ChristianGovernance Report – December 17, 2010

Merry Holiday or Happy Christmas?

We, at ChristianGovernance, want to wish you the very best of the Christmas season and a clear vision of God’s will for your life as you enter the New Year.

I find the controversies around Christmas rather interesting. There are several ways to approach them that might make everyone think a little more about relevant issues surrounding the controversies.

Holiday is a bastardization of “holy day”, so if today’s humanists want to abandon Christmas for Holy Day, then that’s fine by me. They may not want to acknowledge which special day it is, but if they can refer to it as a Holy Day without gagging, then that shows up their hypocrisy. Maybe we should come at the controversy sideways like that and let them know that they really aren’t addressing their anti-Christian prejudice by preferring Happy Holidays – unless their prejudice is rooted in emotion rather than reason…

Furthermore, Christmas is “Christ’s Mass”, so it could be a matter for interesting discussion why today’s Protestants are such strong advocates of Christmas over Holiday when we have doctrinal concerns over the concept of the Mass.

And even calling it a Holy Day provides room for discussion and disagreement. Not all Christians hold to the practice or legitimacy of a church calendar with the recognition of special days. Different branches of the Protestant Church have avoided the practice of recognizing Holy Days for a variety of reasons. The Scottish Presbyterian tradition to which I adhere recognizes Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, as the only truly Holy Day – 52 of them each year.

All that to say that there are different traditions and practices within different branches of Christendom that some of us may not be aware of and others of us may prefer to ignore. But these differences provide opportunities for constructive discussion and healthy debate, even if we sometimes come together across our differences to present a unified front in the face of a common enemy.

It certainly doesn’t hurt for Christians to spend more time reflecting on the significance of God entering this world as a man – fully God and fully man – in order to redeem a people to Himself. In 2 John, verse 7, we read: “I say this because many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.” Believing that God came as Messiah – Christ – in the flesh – in human flesh – is an essential Christian belief. Right thinking about the person and work of Jesus Christ is essential to salvation and to orthodoxy. Christmas is a great time to reflect on such truths and to worship this God of creation and redemption.