My friend Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at UC Berkeley, sent me a link to an article written by David Overbye published in the December 22 New York Times: “Do Aliens Know It’s Christmas” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/science/how-possibilities-of-life-elsewhere-might-alter-held-notions-of-faith.html?_r=1)?
Not surprisingly, Geoff is among the astronomers Overbye quotes in his piece, no doubt in part because Geoff is credited with having discovered more exoplanets (planets circling around other stars) than any other astronomer and with having fine-tuned the method for discovering such planets.
The article, if I might grossly oversimplify Overbye’s point, rightly problematizes the particularity of Christmas. Overbye lifted the article’s title from a question that Geoff frequently raises this time of year: “Do Aliens Know It’s Christmas?”
Again not surprisingly, one of Overbye’s theological authorities is Ted Peters, a professor at the Graduate Theological Union and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. Ted sat on my Masters Committee when I was earning my M.A. in Church History. To those who are skeptical over God’s universality, Ted points out that “God doesn’t seem to be limited by history and communication.”
But, since it is a article of our Confession of Faith that, well, yes, God did undergo real and ongoing limitation in and by history and that this limitation extends to communication, I really think that Ted’s response sidesteps the issue. Indeed, it would seem to be the whole point, the “offense of the Cross” as Paul might put it.
And with this insight, I think we can hazard a response to Geoff’s question. No, aliens do not know its Christmas; and this holds as well for most human beings prior to, say, the 16th century, when Europe’s campaign to conquer the Earth began in earnest. The God of the Universe? This is the god that everyone knows — the god of lawfulness, regularity, systems, reason. This is the Stoic god whom Paul talks up in Romans 1-2 and 13; the god that everyone would believe in anyway, Christmas or no Christmas. And I suspect that even every alien’s son and daughter, did they give it a moment’s consideration, would recognize that lawfulness, regularity, predictability, reason, and so on, hold for them as much as they hold for us humans. The mathematical god holds validity everywhere and at all times. So, yes, in a sense, Ted Peters is absolutely right. This god is not limited by history and communication.
But is this what we mean by Christmas? Is it not precisely the specificity, the historicity, the here-and-not-there, now-and-not-then — this limitation, constraint, emptying; is this not what we understand to be Christmas?
And what if it is precisely this limitation that is the most divine quality of the Palestinian Jew born in Bethlehem? Well, in that case even the search for a universal Christmas would violate its signal characteristic. And, in that case it would be perfectly normal to say to the aliens when they arrive, “Let us tell you a story that we are sure you have never heard . . .” But also then to ask our aliens “What stories do you hold sacred?” And imagine how different the world might have been had Europeans in the 15th century been equipped to ask this question when they arrived in the Americas.