It is increasingly difficult to think of Christmas as remembrance of Jesus’ birth amidst the gifts and other aspects. The day involves fusing the sacred and secular and such efforts immediately or eventually simply do not work out well because Scripture comes in conflict with the world. I think the world has turned Christians from he who was “veiled in flesh, the Godhead see” to a cute baby that is nothing more than that. If we are to continue Christmas, the emphasis should be the supernatural work of God in the incarnation, God and man in two distinct natures and one person.

In the book review that follows, B. B. Warfield summarized the development of Christmas practices over the centuries and their prominence in his day. 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. He compares Christmas to the Roman holiday Saturnalia which is important because it ocurred in December and merged into the flow of practices that developed into Christmas as the ancient church centuries passed to the medieval.

Read More