We need Christmas to inspire real faith as well as joy. Real
faith that embraces real truth. The real truth about Christmas establishes
fundamental qualities of real Christian religion and salvation.
C.S. Lewis objects to overly simplistic worldviews, including
a pseudo-Christian one he calls, “Christianity-and-water, the view which simply
says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right – leaving out
all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and
the redemption.” This is a dangerous overtone to popular Christmas beliefs that
promote a playful idea of God’s love and the Christ-child without substance.
Not unlike the make-believe Santa Claus.
Lewis explains in his book Mere Christianity, book 2,
chapter 2, “The Invasion”:
“It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real
things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I am
sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made
of – all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my
eye and what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain – and, of
course, you find that what we call ‘seeing a table’ lands you in mysteries and
complications which you can hardly get to the end of. A child saying a child’s
prayer looks simple and if you are content to stop there well and good. But if
you are not – and the modern world usually is not – if you want to go on and
ask what is really happening – then you must be prepared for something
difficult. If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is silly then to complain
that the something more is not simple.
“Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by
people who are not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to
destroy Christianity. Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for
a child of six and make that the object of their attack. When you try to
explain the Christian doctrine as it is really held by an instructed adult,
they then complain that you are making their heads turn round and that it is all
too complicated and that if there really were a God they are sure He would have
made religion simple, because simplicity is so beautiful, etc. You must be on
your guard against these people for they will change their ground every minute and
only waste your time. Notice, too, their idea of God ‘making religion simple’:
as if ‘religion’ were something God invented, and not His statement to us of
certain quite unalterable facts about His own nature.”
Since Dickens wrote Scrooge proclaiming “Humbug!” to
Christmas in a time when the depth of the Birth was not so disputed, when good
will included God’s good will to a mankind that desperately needed that good
will… since then, moderns have lost that important bit and think humbug is one
sided – a silly objection to a happy celebration of happiness. The other side
of humbug is setting aside the essence of the Christmas story, the Biblical
one, as archaic and useless, as if modern mankind has ever crafted a more
useful Truth.
