Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 3:08pm

Christ and History

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Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest, who normally writes on purely secular topics, has an interesting Christmas column up:

 

The Christian claim about the Virgin Birth is meant as a radical announcement that Christianity is different. Christianity is not another ‘how-to’ manual telling people how to act vis-à-vis the Creator. It’s not about what kinds of foods are holy and what kinds are impure. It’s not about how to wash your hands or which way you should face when you pray.

 

 

Christianity is much more than a group of people trying to fulfill the teaching of a revered founder; it is a community of people gathered around a world changing hero. Jesus came to save and not just to teach. He did not fulfill his mission by giving the Sermon on the Mount; he fulfilled it by dying on the cross and by rising from the dead.

 

 

More, Jesus could not have fulfilled this mission if he was simply a heroic man. The human race has many heroes and history is filled with the examples of people who gave their lives for others. You can to go the Normandy beaches and see row upon row of graves of people who gave their lives that others might live and be free. Jesus accomplished more through his death because he was more than just another human being; the gospel writers and the Christians who accept their testimony believe that Jesus was also the Son of God. It was God who died upon that cross, God who took the responsibility for human sin, God who drank the cup of human suffering to the bottom.

 

 

The story of the Virgin Birth isn’t there to set up the Sermon on the Mount as the Greatest Moral Lecture in the History of Mankind. It is there because it communicates the deepest, most important truth about Jesus: that he was a human being, but more than a human being as well. It is not an accidental detail or an embellishment; it is not an awkward defense against an embarrassing rumor. It is not the result of scientific ignorance about how babies are made; it is a statement about how this particular baby was different from all the rest.

 

 

That is the main theological point that Luke’s account makes. But he had another end in view, and this is also something to remember as we think Christmas through. The story of the Virgin Birth isn’t just a story about Jesus.  The gospels are also making a point about Mary and through her about women in general. Ancient Christian writers frequently referred to Mary as the Second Eve. The first Eve, as just about everyone knows even today, was Adam’s wife. According to the first book of the Bible (Genesis), she yielded to the temptation of the serpent in the Garden of Eden to disobey God and taste the forbidden fruit. Adam went on and tasted it for himself; ever since then men have been blaming women for all the trouble in the world. For millennia men have used the Biblical story and similar stories and folk tales to justify the second-class status to which women have been historically relegated in much of the world. (In some parts of the world, poorly behaved and uneducated young men call their vicious harassment of women “Eve-teasing.”)

 

 

The figure of the Virgin Mary marks a turning point. She is the Second Eve, the one who said ‘yes’ to God when he asked her to be the mother of his son. When God really needed help, the Bible teaches, he went to a woman, not to a man. And the woman said ‘yes,’ and out of her faith and obedience came the salvation of the world.

 

 

 

Go here to read the rest.  Attempting to understand Christ, or Christianity, in purely human terms is a chase after the wind.  With Christ the divine interacted explosively with human History, and that History has never been the same again.

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Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Monday, December 28, AD 2015 7:54pm

Fr. Larry Richard rightly states that the Incarnation of Christ is the singular most important event in the universe since the Big Bang.

Numerous societies before and after Christ has not been kind to women. Islam treats women as property. Hinduism had the nasty habit of burning the surviving widow on the pyre of her dead husband. I will omit any discussion of Judaism.

Who else but Christianity exalts women? Certainly not modern feminism. Modern feminism seeks to demean the traditional role of women and demeans women who do not seek to act like men.

It is a shame our “separated brethren” (dying Protestantism) often ignore the beginning of the Gospel of St. Luke, but the lamented Fr. Corapi once stated that you can’t expect Jesus to listen to you if you “diss his mother”.

Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant. This is a concept that the Patristic writers developed. The Ark of the Covenant was considered to be so holy that death struck anyone who touched it who was not of the tribe of Levi. How much more important Mary is that the Ark?

The Church Christ founded went on to convert the Roman Empire, East and West. Even though the Western Empire collapsed, the Church Christ founded tamed and converted the barbarians and rebuilt Western culture. It beat back the Muslim invaders. It converted the Slavs. It evangelized two thirds of the Western Hemisphere and put an end to human sacrifice.

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