Before I came to faith in Jesus Christ when I was fifteen I
became aware of a sect that maintained that the only true and faithful
Christians left on the planet were those who belonged to their group.
It was difficult not to be aware of them. They would
periodically come knocking on everyone's door, armed with literature
"proving" their distinctive doctrines, hoping to find someone who did
not spot them coming and pull the drapes down before they arrived, and try to
convert him. I am referring, of course, to the Watchtower Bible and
Tract Society, better known as the Jehovah's Witnesses. These disciples
of Charles Taze Russell and Judge Rutherford, have revived the ancient heresy
of Arianism (the idea that Jesus is not the Eternally-Begotten Son of God,
co-equal and co-eternal with His Father and the Holy Ghost, as orthodox
Christians believe, but a lesser divinity, the first created being) and blended
it with a strong millenarianism (they have set dates for the Second Coming
numerous times in the past, all of which have come and gone). They
are frequently designated a "cult" by evangelical watchdog groups who
use this term to refer any Protestant separatist sect that deviates from
Creedal orthodoxy in some way with regards to the Trinity or the Person of
Christ. One of the ways in which they consider themselves to be
superior to orthodox Christians is that they don't celebrate Christmas -
or Easter, any other holiday, or even their own birthdays.
Shortly after coming to faith I received literature from
another such sect, the Worldwide Church of God, founded by radio preacher
Herbert W. Armstrong. They too rejected the Trinity and orthodox
Christology, although at a later point they apparently recanted all of this,
embraced sounder doctrine, renamed themselves, and joined the National
Association of Evangelicals. This had not yet happened at the time
I am alluding to. I first recognized that there was something off
about their doctrine by the fact that they, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, had a
major problem with Christmas.
I have, ever since, been strongly inclined to doubt the
orthodoxy of anyone who professes a fervent Christianity but who
attacks Christmas. I am aware, of course, that there have been
some to whom no specific error with regards to the Trinity or Christ can be
attributed who rejected Christmas. Oliver Cromwell is the most
obvious historical example, but as Cromwell was a self-righteous Pharisee, a
boorish Philistine, and a vile, treacherous, regicide who ruled as a tyrant
over the people he had deprived of their lawful king through murder, this
hardly raises my esteem of Christmas rejecters.
I have a colleague who is like this. Pretty much
every time Christmas and Easter roll around, he insists upon
pestering me with annoying questions about why we are celebrating
"manmade" holidays like Christmas and Easter rather than
the ones God ordained in the Law. No matter how many times I have
explained to him that God ordained the holidays in the Pentateuch for a
specific nation - Israel - and the New Testament is absolutely clear on the
fact that the Church is not bound to keep the Old Testament feasts, that people
are not required to become Jews in order to become Christians, and that the
Church is free to set its own holy days (the practice of having a special
assembly of the Church on the first day of the week, Sunday, in
commemoration of the Resurrection, rather than the seventh, Saturday, the
Sabbath of the Old Testament, is already in evidence in the book of Acts), it
never seems to penetrate and he persists in thinking that he is like Jesus
admonishing the scribes and Pharisees for setting God's commandments aside for
manmade traditions.
The most recent such episode involved him trying to get me
to acknowledge that Christmas was a "pagan" holiday.
While my response was to explain to him that the Church had already begun
celebrating Christmas on December 25th before Aurelian
proclaimed the Feast of Sol Invictus on the same date in the third century, and
to get irate at being forced to have this same conversation over again, it
occurred to me later, after I had cooled down, to contemplate what he and those
like him think the word "pagan" means.
Judging from the way such people use the word it would seem
that they think "pagan" describes everything pertaining to the
religion and culture of Gentile nations prior to their evangelization, that
this consisted 100% of "manmade tradition", and that anything brought
into Christianity from this source is an impurity that should be expunged
because the Jewish tradition was the only pre-Christian tradition to have
anything in it that was of God.
The irony of this point of view is striking.
Consider the passage in which Jesus denounces using man-made traditions
to set aside God's commandments. You can find it in the fifteenth
chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, the first twenty verses, and in the first
twenty-three verses of the seventh chapter of St. Mark's Gospel.
Who did He address these words to? Were they Gentiles? Were they ethnic Jews who had abandoned
Judaism to worship in the temples of the gods of Greece and Rome?
No, they were the Pharisees, a sect of Second Temple
Judaism. They were the sect, as a matter of fact, that was most
rigid about keeping the Torah (the Law), insisting upon maintaining Temple-level
purity in every aspect of ordinary life, which is where they were coming from
in asking the question that promoted Jesus’ stinging rebuke. More
interestingly, they were the explicitly anti-Hellenistic sect.
Their origins go back to the immediate aftermath of the Maccabean Revolt
against Antiochus Epiphanes, following his desecration of the Temple.
