(LifeSiteNews) — The Christmas Gospel is not an uplifting or revolutionary narrative, but a testimony to the historical event of the incarnation of the Son of God.
In the birth of Christ from the Virgin Mary, it was revealed to the whole world: “Today in the city of David the Savior is born to you: he is the Messiah, the Lord.” (Luke 2:11). Jesus Christ is also not a religious founder and moral preacher in the usual sense, but “the true Savior of the world” (John 4:42) and, by virtue of his assumed human nature, the one and only mediator between God and mankind (1 Timothy 2:4f; Acts 4:12).
But why — for the love of all the world — do even appointed proclaimers of the faith and witnesses of the gospel avoid the question of truth in an embarrassed and gruff manner? The question is whether God himself has made himself known to us in Christ and has acted freely in history for our salvation or whether the profession of faith is just a pious fiction or an empty projection of our hopes, which will never be fulfilled in reality but could only satisfy our imagination. Do we think we can bridge the gap between the real truth of the “Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1; Rom 1:3f) on the one hand and hypothetical relativism, i.e., speaking and acting “as if” the articles of the Creed were true, by resorting to the postmodern concept of a Jesus narrative?
This narrative is supposed to be a meaningful story that, regardless of its objective truth content, makes the cognitive content of the Christian faith, the imperatives of its morality, and the practiced way of life of following Jesus plausible for practical use. It is therefore not the fact of the birth of the Christ-child that fills hearts with joy and hope, but the aesthetic pleasure of the Christmas liturgy, which dampens metaphysical nihilism and numbs the pessimism of life with festive music. The higher critical reason delights in the insight that it has both seen through the biblical stories and the church’s doctrines of faith (the dogmas) as merely time-conditioned claddings of general rational truths or moral principles and saved them for the use of practical reason.
Many “modern” Christians, then, who were first influenced by the deistic (Voltaire) and pantheistic conception of God of the rationalist Enlightenment (Spinoza, Letter 73 “That God has assumed human nature seems to me as absurd as if someone wanted to say that the circle has assumed the nature of a square.”) and the critique of religion (Comte, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud), and then the metaphysics-critical and revelation-skeptical philosophy (Lessing, Kant, Fichte) and the evolutionary world view of modern natural and historical sciences, have lost faith in the reality and truth of the salvific and eschatological presence of God in Jesus Christ, and have since tried to save “their” Christianity by reinterpreting Christological truth into a Christian narrative of their own subjective truth.
Like the ancient Gnostics, their modern disciples consider themselves to be enlightened and adult Christians who, unlike the immature Catholics, do not need the authority of God in the mediation of Holy Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition, or even in the judgment of the Church’s Magisterium in order to represent, with their critical autonomous reason as “progressive Christians,” the highest level of human intellect and freedom and the most advanced cultural development of humanity.
Without a clear reaction from the responsible bishops, a Southwest German theology professor can formally deny the incarnation and question the salvific significance of Christ’s death on the cross. In their fixation on secondary justifications for their existence (global warming, migration policy, ideological partisanship in election campaigns), they have hardly realized that the central content of the Christian faith is being radically called into question. They do not hear or see the saw on the branch of the church bureaucracy that supports them. And it is beyond their imagination that with the uprooting of the whole tree, the leap from one branch to the other sawed-off branch has become meaningless because being a Christian without faith in God and Jesus Christ (John 17:3) has lost all meaning. “You are the salt of the earth. If salt loses its flavor, how can you make it salty again? It is no longer good for anything; it is thrown away and trampled on by people.” (Mt 5, 13)
The assertion that the incarnation could not have taken place because, viewed from a philosophical concept of God — produced by our finite reason — it is downright absurd and scandalous that the Godhead touches the human and material (according to the 2nd century AD Middle Platonist Apuleius, De Deo Socratis 3; also Augustine, De civitate Die 8, 14) did not first appear on the scene of intellectual and religious history with Kant’s critical philosophy.
As is well known, Kant considered a real revelation of God or its knowledge by our finite reason a priori, before all historical fact-finding, to be impossible. The Neoplatonic philosophers (Kelsos, Porphyrios, Emperor Julian Apostata), who were critical and hostile toward early Christianity with its claim to a higher intellect, considered it impossible for God as a pure idea to enter the lower world of matter, suffering, and the finite.
