What’s wrong with celebrating Christmas? To ask this question alone already seems offensive to many. How can there be anything wrong? Is it wrong to praise God and preach Christ? Is it wrong to be happy and enjoy? The complaints against the puritanic killjoy are many. The number of Christians affirming such celebration is countless. However, the lack of self-reflection on this issue reveals something deeper in the church today, that is the ignorance of New Testament reality and New Testament worship, beneath which is the ignorance of the Person and Work of Christ Jesus.
Celebrating Christmas is not simply having a day to praise God and to preach Christ. It is on a man-made day (or a series of days) with man-made rituals, clustered with worldly appeals and moods, while the praise and preaching are just part of, and in most of the time an insignificant part of, the whole event. So what’s wrong with celebrating Christmas? The man-made stuff and the worldly stuff. And there are a lot of them.
First, the man-made stuff. Many refuse to contemplate the clear and simple fact that celebrating Christmas/Easter is never mentioned in the NT. No record of them was found in the early church. The apostolic church not only survived but flourished without them. There are no longer “holy days” required in the NT church, and there is no need for their existence. These days were added later, so such rules should not be considered with any divine mandate and should not have any divine authority over any Christian conscience. But they are worse than that. Such rituals were created and followed out of an ignorance of who Christ is and what He has accomplished.
“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. …Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God. If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations—“Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.”(Col. 2:8-23, ESV)
Many have understood keeping “holy days” and rituals is a higher level of spirituality, but that is not true. The Apostle tells us that this mentality comes from a lower level of spirituality and fosters a lower level of spirituality. As a new person in Christ, you do not have to observe holy days, and not only that, you should not observe holy days. Some may bring out Romans 14:1-11 to argue that it is legitimate to observe days. Yes, it is legitimate, but only in the same legitimacy as being vegetarian, only legitimate as the opinions of “the one who is weak in faith”. Such opinions cannot be treated as the universal rules for everyone or the ideal of a mature Christian. As always, the weak should be strengthened, not to be left alone.
Such “human precepts and teachings” always have “an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body”, but “they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh”. It is useless in terms of spiritual growth and it promotes hypocrisy (of course, those who do not observe days may also act out of hypocrisy, but the apostle points out a particular temptation). The rituals always multiple when the essence of spirituality is wanting. The rituals are spiritual boosters for the weak and hungry, but they are neither medicine nor food. They are straws. The apostles and the apostolic church had no desire to explore the “benefits” of such rituals, because they were so overwhelmed by the glory and richness of “ordinary” life, which was truly extraordinary. It is because most are disinterest in or uninformed about this extraordinary in the ordinary, they turn to the extraordinary out of the ordinary.
As a biblically functioning church, do you really need a day, a week, or a month to celebrate the birth of Christ, while you preach the fullness of Christ week after week? As a biblically conscious Christian, do you really need to have this day when you meditate on the fullness of Christ day after day? No, you do not need. It would be superfluous and even burdensome for you. It will not add anything, on the contrary, it appears odd in the organic Christian life. Whenever people are looking for something to shake, to excite, to reenergize, most of they are looking for boosters, in terms of rules, rituals, forms, etc. Boosters are easy to access and quick to respond. But it leads to fatigue and further reliance upon such stimuli. Above all, it does not and cannot transform the person, as the person remains the same if not getting worse. What you need is not a strong booster but a healthy diet. When you are taking healthy food every day, you would not have the desire for a booster.
The ignorance and subsequent decay of NT spirituality is one of the most urgent diseases of the Christian church today. With that, worldliness creeps in and settles down. Most of that is considered part of the Christmas has nothing to do with Scripture. It is folk-cultural, not theological-biblical. And these two are confused by many. The pagans are rightly confused, but Christians should not. The trees, lights, candles, and gifts have no biblical significance. They should not be assigned any biblical meaning out of a false sense of piety. If you use them, keep them as folk-cultural, and do not use the Bible to sanctify them. Some people think they are participating in a great tradition, but what they are participating in is nothing but a game, a show, for entertainment. Christ is invoked only to add some religious flavor.
Often the theological-biblical is forced to serve the personal-psychological. The fullness of Christ in Scripture is cut into a cute snippet. The theological revelation is packaged into an emotional conditioning. It would be killjoy to preach the fullness of Christ. The popular perception of Christmas makes the fullness of Christ culturally unacceptable and emotionally abusing. The joy of Christmas is too sacred to be ruined by any serious contemplation on Christ. With the state of many churches and Christians, the so-called joy of Christmas is just another therapy. The whole year of negligence on Christ and His Word is covered up by a joyful participation in a festival. The disregarding of Christ’s authority and commandments is swept away since no matter what, Christ is love, especially in December, especially when I am celebrating His birthday. Who can be harsh to those celebrating his birthday? Celebrating Christmas would not make a good Christian better, but it will make a bad Christian worse.
