Cotton Mather, than whom none with more zeal adored the Deity, and divine commands obeyed, was on his way to the meetinghouse when he inadvertently stepped in a temporal vortex, from whence he found himself transported to Bethlehem.
Momentarily disoriented by his precipitous journey, when a joyful band of shepherds hastened by, he accosted one of them to inquire as to where they were headed.
“To a manger in the city of David, to celebrate Messiah’s birth!”
The goodly parson stood aghast at this contagion of popery, and proceeded to catechize the errant shepherds on the Regulative Principle.
After successfully dissuading the shepherds from going to the manger, Mather beheld a shining choir of angels on the hillside, praising God in the highest. At that the goodly parson strode over to the angelic host and sternly remonstrated Gabriel for co-opting a heathenish holiday: “O alienate from God, O spirit accursed. Forsaken of all good; I see thy fall Determined, and thy hapless crew involved in this perfidious laud!”
Then the angels, duly admonished, went silent and betook a somber retreat to heaven.
lol. Awesome.
ReplyDelete"...than whom none with more zeal adored the Deity...."
ReplyDeleteWow, and people are picking apart my syntax at Pyro today! I'm sending them here.
(c;
That aside, very good point. If we apply the principle "Make much of what God makes much of," the commemoration of Jesus' birth is worth a joyous party.
ReplyDeleteDJP SAID:
ReplyDelete"Wow, and people are picking apart my syntax at Pyro today! I'm sending them here."
Actually, you could send them to Paradise Lost. I cribbed a bit of Miltonian syntax in my parody.
No doubt Brother Mather, once properly oriented, would realize he was not in the midst of popish rituals, and would, no doubt, have joined in the unique, time delineated events surrounding the adoration of the Christ Child.
ReplyDeleteNext up for our intrepid time traveler; the tabernacle at the time of David and the Crystal Cathedral “Glory of Christmas” Animal Extravaganza (pre bankruptcy, of course).
Yeah, tell that to Philip!
ReplyDeleteWhen led by the Spirit to join to the chariot he heard the eunuch read out loud that as a lamb He was led silent to the slaughter not opening His mouth. Upon further investigation, Philip opened his mouth and preach Christ to wit the man wanted to be washed!
Act 8:35 Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus.
Joyless to the World?
Hilarious!
TOM SAID:
ReplyDelete"No doubt Brother Mather, once properly oriented, would realize he was not in the midst of popish rituals, and would, no doubt, have joined in the unique, time delineated events surrounding the adoration of the Christ Child."
Yes, worshipping Jesus is normally a very wicked thing to do. It can only be justified under extreme, exceptional circumstances. It requires special permission to celebrate the birth of the Savior.
The story is certainly funny, but does it accurately represent Mather's convictions? Was Mather joyless, as the caricature suggests? Did he not believe in rejoicing in Christ?
ReplyDeleteOr, did he simply not equate rejoicing in Christ with setting up an annual religious festival, replete with colored lights, evergreen trees and egg nog, to celebrate these blessed events?
Is it conceivable that we could worship Christ on a daily basis, and be awed by His incarnation in June as well as December? Do we actually need a "season" to remember the incarnation of our Lord?
Perhaps we would do well to set aside a "season" to celebrate the doctrine of Providence, another to celebrate the Trinity, another to celebrate sovereign election and another to celebrate the perserverance of the saints. I think we could easily go through the WCF or our favorite Systematic Theology and find a doctrine for every day of the year. The trouble is, we would run out of calendar before we ran out of worthy doctrines.
Does the Christian faith need a yearly liturgical calendar to function? Is such an approach even helpful? Or, does it distract from the Spirit's leading in our lives? Did the apostles observe a liturgical calendar? Is this the testimony of Acts and the epistles?
I haven't read much of Mather. Perhaps you're representing him accurately, but I have my doubts. Rather than portraying him as the stereotypical "joyless Puritan", perhaps it would be more profitable to consider whether Mather had a legitimate concern for the manner of our worship, and felt there were genuine dangers to allowing the calendar to regulate our worship.
