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Can skeptics believe in Christmas? Rebecca McLaughlin Q&A

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Rebecca McLaughlin, author of Is Christmas Unbelievable? Four Questions Everyone Should Ask About the World’s Most Famous Story”, talks to Justin Brierley about the evidence for the Gospel birth narratives, and how churches can offer a welcome to skeptics at Christmas.

JB = Justin Brierley
RM = Rebecca McLaughlin

JB
What does Christmas look like for you normally in your household, Rebecca?

RM
We have always alternated between my parents who live in London and my husband’s parents who live in Oklahoma. But last year, because of COVID, We had to stay here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or “New Cambridge”, as I like to call it, (“New England”). And this year, it’s actually unclear exactly what we’ll do. So still figuring it out. But yeah, we’ll certainly celebrate Jesus’s birth.

JB
Do you find that there’s a big difference between the way Brits and folk in the US celebrate Christmas on Christmas day itself? Do you find there are different traditions?

RM
Yeah, I hate to over-generalize from my own personal experience, but my experience in the UK was that Christmas was a lot about going to church, which is great. Love it. My experience of Christmas with my husband’s lovely family in Oklahoma, who are sincere followers of Jesus, is that going to church on Christmas Day is very much optional. Seems bizarre to me. Truth be told. But yeah, similar. And similar question marks around whether fat men and red costumes climb down chimneys or not!

JB
All of which get addressed early on in your book. But before we get to the book, tell us a bit about yourself. Because you may be new to much of the listening and watching audience. I know you’ve have a background in with a PhD from Cambridge, a theology degree from Oak Hill College. What took you though, to the US specifically?

RM
Well, I married a guy from Oklahoma is what happened! He was studying in Cambridge, as well doing a PhD in engineering. But here’s the thing. I married about the only American I know who doesn’t want to live in England. So everyone here says “I’d love to live in England”, and I said, “well, literally the only American I know who doesn’t is my beloved husband”! But it’s actually been wonderful. One of his arguments as to why we should move here is that if you’re American in the UK, everyone’s basically suspicious of you. Whereas if you’re English in America, people love you for no good reason. It’s actually kind of true.

2021 12 15 Is Christmas Unbelievable (1)

JB
This book Is Christmas Unbelievable?. Very good title (I totally approve of “unbelievable” being used in branding whenever possible)! You actually start the book by talking about an episode of Doctor Who that you reference and you link that into the kind of questions people often have about the actual story of Christmas itself?

RM
I’m a really big Doctor Who fan (although not so much the latest series) and it was super fun actually writing this but it was the first time I felt permission to write primarily for Brits. I started with the scene (for those who are fans) of where Amy Pond as a seven year old is praying to Santa because she has a big problem. She has a crack in her wall that’s really scary. And as the drama progresses, we find that the crack in Amy’s wall is actually much more scary than even she realizes. The crack is a sort of skin of the universe and everything’s going to fall apart. Because of this crack, it’s been sucking away at her life, but taking her family members and all the good things from her for a while, and she prays to Santa, and receives the doctor, because she doesn’t have another option.

And I think that’s almost painfully true for many in the West today, that there’s a sense of longing to be known and cared about, by someone who has real power in the universe, someone sort of magical, someone who could intervene and address the scary cracks in the universe around us. And we don’t have any credible person to call to. And so you know, when we’re young we call the Santa.

It was fascinating: even just this last weekend, I was talking to a friend’s mum, who’s an English professor, an incredibly intelligent woman. And she said, on the one hand, she is extremely secular and doesn’t believe in God at all. And on the other hand, she believes in a spiritual world. And was asking gentle probing questions about that, because it seems like often, actually, folks who have closed the door on believing in God, want to keep it open to some sort of spiritual belief that doesn’t actually have any kind of rational basis. And one of the things I want to say in Is Christmas Unbelievable? is that, actually, we don’t need to close the door on believing in Jesus. It’s not just a fairy tale, it’s not just a nice idea for a seven year old at Christmas, kind of like “Santa, you’ll grow out of it”. It’s actually the most believable and credible way of looking at the crazy universe that we live in with all its terrifying cracks.

JB
The interesting thing for me is that Christmas still represents one of those unusual opportunities in the church where people who might not normally ever come to church actually come. Very often I do meet people who are generally skeptical of Christianity, but who love coming to a carol service, love the feeling of Christmas, and sometimes you only get some bits of that in a church service. Do you think churches are doing enough to capitalize on that? Or do we just give them the good feels and not really make the point that “actually, hey, this isn’t just a story, this is something that’s got a historical credibility to it”?

