As a kid I always had some trouble understanding the business about the three wise men. Gold always comes in handy so I could see why you would bring gold to a baby — but what on earth were frankincense and myrrh and why would anybody give them to a child? I figured myrrh might have something to do with myrtle, like the crepe myrtles that bloom so beautifully in South Carolina. So maybe the myrrh was flowers for the mom?

The frankincense had me completely stumped and it wasn’t until I visited Oman a few years ago that I knew what it was or what it looked like: it’s the waxy resin of a tree that grows in the desert and when burned it gives off a rich smell; it’s a principal ingredient of incense. If you are ever lucky enough to visit the astonishingly beautiful and welcoming country of Oman you will have many opportunities to buy some for yourself at many different qualities and price levels. If your trip is like mine, you will also have the experience of seeing road kill camel on the highway and you will visit the tomb of the prophet Job where you will learn that he was fourteen feet tall and a Muslim.

Today on the traditional Christmas calendar we celebrate Epiphany. The Christmas season, at least in the West, has finally come to an end; the wise men reach the manger, give their weird gifts to the baby, and they, the Holy Family and we move on to the next phase of our lives.

That also means the end of the Yule Blog, at least for now. It began on Christmas Eve with “The Thirteen Blogs of Christmas” and much of it was originally composed on a small island off the coast of Belize between bouts of scuba and snorkeling. I wish I were back there now as the freezing winter winds shake the windows and rattle the doors of the stately Mead Manor in arctic but always-fashionable Queens, but the next semester starts up pretty soon and it’s time to revise the old syllabus and hunt up the old books. Thanks to all those who have followed my venture in Yule blogging, and especially to those who’ve sent encouraging comments my way.

Winston Churchill once dismissed a dessert complaining that “This pudding has no theme.” If this Christmas pudding of a blog has had a theme, it’s been the quest to interpret the meaning that seems to shape our lives and give them their depth and value. I’ve been trying to explore how the human quest for meaning shapes the way Christians approach the holiday of Christmas and to do that in a way that is helpful to anyone with an interest in the subject, whether Christian or not.

The Feast of the Epiphany, celebrated today in many western churches and traditions, is both the end of Christmas and its climax. The name comes from a Greek word that was classically translated as the manifestation or the ‘showing forth’ of the baby Jesus to the world, something that happened when the three wise men, sometimes called kings, saw the child whose birth they foretold from the stars. These days we use the English word ‘epiphany’ in another sense; it now means an ‘ah ha’ moment when you suddenly understand something. The old meaning referred to the sender of information; the new meaning signifies its reception. Either way it’s an apt name for today: it marks both the day on which Mary and God showed the baby to the world and the day when the world got its first dim understanding of what this child might mean.

This feast, also traditionally called the “Feast of Lights,” is a good day to look at the last of the three Biblical passages that deal with the Christmas story. The gospels of Matthew and Luke provide the narrative details of the story and those are the ones we have looked at so far. The final source, the first 18 verses of the first chapter in the Gospel of John, says nothing about the details of Christmas: no shepherds, no angels, no chests of gold and no myrrh — but it is perhaps the most profound meditation on what it all means to be found anywhere in the Bible.It’s short enough, and important enough, that I’ve put the King James translation below — the vocabulary is so simple and the subject so profound that the archaic English of the 1611 King James translation is as clear as the more modern ones — and at least to my archaic taste, more beautiful and suggestive. (For the non-Bible experts, the ‘John’ to which this passage refers is not the John traditionally credited with writing this gospel; it is John the Baptist, whose baptism of Jesus was the starting point for Jesus’ public career.)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.
He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.
And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.
For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.
No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.

That opening phrase, ‘in the beginning,’ is a conscious evocation of the start of the Hebrew scriptures; the book of Genesis begins with a Hebrew word translated exactly the same way. The Greek word that the King James translators (a collection of scholars convened by James I of England in the early 1600s to produce an official, standardized English translation that would replace the too-Calvinist Geneva Bible widely used until then) translated as ‘Word’ is ‘logos.’ (Λογος for the Greek fans out there.) It’s an important word in classical Greek philosophy. We see it today in many forms in English; most notably it is the root of our word ‘logic’ and also of the ‘ology’ in words like biology and psychology.

‘Word’ is a weak translation for ‘logos,’ I think, although it’s hard to find a better. Logos is the ordinary way in which Greek speakers refer to the normal ‘words’ of conversation and writing, but it also has a connotation of meaning and order that is missing in English. We should probably stick with ‘word’ as the standard translation, but it’s a useful mental exercise to substitute ‘meaning’ for ‘word’ and re-read the start of the passage to catch this aspect of the Greek. So here are the first four verses again:

In the beginning was Meaning, and the Meaning was with God, and the Meaning was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

This is what I have been trying to say all along: Christmas is important to Christians because from their point of view the baby Jesus is the meaning of Christmas, and the meaning of Christmas is the meaning of life. That meaning is the source of our life, the goal of our lives, and the light of all life and of all human beings. It has existed forever and somehow both lives with and is God on high, but it came into our world and into a Jewish family on a special day when Augustus Caesar ruled in Rome and Herod was king in Jerusalem. We had somehow lost touch with the Meaning of it all, but the Meaning hadn’t lost touch with us. It was intent on finding us anyway — and it did. That is what Christians have been celebrating since December 25 and what in many ways we go on celebrating all year.

Many Eastern Christians will begin their Julian-calendar Christmas tomorrow; for them today is Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas to you all!

For the rest of us, it’s back to the everyday world, which here in glamorous Queens can look a bit dreary on this January day. The nights are still long, the trees are still bare and the days are still cold. But the cycle of the seasons has turned, and the peoples who dwelt in the darkness have seen a great light. And here endeth the 2011-2012 Yule Blog with a final quotation from the last stanza of John Milton’s Nativity Ode, the greatest Christmas poem ever written in English:

But see the Virgin blest,
Hath laid her Babe to rest.
Time is our tedious Song should here have ending,
Heav’ns youngest-teemed Star
Hath fixt her polisht Car,
Her sleeping Lord with Handmaid Lamp attending.
And all about the Courtly Stable,
Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable.

As the Christmas season draws to a close and the return of regular blogging looms, I’m looking back over my short life as a writer on religious matters and thinking about how writing on religion is and is not like writing on other controversial topics.

There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s important to write about religion.  Many people, both religious and non-religious, are affected by the religious beliefs and cultures around them; few of us know enough about how religion works and how different religious faiths and traditions shape the world views of the people and nations with whom we interact.

But it’s also true that writing about religion has its perils.  One, which should be evident to anyone who has followed the comments to my Christmas posts, is that religious writing stirs up powerful and sometimes angry feelings.  There’s a reason why our grandmothers told us never to discuss politics and religion at the dinner table.

And perhaps more dangerous still, there’s the hypocrisy charge.  There is nothing our society likes better than to mock the pretentiously self-righteous when the lies come unglued and the feet of clay are laid bare.  The famous televangelist caught in a No-Tell Motel with a lady not his wife, the family values spokesman caught in a pay to play tryst with a person of an inappropriate gender: our whole society dissolves into gales of laughter and malicious glee as yet another saint gets revealed as just another sinner.

Your jittery blogger, no freer from the Seven Deadly Sins than your average aging American Baby Boomer, can’t help but feel a bit nervous stepping into this dangerous space.  What gives me the right to tell others what is true, or beautiful, or good?  Is my own conduct so exemplary, my spiritual development so advanced that I should be telling everyone else how it’s done?

There’s an instinct to answer all of these questions in the negative, and to just shut up about religion and morals.  And that instinct has some backing.  Take for example the words of Jesus as reported in the King James Version of the gospel of Luke (6:42), “How canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.”

Clean up your own yard first, then join the neighborhood improvement committee.

Fair enough, and a casual glance around my moral front yard reveals a couple of dumpsters worth of rubbish that needs to be cleared away, but there’s a problem here.  If only perfect people were allowed to write about faith and morals, nobody will ever say anything on the subject.  Parents wouldn’t try to teach their kids right from wrong, teachers wouldn’t try to help students build moral character, sponsors in 12 step programs wouldn’t give advice to their sponsees about how to avoid that next drink or pill.  No minister, rabbi, imam or priest would stand before a congregation to preach a sermon.  No Buddhist monk would give advice to the faithful; no Sufi master would counsel disciples on how to approach God.

For some, like the group of atheists who rented billboards last holiday season to denounce all religions as scams, this would sound like excellent news.  But before too much time, even the most violent atheists would begin to notice that something was wrong.

Society really does depend on the virtue of its members.  Self restraint and moral behavior really are the foundations of liberty.  If people don’t behave right, nothing can protect us from the consequences.

The weaker the hold of virtue on a people, the stronger the state needs to be.  If people don’t voluntarily comply with, for example, the tax codes, the enforcement mechanisms of the government need to be that much stronger.  If more people lose their moral inhibitions against theft, and against using violence against the weak, then society has to provide a stronger, tougher police force — and give them more authority under less restraint.

