Confessing Evangelical

Welcome to earth, Thou noble Guest,
Through whom the sinful world is blest!
Thou com'st to share my misery;
What thanks shall I return to Thee?

Ah, dearest Jesus, holy Child,
Make Thee a bed, soft, undefiled,
Within my heart, that it may be
A quiet chamber kept for Thee.

My heart for very joy doth leap,
My lips no more can silence keep;
I, too, must sing with joyful tongue
That sweetest ancient cradle-song:

Glory to God in highest heaven,
Who unto us His Son hath given!
While angels sing with pious mirth
A glad new year to all the earth.

"From Heaven Above to Earth I Come"
(Vom Himmel Hoch) by Martin Luther,
TLH 85, vv. 8, 13-15

Christmas has now officially started: just finished listening to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge (see previous, anticipatory posts below). This will be available on the BBC website shortly: well worth a listen (update: click here to listen). Just don't forget to wait till sundown. :-)

This is the opening prayer from the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, originally written in 1918 for King's College Chapel, Cambridge, but used at similar services up and down the country (the version here is from Carols for Choirs). The final paragraph in particular (about "the multitude which no man can number") always brings a lump to my throat:

Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.

Therefore let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child.

But first, let us pray for the needs of the whole world; for peace on earth and goodwill among all his people; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build, and especially in this our diocese.

And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us remember, in his name, the poor and helpless, the cold, the hungry, and the oppressed; the sick and them that mourn, the lonely and the unloved, the aged and the little children; all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.

Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are one forevermore.

These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the Throne of Heaven, in the words which Christ himself hath taught us: Our Father, which art in heaven...

For me, this prayer is inextricably linked with the Christmas Eve service at York Minster. My uncle sings in the choir at York Minster, and the Minster carol service has been a traditional part of my family's Christmas celebrations for at least the last twenty years (not this year, however: our younger son's birthday takes priority!).

The Minster carol service is quite an event, with thousands of people packing out the cathedral (no chance of a seat if you arrive less than an hour before the start). Apart from this prayer, another highlight is the final reading, John 1:1-14, read from the high altar by the Archbishop of York: spine-tingling stuff that brings home the mystery and wonder of the Incarnation (the introductory words for that reading are, "St John unfolds the great mystery of the Incarnation").

As for the King's College service on the radio, this will now forever be linked in my own mind with sitting in Farnborough Hospital with my wife last year, listening to the service on the bedside radio while waiting for the doctors to decide how best to deal with the fact that my wife was now nearly two weeks overdue with our second baby. Before the end of the service, a decision had been taken, and within a few hours - just after ten p.m. on Christmas Eve - our second son was brought into the world.

I love Christmas Eve!

To accompany the Bidding Prayer (see above), here are the readings for the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, including the traditional titles read at the start of each lesson. These lessons set out, as the Bidding Prayer puts it, "the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child". Each lesson opens in a new window:

1. Genesis 3:8-15. God announces in the Garden of Eden that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head.
   


2. Genesis 22:15-18. God promises to faithful Abraham that in his seed shall the nations of the earth be blessed.
   


3. Isaiah 9:2,6-7. Christ's birth and kingdom are foretold by Isaiah.
   


4. Isaiah 11:1-3a,4a,6-9. The peace that Christ will bring is foreshown.
   
   or Micah 5:2-4. The prophet Micah foretells the glory of little Bethlehem.
   


5. St Luke 1:26-35,38. The angel Gabriel salutes the Blessed Virgin Mary.
   
   or Isaiah 60:1-6,19. The prophet in exile foresees the coming of the glory of the Lord.
   


6. St Matthew 1:18-23. St Matthew tells of the birth of Jesus.
   
   or St Luke 2:1,3-7. St Luke tells of the birth of Jesus.
   


7. St Luke 2:8-16. The shepherds go to the manger.
   


8. St Matthew 2:1-11. The wise men are led by the star to Jesus.
   


9. St John 1:1-14. St John unfolds the great mystery of the Incarnation.
   

I'm about to post the wonderful Bidding Prayer from the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, but before I do so, there's some negative carping about the said prayer that I wanted to get out of the way first. While I was finding an online copy of the Bidding Prayer, I couldn't help noticing how the prayer has "developed" over the years at King's College, Cambridge.