RM
Yeah, I think there are a couple of places that we tend to miss for folks who’ve walked through the door, maybe for a carol service, maybe just once a year. Are we really telling them the whole amazing, magical truth about Jesus? Or are we letting them go home feeling like actually, Santa probably is more fun?

So I think there’s the question of what do we communicate, when folks do show up. Are we showing them the incredible, unbelievable (in the best sense) beauty of the gospel of who Jesus is and of how he stepped into the very gritty, painful reality of our world? And the fact that this is not something that’s been written off as fairy tales by any intelligent person in the last 100 years.

It’s been fun for me in the last decade to get to know these people. They’re world class experts in all sorts of fields at major leading universities, ranging from physics to psychology to history, to philosophy to New Testament studies, who seriously believe in Jesus, and not just, as I said, of a “great teacher”, once upon a time, but actually, as someone who’s born a virgin, who died on a cross and was raised from the dead, so that this isn’t just a kind of a fairy tale for kids.

But I think there’s also another place where we really miss and that is actually inviting people in the first place. I find that the statistics about the gap between people who would say that they even believe that Jesus rose from the dead and people who are actually irregularly part of a church in both the UK and the US, I find that terrifying. And I sort of lament it because, actually, there are millions of people on our streets who would come to church with us if we invited them. And we assume that we will always be rejected if we ask somebody to come with us. And, sometimes, for sure that’s a real thing. But actually, there are a lot of people for whom the reason that they’re not regularly hearing the gospel preached and the Bible taught is actually because they hadn’t been invited. They came on time and nobody talked to them. They had a bad experience once upon a time and no Christian has bothered to be part of that healing.

JB
When it comes to this book, and the subtitle to Is Christmas Unbelievable? is “four questions everyone should ask about the world’s most famous story”. It’s a short book, so is it meant to be something that you could give to someone who’s thinking, “Well I guess it’s the kind of thing churches could give out in the run up to Christmas?” Is that kind of the intended use of this book?

RM
Yeah, that’s precisely the intended use. And also, I decided to put my money where my mouth is (I’m a little nervous about this)! But in the next couple of weeks, we’ve got Christmas carol services coming up at our church. And my family and I are going to walk around our neighborhoods, giving out the book with invitations to our service, and a couple of chocolates to our neighbours, so the rubber is going to meet the road for us. But yeah, it’s intended, both for people who are quite skeptical about Jesus and maybe haven’t thought through why they really don’t believe. And for the probably larger category of people actually, who like the idea of Christmas, and just have never really looked it in the face properly. They’ve never really thought “well, what do I believe about Jesus? And what difference would it make?”

And so the book is trying to ask the basic foundational skeptical questions. So first did Jesus even exist? Because a surprising number of people are still not sure about that, and use the idea that Jesus may or may not have existed as a sort of excuse to not really examine the evidence for who Jesus was.

Second, can we actually take the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s life seriously, because there’s, I think, an even larger number of people who think” yeah, you know, Jesus probably existed once upon a time. But the stories we have about Him in the Bible were written so long after the events that they describe and must, you know, have gone through generations of oral transmission, and it’s all sort of got lost in translation and just isn’t true”. Looking at the fact that the eyewitnesses to Jesus’s life, whose testimony is recorded in the gospels, we’re talking again, and again and again about these stories throughout their lives. And the gospels were written down precisely when those facts were starting to play out. So we have there everything accurately.

JB
I think one of the problems that we run into with the Christmas story, specifically the nativity story as we find it in the gospels, is that because people are so used to it being presented to them, kind of as a fairy tale, almost, it’s the thing they see in their kids Christmas play, it’s all kind of neatly dressed up, and it almost reinforces the idea. As if to say “This is just a story, this is not to be necessarily taken seriously that this really happened”. And, sometimes, obviously, there are things that didn’t happen that we put into the story, because it’s not there in the Gospels. But how do you counter that popular idea, that this is just a fairy tale? How, especially when it comes to the Christmas story, do you begin to go against that?

RM
Yeah, I think one is to say, so we’re looking at the eyewitness testimony of the Gospels, and taking that somewhat seriously from a historical perspective. And the other is to look at actually, how disruptive and crazy the claim that Jesus was born of a virgin conceived by the Creator God Himself was, from a Jewish perspective, actually, it because if you think about if you looked at it back historically, there were plenty of examples in Greek and Roman sort of myths of Gods impregnating human women. From a Jewish perspective and looking back at the Old Testament Scriptures, the God of the Old Testament, is nothing like those kinds of Greco Roman gods who were sort of like superhuman characters anyway. But the Jews believed in this utterly transcendent God, who when asked what his name was said, “I am who I am”, just a being who simply is, and he was so far removed from humanity that you can’t even look at God and live. It’s this God, who was completely the one who made the stars in the universe and had no rivals.

