Christmas is About Salvation

I was thinking about Bonhoeffer’s own approach to Christmas as I sat in church this evening. For German theologians in the mid-last century, the question of salvation was one of the major considerations found in everyone from Barth to Bonhoeffer. What came about was an original emphasis on the way the nature of atonement theology was thought of as a formal divine transaction that happened in the Reformed and Lutheran traditions to salvation as an ontological reality that separated humanity from God.

And so while the cross was certainly important, it was God taking up flesh in the person of Christ that more than anything else became the centering point for first considerations about the meaning of salvation. As Christ takes on flesh, so he takes on the concerns of humanity, our frailty, our fallenness, and the distance that by our very natures makes it impossible for us to come to God.

All of this is raised within the context of the problem of transcendence, a question that seemed more critical when the reality of the First World War made it clear to European theologians that the liberal guarantee of a confidence in the power of humanity to overcome its own moral shortcomings was a tragic overestimation. This sensitivity to the gap that divided human ability from divine being and attempt to find an answer was a way to explain how a good God could remain good despite a world that was debased of any such goodness.  

From a theological position, this meant that events like the First World War debunked the notion that commandment-based ethics (Gebot  Ethik) were the guarantees of salvation desired by humanity.

Reconciled as humanity is through this mystery, divine concern takes up humanity so that salvation does not emerge on a cross but as an act divine self-making that begins in a manger.  The realization of God’s love for us is not that Christ died for our sins, but that God took flesh to himself at all.  Salvation is found first in the Christmas story.