The Liberating Birth of Jesus: A Birth Story Able to Reverse Our Planet’s Perils
Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 5:05PM 
What? The birth of Jesus as told in the gospels is not the same story as the “Christmas story” in holiday celebrations? No, and this book explains why. They exist in two different worldviews. The gospels thrive in the creation worldview, but the Christmas story was born in empire’s worldview.
Understanding the distinction is more important than ever given that we have only until 2030 to make major changes in how we live on our planet. That’s the year which scientists tell us is our deadline to keep earth’s temperature from heating up more than 1.5° Centigrade. Anything greater will bring havoc far beyond what we’re already experiencing and end life for many people and species.
But just how does the birth of Jesus relate to this daunting challenge? The conventional “Christmas story,” though many of its traditions are dear to us, is too anemic to effect changes we must make in the ecological and political realms. In fact, traditional Christmas will only add to overloading our planet’s capacities. But the birth story in the gospels explodes with powers of deep change. There we read about radical genealogy, dreams that carry divine messages for major life decisions, cosmology that dwarfs the forces of history and superpowers, an economics of redistribution, and a somewhat wild Spirit that breaks out of the ways of temples, of religion that justifies injustice and imperialism, and of social habits accepted as normal. The birth story powers generate the nonviolent revolution of a new creation.
Because Matthew and Luke were writing 90 years after the birth in Bethlehem, they’d seen how the followers of the Way of Jesus shaped communities that put the new creation into action. Not only had they seen these communities, they were part of them. People there understood themselves to be “called out” (ekklesia in Greek, from which the word “church” derives) of superpowers, of temple religion, and of any social norms in which it was okay for men to repress women, mistreat slaves, or accumulate wealth.
Out of these experiences of the “called out” followers of the Way of Jesus, Matthew and Luke wrote gospels which beg us to use words like “transforming,” “radical,” and “revolutionary.” That’s why we cannot settle for the “Christmas story.” Our planet is in peril! We need the birth story that connects us to the new creation Matthew and Luke tell us about.
Read this book! Discuss it! Live it! Doing so is more urgent than getting something for everyone under the tree.
The book is available on Barnes and Noble, Powell’s and a few others, if you’d like to avoid buying it on Amazon (as I do), but it’s available there too as print copy or ebook.
Review by Rick Herrick First Posted on the “Progressive Christianity” Website, September 30, 2020
Dr. Rick Herrick (PhD, Tulane University), a former tenured university professor and magazine editor, is the author of four published novels and two works of nonfiction. His most recent book, A Christian Foreign Policy, presents a new way of looking at the relationship between religion and politics.
The Liberating Birth of Jesus by Lee Van Ham is a groundbreaking book for me. My passion for the last fifty years has been the study of the New Testament. According to Van Ham, I have gone about this study in the wrong way. This revelation both hurts; and yet, in a more important sense, is immensely helpful.
Van Ham anchors his study in an analysis of the birth stories in Matthew (1:1-2:23) and Luke (1:5-2:40). I have both written and spoken about those stories. Here is what I have said.
I always begin by asking an audience to read both stories and to list the events on a piece of paper for each one. When this is done, you find the events in the two stories have nothing in common. From this observation, I conclude that at least one of the stories must be fictional. I then proceed to discuss some of the historical problems contained within the two stories which enables me to conclude that in fact both stories are fictional.
My next point is that fictional stories in ancient literature were written for a purpose. In the case of the two birth stories, the authors had several purposes in mind. The first was to pinpoint when Jesus became the Son of God. Both stories indicate that this happened at birth. I then suggest that the two stories introduce the role Jesus will play in the salvation history of Israel. For Matthew, Jesus will function as the new Moses while for Luke he is Israel’s last prophet.
If Van Ham read this introduction, he would say: “Your analysis is interesting Rick, but you miss the main point of the two stories.” He would then point out that my analysis was based on rational thinking, a function of my ego. According to Van Ham, I have missed the point because the authors of the two stories wrote from a perspective of higher consciousness. They lived in early Christian communities where the way of Jesus was deeply embedded in the thinking of the community members. They shared wealth, viewed women and Gentiles as equal members of God’s kingdom, and were committed to the practice of forgiveness, mercy, and nonviolence. They held these views because they were infused with a deep sense of the divine presence, the Christ. The two gospel writers crafted their stories from this perspective.
The writers of the gospels were not interested in biography or history, but rather identity. Who was this guy named Jesus? According to the birth stories of Matthew and Luke, he was a man born within time and in a specific place, but he was also the Christ. The significance of this last label indicates that the man Jesus was infused with the presence of God. In this sense, he was a new creation which is the main point of both the Matthew and Luke stories.
Reading the New Testament according to Van Ham is not about imposing a twenty-first century mindset on the gospel stories. It is also not about piecing together the history of the period, but rather it is about understanding the identity of Jesus. For those like me who love the challenge of interpretation, there is plenty to do. The point of that work is to understand what first century events and images tell us about who Jesus was. Van Ham undertakes an impressive analysis of the genealogy found in Matthew (1: 1-1:17) to do just that.
What is the significance of the two approaches to reading the New Testament, my rational, egocentric strategy based on twenty-first century prejudices and Van Ham’s focus on internalizing a deep understanding of who Jesus was? In my writings, I lay out data from Matthew’s birth story to suggest that a central purpose of Matthew’s story was to portray the historical Jesus as the new Moses. As I suggest above, such a conclusion is interesting, at least to some with an intellectual bent.
