Also, for those of you who say "but Christmas is over," the 12 days of Christmas are still very much underway. We're not even to the seven shrimp a swimming yet...
1. "Folk" Religious Practice
One of my favorite professors in seminary brought up an issue which I'd noticed but not had a good name for until then, the concept of "Folk Theology." Any major religion with established doctrines and practices can have a "folk" version, which is what happens when one gets far away from those who keep things orthodox, and superstitions and traditions begin creeping in, influence from the surrounding culture which rises from background culture to mix with religious conviction, etc.
Scripture is quite clear that we have a direct relationship to God. Because of Christ's atonement, we can boldly approach the throne of grace, a staggering concept that I am still trying to wrap my mind around. When Jesus taught His disciples how to pray, He did so by speaking to the Father directly, not angels, His mother, or anyone else.
Folk theology happens when the natural ways of fallen human thinking start to mix with "theology proper," and people start doing what comes more naturally. Interposing saints or angels between oneself and God to get more "influence," would be one example, though sadly one that has become fairly established practice within large portions of the Roman Catholic Church. (I still pray that the divided church in the future may become one, as the body of Christ ought to be united)
Much of the Islamic world practices not "proper" Islam, but some version of Folk Islam, with local deities still worshipped in some form under Allah, or people wearing talismans to ward off the evil eye, etc. Many of the Islamic terror movements claim legitimacy as reformers, initially coming in to banish these non-acceptable practices and preach a more Qur'an-centric Islamic message, naturally with their own interpretation emphasizing Jihad, etc. (then start recruiting...)
Other milder examples might be putting a Jesus fish on your car, not just as an expression of belief, but because "I'm not saying it will keep me from having car wrecks, but it can't hurt," or carrying one of those angel pennies. Doing these things is not necessarily wrong, but when we start turning to any physical things, rituals, or routines for the blessing and protection that come from God alone, we are walking away from scripture, down the road of folk theology that leads eventually to heresy and superstition.
It's an easy and natural trap to fall into. It could start as people copying a respected and godly leader in their church regarding a particular practice and teaching others to do so, without a total understanding of why he chose that way or that he himself would say it's purely his preference. It could start with someone wanting a tangible expression of the blessing and protection God provides, then more and more identifying that tangible object or symbol with the blessing and protection itself.
It's not like a minefield to be avoided, it's more like rust: It's always gradually appearing, some environments are more conducive to it than others, and it can be prevented with maintenance and care, in this case by always using Scripture as our foundation. (Scripture doesn't say whether you should have a cross on the wall behind the pulpit or not, or even whether you should have a pulpit, but one can easily understand from Scriptural principles that people should not be going up and kneeling before the cross because they think they are more likely to receive God's forgiveness that way)
I saw a severe case of this problem in Mexico, where historical fusion and syncretism with local pagan religions has led to a muddled situation where Mary is worshipped as a goddess (with the moon behind her and all, just like the moon goddess she replaced), and superstition is totally rampant, with little understanding of actual scriptural doctrine in many cases. I appreciate the missionaries and local believers I have met there who labor against this infernal confusion; they need and deserve our prayers. (OMF has a good page on how something similar happened in the Philippines)
The question we need to answer in this blog is, is that what's happened to Christmas? Have we allowed superstitions, influences from pagan/pre-Christian European cultures, to mix together with a straightforward remembrance and celebration of Christ's incarnation?
2. The Dangers of Witch-Hunting
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| At least this guy wasn't trying to say Santa is Satan with the letters re-arranged... |
Growing up in that setting, I have experience with fundamentalism ranging from the cloistering reflex only partially influenced by a legalistic way of thinking to crazy, pharisaical demagoguery.
What I observed was this:
A culture can easily develop in which the Biblical concept of "the world" that is our field of ministry becomes eclipsed by the Biblical concept of "the world" that is this corrupt world system full of distractions and temptations, and instead of engaging it as salt and light, Christians began to withdraw from it.
