The Craziness of the Christmas Claims

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14a)

On the scale of crazy, this claim is tops. There’s no doubt that the Gospels trade in the extraordinary throughout Jesus’s earthly ministry. Walking on water, multiplying fishes and loaves, and even raising folks from the dead are all incredible, amazing and miraculous. We’d all be mystified and compelled to worship if we witnessed any of these events. However, the original Christmas events, when we stop to reflect on them, are on a whole different level. Consider this: the transcendent, all-powerful and self-existent one, the creator of all reality, the one who literally holds all things into being was born human in a common manger!!

The idea of the incarnation is so big and seems almost paradoxical that it makes us pause and consider whether or not it is even a coherent thought. Is it even logically possible that God becomes man? Though the notion is difficult and merits some serious reflection, the short answer is yes, or so it seems to me. To be sure, this idea is as big as it gets, and when we try to grasp all that is involved in the incarnation of Christ, we all too quickly hit the limits of our ability to understand. But being unfathomable is not the same as being logically inconsistent. And there are no obvious contradictions in the idea.

I won’t here say a lot about the doctrine of the incarnation. My purpose rather is, in this holiday season, to challenge us to consider both the bigness and the attractiveness of this idea.

Christmas as a Stumbling Block

A claim such as this is, to be sure, a major stumbling block for the “secular” person. The person I have in mind is the one who thinks that the physical universe, as discoverable by science, is all there is. On this view, God and the supernatural are mere holdovers from a prescientific, more superstitious time and, today, we should know better. This worldview is known as Naturalism. The naturalist in view here believes that there is nothing beyond the natural world. This view is nicely summarized by Carl Sagan who said, “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.” The idea there is a supernatural (or perhaps supra-natural) God is already ruled out from the start. So this view is, in a way, automatically atheistic. Thus, the idea of miracle, any miracle, sounds to secular ears like a fairytale or a myth.

Now so far, this really isn’t an objection to the miraculous. To assume naturalism, have an ultra-high view of science, and then say that Christian theism is therefore false or a fairy tale is not an argument or a true objection. The naturalist would need to say why naturalism best explains the world as we find it. The problem is that there are a variety of features of the world that go unexplained on the thesis of naturalism. These include the universe itself (how did nature come to be?), the fine tuning of the universe (if there is nothing beyond the cosmos, then the way the universe works is nothing more than extraordinary good fortune), moral facts (human value, meaning and purpose), human consciousness (this seems to involve far more than physical brain states), and even things like emotion. The naturalist can tell me what my typical brain chemistry is like when I’m experiencing overwhelming love for, say, my wife and children. However, this does not seem to even be close to what it is to be deeply in love with another. It seems to many of us that our rich human experiences are prime counterexamples to the naturalist worldview. If one takes naturalism seriously, all we have recourse to in describing our emotions are neural firings and brain chemistry. How do you write a compelling love song or poem about that? I wouldn’t try that at home!

Thus, the world of Carl Sagan is not a world any of us should wish for. It is an ugly world. It is a world without purpose, moral goodness, and genuine love. The only goods in this world are natural ones and these amount to fleeting pleasures.

The Beauty of the Gospel

But a world that includes the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, the God-man, the incarnation of God, is an enchanted world. It’s a world with purpose and meaning. It’s a world where caring for someone means something beyond the warm fuzzy it produces. It’s a world where fighting the good fight has eternal significance and is not done merely as a matter of the survival of our species. It’s world that offers genuine hope.

Ultimately, love itself is an otherworldly value. And here’s the thing as we move into this Christmas season. Love was born in a manger. It was out of love for you that God took on flesh. For God so loved you(!) along with the rest of the world, to the extent that he gave his one and only son. This is big. It’s appears virtually incomprehensible but it is so very good.

Let’s be clear, I’m not here providing arguments for these claims. That’s a much longer conversation and one I would love to be a part of. I’m simply pointing out the attractiveness of these claims.

Given the bigness of all this, I don’t blame a person for doubting. I know I have along the way. But I believe it. In fact, I believe every single aspect of the Christmas story as presented in the Gospels, and I think I do so for good reasons. How can I believe that there was a large star in the East, Jesus was born to a virgin, there were a multitude of angels, groups of wise men, shepherds, and so on? How can I believe this in our contemporary age? It is because, on the basis of a variety of compelling evidence, I believe in a supernatural and all-powerful God. This automatically clears the way for believing in the unusual and extraordinary. I have no problem believing these things because I think it’s God’s prerogative of how He works in the world. If he wants to lead with a star in the East, then I don’t see why a supernatural God can’t do that. If God wants to impregnate a virgin, then so be it. These may read to our modern ears as quirky and strange, but quirky and strange does not mean false. Moreover, it is in the quirkiness that we find rich significance. It seems to me, given a belief in a supernatural God, we shouldn’t be put off by extraordinary claims. We should expect them.