Yet at the same time the state becomes stronger, it loses control of itself.  When the moral tone of a people declines, bureaucrats and the police are not exempt from the decay of morals.  They steal; they abuse their authority; they manipulate the processes of the state to serve themselves and their favored clients.  The courts become corrupt; the security services link up with the crime syndicates.  Night falls.

This is not some abstract fear; history and the world today are full of places where the collapse of moral values blights daily life and undermines the prospects for development.  I’ve been to many countries where nobody trusts the courts, the police, the politicians or the journalists.  None of them are nice places to be.

Sadly, people do not spontaneously choose to behave like angels.  Virtue has to be cultivated and developed.  Young people have to be persuaded, cajoled, admonished and above all inspired to seek wisdom, self control, a life of service and all the other virtues that are necessary for our civil lives as well as for the fullest development of our true selves.  Older people have to be reminded of their ideals, encouraged to live up to them and to continue fighting the good fight through the long years of adulthood and middle life.

For some people, reason, commonsense and a strong innate moral constitution makes it possible to live a decent and useful life without the comforts and restraints of religion.  But for many more, only the feelings of awe, gratitude and fear occasioned by the awareness of a Creator can give them the strength and will to set out on the earnest and difficult road of struggle on the path to a moral life.  More, that inner sense needs to be refreshed: people need to hear the message expressed in compelling terms, and they need to hear it again and again through a lifetime.

All this can only happen if a lot of people who are still fighting their own private moral battles stand up on their hind legs in public and praise those virtues that they have not fully attained.  The recovering alcoholic has to tell the newcomer that there is hope for a better future — even if nobody knows better than a recovering alcoholic how easy it is to take that beckoning drink.  The pastor has to encourage the couples in the congregation to strive to fulfill the ideal of a faithful marriage even if his or her own marriage hasn’t been spotless. The intellectual, struggling with questions and doubts about the meaning of faith, must share the best case for faith with a wider audience — or no one will benefit from a lifetime of study and reflection.

Does this mean that I’m arguing for a world of morality based on systematic hypocrisy?  GK Chesterton’s father, I once read, never went to church himself but always carried a Prayer Book on Sundays to set a good example for the lower orders.  Would we be any better off if we added hypocrisy to the lengthening list of our social sins?

It’s not that bad.  There is a line, I think, that separates the posturing hypocrite from the honest (but flawed) advocate for morals and faith.  There is a difference between the honest advocacy of hope and the self-glorification of a moral poseur.

In any case, developing a sensible, honest and penetrating discourse about corrosive human failings and their social consequence is a job that simply has to be done, particularly in a society like ours where the cultures of desire and indulgence run so rampant.  I’m not thinking just or even primarily of sex, though this riveting Atlantic Monthly essay on the effects of internet pornography on our society provides much food for thought.  It is a culture of restraint and virtue that prevents (at least some) bankers from ripping off their clients and the government, that holds politicians back from the worst kinds of demagoguery and dirty tricks — and that punishes those who break these unwritten rules.

Let’s not over dramatize or fall into moral panic.  Our national culture is not going entirely downhill.  The wide and deep hatred of racism that exists in our culture, for example, is a real improvement over the past.  There are some other ways in which we seem to be a less brutal, more caring society than we once were.  But the signs overall are not good.  The social tolerance for greed and self-indulgence that we’ve developed, the prevalence of materialism, the debasement of popular culture, the unscrupulous exploitation of human sexuality for commercial purposes: these are not making us happier, more free, or, as a society, more just.

A twelve day stint as a faith blogger has left me morally challenged by the complexities and the ambiguities this work involves.  But it’s also left me feeling that this kind of work, somehow, has got to be done.  If we leave religion out of our national conversation about values, politics and culture we end up with a vapid conversation that doesn’t address the deepest realities that move most of the people in this country.  And the problems we face today can’t be addressed constructively without getting into the deep stuff and asking the hardest questions about the things that matter most.

To make the connection between the baby Jesus and the man, you have to do something that often makes Protestants uncomfortable: study Mary. This late in the Christmas season, I haven’t yet written much about Mary. That is a characteristically Protestant and American failing. Throughout the Islamic, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic worlds, the Virgin Mary isn’t just a figure in a storybook. She’s the object of widespread popular devotion.

Much of this makes Protestants slightly queasy for both cultural and theological reasons. The folk piety of the Middle Ages combined Christian concepts with pre-Christian rituals and ideas. Christmas trees and Easter eggs had their origins in pagan customs and ceremonies; in many cases the old gods and spirits lived on, thinly veiled, as saints. We can see something like this today in Brazil and the Caribbean where African religious figures and ideas have been conflated with Catholic saints in various ways. The Virgin Mary, a powerful female figure associated with fertility, was a comfortable fit for many of the pre-Christian cults.

The traditional missionary strategy for Christianity was to assimilate as many features of traditional piety and culture as possible to the new religion. In addition, much of Europe was converted to Christianity from the top down. Kings and the nobility adopted the new faith, and it only slowly ‘trickled down’ to the illiterate commoners. By the time of the Reformation, a wide gap had opened up between the folk piety in the countryside and way that educated people understood their faith.

The Reformers stood for what they saw as an intellectually consistent Christian position and they wanted to bring all of cultural life under Biblical norms. They associated popular rites, shrines and customs with the ‘high places’ and ‘groves’ that reforming kings like Josiah sought to abolish in ancient Judea. At the same time, they argued that the Catholic belief that saints (and especially the Virgin Mary) could and would intercede on behalf of sinners was doctrinally wrong and a source of corruption in the church. It demeaned God, they believed, to suggest that intercession from Mary would change his mind.  Is God’s compassion so limited, his wrath so blind, that he won’t show mercy unless the Virgin intercedes?

Surely not, said the Reformers and they promoted an individualistic faith in which each person stood alone before Christ. There was little room in this for the traditional veneration of the Virgin and to this day, Mary plays a very small part in the piety or the culture of the Protestant world.

Another aspect of the traditional Marian cult made Protestants nervous. The attention traditionally paid to Mary’s role not only detracted, Protestants thought, from the unique stature and work of Jesus; it also undercut the Protestant idea that salvation came through faith alone, with good works (deeds) having nothing to do with it. When Catholics celebrated Mary as the Second Eve whose obedience restored the relationship with God that the first Eve lost, Protestants heard this as a claim that human beings by their own will could overcome the effects of sin.

This is all very well, and I’m writing this blog to celebrate Christmas rather than to meddle in centuries-old theological quarrels, but I think the Protestant reaction against the excesses of medieval Mariolatry has gone too far–and the Christmas season seems like a good time to reflect on the theology, rather than the cult, of Mary.

The key to the classic understanding of who Mary is lies in ideas that the overwhelming majority of American Protestant churches share with the Catholics and the Orthodox. Specifically, these have to do with who Jesus was. Jesus is nothing if not paradoxical. On the one hand, he is the Second Person of the Trinity. But he is also a human being. How does this work? Like the Trinity itself it is a complicated idea that over the centuries has been described in very technical ways by theologians much better educated than me, but most Christians have held that Jesus has two natures combined in one person. He is fully divine, fully human — and still somehow just one person, one self. This idea was not formalized until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, but the implications for Mary were already clear enough that twenty years earlier she was proclaimed Theotokos at the Council of Ephesus.

Theotokos can be translated into English several ways: the most common is “Mother of God” and a very large majority of Christians around the world considers Mary to be. literally, the Mother of God. Since Jesus’ two natures are combined in one person, she must be considered not only the mother of his ‘human side’; she is the mother of the whole person. God’s love knows no bounds; his decision to enter history was so unlimited, so unconditional and so total that God became the son of a human woman.

I want to stress that this is not a point of theology that divides Protestants and Catholics. Martin Luther, John Calvin and Charles Wesley all subscribed to the concepts laid down at Ephesus and Chalcedon; contemporary Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians and many others adhere to churches and traditions that consider these ideas to be basic parts of the Christian faith. (Mormons and Unitarians do not; most evangelicals and Pentecostals do.)

The question I’d like to suggest for readers here towards the end of the Christmas season is this: what respect and honor is due to the Mother of God? To sharpen it a bit, remember that Christians believe that Jesus perfectly fulfilled the law of Moses, not just ritualistically or to external appearances but sincerely and from the heart. The ten commandments sum up that law; the fifth commandment tells us to “Honor your mother and father.” Christians believe that Jesus honored his Father by a life of perfect obedience all the way to the cross. What honor do we think he paid to his mother? How exalted is she in heaven? What good thing would he withhold from her? What honor should we, his brothers and sisters by adoption, pay to the mother of our savior and lord?

I am not suggesting that Southern Baptists start chartering planes for pilgrimages to Lourdes or holding Wednesday-night rosary sessions. And it’s clear to me (as indeed it is to most Catholics and Orthodox) that a large part of honoring Mary is to do your best to follow her son. Yet sometime during the Christmas season, it might be worthwhile for Protestants to ask themselves how they propose to honor the Mother of God this year.

If Marian doctrine originates in our attempts to come to grips with the nature of Jesus, our understanding of Jesus will deepen if we study her. Protestants especially can usefully spend some time thinking about the woman who became the Mother of God, and looking at some of the ways she seems to have left her mark on Jesus.