Did our Lord really mean for us to adopt annual holidays, for our emotions to rise and fall with the passing of certain dates on the calendar? Or did He intend that we should live a consistent life of perpetual joy, daily adoring Him for all His glorious works and attributes?
Can I even raise the question without being accused of joylessness?
MITCH C SAID:
ReplyDelete"Or, did he simply not equate rejoicing in Christ with setting up an annual religious festival, replete with colored lights, evergreen trees and egg nog, to celebrate these blessed events?"
That's a straw man and you know it. Christian observance of Christmas doesn't require eggnog or other customary accessories.
For instance, Christians can observe the birth of Christ by simply having a Christmas Eve and/or Christmas Day service in which topical passages of Scripture are read, a sermon is preached on a topical passage of Scripture (e.g. Messianic oracles or the Lukan/Matthean nativity account), Christmas hymns and carols are sung celebrating the blessed birth of Jesus (or, if you prefer, Messianic Psalms are sung), and prayers are said in gratitude for this redemptive event.
Christmas festivities range along a continuum. It's not all-or-nothing.
"Does the Christian faith need a yearly liturgical calendar to function? Is such an approach even helpful?"
The OT had a liturgical calendar. Was that unhelpful?
"Did the apostles observe a liturgical calendar?"
They continued to observe the liturgical Jewish calendar in Jerusalem.
"Did our Lord really mean for us to adopt annual holidays, for our emotions to rise and fall with the passing of certain dates on the calendar?"
So you're saying we should abolish Sunday worship inasmuch as public worship organized around one day of the weak will cause our emotions to rise and fall with the passing of certain dates on the calendar.
Mitch C wrote:
ReplyDelete"Do we actually need a 'season' to remember the incarnation of our Lord?"
Critics of Christmas should stop using words like "need". They create a straw man. Something can be useful without being necessary. I've given some examples in other recent threads on Christmas.
Steve,
ReplyDelete"That's a straw man and you know it. Christian observance of Christmas doesn't require eggnog or other customary accessories."
Sorry. It wasn't meant as a straw man so much as a bit of hyperbole to lighten the tone. I'm not hostile toward you and thought a spash of eggnog might communicate that.
Ignore the lights, trees and egg nog, and my point still stands:
did [Mather] simply not equate rejoicing in Christ with setting up an annual religious festival?
We can rejoice in Christ without an annual Christmas celebration. That is my point.
I think modern Christians are so immersed in the Christmas festivities that they cannot imagine a Christianity devoid of the annual celebration. Or, at least, they cannot imagine it having any joy.
I submit that Christmas can easily rob us of the true joy of Christ by the sensual appeal of its lights, trees, carols and feasts. The trimmings can become a narcotic that steals the focus from Christ.
The question I would pose, therefore, is this:
If it seems to you that a person who loves Christ must be joyless if he does not observe Christmas, then what do you perceive as the source of the Christian's joy—Christ Himself, or a holiday that purports to honor His birth?
Your question has no bearing on my post.
ReplyDeleteHmm. People can get awfully abrupt regarding these unnecessary observances. Rather joyless, don’t you think?
ReplyDeleteHmm. Your abrupt comment is unnecessary. Rather joyless, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteA rather curious event. So this vortex transported Dr. Mather back to the 25th of December, on the occasion of the Roman Saturnalia?
ReplyDeleteBut then, as the shepherds and angels were following the regulative principle of worship (since they were obeying the explicit divine command in all they did), I rather doubt they needed to be catechized in such. I also doubt that the command to go to Bethlehem and look for a newborn lying in a feeding trough is a command for the New Testament church to observe, to the end of the age.
Quite appropriate for you to preface the post with a reference to the Anti-Trinitarian Watts' corruption of Psalm 98, by the way. Kudos.
