The Virgin Birth Is More Than an Incredible Occurrence

We’re eager to ask whether it could have happened. We shouldn’t forget to ask what it means.

For the last 100 years, conversation around the Virgin Birth has centered on whether it actually happened. Could Mary really have had a child without a previous sexual union? Maybe, the thinking went, ancient people were simply more gullible in the face of stories like these.

While the historicity of the Virgin Birth is an important question, there are others worth asking. In his new book Conceived by the Holy Spirit: The Virgin Birth in Scripture and Theology, Rhyne Putman analyzes some of the most pivotal: Did the Virgin Birth need to happen? What if it hadn’t? And why does it matter today?

Not a lot of books exist on this topic from an evangelical perspective. But Putman, a professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, has provided a helpful overview.

In part 1, Putnam carefully examines the birth narratives of Jesus in the Gospels. Throughout this section, he responds to various objections critics have raised. Some have claimed, for instance, that the notion of the Virgin Birth came from pagan mythology. Some have posited that Mary’s place in the narrative of Jesus’ birth describes a metaphorical rather than a biological reality. Other challenges to the biblical accounts ask whether God violated Mary’s sovereignty, or whether the Virgin Birth contradicts the church’s belief that Jesus existed as God’s eternally begotten Son before his incarnation.

In part 2, Putnam discusses the theological meaning and implications of the Virgin Birth. Here, he puts this doctrine into conversation with others, considering how it bears on subjects like Creation, the Trinity, the person and work of Christ, his status as the Second Adam, and his second coming. Putnam closes with two appendices: one that proposes a “harmony” of the biblical nativity stories and another that evaluates traditional Catholic beliefs about Mary.

My favorite parts of the book concern the significance of the Virgin Birth. Putman argues that it was fitting for Jesus to come to earth in this way even if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

There are three reasons for this. First, the Virgin Birth is fitting because it reveals that Jesus is truly human as well as truly divine. Usually, when we think of the Virgin Birth, we emphasize the improbability of a virgin giving birth while downplaying the birth itself. However, treasures reside in both terms. The Virgin Birth is certainly amazing because Jesus was born of a virgin, but it’s equally amazing that God himself was born.

Early Christian heresies denied that Jesus was born. The Docetists, for instance, taught that Jesus was only a spirit being. The church responded by affirming that Jesus was truly and fully human and was born like any other human (except for the virgin part). Jesus took his flesh from Mary, and thus he could truly thirst, be tempted, and suffer. The second person of the Trinity descended from David and was born according to his flesh.

Second, the Virgin Birth is fitting because it signals Jesus’ uniqueness. It indicates that Jesus, though fully human, is unlike every other human being. He is naturally the Son of God but adopted a human father for himself in Joseph. The Virgin Birth displays Jesus, in the words of the Nicene Creed, as “God from God, Light from Light.”

Jesus’ existence did not begin when human sperm fertilized a human egg. In fact, Jesus did not ever begin to exist, since he has existed from before the creation of the world (John 1:1–3; Col. 1:15–17). The Virgin Birth bears witness to the fact that Jesus’ life didn’t begin at conception like ours.

Third, the Virgin Birth is fitting because it signals that we are saved by grace alone. Jesus’ coming was not the result of human ingenuity or the forethought of Israel. Like Mary and Joseph, we are simply recipients of God’s favor and grace. It was God’s action that caused Jesus to be born, not the grand plan of humanity. This reminds us that our salvation is based on God’s initiative. We didn’t orchestrate our salvation; it was wrought by God.

If the Virgin Birth is fitting in all these ways, then what we celebrate at Christmas is not simply an interesting factoid we can marvel at until the novelty wears off. Nor is it something that should cause embarrassment. Rather, the Virgin Birth contains the story of salvation. This miraculous event signals who Jesus is and how he will save us. It touches, then, on core Christian convictions.

I can’t think of many comprehensive books on the Virgin Birth, and Putnam’s volume is a wonderful resource to help people think more carefully about this essential event. (Amy Peeler’s book Women and the Gender of God touches on some of the same subjects, but her focus is narrower.)

Still, there are two aspects of Conceived by the Holy Spirit that I would alter. Putnam spends more time on the scriptural interpretation of the Virgin Birth (249 pages) than on the theology it communicates (92 pages). I think he should have flipped this ratio, or perhaps integrated these subjects more naturally. There are plenty of good biblical commentaries that walk readers through the narratives of Christ’s incarnation; not as many present a comprehensive theology of the Virgin Birth.

Additionally, by separating biblical interpretation from theology, Putman risks furthering the flawed impression that these are separate subjects. I’m convinced that biblical scholars and theologians alike should exemplify how the work of interpreting Scripture includes theological judgment as a matter of course.

Additionally, I think Putnam could have devoted more than an appendix to Marian dogmas within Catholicism. His discussion is quite brief, leaving little room to unpack the most controversial Catholic claims regarding her immaculate conception (the belief that she was born apart from Original Sin), her perpetual virginity, her bodily assumption to heaven immediately after death, her intercession before God, and her presence in various icons.

For example, Putman might have interacted with a recent contribution to Marian theology by Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary: Unveiling the Mother of the Messiah, which attempts to ground the Catholic position in typological arguments from Scripture. Such engagement might fall outside the scope of the book as Putman envisioned it. But I think readers would benefit from added attention to Marian points of division between Catholics and Protestants.

Ultimately, Putnam aims to encourage our faith, especially during Advent season, by having us carefully consider the Virgin Birth. Contrary to popular misconceptions, having faith doesn’t mean believing that which is opposed to evidence. Faith seeks out evidence.

If you carefully examine the scriptural texts on events like the Virgin Birth or even the Resurrection, you’ll notice that ancient people also had a hard time admitting such things could happen. Mary asks questions of the angel who announced she would give birth to Jesus. Joseph assumes Mary’s infidelity until an angel sets him straight. Thomas doubts the truth of Jesus’ resurrection until he sees and touches his wounds. Ancient people affirmed natural laws, but they could be convinced of realities beyond nature.

Faith, then, allows us to open ourselves up to what might initially seem unbelievable. As theologian Geerhardus Vos once wrote in his classic study Biblical Theology, “Religious belief exists not in last analysis on what we can prove, but on the fact of God having declared it to be so.”

Abraham believed in his old age that he would become the father of many nations. His hope in God enabled him to believe this “against all hope” (Rom. 4:18). We must believe, like Abraham, that God can do what seems beyond belief. When we celebrate Christmas, we celebrate God’s supernatural power not only to enter our world as a child but also to bring new life to those under death’s curse.

Patrick Schreiner is associate professor of New Testament and biblical theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of The Transfiguration of Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Reading.

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Church Life

The Nine Days of Filipino Christmas

Samson Uytanlet

Some Protestants observe the Catholic tradition of Simbang Gabi, predawn services in the days leading up to Christmas.

Jam Sta Rosa / Getty

In the Philippines, Christmas starts in September with temperatures in the mid-80s (30 degrees Celsius).

The island nation with a strong Christian heritage celebrates the four-month holiday with street vendors selling bibingka (baked coconut rice cakes) and puto bumbong (purple rice cakes), colorful parol (ornaments representing the star of Bethlehem) hanging outside shops and homes, and people crooning Jose Mari Chan’s classic hit “Christmas in Our Hearts.”

For Catholics, who make up nearly 80 percent of the Filipino population, another uniquely Filipino Christmas tradition is the practice of Simbang Gabi, nine days of masses at dawn through Christmas Eve. The novena is held in honor of the Virgin Mary as she anticipates the birth of Jesus and is considered an opportunity for Catholics to ask for divine favors.

