Christmas and the Home

Estranged from God, man has no inner peace. Augustine’s often quoted words on the first page of his Confessions, “Thou madest us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it repose in Thee,” speak with special force to this generation with its wandering yet wistful search for identity and security. Despite vast scientific and technological achievement, the society in which we live has missed its way. Its position is like that in which, at the beginning of The Divine Comedy, Dante pictured himself as standing: “In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood astray, gone from the path direct.” In an age of breathless change, the very rapidity of material progress, by itself morally and spiritually neutral, is carrying almost a whole generation that is already set on a course divergent from God, away from him at frightening speed.

To such a spiritually homeless generation and in such a time, Christmas 1963 speaks in deepest meaning of the incredible humility and love of God in invading the world of men through the Incarnation. And its message is to call this wayward generation home, just as it has, since our Lord’s birth, called every other generation home.

Of the great days of the church year, Christmas is most intimately related to the family. Reverently we might almost apply to it the German word, gemütlich, which, without precise counterpart in English, describes the warmly affectionate feeling primarily associated with home.

When Christ in sovereign condescension “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:7), he did this by coming into a family. That is why, in spite of the increasing perversion of Christmas for material gain and other secular purposes, the family character of the day can never be completely effaced. Even those who are strangers to the holy truth it conveys share through God’s common grace something of the warmth and love of this day.

Should Christmas be celebrated in church? By all means. To remember in public worship Him whose name is “Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace,” is most fitting. For some, such remembrance means attendance at the preaching of the written Word of which He, the Incarnate Word, is the center. To others it means fellowship at the table of Him who was born to die for our sins, while to still others it means a service of joyous music inspired by Him at whose birth the angels sang.

Yet important as public worship is, there is another kind of worship that at Christmas and, in fact, at any other time is indispensable: worship in the home.

In this time of ecumenical concern with its powerful emphasis upon the Church, the God-given spiritual function of the home must not be neglected. Just as the Church is a divine institution, God-born, not manmade, so is the home. Moreover, to point out that the family antedates the Church is not to set it in competition with the Church but simply to assert its chronological priority under God.

At the heart of Christian life and practice is, to use New Testament terminology, “the church in [the] house.” Because the priesthood of the believer is a cardinal biblical principle, because the union of husband and wife is the biblical analogy of the relation of Christ and his Church, because God entrusts children to parents to be brought up in his nurture and admonition, worship in the home is obligatory. Even more, it is a primary aspect of the Church. History tells us that there is no record before the third century of buildings constructed specially for Christian worship. The Church of Jesus Christ began in the home, a fact confirmed in the New Testament, as when the Apostle Paul sends greetings to Priscilla and Aquila and to “the church that is in their house” (Rom. 16:5), or when he asks to be remembered to “Nymphas and the church which is in his house” (Col. 4:15), or again when he addresses Philemon and “the church in thy house” (Philem. 2).

Among the prime causes of the youth problem today, the breakdown of the American home as a place of worship and of moral authority stands very near the top. Christians, including evangelicals, are not immune from the consequences of departing from the divinely appointed spiritual function of the home. Family attendance at church on the Lord’s Day as well as on special days such as Christmas is vital. But it must be complemented by worship at home.

With all the excitement and anticipation of Christmas tree and Christmas gifts, the family that precedes the distribution and opening of presents by reading the Christmas story from Matthew or Luke and follows this with prayer is obeying God’s priority. The pattern is not just for the one day. Grace at meals and, as the home schedule permits, other recognition of God and his Word are forgotten at peril of the moral and spiritual welfare of both parents and children. It would be instructive to know how many of those who raised such an indignant protest at the Supreme Court decision removing Bible reading and prayer from the public schools ever take the time to read the Bible to their children and pray with them in their homes.

Christmas 1963 speaks to the very heart of family and home. The directness of its message is matched only by its depth. God entering the humble family in the Bethlehem stable through his virgin-born Son; the Child who is the Mighty God; the Saviour who is Immanuel, God with us, and who, wonder of wonders, makes his home in our hearts as we receive him by faith: the Christ who is the Prince of Peace and who, as surely as he came the first time, is coming again “to judge the quick and the dead” and to take the power and reign—these are some of the glories of Christmas. And all of them come out of God’s gracious initiative in taking upon himself human life in a home.

