Theological Christmas Quotes

The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or unphrased), by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural,Transcendence, Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation, Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy, Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday, Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality, Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual, Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic, Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue, or Bible.

Holy theology arises from knees bent before the mystery of the divine child in the stable. Without the holy night, there is no theology.

No priest, no theologian stood at the manger of Bethlehem. And yet all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders: that God became human. Holy theology arises from knees bent before the mystery of the divine child in the stable. Without the holy night, there is no theology. “God is revealed in flesh,” the God-human Jesus Christ — that is the holy mystery that theology came into being to protect and preserve. How we fail to understand when we think that the task of theology is to solve the mystery of God, to drag it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of human experience and reason! Its sole office is to preserve the miracle as miracle, to comprehend, defend, and glorify God’s mystery precisely as mystery. This and nothing else, therefore, is what the early church meant when, with never flagging zeal, it dealt with the mystery of the Trinity and the person of Jesus Christ…. If Christmas time cannot ignite within us again something like a love for holy theology, so that we—captured and compelled by the wonder of the manger of the son of God—must reverently reflect on the mysteries of God, then it must be that the glow of the divine mysteries has also been extinguished in our heart and has died out.

The smallest grain of natural honesty and benevolence has more effect on men’s conduct, than the most pompous views suggested by theological theories and systems.

the real ‘twelve days of Christmas’ is a period in Christian theology that marks the span between the birth of Christ and the coming of the three wise men. It begins on Christmas Day and runs to January 6th.

From a theological point of view, Easter is the center of the Church year; but Christmas is the most profoundly human feast of faith, because it allows us to feel most deeply the humanity of God. The crib has a unique power to show us what it means to say that God wished to be “Immanuel”—a “God with us”, a God whom we may address in intimate language, because he encounters us as a child. This makes Christmas a feast that invites us in a special way to meditation, to an internal act of looking at the Word.

For what, in actual practice, should the critical, mature modernist Christian do when, for instance, he gathers his children around him to celebrate Christmas? Should he read Luke's Christmas Gospel and sing the Christmas carols as if they were true, even though he believes them to be crude and primitive theology? After all, the rest of his society has no scruples about doing this, the pagans and the department stores. Or if this seems too cynical, too dishonest, ought he rather, in the manner of early socialist Sunday schools, to devise a passionately rationalist catechesis, swap German for German, chant a passage from Bultmann instead of 'Joy to the World!'; ought he rather to gather his little ones about the Crib, light the candles, and read Raymond Brown instead of St. Luke on the virginal conception of Jesus: 'My judgment in conclusion is that the totality of the scientifically controllable evidence leaves an unresolved problem.' How their eyes will shine, how their little hearts will burn within them as they hear these holy words! How touched they will all be as the littlest child reverently places a shining question mark in the empty manger. And how they will rejoice when they find their stockings, which they have hung up to a Protestant parody of a Catholic bishop, stuffed with subscriptions to 'Concilium,' 'Catholic Update,' 'National Catholic Reporter,' and 'The Tablet.

For our lives, incarnation means being focused on the spiritual and the eternal but bringing that focus deep into our life. … This is really the heart of the Christmas theological message: Live in two worlds that overlap but are distinct. Don’t be materialistic, but don’t sacrifice our ordinary physical life for any spiritual ideal. Be lowly and lofty.

Having written some pages in favor of Jesus, I receive a solemn communication crediting me with the possession of a “theology” by which I acquire the strange dignity of being wrong forever or forever right. Have I gauged exactly enough the weights of sins? Have I found too much of the Hereafter in the Here? Or the other way around? Have I found too much pleasure, too much beauty and goodness, in this our unreturning world? O Lord, please forgive any smidgen of such distinctions I may have still in my mind. I meant to leave them all behind a long time ago. If I’m a theologian I am one to the extent I have learned to duck when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead, dropping their loads of whitewash at random on the faces of those who look toward Heaven. Look down, look down, and save your soul by honester dirt, that receives with a lordly indifference this off-fall of the air. Christmas night and Easter morning are this soil’s only laws. The depth and volume of the waters of baptism, the true taxonomy of sins, the field marks of those most surely saved, God’s own only interpretation of the Scripture: these would be causes of eternal amusement, could we forget how we have hated one another, how vilified and hurt and killed one another, bloodying the world, by means of such questions, wrongly asked, never to be rightly answered, but asked and wrongly answered, hour after hour, day after day, year after year—such is my belief—in Hell.

