PUTTING AN ADULT CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS

 

“The celebration of Christmas is not a sympathetic waiting for a baby to be born, but much more an asking for history to be born. We do the Gospel no favour  when we make Jesus the Eternal Christ into a perpetual baby, a baby able to ask little or no adult response from us. Any spirituality which makes too much of the baby Jesus is perhaps not yet ready for prime time life. God clearly wants friends, partners and images, if we are to believe the Gospel texts. God it seems wants adult religion and a mature free response from us as adult partners, with mutual give and take and you eventually become the God that you love.”


  1. Fr. Richard Rohr Franciscan Priest and Founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico.

Father Brown was Auburn Professor of biblical studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Among his many honorary doctorates in divinity and theology are those awarded by the European university faculties of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Uppsala and Louvain. He was simultaneously a member of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches and a consulter of the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity. In 1973 Father Brown was the only American named by Pope Paul VI to the Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission.


He is author of some dozen books on the Bible, including a two-volume commentary on The Gospel According to John in the Anchor Bible Series (1966-1970), Priest and Bishop (1970), The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (1973), Biblical Reflections on Crises Facing the Church (1975) and the full-scale commentary of 600 pages on the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, entitled The Birth of the Messiah (1977).

Putting an Adult Christ Back into Christmas


from a study by  Raymond E. Brown

The Infancy NarrativesAn_Adult_Christ_at_Christmas_-_1.html
The First Christmas StoryAn_Adult_Christ_at_Christmas_-_2.html
The Birth of Jesus and His ResurrectionAn_Adult_Christ_at_Christmas_-_3.html