The flip-side to their insistence upon an ultra-rigid, formal, purity
according to the Law was a demand for separation from all things Gentile and
especially Greek. They would have been the last Jews in the first
century to have any appreciation for Philo of Alexandria. In case
the relevance of this has not jumped out at you, it was the sect of Jews who
made it their crusade to keep Judaism unspotted from Greek influence, that were
at the receiving end of the rebuke about substituting manmade tradition for
God's commandments that is evoked every time someone takes issue with
Christians celebrating the Birth and Resurrection of Jesus Christ in the
absence of an explicit Scriptural command to do so.
It is interesting that the person who was most responsible
for evangelizing the Gentiles in the New Testament period, St. Paul, was
himself a former member of this sect and one who had been a particularly
zealous Pharisee at that. This same St. Paul is the one who brought the
question of whether Gentiles needed to become Jews in order to convert to
Christianity to the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem in the fifteenth chapter of
Acts, and then became the foremost champion of the answer he received, which in
short, was no. It is a prominent theme
in several of the epistles he would later wrote, and the main subject of one of
them, the epistle to the Galatians. In addressing the Stoics and
Epicureans at the Areopagus, St. Paul took an apologetic and evangelistic
approach that is the exact opposite of the “only Jews have ever had the truth,
you goyim know nothing” approach that might be expected from someone with his
Pharisaic background. He borrowed their
own shrine to the "Unknown God" to preach the True and Living God to
them, even applying to Jehovah, lines the Greek poets had addressed to Zeus.
I shall have more to say about St. Paul in a moment. First, I would like to briefly return to
Oliver Cromwell, or rather than the Puritan movement of which he was a representative
and leader. These were the forerunners
of all of these sects that object to traditional Christian feasts and festivals
as “manmade” and “pagan” as well as of political liberalism (their party in
Parliament developed into the Whigs) and leftism (the Jacobins, who perpetrated
the French Revolution, and became the template for all subsequent leftwing
revolutionary movements, including the Bolsheviks, themselves took their
inspiration from the Puritan revolt against King Charles I in the English Civil
War). The most extreme – theologically –
of them, also objected to the conventional names of the days of the week and of
the months. The grounds, of course,
were that they take their names from pagan deities (Wednesday, for example,
takes its name from Wotan or Odin).
If the Puritan reasoning were taken to its logical
conclusion we would have to throw out the New Testament. Repeatedly, the authors of the New
Testament, writing in Greek, the lingua franca of the time, referred to the
place the Old Testament calls Sheol as Hades.
It occurs mostly in the Synoptic Gospels and Revelation, although it
also appears in the second chapter of Acts where it is used to render Sheol in
quotations from the Psalms in St. Peter’s address on Pentecost. It was the obvious word to use – Hades in
Greek thought, like Sheol in Hebrew thought, was the underworld, the land of
shadows, where the spirits of the departed went. Where did it get its Greek name, however?
The answer is that the Greeks named this place after the god
they assigned to rule it. In Greek
mythology, when the Olympians, the third generation of gods, overthrew the
Titans, the second generation, the sons of Kronos who had been ruler of the
Titans, divided the world between themselves, with Zeus taking the sky,
Poseidon the oceans and Hades the underworld.
If it is wrong for Christians to call the fifth day of the
week Thursday after Thor, then it must also have been wrong for the Apostolic
writers of the New Testament to refer to Sheol by the name of the Greek god who
got the short end of the stick.
Apparently the Apostles were not as fastidious about avoiding names with
pagan associations as the Puritans would later be. It follows from this that neither was the
Holy Ghost Who inspired their writing.
Nor is this one isolated example. A related one can be found in St. Peter’s second
epistle, the second chapter, fourth verse, where he uses a verbal form of
Tartarus to refer to the fallen angels being imprisoned. Tartarus, in Greek thought, was originally
the place where Zeus imprisoned the Titans, and later came to take on the idea of
a general place of punishment for the wicked dead (Sisyphus and his stone,
Tantalus with his ever-out-of-reach grapes, etc.) St. Peter is obviously using it in a sense
that corresponds with the original meaning of the term. Although this is much rarer in the New
Testament than Hades – St. Peter’s is the only use of the term, the abyss or
bottomless pit that appears in St. John’s Revelation is a reference to the same
concept or place – it is an example of a concept borrowed from Greek thought
that does not really have a strong close equivalent in Hebrew thought, except
perhaps Dudael, which was originally the place in the wilderness where the
scapegoat was thought to end up, but in later Jewish thought a general prison
for evil spirits, a usage not found in any of the books regarded as canonical
by both Jews and Christians (it can be found in the Book of Enoch which,
although quoted by St. Jude in the New Testament, is not considered canonical
by the mainstream of either Judaism or Christianity, although the Ethiopian
sects of both religions place a very high value on it). The Greek name of this place, like Hades,
comes from a god, one whom the poet Hesiod, Homer’s contemporary, assigned to
the oldest generation of gods that preceded the Titans in his Theogyny.