Al-Hakim was wildly inconsistent, founding a Dar al-Ilm – House of Knowledge – similar to al-Mamun’s House of Wisdom – where not only Ismaili theology but astronomy and philosophy were taught in sessions that he himself often attended. But once Barjawan was gone al-Hakim seems to have believed that tolerance had displeased God. In 1004, noticing rich Christian caravans setting off for Jerusalem, he started executing Christians and converting churches into mosques. On hearing of the frenzied Christian rite of the Holy Fire that took place every Easter in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he banned Christmas, Epiphany and Easter, and wine drinking as well. Then he ordered that Jews and Christians wear distinguishing clothing, a Jew a wooden cow-yoke (and in the baths a cowbell) and Christians a cross. Jews and Christians were ordered to convert or die; many pretended to convert.

If you had to summarize the Christmas story with one word, what word would you choose? Now, your word would have to capture what this story points to as the core of human need and the way God would meet that need. Do you have a word in mind? Maybe you’re thinking that it’s just not possible to summarize the greatest story ever with one word. But I think you can. Let’s consider one lovely, amazing, history-changing, and eternally significant word. It doesn’t take paragraph after paragraph, written on page after page, filling volume after volume to communicate how God chose to respond to the outrageous rebellion of Adam and Eve and the subtle and not-so-subtle rebellion of everyone since. God’s response to the sin of people against his rightful and holy rule can be captured in a single word. I wonder if you thought, “I know the word: grace.” But the single word that captures God’s response to sin even better than the word grace is not a theological word; it is a name. That name is Jesus. God’s response wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t the establishment of an institution. It wasn’t a process of intervention. It wasn’t some new divine program. In his infinite wisdom God knew that the only thing that could rescue us from ourselves and repair the horrendous damage that sin had done to the world was not a thing at all. It was a person, his Son, the Lord Jesus.

Liturgy gathers the holy community as it reads the Holy Scriptures into the sweeping tidal rhythms of the church year in which the story of Jesus and the Christian makes its rounds century after century, the large and easy interior rhythms of a year that moves from birth, life, death, resurrection, on to spirit, obedience, faith, and blessing. Without liturgy we lose the rhythms and end up tangled in the jerky, ill-timed, and insensitive interruptions of public-relations campaigns, school openings and closings, sales days, tax deadlines, inventory and elections. Advent is buried under 'shopping days before Christmas.' The joyful disciplines of Lent are exchanged for the anxious penitentials of filling out income tax forms. Liturgy keeps us in touch with the story as it defines and shapes our beginnings and ends our living and dying, our rebirths and blessing in this Holy Spirit, text-formed community visible and invisible. When Holy Scripture is embraced liturgically, we become aware that a lot is going on all at once, a lot of different people are doing a lot of different things. The community is on its feet, at work for God, listening and responding to the Holy Scriptures. The holy community, in the process of being formed by the Holy Scriptures, is watching, listening to God's revelation taking shape before an din them as they follow Jesus, each person playing his or her part in the Spirit.

The theology of Christmas too easily gets lost under the gay wrappings, yet apart from its theological meaning it really has none at all.

As the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the monarch is the defender of the faith—the official religion of the country, established by law and respected by sentiment. Yet when the Queen travels to Scotland, she becomes a member of the Church of Scotland, which governs itself and tolerates no supervision by the state. She doesn’t abandon the Anglican faith when she crosses the border, but rather doubles up, although no Anglican bishop ever comes to preach at Balmoral. Elizabeth II has always embraced what former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey called the “sacramental manner in which she views her own office.” She regards her faith as a duty, “not in the sense of a burden, but of glad service” to her subjects. Her faith is also part of the rhythm of her daily life. “She has a comfortable relationship with God,” said Carey. “She’s got a capacity because of her faith to take anything the world throws at her. Her faith comes from a theology of life that everything is ordered.” She worships unfailingly each Sunday, whether in a tiny chapel in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec or a wooden hut on Essequibo in Guyana after a two-hour boat ride. But “she doesn’t parade her faith,” said Canon John Andrew, who saw her frequently during the 1960s when he worked for Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey. On holidays she attends services at the parish church in Sandringham, and at Crathie outside the Balmoral gates. Her habit is to take Communion three or four times a year—at Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday, and the occasional special service—“an old-fashioned way of being an Anglican, something she was brought up to do,” said John Andrew. She enjoys plain, traditional hymns and short, straightforward sermons. George Carey regards her as “middle of the road. She treasures Anglicanism. She loves the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which is always used at Sandringham. She would disapprove of modern services, but wouldn’t make that view known. The Bible she prefers is the old King James version. She has a great love of the English language and enjoys the beauty of words. The scriptures are soaked into her.” The Queen has called the King James Bible “a masterpiece of English prose.