Church Spires

We looked back and up as we left the church. The steeple still pointed upward, but it should have been horizontal. Not once in the sermon had the congregation been pointed upward to God. We had heard a discourse on “How to React to Criticism” and left the service feeling frustrated and cheated.

It is not always easy for the Church or the individual Christian to keep things in their proper perspective. It is possible to be so occupied with the temporal that the eternal often seems remote; immediate considerations gain priority they do not deserve.

There is one institution in the world called to point men to God. It is the Church, and the spires of our churches bear silent witness to this spiritual call. That the call has often been muted, so that the spiritual note is heard only partially, is a tragedy of our age. That the concern of some who preach centers almost exclusively in man and his relations to others is misleading.

A surgeon who operated on a man for a harelip, knowing he also had a cancer, would be disciplined by his fellow surgeons. A person who sat placidly reading an interesting book while his house burned to ashes around him would be committed to an institution for the mentally deranged. A person who pointed out to a drowning man an interesting bird or flower nearby would be adjudged incompetent. Why then should some ministers give men who need the Bread of Life nothing more than an ethical discourse?

This is not for one moment to ignore or evade the essential social implications of the Gospel. The Cross is the symbol not only of the heart of the Gospel but also of the mission of the Church. In the biblical perspective, preaching has its vertical emphasis of proclaiming Christ crucified and risen and also its horizontal emphasis of neighbor love and concern for men’s welfare. But the relevancy of the horizontal is validated by the vertical, and the two must be kept in their right balance.

The confused society in which we are all involved, and of which we are so acutely aware, has every right to turn to the Church with the words of Peter in mind: “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life,” and in so turning to hear of Him whom to know aright means just that. And it also has the right to expect from the Church prophetic words of compassion and rebuke regarding social and moral problems.

Can it be that our sophistication covers a one-sided view of the nature and mission of the Church and the Gospel committed to her? Social ills must be faced, but the underlying sin of the human heart must also be recognized. To redeem society men must be redeemed. The Church with all its concern for social problems must never neglect the preaching of the Cross.

Church spires speak of the mission of the Church, and the cross that tops so many spires gives the perspective of that mission.

National Need—Righteousness

In noting ethical laxity in government, The New York Times had an editorial called “The Insensitives.” It cited the recently resigned Secretary of the Navy, who “saw nothing wrong with advancing, from his prestigious position, the interests of the bank he once headed,” and also the secretary of the Senate majority, “who had astonishing success in getting vending machine contracts from firms doing business with the Government.” Since the Times made this observation, there have been further revelations about Bobby Baker, prompting a major investigation by the Senate.

Moral insensitivity has also been highlighted by a Capitol Hill incident wherein Senate negotiators were said to have given in to the House’s insistence that its members be given free “junk mail” privileges (permission to send franked congressional mail addressed to “occupant”). In return, according to a United Press International report, a Congressman backed down on his threat to disclose the name of a Senator who was alleged to have two call girls on his government-financed payroll.

Our nation’s malaise is not, of course, restricted to our leaders. Indeed, not only do the leaders to a degree set the moral tone of the country; they also reflect it. A rather chilling pointer to the moral standards of some laboring men appeared in last month’s million-dollar jewel robbery in New York City. Most of the twenty-five to thirty workmen at a demolition site adjacent to the scene of the robbery witnessed the event but did not tell the police. After most of the booty had been abandoned by the robbers, the workmen engaged in a wild spree of looting and caching diamonds and other gems. Then they looted each other.

One could also point to the rising incidence of supermarket shoplifting on the part of housewives, those gentle citizens whose influence on the morals of the young is so telling. The new president-elect of the American Bar Association, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., a Richmond, Virginia, lawyer, attributes the nation’s rising crime rate (four times greater than the rate of population growth) to a “moral sickness” among Americans. He speaks of an excessive public tolerance of “substandard, marginal and even immoral and unlawful conduct.” A by-product of this, he says, is “lack of respect—for authority, for law and for the right of others.” As examples of moral sickness, he gives: parental indulgence of children, public acceptance of and participation in gambling, toleration of drunken driving, and the meager efforts to enforce laws against pornography. Public lack of respect for the law is not hard to come by when the lawmakers themselves show disrespect.

