Christmas and the Annexing of the Pagan
My own approach to defending the celebration of Christmas is a bit different than the usual treatment. There are a few basic points to consider in any such defense.
First, it is true that there is nothing in the Scriptures commanding us to celebrate Christ’s birth or his Resurrection on a single day of the year. On the other hand, there is also no one passage telling us not to. Appeals to the Regulative Principle of Worship are of no avail here, as that speaks to the elements of corporate worship, and even those debates must reckon with the same document’s reference to “the light of nature” in those things not expressly written yet not prohibited.
Second, Paul speaks of the observance of days in places like Romans 14 and Colossians 2. These are not a matter of judgment. However in the case of days not instituted by God at all, we must be careful. The line between what is essentially idolatry and our witness to Christ ought to be maintained. If anyone says that this or that can be an idol, I say “Amen,” it can. But how we determine whether or not it is an idol will have much more to do with motives of the heart and emphases than with the decision to have a tree or a manger scene, to sing only Advent hymns or to ditch any that we catch a secular artist co-opting.
Third, it is certainly true that there are many pagan elements that get mixed into traditions throughout church history. But the irony of the criticisms is that in order for them to work, they depend on our ability to be able to tell the true from the false. But if we have that ability, then those celebrating are equally able to tell the true from the false, and celebrate truly. In other words, the sweeping arguments against any kind of Christmas (or Easter) celebrations are self-defeating. They prove too much and so cut out their own foundations.
Arguments about establishing December 25th or “disentangling” it from the Winter Solstice are no more to the point than those legends of St. Nicholas of Myra. Lurking behind such hesitation is the suspicion that dates of calendars, the giving of gifts, and even the most fundamental parts of nature, like stars and trees, somehow are no longer God’s property because the devil’s people have been occupying for this or that amount of time.
On Not Conceding the Trees to the Pagan
From the perspective of the earliest centuries of the church, the attitude had traditionally been to annex the pagan by celebrating holidays that may contain elements of their myths. If our critics of Christmas would have come up to halt Boniface from chopping down that which had been a symbol of paganism for ancient Germanic people, he would have likely wondered why the critic would want to rush to the defense of the demons.
I am poking at all those who have heard of the “Christmas tree” verse from Jeremiah. This mythology comes from a verse in Jeremiah that speaks of a religious practice among the pagans of the sixth century B.C. It is simply talking about the practice of fashioning idols from wood. Isaiah speaks in the same way. All Jeremiah does is draw out the silliness of worshiping parts of nature by taking you to the "factory" so to speak. The verse says this: "
A tree from the forest is cut down and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman" (10:3).
What tends to add to the excitement of those who take it out of context are the next words: "They decorate it with silver and gold." But these were typical colors with which to overlay an idol. In other words, literal silver and gold — meaning, covered as a pagan god would be. It isn't talking about tinsel and Christmas lights!
The Lutheran apologist John Warwick Montgomery once described the Protestant church’s response to the Modernist controversy in a way that I think helps explain this impulsiveness. When the church had abandoned its post as the curator of Western culture, there were no theological giants left, or allowed, to take on the beast. So, liberalism said, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!” and fundamentalism said, “If you can’t beat ‘em, run!” It no longer occurred to anyone to beat them.
This perspective of the pagan leftovers being appropriated by Christianity, or at least by Western culture that Christians have freely lived within—this perspective is as healthy about days like Christmas and Easter as it is about the days of the week or months of the year that feature names of Norse gods and Roman emperors, who thought of themselves as divine.
The Christian has always perceived that Christ is annexing territory for his kingdom. While some emphases are fit only for exposure and setting aside (such as Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny), the notion that Christ’s birth ought not be celebrated because the day is in dispute or because this was the season of Saturnalia for the Romans, represents a retreatist if not a Gnostic mentality. Saturn’s house should be toppled and the strongman bound as surely as Thor’s tree should be torn down and his hammer melted down into more ammo for our side. We don’t need to leave it alone. We need to trash the place.
Likewise with getting caught up on whether Ishtar really is linguistically related to the word-origins of “Easter,” when Christ clearly rose on that Sunday following the Passover. To retreat from celebrating Christ for fear of the pagan is, well, fear of the pagan. And it would seem that our brethren that would excise from our calendar anything that “smacks” of paganism are only replacing what they consider superstition with one of their own.
