Snippet

Belief

Christmas culture

Creed

26 December 2024

3 min read

My Boxing Day anti-climax

What if the most wonderful time has come and gone, and not much has changed?

Jonny Torrance

Jonathan is a priest and theologian who researches theology and comedy.

A grump cat wears a red Christmas hat, sitting amongst Christmas decorations.

Amin Alizadeh on Unsplash.

Can I begin by sharing an embarrassing secret?

Every year I find Christmas… a disappointment.

This is because it turns out that I’m still basically a 10-year-old, and I still, in the core of my being, believe that the presents under the tree are going to be the key to the lasting happiness I seek.

And, not only that, but I am also convinced that somehow all the candles, and the nostalgia, and the Christmas specials of Call the Midwife, will add up to some glorious, mulled wine inspired transcendence.

Now I know all this is nonsense.

I know that low expectations are the key to enjoying family holidays; that the presents are tokens of love, and sometimes obligation, which aren’t supposed to complete me.

And yet, on Boxing Day there is always this sensation of anti-climax.

The presents have been opened, and the people I love have done their best, and sometimes given me truly creative and thoughtful presents, but none of them are the specific thing I secretly craved.

And the carols were stunning, and candlelight does make everything and everyone beautiful, and I cried at Call the Midwife, but I’m still me, with all my ambivalence and endless need and childish self-regard.

The most wonderful time of the year has come and gone, and not much has changed.

Which gets me thinking about that first Christmas, and how anti-climactic, in some ways, that was too.

Christians believe that the birth of this particular baby in that particular stable, was a key turning point in all history, as God entered the world in human form, coming to rescue his people and restore humanity.

But in the short term, how much actually changed?

Mary and Joseph still faced the overwhelming task of keeping a new-born alive, in a stable far from home.

The shepherds and the wise men seem to have wondered back to their respective lives, and are never heard from again.

And evil still rages unchecked. The story doesn’t make it into many Nativity plays (strangely enough) but the next episode in the narrative is truly horrific – Herod, the paranoid ruler massacring all the babies in Bethlehem in a futile attempt to eliminate the new-born king.

The light shineth in darkness, as we hear in the stunning final reading of Carol services, but the darkness comprehended it not.

Christmas came and went, and the world kept turning.

Christian faith always has to contend with this reality – that not much may change. And so for me there is actually hope in the recognition that the bible includes quite a lot of reality – quite a lot of disappointment, and non-transformation, and outright evil – in its telling of the entrance of God into the world.

And yet, and yet. I also believe that that baby, that birth, that Christmas, really did sow concrete seeds of change into the midst of the darkness and disappointment.

The darkness may not have comprehended the light, but neither could it overcome it.

And somehow, the light shines still, even amidst the piles of wrapping paper and washing up and reminders of human failure that fill our post-Christmas days.

Happy boxing day!

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Explainer

Creed

Faith

Justification by faith

15 April 2024

6 min read

The Rest is Luther

Did 'The Rest is History' get Luther right? Graham Tomlin gives his verdict

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Two podcast hosts in different rooms appear on a split screen talking to each other

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook rank Luther's influence.

I have to confess, I don't listen to every episode of The Rest is History - does anyone do that with the astonishing volume of material they produce? Yet when I see something that interests me – 1970s Britain, the Lost Library of Alexandria, the Easter Rising of 1916, I’m in. So, when I saw they were doing a series on Martin Luther, I just had to listen.

With much of what they cover - take the Lost Library of Alexandria for example - I wouldn’t really know whether they were telling the truth or not, having a passing interest and only a vague knowledge of the topic. Yet this one was different, because, without wanting to blow any trumpets, I do know a fair bit about Luther. I’ve written a doctorate, a biography and a couple of other books on him, lectured on Luther at Oxford University for many years, and spent a lot of time in libraries, poring over his commentaries and treatises, wading my way through dense books by German scholars picking apart the most minute aspects of his theology.

Very often when you hear something on the TV or radio that you know something about, you realise the journalists are winging it. They get away with it because no-one knows any better. So, I wondered this time, would I see through the boys on the podcast, and realise they were winging it too?

They made the Reformation sound and feel the dramatic and earth-shaking movement that it was.

