Rowan Williams is cool!

Merry Christmas Everyone!,

Let me shoot out of the gate strong, here: the popular mainstream media loves to find problems. And if they don’t find any problems, they create them so they’ll have something to talk about. Good news really bums them out, and NOTHING is better than controversy. Another example of that happened this past week when people went a bit nutty thinking that the Archbishop of Canterbury (Rowan Williams) was trashing all of Christian tradition.

That’s simply not the case. You can read parts of the actual interview here. I’ll try to address a couple of the things the mass media drooled over…and inaccurately so.

1. ‘Christians don’t have to believe in the virgin birth!’ What the archbishop actually said was “I don't want to set it as a kind of hurdle that people have to get over before they, you know, be signed up”. And then he went on to say that he does believe in it. The bottom line is that Christians fall all over the spectrum on lots of tidbits from our tradition. Admittedly, usually when people disagree with something from the tradition it’s because their god is science (which is as much salesmanship, theory, and faith as it is fact…if not more). But there’s still a lot of wiggle room for people to find an understanding of Christianity that fits where they are on their journey.

2. ‘The wise men were legends!’ What the archbishop actually said was “Well Matthew's gospel doesn't tell us that there were three of them, doesn't tell us they were kings, doesn't tell us where they came from, it says they're astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire. That's all we're really told so, yes, 'the three kings with the one from Africa' - that's legend; it works quite well as legend.” Let me throw in that the gospel account has them visiting Jesus when he was around 2 yrs old, so the nativity scenes you see with the wise men are inaccurate.

And there is more. I recommend that you read the interview. I also recommend that you don’t believe what the mainstream media tells you on face value. Always try to search out the truth for yourself…don’t believe it just because someone tells you.

Have a blessed Christmas my friends – our Savior is born!

Grace and Peace,

Kevin