When a nation’s moral standard slips, a terrible burden is put upon its law-enforcement agencies; police multiply; budgets mount. It grows increasingly difficult to bring an expanding legion of criminals to justice. Urgently needed is a great tide of righteousness which will lift all our society—a wave which will lap at the soiled edges of every class of men and women, will cleanse away hidden corruptions, will purge elusive felonies, and will sweep in purifying power through government offices and across demolition sites.

Whence this righteousness? It comes from the Cross of Christ, where the very righteousness of God is supremely revealed. And it must flow through the pulpits of the land in powerful preaching that exalts Christ and does not stoop to pamper government leaders or anyone else. Profound awe at the absolute holiness of God must be inculcated and spread abroad. Isaiah saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple. One seraphim cried unto another, and said, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” Then said Isaiah, “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: and he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.”

The Enduring Power Of Simplicity

The recent celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address should remind us of the enduring power of simplicity. When the battlefield was dedicated, there were two chief speakers—Edward Everett, the most renowned orator of the time, and Abraham Lincoln.

Everett’s oration was by the standards of that day a first-rate piece of rhetoric, thoroughly worthy of the occasion. Even now it merits the respect of those who read its eloquent pages. It was timely but not timeless.

Lincoln’s few words are unadorned in their simple directness. They move us as few documents in our national history. And if we hear in them the music of the King James Bible, it is because Lincoln knew his Bible so well that its cadences echo in his words.

We hear much these days about “the problem of communication.” In our endeavor to be “relevant” and “contemporary,” we adopt the vocabulary of the passing hour. Many of us evangelicals who preach and write are thoroughly familiar with the current theological and philosophical clichés. At the same time, we are reputed to know our Bibles; in fact, some even call us “biblicists.” How strange that so little of the matchless simplicity Lincoln achieved marks our words! Perhaps we need a new beatitude: Blessed are they who state the truth clearly, for they shall be understood.

A Sensible Proposal

An article in The Presbyterian Outlook by Ilion T. Jones, retired professor of San Francisco Seminary, discusses the need for a new Presbyterian seminary that will be conservative and evangelical in its theology and practice (see News, page 29).

According to Dr. Jones, “the mounting tide of conservatism in Protestantism” constitutes an “Evangelical Undertow” that “must be reckoned with sooner or later.” He points to the lack of tolerance for conservative Christianity in many seminaries and says that “evangelically-minded Christians express amazement at the intolerance shown them by their liberally-minded fellow-Christians.”

The picture is a true one, and it represents other groups as well as Presbyterians. In fact, the thriving state of the newer independent, conservative seminaries, such as Fuller, Westminster, Dallas, and Gordon—to name but a few—shows the extent of the need.

Dr. Jones’s suggestion that the new kind of seminary be staffed by retired ministers and professors, after the pattern of the Hastings College of Law of the University of California at San Francisco, is appealing, although experienced educators will raise important questions about it. And the proposal of a type of seminary that will take seriously the vigorous renaissance of evangelicalism in the main-line denominations makes a great deal of sense. If, as we hope, it becomes a reality, it may well spur “the young theological liberals,” who, Dr. Jones says, are in the ascendancy in the seminaries, to practice the tolerance that is the mark of true liberalism.

The Only Solvent For Anti-Semitism

There was no racial prejudice in biblical times based on skin color. There was, however, another kind of racial prejudice. It existed between Jew and Gentile and was religiously grounded in God’s election of the Jews as his peculiar and special people.