Some Protestant churches in the Philippines have adapted the tradition of Simbang Gabi in their Christmas celebrations by focusing on Jesus’ arrival rather than the expectant Mary. For three Methodist groups, Simbang Gabi is observed denomination wide. Other denominations, such as the Philippine Brethren Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Presbyterian Church of the Philippines, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance of the Philippines, give local churches autonomy over whether to practice it or not.

During the Philippines’ 300 years under Spanish rule (1565–1898), the Roman Catholic Church practiced Misa de Aguinaldo(Gift Mass), another name for Simbang Gabi, according to parish priest Virgilio B. Hernandez. Beginning on December 16, Catholics gathered as early as 4 a.m. so that farmers could attend the services before working in their fields. Simbang Gabi then culminated with the Panuluyan(lodging place), a dramatization of Joseph and Mary entering the stable, on the morning of December 24.

On Christmas Eve, families would gather for a meal with hamon de bola (spherical honey-cured ham) and quezo de bola (spherical cheese), along with buko (young coconut) salad and seasonal castañas (chestnuts).

Traditionally, Catholic churches in the Philippines have conducted these masses uniformly down to the songs that are sung, according to Hernandez. In recent years, however, the rise in urbanization has led some congregations to meet in the evening instead of at dawn and, out of convenience, hold Mass in malls instead of churches.

From the time Protestantism entered the Philippines in the early 20th century with the arrival of Americans, some denominations such as the United Methodist Church (UMC) have carried on the practice of Simbang Gabi. Unlike Catholic churches, the UMC’s services are less formal and follow the format of a midweek service, said Adonis Abelard Gorospe, pastor of St. John United Methodist Church in Quezon City. Each service ends with the congregation eating a breakfast of pandesal (bread roll) and coffee before starting their workdays.

The nine-day worship service allows more members to participate, Gorospe noted, as some are asked to preach, lead in singing, and prepare food.

“It’s a bonding time for the members,” Gorospe said. “Everyone looks forward to it because they meet with their friends and relatives and they can serve together.”

Another Methodist denomination, Iglesia Evangelica Metodista en las Islas Filipinas (IEMELIF), likely started practicing Simbang Gabi in the 1920s, said Roland Gernale Sebastian, pastor of Melchora Aquino IEMELIF Church in Quezon City.

Pastors of the local churches write the homilies based on assigned themes and passages. Guest pastors or lay leaders are also encouraged to preach at this time. A growing number of IEMELIF churches now conduct services in the evening after parishioners leave work for the day.

On the last day of Simbang Gabi, Christmas Eve, churches hold parties with food, presents, and singing. Members give gifts of appreciation to their pastors and pastoral staff.

Courtesy of IRMEC

Members of an IRMEC church gather for Simbang Gabi.

The I Am Redeemer and Master Evangelical Church (IRMEC), an offshoot of IEMELIF, celebrates a shortened version of Simbang Gabi that lasts four to six nights and focuses on evangelism, according to the IRMEC district superintendent of Bulacan, Norberto Gole Cruz.

As with the other churches, IRMEC’s Simbang Gabi services are a time for the congregations to share meals and show appreciation to their pastors. In addition, they hold a raffle and put on Nativity plays. While some attend the services for the festivities, “the majority join because they are looking to be fed spiritually through the messages,” Cruz said. “Preachers make it their aim to prepare messages that would meet the spiritual needs of the congregation.”

Meanwhile, other Protestant churches shy away from observing Simbang Gabi. James Bryner Chu, pastor of Pilgrim Community Church in Quezon City, which belongs to the International Presbyterian Church (IPC), noted that they follow the regulative principle of worship, meaning that corporate worship must be based on specific directions from Scripture. Thus, Simbang Gabi is not considered part of their tradition.

Others avoid the practice because it was intended as a devotion to Mary. Benzon Shih Sy, pastor of the Quezon City Evangelical Church, who said he belongs to “an orthodox and reformed faith,” sees the practice as unscriptural.

Some Protestants push back against the practice, Gorospe said, because they want to avoid association with the folk belief that the Simbang Gabi novena(or nine days of prayer) guarantees the petitioner that their prayers will be answered.

Yet Gorospe noted that other Filipino Christmas traditions, like the hanging of the parol or the display of the belen (manger scene), also have Catholic origins.

Evangelicals can bring new significance to the tradition by focusing on the expectant joy of our incarnate Savior, said Laurence Gatawa, president of the PTS College and Advanced Studies (formerly the Presbyterian Theological Seminary). Gatawa also celebrates Simbang Gabi with the congregation he pastors, the Emmanuel Christian Church in Cavite.

“We want to remind the people that the Christian life is joyful, despite the sorrows and challenges in life,” Gatawa said. “We want to emphasize that we can have joy and a positive outlook in life, full of thanksgiving and worship. We can join all Christians in the celebration.”

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Books

Join CT for a Live Book Awards Event

CT Editors

A conversation with Russell Moore, Book of the Year winner Gavin Ortlund, and Award of Merit winner Brad East.

Join Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore and other CT editors in celebration of our annual Book Awards.

Hear from this year’s Book of the Year winner Gavin Ortlund (What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church) and Award of Merit winner Brad East (Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry) about the inspiration behind their books and the big ideas that animate them as they answer questions from CT staff and subscribers.

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Books

Excerpt

There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Proper’ Christmas Carol

Andrew Gant

As we learn from the surprising journeys of several holiday classics, the term defies easy definition.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Wikimedia Commons

One Christmas I found myself on London’s Oxford Street, admiring the twinkly decorations and listening to a piped version of “Jingle Bells.” In Chinese.

Our Christmas songs and carols turn up in some surprising places. They come from some surprising places, too. “Ding, Dong! Merrily on High” began life in a French Renaissance dancing manual. The tune of “Good King Wenceslas” was first published in Finland (to completely different words, about priests and virgins, mostly). Certainly, not all of them began life with their seasonal associations attached. Some were born to Christmas, some have achieved Christmas, and some have had Christmas thrust upon them.

For example, every Christmas, you will find yourself singing a song whose original words were about a dead cow and a delinquent ploughboy. The song was heard in a pub in Forest Green, Surrey, in the leafy commuter-belt fringes of London, by the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and it was sung to him by an old man called Mr. Garman. Vaughan Williams found a use for the tune a few years later when he was given the job of music editor of The English Hymnal. He wanted to include a poem by an American bishop called Phillips Brooks but didn’t know (or didn’t like) the tune that Brooks’s own church organist had written for this text back in Philadelphia. So Vaughan Williams helped himself to Mr. Garman’s folk song. The result—“O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

That’s not the only transatlantic immigrant into our English carol tradition. “We Three Kings” is American. So is “Away in a Manger,” which was first published in the journal of the Universalist movement in Boston. The editors confidently informed their readers that the poem is by Martin Luther. It isn’t: They made that up. They claimed they were celebrating the 400th anniversary of Luther’s birth. They weren’t: They made that up, too (or, at least, got the date wrong).

“O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Away in a Manger” are both sung today to different tunes on either side of the Atlantic. Many of our best-known carol texts have had many musical partners over the years. Different tunes sometimes represent differences between one denomination and another, or from one village to the next. Sometimes, a carol would be sung to one tune in church and to a different tune in the pub afterward.

Often, tunes turn up in different parts of the UK in slightly different versions. London gives us a good example. The composer John Stainer once heard “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” raggedly sung on the streets of the capital by a tattered band of Dickensian urchins. A little later, the folklorist Cecil Sharp collected the same tune in Cambridgeshire, England. The same, but different: Stainer’s tune has a different first note from Sharp’s. Somebody, once upon a time, traveled those 70 miles singing carols and got that bit wrong, or misremembered it, or changed it. That’s how an oral tradition works. There is no “correct” version. Even today, hymnbooks and carol collections don’t agree on the exact words of “Away in a Manger” or the precise rhythm of “Angels from the Realms of Glory.”

