"God himself had become manifest in human form!"

Tom Holland writes in the Wall Street Journal,

...The secularization of Christmas is not quite the repudiation of Christianity that it may seem. This is because the very concept of the secular—far from being neutral—originated in a specifically Christian context. The emergence of church and state as distinct spheres, and in due course the very notion of a secular space, was deeply rooted in theological assumptions—assumptions that are exemplified by the Christmas story. When Joseph traveled to Bethlehem, he did so in obedience to the ruler of the Roman world, master of the greatest power on the face of the planet, but in the womb of his wife was the king of very heaven. The conviction that there are two dimensions—those of the earthly and the celestial, the daily and the eternal, Caesar’s and God’s—was embedded in the very beginning of the Christian story. The result was a tension that has endured for two millennia and is still manifest in the culture war being fought over Christmas today.

“And it came to pass in those days,” as the Gospel of Luke tells us, “that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.” Whether the census that required Joseph and his wife to travel to Bethlehem ever happened is generally doubted by scholars, but no one doubts the rapacity of the order to which the Jews, in the decades before Jesus’ birth, found themselves subject. The Roman Empire was one immense tax demand, delivered and enforced at sword-point. It is no surprise that the men who did the Romans’ dirty business for them should feature in the Gospels as moral outcasts, on a level with prostitutes. Tax collectors were agents of the rawest oppression. To be poor and a provincial was to have little choice but to tread carefully. A Roman soldier might well force a civilian to serve him as a porter or provide him with a billet—and no woman, certainly, ever met a legionary without a measure of dread. This, then, was the world into which the pregnant Mary brought her son.

The horrors, though, were precisely what framed the miracle. As Ignatius of Antioch, a century after the birth of Jesus, described the nativity: “Now everything that had been perfectly prepared in the counsel of God began, and all creation was in turmoil at this plan for the complete destruction of death.” Angels appeared to the shepherds, parting the curtain that for so long had veiled heaven from earth, and a star appeared to the wise men, marking the end of the ancient empire of evil. Both events served as signs that a new order of time had begun. God himself, Ignatius exclaimed in awe, had become manifest in human form: “Every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished.”

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