Incidentally, or not, the word we generally use in English
for both places or concepts is also the name of a pagan deity, Hel or Hela, the
Norse goddess of death who ruled the underworld and was the daughter – not
sister as in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – of the god of mischief, Loki,
although it is debatable whether the Norse named the realm after the goddess or
the other way around.
Again, it is quite evident that the authors of the New
Testament did not share the Puritan – or Pharisaic as it would have been called
in their day - notion that borrowing words and even ideas and concepts from the
Greeks and Romans somehow compromised the purity of God’s revelation.
Let us return now to St. Paul. In the first three chapters of his epistle to
the Romans, he makes clear the distinction between special and general
revelation, both of which come from God.
He does not use these terms but the concepts are plainly there. General revelation is how God reveals
Himself to all people everywhere in His Creation. This is what he is talking about when he
writes in the first chapter:
Because that which may
be known of God is manifest in them; For God hath shewed it unto them. For the
invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being
understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so
that they are without excuse. (vv.
19-20)
Later, in the third chapter, he writes that the advantage of
Jewishness was chiefly that “unto them were committed the oracles of God”. This is special revelation, God speaking to
people through His prophets with a specific message.
Note that the distinction is made in the context of an
indictment against all people, Jews and Gentiles both, as sinners. The Gentiles are rebuked in the remainder of
the first chapter for turning away from the Creator to worship created images
and for the moral decay that accompanies such idolatry, and the Jews are
rebuked in the second chapter for the hypocrisy of glorying in having received
God’s Law without obeying it, all of which comes to a head in the general indictment “for all have sinned, and
come short of the glory of God” which is immediately followed by the Gospel
proclamation that we are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption
that is in Christ Jesus”.
One of the implications of this, that the nations have received
the general revelation of God in Creation and Israel His special oracles, but
that both have fallen into sin and that Jesus Christ is the Saviour Who brings
the freely offered redemption of God to both, is that Christ is the fulfilment
of both special and general revelation.
C. S. Lewis had clearly thought through this
implication. In response to the
argument, common among anthropologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, that the Gospel message of the death and Resurrection of Jesus
Christ was merely another version of the dying and resurrected god – the corn
king – that appears in many mythologies as a symbol of the death and decay of
fall and winter being replaced by the renewing of life in spring, he argued
that whereas in pagan mythologies the myth was a symbol of the reality that was
the natural phenomenon, in Christianity the natural phenomenon was the symbol
of the greater reality to be found in the death and resurrection of Christ, and
that thus Jesus, by fulfilling the symbol meaning pointed to by the natural
phenomenon to which the pagan myths pointed, was the ultimate fulfilment of the
myth. This and other related arguments
can be found in the essays of his which were collected into God in the Dock. It is a subject that was particularly
meaningful to him in that it was J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson’s challenge to
him to consider the Gospel as a “true myth” that brought him to faith in Jesus
Christ. Among the most relevant essays
are “Myth Became Fact” and “Miracles”.
In the latter, which argues that God is always at work in the world in
natural processes in ways we have become so accustomed to that we fail to see
God in them and that the miracles recorded in Scripture consist basically of
God doing the same things but “at a different speed and on a smaller scale”,
revealing the Agent Who is at work in the ordinary processes. In this essay Lewis wrote:
God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water
by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn water into a juice which
will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah’s time
till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see. Either like the
Pagans they refer the process to some finite spirit, Bacchus or Dionysus: or
else, like the moderns, they attribute real and ultimate causality to the
chemical and other material phenomena which are all that our senses can
discover in it. But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off.
The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is
God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a
glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at a wedding party in
Cana. Every year God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and
there is an increase, and men, according to the fashion of their age, say “It
is Ceres, it is Adonis, it is the Corn-King,” or else “It is the laws of Nature.”
The close-up, the translation, of this annual wonder is the feeding of the five
thousand. Bread is not made there of nothing. Bread is not made of stones, as
the Devil once suggested to Our Lord in vain. A little bread is made into much
bread…When He fed the thousands He multiplied fish as well as bread.
Look in every bay and almost every river. This swarming, pulsating fecundity
shows He is still at work. The ancients had a god called Genius – the god of
animal and human fertility, the presiding spirit of gynecology, embryology, or
the marriage bed – the “genial bed” as they called it after its god Genius. As
the miracles of wine and bread and healing showed who Bacchus really was, who
Ceres, who Apollo, and that all were one, so this miraculous multiplication of
fish reveals the real Genius.
One of the books that C. S. Lewis claimed as a major
influence on his own thought was G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.
