A Brief Christmas Theology

By M. D. Aeschliman

Monday, December 25, 2023

 

That saintly sage G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a true wise man, always in quest of truth, even if often smilingly in a cap and bells. He is rightly notable for adages and epigrams, the most famous of which is surely, “The difficulty that ensues when people cease to believe in God is not that they then believe in nothing, but that they believe in anything.” Over 75 years I have found no adage truer than this one about contemporary Western persons. The main logical difficulty is that so few of them believe in any of the same things. For many of them the one constant seems to be “anything but Christianity” (let’s call it ABC), as in “I am spiritual but not religious,” but the receptacle of this exalted spirituality seems pretty much anything heterodox: yoga, polyamory, crystals, banal bromides, dietary supplements (or dietary subtractions).

 

Perhaps we are seeing the ultimate working out of what the great contemporary sociologist and theologian Peter L. Berger called “the heretical imperative.” Ever since Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman — and even before Nietzsche, who read Emerson — every man, or woman, seems to be his own (or her own) Messiah. Amor sui usque ad contemptum boni (love of self even unto the contempt of the good): There is nothing authoritative that is conceived to be anterior, exterior, or superior to the self.

 

Over 300 years ago the great poet John Dryden wrote, “What weight of ancient witness can prevail / If private judgment holds the public scale?” But the apparently liberated contemporary person has no knowledge of or belief in “ancient witness”; for him or her, “private judgment” is enough. The self-contradictory, antinomian, anarchic implications of such beliefs (the “public scale”) rarely seem to be understood. The Nietzschean liberation from authority seems to be a jolly state of unstressed bliss: until it doesn’t; and then “the unbearable lightness of being” prevails and “everything that is solid melts into the air.”

 

As opposed to ABC — anything but Christianity — I propose ABCT: a brief Christmas theology. It contains two simple but profound points, rooted in “ancient wisdom,” and in common sense. First, “In the beginning was the Word” (John I). That is, there is in the world ultimately an order that is rational: order, cosmos, objectivity, and purpose are the essence of sanity, wisdom, education, and civilization. We discover and apprehend them, though we do not always comprehend them or live consistently in their light. In any case, they are not merely our inventions and projections; their antecedent and providential authority is not based merely on external power or any individual or collective human will.

 

The second principle of ABCT is that loving-kindness is the greatest of human virtues, which Saint Paul argued in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13. Faith, hope, and loving-kindness (Miles Coverdale’s translation of agape, or caritas) are asserted, but Saint Paul insists that loving-kindness is greater even than faith or hope. People are ends and not only or merely means, persons and not merely things, subjects and not merely objects. Like point one of our two-part ABCT, the doctrine is both epistemological (a form of knowledge) and ethical (practical wisdom for everyday human interaction), warranting rational objectivity and moral reciprocity.

 

These two ideas, beliefs, and values are inexhaustibly profound and fruitful, inspiring innumerable works of art, philosophy, theology, literature, and ethics, not to speak of hundreds of millions of noble individual human lives — in fact, they provide the impetus, trajectory, and residual momentum of our civilization itself, inasmuch as it still is one, and not just an aggregation of competitive individuals and groups. And unlike ABC, ABCT doesn’t reduce, ignore, deny, neglect, or eviscerate the human figures we meet in the street every day or the one we see in the mirror every morning.

 

So may God rest you indeed, merry gentlemen and ladies too, for “the mind can only rest upon the stability of truth,” and this good news can be found anew every Christmas.