An artificial intelligence (AI) tool called ChatGPT can respond to a question or topic with an essay that looks deceptively like it was written by a human. One college professor expects a “flood” rather than a “trickle” of plagiarism problems in the near future as a result. Such technology is being called “a turning point with artificial intelligence,” one that prompts the question, “How can we use these tools ethically and safely?”

Now consider this: half of the ten most-read stories in the New York Times this year dealt with shootings, abortion, or insults. Four others dealt with death, disasters, or aging. (“Wordle is a love story” was the lone exception.)

Given our fallen nature, how confident are you that we will master AI before it masters us? What about the other problems that plagued us last year and are likely to do so in the year to come?

Clearly, we need a Savior to save us from our sins. But, paradoxically, one of the sins from which we need to be saved is the sin of rejecting our need for a Savior.

Legend, liar, lunatic, or Lord?

Yesterday we noted that 52 percent of American adults believe that Jesus was a great teacher and nothing more. Such a supposition is not new. In 1942, C. S. Lewis responded to this assertion in what later became the most famous paragraph in his classic, Mere Christianity:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

From this paragraph derives what is known as the “trilemma”: Jesus must be either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord.

There’s a fourth option, however. We also noted yesterday that 53 percent of Americans believe the Bible “is not literally true.” If they are right, perhaps Jesus did not really claim to be Lord. Perhaps this idea is a legend that grew up over the centuries (a claim Dan Brown made famous in his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code).

If this is the case, we are not forced to choose among Lewis’s three options, since all of them arise from the supposedly faulty presumption that Jesus claimed divinity for himself.

“A hymn to Christ as to a god”

I have taught seminary classes and written extensively on this subject (see my Wrestling With God, for example). To summarize the remarkable extrabiblical evidence for Jesus:

• Thallus the Samaritan (AD 52) referred to the darkness of the crucifixion of Jesus.
• Mara bar Serapion (writing after AD 70) noted that Jesus’ followers considered him to be their king.
• Tacitus (AD 55–120) described early Christian belief as a “most mischievous superstition,” referring to faith in the supernatural or miraculous rather than simply following a human teacher.
• In AD 112, a Roman administrator named Pliny the Younger wrote that Christians “were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ as to a god.”
• And the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (AD 37/38–97) reported that early Christians called Jesus the “Christ,” the Messiah, and believed him to have been raised from the dead.

So, since Jesus’ claim to divinity was not a legend that grew up centuries afterward but a first-century assertion accepted by his followers, we are back to Lewis’s three options: liar, lunatic, or Lord.

However, a postmodern relativist will likely shrug his shoulders and say, “That’s just your truth. I have my own truth.” What do we do then?

“Lord, do not hold this sin against them”

2 Chronicles 24:20 reports that “the Spirit of God clothed Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the priest” (this was not the biblical prophet by the same name), and he called the people to repent of their idolatry and immorality. However, “they conspired against him, and by command of the king they stoned him with stones in the court of the house of the Lᴏʀᴅ” (v. 21). Here was his response: “And when he was dying, he said, ‘May the Lᴏʀᴅ see and avenge!’” (v. 22).

Fast-forward eight centuries to the Book of Acts, where we find a similar story. This time the person who was empowered by God’s Spirit was named Stephen (Acts 6:5). Like Zechariah, he exposed the idolatry and immorality of the people (Acts 7:2–53). And like Zechariah, he was stoned to death as a result (vv. 58–59). But unlike Zechariah, “he cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them’” (v. 60).

What explains the difference?

Stephen knew the example of Jesus’ vicarious atonement and his prayer from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). And while Zechariah was “clothed” by God’s Spirit, Stephen as a Christian was indwelt by the Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16).

As a result, he could manifest the “fruit of the Spirit,” the first of which is “love” (Galatians 5:22). His forgiving grace was witnessed by “a young man named Saul” (Acts 7:58), who soon came to encounter Stephen’s Lord and make him his personal Lord as well (Acts 9:1–18).

Here’s the point: the best way to show skeptics that Jesus is Lord is to show them that he is our Lord. And the best way to show them that he is our Lord is to love them as he loves us.

How will you imitate Stephen today?

Denison Forum

More than one million Americans and Canadians were without power over the weekend as a “bomb cyclone” wreaked havoc with snow, strong winds, and freezing temperatures that affected nearly 250 million people.

But I’m happy to report that Santa Claus was not one of them.

