Life, unedited: Jesus doesn’t need to be made relevant

Mark Stephens 

Wed 23 Dec 2020

Jesus need not be ‘edited’ into an adult, or a timeless philosopher, in order to make him relevant. This baby is not simply a life on the verge of significance. The baby is significant. (Getty Images / AYImages)

In 1943 the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was languishing in Tegel prison, charged with sedition against the Third Reich, for which he would eventually be executed. On 17 December, he wrote a moving Christmas letter to his longsuffering parents. Bonhoeffer recalls lovely celebrations from his past and laments the lonely Christmas of his present. But then the letter takes a turn. With surprising resilience, he writes:

I daresay [Christmas] will have more meaning and will be observed with greater sincerity in this prison than in places where all that survives of the feast is its name. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness look very different to the eyes of God from what they do to man, that God should come down to the very place which men usually abhor, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn — these are things which a prisoner can understand better than anyone else. For him the Christmas story is glad tidings in a very real sense.

In his recent book The Godless Gospel, the philosopher Julian Baggini valiantly tries to retrieve Jesus for the secular age. Treading the well-worn footsteps of Leo Tolstoy and Thomas Jefferson before him, Baggini feels compelled to edit the biblical texts. Ditch all the miracles and eliminate the God-talk, he insists; what really matters is Jesus’s teaching — moral parables, rebukes to the rich and powerful, witty aphorisms. This keeps Jesus relevant for a world weary of dogma.

Christmas barely features in Baggini’s retelling of the gospel. To be sure, some details of Jesus’s birth are briefly given, but they lack much significance. Why would they? The birth of Jesus is just prosaic preamble to what really matters: Jesus the adult sage dispensing words of wisdom.

Baggini’s book throws into sharp relief how strange it is that the Christian story celebrates the infant Jesus. The gospel of Luke speaks excitedly about the arrival of a “Saviour”. But what is the sign that a Saviour is here? A baby. Part of the utter weirdness of the Christian story is that the birth of Jesus is not prelude. It’s essential to the story.

In a year like 2020, one could be forgiven for confusion as to what Christmas might mean. The saccharine sentimentality of Yuletide past feels awkward in this strange, strange year. In its place is the deeper gratitude which emerges from an experience of struggle. The simple joy of eating together. The deep relief that loved ones are safe and well. It’s somehow better than the ideal, because it’s joy in the darkness, and the darkness has not won.

What good is a baby Jesus, wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger? In those earliest chapters of his life, Jesus can’t yet speak. He’s a newborn, not a sage. In medieval portraiture, paintings of the infant Jesus routinely portrayed him as a homunculus, a little man-child. (Have a look at Madonna breastfeeding Child by Barnaba de Modena, in which the child Jesus appears to be suffering from male pattern baldness.) But within the gospel texts, the newborn Jesus is not a precocious philosopher, dispensing hot-takes from the manger. He’s a baby. And yet the arrival of a helpless infant causes pilgrims to travel long distances and many to break out in song. This baby is not simply a life on the verge of significance. The baby is significant — “Jesus, Lord at thy birth.”

This is where Baggini’s reading of Jesus, and Jefferson’s before him, feels manifestly insufficient.

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9 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT INDEPENDENCE DAY AND THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

• by Joe Carter

July 4, 2014 will be America’s 238th Independence Day, the day Americans celebrate our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. Here are nine things you should know about America’s founding document and the day set aside for its commemoration.

1. July 4, 1776 is the day that we celebrate Independence Day even though it wasn’t the day the Continental Congress decided to declare independence (they did that on July 2, 1776), the day we started the American Revolution (that had happened back in April 1775), the date on which the Declaration was delivered to Great Britain (that didn’t happen until November 1776), or the date it was signed (that was August 2, 1776).

2. The first Independence Day was celebrated on July 8, 1776 (although the Declaration was approved on July 4, 1776, it was not made public until July 8), but for the first two decades after the Declaration was written, people didn’t celebrate it much on any date. One party, the Democratic-Republicans, admired Jefferson and the Declaration. But the other party, the Federalists, thought the Declaration was too French and too anti-British, which went against their current policies.

3. After the War of 1812, the Federalist party began to come apart and the new parties of the 1820s and 1830s all considered themselves inheritors of Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans. Printed copies of the Declaration began to circulate again, all with the date July 4, 1776, listed at the top. Celebrations of the Fourth of July became more common as the years went on and in 1870, almost a hundred years after the Declaration was written, Congress first declared July 4 to be a national holiday as part of a bill to officially recognize several holidays, including Christmas. Further legislation about national holidays, including July 4, was passed in 1938 and 1941.

4. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston comprised the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration. Jefferson, regarded as the strongest and most eloquent writer, wrote most of the document. After Jefferson wrote his first draft, the other members of the Declaration committee and the Continental Congress made 86 changes, including shortening the overall length by more than a fourth and removing language condemning the British promotion of the slave trade (which Jefferson had included even though he himself was a slave owner).

5. The signed copy of the Declaration is the official, but not the original, document. The approved Declaration was printed on July 5th and a copy was attached to the “rough journal of the Continental Congress for July 4th.” These printed copies, bearing only the names of John Hancock, President, and Charles Thomson, secretary, were distributed to state assemblies, conventions, committees of safety, and commanding officers of the Continental troops. On July 19th, Congress ordered that the Declaration be engrossed on parchment with a new title, “the unanimous declaration of the thirteen united states of America,” and “that the same, when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress.” Engrossing is the process of copying an official document in a large hand.

6. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the only two presidents to sign the document, both died on the Fourth of July in 1826.

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Thomas Jefferson and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

PRESIDENT ENDORSES INTELLIGENT DESIGN!

by Robert Morrison
April 8, 2013

In a letter of this date, a two-term President of the United States, writing to his predecessor, wrote this:

…the Theist, pointing to the heavens above, and to the earth beneath, and to the waters under the earth, asked if these did not proclaim a first cause, possessing intelligence and power; power in the production, and intelligence in the design, and constant preservation of the system; urged the palpable existence of final causes, that the eye was made to see, and the ear to hear, and not that we see because we have eyes, and hear because we have ears…

Well, as you will readily discern, dear reader, this is not President Obama’s or President George W. Bush’s accustomed style of writing.

This letter, dated April 8, 1816, was penned by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello and addressed to his reconciled friend, John Adams. It’s worth parsing the eighteenth century language because it’s a keen insight into the minds of our Founding Fathers.

In this letter, the former president, Thomas Jefferson, one of the leading scientific minds of his day, rejects the atheism of some of the French philosophes with whom he shared so many ideas. He ascribes to the Creator “power in the production, intelligence in the design, and constant preservation of the system…”

Jefferson’s ideas of Intelligent Design were put to a court test in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005. The federal judge in that case came down hard against any students in the public schools learning what Jefferson actually believed about origins of our universe. The judge found Mr. Jefferson’s reasoning a form of religious indoctrination that was wholly unconstitutional.

Today, liberals routinely cite Jefferson’s “Letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptists as their source for all church-state jurisprudence. No matter that they have completely twistified (Jefferson’s own word) what he thought and what he wrote.

Noted author Eric Metaxas shows where such twistifying leads. It leads to a doctrine of religious freedom that is narrowly construed to permit “freedom of worship” and which at the same time comes down hard on “free exercise.” The First Amendment doesn’t just guarantee freedom of worship. It is broader than that.

Here’s a portion of Eric Metaxas’s recent speech at CPAC:

Let me begin with my hometown, Danbury, CT. Some of you know that Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptists in [1802], in which he uses the phrase “separation of church and state” — and in case there is anyone who doesn’t know it, the sense in which Jefferson uses that phrase is actually the opposite of how it’s generally thought of today. Today we often hear that it means that the state needs to be protected from religion, and that religion should have no place in government or society.

Jefferson and the Founders thought the opposite. They knew that the State was always tempted to take over everything — including the religious side of people’s lives. So they put a protection in the Constitution that the government could not favor any religion over another… and could not prohibit the free exercise of religion.

They wanted churches and religions to be protected from the government — from Leviathan. Why? Because they knew that what people believed and their freedom to live out and practice one’s most deeply held beliefs was at the very heart of this radical and fragile experiment they had just launched into the world.

Okay, so where are the threats to Religious Freedom in America today? Well, for one thing, understand we are not talking about Freedom of Worship. In a speech 18 months ago, Hillary Clinton replaced the phrase Freedom of Religion with Freedom of Worship — and my hero and friend Chuck Colson noticed and was disturbed by it. Why? Because these are radically different things. They have Freedom of Worship in China. But what exactly is Freedom of Worship?

In my book Bonhoeffer I talk about a meeting between Bonhoeffer’s friend, the Rev. Martin Niemoller, who early on in the Third Reich was one of those fooled by Hitler. And in that meeting he says something to Hitler about how he, Niemoller, cares about Germany and Third Reich — and Hitler cuts him off and says “I built the Third Reich. You just worry about your sermons!”

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