Well, my admiration for Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland went up massively. It was brilliant. I once asked Tom whether they had an army of researchers doing their work for them and he told me they didn’t - they read most of the stuff themselves. So, to have them do five episodes on a topic that is not necessarily their specialist subject and get pretty much all of the story not just right, but really interesting, is quite an achievement. They made the Reformation sound and feel the dramatic and earth-shaking movement that it was.

They normally recount history with a good dose of humour, drama and colour. That is taken for granted. They know how to tell a good story. However, they also really know their stuff. Tom led the way, and I must say, told the story with a level of detail, accuracy and sympathy that was quite remarkable. They clearly enjoyed it too – they loved his earthiness, his preoccupation with the devil and excrement that is so distinctively Luther.

Martin Luther, as they said at the end, was no saint. He was a man of extremes. He could inspire devoted loyalty from his friends, and fury from his enemies in equal measure. He was never dull. He always said his besetting sin was anger – he claimed to write best when he was furious. That explains the vituperative language, the skill at invective, his genius for insults. He said terrible things about the peasants and even worse things about the Jews. Yet he also launched a movement that brought fresh dignity and purpose to countless people across Europe and beyond – he can be said to have touched the lives of the one billion Protestants in the world today. He literally changed the world. And Tom and Dominic helped us understand why.

Definitely a nine out of ten.

But why not ten?

Well, I did have one small quibble. Luther was portrayed as someone who struggled to know that God loved him. So far, so good. His great breakthrough was described by the excellent Tom Holland as “a personal experience of God”, whereby Luther found “a feeling of being washed in the love of God.” Luther’s new discovery was that “If God loves you, you exist in a state of grace… which is a feeling that Christ is present in you, in your secretmost heart, and the certainty of that grace gives you a peace of conscience.”

Now there is something of that in Luther, and it was close, but it’s not quite the way he would have put it.

Luther is really not that interested in experiences of God. In fact, he distrusts them. in 1521, a group of prophets arrived in Wittenberg from a small town called Zwickau claiming experiences of God, but Luther was having none of it. He asked about their experience – but not whether they had experienced the love of God, but whether they had experienced his absence. Had they experienced what Luther called Anfechtung – the experience of feeling God is against you, when you struggle with temptation, are driven to despair, when God doesn’t answer your prayers, and when all you know is your own shame, sin, and disgrace? What do you do then?

And that’s why the Bible was important to him – as an existential anchor when the storms of life hit.

The reason he asked about this was that such experiences so often are the things that help bring faith to birth, because they press the question of who you listen to, or trust, in such times – your own feelings of inadequacy and shame? Or God’s word that tells you something different?

Luther found peace of conscience, not in a mystical experience of the love of God, but in hearing again and again the Word which God had spoken to the human race in Jesus Christ. Against all the odds, and despite his frequent experience of God’s absence rather than his presence, he recalled that God had sent his Son, as a pledge once and for all, that God’s heart was full of love and kindness. In sending Christ, God had given himself (or technical language, his ‘righteousness’) to us in Christ, and the only fitting response, was simply to believe and trust that this is true, whereby that ‘righteousness’ becomes ours, and we are, to use Luther's language, 'justified'. Christians are therefore, in Luther’s classic and paradoxical phrase, ‘both righteous and sinful’ at the same time.

This was indeed profoundly emotional for him. It brought a flood of joy and relief. Yet that joy was the result of faith in faith in the Word, which was the main thing. The emotions followed faith, not the other way round.

He once put it like this: “God achieves his purposes through suffering, pain and anxiety. Yet of course these are not the things in which you expect to find God. As a result, most people do not recognise this as God’s work, because they expect God only to be revealed in glory, grandeur and splendour. The way God works confounds human expectations and so, faith is needed to see past the appearance of things to their true reality.”

This was the doctrine of justification by faith – not trying to be extra religious or having ecstatic experiences of God but simply betting your life on the notion that Jesus is God’s great gift to the world, a gift that tells us he is, despite everything that may point in the other direction, full of love and goodness – and not just to the human race in general, but to you, to me. And that’s why the Bible was so important to Luther – as an existential anchor when the storms of life hit.

Tom and Dominic did a fantastic job in their series on Luther. I really recommend you listen to it – you won’t regret it. Only remember, Luther relied more on faith in the Word of God than the fleeting feelings of his heart:

“Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favour that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God's grace makes you happy, joyful and bold.”