This dread of the real world of pain and screams, of blood and disgust, of greatness and wickedness, in which man is fully integrated in his corporeality, has no basis in Christianity. For in a good creation, matter (especially in the bodily-spiritual unity of the human person) does not mean distance from God. He redeems us not from the body but from its mortality and not from the world but from its wickedness. It is precisely in the incarnation, the bodily resurrection and the sensual communication of grace in the sacraments that the material, historical and social world becomes the medium of his self-proclamation to us humans “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
The dualistic opposition of spirit and matter (since Descartes) was also the deepest reason why in modern idealism the material world, contingent history and social development were eliminated from the purely intellectual, inner, moral relationship with God, or why the opposing materialism positivistically eliminated or therapeutically used the God-reference of man as a (dangerous or useful) fiction, illusion, projection.
From the higher standpoint of idealism, Christianity was interpreted and relativized as a historical variant of religious feeling or the heteronomous justification of morality. Catholicism, with its salvation realism, its sacramental structure, and its principle of authority, was regarded by the enlightened reason of subjective or absolute idealism as a pre-critical, medieval, even infantile-regressive form of Christianity, which had missed the “connection to modernity” or had to catch up.
However, even according to Kant’s epistemological presuppositions, which themselves would have to be discussed once again with regard to their historical conditions and limitations, the existence of God cannot be proven as an object beyond experience, but also cannot be rejected as a mystery that is impossible for reason to hear, then God cannot be denied the real possibility that he freely reveals himself to us. He is the origin and goal of man in his search for truth and the justified desire for happiness and eternal bliss.
Indeed, the existence of God and his free devotion to us cannot be deduced or demonstrated from the subjective rational idea of him. But precisely because God is free in Himself, He can also give the world a share in the knowledge of Himself in His eternal Word through the incarnation and the loving will to Himself in the Holy Spirit, whom He has “poured out on all flesh” (Acts 2:17) and “into our hearts” (Romans 5:5).
The reality of God’s historical self-revelation in Jesus Christ can certainly not be pinned down according to the criteria of positivism and logically imposed on us as the result of a mathematical equation. For man to be able to freely decide (or in self-negation) to refuse God according to his dignity as a person, the truth and reality of revelation are present in the world in the mediating forms of the testimony of the “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word from the beginning” (Lk 1, 2) as well as in the proclamation of the Gospel and the confession of faith of the Church.
Faith can neither be rationalistically deduced by mere proofs of reason nor can it be proven epistemologically as unknowable and ontologically as impossible by critical reason. “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.” (1 Cor 1:21).
It is in this foolishness of proclamation and its lack of dead-beating arguments that man is not crushed in the face of God’s power and wisdom. For faith is not servile submission, but liberation to the “freedom and glory of the children of God.” (Rom 8:21). The “world” (i.e., people in their aversion to God) can close the door to their Lord and Creator, even though the one who enters it (and our hearts) in the incarnation is his property.
The person who accepts God in Christ is not alienated but comes to his true self through and in God by means of loving unity with the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. For despite all unbelief, the truth remains that it has come through the Word (Logos), the Son of God, who enlightens every human being. And to all who humbly and willingly received him, “he gave power to become children of God.” (Jn 1, 12).
The words of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, the “teacher of unity” (Pope Francis) against the Gnostics of his time and of all times, remain valid: “For this purpose the Logos became man, that man might receive the Logos within himself and, receiving sonship, become a son/daughter of God. For we could not receive incorruption and immortality in any other way than by being united with incorruption and immortality.” (Against Heresies III, 19, 1).
There is another argument in favor of the truth of the Incarnation as a historical event in contrast to its interpretation as a mythical and archetypal symbol of supratemporal rational or soul-dramatic existential truths. It is the disastrous failure of all post-Christian worldviews and political ideologies of self-salvation, from social Darwinism to transhumanism. They have never been able to conceal the nihilistic abyss from which they have risen and into which they have plunged millions of innocent people to their doom. This world of death and lies can only be overcome by the God of life and truth.
Faith in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, was, is, and will forever remain the reason and criterion for being a Christian. No other is worthy of our unconditional trust. Hope in him alone in life and in death.
“For we know: The Son of God has come. And he has given us insight so that we may recognize the true God. And we are in this true God, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.” (1 John 20).
This essay by Cardinal Gerhard Müller was first published by kath.net in German.