This ability to absorb influences from everywhere and nowhere produces memorable, and often rather odd, results. This partly explains why, for most of its history, the English carol has been an outdoor creature, kept tied up in the churchyard, not allowed to show its muddy face in church. For much of the 18th century, only one carol was permitted in worship, Nahum Tate’s “While Shepherds Watched.” Hymns like “O Come, All Ye Faithful” weren’t granted access until the first half of the 19th century. Even long after that, the idea of singing secular things like wassail songs cheek by jowl with holy writ would have been deeply shocking.

The word carol, too, has had many associations over the centuries. Shakespeare describes a pair of young lovers:

This carol they began that hour …

How that life was but a flower.

The carol sung by this lover and his lass is a springtime love song: It has nothing to do with Christmas, still less church. Some later composers like Gerald Finzi used the term carol for purely instrumental pieces with a songlike character.

Even in a sacred context, the carol was never exclusively a Christmas song—many collections include Easter carols and other varieties, and folk carols like “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day” have many verses which cover the entire Christian story, often from the creation of the world to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If someone tries to tell you that such and such an item is or isn’t a proper carol, remember that, like so many catchall musical terms, this one really defies precise definition. It captures a huge range of types and influences. That’s part of its appeal.

Tracing the history of our carol tradition can be a bit like trying to sweep up all the stray pine needles when you’ve taken down your Christmas tree: There’s always a corner you find you haven’t reached. There’s really no such thing as the history of the English carol.

But there are phases and themes.

Folk and oral traditions provide the earliest sources. Folk carols appear in manuscript sources from the 13th century on. Familiar items such as “The Boar’s Head Carol” and the various holly-and-ivy carols start turning up in the 15th and early 16th centuries. The explosion of printing in the 16th century saw the advent of the broadside ballad: cheap editions of popular songs, including countless versions of carols and Christmas poems of all kinds, a practice that persisted well into the 19th century. Protestant hymnbooks and schoolbooks give us well-known songs such as “In Dulci Jubilo” and “Personent Hodie.” Eighteenth-century hymn singing added “While Shepherds Watched” and the lyrics of Isaac Watts and John and Charles Wesley.

Up to this point, most written versions of Christmas carols and hymns would have reached their performers as words only, leaving the singers to provide suitable tunes which they already knew and which happened to fit. Together with the vagaries of the oral tradition, the lack of any sort of copyright control, and the willingness of different religious traditions or even different villages to adopt their own local variant of a much-loved song, the idea of any sort of correct or standard version of many of our most traditional items gets thoroughly lost in the undergrowth. In “I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In),” the titular vessels have been recorded sailing to Newcastle and up the English Channel. Sometimes the passengers are Jesus and Mary, sometimes Mary and Joseph, occasionally the archangel Michael or the bodies of the three kings on their way to burial in Cologne Cathedral, and sometimes a group of pretty girls.

The intellectual currents of the 19th century brought two main influences to bear on the broad meanderings of our carol tradition. First, scholars and antiquarians started to take folk culture seriously and to collect and write down versions of songs and carols from manuscripts, ballad sheets, and their own encounters with carolers. As the 19th century moved into the 20th, their work was continued in important books edited and collected by, among many others, John Stainer, Sabine Baring-Gould, Lucy Broadwood, Cecil Sharp, J. A. Fuller-Maitland, Edith Rickert, George Ratcliffe Woodward, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Most carols with their roots deep in folk traditions reach the versions we know today in this period: You will probably find yourself singing Stainer’s “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” this Christmas, but his setting preserves only one version among countless possible variants of detail. The compiler exercises an element of choice as well as scholarship. It is a rich and fascinating process.

The second strand of 19th-century thought to feed fatly into what we sing and hear today was the tradition of churchmanship around the Oxford Movement and High-Church Anglicanism. Alongside its theological tracts, the movement gloried in a theatrical style of worship with plenty of ceremony and lots of music. At the same time, its message of social inclusivity gave rise to an explosion in parish choirs and in hymns for congregations to sing.

Tunes could be drawn from wherever a good melody was to be found. The muscular, high-minded, high-collared clergymen who led this revival put new words to melodies they found in old books (as in “Good King Wenceslas” and “Ding, Dong! Merrily”). They edited and translated items from all sorts of traditions, turning the Catholic torch song “Adeste Fideles” into “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and using Lutheran chorales as inspiration for songs like “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.” They borrowed and bolted together art-music and nonconformist lyrics (think “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”), as well as writing many pieces of their own.

These habits—gleaning in the highways and byways of folk and liturgical traditions and composing new items to fit into that tradition—meet in hybrids like “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” a new poem married to an old folk melody.

Next, poets and composers wrote new songs, but in a deliberately archaic style to match the faux-medieval and Victorian sensibility which had so thoroughly colonized the English carol tradition with songs like “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Many of our most cherished moments of Christmas magic have their roots in the fireside imaginings of Victorians like Christina Rossetti and George Ratcliffe Woodward. (There are no frosty winds in Luke’s gospel.)

The next time you clamber to your feet from some buttock-numbing pew or cheap plastic chair to hear once again those familiar old tunes banged out on a wheezy organ or cracked school piano, remember just how English this most English of traditions actually is: not very. Remember the American Phillips Brooks, finding peace from the horrors of the Civil War in the Holy Land at the birthplace of Christ, where the silent stars go by. Remember the dead cow and the naughty ploughboy, carried off to hell by a genie in a puff of blue smoke—all very festive. Remember Mr. Garman of Forest Green, Surrey.

And what about “Jingle Bells”? That one’s American, too, composed by a man who ran away to sea in a whaling ship at age 14, lost everything in the Gold Rush of 1849, and was the uncle of the founder of the J. P. Morgan banking house (more than one cowboy in that family, then). A carol used to be just a party song about love, keeping warm, or having a good time. “Jingle Bells” can surely claim its place in that tradition.

This wonderful, rich musical pudding gives us a unique insight into what makes us who we are. Even more importantly, it gives us lots of great songs. Happy Christmas.

Andrew Gant is a composer, conductor, and lecturer in music at St. Peter’s College at the University of Oxford. This article is adapted from his book Deck the Hall: The Stories of our Favourite Christmas Carols ©Hodder Faith. This article may not be reproduced for any other use without permission.

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Church Life

Advent Calls Us Out of Our Despair

Joni Eareckson Tada

Sitting in the dark helps us truly appreciate the light.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

As a child growing up in the Reformed Episcopal Church, the first day of Advent was lovely yet a little strange. At the evening church service, we sang the most mournful hymns, with lines like “O come, O come, Immanuel, / And ransom captive Israel.” They were always songs that moaned about our sin and captivity and, well, the hymns sounded gloomy.

And so did the Advent Scriptures—like this Advent reading from Isaiah 30:1, which says, “‘Woe to the obstinate children,’ declares the Lord, ‘to those who carry out plans that are not mine, forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit, heaping sin upon sin.’” I was only a little girl, but I thought this was a very odd way to begin the Christmas season.

How could we possibly appreciate the gift of Jesus Christ as Savior of our sins unless first—like right now—we take time to consider what we need to be saved from?

God wants us to understand the depth and breadth of our transgressions against him and come face to face with the utter lostness of our plight. He wants us to own our sad and sorry situation, understanding that our sin offends him and that his wrath is upon us. That without Jesus we are held captive by the Enemy.