Because religion is much more than skin deep, religiously grounded prejudice is in spite of surface appearances the deepest of racial cleavages. Although prejudice against the Negro is now creating the greatest disturbance, prejudice against the Jewish people is much deeper, as it has been of much longer duration. Evidence for this can be seen in the bitter relations between Jew and Arab. The reaction to the recent statement of Vatican II about the Jews indicates how strong the tide of bitterness runs. Further evidence is the extreme difficulty of eradicating this prejudice even from Christian people, who indeed have most reason for disowning it. Another indication that anti-Semitism runs deeper than any other prejudice is seen in the attempt to rewrite Jewish history in order to remove the source of the offense. Bernhard E. Olson (Faith and Prejudice, Yale University Press, 1963) studied lesson materials representing various theological traditions in the Church. He reports that 22 per cent of the lesson materials produced by those he calls liberals criticize the idea that the Jews killed Jesus. The most recent version of the film King of Kings tends by omission of biblical material to create the impression that the Romans bear responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ. And there even are extremists whose anti-Semitism is so bitter that they insist that Jesus was not a Jew but, like the first Adam, a universal man.

All efforts to ignore historical facts or to obscure them by rewriting the Gospels are futile and will never provide the answer to solving Jewish prejudice.

The question of who killed Christ and of who bears responsibility for his death must be raised and answered on both a historical and theological level. Historically, the facts are plain. The Jews, not the Gentiles, instigated the Crucifixion. Pilate resorted to every expedient to save Christ. His Roman sense of justice declared Him unworthy of death. Moreover, within the Jewish community it was not the common people but the religious leadership—the high priests, scribes, and Pharisees—who conspired to kill Jesus. It was the Jews who stood in the holy place, not the Gentiles and not the Jews on the street, who delivered Jesus to his death.

Yet the Gentiles also were responsible. Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. It was a Roman court of law which, by the most monstrous perversion of justice the world has ever seen, justified and legalized the murderous desire of the Jewish leaders.

On the theological level, prejudice against the Jew for the crucifixion of Jesus is wholly unwarranted. The Christian knows that Jesus was a Jew, of the seed of Abraham, the son of David. He knows that “salvation is of the Jews.” Confessing that Jesus died for his sins, he knows that his own sin is a deeper ground for the death of Christ than the circumstance that Christ was crucified by Jewish hands. He knows that his Bible was written by Jews. The Christian also knows that God’s temporary judgment upon the Jews is the historical occasion for his salvation; as Paul said, it “is the reconciling of the world.” The Christian confesses that he enters into Israel’s inheritance, shares in her covenant, election, and in her final glory. Knowing that he is saved by the Jew’s Messiah, by a Gospel that is for the Jew first, how can the Gentile Christian be prejudiced against the Jew? Indeed, Paul warns Gentile Christians who benefit from Israel’s election that an exercise of religious pride and prejudice born of superiority may mean the loss of their own election. Gentile salvation, Paul argues, is “unnatural.” They are saved, he says, not for their own sake but for the sake of the Jews, to provoke them to jealousy, to an acceptance of their own Messiah, who belongs to them first of all because of their divinely bestowed status of election (Rom. 2).

To know these things is the end of that self-pride which is the source of prejudice toward the Jews.

A Personal Testament

The late Dr. Samuel M. Shoemaker, one of our contributing editors and the author of the essay, “The Nature of Humility” (p. 14), left this credo, to be opened by his wife after his death. With the permission of Mrs. Shoemaker, we share with our readers this very personal expression of faith from a devoted Christian minister whose preaching and writing helped thousands.

As I sit in the study on a beautiful, cool August afternoon, I look back with many thanks. It has been a great run. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Much could and should have been better, and I have, by no means, done what I should have done with all that I have been given. But the overall experience of being alive has been a thrilling experience. I believe that death is a doorway to more of it; clearer, cleaner, better, with more of the secret opened than unlocked. I do not feel much confidence in myself as regards all this, for very few have ever “deserved” eternal life. But with Christ’s atonement and Him gone on before, I have neither doubt nor fear whether I am left here a brief time or long one. I believe that I shall see Him and know Him, and that eternity will be an endless opportunity to consort with the great souls and the lesser ones who have entered into the freedom of the heavenly city. It is His forgiveness and grace that gives confidence and not merits of our own. But again I say, it’s been a great run. I’m thankful for it and for all the people who have helped to make it so, and especially those closest and dearest to me.

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