Jesus will come again, and this time save God’s people. This may seem like a cop out, particularly since we do not have a culture which is organized to do Christian behavior. (Which is different than a society organized to make people profess Christianity or belong to or attend a Christian church).
Christians have also had some of their more incomprehensible squabbles about whether Jesus was really God, really human, or both at once, and what any of this can possibly mean in practice. If Jesus as seen as a “perfect” human being, (in the tradition of the unblemished lamb killed for God in the ancient rituals rooted in a nomadic shepherd existence) this is usually a reflection of his Godlike side. The assumption is that no other person is going to be perfectable.
If Jesus was human perfection, we can still question what it means to us. Jesus being human may mean as little to me as the fact that LeBron James is human, if that is supposed to help me dunk a basketball. Jesus is depicted as being tempted by Satan with wealth, power and special treatment. We all know how that was going to turn out, but at least Satan thought it was worth a shot. Most of us feel we would be eminently temptable, and the bigger question is under what mindset would we choose to resist the temptation.
Jesus told his contemporaries that the Kingdom of God was at hand, and told them what that meant. We do not seriously try to put what he said into practice. To many Christians, what he said and did in his life is less significant than what he did by his death. Since we haven’t really tried to live by what he said, it’s hard to say how much better people would be if they did.
“Perfection” seems like a theological abstraction, that is either unlikely for people to attain or if a few did, is unlikely to be widespread, and may even get them treated like Jesus, Gandhi and MLK (the latter two are known to us to have struggled with imperfections, and in some way may be more realistic role models for the rest of us). Looking for perfection may also have a “why bother” quality to it, in an era where what seems possible and worth bothering about matters a whole lot. Making the best of human potential, as described by Jesus, may make more sense. We can thereby admit there is also human potential to do evil, which we know is often encouraged by having evil done to us. However we are not as helpless before it as some versions of Christianity suggest. “The dog you feed is the dog that grows strong” is a Native American answer to the “problem of evil.” We can feed the Jesus dog.