It all began one Christmas – well actually, a few months earlier. A few months earlier I’d found a battered copy of HJ (‘Bert’) Richards’ The First Christmas in my local second-hand bookshop, and as the festive season had almost arrived, it seemed an appropriate thing to browse through. I did – and the whole world changed. Being a latter-day logical positivist (albeit somewhat late to the party) the idea that things might be true in a variety of ways was a bit of a revelation. But that book meant that when the Sea of Faith programmes landed a few months later, the seed fell on some very receptive soil.
That sliver of autobiography shows why I always find Christmas a particularly special time. And why it’s beyond desperate that the Church keeps the Good News about Christmas (as well as pretty well everything else) to itself. But the reason it does so is not (primarily) out of any proprietorial sense – but an unholy combination of fear and ignorance. We don’t tell the news to others, because (apart from a few isolated pockets of unprincipled liberalism) it’s not yet got to us (echoes of Nietzsche’s Madman, perhaps?) With the Good News being – that the Christmas stories (like all the other bible stories) can be taken seriously, whatever your beliefs.
And that’s really handy, because whilst we live in an increasingly multi-faith/no-faith society, Christmas is still widely celebrated, with its core message about the coming of God to Earth in human form. In cathedrals and parish churches across the country, people will respectfully listen to the readings and enthusiastically sing the carols proclaiming that message. And then, a few short days later, when the tinsel and trees get put away, continue exactly as before. Unmoved, unscathed, and completely unpersuaded that any of the religious stuff they’ve just encountered, might have something to offer them.
Which is hardly surprising, given that the message itself is so bizarre, as to verge on (or tip over into) meaninglessness. No wonder the thoughtful unchurched shake their heads in collective bewilderment and look elsewhere for more plausible and persuasive guides to life.
Exactly one hundred years ago this month, the House of Bishops of the American Episcopal Church brought charges of heresy against William Montgomery Brown, the retired Bishop of Arkansas, on the grounds that he wanted the freedom to interpret the creeds non-literally. One of the charges related to the bishops’ indignation, that (according to Montgomery Brown) the Church’s understanding of ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary .. need not be accepted in their obvious sense’. What an ‘obvious sense’ might amount to was never explained, although it was evidently something along the lines of ‘literally’. But it was (and is) ludicrous to imagine that ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary’ could ever be understood literally!
Bishop Brown was found guilty as charged, despite (or maybe because of) his protestations that he believed The Book of Common Prayer in its entirety: ‘I will venture to say there isn’t one Bishop here that believes any more than I do and takes more delight in the worship from that Prayer Book than I do. I believe it from cover to cover, and the Bible too … I don’t reject one supernaturalistic representation of the Bible … of the creed, of the Prayer Book. I interpret it all symbolically.’ (quoted in The Bishop Pike Affair, Stringfellow and Towne, p. 101).
Were those weasel words – or just unusually honest words? Whatever they were, here we are, an entire century later, in exactly the same place. Any parish cleric (or, heaven forfend, bishop) who dares to explore non-literal ways of understanding Christmas, is likely to be cast into outer darkness – if the news ever got out. All the members of the Nativity tableau must be left undisturbed (and unexamined), as the Church continues its descent into cultural irrelevance, apart from the way that crib services are increasingly seen as entertaining opportunities for facile adaptation. (One such was the memorable introduction in Love Actually of the hitherto unknown character of an Octopus.) It’s all a bit of a laugh – for people who daren’t take Christmas (or much else) seriously. That is an enormous shame, as an intelligent understanding of it has the potential to cut through all the layers of self-protection we usually wear, and put us in touch with something that is raw and real.
But if this is ever going to happen, it will demand a commitment to seriousness on the part of the individual, as well as a commitment to openness on the part of the Church. The former is tricky enough, whilst the latter is vanishingly unlikely, apart from in local pockets, and even then, only patchily. Any church with liberal elements in its congregation is also bound to contain others, who would be shocked to the core at any suggestion things might demand more of them than the Sunday School picture they’ve clung to all their lives.
And whilst there may well be all sorts of possible routes to a mature understanding of Christmas, it’s unlikely any of them will be able to dispense completely with the sort of threefold typology set out by Marcus Borg (in such places as The Meaning of Jesus p. 247–8 and Reading the Bible Again for the First Time p. 49–51), from whom I have borrowed shamelessly.
