The post Heaven and earth in little space appeared first on Anglican Mainstream. by Laudable Practice, Artillery Row: Celebrating the day and the child that changed everything. On Christmas Day, Christians again turn to the Christ Child, adoring the...
The post Heaven and earth in little space appeared first on Anglican Mainstream.
by Laudable Practice, Artillery Row:
Celebrating the day and the child that changed everything.
On Christmas Day, Christians again turn to the Christ Child, adoring the One born of the Maiden of Nazareth, proclaiming — in carols and scriptures, in prayer and sacrament, in icons and art — that here, in this Child, is grace and truth, wisdom and peace, life and light, for all and everlastingly. This Child, we believe, is the world’s salvation: our centre and our hope, our beginning and our end, our life and our peace. Or as Christians confess in the Creed, “for us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven”.
In a time of wars and rumours of wars, when the international order is creaking, when old and dark hatreds again cast their grim shadow over our societies, when our assumptions about the enduring stability of democracy and widening prosperity are profoundly shaken, it may seem — to say the least — somewhat strange for Christians to declare that this one Child, born in a far off time, is the world’s salvation.
Surely the world — no matter from what perspective on the Left-Right spectrum we diagnose its ills — needs something much more convincing and much more compelling than a Child (and, let us not forget, a Jewish Child — such a small, insignificant people), born in an ancient time far distant from the challenges faced by political institutions, the global economy, and complex societies in the early 21st century. Something much bigger is surely urgently required — a grand vision, an ambitious cultural project, a heroic ideal — capable of rising to the challenges we face, delivering us from injustices, turmoil, failures, and conflict, and remaking the world anew, whether that be prosperous and free or equal and just.
If the Christian hope in the Christ Child seems strange to secular minds, secular hope in ideologies, institutions, and causes appears entirely naive to the Christian heart. Over the long history of humanity, we have seen time and again, in every culture, in every era, how ideologies, institutions, and causes are, at their best, constrained by human ambition and failures, by the abiding sins of the particular era, by casual, supposedly self-evident assumptions that now horrify us. If that is not bad enough, at their worst, ideologies, institutions, and causes bring grim darkness, crushing injustice, and vast cruelties. It is extreme hubris for the contemporary secular mind to believe that it is somehow liberated from these constraints.
The post Heaven and earth in little space appeared first on Anglican Mainstream.