This Christmas season I have featured a number of posts on carols as well as Dr Paul Copan‘s theological perspectives from his article ‘The First Christmas: Myths and Realities’. (Previous posts on this article include ‘Compliments of the season to all my readers!’ and ‘Angel imagery in Christmas carols’.)
Copan, a theologian and author, has written several books about Christianity in light of the Bible. Highly recommended, in my opinion, is his book Is God a Moral Monster? It gives an excellent explanation of God’s actions in the Old Testament.
In his first Christmas article (see the section called Docetism in Our Hymnody and Theology), Copan cautions us against potential heresy with regard to Jesus (emphases outside of the bullet points mine):
This line from “Away in a Manger” is quite familiar to us: “The little Lord Jesus no crying he makes. . . .” This picture presents a Jesus who apparently never cried as an infant—and perhaps that he never soiled his diapers and never made a mess eating as baby. However, we must be careful about overemphasizing Jesus’ deity and underemphasizing his humanity. This is the heresy of “docetism.” (The word docetism is a derived from the Greek dokeō, meaning “(I) appear, seem.” The Christ seemed human but really wasn’t.)
This is a version of Gnosticism, which came to full bloom in the second century AD. It emphasized the following ideas: (a) a secret, saving knowledge (gnōsis) or illumination is available only to a select “enlightened” few; ignorance, not sin, is the ultimate human problem; (b) the body/matter is evil, and the spirit/soul is good—a belief that tended to produce extreme self-denial (asceticism); (c) an eternal dualism exists between a good Being/God and an inferior evil being/god (who created matter); so the creator in Genesis is an inferior intermediary between the ultimate/true God (the Pleroma—“Fullness”) and this world; (d) history is unimportant and insignificant; if Jesus (the Christ) played any part in Gnostic belief systems, he only appeared to be human but was really divine; God couldn’t take on an evil human body or suffer on a cross.
We can commit the same Gnostic error by focusing on Jesus’ divinity and downplaying his humanity. The same applies to Jesus’ temptation. We may say, “Of course Jesus didn’t sin. He was God.” The Scriptures portray Jesus as someone who struggled; it was not a breeze for him to do the will of his Father. He was not play-acting:
- Hebrews 4:15: For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.
- Hebrews 5:8: Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered.
So, when you sing “Away in a Manger” this Christmas season, you may want to do what our family does—adjust the words a bit: “The little Lord Jesus *some* crying he makes”!
5 comments
January 2, 2013 at 11:18 pm
captaincatholic
Churchmouse,
That particular verse used to bother me a lot, for the very same reason. The ‘heresy alarm’ in my head would go off every time the hymn was sung. After a while, though, I started to get some perspective on the matter. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions. Was the line inserted to suggest that Jesus, being God, was immune to human suffering or was it simply pointing to a moment of contentment, a moment when the LORD was fed, and clean, and warm and enfolded in the Blessed Mother’s arms?
Suffering is part of the human condition and was certainly part of Jesus’ human experience. The gnostics rejected suffering because they refused to believe that God knew what He was doing when He created the world and pronounced it good. In truth, our world is good. Life is good. The fact that life is marked by imperfection, and decay, and mortality is not offensive to God and should not be offensive to us. What should offend us is our own impulse to find fault with God’s gracious gift of life.
As I say, suffering is part of the human condition; but so is happiness. If I’m going to recollect a moment in the infancy of someone I love, if I’m going to focus on a moment to write a song about, would it be surprising to learn that I would decide to select a happy moment? All the photos of my wife that I keep in my wallet are photographs of her smiling. Do you suppose I’m attempting to purport that she is different from other women who are compelled to frown from time to time?
Paul
January 2, 2013 at 11:22 pm
churchmouse
Thank you, Paul.
The message from the post is that Jesus is fully human and fully divine.
Yes, He truly suffered in much that He accomplished for us sinners.
January 3, 2013 at 7:25 pm
captaincatholic
Fully human, fully divine. God wants us to know Him, but that requires us to think in ways that don’t come easily to us. The church calls them ‘mysteries’ and they are a stumbling block to those who insist that life should be simple and easy to fully comprehend.
“Is Jesus God, or a human being?”, “Is God one or triune?”, “Are we saved by grace alone or must we choose to be redeemed?”. Come on you Christians, make up your mind! Is it one way or the other? Trouble is, it ISN’T one way or the other and those who insist that God be simple enough for them to figure out are bound to end up worshipping a god of their own imagination rather than the God who lives.
January 3, 2013 at 9:30 pm
churchmouse
Well said, sir, and thank you. God’s ways are not ours.
Isaiah 55:8: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.
January 4, 2013 at 11:00 pm
captaincatholic
No doubt of it, that’s one of my favorite verses!
It encourages me to forsake my ‘natural’ thoughts and ‘natural’ ways (not that that’s easy!) and to mull on God’s thoughts and embrace God’s ways. To me, that’s the core of repentance.
Paul