What Christmas Is (And Is Not) About

I heard this pastor say on the radio that God came in the form of a Baby in a Manger because He had already tried coming in power and might with His people Israel and had failed to properly draw them in, and so now He was trying a new track: taking the non-threatening form of a Baby.

First of all, this seems inconsistent with the standard evangelical line concerning God's nature. It isnt a problem for me to talk about God "feeling His way through" His relationship with His Creation, but I am in a line of theologians that advocates Open Theism and/or Process Theism. But this guy is of a tradition that would see me as heretical. How, then, can he talk about God "experimenting" in this way?

Further, he cherry-picks Jewish history. Yes, early Jewish history is largely a story of struggle between Yahweh and His people. But by Jesus' time, the Jews had for the most part become what God, through the prophets, had demanded they become.

But my real problem with this formula is it removes the full power of The Incarnation. On this guy's view God, in God's self, remains what the Jews had always taken Him to be. Jesus doesn't really CHANGE our view of God, no. Rather, God remains what we intuitively expect Him to be, and we then project that image onto the man Jesus. But the Incarnation has little power if Jesus is not, in some sense a revelation of God, opening up new avenues of relationship and thought with and about The Divine. If in Christ we don't see God in a new way, then Jesus was superfluous. I mean, isn't this the theology of glory Luther railed against? Doesn't this amount to a rejection of the theology of the cross?

The "stumbling block" of the New Testament (see: 1 Corinthians 1:23) is not that the dominant Jewish vision of God 'just so happened' to meet us in a vulnerable form. To me this amounts to a denial that Jesus and The Father are one God but separate persons. No, the real stumbling block is the paradox of the Cross and the Manger: the radical vulnerability of God, and the power of that vulnerability. To be sure, this God is the same God we know in the scriptures of the ancient Israelites, and indeed visions of a vulnerable God are found there (see: Hosea 1 and Genesis 32:22-32). But this is the final triumph of that vision as the lens through which all understanding of God must be seen.

The world already worshipped power, might, and glory. Christ came as a corrective to all that. That real power IS vulnerability is paradoxical, indeed a 'stumbling block'. We can't in the final analysis try to make superficial sense of our kneeling at a manger. There may be a way to reason the implications out, but it must always look like the absurdity it is, lest the Incarnation lose it's real power to transform our hearts and the world (1 Corinthians 1:17). The Vulnerability of The Manger is the very power of God. This is the madness of Christmas, this is it's real glory, and they are one and the same.