The passionate concern for the poor that shaped much of his ministry can already be seen in her response to the angel Gabriel as reported by Luke. Giving thanks to God, she says of him that

He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

This is not a bad description of what Jesus did as an adult. The empathy for social outsiders, the refusal to be fooled or intimidated by wealth and social position, the radical intolerance for the abuse of privilege — they all seem prefigured in the words of his mother.

Another way in which Jesus was unusual for his time was his willingness to engage in serious intellectual and moral conversation with independent and unconventional women. The ‘woman of Samaria’ who interrogated him about the water of life, Mary Magdalene, the Martha and Mary who were clearly his close friends, the woman ‘taken in adultery’ whose stoning he prevented: Jesus is comfortable and relaxed with many of the women he meets, jokes with them, and treats them with serious respect.

Down through the ages, Christian civilization has often treated women badly, yet visitors from other great world civilizations have often remarked on the (relative) freedom and equality that women enjoyed in the Christian world. The cult of the Virgin played some part in this; the medieval concept of the courteous and chivalrous knight was often associated with Marian piety (and sometimes with ideals of courtly love which had very little to do with Christian ethics).

I like to think that there is something more: Jesus was the son of a strong and independent woman. Steeped in the ethical traditions of Judaism, she was passionate about justice and willing to stake everything on her sense of God’s call. She had a soft spot for social outcasts — after all she was once in the position of being an unmarried, pregnant woman in a censorious and traditional society. She was thoughtful and meditative, but capable of swift and decisive action when the time came.

She was unflinching and courageous.  She followed Jesus to the cross and watched her son die; her loving glance would have been one of the few comforts he had during that final torment.  She was ready to respond to the unexpected, to have her life wrenched out of a comfortable and traditional groove when God showed her that he had something else in mind.

This is the kind of woman that God chose to raise Jesus. She put a lot of herself in her son, leaving an imprint on his character that is visible from a distance of 2000 years. And she didn’t just mark him. She marked, marks us. Our civilization for better or worse has been shaped through its complicated, many-sided encounter with the man she raised and the faith that grew up around him.  We are all sons and daughters of Mary today, whether we acknowledge it or not.

I grew up in the Episcopal Church where one of the favorite hymns was “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones,” often sung on All Saints’ Day (November 1).  I was an adult before I realized that one of the stanzas invokes the Virgin Mary:

O higher than the cherubim,
More glorious than the seraphim,
Lead their praises, Alleluia!
Thou Bearer of the eternal Word,
Most gracious, magnify the Lord,
Alleluia! Alleluia

“All generations,” she marveled to the angel while accepting God’s request to bear his son, “shall call me blessed.” For two thousand years they have; God blessed her and through her, he continues to bless us all.

Happy tenth day of Christmas!

The story is pretty and the ideas are rich: but what actually happened in Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago?  How much of the Christmas story is “real” and how much of both this story — and ultimately the entire record of the the Scriptures — is historically accurate?

This is a much more complicated question than it may appear at first glance.  Many Christians argued long before the rise of modern historical and scientific criticism of the Bible that much of it was written to be interpreted allegorically rather than read as a historical or scientific account.  Others have made the point that books like the Book of Jonah (in which among other things we find the famous story of Jonah and the whale) were widely accepted as ‘true’ in the sense that the Narnia stories or the Lord of the Rings are true.  They tell real and valuable truths about our world but there isn’t a lot of archaeological evidence to support the claim that elves once walked the earth.  And there are other Biblical books — like the Song of Solomon, the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Psalms — that are obviously literary rather than historical.

So the question of Biblical accuracy is complicated, and both believers and non-believers in the Bible’s religious message have reached a variety of different conclusions about its historical reliability.  But even for people — like me — who think that there must be something important behind all this noise and excitement, the question of how to make sense of the Biblical record is convoluted and thorny.

It’s not as easy for an infinitely transcendent God to reveal himself to culture-bound, historically placed people as you might think. When God committed himself to humanity, he made the decision to enter history. He took us where he found us and met us where we stood. Even today we have to figure that there are ways that our knowledge of the universe and of human history places sharp limits on what we can understand about God. The difference between our times and the era of Jesus often complicates our ability to make sense of the stories we are reading.

After all, when the wise men get to Herod, they turn out to be astrologers. They have seen a star in the heavens that announced that a king of the Jews had been born, so they traveled to Jerusalem to find the child. In a sense, it was a journey of scientific discovery: if they found that such a child had been born, their interpretations would be confirmed. The science of astrology would take a step forward.

We know enough about the astrology of the period to have some idea what they were doing. With roots that have been traced back to ancient Mesopotamia long before the Jews got to Judea, astrology in some ways was humanity’s first science and it rested on a very complex set of observations and measurements. Charting the course of the sun, the moon, the stars and the planets through the skies, ancient thinkers noticed that their movements formed patterns. Furthermore, they saw that these patterns corresponded with regular events on earth. When the sun was in the region of the sky that matches the constellation Aries, the earth renewed itself after the winter cold and the crops once again began to grow. As the sun and the other planets and stars moved round the skies in their stately progressions, other cycles took place on earth. Birds migrated for the winter and returned in the spring. Sheep and camels migrated across the pasture lands; fish had their seasons for breeding, at times disappearing and at other times returning in great numbers.

In one of the great intuitive jumps – a great scientific discovery, actually, which is still the basis of much of our knowledge of the universe today – the ancient thinkers posited that those heavenly bodies acted at a distance. The sun not only warmed you when you looked at it; somehow the sun’s rays caused the seasonal changes taking place all around. The moon’s power somehow caused tides, and the tides were greater or less depending on the positions of the sun and the moon in their complex dance. Over the centuries they found that these observations had predictive power; by the time of Jesus’ birth, the sky scanners were regularly predicting eclipses of the sun and the moon and Julius Caesar relied on this science to produce a calendar so accurate that, with Gregory’s tweak, it remains the basis on which the world organizes its affairs to this day.Somewhat ironically, the ancient astrologers worked like the climate scientists today: that is, they built models and looked for correlations to establish cause and effect. If Jupiter turned retrograde (if the planet’s apparent motion in the sky changed direction) and a great king died, then astrologers would assume that Jupiter caused the king’s death. These models were always being tweaked, but with enough tweaking they still seemed to work. Even in classical times skeptics sniffed that “correlation isn’t causality” and denounced astrologers as quacks — their ‘models’ never quite seemed to predict with precision.

Still, with so many demonstrable connections between the heavens and the earth, studying the heavens impressed many people as the best way to forecast future events. It was an approach so intuitively obvious and so intellectually compelling that down through all the recorded years of history, right into the Reagan White House, powerful women and men have sought the advice of qualified astrologers for insight into unfolding events. There are a number of theories about what happened, but it appears that a powerful astrological event occurred around the time scholars think Jesus was actually born; there are several independent accounts of astrologers predicting the birth of a major new ruler at about this time. When the wise men said they were ‘following a star’ they had something very specific in mind.

So what do we make of this? Is the Bible putting its seal of approval on the ‘science’ of astrology, so that we must be either Christians and believers in astrology or scoffers at both the religion and the ‘science’? Do we, as some Christians do, think that rather than an astrological event the Bible refers to a special cosmic miracle, a light set in the sky to mark this special occasion in the history of the world?  Or does this all sound like a bunch of legends collected by ignorant and superstitious people a long time ago and far, far away?

All this gets us into deep theological waters where wiser and better educated writers than I have gotten into trouble. Yet the issue is too important to ignore. It brings us to the questions that any serious person has to ask sooner or later when looking into these things: how true is all this? Are these historical narratives or beautiful myths? What are these ancient documents trying to tell us, and how far can we trust them?

My starting point for questions of this kind is to come back to the ideas we looked at yesterday: the question of a universal God who reveals himself in a particular culture. Jesus was a Jew, shaped by Jewish customs, Jewish history, Jewish theological ideas and Jewish scholarship. And it was not only necessary that Jesus be born to a particular mother speaking a particular language and inheriting a particular culture; he also had to be born at a particular time.

And just as he was a man of his people, a Jew, he was a man of his time; the people around him had no special access to scientific or archaeological knowledge other than what was generally known. And in a world without the internet or printing, the people around Jesus would have likely been less well informed than the cultivated, educated and widely traveled Roman elite.

In Jesus’ time, modern ideas of science and scholarship did not exist. In an age without printing, libraries were rare. Greek and Roman historians, the best of their time, believed that it was appropriate for a historian to write speeches for historical characters based on the historians’ knowledge of character and their understanding of the events. The great speeches in Thucydides’ classic History of the Peloponnesian War weren’t copied from the speakers’ drafts or notes or even necessarily from interviews with those who heard the speech. A well-trained historian at this time wasn’t somebody who searched the written archives and other records and then wrote articles and books that carefully separated what was and was not known. A well-trained historian was somebody who, after careful study of the available information, was able to make intelligent deductions about what was missing, critique the obviously legendary and biased sources, and, on the basis of experience, intuition and skill, was qualified to fill in the large gaps which the incomplete records of the day inevitably left.