Having circled the wagons (formed a outward-facing defensive perimeter protecting what's inside, if you're unfamiliar with the more colorful Old West expression), they then begin to "purge" worldly influences from their midst. This often begins as a genuine attempt to pursue godliness and remove sin, but sadly rarely stops there, becoming a sort of contest: who can find the devil where no one had noticed him before?
I can remember in my childhood, Christian magazines breathlessly explaining how non-Christians were making movies or TV shows that had values that undermined biblical principles, and that good parents should keep their children from watching those things (or to be safe, anything from the same company), lest they be unconsciously corrupted or tainted somehow.
Now, I don't blame the parents. It did sound pretty terrifying, and typically we kids agreed with our parents that if a show or movie was "bad," then we shouldn't watch it. And I think it's instinctive for a loving parent to shield their child from harmful influences if they can. In retrospect I also think it had a lot to do with movements within the Church in America of that decade, with the Moral Majority and other attempts to steer the moral climate of the nation from the top-down, away from the cliff towards which it was hurtling, since that still seemed possible at the time. (Despite the deplorable state of our culture as 2015 approaches, I am strangely optimistic; the Church has always done poorly when it dabbled in politics, but shone brightly when times are dark)
But my point is, a church, or portions of the Church, can sometimes get into a witch-hunting mindset, forgetting that from Eden onward the world has always been the world, fallen, and full of people who don't live by Biblical principles. Instead of going out to be salt and light, they become focused on avoiding and purging bad influences. This embattled mentality can turn into a kind of deep-seated fear, which leads to even more urgent searching to uncover hidden evil influences. (Soon everything is suspect, everything is guilty until proven innocent, not even explicitly conservative and evangelical sources cleave closely enough to whatever fine line is judged to be truly safe.) It's a fear which feeds on itself, and it can become like a prison that locks from the inside.
3. The Church Never Existed in a Culture-less Vacuum
Claims that the Church has been contaminated by the surrounding culture go all the way back to the Gospel writers, with some scholars accusing the Apostle John, for example, of having been too influenced by Greek philosophy. It's actually quite a common accusation that Greek thought and gnostic influences warped Christian doctrine from the very beginning of the Church. Does that mean we throw out all the early Church fathers as "tainted"? Of course not. For one, the Early Church Fathers are excellent sources for us, but we do not regard them as infallible to begin with. Two, it is they who wrestled with the heresies and hammered out doctrinal statements from which we benefit today. There is great value in studying them as wise and godly examples, not in subjecting them to an ideological litmus test. Three, "Biblical scholars" will think up every kind of possible accusation to throw at something that hasn't been tried yet. Not all of them actually believe the Bible, but they all need to write dissertations.
I love G.K.Chesterton's illustration of orthodoxy as a horse or chariot rider who can handle shocks and bumps without losing his balance precisely because he is always moving. And I think his picture is accurate.
The Church is not a delicate glass of water we strive to keep perfectly clear and undisturbed, it is the Body of Christ that reaches out to this world and lives in it, beset by strange circumstances and local confusions, always "in crisis" but never destroyed, always under attack but never defeated, always purifying itself from heresies and finding new ones popping up wherever the church spreads rapidly. It would be impossible if sustained by men, but it is sustained by God.
When the Church goes into a new culture, or develops and spreads in any culture, it can express unchanging, transcendent truths through each culture in contextually appropriate ways. This is a huge difference between a global religion like Christianity and a culture-bound one like Hinduism. Even with a massive number of adherents, due to India's population, and even with some principles of Hindu philosophy having spread around the world, very popular at various times, monkey temples and sacred cows never really caught on in a global context, and aren't going to. Those things can't really escape the culture they developed. If they exist outside of India, they do so directly in proportion to the prevalence of that culture in a specific area.
Christianity is unique among religions (it's not merely a religion, but I'm speaking in comparative terms) in being the least dependent on culture. Local religions, based on un-exportable cultural values or concepts, typically cannot ever hold out against global ones which are based on more universal principles and can thus cross cultures with varying degrees of success, and are often attractive to younger generations who have begun to lose their traditional values but recognize it as a link to a wider world, both geographically and conceptually.