Kaalvenist wrote:
ReplyDelete"So this vortex transported Dr. Mather back to the 25th of December, on the occasion of the Roman Saturnalia?"
I have yet to see documentation that any pagan equivalent of Christmas was celebrated before Christians began using December 25, much less as early as the time of Jesus' birth. Can you document it?
Jason wrote:
ReplyDelete---
Can you document it?
---
I can't help snickering at that one given everyone's response to your well-reasoned arguments has thus far been to clamp their hands over their ears and yell really loud.
http://www.americanpresbyterianchurch.org/Festivals.htm
ReplyDelete(If you can't read the last letters, it's htm)
http://www.naphtali.com/articles/george-gillespie/holy-days/
Kaalvenist,
ReplyDeleteYou haven't told us what your links are supposed to prove.
Your first link takes us to a portion of Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons. I've already addressed that book in another recent thread. You've done nothing to interact with what I said there. Instead, you're just citing the same unreliable source that a previous poster cited, and you aren't interacting with what I wrote in response to that previous poster.
I've read Hislop's material about Christmas on the page you linked. Many of his claims aren't documented, and he repeats arguments I've already addressed. I've linked to the Chronicon blog's articles on Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, for example. Hislop does nothing to interact with what my sources have documented. He also ignores what the early Christian sources said about December 25 and their intentions in celebrating Christmas. Instead, he cites a wide variety of inconsistent pagan practices in different parts of the world and at different times and suggests that anything in the pagan world that's vaguely similar to something associated with Christmas must have been the source of its Christmas counterpart. The article cites something from Egypt at one point, something from Babylon somewhere else, and something from Rome at another point. If something associated with Christmas is vaguely similar, even if the Christmas counterpart is late or only accepted in part of the Christian world, it's cited as evidence of the pagan origins of the holiday itself.
(continued below)
(continued from above)
ReplyDeleteOver and over, we get reasoning like the following:
"Yea, the 'Christmas goose' and 'Yule cakes' were essential articles in the worship of the Babylonian Messiah, as that worship was practiced both in Egypt and at Rome (Fig. 29). Wilkinson, in reference to Egypt, shows that 'the favorite offering' of Osiris was 'a goose,' and moreover, that the 'goose could not be eaten except in the depth of winter.' As to Rome, Juvenal says, 'that Osiris, if offended, could be pacified only by a large goose and a thin cake.'"
We've already addressed the erroneous nature of that sort of reasoning, and Hislop does nothing to advance the discussion. We get paragraph after paragraph of speculative reasoning like what I've quoted above, while the testimony of the early Christians themselves is ignored. If you're going to accept Hislop's reasoning, why don't you follow the similar reasoning of those who argue that Christianity itself was borrowed from paganism?
Here's another example of the bad reasoning put forward by Hislop:
"The very name by which Christmas is popularly known among ourselves—Yule-day—proves at once its pagan and Babylonian origin. 'Yule' is the Chaldee name for an 'infant' or 'little child'; and as the 25th of December was called by our pagan Anglo-Saxon ancestors, 'Yule-day,' or the 'Child’s day,' and the night that preceded it, 'Mother-night,' long before they came in contact with Christianity, that sufficiently proves its real character."
The reference to how "the 25th of December was called by our pagan Anglo-Saxon ancestors" isn't documented. And the same reasoning Hislop applies to "Yule-day" could also be applied to "Sunday" in "Sunday school", "Sunday services", etc. When your church holds a service on a Thursday, do you take it as something that "sufficiently proves" that your church is honoring Thor?
I don't know what you want us to conclude from your second link. The page you've cited gives us some material from a seventeenth-century source, George Gillespie, that presumably wouldn't interact with the recent scholarship I've cited. And you don't tell us which portion of Gillespie's material supposedly refutes what we've argued.
Hislop seems to be addicted to the same parallelomania as Robert Price, Joseph Campbell, James Frazer, et al.
ReplyDelete