Here's the (I assume) original wording of one of the paragraphs of the prayer, as adopted by Carols for Choirs and still used by other churches and cathedrals that use this service:

And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us remember, in his name, the poor and helpless, the cold, the hungry, and the oppressed; the sick and them that mourn, the lonely and the unloved, the aged and the little children; all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.

However, those listening to the service on the radio this year will not hear those words, nor will they have done so for at least a decade. By 1997 (the earliest date for which the order of service is available online), the highlighted words had become:

...and all who know not the loving kindness of the Lord.

Wouldn't want to suggest that not knowing the Lord Jesus was ipso facto the same as not knowing the Lord, now, would we? By 2002, however, even "the Lord" had obviously become too specifically "Christian" in tone - is this a term with which Muslims would feel comfortable, I ask myself? - so since then we have had:

...and all who know not the loving kindness of God.

For some bizarre reason, however, the multitude of those who rejoice with us "upon another shore and in a greater light" is still one "which no man can number". Bit of further editing required there, shurely?

Anyway, enough of such unseasonal griping. One positive post coming right up!

Time magazine has been getting excited about this year's discovery that "Bloggers Get Scoops Too". And in case anyone needed proof of this, Josh reports on another "evangelical anti-Incarnationism" smoking gun: Prof FW Grosheide's assertion that "...the shed blood and the broken body of Christ do not exist anymore."

A few months ago, I thought about doing a series of posts on the theme, "I Was A Teenage Twentysomething Heretic". This was after I read the sections on Christology in the Formula of Concord and - my mind being suitably blown by what I read - realised just how feeble my understanding of the Person of Christ had been during my decade as an Anglican Evangelical. But the detailed analysis of the FoC which this would have required all seemed too much like hard work, so I never got round to it.

And anyway, perhaps "heretic" is overstating the point. It's not that I would have denied the teachings of Nicaea or Chalcedon, quite the contrary in fact: adherence to orthodox teaching was very important to me, and one of the main attractions of Lutheranism was its conscious desire to take seriously the orthodox understanding of the Incarnation. However, reading the Formula of Concord did make me realise how lame the understanding I had inherited was, compared with the richness and depth of Lutheran/Cyrillian Christology (the fact I would probably have at least half-agreed with Simon Manchester's comments on Christmas says it all).

But one thing that struck me when I was considering my Twentysomething Heretic series was how teachings I would previously have regarded as particularly obnoxious - such as the Real Presence - are in fact excellent defences against the sort of errors to which evangelicals can be vulnerable.

For example, the question came to mind one day during the summer, "Does the risen Christ have blood coursing through His veins?" (or, as Prof Grosheide might phrase it, "do the shed blood and the broken body of Christ still exist?"). To which the answer now seemed to be, "Well, yes, He must have, because otherwise how could His blood be present in, with and under the wine in the Sacrament of the Altar?"

It then struck me with some force that I had previously been working on the vague and unnoticed assumption that Christ no longer had blood circulating round His risen body.

Quite apart from this being directly contrary to our Lord's own description of His risen body, what this really revealed was that I had not truly believed in my heart that Christ was still "human", that He was still incarnate. I was conceiving of what St Paul describes as the "spiritual body" of the resurrected life as something less than material, rather than more solid, more real than our current level of material existence. (A bit like the point CS Lewis makes, that the reason our Lord could pass through walls after His resurrection was not because He was immaterial compared to them, but because the physical matter of our universe is now so immaterial compared to Him.)

But our confession of the Real Presence - or, to use the Pontificator's excellent phrase, "the Real Identification" - is a confession that Christ's blood is truly present in the cup at the Lord's Supper, which is a confession that our Lord still has blood, which in turn is a confession that our Lord is still truly incarnate, very God and very Man. To lose the first link in that chain of reasoning doesn't necessarily mean you lose the second and third links, but it does leave one much more vulnerable to the "Casper the Friendly Ghost" view of the resurrection body, and contributes to the downgrading of the Incarnation among many evangelicals.

If in fact I am now mistaken, have got the wrong end of the stick, and am falling into dire heresy, please tell me ASAP!

In the meantime, perhaps I should, after all, go on to look at how the "semper virgo" and "clauso utero" teachings (which are both at least assumed, even if not actually confessed, in the Book of Concord) can help guard against other Christological errors (for example, the danger of what one might call "creeping kenoticism"). But that's perhaps too hot a potato to start tossing around just before I go on my Christmas break...

