Anne Rice on the meaning of Christmas…so close!
As a follow up to Ricky Gervais’ atheist comments on Christmas, the Wall Street Journal invited author and semi-Christian Anne Rice to share her thoughts on the meaning of the holiday.
You can read her essay here.
Rice has had a rocky recent past when it comes to her faith. But her “Christ the Lord” novels written a few years ago upon her conversion to Roman Catholicism (which she renounced earlier this year) are absolutely fantastic and I heartily recommend them as great novels which are surprisingly good historical fiction (though from a traditional Catholic perspective…i.e. James is Jesus’ half-brother, Mary remained a virgin her entire life, etc.).
Because of this, I wasn’t shocked by how much she missed in this post…I was shocked, and encouraged, by how close she came to actual Biblical truth. My comments, which I left on the WSJ comment section, were as follows:
So close, Anne.
This incredibly beautiful and profound paragraph…
“And when I ponder the never-ending journey of Christianity through history, I wonder if it is not the story of the Incarnation that gives the belief system its seemingly eternal power: the single idea that the God who made us is one of us, that God is beyond us yet became human as we are, returning inevitably to Heaven with a body as human as our bodies, even marked in eternity with the wounds of His cruel physical death.”
…is followed by one in which the heart of the true Gospel message is completely removed:
“But the genius of the Christmas Crib is that you do not need theology to approach it. You do not need any bloody atonement theory to touch the Christ Child’s outstretched hand. The story is complete there without the horror of the cross. Christ has embraced our helplessness. Christ has enshrined our physicality within the limitless power of the Maker of all things.”
There’s a reason that only 2 of the Gospels even deal at all with Jesus’ birth narrative, yet all 4 deal with the crucifixion–with John’s Gospel devoting almost half of the entire book to the events of the Passion week.
As a fan of N.T. Wright, Anne, I would encourage you to drink deeply from his “Jesus and the Victory of God” and “The Resurrection of the Son of God” volumes.
You’re so close!
JM
Categories: Arts and Culture, Biblical Theology, Blog, New Testament, Theological issues