But Christianity stands out clearly even among global religions..
Islam, the second-most exportable religion, is heavily influenced by Bedouin cultural values at its core, and tends to "Arabicize" cultures where it gains influence to bring them in line with Qur'anic principles. Hinduism, as mentioned above, has a very large number of adherents but I would argue it is not truly a global religion in the sense that it can traverse dissimilar cultures. Buddhism, with its roots in Hinduism, is more like a complex series of related world views, ranging from polytheistic/animist religion to atheistic philosophy, yet it is only in the philosophical realm, like Hinduism, that it has found a real following in the West. It's easy to find fans of Zen in America, but non-Asian Tibetan Buddhists are a bit sparser.
Christianity, by contrast, has an meta-cultural message (it is represented in many cultures but the message itself transcends culture and is distinct from any of the particular cultures in which it is represented). Certainly, one could claim that it has a close association with the West, but one then has to define "West." Tens of thousands of Korean missionaries certainly would not agree with you, and the Russian Orthodox church with over one hundred million members might object as well. The global Church has had a very Western feeling over the past two centuries because, for reasons of both church and secular/economic history, that's where the vast majority of missionaries had been coming from. That is changing in the 21st century, to the extent that there may come a day when the Church in Europe and even America is revitalized by African, Asian, and South America missionaries. The process has already begun. A dear sister from Ghana I met at seminary considers herself a missionary to America, to bring God's truth back to the land which blessed so many nations with the gospel but is now itself in dire need of revival.
When people repeat the oft-quoted phrase "it's not a religion, it's a relationship," though it is a bit hyperbolic (Christianity certainly is a religion, but one which is founded on a relationship to God not found or attempted in any other religion) they are getting at this truth: Christianity is a belief in God as He has revealed Himself to us through Scripture (comprising the Bible), and faith that Jesus Christ is God, as He claimed to be, and that we can have a relationship with God, through Christ, that allows us to receive a different kind of life from Him, an eternal life which is holy and can be lived in His presence both on earth and in heaven. That message may be more readily received or more easily communicated in certain cultures, but it's all on a higher level of abstraction than any particular culture. Any cultural clashes will occur in the attempted working out of these truths in reality. Then indeed, there may be clashes all the way to martyrdom, but one then finds local groups of believers rapidly follow.
And from the 1st Century AD until now, all those believers have come from a particular culture or another, and have not magically been transported out of it when they believed. They have had to express the truths of Christianity in their own culture, either by adapting existing cultural practices and ways of thinking, creating new practices and ways of thinking to express Christian truth within the context of their culture, or borrowing practices and ways of thinking from outside their own culture.
Nearly any Christian in the 21st century who has been trained to work in a cross-cultural context would agree that the first two are superior, and I agree both in the abstract and from experience. The last thing you want is for your local church to be copying foreign ways of doing things which confuse and repel locals and train them to think Christianity is therefore a foreign religion which has nothing to do with them. Sadly, this did occur in Taiwan to some extent, though often it happened despite the missionaries' best efforts to avoid it.
4. What's All This Got to Do with Christmas?
So far I've set out a few points:
1. We must be careful to avoid folk religious ways of thinking.
2. We must remember we are to be light to the world, and not fall into an embattled mentality of fear-based "witch-hunting," choosing to disqualify instead of using discernment
3. Christianity is neither culture-bound nor culture-less, but is meta-cultural, and finds its best and most authentic expression when believers live out Christian truth in ways that make sense within their own culture.
Those are important to our discussion because they all have to do with how many people perceive Christmas to be a pagan holiday.
