Christians make better humanists. That could be the top line of a report just out from the thinktank Theos. And I suspect the timing – just in time for Christmas – is no coincidence. After all, the story of God becoming a human being is one of the deep wellsprings of European humanism. Instead of presenting us with a booming voice from the mountain top, or some universal expression of cosmic power, Christmas Christianity insists that fully to imagine God is to imagine a human child – little, weak and helpless.
Two thousand years later, when all the misleading tinsel has been pushed aside, it remains a shockingly subversive message. God is not to be discovered beyond Orion’s belt but down on Earth. Early cosmologists looked into the sky for clues to the whereabouts of God, but, incomprehensibly to them, the stars led towards a random shed on the back streets of a small town in the Middle East. From then on, think of God, think of a crying infant. Not a superhuman force, not even a human being enhanced by superhero-like powers, but a gurgling, pink and fleshy homo sapiens. It is the ultimate humanist narrative. Surely no abstract and intellectual deconstruction of divine power can possibly compete with the seditious thought of the need to change God’s nappy. It’s little wonder that many accused early Christianity of atheism.
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