When the author of Luke’s gospel tells us at the beginning that he made a systematic and orderly investigation of the events to give us the best information available, he could only mean that he was doing what a responsible and serious historian of his time understood as his duty. As I wrote in one of the first Yule blogs, that is different from what a professional historian today would assume the job entails, but the only observers around during Jesus’ lifetime would inevitably look to classical rather than to modern historical standards and ideas.

That makes it tough on contemporary readers who want to apply the standards we use in modern history (and modern science for that matter) to events that took place long ago and far away. When we read a historical document, we have a very clear standard of what we mean by whether the document is accurate.  If the wise men had brought a video camera with them, what would have been on the pictures of the holy family that they uploaded to wisemen.com on the web?

We want answers to questions like this — and we can’t get them. Until and unless we build time machines, we must deal with the information that we have, collected by people whose ideas of historical verification and science were very different from ours.

I’m not sure that this matters as much as some people — Biblical ultra-literalists on the one hand and scoffing atheists on the other — think it does. Human beings almost never have the kind of knowledge and certainty that we want, but we press on nevertheless making choices and commitments. From where I sit, it seems pretty certain that Something Big happened at the first Christmas and that history somehow turned on its hinges. When I’m writing for a general audience I will often use the expressions CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before the Common Era) rather than the more traditional ones of AD (anno domini, in the year of the Lord) and BC (Before Christ) to date events. There’s no point in picking quarrels with some of my readers every time I write an essay. But as I see it, the old AD/BC division points to something important and real. History turned a corner with the birth of Jesus Christ, and while the written reports of that event don’t tell me everything I want to know, they do tell me everything I need.

There is something else to think about.  As we saw yesterday, Jesus was born into one nation to be the savior of all.  In the same way, he was born at a particular time in world history in order to reach out to people all over the world in many different historical eras.

The time of his birth is an interesting one from this perspective.  The Greco-Roman world is enough like ours, that it is understandable to ‘moderns’ in ways that, say, Egypt of the pharaohs or ancient Babylon is not.  The rules of logic and many of the basic philosophical ideas that we still use today had been developed. The historical tradition that shaped Luke’s work is recognizably the foundation of the discipline of history as it is still practiced.  Modern historians have more resources and have developed their craft well beyond anything Luke knew, but he and they share a basic understanding of what it is they are trying to do.

Jesus was born into a culture and a historical epoch that are relatively open and accessible to us today.  When we read the letters of Paul or study his exploits and speeches through the writing of Luke, we can understand the intellectual traditions and literary forms being employed.  Jewish theology and exegesis on the one hand, Greek philosophy and literary forms on the other (the ‘epistles’ of Paul are letters that follow well recognized patterns in other letters written at the time): these are not exactly what we know today but they are close enough and comprehensible to us that it is not, for example, like the Epic of Gilgamesh or other ancient literature that is more remote and less comprehensible on its own or indeed on any terms.

At the same time, the circumstances and culture into which Jesus was born are also accessible to people in many pre-modern and non-western cultures. Pastoralists and agriculturalists around the world who would be almost as bewildered by contemporary London or Shanghai as anybody in Jesus’ time are able to understand the world of the gospels.  Jesus spoke in simple ways about realities that farmers and illiterates around the world can grasp. Bread, wine, sheep, goats, planting seeds, catching fish: not everybody around the world is directly familiar with all of these reference points but the message of the gospels is, demonstrably, clear enough so that people in every world culture at all kinds of levels of development can find meaning and coherence in it.

If the gospels came out of a culture that was closer to western modernity, and the gospels had therefore been written in ways that satisfied contemporary academic historiographic models (complete with photos and footnotes), the resulting 900 page biographies of Christ might be more satisfying to us, but perhaps much less accessible to poor farmers in Africa or simple fishermen in Indonesia.

Shockingly, that matters a great deal to God. The story of the gospels is a story for everybody, not just for sophisticated, college educated citizens of advanced industrial democracies.  Just as we find just enough common ground, intellectually and culturally, with these documents to grasp what they are getting at even while we are frustrated by their indifference to some of our cultural expectations, so others in other places and times have found them clear enough to hear and believe. The gospels occupy a kind of center point in human culture as a whole: products of a particular time and place, but comprehensible to all.

Medieval maps often placed Jerusalem at the center of the world.  That was less a literal description of the way the makers thought about the physical universe (many medieval scholars knew that the ancient Greeks had not only figured out the shape of the earth, but they had calculated its size), than a statement about the central importance of the gospel stories in human life.  If we could somehow make a cultural map of the world, the gospels might well go somewhere near the center as well.

The wise men who followed the star were led to the center of all things. They did not understand the difference between astronomy and astrology as well as we do, but they used what they knew to get to where they needed to be.

It was enough for them, and people today can still do the same thing. We can follow the light we have to the center of all things, to a place that both shepherds and scholars can find, and when we arrive, like both the shepherds and the wise men, we will find that it has what we need.

A fresh fall of snow is a lot like a new year.  For the first few hours, the snow is pure and fresh; then the people (and the dogs) come out. Gradually the snow is trodden down, plowed into icy heaps, and begins to turn various unsightly colors as the soot from passing cars and various other substances defile it. After a few days it is an ugly, unsightly mess, and one longs to see it cleared away.

New years can be like that, too. They start out clean and pure and we make resolutions to keep them that way. Then, over time, the old habits creep back and before long we will be needing a fresh start once again.

Over the last few days we’ve been delving into the meaning of Christmas; it’s led us into a discussion of the Christian concept of God. There are many qualities that can be used to describe the deity; Muslims often speak of the “ninety-nine names of God,” and it’s an instructive and beautiful list on which any monotheist can profitably meditate.

But at the end of the day, for Christians the heart of the matter is this: God is love. Love doesn’t just describe God’s relationship to the creation; it describes God’s essence — his inner life and being. This as we have seen is the origin of the Christian idea of the Trinity: love is so intrinsic to the divine nature that we cannot conceive of his unity except as communal.

From a Christian perspective, God’s act of creation is an expression of love. God made the world because he wants an abundance of beings and sensibilities to love, to be with, to share life with and to make happy.

That is where we come in. We have no way of knowing whether there is life on other planets, much less what if anything it thinks and whether it has religious aspirations, but among those life forms we know anything about, people have a particular place in God’s plan.

The Bible tells us that God loves animals and even plants. He knows when any sparrow falls and the Psalmist says, “The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their meat in due season. Thou openest thine hand and satisfiest the desire of all things living” (Psalm 145:15-16). God clothes the lilies of the field, Jesus says, more gloriously than King Solomon in all his robes (Matthew 6:28-29).

It is possibly not quite right to say that God loves people more than he loves the animals and plants with which we share our planet. It would be better to say that he loves every being in the way most appropriate to its nature, and that people, made in God’s image and given both personality and intelligence, receive a unique kind of love and were created to enjoy a special relationship with God. Strange as it may seem, the maker and ruler of the universe seeks out the pleasure of our company; we can please God and we can hurt him by the ways we treat him, treat ourselves and treat one another.

All this means that human beings present God with an extraordinary problem. On the one hand, we are irresistibly lovable, beautiful and, where God’s love is concerned, needy: how could we not be; that’s how he made us, as beings especially crafted to be fulfilled and transformed by his love. In some ways God looks at us with the kind of tender solicitude and hopeful anxiety with which we look at small children.

Yet at the same time, we’re a fairly nasty bunch of characters, more Lord of the Flies than innocent cherubs. Just pick up a newspaper or go to your favorite news site: genocides, starvation, vast contrasts of poverty and wealth; terror, arms races, environmental destruction; the rich and the poor cheating and stealing from one another, with the rich generally doing best because they’ve got more power to abuse; nations nursing ancient wounds as hatreds fester.

Or back off from these entrenched historical evils and look at what goes on in families, neighborhoods and among friends. Abused children growing up to repeat the cycle. Children of alcoholics and addicts grow up with psychological wounds that predispose them to repeat the same sad behavior. Widespread epidemics of cheating in school, cheating on taxes, cheating on expense accounts, cheating on spouses. It’s a bit like the national debt; each generation gets the bill for its parents’ shortcomings – and passes that bill with some additional charges down to their own heirs.

Christians talk about this situation under the heading of original sin, saying that our species has been a big dysfunctional family since the dawn of time, and that each of us repeats that cycle of abuse and betrayal in our own way even as we suffer from the damage done by those who came before. Other religions object to the kind of metaphysical structure that Christians give to the concept, but virtually everyone intuitively gets this picture of a human race somehow at war with itself and fundamentally out of whack.

This is what, and who, God is bound and determined to love; the question is how can he do it?

From the Christian point of view, this is not a trivial problem. People aren’t just messy and incomplete. We are actively evil. As Reinhold Niebuhr puts it, we place ourselves at the center of the moral universe instead of God and our neighbors. We aren’t just victims of an unjust society and a tragic history; we make choices that perpetrate and even deepen injustice and add new dimensions to unfolding tragedies of our time.

God is so loving that he can’t leave us to perish in our misery and mess. He wants us with a love that will not be denied. Yet at the same time, God is too just, too all-seeing to overlook what’s going on.

