Even if the stories of the birth are not historical account, they can - as we have also explained - be true in their own way, can make a truth known.
I will break in here to point out that those who would mock this as some kind of ass-covering, especially, who else, the scientistic-materialist-atheists, it is an unacknowledged truth that they invent, tell and fully believe such stories. I have pointed out just within the past week that every single evolutionary story told about animals and other organisms in the lost, unobserved, undocumented, unevidenced past is exactly that kind of story. And unlike the stories I've mentioned, the two birth narratives don't claim to produce scientific knowledge. Those stories of science are told under the most obvious of ideological framings and with obvious ideological or professional motives that the stories they come up with just happen to support. Odd that. Certainly in the case of Luke and implicitly in the case of Matthew, the motives of the writers are admitted to and proclaimed and is not claimed to have the status claiming to be objective knowledge of the kind science is most frequently claimed to produce (it doesn't, by the way and philosophically competent scientists don't make those kinds of claims, incompetent ones and atheist hacks do).
And the same can be true of the kind of historical fiction I've talked about in the past week.
So maybe we should do what Hans Kung does, look at the stories in terms of their meanings and the motives in telling them.
The infancy stories as part of the proclamation and as professions of faith are meant to make known, not primarily historical, but saving truth; the message of the salvation of men in Jesus. And this can be achieved more graphically and therefore more impressively in the form of a Christmas story, legendary in its detail, of the child in the crib in Bethlehem than with the aid of documents giving completely accurate details of the time and place of birth.
It is not historical criticism, searching for the essential message, which has emptied the Christmas message and the Christmas feast of meaning but on the one hand the trivializing of these things, reducing them to a romantic idyl, a cosy private affair, and on the other the superficial secularization and the ruthless commercialization. As if the "holy infant so tender and mild" - not indeed in Luke and Matthew, but in the holy pictures - were always smiling and never cried in his very human misery (which is indicated, without any social-critical protest, by the crib and the swaddling clothes). As if the Saviour of the needy, born in a stable, had not clearly revealed a partisanship for the nameless ones (shepherds) against the great ones who are named (Augustus, Quintinius). As if the Magnificat of the grace-endowed maid, about the humiliation of the mighty and the exaltation of the humble, about satisfying the hungry and sending away the rich, were not a militant announcement of a revision of priorities. As if the lovely night of the newborn child meant that we could ignore his work and his fate three decades later and as if the child in the crib did not already bear on his brow the mark of the cross. As if already in the announcement scenes (the center of the Christmas story) before Mary and the shepherds - as later in the process before the Jewish tribunal - the complete profession of faith of the community were not given expression by bringing together a number of majestic titles (Son of God, Saviour, Messiah, King, Lord) and by ascribing these titles to this child instead of the Roman emperor here named. As if here - instead of the illusory Pax Romana, brought by increased taxes, escalation of armaments, pressure on minorities and the pessimism of prosperity - the true peace of Christ were not being announced with "great joy," founded on a new order of interpersonal relationships in the spirit of God's friendship for man and the brotherhood of men.
It is in fact obvious that given the apparently idyllic Christmas story has very real social-critical (and in the broadest sense, political) implications and consequences. This is a peace opposed to the political savoir and the political theology of the Imperium Romanum which provided ideological support for the imperial peace policy; it is a true peace which cannot be expected where divine honors are paid to a human being and an autocrat, but only where God is glorified in the highest and he is well-pleased with man. We need only to compare Luke's Christmas Gospel and the Gospel already mentioned of Augustus at Priene to see how the roles here are exchanged. The end of wars, worthwhile life, common happiness - in a word, complete well-being, man's "salvation" and the world's - are expected no longer from the overpowerful Roman Caesars but from the powerless child.
Hans Kung: On Being A Christian
Thanks for that.
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