B. B. Warfield on the Celebration of Christmas
In a review of a German book beautifully illustrating the art associated with the celebration of Christmas written by Georg Rietschel (1842-1914), who was a professor of theology at Leipzig University (H.T. Barry Waugh: Warfield on Celebrating Christmas) , B. B. Warfield concludes by raising the following questions:
1). What can be said for the customs [of Christmas] to which we have committed ourselves?
2). There is no reason to believe that our Lord wished his birthday to be celebrated by his followers.
3). There is no reason to believe that the day on which we are celebrating it is his birthday (see Michael Kruger Five Misconceptions of Christmas).
4). There is no reason to believe that the way in which we currently celebrate it would meet his approval.
These questions cause Warfield to conclude with the follow challenge; “are we not in some danger of making of what we fondly tell ourselves is a celebration of the Advent of our Lord, on the one side something much more like the Saturnalia of old Rome than is becoming in a sober Christian life; and, on the other something much more like a shopkeeper’s carnival than can comport with the dignity of even a sober secular life?”
Christmas is a difficult time for Christians precisely because of these important questions raised by Warfield. What do we do when a secular holiday and all the things that go with it (some good, some terrible) becomes thoroughly intertwined with the Christian celebration of our Lord’s birth and incarnation? There is something wonderful about an annual gathering when families and friends come together, feast, share gifts, and make family memories. There is something awful when “Frosty the Snowman” plays in the annual rotation of the FM radio station of Christmas music right after “Joy to the World.”
But Waugh points out that there is no “bah humbug!” here, although there is a strong caution given about how we ought to work to untangle these two events so as to treat each one appropriately. Waugh points out,
Even though his concluding comments are forceful, Warfield was not against Christmas as a seasonal celebration but instead thought it was an unnecessary addition to Scripture’s ecclesiastical calendar which cycles every seven days on the first day of the week. I have seen a Christmas card expressing seasonal sentiments of greeting and good will sent by him to his Princeton Seminary colleague J. Gresham Machen. The illustration on the cover is a snow-covered village. He must have accepted Christmas as a seasonal celebration, possibly as a national holiday of good will or a time to remember friends and family. The closing lines of the review show that marketing and gift giving were as common in Warfield’s day as they are now.
Warfield proceeds to review Professor Rietschel’s book by focusing upon the professor’s account of the history of the church’s celebration of Christmas alongside Easter and Pentecost (Whitsunday). One of the best ways to begin to “untangle” the secular from the sacred in this instance is to consider the history of the Christmas celebration as it develops in the church across time.
Says Warfield:
Prof. Rietschel tells us that no other Christian festival has so intimately wedded itself with the family life and the life of the people as Christmas. Nevertheless, for more than three hundred years the Church got along entirely without it. The primitive Church did not even possess a distinctively Christian Easter or Whitsunday. By the middle of the second century we find, however, Easter celebrated and soon afterwards Whitsunday; and by the end of the third century, or the beginning of the fourth, a third festival begins to appear in the East by the side of these. But this third festival was not Christmas but Epiphany; and it was celebrated on the sixth of January, along with which there gradually came to be made remembrance of the birth of Christ also. The idea that Christ was born on the 25th of December seems to appear first early in the third century as the result of a calculation from the 25th of March, the New Year’s day of that time, which had come to be looked upon as the anniversary of the Annunciation.
Warfield continues . . .
But there is no trace of the celebration of this day until the middle of the fourth century. Prof. Rietschel thinks indeed that we can fix confidently on 354 (or possibly 353) as the exact year of its first celebration. This occurred at Rome; and thence the new festival spread—reaching Constantinople in 379, Cappadocia in 382, Antioch in 388, Egypt in 432; but Palestine not until the seventh century, while the great Armenian Church has resisted the innovation up to our own day.
As for the origin of the Christmas gifts and the Christmas tree, blame the Germans and Queen Victoria!
If the celebration of the twenty-fifth of December as the birthday of the Lord dates thus only from the later Patristic age, the modes of its celebration most common among us are of yet more recent origin. The custom of giving presents upon Christmas Day is of medieval invention; the Christmas-tree a modern extension. We first hear of Christmas-presents late in the fourteenth century: and the usage made its way only slowly and against much opposition. It was even made the subject of legal enactments; and as late as 1661 and indeed as the 1735 Saxon “Policey-Ordnung” sought to regulate and provide against the abuses of this custom. The Christmas tree seems to have come in through a confusion of the festival of Christmas with the observance of “the day of Adam and Eve,” which fell on December 24th, and a feature of which was the erection of a “Paradise,” in which were planted the two trees of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and of Life. We appear to hear of our distinctive “Christmas-tree” first at Strassburg, at the opening of the seventeenth century. The “burning Christmas-tree,” that is the Christmas-tree adorned with candles, we meet with first about 1737. It was not until the nineteenth century that it began to spread very widely even in Germany. Neither in the North German States of Holstein, Mecklenburg, Pommerania and the Provinces of Prussia, nor in the Rhine-land in the West, nor in Bavaria in the South, was it in use until towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Outside of Germany it has appeared only as a German importation. Oddly enough the first Christmas-tree was set up in France and England in the same year, 1840, by the Mecklenburg Princess Helen, Duchess of Orleans, in the former, and by the Saxe-Coburg Prince Albert in the latter. “Thus the Christmas-tree,” smilingly remarks Prof. Rietschel, “has held its conquering way over the earth.”
Warfield concludes his review in addressing how European Christmas customs have been Americanized.
It goes without saying that we have adverted only to a few of the numerous interesting facts brought out in this wide survey of Christmas usages. We have, indeed, confined ourselves to such as furnish a compressed account of the origins of the customs now most common in American families. [Rietschel’s] book is crammed full of other lines of investigation of equal inherent interest. Even such as we have briefly reported may supply us, however, with some food for thought. There is a certain passionate intensity in the way in which Christmas is now celebrated among us. But after all, what can be said for the customs to which we have committed ourselves?
Warfield closes with the questions raised above,
There is no reason to believe that our Lord wished His birthday to be celebrated by His followers. There is no reason to believe that the day on which we are celebrating it is His birthday. There is no reason to believe that the way in which we currently celebrate it would meet His approval. Are we not in some danger of making of what we fondly tell ourselves is a celebration of the Advent of our Lord, on the one side something much more like the Saturnalia of old Rome than is becoming in a sober Christian life; and, on the other something much more like a shopkeeper’s carnival than can comport with the dignity of even a sober secular life?
What shall we say? Well, we surely must admit we are stuck with our current Christmas confusion, but we can begin to untangle such by stopping the habit, as Warfield puts it, of fondly telling ourselves that the American Christmas is about our Lord’s birth and incarnation. What we do at Christmas really does belong in the “happy holidays” category. I’m with Warfield here—there is nothing wrong and much good about an annual celebration grounded in family, food, and gift-giving. Nothing better than the smell of a real Christmas tree in the house. But the less of Christ in this “happy holiday” the better.
If we choose to celebrate the incarnation and birth of our Savior on December 25, lets strive to keep Advent and the American Christmas completely distinct, even if we celebrate both on the same day.