Spirit of Christmas doesn't grow on a fir tree, Christmas blooms wherever the heart is hatefree.

a fluid, hybrid faith that ultimately boiled down to the celebration of all holidays indiscriminately, without giving their religion any further theological examination. Hanukkah was the time to light up the menorah, Christmas was when the tree was decorated and gifts were given and received, and that was that. On

If the heart doesn't shine with a Christly spirit, all the gifts hanging on trees are worthless.

If you cannot be Christlike in your deeds, what's the point of all these festivities, which are supposed to be rooted in goodwill towards all, not mindless self-obsession!

There is no Catholicism or C of E, there is only 'Love Thy Neighbor'.

If the history of the world is a story, then theology is a type of literary criticism. We do not just read the story and go with the flow of it, we are also to reflect on it as we read. What is the meaning of the story? We do not just want to know that the infinite God was born as a baby at Bethlehem, we should also want to know what that staggering reality might mean. Of course we must include the great events—creation, fall, the flood, the exile to Babylon. And when we include them, we must rank them, and if we do that, the birth of the Christ in Bethlehem is one of the greatest plot points ever.

His wife was dead, his career in the ministry finished. He was leaving theology and the pastoral office behind and setting out toward a goal he could not see but which he knew involved both literature and natural history. “Things seem flying to pieces,” Charles wrote Aunt Mary. Late in December 1832 the brig Jasper, 236 tons, cleared for Malta. There was a northeaster coming as Captain Ellis headed the ship, with Emerson aboard, out into the gray Atlantic swells. It was Christmas Day.7

In German-speaking countries Percht is the equivalent of Abundia and Satia. Their identical nature was clearly established by Thomas von Haselbach (ca. 1420–1464), professor of theology at the University of Vienna, who provided other names for these nocturnal visitors: Habundia, Phinzen, Sack Semper, and Sacria.24 Phinzen is the personification of Thursday, Sack Semper is a bogeyman, a member of the Christmas processions as well as the personification of Sempertac, which falls eight days following Three Kings Day (Epiphany).

Are we among those who yearn for the coming of the kingdom of justice and peace, who seek peace through justice? Or do we, like advocates of imperial theology, seek peace through victory? Where do we see the light of the world? Is America, the American empire, the light shining in the darkness? Jim Wallis, in his important book God’s Politics, reports that our president on the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 2001 spoke of America as “the light shining in the darkness.”1 The statement is remarkably similar to Rome’s claim to be Apollo, the bringer of light. Or do we see the light of the world in Jesus, who stood against empire and indeed was executed by imperial authority?

Theologically Christmas Day is the greatest occasion for rejoicing offered to sinful mankind; but this aspect of it is so august and so great that the human mind refuses to contemplate it steadily, perhaps because of its own littleness, for which of course it is in no way to blame. It prefers to concentrate its attention on ceremonial observances, expressive generally of good will and festivity, such, for instance, as giving presents and eating plum-puddings. It may be said at once here that from that conventional point of view the spirit of Christmas Day at sea appears distinctly weak. The opportunities, the materials too, are lacking. Of course, the ship’s company get a plum-pudding of some sort, and when the captain appears on deck for the first time the officer of the morning watch greets him with a “Merry Christmas, sir,” in a tone only moderately effusive. Anything more would be, owing to the difference in station, not correct. Normally he may expect a return for this in the shape of a “The same to you” of a nicely graduated heartiness. He does not get it always, however.

Their self-image was based on mere psychological information instead of theological truth. What the Gospel promises us is that we are objectively and inherently children of God (see 1 John 3: 2). This is not psychological worthiness; it is ontological, metaphysical and substantial, and cannot be gained or lost. When this given God image becomes our self-image, we are home free, and the Gospel is just about the best good news that we can hope for!

It is not that the Word of God is threatening us with fire and brimstone, but rather it is saying that goodness is its own reward and evil is its own punishment. If we do the truth and live connected in the world as it really is, we will be blessed and grace can flow, and the consolation will follow from the confrontation with the Big Picture. If we create a false world of separateness and egocentricity, it will not work and we will suffer the consequences even now. In Catholic theology we call this our tradition of “natural law.” In short, we are not punished for our sins, but by our sins!

those with doctorates in theology. No, he chose fishermen, tax collectors, and other unlikely candidates. He taught them humility by washing their feet at the Last Supper and then told them, “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (John 13:15). Jesus told his disciples, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). This theme of humility is seen throughout the New Testament. The entire Christmas story is, in part, a story about the reversal

You write an "I", that is you. Now cross it out, and there is Christ (+). Anybody who crosses themselves out in love for others, becomes a living Christ. Anybody who wipes themselves out in serving others, becomes a living Buddha. Anybody who lays themselves down to lift up others, becomes the epitome of divinity absolute. And that, my friend, is Religion 101 - it's Theology 101 - and above all, it is Life 101.

