The Meaning of Xtmas

As I listened to the message about how Jesus came to save the world from sin - I reflected yet again how meaningless this message seems in mainstream modern culture.

Save us from sin - but the word 'sin' to a secular modern means only two things - neither of which requires Jesus to 'save' him.

The first to come to mind are sexual sins.

But modern people nowadays 'know' that sexual sins are arbitrarily defined and can be redefined at will; and indeed many people have lived to seen illegal sins made into privileged virtues promoted by government and media propaganda and rewarded by legal protection, high status, jobs, promotions, fame and honours.

So, it seems they don't need Jesus to 'save' them from this kind of sin, when the State and media can (apparently) easily and swiftly make any sin into a virtue.

(Alas, however, only by making the opposing virtue into a sin - but leave that aside, no doubt that too can be fixed, if necessary, at some time in the future...)

The other thing that springs into a modern secular mind at the mention of sin is selfish people being mean to other people: humiliating them, impoverishing, torturing them - making them into victims.

Yet, of course, the solutions to victimhood for moderns is not Jesus but (again) The State, especially State bureaucracies; who (at least  by the own measurements) claim to be the solution to all forms of selfishness, and to create an eternal mandatory and universal altruism - which is (apparently, 'objectively') far better than Christianity since it does not depend on such labile and contingent factors as personal repentance.

So they don't need Jesus to save them from that kind of sin, either. 

So, for modern people to understand it, we absolutely need to re-conceptualize virtue and sin in terms of attitude, disposition, outlook, focus, perspective.

Sin not only as wrong behaviours but as a wrong relation to the world.

A matter of wrongness in the basic outlook on the world, the understanding of man's place in the scheme of things, of the human condition.

Virtue consists in a proper understanding of man's place in the world, which includes an understanding of his ultimate prupose in life.

(This ultimate purpose is 'theosis', santification.)

The great sin of modernity is its perspective and focused purely on this world, and ultimately focused on the subjective individual: that the human condition is seen as a matter of feelings and emotions.

Modern secular ethics are no more than an extension of this selfish subjectivism: what is good is (merely) what I feel to be good.

What is good is what it makes me feel good to regard as good.

And (of course) this is purely a matter of human innards: of physiology and psychology (and ultimately psychology reduces to physiology).

Humans could be, and are, manipulated (either by others, or self-manipulated) to feel good about something and bad about another thing; and the polarity can be reversed: all it requires is to be able to control how people feel and to link the feeling to an entity; and, what else is pharmacology, what else is mandatory education, what else is popular art, propaganda and the mass media?

Sin is this situation.

Sin is the situation where how we feel is the ultimate human reality; but, since, how we feel is known to be contingent and means nothing; hence, sin is that ultimate reality is nothing. 

Sin is to embrace this nothingness as reality, to propagandise that nothingness is reality, to denigrate anything which saves us from nothingness.

And that is the reason we need to be 'saved'.

And this is the reason why we cannot save ourselves.

We need to be saved from nothingness, and from those who brainwash us into a belief in nothingness, and from ourselves who propagate that reality is nothingness.

Sin is to embrace nothingness.

And to understand Christianity is to know that, if Christinaity is indeed true, then it does indeed save us.

But to understand the truth of Christianity, we cannot make a comparison with secular modernity because secular modernity does not even rise to the level of untruth - it has no coherence.

(How can it make sense to believe that reality is nothingness?).

Materialist secular modernity does not disprove Christianity, instead it renders thought impossible.

Secular  modernity does not disprove Christianity it (merely) makes Christianity incomprehensible, as it makes everything incomprehensible (science, beauty, art, morality)

So Jesus did come to save us from sin; but the modern concept of sin (and of everything else) is so hopelessly corrupted that we cannot understand what was obvious to all humans throughout history: we are pathetic, deluded and distracted creatures who cannot even understand the hopelessness, the nothingness of the human condition perceived from a wholly this-worldly and materialist perspective.

To Recap:

What do we need to be saved from?

What is 'this world of sin'?


Imagine a world of drugged dupes and drugging dealers, perpetually distracted by flashing lights and pictures when not flashing lights and pictures at others. By shouts and threats and tempting promises, by flattery and apology. Led by lust and hunger, the search for comfort and to escape pain; by a yearning for status, by the need for deference; and also crippled by guilt and a grasping for self-esteem, staggering from one temporary absorption to another. Of individuals controlled by alternating pain and pleasure (or the hope of pleasure and relief from pain), made to work by the crudest of carrots and sticks, or allowed not to work on condition of obedience, manipulated by each other into hatred or submissiveness.

Let us call this the nightmare of nothingness.

We are indeed a world of victims, and at the same time we are a world of exploiters and would-be exploiters.

And at this level of analysis there can be no escape, no imaginable escape; because there is nowhere to escape to, and no-one to lead an escape; since all are - at root - in exactly the same situation.

In essence, Christianity is a profoundly mystical religion; it is about the human's relationship to reality.

Christianity is not about specific morals or arrangements: it is true everywhere, for anyone, in any situation. 

When we are saved, we are saved from the nightmare of nothingness. And we are saved by our relation with God which is a relation above and beyond the nightmare of nothingness.


Everything in Christianity is about helping us to escape the nightmare of nothingness and (by the process called theosis) moving us closer to communion with God.

That is the meaning of Xtmas - at least as we pathetic moderns can perceive it.

Bruce Charlton