A friend recently gave me a sleeve of stickers to affix to my
Christmas cards that read “Keep the Christ in Christmas.” While I
strongly agree with the sentiment, I fear it may be too late.
Anyone who has seen news footage of idiots duking it out over the
last X-Box 360 on the Wal-Mart shelf would have to agree that the
War on Christmas is over and the materialists won.
And they aren’t even magnanimous in victory. They’re rubbing it
in our faces. Have you seen the latest Honda commercial? It
features the song “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” — a secular
ditty if ever there was one — only the ad wizards changed the
words and mangled the tune to recast the song as “We Wish You a
Happy Holiday”:
We wish you a happy holiday
We wish you a happy holiday
We wish you a happy holiday
And a happier new year
Advertisers seem to have given up on trying not to offend anyone
and have instead come to realize offending Christians is
inevitable. Whatever. As the man said, I’d rather push a Ford than
drive a Honda.
It’s only natural, I suppose, that Christ should be robbed of
His Big Day. Everywhere we turn in the common culture, the Jesus of
the Bible has been replaced by the Jesus of the Da Vinci
Code. For example, my wife and I hosted two couples over the
Thanksgiving weekend. Perfectly willing to shatter the rule about
not discussing religion at the dinner table, I brought up the
subject of Unitarianism, as two of our guests had attended a
Unitarian church over an extended period of time during the 1990s
and early-2000s, though they no longer do. They believe in a god,
they were swift to assure me, but they were unwilling to accept the
divinity of Christ. Was he a great moral teacher? Of course. All
you need to do is read the Bible to know that, they told me. But
the idea that He is God is simply too much for them to grasp. In
other words, God may not necessarily be dead, but Christ sure is
(though, it must be stated, He’s well known for His comebacks.)
It is fortuitous, then, that Mr. Clive Staples Lewis has once
again entered the public dialogue by way of the December 9th
cinematic release of his masterwork of children’s literature
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The
Wardrobe. Certain to be among the year’s blockbusters, it will
also serve as one of those “water cooler” cultural moments. While a
tad subtler than Mel Gibson’s graphic The Passion of the
Christ, TLTWTW will nevertheless similarly find us
talking about Christianity again.
But it is Lewis’s works in the field of Christian apologetics
that provide the best ointment for the open sore of
Jesus-was-just-a-really-nice-guy-ism. More than anything Lewis
wrote in The Chronicles of Narnia, this blurb from his
The Case for Christianity eviscerates the proposition that
Jesus was a great moral philosopher, but in no way divine:
I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the
really foolish thing that people often say about Him [Jesus
Christ]: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I
don’t accept his claim to be God.”
That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a
man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great
moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with a
man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil
of Hell.
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son
of God, or else a madman or something worse….You can shut him up
for fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can
fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up
with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great humanteacher.
He has not left that option open to us. He did not intend to.
Ah, but there is a third option, my guests argued. The Gospels
were written some forty years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth.
Isn’t it possible that He was just a wise teacher but that
His followers embellished the stories about His teachings to
include his claims of divinity?
This proposition is the subject of the cover story in this
month’s Harper’s titled “Jesus Without the Miracles:
Thomas Jefferson’s Bible and the Gospel of Thomas” and written by
Erik Reece, a lecturer in English at the University of Kentucky.
Jefferson, the reader will recall, clipped his favorite phrases of
Jesus from the New Testiment to create The Life and Morals of
Jesus of Nazareth. And the Gospel of Thomas is a Gnostic
collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, but which were probably
written a hundred years or so after the canonical
Gospels.
But it isn’t logical to conclude that Jesus was a wise teacher
who was later turned into God by fawning enthusiasts because His
wise teachings and His claims to divinity were recorded by the
same people. If we cannot know that He did in fact say, “All
power in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” then we can’t
know that he actually said, “Blessed are ye poor: for yours is the
kingdom of God.” It defies logic that His disciples were meticulous
scribes of his moral pronouncements but zealous fabulists about
everything else. They were either telling the whole truth or a
whole lie. And considering they spread the Gospels under penalty of
merciless torture and death, it seems unlikely they were lying.
Would you allow yourself to be crucified upside down for a lie?
No, you wouldn’t. But would you for a mistake? There is another
possibility my dinner guests did not suggest. Suppose Jesus was
just a slick magician performing parlor tricks for the rubes, sort
of like when I disconnect my index finger to impress my niece and
nephew, and the dern country mice fell for it and started following
him around. But if this was the case, wouldn’t the yokels have
given up on Him after He was captured and killed and they became
the subject of public ridicule for having believed him? I know the
day will come when my niece and nephew will realize I can’t
actually remove my finger and instead I just configure my thumb to
look like the tip of my finger. On that day their faith in
my “magical powers” will die and they’ll just roll their eyes and
run off to play Power Rangers. Truth be told, some of Jesus’
disciples’ faith was shaken. But then He rose from the
dead and issued to them the Great Commission to spread the Good
News. That must have been one hell of a parlor trick because these
fishers of men bought it hook, line and sinker. While it is
possible that Jesus was just a first century Doug Henning,
the idea that he could raise himself from the dead is an incredible
stretch.
And so we are left only with Lewis’ formulation. Jesus was
either the Son of God or a nut or the Devil himself. Too many in
academia, the news media, and the religious and political Left are
unwilling to consider the former and few of us can even fathom the
consequences of the latter two. And so a great many Americans have
chosen the least logical conclusion: they have constructed an image
of a polite, well-meaning Jewish boy who had some compelling
thoughts on how people should treat one another. As Reece writes in
Harper’s, “My main focus is to look at the actual
teachings of the reformer we call Jesus, and not be burdened with
sin, sacrifice and salvation.”
We have taken the Christ out of Jesus Christ. Is it any wonder
then that we have taken Christ out of Christmas, as well?