Then consider this low income, teenage girl with a most common name of her time and place from a nowhere town called Nazareth. This God who, that woman Mary was told, was going to become human in her womb. It is completely crazy! And sort of more crazy for Mary actually then for us now, in some ways. And if we properly work through that claim, and what that means the implications of that are for us. It’s not fairy-tale-like and it’s much more real and serious than that.

JB
Yeah. What do you say to the skeptic who says, “Oh, well, It could just be later writers needing to give Jesus a kind of special arrival. And the fact is in, in what is often seen as the earliest gospel mark, you don’t have the Nativity stories, obviously, Luke and Matthew who tell that one”. So what do you say to those who say, “Oh, it was some kind of to boost his divine credentials, basically, that all this story of wise men and stars and stuff was introduced”?

RM
A couple of ways I’d answer that. The first is to say, the earliest writings that we have about Jesus, which is some of the letters that Paul wrote to some of the first churches, talk about Jesus’s resurrection, actually major on that. And so folks who say, “well, the stories about Jesus sort of got exaggerated over time. And you know, you started off as this great teacher, and then over time, it became the sort of godlike figure who, yeah, let’s make sure that he looks like he was saved by the Holy Spirit of virgin kind of thing” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because the resurrection claim is just as crazy, actually, as the claim that Jesus was born of a virgin. And that was not only seen in Jesus in the earliest writings about Jesus that we have, but also is the driving engine of the Christian faith. Christianity without the resurrection is like Romeo and Juliet without Juliet. It’s not even a thing.

So Christianity was started on the basis of this extraordinary miracle. And then we say, “well, yeah, but you know, Mark’s gospel, as you mentioned, generally believed to be written, first, you know, Mark, then sort of Matthew, Luke in the middle, and then John at the end. And Mark’s gospel doesn’t give us the account of Jesus’s birth”. I say, true. However, Mark makes very clear from the very first chapter, that Jesus is the God of the Old Testament. So we sort of set it up where he says, that John the Baptist, who would pave the way for Jesus is the fulfilment of this Old Testament prophecy about a voice crying in the wilderness preparing the way for the Lord, the God of the Jews.

And then we had this voice from Heaven in Jesus’s baptism saying, “this is My beloved Son”. So there’s no question that Mark’s underplaying Jesus’s divine identity. He’s just telling us that Jesus is God’s Son, in a different way. And I love what John says in his Gospel about “if everything that actually Jesus said or did was written down, the whole world wouldn’t be big enough for all the books”, but each of the gospel authors is being highly selective about what they tell us. And Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, all tell us that Jesus is God’s Son. But they start telling us that in different ways,

JB
What about the virgin birth itself? For some people, the fact of a miracle is a problem because people are wedded to the idea that naturalistic explanations always trump any purported miracle. Where’d you begin with someone who’s just sort of skeptical full stop of things like virgin births or resurrections?

RM
Well, I think there are a lot of people actually, who would say, “I think I maybe believe in God. But the idea of a virgin birth is kind of like a supernatural bridge too far”. And I can see why people feel like that makes sense. But if you actually stopped to think about it, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Because if there is a God who made the universe and made the stars and the galaxies and every human being in our world, then the idea that he made one human being in a different way, is actually completely logically consistent. In fact, to think that he couldn’t do that would be like saying to Simone Biles, “I know, you’re the greatest gymnast of all time, but I bet you can’t do a somersault”. So in terms of just the miracle piece, the Incarnation it’s child’s play, from God’s perspective.

Now, of course, some people say, “I don’t believe in God at all, and I’m excluding from my realm of possibilities, the idea that there could be a creator god”. And then of course, there aren’t any miracles, you then have an awful lot of other things to figure out. And science doesn’t answer your questions for you, in case you’re wondering from that perspective, science actually isn’t offering an alternative hypothesis to a creator God. So there’s at least a sort of logical consistency for folks who say, “I definitely don’t believe in God, and therefore I don’t believe in miracles”. But for the larger proportion of people who say, “Yeah, I am open to the idea that there is a God who made the world, but not miracles”, that’s actually not very logically consistent.

JB
I have a feeling it was Glen Scrivener who I thought had a rather fun way of putting it to those who don’t believe in God or subscribe to an atheist naturalism, saying, “well, choose your miracle, either: there was a virgin birth of the universe or the virgin birth of Christmas”. They’re both essentially miraculous claims.

RM
It’s a great line. And I actually quote it in my book with Glenn’s permission because it’s so good!

JB
Your final question that you land on is “why does it matter”? And in a way, that’s the most important thing, you could potentially convince someone that there’s a historical basis to this story, and that they don’t need to throw out Christianity just because there are miraculous claims in it, and so on. But that doesn’t necessarily get someone to actually engage with it and think, “yeah, this makes a difference to me”. What’s your advice on that front?