At their heart, they focus on the journey of faith moving along a continuum from an unimaginative literalism, towards a position that allows the stories to get under our skin. But to begin at the beginning: When we were little, we first heard the birth stories of Jesus, in a state of precritical naïveté. In that state, we took it for granted that things really happened that way, and Jesus really was born of a virgin, and that there was a magic star, wise men, birth in a stable, angels singing to the shepherds, and so forth. In that state, we simply heard them as true stories.
Gradually, at least some people begin to question and evaluate, not just these stories, but much else besides (including Santa Claus). This is the state of critical thinking, and it would be worrying if young people didn’t go through it. It involves a demand for evidence, and the abandoning of ideas that don’t meet the test.
Many people (such as the so-called ‘New Atheists’ of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens) get stuck in that stage for their whole lives – which is unfortunate. Because on the far side of critical thinking is postcritical naïveté, which is about being able to hear the central stories of the Christian tradition once again as true stories. Not in the sense of somehow returning to the childhood state of precritical naïveté, but realising that their truth does not depend on their historical factuality. It is the ability (Borg tells us) to affirm the words of a Native American Storyteller, ‘I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true’. As T. S. Eliot famously put it: ‘And the end of all our exploring – will be to arrive where we started – and know the place for the first time’.
Which is all very well – until the Church gets involved, and insists (as it almost always does) that the stories need to be heard as history, rather than as ‘just’ (sic) stories. Anything else is seen as thin gruel, because facts are apparently the only things that count. If the stories aren’t historically-based, they’re simply ‘not true’. And if they’re ‘not true’ – then they ‘don’t matter’. No wonder congregations are so keen to hang onto the historicity of the bible, as that’s the only way it can (they’re told) ‘be true’.
And even when people are prepared to countenance the language of metaphor (such as Jesus being described as ‘the bread of life’), it’s on condition that the words themselves are accurate renderings of historical events and conversations. There’s an obvious disconnect in all this with the worlds of film and theatre (as well as literature more generally), where most reasonable people would find it somewhere between absurd and offensive if members of the audience felt obliged to stand up and object that (say) Macbeth ‘wasn’t true’. We willingly suspend disbelief and enter another world whilst watching a play or film – and hope that when we return to the everyday one, our lives are richer, with sympathies and empathies enhanced. So if we’re able to appreciate fiction, we should be able to appreciate the Christmas stories.
But to say that, for many people, would immediately sound as if we’ve sold the pass, and given up on the ‘truths of religion’. That’s because they’re stuck in the first of Borg’s stages, seeing ‘belief’ as the (only) thing that matters, rather than simply allowing the stories to sink into and inform our consciousness.
We can probably all think of people of goodwill who are happy enough to go along with the Christmas ‘stuff’, but unable (and it really is a case of ‘unable’ rather than ‘unwilling’) to see it as the gateway to something far deeper. That was certainly the situation I was in, pre-Bert Richards. And many of those who will sing the carols this Christmas are likely to be similarly located – on the outside of the Church, looking in.
And whilst we could list the various elements of the Christmas stories with present day personal implications (the value of giving, the miracle of new life, the importance of family), doing so robs those stories of much of their power. In the same way that trying to turn the behaviour and language of the characters of a novel, into a series of philosophical propositions/lessons that we could learn from, would rob it of whatever it was that made it a novel. Stories (including religious stories) can’t be analysed without significant loss – otherwise people would read the works of moral philosophers rather than novelists in order to try and make sense of life.
But we need the philosophers in order to try and make sense of religion. In his Culture and Value Wittgenstein says: ‘An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it’. And in The Sea of Faith Don Cupitt adds (p. 230) ‘to be honest, you must walk the tightrope; to be religious you must not fall off it’.
Again, in Culture and Value (p. 33) if a man (sic) has faith ‘you no longer rest your weight on the Earth, but suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything will be different (as) a man who is suspended looks the same as one who is standing, but the interplay of forces within him is nevertheless quite different, so that he can act quite differently than can a standing man’.
Which doesn’t offer much comfort for those who aren’t prepared to take risks – or put in the necessary practice on the high wire. People can’t move to Stage 3 without considerable effort – which is why many will never manage it. But the potential rewards are so great that we need to do all we can to rescue and rehabilitate the wonderful Christmas stories from the clutches of the literalists (of either Stage 1 or Stage 2). We need to insist on their beauty and power, and refuse to apologise for their fanciful elements. There will always be those who remain cynical and jaundiced about the season, which is both unfortunate and sad. And whilst the commercial aspects are bound to dominate, we need to counter all the silliness and self-indulgence, by offering a far richer model of human flourishing. And taking the nativity stories from 2000 years ago as seriously as they deserve, is a pretty good place to start.