Europe has a long history of Christianity, the "Christendom" of times gone by, where for centuries a European Church both changed Europe and was changed by it. The particular expression of Christianity in Europe looked very different in different places, of course, but in much of Europe it first clashed with, then supplanted, local pagan religions. We don't have a lot of accurate information about these (neopagan practices are almost totally made up, based on guesses of how people might have done things), but we have enough information to know that some Christmas traditions may have some roots in what were originally pagan practices. Plus, the date itself seems to coincide with various pagan festivals centered around the Winter Solstice. A quick google search will reveal all you ever wanted to know about those associations, with many facts both legitimate and worthy of consideration and hilariously wrong. But it doesn't matter.
Here's why:
The Bible, and the history of God's dealings with men that we read in it, is a beautiful expression of God's truth in reality. Reality echoes this divine truth in innumerable ways, and therefore so does human culture. Pagan religions from Egypt to Scandinavia have the story of a dying and rising god, some long before Jesus came to earth. It would be foolish at best to suggest that those stories in any way taint or diminish the story of the Resurrection. They are merely faint and confused echoes of a grand eternal truth. For some, such as the former atheist C.S.Lewis, God used them to point the way towards that truth.
More pointedly, does the fact that the cross was a brutal piece of execution equipment used by the pagan, polytheistic Romans, a symbol of the consequences of rebellion against supposedly all-powerful Rome, make the cross a pagan symbol?
I imagine (and hope) you are saying to yourself "of course not," but I encourage you to follow that logic. Why not? What transformed the cross into an acceptable symbol for the church to use, from early in its history until today, and even by which to identify itself? The answer is, what happened on it; an event that forever changed the meaning of that symbol. A symbol of suffering and shame became a symbol of hope and faith and God's love. So symbols and images can be repurposed; they can be transformed from whatever their original meaning was into something else, including something charged with gospel significance.
Of course it's not something one can do randomly; the transformational event must totally dominate the original meaning so that the symbol is now instinctively understood to refer now to this new meaning. A notable negative example: the swastika. Once a symbol of peace (still a common Buddhist symbol here in Asia), cannot now to Westerner's minds convey anything other than nazism, violent racism, and the holocaust.
Now we arrive at my point about folk religion. We know, as scripturally-educated believers, that it is not religious symbols and pictures that have power (in the spiritual sense). They are nothing in themselves; all authority on heaven and earth has been given to Christ, and He does not lend that authority to an idol of any kind. Therefore an idol is nothing, as Paul said. An empty symbol, an image of supposed authority that cannot reference any true authority. Some measure of power, yes, while darkness still remains on this earth, but even that darkness is subject to the authority of Christ, and soon will be put under His feet. (and ours, with and through Him)
Therefore, while obviously we do not and should not wish to associate ourselves with darkness, we need not fear pagan symbols as pagans do, because we know they are empty, and the darkness they point to has been defeated, even mocked, by Christ on the cross.
So we need not irrationally fear a pagan symbol as something that can hurt us somehow, give us "bad mojo," or somehow remove authority from Christ. That is a folk religious way of thinking, like people in medieval Europe who supposedly said "God bless you" when you sneezed, for fear part of your soul had escaped temporarily and you were in spiritual danger.
But this means if a Christmas tree, for example, is not now a symbol of paganism, it doesn't matter if it was one 500 years ago. The original meaning has been lost, beyond anything but guesses and conjectures, and it is now irrevocably globally identified with a celebration of Christ's birth. And that Christ's birth is celebrated on a date close to the Winter Solstice doesn't matter, because God made the winter solstice. Through Christ all things were created. It's His, not theirs.
Light cancels out darkness, not the other way around. God wins. That is the most fundamental thing I can say about this entire topic, Christmas, Easter, etc. Finding a tenuous or potential historical link back to something pagan does not cancel out that symbol, that event, that celebration. It means the light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness is not overcoming it. God is winning. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light... for unto us a child is born. The symbols of that former darkness are stripped from the enemy one at a time, and they are laid at Christ's feet. The Winter Solstice may have recently passed, but we marked it by joyfully celebrating the birth of our Lord, our Savior, and our King.
And soon it shall be Spring.
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.
(Isaiah 9:6-7)
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