We begin our celebration of Christmas where we ought to begin it, and that is with a child in a manger, visiting angels, followed by the visiting shepherds, and all the other features of the story that we know so well. We begin with the basic facts of the story. But the facts of the story are such that, upon reflection, we also come to realize that it will take centuries to work out the implications of these facts. And by the time the Lord returns, we still won’t be done with it.
We know what the problem was—from our disobedience in the Garden on, the human race, our race, was estranged from God. We also know who overcame that estrangement—God in His mercy determined to visit us in human flesh, and His name would be called Emmanuel, God with us. The Word made flesh took on a body so that He could sacrifice Himself on a bloody cross. That is the ultimate meaning of Christmas in broad outline.
But there were naturally follow-up questions, and these follow-up questions took the Church three and four centuries to settle. The first great answer was at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. and the second great answer was at Chalcedon in 451 A.D. Who is this Jesus exactly? Nicea determined, rightly, that the Lord Jesus was fully God and fully man. But then Chalcedon needed to answer the question raised by the fact of these two natures—what was the precise relationship between the two natures?
Their considered formulation was that Jesus of Nazareth was one person, and He was one person with two natures, the divine and human. There was a true union between the two natures “without division, without separation.” At the same time, a true distinction is maintained between the natures, “without confusion, without change.” Without the distinction kept and maintained, the door is opened to that old opium dream of human deification. Without the union accomplished, we are still in our sins on this side of the Creator/creature chasm, and would resort, as we have always resorted, to the task of self-salvation which always leads to attempts, at the end of the day, at self-deification.
We are always confronted with two basic options. Shall we hear and obey the Word of God, or shall we linger and listen to the whispered words of man? God or man? Who shall be our salvation? If we do not heed and obey the Word of God, then we are left with the words of man. But when man aspires to do what only God can do, he inevitably turns to the power of collective man, which is to say, the humanistic state. That is our poor man’s approximation of Deity—a Hegelian nightmare while running a temperature of 104.
Statism is not simply a political arrangement that is inefficient. It is not just something that facilitates encrusted bureaucracies becoming overgrown and cumbersome. Statism is necessarily the established church of the false religion of humanism.
Limited government is the essentially Christian view of civic government because it is government of the creatures, by the creatures, for the creatures. When God is great and man is small, the end result is that government remains modest and small. When man is great, at least in his own imagination, and God is small, also in his dreams, the end result of that is a swollen civic order.
In our civilization’s long war against civic tyranny, what would be the date of the most significant battle, the most momentous clash? On the subject of liberty, some might want to offer something like July 4, 1776. Others might say June 15, 1215, the day the Magna Carta was signed at Runnymeade. Those were important dates, to be sure, but I would want to say that it was the issuance of the Definition of Chalcedon in 451. This was the death blow to statism because it was the death blow to the humanism that undergirds and supports every form of statism.
What Chalcedon did was shut the door on any possibility of a divine/human mish mash. This great statement became an essential part of the West’s “social imaginary,” meaning the framework of our most basic assumptions. This even includes those who self-consciously wish for the older pagan order, and who would labor to return us there. But it is all in vain. The Incarnation has happened and cannot be undone. Moreover, we as a people have wrestled with the implications and made a decision. That cannot really be undone either. There can be brief spasmodic revolts against this new reality, but a new reality it remains. Christ is born, Christ lived a perfect and sinless life, Christ was crucified by the old order, and He rose again from the dead bringing the new order with Him. And the Christ who did all this is the great Jehovah, born of a woman, born under the law.
All of this is suffused with meaning, and one of the central meanings is political . . . and it is political grace upon grace. We need no longer be governed by the delusional and darkened imaginations of would-be gods. Take any of our ruling kleptocracies, promote them to the level of Olympian deities, and then try to imagine why you would want to live under such a regime. God has offered a better way.
To summarize it all, the gift of Emmanuel at Christmas, as defined and protected at Chalcedon, was the death blow to the ancient humanist pipe dream of man becoming God. That is always where the unbelieving heart wants to go, but the way is closed off now. And, as it turns out, if we are to be saved at all, the only alternative to man becoming God is the true and actual gospel of God becoming man. That is precisely what happened, and this is precisely why we are able to celebrate as we do.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.