Think of a God’s eye perspective on someone who beats and abuses a child. God sees the helpless victim and burns with anger; yet he also knows that the perpetrator was once an innocent victim. He felt all the fear and pain of the young child who has grown up to become an abuser, feels all the pain of the adult who has grown up twisted. Knowing the future, as God does, he perhaps can see a time ahead when today’s victim is tomorrow’s bully. He can see the fanatical Nazi as a child growing up in a culture wrenched out of shape by defeat, inflation and change. He can see the Ukrainian mafioso as the product of a society that suffered genocidal violence at the hands of both Soviet and Nazi oppressors. He sees the genocidaires of Rwanda and Darfur as products of societies gone deeply wrong: yet he also hears the cries of their victims. Crime is real and evil is real, but the line between good and evil does not ultimately separate groups of peoples or individuals; it runs through every human heart.

It is not just the spectacular sinners, with their hands drenched in blood, whose victims cry out for justice. The quiet, respectable sinners — American whites, for example, who could have done more about racial injustice but chose to turn a blind eye — have responsibilities that a just and loving God cannot ignore.

God cannot love the victim of violence or exploitation without loving and indeed demanding justice; but he cannot love anybody at all unless he finds a way around its strict demands. Is God going to be an inflexible prosecutor who sends us all to hell? Is he going to wink at crimes and overlook offenses? Christians believe that God refused to choose between his love and his justice. He refused to overlook the evil of the world, but he also refused to walk away from the whole ugly mess.

Instead, God chose to engage. He would draw closer to us, but not do so in a way that took evil lightly. Specifically, God chose to become a human being, to live with us and ultimately to take on himself the punishment that justice demands. The baby in the manger wasn’t just there to look cute and beam rays of forgiveness to shepherds and kings. He was born to suffer rejection and injustice, to be tortured and scourged, humiliated and mocked, to face an unjust trial before an oppressive foreign ruler, to feel the full weight of the wrath of God due to all the evil in the world, and to die a cruel death while being ridiculed and mocked by his opponents.

God resolved the dilemma between love and justice by taking them both all the way.  The creator of the world took the hit we had coming.  The anger, the condemnation, the judgment all fell on Jesus, who bore it all out of love.  That, for Christians, is what makes Christmas such a special time of year.  God really knows us; he knows the worst things about us and isn’t fooled by our rationalizations and evasions. And he still loves us enough to be born among us and to pay the price for all we have done.

Unlike all the other prophets, preachers and visionaries who came into the world, Jesus did not just come to remind us of the importance of a moral law we cannot keep. He did not just come to tell us, eloquently and wisely, what we have known all along.  He came to deal with the flaws, the weakness and the twisted selfishness that stand between us and God.  He came to deal with the reality that no matter how much we might wish to live the right way — we haven’t and don’t.

He came to show and live out God’s radical commitment to his creation.  People aren’t just a hobby to God.  Infinite love made us to share an infinite intimacy and will go to infinite lengths to restore that bond no matter how deeply or how horribly we have failed.  That love is not blind; it knows what messes we make of our lives and how we wound and damage others. But even so, God is determined to be with us.

That is why there was a baby in the manger.  That is why we celebrate this time of year. God knows exactly who we are, loves us anyway, and will do whatever it takes to make our relationship work.

Earlier this week I blogged about how theists and atheists are the not all that different from each other; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical and even spiritual meaning in life. Human life amounts to more than eating and scratching our various itches, and whether or not we believe in God, we want to do something real with our lives. We have itches that scratching won’t fix.

On this seventh day of Christmas, I want to blog about how theists and atheists are different. While both groups think life means something, we understand that meaning in different ways.

All human beings encounter something in life that seems to transcend ordinary experience.  This is true whether or not we believe in one God, many gods or no god at all. , Almost all human beings have ‘peak experiences’ from time to time.  There are moments and relationships in life that point beyond the physical realities toward the meaning of life. Painting a picture, talking with a friend or a loved one, holding the hand of a small child, volunteering in a homeless shelter, watching the surf roll up the beach as the sun rises on the horizon: at certain moments in our lives these very ordinary experiences connect us with something that somehow feels more real than the superficial and trivial concerns that usually engage us. Something triggers a moment of special clarity and insight that puts the issues and problems of our daily lives into a new and more meaningful perspective. Mystics and people with strong religious beliefs see these moments as encounters with God.  But others feel that these experiences are ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘religious: they experience a feeling of intense meaning and perception that isn’t grounded in any specific religious or theological context.

Some of us have these moments more than others and they seem to be more common at some stages of life than at others, but I’ve never met someone who doesn’t have and doesn’t cherish these moments when things all seem to come together, when the universe seems to make more sense than usual and we feel somehow at home.

A second way that theists and non-theists are in touch with something bigger than themselves comes when we perceive the power of ideas and ideals. Things like justice and freedom can’t be bought in a store or seen on TV, but we feel they are important and real. They have no physical existence but we not only know what they are; if we don’t have them we hunger for them as much if not more than we hunger for real, physical food.

The idea of truth has the same kind of power. Whether we think about scientific truth or moral truth, we want to know what it is and we want to see it recognized and honored. We dislike hypocrisy because it is a crime against truth. We hate censorship for the same reason. We believe that human reason ought to be free to operate, free to reach its conclusions, free to share its findings with others.

None of this necessarily has anything to do with religion. You don’t have to be a religious believer to believe, for example, that there are causes in whose service you should be prepared to die — or that you ought to be willing to make financial sacrifices to help the poor.  You do not have to believe in God to believe that there is an objective standard of fairness by which your conduct is judged, and that some human actions are clearly right (as when a fireman goes into a burning building to save an endangered child) and others (as when a fraudster establishes a Ponzi scheme to bilk the credulous and the elderly out of their life savings) are clearly wrong.  “Right” and “wrong” are abstract ideas, but they are ideas with great power over us and both religious and non-religious people acknowledge their sway.

Mystic or spiritual experience of the meaning and coherence of existence; the appeal of values like justice and truths which speak directly to our hearts in ways that cannot be denied: these are two ways in which almost everyone on earth experiences the power of transcendence in ordinary life.  Having these experiences is part of what it means to be human; interpreting these experiences is what often divides people into different theological and political camps.

Most of the atheists I’ve known have a profound and moving faith in the meaning and value of human life and in the value of abstract ideas and ideals. Some believe in these virtues and values enough to stake their lives on them and they have faith that doing so results in a life that is more meaningful and more real than one squandered simply on the pursuit of material goods or prestige and success. The late Christopher Hitchens was one such person; Hitch passionately believed in social and political ideals and thought it was his duty to speak up for them whatever the consequences.

Theists, at least in the Abrahamic traditions which I know best, go a step farther. They not only believe in meaning as found in moments of intense personal experience and in the great abstract and impersonal ideals like justice and truth. They believe that the source of meaning and existence hangs together and points to something greater than itself. For theists, life is ultimately meaningful and meaning itself is ultimately personal.

Part of this comes from experience; theists often feel that they have directly experienced God in some of those moments of transcendence that we all feel. They feel they are encountering Somebody in those peak experiences of intense perception and awareness, not just Something. At those peak moments of insight, and even in the midst of everyday life, for many theists there is an experience that the universe doesn’t just sit there while we experience it. It responds to us in a meaningful way.

Theists also look at values like justice and truth and think they tell us something about the way the world is made, not just how we feel. The love of justice isn’t just a product of our evolutionary upbringing, a flicker of sensation in our synapses that points to nothing beyond our conditioning or our genes.

For theists, the universe isn’t just a place with scattered bits of meaning in it. Meaning isn’t decoration or illusion, grace notes that accompany us on our meaningless way through the dark void. Existentialists and others who believe that the universe is ultimately meaningless but who still choose to act as if meaning was real are among the moral heroes of the world, but theists think there is more to life than the affirmation of meaningless ideals in the face of an uncaring void.

They think meaning really means something, that it all adds up. The transcendence that comes to us in life doesn’t just happen; it points to the nature of ultimate reality. That ultimate reality transcends our ability to comprehend, and we only get scattered glimpses of it here and there, but whatever it is, it is greater than we are.

To be a theist is to believe that the meaning we experience in life is a clue. We can follow that clue to learn something of the nature of the creator of the world, of the author of meaning.

This leads very naturally to the concept of a personal God. The ground of all being, the ultimate reality behind everything else, the final and ultimate meaning to which everything else points will certainly be different from us. It is probably going to be indescribably and infinitely more alive and more complex than anything we know or can imagine – but it is certainly not going to be less complex, less individuated, less self-aware than a human.

This fountain of transcendence is not going to be something that can be captured and domesticated by human categories and words. The great theologian Thomas Aquinas at the end of his life said that all of his theological work was ‘like straw’ compared to the reality he glimpsed in visions. He wasn’t retracting his work; he was observing that the reality went beyond anything he could express.

Like Aquinas, theists in all the great religions have tried to make sense of the immensity of meaning that they see coiled at the center of the universe; it is in these theological understandings that the great religions often differ. Christianity has a unique and disturbing approach to understanding God; as we saw yesterday, their concept of God as love leads to the idea of the Trinity, of community being intrinsic to the nature of God, not a byproduct of creation.

