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Showing posts from December, 2015

The Jesus Problem

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Bill O'Reilly's Faux News invention of the War on Christmas typifies the evangelical obsession with a Jesus narrative divorced from the doctrinal and ethical messages behind the Nativity. The greeting of 'Happy Holiday' in no way threatens the church, the Christian faith or Jesus himself because Advent borrows nothing from our cultural celebration of Christmas. Advent itself has meaning beyond the birth of Jesus. I won't bore you with yet another reminder of the origins of, or fallacies surrounding, Christmas, simply to say that the church exploits the Christmas season as much as John Lewis and Coca Cola. However much we might deplore the nauseating commercialism engulfing Christmas, its a buyers market. By definition, consumerism is a consumer disease rather than a marketing epidemic. The church itself has had to learn that in order to engage with its potential pew dwellers it must speak the common language, much like New Testament writers who wrote in Koine [comm