Originally published in 1925 as a sort of response to H. G. Wells’ The Outline of History, it consists of
two parts, the first of which gives a sort of overview of the pre-Christian
history of the world, the second part of which looks at Who Jesus Christ was,
and overall demonstrates why materialistic, rationalistic, and evolutionary
accounts of both man and Christ such at that proffered by Mr. Wells are
unsatisfactory. Throughout the book Chesterton presented mythology and
philosophy as existing in a seemingly irreconcilable tension in pre-Christian
paganism. In the fifth chapter of the
first part, “Man and Mythologies” he writes that “All this mythological
business belongs to the poetical part of men” and proceeds to explain why a
scientific account of mythology will miss the point completely, because it is
all about imagination and the aesthetic point of view of the artist. For Chesterton, as later for Lewis,
mythology did not represent an inferior form of theology, because it was not of
the genus theology at all: “A man did not stand up and say ‘I believe in
Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,’ etc., as he stands up and says ‘I believe in God
the Father Almighty’ and the rest of the Apostles’ Creed.” In the chapter that follows this he begins
the degeneration of mythology into superstition, black magic, and devil
worship, noting that contrary to what is often assumed this was characteristic
of civilizations grown decadent rather than primitive societies embarking upon
civilization. He then switches gears to
discuss the Philosophers, who sought absolute and abstract answers to ultimate
questions, and into which category he places not just people like Aristotle,
but the founders of Eastern philosophical systems usually thought of as
religions, such as Buddha and, especially Confucius. In the fifth chapter of the second part,
entitled “The Escape from Paganism”, he returns to the theme of this tension
and maintains that in Christ and His Church, the mythological and philosophical
are brought together and reconciled:
The Catholic faith is
the reconciliation because it is the realization both of mythology and
philosophy. It is a story and in that
sense one of a hundred stores; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense one of
a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life. But above all it is a reconciliation
because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories….To
sum up; the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of man offered
salvation by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring tendencies of
the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most certainly never
satisfied together. It met the
mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search
for truth by being a true story. That
is why the ideal figure had to be a historical character, as nobody had ever
felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical character. But that is also why the historical
character had to be the ideal figure; and even fulfil many of the functions
given to these other ideal figures; why he was at once the sacrifice and the
feast, why he could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the
rising sun.
The position taken by Chesterton and Lewis could be
summarized as this: Jesus Christ is the true and ultimate fulfilment of pagan
mythology and philosophy just as He is the true and ultimate fulfilment of Old
Testament Judaism. Those who have
inherited the Puritanical spirit of Oliver Cromwell, as he in turn inherited it
from the Pharisees of old, will howl their outrage over this suggestion and
claim that it is unscriptural, but it is implicit in St. Paul’s account of
general and special revelation in the epistle to the Romans and explicit in his
address to the philosophers of Mars Hill.
Obviously, this does not constitute an endorsement of the idolatry,
immorality, or philosophical errors of paganism, all of which St. Paul
rebuked. After all, saying that Jesus
was the fulfilment of the Old Testament hardly constitutes an endorsement of
the arrogant ethnocentrism of the Pharisees, much less the errors of the other
sects of first century Judaism.
For all those who believe in Jesus Christ, as the Son of the
True and Living God, equal to the Father and the Holy Ghost, Who became truly
Man while remaining fully God in order to redeem all of mankind, and to fulfil
all that God had revealed before through general or special revelation, there
could hardly be anything wrong with celebrating either His birth, as narrated
to us in two of the Gospel accounts, or His triumph over all of mankind’s
enemies – sin, death, the devil, and hell – in His glorious Resurrection as
told in all four of the Gospel accounts.
To claim that the celebration of either of these is “pagan” is
absurd. Yes, Christmas falls close to
the winter solstice, as do the festivals of lights of all sorts of other
religions such as the ancient Roman Saturnalia, the Hindu/Sikh Diwali
(technically this falls about a month earlier but close enough) or, for that
matter, the Jewish Hanukkah (which the Gospel of John records our Lord
participating in even though it is “manmade”), but this is hardly grounds for
objection. The Book of Genesis says
that God put the sun, moon, and stars in the sky for “for signs, and for
seasons, and for days, and years” and so it is hardly surprising that the different
religions that arose out of the basic need to worship that God placed in human
nature at Creation would often have festivals at the same time of year. Ironically, those who dismiss Christmas as “pagan”
are themselves guilty of what they accuse others of. Pagan, in the Latin tongue, meant rural,
rustic, and peasant. It was a snobbish
term by which the sophisticated, urban, elites of ancient Rome dismissed simple
country folk. If there was anything the
Church borrowed from ancient Rome that it ought not to have it was this term
with its associations of contempt for those who live on farms and in
villages.