Daniel's revised Christmas carol poll left me in a quandary (unlike version 1, which left me disenfranchised): should I vote for In Dulci Jubilo, or for Vom Himmel Hoch (a chorale of whose existence I was unaware till taking delivery of this less than a month ago, but which is now already one of my all-time favourite Christmas hymns).

In the end, In Dulci Jubilo won by a nose. How could it fail, really, when you consider the origins of this "quintessential Christmas carol"?:

The origins of this carol are unknown, but one fourteenth-century writer reported that the angels sang it to the mystic Heinrich Suso (d. 1366), who, upon hearing the music, took up dancing with the angels.

This account comes from Duck Schuler's fascinating article, "Dancing with Angels", from a 2002 issue of Credenda Agenda. As Schuler goes on to observe:

That's one of the best how-I-thought-of-this-tune-stories that I have ever read. But it does give us insight into the writer's estimation of the tune. How else could we get such delightful words and music? Six hundred fifty years later it continues to delight us.

What gives this carol its charm and beauty is its "macaronic" form - in other words, the way it mixes Latin and German (originally) or English (in translations such as the following):

In dulci jubilo
Now sing with hearts aglow!
Our delight and pleasure
Lies in praesepio,
Like sunshine is our treasure
Matris in gremio.
Alpha es et O!

The music and text were first published together in printed form in a 1530 Lutheran hymnal, and one verse that first appeared in 1542 may even have been written by Martin Luther himself. It certainly seems to have his fingerprints all over it:

O Patris caritas! [O love of the Father]
O Nati lenitas! [O gentleness of the Son]
Deeply were we stainèd
Per nostra crimina; [Through our sins]
But Thou for us hast gainèd
Coelorum gaudia. [The joy of heaven]
O that we were there!

This carol is also sometimes sung in a non-macaronic, English-only translation ("Good Christian Men Rejoice", by JM Neale). Um - why?

Schuler also provides an interesting analysis as to why the carol is so musically pleasing:

The music is in the form of A (a a) B (b c) B (b c) C (d e). The first eight notes of the melody are repeated immediately, but the next unit that is repeated is twice as long. These melodic repetitions are written in such a way as not to be tedious but to provide a pleasing coherence. The melody is in a lilting triple meter and sustains an iambic rhythmic character (pretty much) throughout. The rhythm propels the melodic line upward in the opening phrase, the musical equivalent of bouncing higher and higher on a trampoline.

So now you know.

Last word goes to the last verse:

Ubi sunt gaudia [Where are joys?]
In any place but there?
There are angels singing
Nova cantica [New songs]
And there the bells are ringing
In Regis curia. [In the King's court]
O that we were there!

Depending on your mindset, you'll either find this completely sick (think of the audience's slack-jawed response to the opening chorus of "Springtime for Hitler" in The Producers) or completely sick and also rather fun (think of the audience's response to the rest of "Springtime for Hitler"): Penguin Baseball. The record in our office so far is 328.3 metres...

The Spectator has an interesting interview with Diarmuid MacCulloch, author of a recent history of the Reformation, as well as a highly-regarded biography of Cranmer a few years back, in which he describes the shifts in approach to Reformation history over the past forty years.

The interviewer, Theo Hobson, describes how "Reformation studies ... underwent a revisionist revolution, with the questioning of the Protestant triumphalist narrative". MacCulloch continues:

That began in the mid-1970s, and it actually emerged from local studies — for example, the work of Christopher Haigh on the Reformation in Lancashire, and I was doing a similar study on Suffolk. The picture was emerging of a very vigorous Catholicism both before and after the Reformation. The old picture of a decaying, corrupt Church was just not right. So there was a rejection of the Protestant triumphalism of historians such as A.G. Dickens.

Hobson then observes that, "For a while the pendulum swung the other way, towards an idealisation of pre-Reformation England". I suppose this would be typified by books like Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars, which is a fascinating book that certainly puts paid to any notion that the old Catholic religion was unpopular and in steep decline. But reading Duffy did put a question in my mind that MacCulloch also raises: if the pre-Reformation church was so great, how come the Reformation happened in the first place?

I think we’ve now moved on a stage - there's a recognition that the Church was complex and rich before the Reformation, and that what came after was also complex and rich. But a big question remained which the revisionists tended to ignore. If this Church was so strong and complex and richly textured, and popular, then how could it fall apart so quickly, which undoubtedly it did? The Reformation becomes much more interesting than in the old account, where the Church was ready to collapse.