I know what it’s like to be held captive by a sad and sorry situation. Decades ago, when a reckless dive left me paralyzed at the age of 17, my world went dark. My despair seemed like a bottomless pit. I was lost to life as I once knew it—riding horses, playing sports, and hiking through the beauty of God’s creation. But now? I felt enslaved by a life sentence of quadriplegia.  

Lying in the rehabilitation hospital after my injury, I wanted to end my life. Unable to do even that, I determined to end my life spiritually. I told my mother to shut the door and close the drapes. I wanted to shut out the light—shut out the whole world. I was lost.

Only when we appreciate the fact that we are lost can we fully celebrate being found. Perhaps that’s why James says, “Grieve, mourn, and wail” over your sin and God “will lift you up” (4:9,10). Only when we face our lostness can we say,

Joy to the world! The Lord is come.

Let earth receive her King.

Let every heart prepare him room,

and heaven and nature sing!

There is a method to the mystery of Advent. As each week of Advent progresses, the Scriptures—and the hymns—turn from somber to joyful. They become lighter, happier, and full of hope.

Even Scripture’s tone changes in the hope-filled call of Isaiah 40:3: “Prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” And in Isaiah 41:10, God says to the captives, “Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

The journey through Advent teaches us that we need Jesus. The Light of the World is coming to set the captive free.

As December 25 draws near, it is time to reflect on the manner in which we wait for Christ in the darkness of our captivity and respond to his eternal light.

We all have different responses to the incarnation of the Son of God. Are you searching? Wanting to draw closer? Or are you a little indifferent—almost uncaring that another Christmas is here already?

People likely responded similarly to Jesus’ arrival. Think of the answers people gave when they heard of what had happened in Bethlehem. There were many, like the innkeeper, who couldn’t have cared less. He had things to do, pots to wash, beds to change, stuff to pick up at the market.

Other people were cruel and even malicious, like Herod. He did everything in his power to stop the celebration, hunt down this so-called King, and put an end to the events God had already put into play.

Still others were frightened, even terrified—like the shepherds. It was only after the angels bent over backward to explain what was going on that their fears were put to rest.

Other people were curious, like the wise men—the searching types. They sincerely wanted to know what was going on. They sensed that something different, something important, had happened. And they knew, without even having the Bible to guide them, that it would mean a big change for the world.

Some people waited, like Simeon in the temple. Other people hoped, like Anna the prophetess. Still others like Mary and Joseph knew the answer to “What Child Is This?” and worshiped this little one sleeping in his mother’s arms.

Do you, like the innkeeper, just have too much to do to take time to truly celebrate Christ’s birth? Do you, like the innkeeper, just have too much to do to take time to truly celebrate Christ’s birth? Or like Mary and Joseph, do you take time to stare out from the gloom of your daily struggles to contemplate the brilliance of God’s perfect light?

The miracle that has illuminated human history also illuminates our weary hearts. The God who overflows the universe has poured himself into baby flesh. The high and holy who shrouds himself in his own dazzling light, whose chariot is the wind and fire, who crosses the heavens on storms and lightning, who shakes the foundation of the earth—he has entered history. Jesus has touched down on this chaotic, fragile, and noisy planet. You can hear his Christmas footsteps if you stop, look, listen, and be still.

Tonight, bundle up and head outside. Gaze at the stars and ponder: The same night sky overhead peered down on that Christmas miracle over 2,000 years ago. And then, if you can, sing, “All is calm, all is bright,” deep from your soul.

Because of that night in Bethlehem, the Spirit of the Lord has invaded your heart and taken up residence in your very soul. He boldly intruded into your sin, calling it what it is and challenging you to leave it behind.

So come, oh, come, Immanuel! This glorious Advent season, may we realize afresh our need of you, our Savior, and may we own our desperate condition. Only then can we truly have a very merry Christmas.

Joni Eareckson Tada is the founder and chief executive officer of Joni and Friends, a Christian nonprofit ministry committed to reaching and serving people with disabilities with practical help and the saving love of Jesus.

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Culture

Advent Doesn’t Have to Make Sense

Christian Gonzalez Ho

As a curator, I love how contemporary art makes the world feel strange. So does the story of Jesus’ birth.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek

The first piece of art I bring my art-history students to see in the museum is a glass cube, four feet by four feet. Square sheets of glass infused with metal make the sculpture simultaneously reflective and transparent. The cube has a polarizing effect on visitors, inciting responses that range from confusion to curiosity to contempt. I invite my students: “Turn your attention to the cube. Observe it for two full minutes.” That’s an eternity to look at something that seems to resist meaning.

By the time the exercise has finished, the students can’t wait to talk about the work, the way it refracts color and light. Our conversation is punctuated by laughter. The two-minute exercise underscores art historian Jennifer Roberts’ adage: “Just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it.”

Looking at art is confusing. Looking at contemporary art can be especially confusing. That remains true for me in my work as an art historian and curator. But I’m also assured: When I persevere in being with a piece, it imparts the “eyes to see and ears to hear” it.

In the meantime, the confusion caused by good art is valuable. It challenges what we think we know and how we know it. It resists our authority, not by exerting equal and opposite force but by striking us obliquely, throwing us off balance. Good work defamiliarizes us; it makes the world feel strange, new, and other—sometimes frighteningly so.

Earlier this year, I started curating a show for my university’s museum, featuring Larry Bell’s glass cube among other works. I sensed that these pieces had something important to teach me about Advent, even though they aren’t illustrative like the Merode Altarpiece or even made by Christian artists.

Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence 2014.1.090

Larry Bell, Glass Cube, 1984, metal film on glass and chrome-plated brass 36 x 36 x 36 in.

Immured by two millennia of history, Advent often strikes me like that cube—complete, hermetically sealed, indifferent to my presence. But when I look into the glass, I find myself becoming remade in its reflection, startled by its alterity. It causes me to see myself, others, and the world differently. So too with Advent.

“Do not fear”: It’s one of the most repeated phrases in the accounts of the birth of Jesus. The angelic prologue is not followed by “I will explain everything to you” or “Everything will be okay.” Rather, it precedes unmitigated uncertainty. “Do not fear” was an invitation to see with the eyes of the Spirit rather than look with the logic of humanity. Zechariah, Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds were all invited to exchange their earthly understandings for the knowledge of eternity.

“Do not fear” has too often been translated into the American ideology of “happily ever after.” But in context, it was spoken by a terrifying, numinous being. It was a warning: Brace yourself to witness the eternal God in the form of a human baby.

Near the glass cube in the gallery hall loops a video made by the sculptor and dancer Nick Cave. His “sound suits” are composed of buttons, sequins, and fishing bobbers of all sizes, colors, and shapes, plus bundles of twigs and antique figurines. The result is a collection of surreal sculptural figures exploding with colors and textures, exuding an electric energy.

Nick Cave made his suits in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King. “As a young Black male, you know, I was … feeling dismissed, discarded,” he reflected. “I was just trying to process that, and, you know, what does that mean. … I found myself one day in the park, and I looked down on the ground, and there was this twig. And, I don’t know, I just started collecting these twigs. … I sort of brought them back to the studio and started to build this object.” When he donned the suit, he noted its shimmering sounds and named it accordingly.

Discarded objects become joyful revelations. Despised, weak, and rejected materials become a strange conduit of hope, a profound illustration of 1 Corinthians 1:27. This is the kind of artwork that requires us to set aside our sensemaking—the suits are weird!—in order to see splendor.

Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune / Getty

Soundsuits by Nick Cave

During Advent, God defies earthly power and reason; he uses a baby born into dirty straw to bring about redemption. We are reminded that we must surrender our ways of looking and knowing if we hope to see the kingdom of God (John 3:3).

Of course, it’s not just contemporary art that can help us understand Advent more clearly. Canonical works have something to teach us, too, if we can get past the layers of commentary and critique and see them anew.

Caravaggio’s Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602) isn’t included in my show. (The “secular” version is in a German gallery.) And once again, it’s not a Nativity scene. But it always makes me think about Advent too.

It’s hard now to comprehend how disruptive Caravaggio’s work was; Nicolas Poussin, one of the greatest painters of the 17th century, went so far as to say that the Italian painter “came into the world to destroy painting.” In the Incredulity, Caravaggio offers up a surrealist representation of the interaction between Christ and Thomas, taken from John 20:24–27. Christ guides Thomas’s hand into the wound in his side.

WikiMedia Commons

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

I find this the most moving, compelling metaphor for what happens when we begin to see an artwork—as we give our attention to it, we are drawn into its depth. Christ does not point the confused Thomas toward a scar that will satisfy his intellectual doubts. Instead, Thomas is being drawn into Christ’s side, toward a terrifying and gaping darkness.

In this version of the painting, Caravaggio renders the wound as neither past nor present but an eternal mystery—the lamb slain before the foundations of the earth, a God incarnated as a child.

My prayer is to see Advent as God does: to surrender to its wisdom and enter into its wonder.

Christian Gonzalez Ho is earning his PhD in art history at Stanford University and is the cofounder of Estuaries.

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Theology

Glory to God in the Highest Calling

Sandra Glahn and Seana Scott

Motherhood is honorable, but being a disciple of Jesus is every woman’s primary biblical vocation.

Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Henryk Siemiradzki

WikiMedia Commons

One Sunday when my son was a baby, a woman approached me (Seana) at church. I dreamed of changing the world for Jesus, but I had exchanged traveling the globe as a missionary for perpetually changing diapers and scrubbing dishes in the suburbs. The woman declared, “I am so glad you are staying home. Motherhood is your highest calling.”

At the time, this felt true—I’d left a career I loved to stay home with my child. Yet this woman had seemed to shrink all my gifting and capacity for serving Christ into one role and season of life. And sadly, I held on to that comment as if it had come from the mouth of God. So when motherhood with a neurodiverse child failed to fulfill my longing for wholeness (as some Christian parenting books taught me it would), I felt I was failing both as a woman and as a Christian.

Early on in my married years, I (Sandra) identified more with Ramah, convulsing over the innocents that Herod ordered killed, than with the little town of Bethlehem. For ten Christmases, infertility and multiple pregnancy losses attuned my heart to “Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more” (Jer. 31:15–22; Matt. 2:16–18).

My husband and I had adoptions fall through on December 22—two years in a row. So amid the aroma of gingerbread and the sight of twinkling lights, we shut the door to the nursery and tiptoed away, exchanging dreams for empty arms. The deepest pain of all came from my failure to live out what I perceived then as God’s highest calling for every woman: motherhood.

And after the successful adoption of our daughter, who is now a mom herself, I wore the hat of a work-from-home mom all through her childhood. As my daughter grew, I needed to revisit where and why I owned the view that God had only a maternal vision for godly womanhood.

Over the years, the two of us—a work-from-home mom of three and a seminary professor and grandmother—wrestled with these important questions: Is motherhood truly every Christian woman’s highest calling? How did Christ view motherhood? Was motherhood the highest calling for women in the early church? If motherhood isn’t a woman’s highest calling, what is?

In the process, we’ve read stories of ancient Christian women and explored how the biblical ideal of womanhood differs from some of the heralded visions of motherhood in modern evangelicalism. And what we found was that both the Scriptures and early church history can help realign some of our off-kilter views about a Christian woman’s “highest calling” in the modern church.

Let’s start with the universal female ancestor, Eve, whom the Bible hails as “the mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20). In the first chapters of the Genesis narrative, we see how God creates our first parents to rule together and to fill the earth with image-bearing worshipers of God (Gen. 1:28). In this way, male and female humans shared the same mandates of ruling and multiplying.

Although parenthood was part of how Adam and Eve were meant to glorify God and partner together to multiply image bearers, nowhere in these early chapters of Genesis do we find language that suggests having children is a woman’s highest good. And in the New Testament, instead of finding a reiteration of the Genesis mandate to multiply humans, we find Christ issuing a similar mandate to multiply worshipers by making disciples (Matt. 28:18–20).

Now, let’s turn to the next most famous mother of all time, who birthed the God made flesh—Mary, “the God bearer,” as the Council of Ephesus (AD 431) called her.

In Luke’s gospel, the angel Gabriel visits Mary and prophesies that she would birth a child conceived by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:30–33). Mary’s motherhood to Jesus throughout his life was an honor which played a vital role in the provision of salvation for all of humanity. It’s clear that God ordained parenthood, including Joseph’s role, as part of his miraculous plan.

As we continue following the story of Mary, we arrive at the scene where Jesus is grown and ministering to a crowd of people. As he is teaching about the kingdom and speaking against the legalism of the Pharisees, someone in the crowd interrupts him to say, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”

In response, Jesus asks, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he says, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt. 12:47–50).

By this, some people might think Jesus is dismissing or putting his mother down. But by Jesus’ own definition, Mary would have been included in the group of family members he affirms. Did she not tell Gabriel, “I am the Lord’s servant. … May your word to me be fulfilled”? (Luke 1:38). Did she, of all people, not agree to align her will with God’s will?

Still, Jesus reframed what is most valuable in his kingdom, which is not a natural relationship bound by blood—though family can be one of God’s greatest blessings—but rather a mutual kinship defined by obedience to the will of God. When seen in this light, Mary’s calling of motherhood to Jesus was secondary to her ultimate belief in and obedience to her Son.

Then there’s the familiar story of Mary and Martha. Martha is doing all the traditionally feminine tasks, while her sister, Mary, sits at Jesus’s feet—taking the bodily stance of a first-century disciple before a rabbi. Martha accosts Mary, expecting her help with domestic tasks. But instead of sending her back to the kitchen, Jesus affirms Mary for choosing “what is better” (Luke 10:42).

From the Lord’s own example, we learn that the highest calling of any person—regardless of marital or parental status—is to follow him. And the highest calling of a disciple is not to make children but to make disciples (Matt. 28:18–20). Sometimes the two will overlap—for example, both of us have labored to disciple our children in the faith. But our disciple making extends far beyond hearth and home into building up the church to fulfill its calling as the body of Christ.

In her article for Christianity Today, Jeannie Whitlock writes about how her birthing a child reminded her of the church: “Our bodies are as crucial to God’s plan as Mary’s was. Like Mary, whether single, married, parents, or otherwise, we are called to bear Christ’s life into the world.”

Paul honors many women for their faithfulness to the gospel. Of the 29 people Paul greets in his letter to the Romans, 10 of them are women. We find names like Phoebe—deacon of the church in Cenchrea—and Prisca, or Priscilla (more about her later). We read about another Mary, who some believe refers to Mary Magdalene. There was also Junia, prominent among the apostles, and Julia, relative of Philologus. Tryphena and Tryphosa were workers in the Lord. Paul honors both Nereus’s sister and Rufus’s mother, who was like a mother to Paul.

Of these ten, only one was honored for her biological motherhood, yet all were recognized for their faithful service in the kingdom.