I won’t try to speak for Islam or Judaism, but to understand where Christians are coming from with this whole God thing, it’s probably more useful to think about the heart of the universe than its king. If you think of God as the source of the meaning that flows through people’s lives you will come closer to how Christians think of him than if you think of God as the universal lawgiver or even as the creator.

Christmas takes the universal creator out of the realm of abstraction and brings him into our world.  God is the baby in the heart of his family, the adored child whose presence gives new meaning and hope to the parents and friends. This is not God as the Punisher and the Avenger; it is God giving himself to the world out of uncontrollable, unstoppable love. For Christians, the familiar scene around the manger is among other things a way of saying that we can be at home in the universe; despite the immensity of stars and space stretching away from us on every side, the universe makes sense – and we are loved.

Meaning lives and meaning loves; that is what Christians are celebrating at this time of year.

Now it gets tough. That little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying so cutely in the manger is the biggest trouble maker in world history, and the shocking claims that Christianity makes about who he is and what he means divide Christians not only from atheists and agnostics, but also splits Christians off from other religions.

If Christians saw that little baby as nothing more or less than a beautiful symbol of human innocence and love, there would be no problem. Even recognizing him as an important teacher and religious leader does not raise many hackles. Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet and the predicted Messiah; Islam has no trouble with the idea that he was born of a virgin, and the Virgin Mary is a popular and well respected figure for Muslims.  When it comes to his moral teaching, much of what Jesus says is unexceptionable.  The Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have others do unto you) has its analogs in many religious traditions.  Jesus’ summary of the moral law (Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself) is also something that people from many different religious traditions can take to heart.  Many non-religious people (and non-Christians like Mahatma Gandhi) have been inspired by Jesus’ example and teaching. If Christians were simply celebrating the birth of a moral teacher on Christmas, the world would be a more peaceful place.

But that’s not how most Christians see the baby in the manger. They don’t think he is a symbol; they don’t think he’s a messenger. They think he is the real thing. He is the meaning of meaning, the truth made flesh, the only begotten Son of God. As a grown man, he would tell people that “I and the Father are one.” Most of the people we call Christians believe he was right, and speak of the baby Jesus and the man he grew to be as one of the Three Persons of God.

For both Muslims and Jews, this an atrocious theological scandal, a fundamental betrayal of the essence of monotheism.  It’s an atrocity to worship a creature, a human being however noble, as God; it’s an atrocity to mingle polytheism with monotheism; it’s an atrocity to blur the bright line between Creator and creation by mixing the two together in the person of Jesus.

The Christian betrayal of monotheism, from this perspective, is damaging and deep.  It’s not just that God is One and indivisible; it is also that he is incomparably greater than and infinitely above above human beings.  While God is compassionate and caring there is an infinite distance between the Creator and the created, between God and man. Getting into a right relationship with God involves acknowledging and accepting this truth.

The Christian idea that Jesus is God, non-Christian monotheists feel, is a direct assault both on God’s unity and his transcendence.  To many serious Muslims and Jews, the Christian idea of God as revealed in the Christmas story is a caricature of monotheism, a distorted vision that robs God of both his unity and his dignity.

For many Muslims, shirk, the improper association of the created with the creator, is the ultimate in blasphemy. For many Jews, to worship a human being as God is idolatry – one of the worst sins there is. Christianity’s core belief that the baby in the manger is God made man is a flagrant assault on the core principles of monotheism as understood by the two other Abrahamic faiths.

And, both Jews and Muslims (to say nothing of Unitarian Christians) have pointed out for many centuries, this Christian idea that Jesus is in some way God immediately opens up dozens of tough theological questions. Christians have squabbled and often shed blood over the many different ways theologians have tried to define and explain the Trinity — and the Incarnation of God in Christ.  There has never been a time when all the world’s Christians reached an agreement about the meaning of these great doctrines.  Words likehomoousion, and Filioque continue to divide the world of Christianity over technical points of doctrine.

The reason Christians argue endlessly over the nature of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation, many maintain, is because these doctrines are nonsensical to begin with.  In any case, the fact that these distinctive Christian ideas lead believers into endless tangles of controversy and contradiction is real.

This little Yule Blog isn’t going to settle these great controversies. My goal is more modest: to help Christian and non-Christian readers understand what classical Christians mean when they identify the baby in the manger with God on high. That means taking on the most controversial and complex idea in Christianity; the doctrine of the Trinity is wrapped around that baby in the manger even tighter than the swaddling clothes.

In the old days almost every educated American, whether he or she were Christian or not, would have some idea about what this doctrine meant. Not all Americans were Trinitarians; in addition to Jews and the very small number of Muslims in the United States at the time, Unitarians, Mormons and a great many free-thinkers also disapproved of the concept. But understanding this idea and at least something of its history seemed important enough both for the sake of understanding American history and culture, English literature, and world history, literature and art that even secular institutions of learning made some effort to ensure that students learned about the Trinity.

That isn’t happening much anymore; unfortunately this means that young people will have to pick up their knowledge of core religious ideas from disreputable bloggers like yours truly. 

The New Testament books speak of God in three persons.  There is the Father (“Our Father who art in heaven” as Jesus prayed in the Lord’s Prayer), the Son — Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, sometimes called the Holy Ghost in older English translations.  In subsequent years Christian scholars and theologians tried to make sense of this language and gradually moved toward the idea of the Trinity as we know it today: One God, Three Persons. The Quicunque Vult, or the “Athanasian Creed” is an early document that gives some idea of the complexity of the Trinitarian idea as theologians hammered it out; it is enough for our purposes to know that most Christians believe that the God of the Bible is best described as one God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The question of how one God can exist in three persons has perplexed 1nquiring minds for a very long time.  St. Patrick very famously explained the doctrine of the Trinity to new Irish converts by showing them a shamrock (aka a clover leaf): three lobes, one leaf. Others have used examples like a triangle: three sides, one figure. None of these are exact, and Trinitarian theology is one of the most complex and arcane branches of Christian thought. As a mere lay blogger I don’t have the theological chops to present a technically sophisticated and theologically nuanced presentation of the doctrine, so I’ll try to start from a different place – from this question of meaning that we have been tracing through Christmas.

I wrote earlier that theism is rooted in the intuition that the meaning we experience in our lives and our interactions with other people adds up to something real. Love for example isn’t just a biologically conditioned feeling of affinity that encourages us to protect our children and other members of the tribe, assuring that our genes will be passed on in this brutally competitive world. Love in the Christian view is rooted in the ultimate realities; it reflects the basic nature of the universe and in the end love will be vindicated.

Like the other monotheistic religions, Christianity moves from the idea of meaning to the idea of a personal God, but Christianity goes a step further. It identifies God with one particular aspect of meaning: love. “God is love,” says one of the letters that make up the New Testament (1 John 4:8). This is the phrase that Pope Benedict XVI chose for the title of his first encyclical letter; it resonates through the history and theology of all the Christian denominations like nothing else.

Christians really mean this. When they say ‘God is love’ they don’t just mean that God is a being who loves. They aren’t just saying that God is nice, or that he is compassionate and forgiving.  They mean that love is the core of his nature, the key to his being.

Love isn’t something outside God; love is the nature of God. And love is community. Life isn’t life if it isn’t shared; to be God is to love — and to love is to be in community and relationship. God was love before there was a creation for him to be in love with, but to be solitary is not in the nature of God. Ultimately I think, what Christians mean by the doctrine of the Trinity is just this: because God is love, community and relationship are rooted in the depths of his being. Community is intrinsic to God. His unity is communal.

Among the many classes of people who dislike this idea, two are particularly prominent:  rationalists and convinced monotheists who don’t buy the Christian package. For rationalists, the idea that God is many and God is one is a contradiction of the most elementary principles of logic. This was the part of Christianity that many of the Founding Fathers and other enlightened and educated people of the Age of Reason had the most trouble with. They wanted a God who was logical; the Trinity didn’t fit.

Today, this is less of an issue. We have all grown so accustomed to living with conflicting paradigms and grand narratives that we are less strictly logical than many of our ancestors were. This isn’t always a good thing; a healthy dose of Aristotelian logic would clarify a lot of the confusions that vex our political and cultural discourse today. But still it makes the concept of a Trinity less difficult for contemporary minds to accept.  Two hundred years ago ‘enlightened’ minds generally accepted the existence of God without much trouble but boggled at the concept of the Trinity.  Today, enlightened minds have more trouble accepting the existence of God; if they do accept that existence, the problem of the Trinity doesn’t loom particularly large for them.

This is partly because our scientific paradigms have changed.  The science of 1800 was pretty open and shut: a thing was either true or false.  These days, physics tends to broaden the mind;  after even casually wrestling with modern physics, many people are more comfortable than they used to be with the idea that the basis of existence may violate human expectations and logical categories. If light can be both particles and waves, maybe God can be both unitary and communal.

(There may be another reason why Americans in particular are predisposed to accept the idea of a Trinity.  We have one federal government, established under one Constitution, divided into three branches.  If we can be Trinitarian in our politics, why not also in our theology?)