ISTM that this "complex and rich" account of the Reformation is more convincing than either a "Protestant triumphalist" account of victory over a decaying Catholicism, or the revisionist account of Protestantism forced upon an almost wholly unwilling nation.

I also wonder whether the "Protestant triumphalist" view has been somewhat exaggerated and caricatured by the revisionists. Surely a large part of the Reformers' objection to late-medieval Catholicism was precisely that it was lively and vigorous, but with its life and vigour being largely misdirected, into just the sort of picturesque but theologically-unsound activities that Eamon Duffy (a Roman Catholic) finds so persuasive: Masses, altar guilds, the cult of the saints, etc. St Paul's words still seem appropriate here:

I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness.

The life and vigour of works-orientated Catholicism is one reason why the Reformers put so much energy (perhaps too much energy in some cases) into "stripping the altars"; perhaps that is also why it took a long time for the public as a whole to catch up, since by and large people couldn't see what the real problem was.

This remains a common problem today. Who can doubt that the Episcopal Church, for example, has a great deal of "life and vigour" on its own terms (as seen, for example, in the rich and colourful theatre of Gene Robinson's consecration as bishop)? That's one reason why it's taken so long for conservative Anglicans to rouse themselves to take action against apostasy within that church. And within Lutheranism, the number one argument put forward by proponents of church growth techniques and contemporary forms of worship is that the churches which adopt these practices are more lively and vigorous than those which resist them.

It would be easy to hold fast to the faith once for all delivered to the saints if heterodox churches (and Christians) could be easily identified by their decadence and decay. But the theology of the cross means that very often it is churches that confess the true faith that look unimpressive, apparently lacking life and vigour, whereas the churches that hold to a theology of glory will always win out when assessed on the theology of glory's own terms.

A Christmas poem by someone who understood the link between the Incarnation and the Sacraments (note in particular how, for Betjeman, the Incarnation and the Real Presence are a "single truth").

The final couplet puts this poem into a growing list (also including this and this) of poems that I have always loved, but that were (prior to my becoming a Lutheran) something of a guilty pleasure. Thrilling to be allowed to agree with this sort of thing at last!

Christmas

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
    The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
    Has caught the streaks of winter rain.
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hooker's Green.

The holly in the windy hedge
    And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
    The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
"The church looks nice" on Christmas Day.

Provincial public houses blaze
    And Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze
    Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says "Merry Christmas to you all."

And London shops on Christmas Eve
    Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
    To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
    And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad,
    And Christmas morning bells say "Come!"
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true? And is it true?
    This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
    A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
    No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
    The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
    No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
    Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives to-day in Bread and Wine.

In the comments for my recent post on evangelical ambivalence about Christmas and the Incarnation, a discussion arose over the NIV's translation of sarx as "sinful nature" rather than "flesh".

While, as I said during that discussion, I think it's possible to overdo the NIV-bashing, "sinful nature" is perhaps a good example of the NIV falling into "the heresy of explanation".

This useful and enlightening phrase comes from the introduction to a new translation of the Pentateuch, "The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary" by Robert Alter, which is reviewed by Digby Anderson in this week's Spectator. Anderson describes how new translations of Scripture may "at least initially" send people back to their Bibles and increase sales, but "rarely have these new translations given the overwhelming experience" of the Authorised Version. He continues (emphasis added):

Their fault, apart from limp prose, says Alter in his introduction, is "the heresy of explanation". When accurate translation produces a word or phrase that the translators feel is strange or "inaccessible" to modern readers they adjust it so that it explains itself. The result is "a betrayal" and, since strangeness is a quality of the Hebrew original, the translation places "readers at a grotesque distance from the distinctive literary experience of the Bible in its original language".

The sort of thing Alter has in mind in speaking of the heresy of explanation is the rendering of metaphors of body parts such as "hand" by the function for which they stand e.g. power, control, responsibility. The substitution is needless — the meaning was clear anyway — and it subverts the literary integrity of the story in which it occurs where "hand" is repeatedly used in a connected way. Another example is the substitution of offspring, heirs etc. for seed, which cuts a passage off from all the other ones where seed is used.

As Anderson points out, "This is spot on", and the greater retention of "concrete" metaphors over abstract language is one reason among many why I greatly prefer the ESV over the NIV.

