Christmas. Adam C. English
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over a hundred years ago in the pages of the New York newspaper The Sun. In what has become the most reprinted editorial in history we see all the hallmark elements of a fight for innocent imagination in the face of extinction. Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote this inquiry: “Some of my friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’” The Sun responded in a famous and touching way, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” The response inspired a musical cantata and an Emmy-awarded TV special as well as countless translations and reprints. It should not come as a surprise that the author of the editorial, Francis Pharcellus Church, worked as the religious-affairs reporter for the paper. In the late-Victorian estimation of Mr. Church, Santa Claus “exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist.” Even if no one ever witnessed the patron of Christmas descending the chimney and even if no admissible evidence could be collected, Church concluded that this would not prove anything. “The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.”24
Beyond Virginia’s immediate question, Francis Church was responding to the ever-expanding scientific materialism and secularism of the day. At one level, the issue at stake in the editorial was Santa Claus, but at another it was the future of belief itself in the wake of “skepticism in a skeptical age.”25 Americans were at that moment feeling their traditional beliefs battered and blown about by industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, and scientific progress. “One characteristic solution,” says historian Stephen Nissenbaum, “was to think that God must exist simply because people so badly needed Him to; without God, human life would be simply unendurable.”26 People needed God to exist because more than ever God seemed not to exist. Nissenbaum’s observant insight brings us back to the movie, Miracle on 34th Street, with Kris Kringle in the wood-paneled courtroom, complete with objections, overrulings, and I-will-have-order-in-my-court-so-help-me-God gavel banging. In part, Nissenbaum names one reason so many people resonated (and still resonate) with Miracle on 34th Street: they wanted to believe. We want to believe. We just don’t know how or why. So, all we can do is just believe! This has become the best and really the only advice we know to give to people yearning for belief in an unbelieving age.
Our struggle will not be in vain if we are driven back to the incarnation. We must once again rediscover the mystery of divinity made humanity and eternity made time. Let us not be distracted by the sore-scabbed Victorian need to believe; rather, let us turn our attention to the real issue, the what of belief, the who of faith. This we find in the incarnation.
A Word from a Classic
I will always think fondly of Athanasius’s On the Incarnation as the first classic from Christian antiquity I read cover to cover. I was in seminary at the time and I read it over a Christmas break. Quite fitting, come to think of it. I sat on our blue couch next to a scrubby Scotch pine Christmas tree in our Fort Worth duplex’s front room. My reading accomplishment was nothing to brag about—the book spans less than seventy-five pages. But the experience was transformative. As if tipping over a vase and accidentally spilling out the rich treasure of the church’s theological tradition, I felt elated, delighted, and energized by the discovery of this Christian classic. I also felt a bit clownish. I was Nick Bottom from Midsummer Night’s Dream upon the discovery that his head had changed into the head of an ass. I kept touching the long ears of my newfound sensibility. The treasure had been within my reach all along. I had suffered from what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery”—the prejudicial preference for all things new and modern and shiny over against all things old and antiquated.27 I had assumed wrongly that “more recent” meant “more insightful,” “more scholarly,” “more advanced”; I was guilty of presuming that novelty equaled progress. I was an ass, but at least I knew it.
Athanasius (296–373), writing in the Greek of the mid-fourth century, begins with a simple question: why did God become human? Saint Anselm of Canterbury would famously ask the same question 600 years later in his Latin dialogue Cur Deus homo, or Why Did God Become Human? Theologians ask it still today, each in his or her own language. Like a tree whose branches are laden with fruit just out of reach, Athanansius’s question tempts us with delicious mysteries just beyond our grasp. And perhaps because it hangs outside the reach of nimble fingers and agile minds, we feel tempted to frustration. We might want to fold our arms and reject the whole idea of the incarnation of Christ as irrational (1 Cor 1:22–23). Because it presents us with an uncracked mystery, we dismiss it as impossibility. Athanasius meditates on the arrogance of the human mind that declares out of order anything it cannot comprehend, saying, “The things which they, as men, rule out as impossible, [God] plainly shows to be possible; that which they deride as unfitting, His goodness makes most fit; and things which these wiseacres laugh at as ‘human’ He by His inherent might declares divine.”28
In a tantrum of stomping and braying, we let our intellectual pride deride what it cannot grasp. We mean to mock God and religion and the folly of the gospel but we only make a mockery of ourselves. What is surprising, or should we say miraculous, is that the holy and everlasting One chooses to love and cherish us anyway. We should be nothing more than a misplaced footnote in the eternal history of God. We are the impossible and unfitted thing. The scorn we think to pour out on the gospel clings to us like tar; we end up covered in our own filth—we are the laughingstock, the wiseacres.
For all that, the Son does not laugh at us. He laughs with us.
He joins us in the “utter poverty and weakness” of the incarnation and the cross where he “quietly and hiddenly wins over the mockers and unbelievers.”29 The Son does not lead a heavenly assault on the evildoers of earth nor does he stamp his foot on high and demand submission. As Athanasius understood, he quietly wins the world over. In the hidden and unassuming way of the cross, the Son persuades, gestures, prods, and encourages until humans are made “most fit” to be declared “divine.” What the Lord accomplished in miniature in Sarah’s old and decidedly barren womb by bringing forth Isaac, the Hebrew man of “laughter,” the incarnate Son of God accomplished for all the people of the world, turning what was laughable into a genuine source of celebration and rejoicing in heaven (Luke 15:7).
On this point Athanasius speaks with unshakable certitude. The Word of God wrapped himself in human flesh and took on the shame of the cross “out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us.”30 By human standards, it was not proper or fitting that the Word of God assume flesh, suffer, and die. These things happened for one reason and one reason only, Athanasius says: “out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us.” And so we return to the beginning, to the arche whence the Father’s love issued forth as Word to be heard and seen and touched and believed. And yet in point of fact there was no arche, only the everlasting Instant.
Admittedly we are treading on eternal things where language fails. It is not accidental that at the climactic moment in the 1965 A Charlie Brown Christmas, when Charlie Brown cries out in final frustration, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?,” Linus answers simply and without commentary by reading the words of Luke 2:8–11. Everyone gets it. The meaning is clear. The curtains fall.
In the end, when language and explanations fail, there is but one thing to say. And even this need not be said because it does not depend on us to say it. It has already been said. As the retired Cambridge theologian Nicholas Lash observes, “God does not say many things, but one. God speaks the one Word that God is and, in that one Word’s utterance, all things come into being, find life and shape and history and, in due time, find fullest focus, form and flesh, in Mary’s child.”31 The simple story of the Word made flesh is the utterance of all