Is your nativity missing a dragon?

This Christmas, we might be closer than ever to the story’s origins. Terror. Surveillance. Poverty. Genocide. Perhaps it is time to add a dragon to tame creche scenes.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

The head of a giant paper dragon glows orange and red against a night sky.

Oliver Needham on Unsplash.

Advent is not Christmas. The wisdom of the church is this: humans need time to take stock of the grim reality of life, as the nights get even longer. We can’t skip forward with shopping bags and fairy lights to Christmas. These weeks of Advent prepare us. For the unexpected. For the necessity of grace.

Advent is the time the church reflects on its hierarchical structures, its imperialist tendencies, its obsession with power. And repents. It repents because it is about to celebrate that God’s greatest power move was to become powerless. Yes, the church forgets this annually. Sometimes centennially. But inbuilt within the church year is a season that forces it – and ourselves – to come face to face with our hypocrisy.

Advent begins in the darkest time of the year.

Advent is also an enforced time of waiting for the miracle of the unexpected, often in times of grave crisis. We, like the church, can be perpetrators, but we can also be victims. Another aspect of Advent is a vigilant time of waiting alongside the oppressed, in hope, for what we cannot see. For some people it involves fasting, a sign of repentance. For others, it is an advent wreath with daily readings and meditation. Still for others, it is a time to challenge rather than give in to our consumerist global empire.

Advent invites us to remember that God doesn’t come how or when we want. God cannot be manipulated. God can only be received, and most often by those who least expect him. Those on the margins. Those pregnant by accident. Those under tyrannical rule. Advent grows in the church a reverence for the downtrodden and the abused, if we are paying attention. Advent teaches that God comes to those who think they least deserve him.

What if we stretched out Advent across four weeks of waiting, of gestation, refusing to allow Big Corporate Christmas to deliver the baby prematurely?

The first Christian account of the birth of Jesus is not, surprisingly, in the gospels – the four biographies of Jesus’ life, composed within living memory of him. We are accustomed to this first century record of sheep and shepherds, stars and stables. But there is a poetic nativity story that is composed prior to all these histories of Jesus, hidden in the middle of the Apocalypse – the book of Revelation. Written just a couple decades after Jesus’ death, this story is of a woman on the run, being pursued by a dragon. At long last, she is cornered. “The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born”. This child facing the dragon, against all odds, is the child Jesus.

This is the grim situation of people all over the world this Advent, far closer to the original nativity story than our chocolate calendars communicate. And perhaps this is a better text for this year’s Advent, as the world watches the fate of women and children in Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Africa. The dragon has indeed invaded the lives of so many. The world is holding its breath.

This Christmas let’s up our Advent game. Let’s put dragons in our nativity creche displays. Take out the baby – he hasn’t been born yet! And let’s hold our breath with the rest of the world, sensing the real and present danger. What if we stretched out Advent across four weeks of waiting, of gestation, refusing to allow Big Corporate Christmas to deliver the baby prematurely? What if we used Advent for its original purpose, which is to examine ourselves for our own hypocrisy, our own violence and hatred, our own abuse of power on micro and macro levels? Perhaps then we can truly welcome Christmas. As hope for the powerless. As the possibility for peace in the midst of war. As good news for the world.

As a teenage girl 2,000 years ago prayed in hope,

My spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant…

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

Explainer

Belief

Creed

30 March 2023

4 min read

Beyond cold certainties

The Creeds set out a vision of reality – a vision that cannot be proved to be true, but which was found to be true by a community of people.

Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath retired as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University in 2022.

A red shutter door bears a large painted message reading 'io ci credo'

'I believe it.'

Paolo Gregotti on Unsplash.

“I believe.” For many, the opening words of the Christian Creeds are self-defeating. Why read any further, when all they offer is opinions, rather than certainties? Faith is just a lower form of knowledge – a kind of hesitant half-truth, which seems out of place in today’s more sophisticated world, informed by science and philosophy rather than outdated worldviews inherited from a credulous past.

It’s a fair point. We cannot believe anything we like; there has to be reason to believe it, evidence in its support. For those wedded to a hard rationalism, we can only believe what can be proved to be true. Yet the problem is that the secure truths of logic and mathematics are existentially inadequate. We seem unable to escape the lure of “ultimate questions”, to use Karl Popper’s term for truths about meaning and value in life that frustratingly lie beyond the scope of science to confirm.

We can prove shallow truths. Yet the truths that really matter to us seem to lie beyond rational confirmation.

When it comes to the really important things in life, we are confronted with a rationalist dilemma. We can prove shallow truths. Yet the truths that really matter to us seem to lie beyond rational confirmation, often leading us into vicious argumentative circles rather than offering clear and persuasive proof. Bertrand Russell made this point in his famous defence of philosophy: “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”

Albert Einstein was fond of using mental experiments to open up some fundamental scientific questions, finding that they combined imaginative reflection with rational analysis. Here is a useful mental experiment. Suppose we limit ourselves to a mental and imaginative world in which we only accept what can be proved to be true. What sort of world would that be? It would, obviously, be a world from which Christianity was absent. Yet, perhaps less obviously, it would be a world from which all beliefs – moral, political, social and religious – are excluded. It would be a world without moral values, which remain obstinately resistant to rational or scientific verification. My suggestion is that this mental experiment indicates that this world would be existentially, morally and personally uninhabitable.

The human quest for wisdom, goodness and meaning takes us beyond the cold certainties of logic.

The opening words of the Creeds need to be seen in this context. The human quest for wisdom, goodness and meaning takes us beyond the cold certainties of logic into a world in which we believe or trust certain things to be true, life-changing and live-giving – but cannot prove them to be true. The Latin word credo – traditionally translated into English as “I believe” – is better rendered as “I trust,” invoking the world of relationships rather than mere beliefs.

The Creeds set out a vision of reality – a vision that cannot be proved to be true, but which was found to be true by a community of people, who have passed down in the Creeds their collective witness to what they discovered. As C. S. Lewis remarked, “the one really adequate instrument for learning about God is the Christian community.” This vision is affirmed to be trustworthy – not merely something that is transformative and liberating, but something that can be lived, not merely thought.

Getting the bigger picture

Faith is thus not a half-hearted hope that there might be a God. For Christians, it is a broad recognition that we live in a world in which certainty is not possible, save in closed mental domains that have little relevance to the serious business of living well and authentically. It is about “getting” what things are all about in an epiphanic moment of putting everything together and seeing a bigger picture within which we realize we belong and can flourish. There are other big pictures, of course – but all of them lie beyond proof. In choosing any of these, we are making an informed judgement that goes beyond the available evidence. We may believe (and have good reasons to believe) that it is the best big picture; yet we cannot show that it is true. What we do know, however, is that others have grasped this vision in the past, and transmitted this way of thinking and living to us.

‘Decentring’

The Creeds are thus not a demand to believe, but a description of what has been found, an affirmation of its capacity to satisfy and sustain, and an invitation to explore, discover and inhabit this new world. The Creeds provoke us into looking beyond the world of familiar banalities, and being prepared to be receptive to strange truths, which others have found to be life-changing. The vision of reality that we find articulated in the Creeds might be described as “decentring” – a term used by Iris Murdoch to describe the process of breaking free from our worrying obsession to make everything focus on us. As Plato suggested in his famous analogy of the Cave, there is a greater world that lies beyond us which, once grasped, makes us see things in a very different way. For Christians, faith is about the discernment of this vision of reality, and deciding to act as if it were true, in the firm belief that it can be trusted – and living meaningfully and authentically as a result.