ARTICLES

by Josh Moody

The following article was written for Evangelicals Now and published in their December 2024 issue. 

The origins of Christmas celebrations as we tend to experience them are fraught with controversy – and ignorance, too.

It may be that the purported pagan roots of Christmas trees are arguable, but the actual celebration of Christmas goes back much further than Albert’s love for the German Christmas tree. Some say that December 25th was chosen by the early church because it is roughly nine months after the virginal conception. That may well be, but it’s also the case that the date falls on a time when ancient Roman imperial customs celebrated in pagan ways.

The Christian church sought to establish distinctly Christian holidays to take over from the previous pagan holidays. In particular, I have recently discovered through Hughes Oliphant Old’s majestic seven volumes The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, the Cappadocian fathers probably prioritised festal preaching because it gave them an opportunity to underline the doctrinal message of Nicene orthodoxy.

Now, there’s a thought! American celebrations of Christmas are alike British, yet different too. They are different in many ways because in America, of course, there is also the distinctly American celebration of Thanksgiving. In crass terms, Thanksgiving centers around a meal – the giving of thanks with family is rooted in feasting. And that food is very like a traditional British Christmas meal. Rarely, I expect, will Americans eat Turkey at Christmas with all the extras that most British people expect at Christmas. They ate that just a few weeks beforehand, after all.

But Christmas in America is very similar in that it receives the same pressure to de-Christianise the celebration in favour of more generally commercial partying. In response, the churches, as they do in the UK, seek to use the Christmas holiday time to emphasise the real meaning of Christmas, and reach out to those who celebrate Christmas but perhaps don’t understand or believe in its real meaning.

That’s certainly excellent – the evangelistic opportunity that Christmas presents.

But there is another part that perhaps those long ago Cappadocian fathers could exemplify for us. To use the Christmas holiday as an opportunity not only to reach non-Christians but also to teach Christians – and in particular to teach the mysteries of the incarnation, of the God-Man Jesus Christ.

How much of our confusion as churches is traced to doctrinal confusion (see Ephesians 4)? Unity cannot be achieved without doctrinal clarity. The honouring of Jesus as beyond sentimental, but as God Incarnate, would solve many of our ethical challenges within the broader church too by a reassertion of his divine authority. Yes, let’s hold out one hand to the world and with the message of Christmas ‘silently pleading’ to seek to win others to the Lord Jesus. But then also let us, with the other hand, lift up the self-same Lord Jesus as indeed Lord and God.