US military officials assured anxious children that the arctic blast that disrupted US airline traffic would not prevent Santa from making his annual Christmas Eve flight. A spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which tracks the yuletide flight, explained: “We have to deal with a polar vortex once in a while, but Santa lives year-round in one at the North Pole, so he’s used to this weather.”

My four grandchildren confirmed the military’s report by opening numerous presents from Santa yesterday morning.

Santa Claus has an official address

Of course, rationalistic skeptics might view both the military’s statement and my grandchildren’s testimony as somewhat fanciful. In their view, anything that defies human logic and experimental corroboration must be considered myth and tradition, nothing more.

This is especially the case if they can find rational explanations for the events in question.

For example, according to the United States Postal Service (USPS), Santa Claus’s official address is 123 Elf Road, North Pole, 8888. The USPS reports that letters sent to this address are received, personal information is redacted, the letters are published online, and generous people “adopt” them and ship gifts to the letter writers. This practice provides a naturalistic explanation for many gifts from “Santa.”

Another factor is the bedrock principle of scientific discovery that an experiment’s results must be capable of verification by others who perform the same experiment. Philosopher Antony Flew offered a similar approach called “falsification”: essentially, if a truth claim cannot be proven wrong, it cannot be proven right.

If I claim to have met with Santa Claus on his nocturnal visit Saturday evening, you will want evidence: Did anyone else see him with me? Did I take his photo or get other empirical evidence of our encounter? Can you speak with him? If the answer to these and any other investigatory questions is no but I still insist that my story is true, you will obviously dismiss my assertion.

And so it is that many view Santa’s “visit” on Christmas Eve with unbridled skepticism. Tragically, millions view the other event we celebrated this weekend in the same way.

Was Jesus a great teacher but nothing more?

According to a recent survey, 52 percent of American adults believe that Jesus was a great teacher but nothing more. In their view, it is as mythical and irrational to claim that the Christ of Christmas is the Son of God as it is to claim that Santa visited my home last Saturday evening.

I believe I understand their reasoning:

One: Since 53 percent of Americans believe that the Bible “is not literally true,” they do not allow clear biblical claims for the divinity of Christ (cf. John 1:1, Colossians 2:9, Hebrews 1:3, John 8:8) to change their minds.

Two: Since we live in a postmodern, relativistic culture where many people consider all truth claims to be personal and subjective, they are not persuaded by the extraordinary extrabiblical evidence for the deity of Christ. (For a survey of such evidence, see my “Is Jesus really God?”)

Three: If Jesus is only a “great teacher,” they are no more bound to do what he said than they are to obey the teachings of Buddha, Confucius, or any other “great teacher.”

Four: Thus they can choose which teachings of the “great teacher” they will obey and reject the others in order to live however they wish to live.

“The site of God’s surprising presence”

The illogical nature of this reasoning deserves a larger response than I have room left to offer today, so we’ll pick up the story tomorrow. For now, let’s close by focusing on the billions of people who do accept the biblical claim that the Baby of Bethlehem was and is the divine Son of God.

In her Sunday New York Times article, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren explains what this truth claim means for them: “Because God took on a human body, all human bodies are holy and worthy of respect. Because God worked, sweating under our sun with difficulty and toil, all human labor can be hallowed. Because God had a human family and friends, our relationships too are eternal and sacred. If God became a human who spent most of his life in quotidian ways, then all our lives, in all of their granularity, are transformed into the site of God’s surprising presence.”

What does the incarnational miracle of Christmas say to the hurting and lonely? Warren continues: “God knows the depths of human pain not in theory but because he has felt it himself. From his earliest moments, Jesus would have been considered a nobody, a loser, another overlooked child born into poverty, an ethnic minority in a vast, oppressive, and seemingly all-powerful empire. We have tamed the Christmas story with overfamiliarity and sentimentality—little lambs and shepherds, tinsel and stockings—so we fail to notice the depth of pain, chaos, and danger into which Jesus was born.

“God identifies himself most with the hungry and the vulnerable, with those in chronic pain, with victims of violence, with the outcasts and the despised.” When Jesus was born, “it was not into a posh home in a cozy Christmas movie but instead into a place of hardship and sorrow.”

A time for choosing

You and I can dismiss the incarnational miracle of Christmas, or we can believe that “to us a child is born, to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:7). We can trust that Son with our greatest fears and failures, worries and burdens. And we can invite those we influence to do the same.

Warren concludes: “The hope of Christmas is that God did not—and therefore will not—leave us alone.” But we can leave him alone and miss the miracle of Christmas in our daily lives.