RM
It would entirely depend on the particular person. But one of the things that I’m looking at in the fourth chapter, is quite how much we lose when we abandon Christianity. And it’s actually much more than most of us realize, and our fellow Brit, the historian Tom Holland, who I’m sure you’ve had on your show before, is really good on this because he read a history of Christianity in the west over the last few 1000 years and he started writing it very much as a non Christian. So when he’s very sort of skeptical of his claims, and one of his conclusions in the process of writing that book was that many moral truths that we hold today to be sort of self-evident – for example, that all human beings are fundamentally morally equal, or that the rich and the strong and the powerful don’t have the right to trample on the weak and the poor and the marginalized, and that women and men are actually fundamentally morally equal – all these beliefs have come to us from Christianity. And without Christianity, we don’t actually have a good foundation for them.

Another guy, who I also quote in the book, who I found interesting on this as an Israeli historian. Yuval Noah Harare, he wrote this incredible sort of global bestseller, Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind. And he makes similar points, but with less of a sense of the mental loss than Tom Holland does. And he’ll say things like, “homosapiens have no natural rights, just as chimpanzees, hyenas and spiders have their natural rights”. He says human rights are a figment of our fertile imaginations. And so there are all sorts of things that we kind of assume, you know, to be just sort of basic moral common sense, that actually crumble in our hands when we take belief in God in general, and actually, in Christianity, in particular, out of the equation. So there’s much more at stake at the global sense than we realize.

And I think there’s a whole lot at stake in the personal sense, not least, because all of us will die. And that’s something that I think we’re really good, especially in the West, especially if we’re not visibly toward the end of our lives, it’s something we’re really good at forgetting, or pretending won’t happen. And facing up to the fact that we will die, and looking at what that means for our lives, now, actually, I think will help us to see quite how much Jesus’s truth or otherwise actually matters.

I think it applies in all sorts of other spheres. I think it applies to how we think about romance and sex and marriage. I think it applies to how we think about, parenting and work and sickness and suffering and all, like every area of our lives, science and literature and art and music. But I think one of the places that it becomes sort of acute, is when we actually confront the reality of our death, and whether that is meaningful at all, or whether we’re just a collection of atoms and molecules that don’t ultimately matter.

JB
I think in the end, for me, the thing about Christmas that is the most miraculous in a way is, of course, the incarnation is that God came to be a human entered into the story he had created. Could we do a better job of bringing that across? Because sometimes we do just rely on the kind of the feeling of Christmas to kind of get people there. Are there any kind of suggestions you could give for those who want to make that story fresh, especially for skeptics? The concept, if you like, that God would do that and that there is a God who has that much interest in his human creation to become one of them. How can we kind of tell that story again to today’s generation?

RM
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s funny, I’m generally very much a lover of Luke’s Gospel versus Matthew (no offence to Matthew). But when it comes to their birth narratives, If I had to pick one I’d go with Luke’s but there’s this wonderful moment in Matthew when, as Matthew is prone to do, it ties what’s happening back to the Old Testament. And he’s just said that, it’s just at the Angel telling Joseph that the baby needs to be called Jesus. And then he says, “This has to fulfil what was prophesied in the Old Testament”. About a baby being born, who will be called Emmanuel which means “God with us” and you look at it and you think, “well wait a minute, the baby’s name is Jesus, not Emmanuel”. How is this fulfilling that prophecy? And then if you sit with that for a minute, you realize, “oh, Matthew is telling us that Jesus – whose name means God saves – is Emmanuel, God with us”. And that his incarnation, his God’s becoming flesh in the person, Jesus is God, stepping into not just our world in general, but our humanity in particular, and being here to be with us. And we see that then played out in Jesus’s life when we see it in his death and see it in his resurrection. And we see it in the Christian promise.

And I think this is often something that we sort of underplay when we’re telling people the gospel of Jesus, that when we put our trust in Jesus, we are united to him. So that everything that is true of him becomes true of us, there’s a sort of great joining together. And we become intensely with God in this extraordinary way. And I think something that all of us longed for, is to be fully known and completely loved. And we spent a lot of our lives sort of managing, navigating between those two things, because honestly, if you knew all of my thoughts of living the last twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t have been on the show. I mean, you’d be so morally disgusted. And likely, I would probably feel the same about you. Like if we actually saw each other’s thoughts, every one of our relationships would be broken. And yet, the one person Jesus, who does see our thoughts, is also the one who loved us to the point of being willing to come and die for us. And so this intense sense of God being with us in Jesus, and knowing us, loving us having made us, having redeemed us is central to the Christmas story.

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