The fact of Christmas
When a modernist, even if he is the Bishop of Durham, says that it is very hard to accept the literal truth of much of the New Testament, one must agree. When he says that much Christian doctrine, including the Creeds themselves, contains statements which mix particular fact with metaphysical theory in a way which makes the modern mind uneasy, he is speaking the truth. When he uses textual criticism to prise open assumptions about the order, interrelation and sources of the Gospels he is taking on a task which intellectual honesty demands must be per- formed. It is true that many things which men have asserted as eternal truth have been little more than reflections of their current obsessions, true that much belief mingles with superstition and sentimental- ity, true that it is dangerous to claim that the hand of God is clearly. acting on one's behalf. The modernist is nothing if not reasonable, and it is a good thing to be reasonable.
Why is it, then, that these criticisms of traditional faith seem not liberating, but dispiriting? Why has no radical theologian, however saintly and however eloquent, managed to revive Christianity? Why is the language of the modernist the language of retreat? In liturgy, the new, however scru- pulously produced, lacks life and beauty. In architecture, it has laid waste what the `false' piety which it replaces once made abundant and lovely. It may be hard to gainsay the arguments of theological radic- als: it is far harder to find in them anything that can comfort and save.
The modernist himself has a ready ex- planation for this phenomenon (assuming that he is honest enough to admit that it exists) — people like to cling to illusion; they are imprisoned by the false conscious- ness of traditional religion; because the truth is difficult, they do not want to hear it. No doubt people are lazy and cowardly about challenges to their existing beliefs, but this explanation will not do. For belief in Christianity is not merely an assent to a series of propositions or even the following of a series of rules. It is a state of being, not an opinion. It is not like signing a petition, but like being in a family. If a clever man approaches one and points out — even with much reason on his side — that the family of which one is a part has its faults, that it is shabby, poor, old-fashioned, and that there should be other families which are cleaner, better organised, vaccinated and with full insurance cover, one might agree with him, but one could not conclude that it would be right to desert one's own for what seemed, in the abstract, better. Indeed, it would not only be wrong: it would be impossible. No one can become a member of a family not his own just by
declaring that he wants to.
For the traditions of Christianity remain real, even when they seem to have been discredited, and nothing proposed to su- persede them seems real at all. They have been inhabited so long that believers find it easy to understand and love what they .cannot justify or explain. Yet that justifica- tion and explanation exist. The task of theologians should be to provide them without making that love grow cold.
They could start with Christmas. The birth of Jesus intervened directly. in what people call 'real' life. God did not deliver an edict about the nature and future of man. Instead He disclosed Himself in the oddest sort of concealment which He could devise — He became the creature whom He meant to save, and so subverted and yet fulfilled the reality of life on earth. He did not separate the physical reality of man from an abstract plane of intellectual truth. He united all planes of existence in the person of a child. Every aspect of the story, every teaching, like the Virgin Birth, which the Bishop of Durham finds absurd, is a way of making us understand that fact: every repudiation of that story is a way of diminishing it.
In this child, man • sees himself not temporarily occupied by some alien being, but become something else forever. Only by learning the story of how the child was born and lived and died can he understand
what he has • become. For what Christ bestowed was not so much a body of teaching or an example of a moral life — though He gave both those things — but a grand fact from which the teaching and the example derived. The fact is of God becoming man, and since it is a physical event as well as a metaphysical one, it must be a fact off history.
It is only because men have considered the birth of Christ to be a fact that they have been ready to receive the truths of His religion. This is partly because a fact is more readily accessible than a statement of theory, but it is true for a far more important reason. No theory, howeNier noble, has power of itself — it needs agents to put it into practice. No theory, there- fore, has the power to save the world. By becoming man, God made man the agent of His power — He did things which man alone could not do, but which man could, in part at least, understand. By doing so, He made it possible for men to love Him, as no one can love a theory, and so to serve Him. On the base of fact, people have been able to build an elaborate and extra- vagant work of devotion. Liturgy and art, the cult of saints, churches and monaster- ies, dynasties and whole nations, have flourished from the original seed; all have been able to do so because the object of their devotion was actual and they have believed that what He did was real.
The reality of Christ is what enables men to be Christian. Instead of having to believe that the good is no more than an ideal state, unbridgeably separated from their lives, they can understand that what they do and feel and think in the world can enact God's purposes. And they can know that those actions, feelings and thoughts can imitate the divine and yet be character- istically human. Above all, they can per- ceive the operation of love in the world.
They know that they are and have been loved, and that it is love, and not magic or inscrutable fate, which has redeemed them.
And so a theology which undermines the reality of the life of Christ removes the possibility of believing in Him. In the interests of human 'emancipation', it cuts man off from the events which set him free. In this century, millions of people have been cut off in this way. This makes it all the more important that each Christmas the story of Christ's coming be told as fully and clearly as it can. No one who tells it or hears it can fail to notice its strangeness; but it is only a dessicated modern mind which thinks that what is strange, is suspect and that what is physical is frightening. Any birth is strange; how much stranger is the birth of God. The birth of God is real; therefore the joy of Christmas is real.
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