Should Christians celebrate Christmas? What do you think? What are some of the pros and cons?
The Cons or Reasons why not to celebrate Christmas:
1. Many of our current Christmas customs are either not explicitly Christian, or worse yet actually pagan in origin. Think with me of Christmas trees, yule logs, Santa, Christmas lights and decorations, etc. What do any of these things have to do with God’s gift of a Savior?
2. Even the popular thought of telling children to be good little boys and girls in order to get presents from Santa represents unbiblical thinking that we can be good through our own human efforts. Where is our dependence upon God and our need of His grace?
3. Much of the focus at Christmas is on commercialism and/or materialism. Recently I read in a news magazine that the average American spends $866 a year on Christmas for decorations, presents, and special holiday foods. How does this compare with what you are doing this year?
4. Many of our current practices are a distraction from the true meaning of Christ’s birth. Jesus warns us in the Sermon on the Mount that we can either lay up treasures in heaven or treasures on earth. It is not automatically wrong to seek to bless others (including those in our own families with various gifts), but the question is where is the focus and priority in our Christmas celebrations?
5. Historically, a number of Christians have refused to celebrate Christmas as pagan inroads into the church. The Puritans are the clearest example of a godly and committed group of people who rejected observing Christmas. There is a lot we can appreciate about the Puritans, so we should weigh their counsel seriously.
6. We can also observe that the word Christmas or nativity are not found in Scripture in any of our standard Bible translations nor in the original Greek or Hebrew. So, we are not dealing with biblical language as such. Even the etymology of our English word Christmas is Christ Mass, which suggests a theology different from that of many of us.
7. God never tells us to celebrate Christmas of the events related to Jesus’ birth anywhere in His Word. But there is a lot He doesn’t tell us in His Word. For example, He also doesn’t tell us to observe the American version of Thanksgiving or even Good Friday or Easter.
The Bible uses other language to describe what we sometimes think of as Christmas, and this biblical terminology of the incarnation of Christ will get us on firmer ground for knowing how to celebrate Christmas. The story of Christ’s birth as a babe in Bethlehem is found several times in the Bible, especially in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
Here is my current list of the Pros for celebrating Christmas:
1. It is an opportunity to focus our minds and hearts on Christ. Anything that helps us learn more about the Person and Work of Christ—who He is and what He has done for us—is always a priority.
2. Christ’s incarnation is one of the highwater marks in the whole of redemptive history as we find this described for us in Scripture. We can ask ourselves what is the climax of biblical revelation? Here I think it would be a toss-up between Jesus’ birth, His death on the cross for us, and His resurrection from the dead. But the truth of the matter is that these three events are all interrelated; you can’t have one without the others. They all go together, and Jesus’ birth is part of this constellation of key events.
3. Even the secular world has long recognized the significance of Christ’s birth by dividing history up into years numbered BC for Before Christ and AD meaning the Latin Anno Domini, meaning “in the year of the Lord” for those years after His birth. More recently in an effort to be religiously neutral and politically correct, this has often been changed to BCE or Before the Common Era and CE or Common Era. But the idea is still the same. We still begin with the assumed date of Christ’s birth as our starting date.
Incidentally, the idea to count years from the birth of Jesus Christ was first proposed in what we today would call the year AD 525 by Dionysius Exiguus, a Christian monk who tried to calculate the time of Jesus’ birth as the “zero” mark on his numbering system for revising the calendar to the one we currently use. This approach gradually became the standardized system for calculating dates during the early Middle Ages. Prior to 525 all kinds of other numbering systems were used, including the popular one in the Roman world of NT times of counting from what today we would call 753 BC as the traditional date for the founding of Rome. But the point here is that even the secular world has recognized that Christ’s birth was perhaps the most significant event in human history. Anything that important is certainly worth celebrating.
By the way, in hindsight we can see that the sixth century Dionysius assumed the wrong date for Jesus’ birth. Further scholarship has observed a statement recorded in Josephus, a Jewish historian, who relates Herod’s death (the same King Herod who tried to murder the baby Jesus and all the other male children in Bethlehem) to the timing of a particularly significant lunar eclipse. Modern astronomers have been able to calculate the dates of lunar eclipses in antiquity, and it appears that the most likely lunar eclipse visible in Israel at this time would have taken place in 4 B.C. So probably Jesus was actually born in 4 B.C., or as others would assume, perhaps a year earlier in 5 B.C.
4. There is at least some evidence in Scripture of joy and rejoicing at the time of Jesus’ birth.
Here we can think of the words of the angels to the shepherds in Luke 2:10-14: “And the angel said to them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ ethe Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth.”
We can also think of the story of the wisemen or magi in Matthew 2:10-11: “When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.”
If the shepherds and wise men rejoiced at Jesus’ birth, then it is certainly appropriate for us to rejoice and celebrate Jesus’ birth as well
5. Christmas is a time when we remember and celebrate Christ’s first coming, and as such it helps us prepare and look ahead for His second coming. At the time of His first coming, His people had been looking forward to the Messiah’s birth for centuries, and now we have been looking forward to His return for centuries as well. Hopefully reminding ourselves of Christmas and His first coming will help us live expectantly as we await His Second Coming.
6. There are places for all kinds of meaningful and appropriate family and church customs, celebrations, and traditions. We all celebrate all kinds of birthdays and anniversaries—and appropriately so, even though we are not commanded specifically to do so in Scripture. Celebrating Christmas as families and as a church is not necessarily wrong or inappropriate. And celebrating Christ’s birth seems particularly appropriate.
7. It is a season of the year when we can more easily point others to Christ than at other times. Christmas can be a time of potential ministry when it is approached in the right way. I know as a family we have often tried to write an annual Christmas letter as a means of trying to keep in touch with more distant family and friends—many or who don’t know the Lord.
The bottom line here in deciding how appropriate it is to celebrate Christmas depends upon our motives. Why is it that we are celebrating Christmas? The key to a proper celebration of Christmas is a proper focus on Christ: both who He is—or His person—and what He came to do—or the works of Christ.
Celebrating Christ’s birth for the right reasons—namely glorifying God—is always good and right. While celebrating Christmas for the wrong reasons is questionable at best. The question for each of us is, what thoughts go through our minds when we think about Christmas? Hopefully, we see Christ’s coming as one of the key events both in world history as well as what God has been doing in our own personal lives.
Let me close with two short devotional thoughts on Christ’s incarnation. The first is by the church father Augustine, and the second by a Princeton theologian of a century or so ago named B. B. Warfield. Both of these quotes are taken from a new Christmas devotional my wife and I have been reading called, O Come, O Come Emmanuel by Jonathan Gibson (Crossway, 2023).
“Man’s Maker was made man, that He, Ruler of the stars might nurse at His mother’s breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey, that the Truth might be accused of false witness, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood, that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die.” —Augustine
“The glory of the incarnation is that it presents to our adoring gaze not a humanized God or a deified man, but a true God-man—one who is all that God is and at the same time all that man s: on whose mighty arm we can rest, and to whose human sympathy we can appeal. We cannot afford to lose either God in the man or the man in God; our hearts cry out for the complete God-man, whom the Scriptures offer us.” —B. B. Warfield
As the popular saying goes, Jesus is the reason for the season. And we can properly celebrate Christmas only to the extent that Jesus is preeminent.