The Christmas claims are big and they are beautiful. I rest comfortable in the hope they provide.

(A version of the article was first published on www.theologicalmatters.com on 12/22/2015)

About 4 years ago, Paul Gould, Keith Loftin and I were at a restaurant planning out an online apologetics course. A comment was made that we should write a book with this material. So we did!  And that book comes out in 1 month (11/1)!!

There are a number of great apologetics texts out there. Here are a few notables about our book for those who may be interested.

An up-to-date and readable read

The book is intended as an up-to-date book informed by current scholarship without the reader requiring any specific training in apologetics. Between the three of us, we have roughly 50 years of combined experience teaching Christian apologetics at all different levels of expertise. So our hope is that it can serve someone who is brand new to the area of study as well as be interesting to an intermediate student of apologetics.

Here’s the table of contents:

1. An Invitation to Apologetics
2. Truth, Knowledge, and Faith
3. God
4. Miracles
5. The Reliability of the New Testament
6. Jesus
7. Jesus’ Resurrection
8. Is Jesus the Only Way?
9. The Problem of Evil
10. Counterfeit Gospels: World Religions
11. Counterfeit Gospels: Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses
12. Standing Firm and Going Out

Artwork

Many apologetics textbooks are, let’s just say, a wee bit lacking in creativity. We included original artwork in every chapter. Judith Dickinson (a.k.a., to me, mom) sketched pictures of, among others, C.S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga. Check these out:

Wayne Miller, a PhD student at SWBTS, drew some great cartoons for illustrations:

We also including a few graphs and charts.

The brilliance of the gospel

Beyond all of these things, the heart of the book is to defend the idea that the gospel is brilliant!! I love this term ‘brilliant’ in this connection. It has, for us, a double meaning. First, the gospel, as idea, is brilliant since it is smart. It is, in fact, the biggest idea I know. This is to say the gospel is profound, rational to believe, and eminently defensible. Much of the heavy lifting in the book is to defend this.

But the second sense of the term ‘brilliant’ is that the gospel is beautiful and desirable. We try, in each chapter, to connect the rational defense with the desirability and attractiveness of Christianity.

Here’s an excerpt from our introduction:

…what we find in Christianity is a perfect blend of reason and romance. Nowhere in Scripture is there a call to separate head (reason) and heart (romance) in our love of God and man. This is good news! Christianity does not require us to abandon the intellect or emotions. Christianity is both true and satisfying. Consider C. S. Lewis’s description of his pre-conversion mind:

The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest conflict. On the one side a many-island sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless. (Surprised by Joy, 170)

Lewis discovered that it was only in Christianity that his two hemispheres could be brought together into a coherent whole. In Christianity he had found a place to stand and a story that understood his longing for both how things are (truth) and how things ought to be (goodness and beauty). Christianity is true myth.

Online supplementary material

Our publisher, B&H, will be supplying the reader with a variety of supplements on their website. Among other material, we shot 2-3 videos per chapter that help introduce and augment the material in the book. This will be made available via Word Search from B&H Publishing Group.

Promotion at Lifeway

The book is currently half off for preorder at Lifeway.

The book will work for a classroom, church small group, or for anyone looking to go deeper in the defense and desirability of the faith.

Perhaps the most attractive part of Religious Pluralism (RP)—the notion there are many ways to God—is its supposed inclusivism. Religions are not exactly known for coming together on almost anything. If the major religions can come together under the big tent of RP, then this would be, it seems, a good thing. But is RP a big tent? Does it include a diversity of views? I think RP is no more inclusive than the exclusively exclusive Christian exclusivist.

There are a variety of ways to understand RP. The most plausible version, I think, is John Hick’s.[1] It has the benefit of being logically coherent unlike many of the more simplistic forms of RP that say (literally) all religious views are correct (which is literally incoherent). By contrast, Hick actually argued that all religious views are strictly speaking false in terms of the particulars they defend. Religions, for Hick, attempt to describe the indescribable. Though he thought all religions are false, he wasn’t an atheist. He thought there was a terrific value in the major ancient religious traditions in that they each provide a way to God, or what Hick calls the Real. The Real is that indescribable transcendent reality all religions point us to. So when the Christian says that Jesus died on the cross and this provides the way to God. The Christian is wrong that it is Jesus’s death that provides the way to God. For Hick, Jesus is not God and nothing happened on the cross other than someone died. But being a follower of Jesus is a way the Real. It is the way that Christians get to the Real, but so do the practices of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.

Some people seem to think this lack of exclusivity is refreshing. But is this really inclusivism? The problem is that it is only inclusive in the sense we are all inclusively wrong in our particular narratives about salvation despite the fact it’s going to end up okay. But when we think carefully here, we’ll see that Hick’s beliefs are a set of exclusive truth claims themselves. There is not much that is truly plural about Hick’s pluralism.

