How do you celebrate Christmas? The answer can be as varied as the number of people who see the day as special in one way or another. For nearly two millennia, people all over the world have observed Christmas as either a religious celebration or a secular holiday, or both. The occasion of Christ’s birth, and eventually the date of December 25, has become a cultural (and commercial!) phenomenon, whether or not Christ himself is the focus.
In light of the cultural distractions, the better question is more attuned to the mystery and majesty of the moment: How do you focus your heart and mind on the lordship of Christ at Christmas? The church has always recognized and rejoiced in the fact that in the fullness of time, God sent his own Son to redeem sinners and reign over all creation as the man Jesus Christ (Gal. 4:4; Eph. 1:10). And throughout the centuries, faithful Christians have developed habits and practices to celebrate the first coming of Christ until he returns to complete his work of salvation and to consummate the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Every Christmas, then, presents a special opportunity in the worship and witness of the church to glory in the incarnation and to glorify the incarnate Son. God created all things through and for the eternal Son (Col. 1:16). This same Son came into his own creation as a man to reconcile all things to himself (Col. 1:19–20). And this incarnate Son will rule over all things until all of his covenant people are redeemed and raised up to rule with him in a new creation (1 Cor. 15:24–28; Eph. 1:20–23; 2:5–6). At Christmas, we should take time to kindle our affections for Christ our Lord, and to concentrate our minds on the measure of God’s grace in the incarnation.
So I want to suggest a new tradition for this Christmas. I don’t want to add to the activities that you might have planned. There can be so many good things in our lives that I sometimes wonder if the better things can get missed. And that can be true of Christmas. So I’m inviting you to slow down and make some time to dwell richly on the grace of God in the coming of Christ. And I’m proposing that a profitable way to do that is to listen carefully to the early church’s witness to the incarnation of the Son.
Three Considerations for a Chalcedonian Christmas
This Christmas, I invite you to consider afresh the glory and grace of God in the birth of Christ by attending to the Chalcedonian Definition of Christ from the year 451. Let’s begin by answering three questions.
1. Why should we attend to a creed from the fifth century?
As God’s word written, Scripture alone has magisterial authority grounded in the Spirit’s work of inspiration. Yet the same Spirit teaches the church to make true theological conclusions from Scripture. To that degree, we can receive the earlier traditions of the church with ministerial authority grounded in the Spirit’s work of illumination that helps us live according to Scripture. The church today does well to retrieve and learn from its own theological tradition within these parameters to maximize the Spirit’s work of “doctrinal sanctification.” That is especially true regarding the Spirit’s work in the early centuries that led the church to an orthodox confession of the unique events and central truths of the Christian faith.
2. What does Chalcedon tell us about Christ?
Leading up to the Council of Chalcedon, the church was struggling to find its unified witness to the unique event of the incarnation as the linchpin truth for the Christian faith. The church largely agreed that the Lord Jesus Christ is (and forever will be) both divine and human. The disagreement concerned how to understand this glorious truth. And the options ranged from a synthesis that made the God-man some kind of “third thing,” to a separation in which God adopts a man, rather than God the Son becoming a man.
Thus, the early Christological debates threatened the unity of the faith at the heart of the faith. Christianity and the gospel depend upon the divine Son’s complete incarnation into our humanity without losing his divinity. In short, the Christ must be fully man to redeem sinners through his own substitutionary death and re-create them as a new humanity to bear the true image of God throughout a new creation. And the Christ must be fully God to have the authority, power, and glory to accomplish such a re-creation and bring the kingdom of God to earth as planned from the beginning.
In response to the Christological confusion, Chalcedon produced a “Definition” that the church then developed into the full orthodox statement on what it means that the divine Son became a man. The Chalcedonian achievement is far-reaching, but for our purposes, we can summarize it in four statements:
(1) Christ is one person with two complete and distinct natures;
(2) this one person is the divine Son, the second person of the Trinity;
(3) the person of the Son is and acts as fully God according to his divine nature, which he shares equally with the Father and the Spirit; and
(4) the person of the Son is and acts as fully man according to his human nature, which is a body and soul exactly like ours, except for the corruption of sin.
In its framework and fullness, Chalcedon is a special gift of God’s grace in the “Christological sanctification” of the church. The reality of the incarnation did not depend on it. But the clarity and coherence of Chalcedonian Christology has enabled the church to declare and defend the truth of how the Son became the man so that mere man can be redeemed from our sinful rebellion and become a new humanity in Christ.
3. How does Chalcedonian Christology help us celebrate Christmas?
Considering Chalcedon at Christmas can help us first and foremost by understanding that the birth of Christ was the incarnation of the Son. Christ was “born” (more accurately, “conceived”) in the womb of Mary because it was then and there that the eternal Son chose to create and assume a human body and soul. And from that vantage point, we can peer more deeply into the love, humility, wisdom, power, and grace of God.
Consider these thoughts:
- As sinful human beings, we have used every capacity of body and soul for sin beyond self-repair.
- The divine person of the Son, knowing the eternal fullness of life in the divine nature with the Father and the Spirit, chose to add a human nature of his own to experience limitation, weakness, loss, and death for us as the God-man Jesus Christ.
- By becoming a real human being, the divine person of the Son could offer genuine and perfect human obedience to the Father by directing every capacity of body and soul into conformity with the divine will.
- Because it is the divine person of the Son (not his divine nature) who acts and obeys as a man, his life, death, and resurrection actually accomplish the human atonement required for our salvation and establish the pattern of human righteousness required for our sanctification.
- By remaining fully and truly God, the divine person of the Son commands our complete love, allegiance, and obedience as he recreates a new humanity to bear his own image throughout the earth.
- Because it is the divine person of the Son (not his human nature) who accomplishes our salvation and empowers our sanctification, God alone deserves all the praise and glory.
- As new creatures through faith in Christ, the fullness of his human righteousness is counted as our own, and we joyfully follow his call to conform every capacity of body and soul to his own glory and excellence.
The Heart of a Chalcedonian Christmas
In short, a Chalcedonian Christmas begins with the eternal Son and remains focused on him as he becomes the incarnate Son by assuming a human nature for us and for our salvation. This focus helps us maintain the mystery and majesty of the moment—the moment when God the Son was born as the Christ so that the Creator-Covenant Lord himself could redeem his people and restore his creation, both as God and as a man. And this glorious truth should penetrate our minds and produce a wondrous joy in our hearts because this Christ reigns over all until all is complete. In this way, every Christmas should be “Chalcedonian.”
I hope you take up this invitation for a new tradition. And as you do, let me be the first to wish you a very merry Chalcedonian Christmas!