Becoming christian and converting to christianity are two different things. Converting to christianity means having the paperwork that says you are christian. Becoming christian means becoming christ-like in every aspect of life, no matter the paperwork.

Forgive Us Jesus (The Sonnet) Forgive us Jesus, my friend, We couldn't walk in your footsteps. You asked us to love our neighbor, Yet we found it impossible to be hateless. You didn't hate those who hated you, You loved them despite being mocked. Yet we can't even talk without judging today, We can't accept any difference in thought. Forgetting all comfort and luxury, You gave your life trying to erase bigotry. Yet we made you fodder for our own prejudice, And turned the crucifix into a badge of cruelty. We used you my friend to deepen our division. We prefer mindless worship over hearty compassion.

put that theory into practice. I believe that by ‘waiting on the Word’, in every sense of that phrase, waiting on the true Logos, the meaning behind all meanings, and attending closely to the way that meaning is imaginatively bodied forth in poetry, we can begin to unfold a little more of the mystery of our faith, to unpack and open out the contents of those technical words, Incarnation and Atonement. It is my conviction that to do theology well we must bring the poets to the table along with the theologians, and listen carefully to what they say.

A remarkable number of the Patrick legends are comic, portraying the saint as a man you would enjoy being around. Consider, by contrast, Patrick’s contemporary, Saint Augustine, with his towering intellect and moral and theological precision. You can’t help respecting the man, but you wouldn’t necessarily want him at your Christmas party.

What a great opportunity to rediscover this ancient use of the "Twelve Days of Christmas"! We know about the "partridge in a pear tree;' but the deeper spiritual meaning of these days is lost to most people. To illustrate, the third day represents the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. Rather than "five golden rings;' the traditional reference is to the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Seven symbolizes the gifts of the Holy Spirit in Romans 12; eight represents the Beatitudes of Matthew 5; ten-can you guess?-stands for the Ten Commandments.

In strange, often unintended ways, the pursuit of “justice,” shalom, and a “holistic” gospel can have its own secularizing effect. What begins as a gospel-motivated concern for justice can turn into a naturalized fixation on justice in which God never appears. And when that happens, “justice” becomes something else altogether—an idol, a way to effectively naturalize the gospel, flattening it to a social amelioration project in which the particularity of the revelation of God becomes strangely absent. Given the newfound appreciation for justice and shalom among evangelicals, we do well to see such trajectories as a cautionary tale, like a visitation from the ghost of Christmas future showing us where we could end up.

What’s more, Christmas itself has now far outstripped Easter in popular culture as the real celebratory center of the Christian year—a move that completely reverses the New Testament’s emphasis. We sometimes try, in hymns, prayers, and sermons, to build a whole theology on Christmas, but it can’t in fact sustain such a thing. We then keep Lent, Holy Week, and Good Friday so thoroughly that we have hardly any energy left for Easter except for the first night and day. Easter, however, should be the center. Take that away and there is, almost literally, nothing left.

Jesus is long gone, he is not coming back. Worshipping him and hoping for his so-called second coming may give you comfort, but it doesn't do anything for either Jesus or the society. The only way you can make any difference in the lives of others as well as your own, is by becoming Christ-like in character and action.

12 Days of Christmas (Sonnet 1900) On the first day of Christmas my ode to thee, promise of messy love only sweetens by indignity. On the second day of Christmas my ode to thee, pocketful of moments become memories through amity. On the third day of Christmas my ode to thee, Christ ain't a cult but a voice against animosity. On the fourth day of Christmas my ode to thee, each act of hate is the same old crucifixion frenzy. On the fifth day of Christmas my ode to thee, intolerance is the desecration of sanctity. On the sixth day of Christmas my ode to thee, reason doesn't ruin, but enhances divinity. On the seventh day of Christmas my ode to thee, true miracle unfolds in everyday acts of empathy. On the eighth day of Christmas my ode to thee, save sermon on the mount all else is triviality. On the ninth day of Christmas my ode to thee, faith ought to enhance not degrade humanity. On the tenth day of Christmas my ode to thee, every stream reflects the same aspiring piety. On the eleventh day of Christmas my call to thee, every heart is a living church, from river to the sea. On the twelfth day of Christmas I entrust to thee, season of love and peace transcends ethnicity.

Salvation is not based on theological acumen; salvation is based entirely on trust. Salvation is not found in believing the right things, but in trusting the right person.