Don’t Be Jaded By Christmas. Ponder The Virgin Birth.

I was raised in a family that loved Christmas. Every December after school ended, my mom took me and my little brother to a small town in west Tennessee to spend a couple of weeks with her family. We’d help close up my granddad’s furniture store around noon on Christmas Eve. Then we’d have a potluck lunch with his employees. My aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins would come to my maternal grandparents’ house after the candlelight service at church.

This was Christmas in my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, the Christmas I experienced every year for 22 years. Thinking about it brings so much nostalgia and sentiment.

But nostalgia and sentiment are, for me and almost everyone else, also colored by brokenness, hurt, and loss. Most notably, my brother died of a drug overdose in March 2021. But before that, several key members of the family passed away: my mom’s father (the patriarch of the family), my paternal grandmother, and my mom’s younger sister. The happy memories of my childhood Christmases are shaded, even marred, by loss.

For those of us who have experienced such deep pain, how can we still find joy during the holidays? How can we still love Christmas, despite the acute emotional pain we may feel at this time of year?

This is where Rhyne R. Putman’s book Conceived by the Holy Spirit: The Virgin Birth in Scripture and Theology comes in. The way out of our hurt isn’t to ignore it or wallow in it but to trust in the one who willingly stepped into it and saved us from it.

Christmas’s True Meaning

As Putman, associate vice president of academic affairs at Williams Baptist University, repeatedly shows, the triune God’s work in the incarnation of God the Son doesn’t ignore sin’s effects. Instead, it’s in that work that Jesus encounters and overcomes the source and consequences of sin and death on our behalf.

The way out of our brokenness and hurt isn’t to ignore it or wallow in it but to trust in the One who willingly stepped into it and saved us from it.

The true meaning of Christmas is that the one true God, in the person and work of Jesus Christ, becomes one of us to free us from what ails us and restore us to our purpose: dwelling with God and glorifying him forever. It’s this fundamental reality of God’s redemptive work on our behalf that can produce love in our hearts for the celebration of Christ’s birth. Sorrows remain. Yet there’s hope that God has done what’s necessary to redeem us from sin’s effects far as the curse is found. This brings joy to the world.

As Putman puts it,

In advent and Christmas seasons, we have an opportunity to reflect on what God has done for us in the virgin-born king and what he will do for us in the future. We rehearse the OT story, reliving the expectation of Israel as we await the final consummation of God’s kingdom in Christ. At the heart of the Christmas story is a profoundly theological message about the triune God and his great salvation. (344)

Putman’s book is both biblically rooted and theologically careful. It’s both intellectually insightful and eminently readable. It won’t go over the average reader’s head. Instead, Putman defines terms and carefully works through biblical texts. He shows how doctrines interrelate and how a particular doctrine or exegetical insight helps us to live faithfully.

Rich Doctrine and Exegesis

The hope that comes from truly understanding Christmas is grounded in both Scripture and historic Christian doctrines. The New Testament’s description of Christ’s miraculous conception, virgin birth, and childhood are fulfillments of the Old Testament’s hope. This includes hope for the Messiah, for David’s son, for Abraham’s heir, for the seed of woman. It includes hope for the restored temple, for the restored land, and for the restored people of God. As Putman explains, “From Genesis to Revelation, we see that the birth of Jesus was not an arbitrary act of God—but an event that looked back to the garden of Eden and forward to the New Jerusalem” (249).

Moreover, this properly biblical, exegetical, and theological understanding of Christ’s incarnation helps us to articulate a faithful Christology. Jesus is one person with two hypostatically united natures. He’s fully human and fully divine. His two natures aren’t separated, divided, mixed, or changed in the incarnation. This brings us hope because only the God-man—one who’s truly God and truly man—can save us. As Putman summarizes, “The immortal and incorruptible Word took on mortality and corruptibility so that he might defeat them once and for all on our behalf” (261).

Putman’s combination of rich theological insight and a comprehensive explanation of the biblical story is a callback to the original virtuoso of Christmas theology, Athanasius in On the Incarnation [read TGC’s review]. In that regard, Putman demonstrates that what he’s saying is nothing new by masterfully weaving material from the early church through his argument. He’s simply articulating for a new generation the same hope Christmas has brought since Christ came into the world.

Christmas Hope in the Gospel

Conceived by the Holy Spirit is the best sort of theological book. It’s academically robust, helping pastors and scholars understand an important historical doctrine. But it’s also richly devotional, pointing readers to Christ.

Most significantly, this book reminds us that because Jesus is God the Son incarnate, he could step into our brokenness and heal it through his life, death, and resurrection. Jesus lived the life we cannot, died the death we deserve, descended into the realm of the dead we all experience, and crushed death to death when he rose from the dead. So we have hope in the face of death and loss.

Christmas is a time to sing about and celebrate the fact that, though he’s veiled in flesh, we see the godhead in Jesus Christ.

For these reasons, we can still love Christmas, despite how the holiday nostalgia brings up memories of hard things. Christmas is a time to sing about and celebrate the fact that, though he’s veiled in flesh, we see the godhead in Jesus Christ. He’s the Incarnate Deity who brings peace on earth and reconciles God and sinners. He brings joy to the world through breaking sin’s curse far as it’s found. We can still love Christmas because, as Charles Wesley wrote in one of his classic hymns, it’s a time when we specifically recall that, in the incarnation,

Christ by highest heav’n adored,
Christ the everlasting Lord;
Late in time behold Him come,
Offspring of a virgin’s womb . . .

Mild He lays His glory by,
Born that man no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of earth;
Born to give them second birth.