This title is baldly oxymoronic: theological clickbait. But a few minutes’ reflection on the deep and abiding differences between the emphases of Western and Eastern Christians at Christmastime tells us something important and vital not only about those churches but also about their Christ and the salvation Christ brought.
Essays in Wheaton College professor Timothy Larsen’s fine Oxford Handbook of Christmas briefly set out the respective theological emphases of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches at Christmas, emphases echoed by Lutheran and Anglican churches respectively—at least, according to the experts penning the respective essays on each communion.
In brief, the Catholic/Lutheran/Western emphasis is on the Nativity of Jesus as the event marking the Son of God becoming the divine-human person who would grow up to sacrifice himself as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Catholic and Lutheran services therefore focus on the Atonement, the Cradle both foreshadowing and being overshadowed by the Cross.
Indeed, it was striking for this Protestant to read a Catholic scholar (Anne McGowan of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago) describing Roman Catholic services thus:
The official Christmas liturgies of the Roman rite . . . do not dwell extensively on the Christ Child born in Bethlehem but rather on the salvation of humanity ultimately made possible through the Incarnation. Therefore, the celebration of Christmas in Roman Catholic worshipping communities involves situating Christ’s birth in the broader context of his death and Resurrection . . . .
… Roman [liturgical] texts for Christmas largely bypass narrative details about Christ’s birth, emphasizing instead “the marvellous consequences of that event for the regeneration of a human race fallen but destined for glory” and doctrinal reflections on its significance. (McGowan quotes fellow liturgical scholar Patrick Regan.)
Kirsi Stjerna, of the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in California, represents her tradition thus:
In the spirit of Luther, Lutheran proclamation at Christmas never moves far from the Holy Week’s remembering of the crucifixion but rather maintains the tension between life and death as the place to reckon the miracle of the Resurrection and eternal life, the promise of which became incarnate through Mary’s womb.
The Orthodox/Eastern emphasis—echoed by at least a considerable number of Anglican churches especially of the Anglo-Catholic and Broad Church varieties, if not so much the Evangelical tradition—is on the Incarnation itself. The Nativity of Jesus is the coming forth of the great union of the divine and the human in one person, the union that solved the great problem of Greek thought: the utter gulf between God and humanity, Creator and creation, immortal and mortal.
As Mary B. Cunningham of Nottingham University puts it, following the often-cited sermon of Byzantine theologian Gregory Nazianzen and hymn-writer Kosmas the Melodist,
God has taken on mortal flesh and thus renewed, or recapitulated, the original creation. . . . Heaven and earth are reunited and death gives way to eternal life. . . .
. . . The emphasis is . . . on the story of salvation from the Fall to Redemption in the Incarnation of Christ. (Note: “Redemption in the Incarnation.”)
Martyn Percy, formerly of Christ Church, Oxford, likewise speaks of “the distinctive theological emphasis that Anglicanism is probably best known for—namely, for its focus on the Incarnation.” (Again, Anglicans of the Evangelical party might both agree that Anglicanism in general might be known for that emphasis and yet stoutly insist on a balancing emphasis, at the very least, on the Passion of Christ.)
The Eastern Church thus typically criticizes the West for giving the Incarnation short shrift. Easterners see Westerners reducing the Nativity as to merely the preliminary requirement for what really matters in their soteriological scheme: the suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.
Why, the Easterners might press, are there not just one but two gospel accounts of Jesus infancy? And why do they hardly so much as hint at Jesus as Suffering Servant, but instead echo Old Testament themes of Israel’s redemption and global shalom under Messiah’s glorious reign?
The Western Church could respond that while, yes, there are two Gospel Nativity stories, all four Gospels speak of Passion Week. Moreover, all four Gospels are heavily weighted toward that week, with multiple chapters offering detailed description of those world-changing days.
Why, the Westerners might press, is the Cross, not the Cradle, the universal symbol of the Christian religion. Why else do crosses abound on and in, and provide the very architectural footprint of, churches in the East as well as everywhere else?
As a bemused Protestant in grateful awe of both of these traditions, I’m initially inclined to the view that the West is quite right. The centre of gravity in the Gospels is indeed Passion Week. For their part, the rest of the New Testament documents say next to nothing about the birth of Jesus, and the Incarnation itself is celebrated largely as the West construes it. The doctrine of the Incarnation is foundational metaphysics in the service of a soteriology focused on the adult Jesus: this happened in order for that to happen.
On its own, the Incarnation accomplished nothing toward our salvation, and salvation is the central mission of the Son of God as Jesus Christ. Put sharply, if Jesus had been merely born and then gotten killed in Herod’s sweep of Bethlehem babies, we would be yet in our sins. And the ubiquity of crosses in Orthodox iconography and architecture confirms that Orthodox believers themselves agree that of course the Cross matters centrally in the economy of Salvation.
I’m yet also inclined to the view, however, that the Orthodox might have the last word. In their doctrine of salvation, they emphasize theōsis, the gift of God’s own goodness of which believers receive through the Holy Ghost. By thus partaking of the divine nature (II Peter 1:4: a verse central to Orthodoxy and almost unknown in Western churches) we become more godly. And to become fully and finally the image of God in communion with God is the final telos—the whole point, we might say—of human creation and salvation.
Christ did not come, after all, only to atone for our sins. He rose in new life as the first fruits of resurrection and then he ascended as Lord to God’s right hand. He now waits to return to establish his everlasting reign on a new earth over his renewed people. For us sinners to be able to walk into that new world with Jesus and to be fit to take up everlasting residence in it, we have to be more than forgiven: we need to become godlike in our purity, in our goodness, in our Spirituality.
Again, the Incarnation on its own does not infuse us humans with God’s nature. The Holy Spirit, downstream of Calvary and of Pentecost, does that. And our Eastern brothers and sisters generally agree.
The Eastern instinct to celebrate, even to focus upon, the union of the divine and the human in the Nativity nonetheless is a good instinct. We Westerners need to get beyond Passion Week, key as it is, to remind ourselves and declare to the world all that Jesus did plus all the Holy Spirit does to be well and truly and fully saved. And a central element in the fullness of salvation is our partaking of the divine nature, Christ in us, our being filled with the Holy Spirit such that we bear only and ever his fruit.
The Incarnation is indeed the place to start, where Christ’s mission truly starts. It is worth dwelling on—not hurrying in Advent and Christmas too quickly to Lent and Easter.
For more on these themes, check out the TBM minicourse “Salvation Theology 102.” For now, let’s be glad for an Event so rich that no community of the global church can embrace it all, let alone articulate it all. Let us rejoice in, and truly learn from, the great prayers and songs and art of Christians eastern and western, northern and southern, ancient and modern, to celebrate and to proclaim a Christmas Story as best we ourselves can. And let us delight in others telling it their way, too.
