Being a keen observer of the human condition, and a sometimes participant in it, I think it is fair to say that most new mothers love their new babies. When our first child arrived, Margaret exclaimed in wonderment to the attending physician, "I thought all newborns were ugly; my daughter is beautiful!" Nature knows that a baby without a mother’s love is in for big trouble. Even government knows.
Serving as foster parents for a neonate, we learned that the state of Iowa required the birth mother to physically “hand over” her baby to the social service agency. Love is a hands-on and literally touching emotion.
While only specific women become mothers, it is also fair to say that women in general take an interest in little babies. For Christian women this includes the baby Jesus and the labors of his mother, Mary. I assume that many of them, like my wife, collect nativity scenes from different cultures and set them around the house at the beginning of the Christmas season. These crèches celebrate the international advent of the baby Jesus. Like everything human these depictions run from beautiful and exotic to banal and terrible. Fortunately for me Margaret actually likes weird things which, of course, explains our long and happy marriage.
In my first pastorate I discovered that the minister was expected to set up the manger scene on the church lawn. However, I had learned in seminary that the shepherds (Luke) and the wise men (Matthew) may not have been in the same place at the same time. Indeed, if Our Savior was born when the star first appeared to the wise guys (rather than two years later when they neared Bethlehem) then Jesus probably walked up to them.
Taking my young self with utmost seriousness, I decided the congregation needed to understand the possibility of doxological conflation before the traditional manger scene appeared. My task was to explain the Historical Quest for the Baby Jesus including the Virgin Birth. Moreover, to make a biblical/theological point that would amaze the local Methodists and Baptists, I decided to leave the shepherds in the closet with the tableau’s purple (!) donkey, which mightily offended my aesthetic sensibilities.
A few days later, one of my elders drove over to the manse and insisted that I go for a ride with him. He drove me to the church, opened the door, unlocked the closet and without a word he and I put up that mangy scene — purple donkey and all. As a long-term result I developed a passionate commitment to the office of ruling elder. I also learned that pastors need to love their people long enough to be loved in return before trifling with their customs. In other words, congregations want to know for sure you care before they care what you know for sure.
Not long ago an acquaintance of mine traveling in South America purchased a crèche for his wife. It was unusual, and it was on sale. Some Presbyterians cannot resist a bargain. The nativity scene was quickly bought and gift wrapped. On Christmas day, he discovered to his dismay that, while every other piece of the traditional manger scene was in place, the baby Jesus was absent. A Christmas scene without Christ presumably explains the cheap price.
Sadly, I know Presbyterian churches that offer the same big discount. In one of them some members sat together in the balcony all year counting the sermonic references to Jesus. They often went home with both fists clenched. In Christian congregations where Jesus Christ is not present, baptism becomes a spiritual Jiffy Lube and the Lord’s Supper is fast-food take-out: junk food supposed to keep you moving along the highway to Heaven.
The issue, of course, is not the number of homiletical references to Jesus, but their meaning. Put another way, most Christians accept much of the orthodox view of the work of Christ because people still yearn for a real salvation. However, some Presbyterians are willing to settle for a symbolic savior. Therefore, the traditional view of the person of Christ is today under both direct and indirect attack. This bifurcation leads to disaster. According to John Calvin, “the blessed and happy state of the Church always had its foundation in the person of Christ” (Institutes II.6.2) [Emphasis added].
Surely, most Presbyterians will refuse to buy a Holy Family without the baby Jesus. One would hope that the strong emphasis of Reformed theology on the integral humanity of Christ will never be lost but also not maintained by discounting the substantial relation of Son to Father. The birth of Our Lord is indeed a human process, but it is also a divine gift. Resurrection, on the other hand, is a divine gift entirely. Presbyterians should continue to understand Christ’s person and work, Christmas and Easter, as interlocking realities.
Some day I would like to analyze the impact of John Milton’s theology on the English-speaking world. This project would involve not only Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, but most especially his De Doctrina Christiana. I think John Milton is tinted and tainted with Arianism — a heresy being crudely revived in today’s Presbyterian Church. However, Milton’s version of this ancient heresy — if such it be — is so sophisticated that I will happily accept his view as orthodox. In my judgment, Milton’s struggle with the “Trinal Unity” of the “Infant God” (“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”) will not mislead the church but only annoy some scholars. According to our great Puritan poet:
Beyond compare the Son of God was seen
Most glorious, in him all his Father shone
Substantially expressed
(Paradise Lost, III.138-40).
I’ll buy that manger scene.
Charles Partee is P.C. Rossin Professor of Church History at Pittsburgh Seminary.