To see this, consider the fact that Hick’s pluralism asserts that all of us religious folks are wrong in what we assert. That’s a lot of disagreement and falsehoods for a view labeled as pluralistic. Hick clearly believed that his view about the world was the one true view and he defended that view for decades. Pluralistic? No, it isn’t. Tolerant? Not really. Exclusive claim? Bingo! If you disagree with the pluralism, the pluralist will say that you are wrong. The pluralist believes that it is only she who has the full view of reality, and the rest of the world, both now and historically, is just simply wrong about what they believe religiously.

As it turns out, inclusivity is impossible. This is a consequence of the nature of a truth claim. Whenever we make a claim, we are claiming that it is true, and this implies that its contraries are all false. One can try to be perfectly inclusive, but it will always exclude whoever holds the contrary view. Imagine we assert the following view: “everyone, no matter what they believe, is right.” If anything is inclusive, this is it. But doesn’t this exclude everyone who says there are only some who are right? This extremely inclusive statement excludes all those who disagree (which, by the way, is almost everyone on the planet since probably no one believes this). The claim, though it seems inclusive, actually excludes everyone!

Anyone who makes a truth claim, given the nature of truth, is an exclusivist. Thus, if being exclusive is a problem, it is a problem for everyone! But there’s no reason to think that being exclusive, all by itself, is a problem. There seems to be no way to have meaningful dialogue without it. Let’s just stop pretending like we don’t disagree and then we can have thoughtful, loving and tolerant-but-sharp disagreement. This is very possible and far more meaningful.

[1] John Hick. An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

The Bible in no uncertain terms describes God as jealous. In fact, God himself proclaims:

You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God (Exodus 20:5)

This, it seems, is grist for the New Atheist hostility mill. What?! You think God is jealous? In the words of Bill Maher, in his not-so-much interesting movie Religulous, “Your God is jealous? That seems so un-godlike that God would have such a petty human emotion. I know people who have gotten over jealousy, let alone God.”

The problem with this response is the problem with much of the New Atheist content, which is it treats superficially a notion embedded in a very specific tradition and a context. Virtually absent from their critiques is any attempt to understand what Scripture or Christians mean by this sort of claim. If Scripture was predicating of God a petty human emotion, I too would react with disdain. But maybe, just maybe, there is a bit more subtlety here and if we dive into the context, we’d see something actually quite profound and interesting. Fingers crossed!

Is Jealousy Wrong?

Let’s first ask whether jealousy is always morally wrong. There’s certainly a way of being jealous that is morally inappropriate. In this case, one is strongly desiring something one lacks or to which one has no right to possess. So if you strongly desire your neighbor’s car, your co-worker’s house, or your friend’s good looks, then you are jealous of them in a way that seems overall inappropriate. The moral virtue is to be content with what we possess and to moderate our desires accordingly.

Is this what the Exodus passage is referring to? Well, no, of course not on the Christian view. For the Christian, God is without lack and so it’s suspect from the start to think that Scripture is picturing God as desiring something he lacks. Perhaps Christian theology gets the Bible wrong here…or (said with emphasis) perhaps we shouldn’t see this as God’s desiring something he lacks and there’s a better reading of what’s going on.

It’s also worth noting the Bible goes on to explicitly prohibit an attitude of jealousy in Galatians 5:20. This is (since it is prohibited) the morally inappropriate sense of jealousy. So perhaps Galatians is prohibiting something that Exodus is ascribing to God…or (said with emphasis) perhaps there are different senses of the term and there’s a morally appropriate sense of jealousy.

I want to suggest there is a morally appropriate sense of jealousy.

Appropriate Jealousy

What would be a morally appropriate sense of jealousy? The term seems to have enough flexibility to include strongly desiring something that is in fact rightfully ours. On the Christian view, the world is rightfully God’s. We, in particular, are his. So for him to desire us and our affections, for him to be jealous in this sense, is not morally inappropriate.

Perhaps an analogy is when someone’s spouse has, in a way, wandered from the marriage. It is completely appropriate for one to be jealous after one’s spouse in this scenario. In fact, if there’s any hope for the marriage, then one will desire and seek to win one’s spouse back.

For God to be a jealous God, he desires our affections and worship, not because he lacks in some way, but because he is the appropriate object of our affections and worship. Other gods, even if they existed, are not worthy of worship. They indeed, without fail, lack in various respects. The gods are to be appeased and placated, but not worshipped. We flourish best when we turn our affections and worship to God. It’s our telos, it’s our design. Being religiously plural–in giving our affections to other “gods”–is ultimately harmful to our wellbeing.

Rather than this being some expression of a petty emotion, this is a quite beautiful picture of God’s attitude towards us.