Appendix
B. B. Warfield on Christmas (from his review on Georg Rietschel’s Wehnachten in Kirche, Kunst und Volksleben. Mit 4 Kunstbeilagen und 152 Abbildungen. Large 8vo, pp. 160. Bielefeld und Leipzig: Verlag von Velhagen und Klasing, 1902.). Published in Princeton Theological Review No. 3, 1903, Page 489-490. In red.
Prof. Rietschel tells us that no other Christian festival has so intimately wedded itself with the family life and the life of the people as Christmas. Nevertheless, for more than three hundred years the Church got along entirely without it. The primitive Church did not even possess a distinctively Christian Easter or Whitsunday. By the middle of the second century we find, however, Easter celebrated and soon afterwards Whitsunday; and by the end of the third century, or the beginning of the fourth, a third festival begins to appear in the East by the side of these. But this third festival was not Christmas but Epiphany ; and it was celebrated on the sixth of January, along with which there gradually came to be made remembrance of the birth of Christ also. The idea that Christ was born on the 25th of December seems to appear first early in the third century as the result of a calculation from the 25th of March, the New Year’s day of that time, which had come to be looked upon as the anniversary of the Annunciation. But there is no trace of the celebration of this day until the middle of the fourth century :Prof. Rietschel thinks indeed that we can fix confidently on 354 (or possibly 353) as the exact year of its first celebration. This occurred at Rome ; and thence the new festival spread—reaching Constantinople in 379, Cappadocia in 382, Antioch in 388, Egypt in 432; but Palestine not until the seventh century, while the great Armenian Church has resisted the innovation up to our own day.
If the celebration of the twenty-fifth of December as the birthday of the Lord dates thus only from the later Patristic age, the modes of its celebration most common among us are of yet more recent origin. The custom of giving presents upon Christmas Day is of mediaeval invention; the Christmas-tree a modern extension. We first hear of Christmas-presents late in the fourteenth century : and the usage made its way only slowly and against much opposition. It was even made the subject of legal enactments ; and as late as 1661 and indeed as 1735 the Saxon “ Policey-Ordnung ” sought to regulate and provide against the abuses of this custom. The Christmas-tree seems to have come in through a confusion of the festival of Christmas with the observance of “ the day of Adam and Eve,” which fell on December 24th, and a feature of which was the erection of a “ Paradise,” in which were planted the two trees of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and of Life. We appear to hear of our distinctive “ Christmas-tree ” first at Strassburg, at the opening of the seventeenth century. The “ burning Christmas-tree,” that is the Christmas-tree adorned with candles, we meet with first about 1737. It was not until the nineteenth century that it began to spread very widely even in Germany. Neither in the North German States of Holstein, Mecklenburg, Pommerania and the Provinces of Prussia, nor in the Rhine-land in the West, nor in Bavaria in the South, was it in use until towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Outside of Germany it has appeared only as a German importation. Oddly enough the first Christmas-tree was set up in France and England in the same year, 1840, by the Mecklenburg Princess Helen, Duchess of Orleans, in the former, and by the Saxe-Coburg Prince Albert in the latter. “Thus the Christmas-tree,” smilingly remarks Prof. Rietschel, “ has held its conquering way over the earth.”
It goes without saying that we have adverted only to a few of the numerous interesting facts brought out in this wide survey of Christmas usages. We have, indeed, confined ourselves to such as furnish a compressed account of the origins of the customs now most common in American families. The book is crammed full of other lines of investigation of equal inherent interest. Even such as we have briefly reported may supply us, however, with some food for thought. There is a certain passionate intensity in the way in which Christmas is now celebrated among us. But after all, what can be said for the customs to which we have committed ourselves ? There is no reason to believe that our Lord wished His birthday to be celebrated by His followers. There is no reason to believe that the day on which we are celebrating it is His birthday. There is no reason to believe that the way in which we currently celebrate it would meet His approval. Are we not in some danger of making of what we fondly tell ourselves is a celebration of the Advent of our Lord, on the one side something much more like the Saturnalia of old Rome than is becoming in a sober Christian life ; and, on the other something much more like a shopkeeper’s carnival than can comport with the dignity of even a sober secular life?
