For Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we will have no posts about economics, politics, or cultural woes. We will just contemplate and celebrate the incarnation of God.
I always find it odd that so many Christians, even, tend to think of God as an abstraction or as someone gazing down from up above. As if He had not come down from Heaven to share our humanness, to suffer with us, to redeem us.
It makes a huge difference to believe in a God who became man. It’s how Christians are different from Muslims and from Deists. Consider the problem of evil. How could God allow so many evils and so much pain in the world? This is a stumbling block to non-believers, and even Christians, of course, often struggle with this questions. But the question assumes a particular view of God, that He is purely transcendent and detached from His creation. But if God became flesh in Jesus Christ, this complicates the question profoundly. This is a God who Himself suffered at the hands of evil men, who Himself experienced physical and emotional pain, who on the Cross was tortured, abandoned, and despaired. More than that, He bore the full brunt and consequences of human evil. He also bore the afflictions of the whole world throughout history. Jesus, true God and true Man, is Immanuel, “God with us.”
So today we will exult in God becoming Man. Helping us will be some poems by G. K. Chesterton. Read these poems. Even if you don’t like poetry, I’d bet you will like these. (Chesterton did not write poems to be puzzles you have to untangle. He is lucid, not obscure.) Then comment on anything in the poems that you found profound, moving, or enlightening. Interspersed with the poems will be other posts about Christmas. So have a blessed Christmas, and my prayer is that this blog will help you to that end!
Thank you.
A blessed Christmas to you and all who frequent this site!
Where are the links to the poems?
Just look up their titles and the author online. They are lots of places in the web, being in the public domain.
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About the Blogger
Gene Edward Veith is the Provost and Professor of Literature at Patrick Henry College, the Director of the Cranach Institute at Concordia Theological Seminary, a columnist for World Magazine and TableTalk, and the author of 18 books on different facets of Christianity & Culture.
Lucas Cranach, self portrait c.1530.
About Lucas Cranach
Lucas Cranach was the great artist of the Reformation. He was a close friend of Martin Luther. He was a businessman, who first printed Luther's translation of the Bible; a politician, who served on the Wittenberg town council and served the city as its mayor; a chemist, who operated a pharmacy; a teacher, who trained a host of apprentice artists; a family-man, who helped arrange Luther's marriage with the two men serving as the godfathers of each other's children; and an active layman in his church, who gave his pastors important personal and material support. As a Christian who lived out his faith in his many different callings, Cranach thus embodies the Reformation doctrine of vocation, using the gifts God had given him in service to Christ and his neighbor in the church, the family, the workplace, and the culture. In the spirit of Lucas Cranach, this blog will discuss wide-ranging issues of Christianity and culture with a Lutheran twist.
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