The other objection to the Trinity from the standpoint of other Abrahamic monotheisms remains vibrant and influential. This is not a religiously polemical blog — at least I’m trying to keep it from turning into one. I can understand why people from other religious backgrounds and traditions see the Trinitarian idea as chipping away at the transcendence and the uniqueness of God, and I respect their concerns. Christians, obviously, don’t share this objection. For Christians, to say that the divine unity is so unimaginably deep, rich and transcendent that what humans understand as community is inextricably bound in God’s unique being is to stress God’s transcendence, not to undermine it. Belief in the Trinity doesn’t, from this perspective, undermine one’s belief in the Unity of God: it gives our idea of God’s unity a depth that emphasizes just how unique and unimaginable the creator really is.

For Christians, God is a different order of being than we are, and one of the ways in which he is different is that for him there is no contradiction between the singular uniqueness of who he is, and the fact that his essence is community, relationship and love.

Christians see this communal nature of the one God as a further affirmation of the basic intuition of theism: that our experience of the meaning in life points us toward the divine. People are social beings and much of the meaning and transcendence we find in life is related to our participation in social units ranging from the family to the global human community. We are individuals, but we only become our fullest selves in relationship with others. God similarly is himself only in relationship; since God can never be less than fully himself, we must understand his being as complex enough to give full scope to this aspect of his being.

In any case, Christians generally believe that the baby in the manger was the Second Person of the Trinity, taking on human flesh and come to live among us.  As John Milton (who later changed his mind on this topic) put it in his 1629 Nativity Ode:

That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherwith he wont at Heav’ns high Councel-Table,
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside; and here with us to be,
Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day,
And chose with us a darksom House of mortal clay.

That baby in the manger, Christians believe, was God himself come down to be among us.

Today I drove back from Virginia to New York — almost eight hours of stop and go driving on the New Jersey Turnpike and its accomplices up and down the Eastern seaboard.  It’s been many years since I made that trip during a holiday week; now I remember why I gave it up.

But the experience that knocked all the blogging spirit out of me this week had nothing to do with traffic.  It was about a dog: my brother’s three children and his wife had long wanted a dog.  That desire reached a fever pitch over Thanksgiving when they spent several days with their cousins’ dog in Philadelphia.  It was clear that a dog had to happen for the Virginia Meads.  Not so clear was how it could happen, and happen in time for the holidays.

After many calls, much consultation, and a certain amount of old fashioned deceit, an eight week old black lab has been tracked down.  The shots have been given, the vet has signed off, solemn oaths have been sworn, and the new Mead dog will be meeting his new family tomorrow night.

For now, they are calling him Riley, though I understand that a determined minority of the children concerned still likes the name Mowgli. ‘Blog’, I fear, was never really in the running.  He is coming in a crate and will have a blanket with his mother’s scent to help him make the transition.  The children have all sworn to take care of him; the mom and dad, remembering their own records of compliance with such promises back in the day, are reconciling themselves to becoming part time puppy parents.  I think this is OK with my brother; he never actually gave permission in so many words for me to gift his family with a dog. (Come to think of it, he did kind of the opposite.  I remember words like “no” and “never” being bandied about, although his children told me he didn’t really mean it and was just being grumpy.)

In general, the family’s experience with labs has been mixed.  Cosmo was an excellent dog and is much missed.  Sam was relocated to a farm after, among other exploits, eating most of a couch.  Sophie falls between these extremes, though if she gets everything she wants, she is generally sweet tempered.  Where Riley or Mowgli falls in the spectrum is of course unknown at this point; something tells me that for the sake of my relationship with my brother, I should be hoping for another Cosmo.

We shall see.

Happy fifth day of Christmas, and welcome back to the 2011 Yule Blog, where we aim to keep the holiday fires burning right up through Twelfth Night on January 6.

Yesterday King Herod’s massacre of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two shocked us out of the idea that Christmas is basically a pretty holiday about presents and elves. Christmas is serious business, at least as Christians understand it. The birth of the baby in the manger is connected with the murder of the babies in the streets of Bethlehem and indeed to the sorrow and suffering that have marked the long and bloody journey of the human species. Christmas is the unveiling of God’s plan to save us from ourselves without stripping our moral freedom from us.

The shocking claim of Christmas, that the baby in the manger is the God of Abraham and Isaac, the maker of heaven and earth, the uncreated creator of all things is at least as hard to understand as it is to believe. But that outrageous claim is why Christians celebrate the day: they believe that this baby, born of a virgin in Bethlehem of Judea, was the only begotten son of God, the long prophesied Messiah, and the savior of the world. For the people who think this, it makes perfect sense that the world’s biggest annual celebration is held in his honor; his birth was the biggest and best thing that ever happened.

Forget believing or disbelieving this; if we are going to understand what Christians mean by these ideas, we have to unpick some concepts and examine some unspoken assumptions. We need to know what Christians mean by God, why they think God had a son and what they think God’s son was doing being born at all, much less being born in Bethlehem. These are some big questions and we won’t get them all answered in one day; those of you who stick with me through the rest of the Christmas season will, I hope, have a better idea how this all hangs together by the time we are done.

The place to start is with the idea of God: why do Christians and so many other people believe in an invisible ruler and creator of the universe – and then how does the Christian idea of God differ from the others? We’ll go on from there to see how the Christmas story makes sense to Christians in the light of these special beliefs.

Whether we look at Christianity or at other religions, the idea of God doesn’t come from the realms of science or philosophy. That is, most people don’t believe in God because they work through a long philosophical argument.  Most people haven’t taken classes in formal logic to evaluate the claims and counter-claims of various world philosophies before making their choice. They have not been slowly driven to the logical necessity of a Prime Mover in the universe, or followed St. Anselm’s argument that existence is a necessary attribute of the greatest being that our minds can conceive.

But neither do they believe in God because they are scientifically ignorant.  They don’t believe in God because they think that God makes the thunder clap and the rain fall.  They don’t believe in God because they’ve never heard of the theory of evolution and need an explanation for why the physical universe works the way it does.

Most people believe in God because they feel that life means something.

We are born, we move through life; if we are lucky we grow old and die. As all this happens, we feel things. We feel connections to other people – to family, friends, lovers and spouses, fellow citizens of a nation, fellow members of our species facing a common fate on a single and fragile planet, the animals that share our lives and our world. We see astounding acts of heroism and devotion, especially in everyday life. We see parents sacrificing for the sake of their children, young people caring for aged relatives, firemen rushing into burning buildings to save people they don’t even know, inspiring teachers who earn very little money but seem contented and fulfilled, volunteers giving spare time and money to their communities in many ways, judges who give honest verdicts without favor or fear – and on and on and on.

We also see beauty all around us: sunrise, sunset, the play of light on water, starry nights, the subtle colors of a grassy field, the awesome presence of a mountain range, dazzling tropical fishes, roses in a garden. We often feel there is some kind of connection between the beauty of nature and the beauty of human life well lived; many of us seek to respond to the beauty we see around us by creating beauty (whether as art, in gardens or in our daily lives) of our own.

Moral beauty, physical beauty, feelings of love and devotion to people and causes that take us beyond our selves: for most of us, the part of our life that feels truest, most real and most fully lived revolves around these things.

Our lives in the world point us towards something beyond the facts of our lives. Eating, drinking, making babies: this is all very well, but our lives do more than revolve around the simple biological necessities. They point us toward meaning.

Most people, including the very large majority of those people who say they are atheists, believe that life means something. To those who believe that life means something, the moral feelings we have about justice and duty (for example) aren’t just random biological signals that flash across our neurons in response to evolutionary patterns. We sometimes can’t articulate why this is true, but we feel that it matters that we do the right thing: that we bring up our kids well, that we honor our parents and care for them when they are old, that we remain loyal to our spouses and keep our wedding vows, that we behave fairly in our dealings with other people and that we contribute to the greater good through the way we live our lives. There are people and causes for which many of us are willing (though perhaps not particularly eager) to die.

Maybe we feel this way because we are biologically hard-wired to do so, but the fact is that the overwhelming majority of people around the world believe that life counts and that the whole is somehow greater than the sum of the parts.

This feeling that there is some meaning to our lives is the basis, I think, not only for the Christian religion and for all religions and mystical experiences; it is the basis for the many noble forms of ethical thought and philosophical reflection found among atheists and agnostics. Anyone who feels the pull of a higher path and greater responsibilities than just blindly grabbing what can be seized is moved by a vision of something outside ones own life that compels our allegiance and respect: a vision of what matters and a sense of life’s meaning.

That sense of life’s meaning is our sense of the transcendent: a sense that our experience points beyond itself to something important.

It seems to me that atheists and theists often exaggerate their differences. Both atheists and theists experience transcendence or meaning in their lives and both have faith that transcendence matters. Both try to live their lives in the light of their experience of life’s meaning.

The difference between theists on the one hand and atheists and agnostics on the other is relatively minor compared with the difference between those who believe that life means something and those who don’t know and don’t care. Ethical atheists believe in the importance of justice, the need for self-control and the need to live by an ethical code in the world just as much as religious people do. Like religious people, they often fail to live up to the codes they believe in, but that (for now) is not the point. The vast, the overwhelming majority of the human race thinks that life means something and that we ought to honor that meaning in the way that we live.