The day after Christmas is a time for choosing what Christmas will be to us the rest of the year.

Choose wisely.

Denison Forum

No one knows exactly when Jesus was born because the Bible doesn’t give us a specific date.

And the Bible doesn’t tell us, in large part, because the first generations of Christians just didn’t really care. Celebrating births was seen as more of a pagan tradition and something that, for the first few centuries, the church tried to distance itself from.

The Epiphany, the date that commemorates the coming of the wise men, was actually a much more significant day for much of Christian history, even after people started celebrating Christmas.

For example, the old English carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas” actually begins on December 25 and culminates on January 6, with the largest celebrations historically reserved for the latter date.

But if the Bible doesn’t tell us when Jesus was born and it took Christians a few centuries to start celebrating his birth, how did Christmas end up on December 25?

Was Jesus born in the fall?

There are good reasons to believe that Jesus was actually born sometime in late September to early October.

For example, it is thought that Zacharias—the Father of John the Baptist—likely entered the temple to burn incense in mid-June, which would have put John’s conception later that month.

Given that Elizabeth was six months pregnant when the angel came to see Mary (Luke 1:26), that would put Christ’s birth in the fall of the next year. However, because Scripture doesn’t tell us when Zacharias encountered the angel and we are left to rely on tradition for that dating, there is room for disagreement.

The earliest dating of December 25 goes back to the 200s, when a tradition began to circulate that Jesus was conceived on the same day that he was crucified.

Since Tertullian dated the crucifixion to March 25, nine months after that would have meant that Jesus was born on December 25. The idea that Jesus was conceived on the same day that he died is also not found in Scripture, but it became popular enough that most accepted it without giving it too much thought. By the time of Augustine, that belief had become common knowledge, and he incorporated it into his treatise On the Trinity.

However, our celebration of Christmas on December 25 is not due solely—or even primarily—to this theological quirk.

Sharing a birthday with the gods

In addition to the dating from Christian sources, December 25 has been an important day for cultures throughout much of human history.

The winter solstice was often celebrated around that time—which is the origin, in some ways, of our Christmas trees—and, by the first century, two significant Roman feasts occurred on December 25.

The first was the Feast of Saturnalia. Saturn was the Roman sun god, and, since the solstice commemorated the days beginning to get longer, people feasted and shared gifts in his honor.

The second major feast was the birthday of Mithra.

By the third century, Mithraism was quickly becoming one of the most popular mystery cults in the Roman world and was especially significant in the army. Mithra was their sun god, and they actually had several traditions in common with Christians.

For example, they practiced baptism—though by the blood of a bull instead of water—as a way of initiating new members. They believed in the “unconquered one” who served as a mediator between the light and the darkness, while also functioning as a revealer of truth. And they had a fairly well-developed theology of the afterlife, which was not overly common back then.

Both of these celebrations are important for the dating of Christmas because when Constantine—the Roman emperor who legalized Christianity—ascended to the throne and began encouraging people to convert, making a bigger deal out of Christmas was part of his approach. Because Romans already had significant festivals in place worshiping the birth or rebirth of some of their gods on December 25, it was easier to ask them to keep the parties but make them about Jesus than give up a popular celebration altogether.

So, in 336, Constantine formally declared that the celebration of Christ’s birth would occur on December 25. For the most part, it’s stayed that way ever since.

Accommodating the culture for Christ

Does knowing a bit more about the pagan and theologically questionable background to our celebration of Christmas on December 25 change the way you see the holiday?

For some, it might.

The Puritans, for example, essentially banned any large celebrations of Christmas because of those connections, and their hesitance persisted until the mid-to-late 1800s for most Americans.

But Christians have been taking pagan or cultural beliefs and recontextualizing them in ways that point people back to Jesus for much of our history, often to great effect.

Rather than dwelling on the degree to which Constantine’s motivations for setting the date diminish Christmas, let’s focus instead on whether aspects of our culture could be used for a similar purpose.

With Halloween, for example, giving out tracts with candy—and note I said with candy rather than in place of candy—or hosting trunk-or-treats the weekend before at our churches can be a great way to take a fun celebration that has little to do with Jesus and use it as a way to share the gospel.

It’s certainly possible to go too far with such efforts and cross into heresy—which is why allowing God to guide our plans is so important—but we could do far more for the kingdom if we looked for ways to accommodate the culture rather than asking the culture to accommodate us.

Denison Forum