As modern Christians, we live in what feels like an increasingly disenchanted cosmos. The thrill is gone. Charles Darwin told us we are just highly evolved apes. Carl Sagan informed us that the earth is nothing but a pale blue dot. And John Lennon encouraged us to “imagine there’s no heaven, / It’s easy if you try. / No hell below us, / Above us, only sky.” What is left is a disenchanted cosmos—just matter in motion, no ghost in the machine. Everything (we are told) can be explained by science. Everything can be reduced to its component parts. A star, to quote Eustace Scrubb, is nothing but “a huge ball of flaming gas” (Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 209). Our bodies are nothing but recycled stardust. Love is only a chemical reaction. On the other side of the so-called Enlightenment, which some prefer to call the “Endarkenment,” modern man feels (understandably) alienated—estranged from God, the world, and himself. The cosmos feels disenchanted, as if it were (like Narnia under the reign of the White Witch) always winter but never Christmas.

And yet, even at his most jaded, modern man knows deep down that there is more to the story. As Hamlet told Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth . . . Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.54). There is more than a ghost in the machine. We are more than the sum of our parts. Amidst the white noise of modern and postmodern despair, there remain what some have called “signals of transcendence,” persistent signposts that point beyond themselves to another world. One such signal or signpost is the church’s yearly celebration of Christ’s incarnation.

Christmas Through New Eyes

Like the rest of Scripture, the nativity accounts presuppose a robust premodern view of the world—namely, the supernatural worldview of the Bible. Nevertheless, it is precisely at this point that we face another challenge. The Christmas story is so familiar that many of us have become comfortably numb to its narrative power. We receive it through the distorted filter of countless commercials, cantatas, and caricatures. To borrow a phrase, how can we learn to see Christmas (and thus the cosmos) through new eyes? The short answer, according to John Calvin, is by putting on the “spectacles” of Scripture (Calvin, Institutes, 1.6.1; 1.14.1), by letting the Bible tell its own story in its own way. With this method in mind, we will focus on three Christmas realities: angels, the world, and Christ’s birth.

Heavenly Host

First, we must recover a biblical view of angels. It is impossible to tell the nativity story apart from angelic beings, especially the messenger Gabriel, who appeared to the Virgin Mary. Unfortunately, if modern people think of angels at all, they imagine the infantile cherubic forms of Renaissance paintings. Contrary to popular misconceptions, Gabriel is not a Precious Moments figurine but a created spirit, “immortal, holy, excelling in knowledge, mighty in power, to execute [God’s] commandments, and to praise his name” (Larger Catechism Q. 16).

As a winged messenger, he represents one class of the celestial hierarchy,whose other ranks include throne guardians with flaming swords (Gen. 3:24), fiery (perhaps serpentine) court attendants (Isa. 6:1–3), and four-winged/four-faced steeds who pull God’s cloud-chariot through the sky (Ps. 18:10) on wheels within wheels full of eyes (Ezek. 1:15–21). Having received a commission from the divine council on the heavenly mountain (Ps. 82), Gabriel—perhaps “being caused to fly swiftly” (Dan. 9:21)—descended upon the city of Nazareth to deliver a royal message to a young Jewish maiden (Luke 1:26–38). In the Bible, angels are good but terrible creatures who inspire fear in the hearts of those who encounter them. This is clear from the shepherds’ reaction to another angelic visitation: “And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid” (Luke 2:9). Like Elisha’s servant, we need our eyes opened that we may see the inhabitants of the unseen realm (2 Kings 6:17), including the heavenly host who sing, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:14).

Deep Heaven

Second, we must recover a biblical view of the world. Whereas secular scientists speak of the universe as a mechanical closed system, the Bible describes the world as a majestic three-story house composed of heaven, earth, and sea (Exod. 20:4, 11). This ancient cosmology is reflected in the nativity story. After the shepherds heard the Gloria of the heavenly host, the angels departed from earth into heaven (Luke 2:14–15). This scene—of the heavenly host descending and ascending from the heavenly places—suggests an opportunity to improve our language. If you look up at the stars in the night sky, what do you call what you see? We have been catechized by modernism to call it outer space. For the secular scientist, that is all it is—outer space. But the Bible does not call it that. Luke instead refers to “heaven.” In fact, the apostles and prophets speak of three heavens (cf. 2 Cor. 12:2): the airy heaven of the sky, the ethereal heaven of the stars, and the empyrean heaven of God’s special presence with his holy angels (see Van Mastricht’s discussion in Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 3:143).

This might seem like a minor point, but the difference between “outer space” and “deep heaven” is significant. Although there is nothing wrong with scientific descriptions of outer space, such language falls short of the Bible’s own vocabulary. C. S. Lewis made this point in the first installment of his Ransom Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet. According to Lewis, whereas the term “space” suggests “the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds,” the term “heaven” evokes an “empyrean ocean of radiance” in which celestial bodies swim—“the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes” (32). He concluded, “Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory—the ‘happy climes that ly / Where day never shuts his eye / Up in the broad fields of the sky.’” Indeed, toward the end of the novel, the main character says, “If we could even effect in one percent of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning” (154). It starts with a recovery of the Bible’s own cosmology, from the sea of crystal to the star of Bethlehem.

Deeper Conflict

Third, we must recover a biblical view of Christ’s birth. Not only do nativity sets and figurines put considerable strain on the second commandment (indeed, to the breaking point), they tend to domesticate and defang the raw reality of what is actually going on. According to Revelation 12, the nativity scene is one of cosmic warfare, what Meredith Kline called “the deeper conflict” that goes all the way back to Genesis 3:15. It is the epic story of a queenly maiden in distress, threatened by a great, fiery red dragon (Rev. 12:1–6). Like Heracles, who strangled a serpent in his cradle, the hero whom she bears is destined to slay the dragon and wed the princess, and that is precisely what Jesus accomplished by the blood of his cross and the power of his resurrection (Heb. 2:14–15). He was born to die, and he died to purchase his bride and destroy his enemy. As others have said, you can summarize the Bible’s storyline as “kill the dragon, get the girl.” This is what it looks like to see Christmas (and thus the cosmos) through new eyes.

It’s Winter but Christmas Is Coming

As a modern Christian, you may feel like you are living in a disenchanted cosmos, but, rest assured, that perception is only an optical illusion. The reality is that we live in a fiercely supernatural cosmos, whose history teems with giants and dragons, warriors and wizards, angels and demons—a riotous realm in which stars sing, trees clap their hands, oceans roar, mountains melt, axe heads float, sinners get saved, and animals have been known to talk. Amidst the white noise of modern and postmodern despair, various “signals of transcendence” still get through—including the true story of Jesus, the only begotten Son, who was born of a virgin, defeated the dragon, descended into the underworld, rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, and (even now) sits at the right hand of the Ancient of Days surrounded by angelic throne guardians, who do not rest day or night, shouting, “Holy, holy, holy!” (Rev. 4:8). Of all times of the year, Christmas affords a wonderful opportunity to break the spell of the “Endarkenment” and (so to speak) re-enchant our view of the cosmos in our own generation. It may be winter, but Christmas is coming. Long live the true king!   

The author is pastor of Heritage OPC in Wilmington, North Carolina. He quotes from the New King James Version. New Horizons, December 2023.