Robert Alter's view is that "the translation closest to the original is, despite its many faults, the King James", which is almost enough to dig out a copy of the Authorised Version and use it instead of the ESV for a couple of days. But then the ESV stands in the same stream as the Authorised Version, flowing from Tyndale down 500 years of English-language Christianity, with many of those old cadences and turns of phrase still intact, which is yet another thing I like about it.

To close, here's a sample from Robert Alter's translation, which Robert Fagles has praised as for "reanimating the King James version" and for its "cadenced gravity" ("You could not say either of those things about the New English Bible or Jerusalem", as Anderson points out):

And the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at, and she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her man, and he ate. And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and made themselves loincloths.

... And the Lord God said to the serpent,
"Because you have done this,
Cursed be you
Of all cattle and all beasts of the field.
On your belly shall you go
And dust shall you eat all the days of your life.
Enmity will I set between you and the woman,
Between your seed and hers."

IntolerantElle raises a common objection to Christmas, namely that it is not really a "Christian" festival, but is instead merely a pagan festival covered with a thin Christian veneer. (This objection is in fact raised by both Christians and non-Christians - I've just spent some of the past half hour having a [light-hearted] discussion about this with some colleagues at work.)

I have two difficulties with this argument (quite apart from loving Christmas in all its aspects, which makes me a bit unsympathetic to "bah humbugs"). Firstly, I fail to see what relevance the "pagan roots" of Christmas have to the question of how we as Christians should celebrate Christmas. It's a bit like saying that you shouldn't visit your local parish church just because (in England) many ancient parish churches were founded on former pagan worship sites, so that the local church "is really" a pagan worship site (actually, in all too many cases these days, that may not be all that far from the truth. But I digress ;->).

Whatever Christmas may have started out as - whatever pagan elements, both ancient and modern, may still remain as part of the event - that cannot override entirely the vast wealth of Christian music, iconography and practice that have given Christmas an ineradicably Christian nature over more than 1500 years.

But the second objection to the "Christmas is just a rebranded pagan festival" argument is that it quite possibly isn't even true. It seems there is a strong case for arguing that the situation is precisely the reverse of what is generally assumed: that in fact the pagan festival of "the Unconquered Sun" was a hijacking of a popular Christian festival, rather than vice versa.

The case for this is put forward by William Tighe in an article from the Touchstone Magazine archives, Calculating Christmas:

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ's birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus' birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Rather, the pagan festival of the "Birth of the Unconquered Son" instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the "pagan origins of Christmas" is a myth without historical substance.

Early Latin Christians concluded that Christ had died on 25 March 29. Based on the concept of the "integral age" – the theory that the great prophets of Israel died on the same dates as their birth or conception – they concluded that Jesus had been conceived on 25 March. Hence this became the Feast of the Annunciation, and December 25 was Epiphany.

Eastern Christians, on the other hand, used a calculation that made 6 April the date of the crucifixion. Add nine months and this gives you 6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany, which in the Eastern calendar is a far more significant festival than Christmas.

The point is not that these calculations were based on valid reasoning, or gave an accurate date for the birth of Christ (as Tighe points out, 25 December is "wholly unlikely to have been the actual date of Christ's birth"). The point is simply that second century Latin Christians had come to regard 25 December as the date of Christ's birth. This is in contrast to the generally-held assumption that they adopted a pre-existing pagan festival as an exercise in seeker-friendly re-branding.

As Tighe concludes:

The pagan feast which the Emperor Aurelian instituted on that date in the year 274 was not only an effort to use the winter solstice to make a political statement, but also almost certainly an attempt to give a pagan significance to a date already of importance to Roman Christians. The Christians, in turn, could at a later date re-appropriate the pagan "Birth of the Unconquered Sun" to refer, on the occasion of the birth of Christ, to the rising of the "Sun of Salvation" or the "Sun of Justice."

That said, I do dislike the "reason for the season" line which Elle refers to: not because it is inaccurate, but because it is irritating and trite. From mystery and awe ("the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, the glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth") to grating advertising slogans: more evidence of how some evangelicals are making a complete hash of Christmas these days (see previous post).

Some people may have thought Chris Williams was being a bit extreme recently when he referred to "evangelical anti-Incarnationism". Sure, many of our non-Lutheran evangelical brothers and sisters are maybe stronger on talking about the work and words of Christ rather than about His person. Granted, their rejection of the Real Presence undermines the doctrine of the Incarnation by allowing Christ's divine and human natures to be separated from one another. But surely that is merely an inadvertence, or what JI Packer calls in another context "an intellectual besetting sin", rather than being actually "anti" the Incarnation.