The apostle Paul encourages young widows to marry, to have children, and to manage their homes (1 Tim. 5:14). He writes that “it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Cor. 7:9). He also honors the faithfulness of Timothy’s mother and grandmother (2 Tim. 1:5). Yet nowhere does he hint at marriage or motherhood being a woman’s highest calling. In fact, in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul famously encourages believers to remain single for the work of the gospel (1 Cor. 7:8–9). For him, “to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21), and so it should be for us.

To understand how women in the first-century church viewed their callings, we turned to the Book of Acts. There, we found that when women appeared in the text, it wasn’t because of their roles as mothers but because of their gifts to strengthen the church. Priscilla, together with her husband Aquila, taught the skilled preacher Apollos (Acts 18:24–26). If Lydia, a prominent businesswoman, was a parent, the text does not mention it. Instead, she was recognized for leading her household to faith and for her hospitality (16:14–15). And the unmarried daughters of Phillip were mentioned for their exercise of the gift of prophesy (21:8–9).

If motherhood were truly a woman’s highest calling, wouldn’t we find the women of Scripture honored foremost for their motherhood rather than for their service to God’s kingdom? But that is not what we find. Yes, Christian women who married and had children were called to love and care for their families well, yet this work was seen not as their primary calling but part of fulfilling their ultimate call to follow Christ.

When Paul lists qualifications for an older woman to be placed on the “list of widows” cared for by the church, he advises she be “well known for her good deeds, such as bringing up children, showing hospitality, washing the feet of the Lord’s people, helping those in trouble and devoting herself to all kinds of good deeds” (1 Tim. 5:9–10). Of that list, only one point is related to motherhood.

Paul also doesn’t specify that the children the widows raise need to be biological (most children would be fully grown by the time their mothers reached the prescribed age of 60!). In fact, many of the widows who are “really in need and left all alone” are likely not biological mothers at all, since Paul says those with children and grandchildren should be cared for by their own families instead of the church (v. 5).

The apostolic instruction was so clear in this and other passages that male leaders in the early church acknowledged a legitimate office (clergy) for an “order of widows” in the Apostolic Consitutions, an ancient manual of church order used in the third century.

We see the same pattern of discipleship over motherhood in early church history as well. When a third-century noblewoman, Perpetua, became a Christian through the testimony of her servant, Felicitas, the authorities threw them into prison. The young Perpetua had an infant son, whom she was allowed to nurse in her cell. But when she was told to either recant her faith in Christ and worship the Roman gods or die and leave her child motherless, she chose death over her child because her highest allegiance was to Christ. While in prison with her, Felicitas gave birth and also chose to leave her infant in the care of her local Christian community rather than recant. Imagine the gut-wrenching pain of these decisions!

Perpetua’s anguished father even tried changing her mind multiple times, but she responded that only by devoting herself to Christ and his glory would she remain a “perpetual daughter.” If motherhood were truly a Christian woman’s highest calling in the early church, such heroines of our faith would or should have chosen their marriage and family over dying for Christ.

Such stories inform how I (Sandra) pray for and care for my daughter, her husband, and their daughter, and how I (Seana) find fresh perspective on motherhood with my kids still at home. Following Christ led our mothers of the faith into the arena, whereas following Christ leads me to my kitchen sink, laundry piles, and dinner discussions about the Marvel universe. Whatever arena God leads us into, we sacrifice ourselves to serve the Lord as our highest calling. And regardless of parental status, all women in our churches today can be nurturers of faith.

Especially in this holiday season, when we hear someone ask the dreaded question “When will you have children?” of our childless friend, will we intervene? When we see an exhausted mother, will we choose to say something besides “Motherhood is your highest calling”? Or when we feel we must bake dozens of cookies, attend every festival, and decorate the tree as if it’s on display at Magnolia Market to be the perfect mother—will we miss attuning our hearts to the presence of our Savior and serving him? Will we be like Martha, fixated on fulfilling all that our culture expects of us as women, or will we prioritize sitting at the feet of Jesus like Mary?

Ever since the angel’s announcement to Mary, following Christ has been every woman’s highest calling. And whether or not we end up being a wife or a mother, we can all become perpetual daughters of God.

Sandra Glahn is a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, president of the Evangelical Press Association, and the author or coauthor of more than 25 books. Seana Scott is a writer, speaker, and content creator passionate about disciple making.

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Theology

The Star of Bethlehem Is a Zodiac Killer

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

How Christmas upends everything that draws our culture to astrology.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Not long ago, a Christian economist from India mentioned that he was part of an unusual coalition. The group ranged from atheists to believers, from astronomers and physicists to religious leaders, all seeking to debunk astrology in their home country. This was not some remnant of old Eastern superstition, as most Western secularists would assume. The hunger for horoscopes was largely, he said, a cultural import—from North America. This should not surprise us.

In her book of several years ago, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Tara Isabella Burton points to studies showing that 40 percent of those who say they have no religious affiliation believe in psychics and that 32 percent say they believe in astrology. Burton argues that secularization does not mean an abandonment of spiritual beliefs and practices but a “remixing” of them.

We can see that fascination with the role of stars in human lives in recent fictional explorations of the meaning of life. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 2021 novel The Morning Star sets a series of family conflicts and personal crises against the context of a mysterious, foreboding star in the night sky. A similar story is the backdrop of Sarah Perry’s 2024 novel Enlightenment, which is about, of all things, a deconstructing English Calvinistic Baptist who questions whether a comet is controlling his fate. He finds purpose in a combination of physics and a kind of astrology.

Perry told interviewers that her editors insisted she explain theological concepts like predestination and providence in plainer terms for readers. One assumes the editors took it for granted that readers would need little explanation, on the other hand, for the kind of fatalism that is grounded in reading the stars.

Astrology is, of course, an ancient practice, but it is perfectly fitted for this age. In his Confessions, Augustine argued that astrology was a way to justify one’s sin without seeking mercy from God. The astrologers could say, “The cause of your sinning was fixed unchangeably by the heavens” and “The planet Venus (or Saturn or Mars) has done this,” Augustine wrote, “meaning that man, made up of flesh and blood and proud corruption, is free from fault and that the creator and ruler of the sky and the stars must bear the blame.”

We humans do indeed wish to self-justify our guilt, but I think there’s an added pull to astrology that is different from that of ancient times.

We now have choices every day that our ancestors never imagined. Up until very recently, a high school career counselor would have made no sense. In some ways, the same is true of other big choices—who a person marries, for instance, or where one lives. But all these are fraught with possibilities of making the wrong choice. Why should you trust your 19- or 20-year-old self to make decisions that will define not just your life but the generations after you?

Pierce Moffett, a character in John Crowley’s Aegypt series of novels, realizes that clairvoyance and astrology are about “assenting that the cosmos was in some sense a story—that the universe was a cosmos.” He concludes that the search for harmonies and directions for the future is ultimately about providing “Cliff’s Notes to the plots of their own lives.”

Faced with the fear of wrecking one’s future—or the regret of fearing one has already done so—who would not want a shorthand way to find that plotline? That is especially true when an entire global culture seems plagued by anxiety, the kind that philosopher Hartmut Rosa describes as the simultaneous expectation of being in control of everything while feeling that everything is out of control.

When a person feels dominated by a fate outside of one’s control, there’s comfort in believing that fate is controlled by our Zodiac sign. At least then, one reasons, we can kind of see what’s coming.

The wise men of the Gospel of Matthew’s birth narrative were Eastern star-readers, discerning from the night sky a sign of the coming of Israel’s prophesied king (Matt. 2:1–2). When they calculated by the star the location of the Christ child, Matthew tells us that they “rejoiced exceedingly with great joy” and worshiped Jesus when they found him (Matt. 2:10–11, ESV throughout).

At first glance, the guidance of the Magi might lead us to conclude that we too should seek out those who can read constellations. But the story of Jesus upends all that.