Van Ham does an impressive job laying out data for both birth stories that indicate the stories are about Jesus’s identity as a new creation, a human being who has been taken over by God’s presence which is embedded in all living things. When you focus on understanding this data and internalize the story in a meaningful way, the story is transforming. It takes you to a different place. You too become infused with this divine presence.
This encounter with the divine presence is critically important for Van Ham because he has an agenda with this book. He has a passionate concern for the threat of climate change and the damage to the world that results from an egocentric perspective focused on greed, power, economic gain, and consumption. He believes the only hope for mankind to survive the global crisis posed by climate change is to acquire a new way of thinking, a way of thinking defined by the presence of God living within us, a way of thinking made possible by the incarnation of Christ in all humans. One way to acquire this higher level of consciousness is to learn to read the New Testament with new eyes. This book shows you how to do that. It is an important book.
Reviewer Diane Donovan posted her review in the Midwest Book Review, February 2020
The story of Jesus’ birth and impact on the world is so famous that readers might wonder at the need for yet another book on the subject. This alternate viewpoint is a much-needed adjunct to both the story and the efforts of humanity to survive, and thus provides a very different perspective than most.
The Liberating Birth of Jesus: A Birth Story Able to Reverse Our Planet’s Perils is not a holiday story, but draws important connections between dreams, angel lessons, acts of goodness, and the real meaning of Jesus’ creation story. As such, Mary, Jesus, the cosmological and psychic impact of Jesus’ arrival on Earth, and underlying messages pre- and post-Jesus are connected to both human affairs and planetary health and systems as a whole.
Lee Van Ham crafts a blend of new age and religious inspection that old school Christian readers may at first find puzzling or challenging. The difference lies not in the Jesus story itself, which is more than familiar, but in perceptions of its translation and impact.
The tone of this methodical consideration of political, social, and religious systems is scholarly, yet accessible. It creates solid references between scripture and broader new interpretations of its meaning than most religious inspections offer: “Tamar’s story in Genesis 38 oozes intrigue, family dysfunction, and trickery. It revolves around the levirate law, so named because of its derivation from the Latin levir, which means “brother-in-law.” According to this law, if a woman’s spouse died, the spouse’s brother was required to marry his sister-in-law (Deuteronomy 25:5-10).
When it operated well in patriarchal cultures, it was better than a modern life insurance policy. While today a husband can buy insurance on his life to assure the economic viability of his wife and family in case of his death, continuing relationships with in-laws and community are not assured. Social vulnerability increases. The levirate law provided both economic and social glue for a community. A brother who refused to follow the law opened himself to public shame for putting his own interests above the wellbeing of his relatives and the community as a whole. Furthermore, this economic and social law was given divine sanction, meaning that to disobey it was to disobey God, so when Judah and his sons disobeyed it, Tamar exposed them socially, economically, and spiritually.”
This food for thought is weighty and compelling, of necessity requiring that readers move slowly through the book. There’s simply so much to digest and consider that a quick reading is not recommended.
Choices in the narration of the birth story in the Bible and the impact of social, political, and religious perceptions in how it was presented provide intriguing insights with wide-ranging messages for any Biblical student: “Matthew is eager to show that the birth story includes wider geographies and ethnicities than Judea and Jews. The magi were from a geography beyond Judea, just like some of the women in his genealogy, and are another example of how Matthew decisively includes foreigners in his transforming story.”
Discussions of patriarchy, matriarchy, the politics of Rome, the “naming of Jesus by an angel,” and other circumstances often challenge an average Christian reader’s long-held assumptions and viewpoints about Biblical history - and this is a good thing.
Those who appreciate different approaches to Biblical interpretations and events will find The Liberating Birth of Jesus a significant new approach to Biblical scholarship. It’s not just an urgent call to action, but a recreation story of empowerment that pinpoints a major point of diversion and hope between past Biblical perceptions and modern analysis: “…the creativity of people 20 centuries ago connecting the Jesus of Bethlehem and the Christ of the eons and cosmos. Their context, however, differs from ours in that “Christ” was not then assumed to be Jesus’ second name. What is especially important for us today is to rediscover how they are separate.”
What is happening in today’s world, ecologically and politically, is impacted by misinterpretations about the birth and impact of Jesus.
This broader cosmological consideration of planetary ecology is a much-needed, empowering read recommended for a new generation of thinkers as well as those who would incorporate the creation story’s cosmology into revised approaches to life.
An Easter Story
April 17, 2020
Lee Van Ham’s new book, “The Liberating Birth of Jesus” came out in late fall. The timing and the title might lead one to expect that it’s a story of Christmas. It’s not, though there’s mention of how our culture crowds out the full meaning of Jesus’ birth.
It’s an Easter story. Specifically, it’s about two Easter people, whom we know as Matthew and Luke, who wrote for Easter people, to help preserve for future generations the mind-blowing experience of encountering Jesus.
Why do we have these two birth narratives in the gospels of Matthew and Luke? Because each writer is using different but complementary ways of making the case that the Jesus whom the early Christians encountered brought them to a new consciousness, a new creation.
Van Ham works through all the pieces of the story, the magi from afar, the shepherds close by, genealogy and dreams and angels, showing how they point to the arrival of a new creation. For us today, this new way of seeing can lead us to living radical creation-centered lives.
Christmas as we know it came in with government-sanctioned Christianity in the fourth century of our era. Over and over, the Easter message has been co-opted by human institutions. Over and over, prophets arise to bring us back to the main point: the energy of Easter that is a new beginning.
“The Liberating Birth of Jesus” is a short but solid book that would make a good group study. I highly recommend it.
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