My own thoughts were along this sort of line, but then I was pulled up short while reading the latest issue of The Briefing. In an article entitled "So this is Christmas...", Sydney Anglican minister Simon Manchester came out with the following, somewhat startling, statement (emphasis added):

One of our difficulties at Christmas is getting enthusiastic about the doctrine of the incarnation when the Bible seems more enthusiastic about the atonement and resurrection. Are we to be driven by Bible or calendar?

Surely this is a false dilemma when we have the opportunity to move from the person of Christ quite quickly to his work.

My immediate response was that the angels seemed pretty enthusiastic about the incarnation in Luke 2:8-14. And the Apostle John seemed pretty enthusiastic about it in John 1:1-18.

Simon Manchester's article typifies the lukewarm attitude of many evangelicals towards Christmas. Often, it seems that the focus at Christmas is almost exclusively on how we can make best "use" of Christmas by evangelising the the non-Christians (or semi-Christians) who make their annual trip to our churches, rather than on how we ourselves as Christian believers can celebrate the joy and wonder of God coming among us as a baby in a feeding trough. This lukewarm attitude to Christmas is worrying, because I fear it reflects a deeper lukewarmness about the incarnation itself, as Simon Manchester's words unconsciously reveal.

This can also be seen in many evangelistic materials, which tend to be strong on the work of Christ - what He has done for us - but rather weak on His Person - who He is, true God and true Man. In the classic Sydney gospel outline Two Ways to Live, for example, Jesus is specifically described as a man, but no mention is made of His also being God.

The incarnation may be a more difficult message to put across than "Jesus the King", and may be perceived to be less "seeker-friendly". And it certainly is important at Christmas to tell people why Jesus came in the flesh: namely, to die as a sacrifice for our sins. But - as Christians have recognised from the earliest days of the church - without the incarnation we have no Gospel at all, because this Man's death is meaningless unless He is also God.

Simon Manchester and any other evangelical ministers who feel the same way are welcome to hurry on past the manger to the cross ("to move from the person of Christ quite quickly to his work"), but "as for me and my house", we prefer to side with the angels and St John - and with Martin Luther, for that matter, who had no difficulty in getting as enthusiastic about the incarnation as he was about the atonement and resurrection.

As Luther says in his famous Sermon on the Afternoon of Christmas Day 1530, on the angel's announcement to the shepherds in Luke 2:11:

If it is true that the child was born of the virgin and is mine, then I have no angry God and I must know and feel that there is nothing but laughter and joy in the heart of the Father and no sadness in my heart. For, if what the angel says is true, that he is our Lord and Saviour, what can sin do against us? "If God is for us, who is against us?". Greater words than these I cannot speak, nor all the angels and even the Holy Spirit.

This is most certainly true!

It would be wonderful - and would no doubt have a profound impact on non-Christian visitors, not to mention those who are already believers - if every evangelical pulpit could reverberate with that same joyful assurance at this and future Christmases.

You are 'Hark! The Herald Angels Sing'.
You take Christmas very seriously. For you, it is a religious festival, celebrating the birth of the Saviour, and its current secularisation really irritates you. You enjoy the period of Advent leading up to Christmas, and attend any local carol services you can find, as well as the more contemplative Advent church services each Sunday. You may be involved in Christmas food collections or similar charity work. The midnight service at your church, with candles and carols, is one you look forward to all year, and you also look forward to the family get together on Christmas Day.

What Christmas Carol are you?
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Hmm. Not sure I agree 100% with that result. Yes: (i) celebration of birth of the Saviour; (ii) love Advent; (iii) love Midnight Mass (though get to it only rarely, due to also enjoying spending Christmas Eve having a few drinks with my family); (iv) love the Christmas family get-together. I'm afraid the food collections and charity work tend to fall by the wayside, he said defensively.

I think I'd rather have been this one:

You are 'Adam Lay Y Bounden'!
Ah, you appear to be something of a Christmas snob. Whether you are a musician who has sung one carol service too many, or merely someone with very highbrow views on music and culture, you shudder at the thought of piped music in lifts, wince at endless repetitions of Jingle Bells and have put out a contract on Rudolph. While you agree that some of the well-known carols are lovely, you are more drawn by the really obscure medieval carols, or the ones arranged by Bach. You also know parodies of several carols - a legacy of excessive carolling, or perhaps just the product of an enquiring and slighly cynical mind... Try to enjoy Christmas, anyway.