The ancient prophecy—“I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near; a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel” (Num. 24:17)—also originated with a frustrated occultist. Balaam was hired by the warlord Balak to place a curse on Israel—a curse God kept turning into a blessing that would include the prophecy of Jacob’s dawning star.

The apostle Paul wrote little about what we call “the Christmas story,” with the exception of such brief references as this one: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law” (Gal. 4:4). He did this to free us from slavery—slavery to “the Law” but also to what he calls “the elementary principles of the world” (v. 3).

The pull, Paul wrote to the church at Colossae, was to return to captivity to these “elemental spirits of the world” (Col. 2:8). The ancients were not stupid to believe themselves to be trapped by forces outside their control—the “elements” of a universe that ultimately kill us all. The problem is not just that people feel this kind of fatalism, but that we actually want it.

“Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods,” Paul wrote. “But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more?” (Gal. 4:8–9).

Whether it’s with a “Well, what are you gonna do?” resignation or with an attempt to channel the uncontrollable forces we believe are throwing us around, we, left to ourselves, would rather have a story written for us by fate or destiny or charts or graphs—or even a legal code from the Bible—than contemplate the dark possibility that there is no story at all, just a random, meaningless void.

A certain kind of rationalist laughs at the “backwardness” of those who read their horoscopes. But there’s little difference between that kind of superstition and the kind of techno-utopianism that rests the future on, say, “terra-forming” Mars or downloading human consciousness to the cloud.

We don’t find freedom from that kind of fate-slavery by mastering the elements or, even worse, by mastering the Creator of the elements. We don’t find it by becoming as smart as “the universe” or by learning how to harness it—either by magic or technology. We find freedom, instead, as children and heirs of the Father who “sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:6).

In other words, we find freedom not by becoming Magi, much less King Herod attempting to channel that kind of power to protect himself. We find freedom when, joined in union with Christ, we cry out in dependence not on an impersonal universe but on a Father who loves us.

By losing your need for control—even the illusory control of predicting your future—you can count the future of Jesus as your future. His “destiny,” if you will, becomes your own. By losing your life, you can find it.

Maybe the star on top of every Christmas tree you see this year will remind you of this: that the star itself can’t help you as you grapple with a past you might regret or a future you might fear.

The person checking the horoscope app next to you in the coffee shop is not a flake or a fool. They are trying to find a story that makes sense. That way won’t get them there. But God has been known to redirect people to the real story—the story that became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

News

As Malibu Burns, Pepperdine Withstands the Fire

Kate Shellnutt

University president praises the community’s “calm resilience” as students and staff shelter in place in fireproof buildings.

The Phillips Theme Tower at Pepperdine University was surrounded by fire on Tuesday.

Jae C. Hong / AP

The sky glowed orange and smoky through the floor-to-ceiling library windows at Pepperdine University, where students spent two nights in a row as flames licked over the hilltops along the Malibu campus.

During the final days before winter break, a 2,800-acre wildfire forced the Christian university to issue shelter-in-place orders Monday night and again Tuesday.

Around 3,000 people—undergrads in backpacks, hoodies, and N-95 masks, along with other members of the university community—waited out the blaze in fireproofed campus buildings, including Payson Library, the Tyler Campus Center, and the dining facility, Waves Café.

Student reporter Gabrielle Salgado told The New York Times that it was hard to sleep in the library on Monday. Some students played games or studied. By morning, the rest of the week’s exams had been canceled.

Before they were ordered to take shelter Monday night, some students with cars and faculty members had rushed to evacuate on their own, and some were able to navigate road closures to make their way out on Tuesday morning.

But by Tuesday afternoon, the university reported that the fire had returned. It burned down a ridge to the road along campus’s perimeter, though officials hadn’t seen any significant damage to buildings.

The iconic tower displaying a cross at the school’s entrance also glowed as the land around it burned.

University president Jim Gash moved between emergency operations meetings and the shelter areas, where he said students were “supporting each other and lifting one another up in prayer.” He praised the “calm resilience” of the Pepperdine community.

“When we are tested, we lean on our faith, rely upon our planning, and rally alongside one another,” Gash said in a statement.

Due to the frequency of wildfires in the region and the congestion along the nearby Pacific Coast Highway, Pepperdine’s campus was built to withstand such blazes. The school developed an extensive emergency plan, including stocking meals and supplies, to allow the Malibu campus to shelter in place.

The chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department said that 1,500 firefighters were battling the Franklin fire, which remained 0 percent contained as of Tuesday night. He estimated that 15 structures in the area had been damaged or destroyed, but there were no reports of fatalities.

“Fire activity around Pepperdine’s Malibu campus has greatly diminished as the Franklin Fire has burned through most of the fuel immediately surrounding campus, but some flames are still visible in small pockets of campus,” the university wrote late Tuesday, as the shelter-in-place order remained overnight. “Firefighters continue to respond to and put out lingering hot spots and protect structures.”

Onlookers following the spread—seeing pictures of the blaze approaching Pepperdine and the students inside buildings on the news—have wondered why the university community is allowed to stay while thousands of neighbors evacuate.

Curbed Los Angeles reported on the school’s fire preparedness in 2018, during the last major wildfire to threaten the area, writing that “Fire is such a way of life at Pepperdine that students and faculty can measure their time at the school in the number of times they’ve participated in the shelter-in-place exercise.” The school’s emergency plans were developed alongside the fire department and are audited by officials.

The plan went into action once again this week. According to the Associated Press, resident assistants heard word of the shelter-in-place orders on Monday and began knocking on dorm room doors in the middle of the night, with no power, to usher students to refuge.

Pepperdine’s executive vice president, Phil Phillips, said in the Curbed piece that “many of our employees are alumni who actually sheltered in place during a fire.” He’s now been through seven.

“What you don’t want is to be stuck,” he told the AP on Tuesday. “Protecting our students, providing for their safety is a moral obligation for us, so we take it really, really seriously.”

As the university posted updates on its Facebook page Tuesday night, commenters offered prayers and recalled the school’s record with wildfires.

“You have always handled these fires with the utmost care. I can attest to that from my experience in the 1985 fire as a new student,” one alumna wrote. Another said that the pictures looked exactly like what he saw while sheltering in place a decade ago.

Curbed pointed out the building design and placement on the 830-acre campus, which was built in the early ’70s: Pepperdine relied on fireproof materials like steel, concrete, stucco, glass, and tile—no exposed wood. The architect’s “Mediterranean modern” style was inspired by the Greek island of Patmos.

The school also clears away dry brush that can accelerate wildfires and collects runoff waste water in a pond, which helicopters used to fight the Franklin fire.

Faculty who evacuated on-campus housing, including humanities professor Jessica Hooten Wilson and law professor Joel Johnson, shared dispatches and asked for prayers.

Jeff Baker, an associate dean at Pepperdine’s law school, offered an update on Tuesday night.

“Long day in Malibu. We remain safely off campus. #FranklinFire returned to Pepperdine tonight from a different angle & burned through the part of campus where our neighborhood is,” he wrote on the social media platform Bluesky. “Pepp reports no structures suffered significant damage. Heroic firefighters have saved our homes again.”

Baker told followers, “We’ve walked this road before,” and that the law clinic was planning to set up pro bono disaster response “right away.”

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Theology

Why Christians Oppose Euthanasia

Brad East

Contributor

The immorality of killing the old and ill has never been in question for Christians. Nor is our duty to care for those the world devalues.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Advent is a time for the church to prepare to celebrate the gift of new life: Jesus, God made flesh, born of a virgin, laid in a manger. In a gruesome twist of timing, however, this Advent season has begun with euthanasia once more in the news.

