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

14 March 2023

4 min read

Seeing the world through different eyes

Can 'dull words' signpost to something beyond? Explore how creeds help imagine life.

Alister McGrath

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

A set of low concrere blocks in the shape of a map's viewpoint symbol sit beside a lake.

'Viewpoint': a sculpture near Needs Hill on the north side of Kielder Water.

Oliver Dixon, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why are the Creeds so dull? To many, they have the intellectual depth and emotional appeal of hastily written shopping lists. Their leaden and impenetrable statements seemed to point to a cold, dead orthodoxy which has nothing to say to a fast-changing world. During my own phase as an atheist, I saw the creeds as top-down authoritarian attempts to trap people within a narrow and restrictive view of the world. I objected to being told what to think; I wanted to find things out for myself.

My outlook on life changed while I was a student at Oxford University in the early 1970s, as I began to appreciate for the first time the intellectual and imaginative appeal of Christianity. The Creeds themselves had nothing to do with this transition, which came about through conversations with intelligent and reflective Christians. This helped me grasp the vision of what lay at the heart of Christianity – something that could not be reduced to words or slogans, but which gave birth to a new way of living and acting. This seemed to be a million miles away from the arcane declarations of the Creeds. But as time passed, I began to see the Creeds in a new way. Let me explain.

The way we imagine the world – whether socially, morally, politically or religiously – needs to be expressed.

Back in the 1980s, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor introduced his idea of “articulation”. Every attempt to live a good life or develop a viable moral system depends on a set of background assumptions which need to be identified and put into words. “Articulation” is about the “bringing to light of that which is unspoken but presupposed”. Taylor’s point is that we need to put into words the grander vision of reality which shapes the way we think and live, despite the obvious inability of words to do justice or fully express this vision. The way we imagine the world – whether socially, morally, politically or religiously – needs to be expressed; yet that very act of expression both diminishes and restricts that vision, precisely because it is a rich imaginative reality that cannot be reduced to words.

It is this vision of faith which engages, inspires and motivates believers, not its verbal articulation in the Creeds.

The Creeds are thus an articulation of the core vision of faith. (The Apostles’ Creed is thought to have emerged gradually within Christian communities, particularly in Rome, apparently in response to the need for brief personal articulations of faith at baptism.) It is this vision of faith which engages, inspires and motivates believers, not its verbal articulation in the Creeds. If this vision is to be effectively expressed in words, it will use the language of poetry, capable of engaging the imagination and emotions. Perhaps this helps us understand why some of the Church’s best-loved theologians were poets (think of John Donne, or George Herbert). We need verbal articulations of faith, yet too easily misunderstand these as defining the essence of faith when they are actually signposts to its core vision.

Thinking of Creeds in this way allows us to see them as expressing frameworks of exploration and discovery. Rather than presenting us with a set of verbal formulae as “givens”, the Creeds point to a rich landscape that we can explore, identifying its landmarks that deserve our attention. They are like guidebooks, telling us what to look out for – and thus countering our natural tendency to limit ourselves to the familiar by pointing out what we have yet to discover.

Yet the Creeds are not themselves the agents of discovery. If the Christian faith can be compared to a landscape, then its best guides are those who live there, having internalized its features and incorporated them into their lives. There is a necessary and proper synergy between the statements of the Creeds and the personal experiences of Christians. The Creeds map the landscape of faith; yet individual Christian believers are best placed to explain and unpack its features, and the difference that this makes to their lives. The primary witnesses to the vitality of faith are thus ordinary Christians, who can connect the landmarks of faith with their personal journeys of discovery and living out their faith.

At times, those personal narratives may express the excitement of a new way of seeing the world; at others, they may concern how faith enables individuals to cope with uncertainty, trauma, loneliness, and death. The Creeds cannot (and do not) make those connections; they can, however, provide a framework for exploring and understanding how faith changes lives and shapes personal worlds, in dialogue with those who have made those discoveries, and can express them in their own words and ways. The Creeds cannot tell anyone what it means – or feels like – to believe in God. Yet they make room for individual believers to tell their stories, amplifying and embodying the terse and otherwise opaque creedal statements.

The Creeds, at first sight, at least, may indeed be dull – but their significance lies in the landscape to which they point. Far from trying to limit us, they are seeking to expand our vision by pointing to a greater reality that lies behind and beneath them.