While I'm not quite that highbrow - my ideal Christmas music selection is to alternate between this and this - I do love both mediaeval Christmas music and Bach. "Coventry Carol" wins out over "Away in a Manger", any day.

Chris raises the question of What Christian Parents Should Say About Father Christmas. Always a lively one this, and one which vexed me for some time following the birth of our first son.

Basically, my personal feeling was that I couldn't really see what all the fuss was about. Father Christmas (whose exclusive franchise in the UK keeps getting encroached upon by his North American rival, Santa Claus) had always been part of my childhood Christmases, "and it never did me any harm" - it was all part of the fun, even once my sister and I had "apostatised", and indeed even today my parents (particularly my mother) will joke with us about "what Father Christmas is going to bring us this year".

It felt a bit cold and calculating for young children just to get their presents from Mum and Dad rather than from this magical figure of generosity - almost a bit like encouraging them to call you by your Christian names. All rather tedious and "adult". And - quite apart from children feeling left out as everyone else goes Santa-crazy - it's scarcely a guaranteed route to popularity for one's children to be solemnly telling all their young friends that Father Christmas doesn't exist.

(I stress that all this was just my personal feeling within my own family context - I don't mean to criticise any Christian parent who exercises their Christian liberty differently on this issue in their own family).

So I needed a pretty good reason for "me and my house" to go down the "anti-Santa" route, but all I that was being communicated to me was the generalised sense that "good Christian parents don't do that", coupled with an uncomfortable awareness that, in fact, an awful lot of "good Christian parents" do.

So, last Christmas - with our then-two year old son approaching his first Christmas at which he would be conscious of Father Christmas' existence - I emailed the LCMS's Church Information Center as follows (I wasn't a Lutheran at that stage, but I knew where to get sound, sane, pastoral advice that respected true Christian liberty without tolerating the genuinely sinful). Here, from the depths of my "saved items" folder, is my query:

What advice would the LCMS give to parents concerning what they say to their children about Santa Claus? Should Christian parents refuse to have anything to do with Santa, or is it enough just to try and ensure he is put firmly in his (marginal and secondary) place, with a positive focus on centering the whole Advent/Christmas period on Christ in a way that captures children's imagination?

And here's the reply I received a day or so later:

Hello, Mr. H_____:

The following is an e-mail response written by one of our pastors here when this question was asked previously. I hope it's helpful to you:

Christian families will make Christ the absolute center of their Christmas and will have devotions and focus on His birth. They will therefore not permit themselves of their children to become all hung-up on Santa, *either* by way of talking about Santa so much that they cloud the true meaning of Christmas, or getting so caught up in a legalistic "ban on Santa" that they inflict on their children their own personal issues.

If my own personal experience is of any help, I'll share it. We have three children. One is nine, the other eight, the other is five. My oldest son never believed in Santa (neither did his father), Santa just never made any sense to him and so he never believed in the jolly old elf. Does he enjoy the Christmas stories featuring Santa? Of course! Does he watch Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer every year, yes, sure he does. His younger brother is presently wavering between reality and fantasy re. Santa, and enjoys that. Our youngest, a little girl, is a firm believer in Santa and no amount of persuasion from her older brother has so far swayed her opinion (though we suspect her confidence in Santa is starting to waver).

Have we gone out of our way to lecture her about the fact Santa is not real? No, of course not. Have we encouraged her "belief" in Santa? No. We are letting her be a child. When she is older, she will put away childish things, even as our older children are in the process of doing. We don't pray to Santa. We don't write letters to Santa. We do not deliver discourses on Santa to the children. It is just a fun story for them and they have enjoyed it, much as they enjoy the Aesop's fables and nursery rhymes.

Blessings in Christ!

In His service and yours,
L____ C. H____
LCMS Church Information Center

I found this a very helpful response. I also found this article by Pr Richard Bucher helpful (from The Christmas Page of Our Redeemer Lexington's website).

My current line with my older son (our younger son will only be one year and one day old on Christmas Day this year) is that Father Christmas brings presents to people because he is so happy about Jesus being born. When the boys are older, then I can tell them about how his real name is St Nicholas, and share with them some of the stories about that great saint. And then when they turn round and say that Father Christmas isn't real - well, I'll tell them that under no circumstances are they to break that news to their grandmother ;-)

As an antidote to John Spong's poisonous ramblings about John Stott (as highlighted by Josh and ably demolished by the Pontificator), here's a more constructive recent piece from the Houston Chronicle, by David Brooks: Inquiring Dems need to know: Who is John Stott?