Discussions and disputes about the nature of God are best understood as discussions about the nature of meaning. They involve the different answers people give to the question “What is life really all about?”

Christians answer that question with a distinctive understanding of God; looking into that a little more deeply will help us see how Christians can possibly believe that a baby in a manger could be God — and what they mean when they say it.  During the next few days of Christmas I’ll try to tease out the features of this distinctive Christian approach to the meaning of life.  But for now, the main thing is to see that for most people their religious convictions don’t come from the realm of myth and fantasy (pictures of guys with white beards seated on thrones in the sky); they come from that part of the human personality which sees the moral and physical beauty of the world and the people in it, and reaches out to try to make sense of the meaning that seems to lie all around us.

Just as Christmas is about something deeper than Santa and the toys in his sleigh, so religion is about more than the stories and doctrines in which it is often expressed: religion is born out of humanity’s experience with the mystery of love that burns so brightly in this darkest time of the year.

Manger is the French word meaning “to eat”; a manger is a place where you put hay and similar things for the animals in a barn to eat. The swaddling clothes were used to wrap up the limbs of newborns so they wouldn’t injure themselves by moving too much.

Jesus was born in a shed, not at home, not in a palace, not in a hospital. (Not that anyone was born in a hospital in those days, or that any mothers had anesthesia.  Something we moderns often forget about history is that until the 19th century childbirth was incredibly painful and incredibly dangerous) At one level this is a message about the equality of everyone in God’s sight. He didn’t send Jesus into a palace. But when preachers talk about this scene as attesting to God’s identification with the poor, they get it wrong and they miss the real point of the story.

Mary and Joseph weren’t staying in the stable because they were poor. The problem was that the inn was all sold out; Mary and Joseph happened to turn up at a ‘peak travel’ time without a reservation. The inn did the best it could by them, but with all the regular rooms committed, management could only offer the use of an outbuilding. There would have been plenty such in those days built to store supplies and house animals; between the animals that the inn would use for work or to provide food and those accompanying travelers, the various sheds and barns attached to an inn would see a lot of use.

If the Christmas story had taken place in the United States today, the story might read that the hotel was full, so management found Joseph and Mary a spot in the security office of the parking garage. When the baby was born they would have wrapped it in Pampers and laid it on the desk.

So far as we can tell, Jesus was born into something that corresponds, sort of, to the modern American concept of the ‘middle class’: more middle middle than upper middle. The family had money to travel as far as Bethlehem and could have paid for a room if there had been one. Joseph was a carpenter: a skilled workman at a time when such work was more valued than it is now. No one would mistake this family for a family of privilege or wealth, but in their home Jesus would be unlikely to go hungry and would have the chance to learn to read and get an education. It’s very hard to make comparisons between such different eras and societies, but one way for Americans to think about Jesus’ place in the life of his time would be to think of Joseph as something like a construction contractor from a town nobody has heard much about in a state people look down on. There might be a family story about some kind of genealogical connection with George Washington through Martha. The town librarian actually thinks there is something in it, but nobody, including Joseph, much cares.

Jesus came from a place in his society that gave him the opportunities to learn about the cultural and intellectual history of his people and to acquire the basic intellectual skills of his milieu (though there is no evidence that he learned Latin or anything beyond a very basic Greek), but there’s no trust fund attached, no legacy at an ivy league college, and no one anywhere was ever impressed with his background.

I hate to say this to the liberation theology folks, but Jesus doesn’t seem to have been one of the ‘truly’ dispossessed. He was a hick and an outsider, but he wasn’t particularly poor.

Given this perspective, some of the ‘poor baby Jesus’ carols and sermons leave me cold. There’s a folk song that always rubs me the wrong way:

Jesus, Jesus rest your head
You have got a manger bed.
All the evil folks on earth
Sleep in feathers at their birth.

No: Christians think there is good and evil mixed up in all people, rich and poor. And while God has a special love and concern for the poor he’s not a trust-fund liberal who simultaneously romanticizes the poor and condescends to them.  Christians have a duty to help the poor and to ensure that the weak get fair treatment, but sentimentalizing the poor and treating them simply as objects of pity is to dehumanize and demean them.  Jesus seems to have come from a milieu that gave him the intellectual and social resources to argue on equal terms with the powerful and well connected — but that also gave him the ability to connect with the poor and the marginalized and to see them as real people.  Not a bad mix, really.

In any case, Christmas doesn’t need to be sentimentalized or hyped; it is shocking and moving enough as it is. And today, the fourth day of Christmas, the traditional liturgical calendar has a powerful way of slapping us into serious reflection on the meaning of the event, jolting us out of our turkey comas and eggnog overdoses with an unforgettably grim story.

December 28 is not just the fourth day of the Christmas season in the traditional Christian calendar; it is also Holy Innocents’ Day, the day we remember the deaths of the babies in Bethlehem who were murdered at Herod’s command.

Matthew is our source (Matthew 2:1-18). The wise men following the star came to Herod, the puppet local ruler then installed in Jerusalem by the Romans. Their arrival created a stir at court; in an age when astrology was seen as a prestigious branch of science the news that the heavens were proclaiming the birth of a potential rival to the throne was not received well.  Herod was already the King of the Jews; the idea that another one was getting born in some corner of his dominions did not please him.  Herod asked the wise men to return to court when they found that baby so that “he might worship him too.” Being warned by a dream, perhaps reinforced by a belated attack of common sense, the wise men quietly slipped away after their visit to Bethlehem. This left Herod with no way to get rid of the dangerous baby with a ‘surgical strike’ against one particular child. In the absence of better information, he decided to kill every child in Bethlehem less than two years of age. Joseph was also warned in a dream, we are told; he and Mary took the child to Egypt and so missed Herod’s attack. Where the night had recently echoed with the songs of angels to the shepherds, the streets of Bethlehem filled with the cries of mothers as their children were taken and killed.

This was, Matthew tells us, the fulfillment of an ancient prediction of the prophet Jeremiah, “Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled because they are no more.”

People complain about the commercialization of Christmas; maybe we should think more about the way our culture sentimentalizes and trivializes this event. The holiday isn’t about a red-nosed reindeer’s quest for social acceptance; it is about streets red with the blood of slaughtered innocents while the Holy Family flees into exile.

Get away from Christmas card sentimentality and some troubling questions come up. What kind of a God would get his own kid out of harm’s way while leaving so many other children so exposed? Why didn’t God give all the parents dreams? Or, more elegantly, why didn’t he send Herod a nice heart attack? On reflection, that turns out to be a new and very sharp way of asking one of the most basic questions that people quite justifiably ask about God: what kind of God could allow such evil and catastrophic things to happen? Why are innocents slaughtered and oppressed anywhere? If God is so powerful and he loves us so much, why are the historical records, and our daily newspapers, so full of violence, evil and oppression?

The classic Christian answer to this question, and here again standard Christianity makes a lot of sense to me personally, has two parts. The first is that God made us free; he did not want a universe of sock puppets praising and obeying him. He wanted a world, not a computer simulation; he has given us the freedom to be co-creators with him of the world we live in. But having given us real freedom, he and we are stuck with the consequences. Our choices are real, and they have real consequences for ourselves and for those around us. If God is serious about our freedom, he must abide by the choices we make.

But if God must take our choices seriously, he did not and does not have to let it end there.  God, Christians believe, did not abandon us to the consequences of the choices that we and other human beings have made. Instead he determined to engage with us even more deeply; to enter history himself and to transform it from within. Christians believe that God launched a complex, multi-generational rescue operation, one that is still going on today. He will not renege on his commitment to make us free and intelligent co-creators of the world, but he will not let evil and ignorance have the last word; he will not allow our mistakes and shortcomings to separate us from his love.

The Christmas story is the moment when the rescue operation shifts into high gear. God leaves his throne, leaves heaven, and enters the world as a baby, entering the historical process himself as a human being to be shaped by human culture with all its shortcomings and limits; to share the joys, sorrows and temptations of human life in all their bewildering complexity; and to share the vulnerability of humans to betrayal, injustice, torment and finally death.

God gave up everything that he had to rescue us. He ran into the burning building to pull us out. He gave up his seat in the lifeboat to make room for someone else. That is what we are celebrating at Christmas, and that is what this story is about.

From the very beginning Jesus was subject to the same kind of contingencies that affect us all. His parents traveled in a peak season; he was born in a manger. And if he was rescued from Herod, it wasn’t to live happily ever after. Years later, as an adult, Jesus would walk, purposefully and with full knowledge of what he did, toward a fate as bloody and as cruel as the one that overtook the babies of Bethlehem at Herod’s command.

God became man and dwelt among us in order that in the fullness of time we can become like gods ourselves and go live with him. This is the shock of Christmas; this idea is why, thousands of years after it first happened, people are still locked up and killed because they believe in it.

The first verse of the famous Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem” ends with these words: “The hopes and fears of all the years/Are met in thee tonight.”

The baby in the manger, the soldiers in the streets: hopes and fears clash in mysterious ways.  That is what Christmas is about; in the next few posts we will try to think about what it means.