From B.C. to A.D.

WJFR at Every Waking Hour has linked to two good reads on Christmas.

One of them has quotes from Chesterton and will be a treat for those of us who love Chesterton and feasting. Click on the link to get to that.

The second one is an article by the late David Chilton, and I'll be discussing that one here. Yesterday I wrote a little about some of our out of the mainstream views on Christmas. I wrote with some trepidation because our views to too far in one direction for some people, too far in the opposite direction to another group of people, and are inconsistant enough to confuse everybody and please nobody but ourselves (and, we hope, be acceptable to God, who is the only one who really matters).

I expected to hear some shock and dismay in response, but you all have been graciously and kindly silent about it, so I am going to be so bold as to be even more confusing and inconsistant. David Chilton's article is unabashedly supportive of supporting Christmas in a public and loud, and even commercialized, fashion, and while I disagree with him on some details, I agree on overall principles.

For instance, in talking of the annual attempts by the ACLU and company to squelch public expressions of Christmas as a religious holiday, he says: "I recall hearing a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union claim that the very message of Christmas itself was being violated by any public recognition of its existence. What we need, he said, is to remove Christmas from public life completely, and allow it to become once again a private, personal expression of religious sentiment and family values.
To him, apparently, the essence of Christmas was like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting—a household gathered around a piano drinking hot spiced cider and singing “Here we go a-wassailing,”1 while an apple-cheeked matron, her eyes sparkling with reflected light from the roaring fire in the hearth, loads the festal board with heaping platters of roast beef, steamed vegetables, and candied fruit.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, so far as it goes. It just doesn’t go far enough. While it would surely be a mistake to claim that commercialization is the essence of Christmas, such a statement is rather close to the truth. From the very beginning, Christmas was regarded as a public event. It was never regarded as a private matter, still less as the sentimental remembrance of childhood it has become. In its origins, Christmas was not only public, not only commercial—it was downright political..."

And you see, while he is mistaken about the origins of Christmas (it was a few hundred years after the birth of Christ before the customary December festivities transformed into what we call Christmas), he's exactly right about the coming of the Messiah, the birth of Jesus, the advent of the Christian era. It wasn't a secret. It didn't happen within the private walls of home. It didn't happen at 'home' at all, as the center of that event left His glorious home in Heaven to come to earth and put on human flesh and become one of us. It didn't happen in the home of Mary and Joseph, as we all know they were traveling from home to participate in the Roman Census and were forced to take shelter in a stable, finding no room in that inn.

More than that, Christianity itself is not to be confined to the privacy of the home. In one of those paradoxes of which G. K. Chesterton was so fond, the Christian is told to fast and pray in secret, not making a big production of it, to practice benevolence quietly, without drawing attention to oneself, in fact, so privately that the right hand knows not what the left hand is doing, and yet to proclaim Christ from the mountaintops and confess Him before men, to preach the word in season and out of season (even this season).

All attempts to squelch religious expression from the marketplace of ideas, even those religious expressions that I am not comfortable with, are also attempts to squelch my religious expression. So even though I find manger scenes where shepherds and three wise man join together to worship the newborn Christ chronologically jarring, I don't want to see them banned from public displays.

Chilton goes on to say:

"The early Christians were much concerned with the public aspects of the Incarnation. Indeed, they were martyred in droves, because they refused to privatize their faith. Even their creeds, proclaiming Jesus Christ as the one and only link between heaven and earth, were far from being abstract theological treatises. That proclamation had a political impact that shattered forever the old pagan pretension that merely human rulers were “divine.” Christians and non-Christians alike have benefited immeasurably from the resulting restraint on governmental tyranny that is unique to Western civilization."

Halleluja! Here there are no caveats, no minor details to fix- we are in complete agreement. David concludes:

"I rejoice in the commercialization of Christmas. It signals the one time in the year when our world approaches sanity. The brightly lit houses, the evergreens garlanded with bulbs, the carols that provide the musical background for even our most hectic shopping—all creation comes alive with the message that the shift from B.C. to A.D. changed the world forever."

And indeed that event did change the world, praise God.