Brooks (not himself a Christian) criticises the media's habit of selecting only "Elmer Gantry-style blowhards" such as Jerry Falwell as representative of evangelicalism, whereas "people like John Stott, who are actually important, get ignored."

Brooks continues:

[I]f evangelicals could elect a pope, Stott is the person they would likely choose. He was the framer of the Lausanne Covenant, a crucial organizing document for modern evangelicalism. He is the author of more than 40 books, which have been translated into over 72 languages and have sold in the millions. Now rector emeritus at All Souls, Langham Place, in London, he has traveled the world preaching and teaching.

One of Stott's most distinctive features is the "voice" you encounter when reading his work, one which has had a huge impact on evangelicalism ("over the years I've heard hundreds of evangelicals who sound like Stott"):

It is a voice that is friendly, courteous and natural. It is humble and self-critical, but also confident, joyful and optimistic. Stott's mission is to pierce through all the encrustations and share direct contact with Jesus.

Probably the most important comment, and one which explains the impact that Stott has had over the past 60 years, is this:

Stott says that the central message of the Gospel is not the teachings of Jesus, but Jesus himself, the human/divine figure. He is always bringing people back to the concrete reality of Jesus' life and sacrifice.

Brooks quotes this wonderful passage - absolutely typical of Stott at his best - on the subject of why evangelicals insist on sticking to the scandal of particularity:

It is not because we are ultra-conservative, or obscurantist, or reactionary or the other horrid things which we are sometimes said to be. It is rather because we love Jesus Christ, and because we are determined, God helping us, to bear witness to his unique glory and absolute sufficiency. In Christ and in the biblical witness to Christ God's revelation is complete; to add any words of our own to his finished work is derogatory to Christ.

He concludes with a lesson for Democrats who are busy trying to rebuild the party's electoral appeal post-Kerry:

Politicians, especially Democrats, are now trying harder to appeal to people of faith. But people of faith are not just another interest group, like gun owners. You have to begin by understanding the faith. And you can't understand this rising global movement if you don't meet its authentic representatives.

Not Falwell, but Stott.

I may have been too busy to blog much recently (see below), but mercifully I haven't been too busy to listen incessantly to my latest CD purchase: the Gabrieli Consort's recording of Michael Praetorius' Lutheran Mass for Christmas Morning. It's a recording of a complete Mass as it might have taken place on Christmas Day in 1620, complete with chorales, canticles, liturgy and even the (chanted) epistle and Gospel readings. The only thing missing is the sermon. Oh, and the notices. ;-)

Amazon's editorial review is spot-on when it describes this "exhilarating disc" as an "essential recording". This is thrilling, joyous music that makes you realise what it sounds like when people are truly celebrating Christmas, with the emphasis on both words. It is music for people who know what it means for God to come among us in the flesh as a baby in a feeding trough, people who can say "I know of no other God except the one called Jesus Christ" not as a slogan or even as a mere proposition, but as a confession from a heart overflowing with love for their Saviour. If only Lutheran worship sounded like this today!

Do listen to the sample tracks on Amazon. Particular highlights include the Introit, Puer Natus in Bethelehem (track 2); the Gradual Hymn, Vom Himmel Hoch da Komm Ich Her (track 5); the haunting mediaeval melody for the Creed, Wir Glauben All' an Einen Gott (track 10); Luther's setting of the Sanctus, Jesaja Dem Propheten das Geschah (track 15); and the seriously loud setting of In Dulci Jubilo that concludes the disc (not, alas, included as one of the samples). In Dulci Jubilo comes complete with trumpets positioned, as Praetorius pragmatically recommended, outside the church...

It's appropriate that, when I looked at the page on Amazon which features this disc, there was a banner ad for this product. Particularly handy for when the full chorus comes in with the chorale melody half way through Puer Natus in Bethlehem - a truly heart-stopping moment.

UK readers may now have difficulty sourcing a copy before Christmas, but you can try here, here or here (that last one is where I bought it, for the laughable price of £5.99 plus £1 P&P - but I had to wait a few weeks for it). But even if you can't get it in time for Christmas, this is music for celebrating the Incarnation all year round.

Why are you still here?

...so been unable to blog. Likely to continue for a few more days yet... apart from what I'm about to post next...