At the end of November, British lawmakers approved the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to move forward, albeit by a relatively slim margin: 330 in favor, 275 against. Australia and some US states already have similar laws in place, while Canada’s MAID program (Medical Assistance in Dying) has become the country’s fifth leading cause of death. In Canada, as in the Netherlands, those who seek, select, or acquiesce to “assisted dying” need not be old, nor their illness terminal. Even young people with mental maladies have been killed this way.

These programs raise moral, theological, and political questions for believers, but many of them are quite easily answered: Christians oppose euthanasia.

The church’s moral teaching has always held that murder—defined as the intentional taking of innocent life—is intrinsically evil. It follows that actively intending the death of an elderly or sick human being and then deliberately bringing about that death through some positive action, such as the administration of drugs, is always and everywhere morally wrong.

This ethical argument is very similar to the one Christians make about abortion. We could modify the oft-quoted line from Dr. Seuss—“A person’s a person no matter how small”—by substituting old or ill for “small.” (Other substitutions also suggest themselves: smart, abled, sexed, or hued.) To be sure, there are relevant differences between active euthanasia and, for example, removing a brain-dead person from life support. There are none, however, between administering fatal drugs and offering or prescribing them: Both directly facilitate the intended death of a patient under a doctor’s medical care.

Christians are not alone in valuing life; many Jews, Muslims, and other people of goodwill also affirm the intrinsic goodness of human life. But there is a distinctly Christian conviction at work here, and it is bedrock to our faith: Every human being, from conception to death, is created by God, loved by him, and stands under his protection.

The claim that innocent human life is inviolable is not primarily a claim about us humans, then, but about our Creator. To murder (or torture or enslave, as the church father Gregory of Nyssa saw as early as the fourth century) is to trespass without authority, to assert rights where one has none. It is to unsay God’s “very good” spoken over a fellow creature, to reject and despise a man or woman whom the Lord has brought into being and for whom Christ died. Inviolability is the upshot of our creation in the divine image.

Unlike many topics in theology and ethics, this is not an issue on which the church has ever been ambiguous. There were no early church councils to debate the taking of innocent life. It didn’t take centuries of conflict to adjudicate. On the contrary, Christians were known from the start for their adamant rejection of pagan disrespect for those unwanted by their families or deemed socially useless—the unborn and newborn, disabled and elderly.

Neighbors noticed immediately: In refusing to classify any human being as worthless, Christians were strange. They didn’t expose their baby girls. They cared for the orphan and the widow. And they applied this principle across the board, not only to others but also to themselves, which meant rejecting suicide, too, as a kind of murder.

Which brings us back to euthanasia, where the dominant story in countries like Canada is not forcible killing but death at the patient’s own request. Our culture’s instinct is to say that this kind of suicide is not the same as murder, that “death with dignity” is the right of the autonomous self. While understandable, this instinct is wrong.

My life is no more my own to take than is the life of another. True—in any number of ways, my life is “mine.” But in one crucial sense—the most important sense—it does not belong to me. As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, to the Lord who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20). In Paul’s words, I was bought with a price (1 Cor. 6:20), and I cannot repay it except with thanks, obedience, and reciprocated love.

For Christians, therefore, autonomy as our culture understands it is not a relevant variable in the moral equation of euthanasia. This remains true even when the life in question is painful or likely to be brief. We simply lack the authority to put anyone, including ourselves, “out of their misery”—a phrase we reserve for animals for a reason. This authority belongs to God alone. There are legal, cultural, and political reasons to resist the logic of euthanasia, but above all, Christians are called to persevere in hardship by uniting our suffering to the passion of Christ, who bore our sins on the tree, thereby leaving us an example, that we might follow in his steps (1 Pet. 2:21, 24).

In Christ and in the lives of all the poor and hurting to whom he ministered, we see that every human life, no matter its relative health or condition, is precious to the Lord. We honor his love by honoring all lives, precisely in their suffering.

To be sure, Christians want to ameliorate suffering. But if we know anything, we know that no policy, no discovery, no technology can conquer death. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas likes to say, there is no getting out of life alive. Choosing the hour and means of our death is one particularly seductive counterfeit defeat of death. But Christ alone is the victor over that “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26).

If, however, the ethical question of euthanasia is clear within the church, it becomes more complicated when we turn to law and public policy. Christian votes and advocacy can influence laws governing medical practice, but we also live in a pluralistic, secular society in which our beliefs and practices are not the only or even the most dominant influence. Though our ethics may not prove persuasive to those who don’t share our faith, we should nevertheless fight to keep euthanasia from being legally permitted or socially approved. Why?

The two—laws and norms—are related. Even with “right-to-die” laws passing across the Western world, few would defend them through bald appeal to the valuelessness of incapacitated or aging lives. No one wants to say out loud that old or very sick people should get on with it and just die already. But that is the message of these laws.

Besides the outrage of tasking doctors with violating the Hippocratic oath—or, what’s worse, the Orwellian twist that describes killing patients as “helping” them by relieving their pain—the social implications are undeniable. If I am unwell and a doctor presents me with three options, one of which is my own termination, suddenly suicide becomes a real option in a way it probably wasn’t before.

This is one reason we as Christians are right to stand up for the vulnerable even if we fail to persuade the majority. That task will continue whether or not such laws pass where we live. The church rejects the Scandinavian vision of a world “cured” of children with Down syndrome. We equally reject a world “freed” of the aged, the hurting, or the lonely. We want these people to live.

We owe no one an apology for saying so, but we do owe those the world devalues our sustained, costly care. With medicalized suicide on the table, the vulnerable are bound to wonder, Would the world be better off without me? Am I a burden to my family, or perhaps to society? Would my sacrifice benefit a welfare system already stretched to the brink? After all, some victims of MAID have reportedly “chosen” it because they lacked the funds for housing or adequate treatment. (Christian approaches to medicine, insurance, and markets are relevant here. Let the reader understand.)

In a word, we serve the world best when we not only model lives that accept the fact of death—though not its finality—but also encourage others to live to the full until their time runs out. We do this via norms and laws, but above all we do it by serving and loving the hurting and vulnerable, by showing them, through word and deed, that their lives have value and are worth living to the end. A person’s a person no matter how old, no matter how ill, no matter how pained.

And if such persons are burdens, we must bear them and bear with them (Gal. 6:2, Eph. 4:2). As Christian ethicist Gilbert Meilaender put it in the title of a 2010 essay, “I want to burden my loves ones.”

The truth is, we are burdens, from the moment we are born. There’s no getting around it. There is no burden-free life. To seek to engineer one is to rid the world of people who burden. It isn’t ending suffering so much as ending people who suffer.

That’s not kind or beautiful, dignified or selfless. At Christmastime it’s aptly labeled Scroogian. It was, you’ll recall, that “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” Ebenezer Scrooge who, regarding the needy in London who’d rather die than go to the poorhouse, said: “If they would rather die … they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Humbug! The church knows better. The yoke of Christ’s law bids us to invite the world’s burdens into our midst and there find life, joy, and solidarity. To quote Hauerwas again, “in a hundred years, if Christians are identified as people who do not kill their children or the elderly, we will have done well.”

The onus here isn’t on those who die by legalized euthanasia. Even if they request this kind of death, they are victims of a system. The problem is a regime, downstream from an entire cultural complex. In other words, the onus for change is on the rest of us. The church must, by the Spirit’s power, be a community of care for the sick, the depressed, the lonely, the elderly. Laws are but a stopgap. What we need is a culture of life to confound the culture of death. We say yes to life tomorrow by saying no to death today.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

- More from Brad East

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