Tag Archives: Charles Dickens

Rescuing Christmas from the Humanism of Charles Dickens

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A Christmas Carol is the story of a miserly old man named Scrooge who is visited by four spirits, or ghosts, one Christmas eve: his long-dead former business partner, Marley; and then in immediate succession the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. It is a story that has become a part of the American psyche and has done more to shape our view of Christmas than any other piece of literature, including the Bible.

In his book, The Man Who Invented Christmas, Les Standiford describes Dickens as “the first modern novelist” and “the chief spokesman for his age.” During the mid-1800s, Charles Dickens was the most famous novelist of his time. He had come from a childhood of poverty and humiliation to become one of England’s most articulate social critics, and he used his gifts as a novelist to advance a social agenda that still influences social policy today. For those interested in exploring more of his works, a novels website can provide easy access to his literary masterpieces.

When he published A Christmas Carol in 1843 he had already made a name for himself with such novels as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and The Old Curiosity Shop. But by 1843 he was nearly bankrupt.

Really for no other reason than he desperately needed the money, Dickens began writing A Christmas Carol in October of 1843 and finished it in just six weeks, releasing it just in time for Christmas on December 19. All 6,000 of the original copies sold out within a few days.

A Christmas Carol is more than just a heartwarming Christmas tale. At its very foundation is an intentional presentation of an alternative gospel based in Charles Dickens’s humanistic view of the world, which can be summarized as:

The happiness of man is his ultimate end and purpose. We are fellow travelers to the grave and therefore ought to seek all of the pleasure this life has to offer. “The end he sought in all his zeal was a society in which the pleasures of life could be enjoyed by everyone: culture, entertainment, good food and drink, convivial fellowship, and a happy family.”

Man is basically good and possesses an “innate decency.” Dickens believed “in the possibility of an individual’s capability for self-determination,” that “man had the capacity to change himself and his lot in life.”

The source of man’s sin is his ignorance, which leads him to poverty and ultimately to commit crime. Dickens offered education and benevolence as the solution. “With the application of his knowledge, reason, and innate decency, mankind had everything needed to make a just and happy world.”

All of these themes find their apex in A Christmas Carol:

Les Standiford: “A Christmas Carol is a bald-faced parable that underscores Dickens’s enduring themes: the deleterious effects of ignorance and want, the necessity for charity, the benefits of goodwill, family unity, and the need for celebration of the life force, including the pleasures of good food and drink, and good company.”

A Christmas Carol presents “a secular counterpart to the story of the Nativity.” Dickens “complemented the glorification of the nativity of Christ with a specific set of practices derived from Christ’s example: charity and compassion in the form of educational opportunity, humane working conditions, and a decent life for all. Just as vital as the celebration of the birth of a holy savior into a human family was the glorification and defense of the family unit itself.”

Colossians 2:8-15 deals head on with the humanist error of focusing on the humanity of Christ to the exclusion of his deity, which is precisely the error that Dickens makes. The humanism of Charles Dickens values the example of Christ more than Christ himself, a view of Jesus that betrays an unbiblical understanding of the humanity of Christ:

1. The Humanity of Christ was a veil for the Deity of Christ: v. 9

(Hebrews 10:19-20 “through the veil, that is, through his flesh”)

2. The Humanity of Christ was a vehicle for the deliverance of God’s people from their sins: v. 13; Colossians 1:22

Here Jesus deals with Christmas Past: Dickens believed man could atone for his past mistakes by living more charitably in the present.

a)    Matthew 1:19 – 21 “He shall save his people from their sins”

b)    1 Peter 2:24 “He himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree”

c)    John 1:29, 35 “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”

d)    Isaiah 53:6 “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”

3. The Humanity of Christ made possible his victory over the devil: v. 15; Hebrews 2:14 – 18

Here Jesus deals with Christmas Future: Dickens believed that your future reward was based on your present life of good works and benevolence.

a)    Through his resurrection he has defeated death and the devil: delivering those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage: this is Scrooge’s fundamental problem: he doesn’t want to die.

b)     Through his resurrection he has become our priest

Jesus did not come into the world to reveal to man his own potential. Jesus came into the world “when we were yet without strength” and he died for the ungodly.

Jesus didn’t come into the world to be an example of how humans should live charitable lives. He came into the world, not to rehabilitate us or to reform us, but to make us new.

Rescuing Christmas from The Puritans: Thoughts on Les Standiford’s The Man Who Invented Christmas

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Les Standiford is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University. He has written an intriguing back story to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in his The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits.

If the title causes you to question the attribution of the invention of Christmas to Charles Dickens, given the history of the holiday pre-19th Century, Professor Standiford clarifies things for us a bit when he says “Dickens did not singlehandedly dream up the concept of a yuletide season with its various accoutrements.” Standiford asserts that Dickens “came to the rescue of a downtrodden holiday that a repressed Western world was fairly bursting to revive.” The result, as Standiford readily admits, was that Dickens “gave his contemporaries…a secular counterpart to the story of the Nativity…”

The book traces briefly the biographical history of Charles Dickens, whose life came to a critical turning point in October of 1843, leading ultimately to the writing of A Christmas Carol that same December when he was just 31 years old. 

Just as helpful as his biographical background on Dickens, Professor Standifordrecounts how the birth of Christ came to be celebrated on December 25 via the edict of a fourth century Pope (Julius I), effectively joining the pagan orgies of the Roman Saturnalia with the Church’s celebration of the birth of Christ:

The decision to create Christmas…officially celebrating the birth of Jesus for the first time, brought mixed blessings to the Church. Indeed, many pagans found the new religion that embraced their old customs inviting, and the membership rolls grew.

This merging of paganism with Christianity becomes for Standiford the quasi-standard for true and genuine celebrations of Christmas. But, in Standiford’s recounting and much to his dismay, along comes Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans whose “views of the practice of Christianity” led them to conclude that such celebrations of Christmas “had simply gotten out of hand.”

One gets the impression that the professor views the efforts of godly Puritans to maintain the sanctity of celebration around the birth of Christ as the embodiment of Dickens’s Scrooge. In fact, it is the Puritans and other conservative Anglicans Standiford holds responsible for the “downtrodden” nature of the holiday. The Puritans had made things bad for Christmas, both in England and the United States, writes Standiford. Thanks to the preaching of the Puritans and the legislative efforts of Oliver Cromwell and other Puritans in Parliament, “by the late 1700s the holiday had become a pale shadow of its former self, cloaked in piousness.” Standiford seems to lament that the merry-making and the orgies had all but stopped, replaced by solemn and sanctified celebrations.

But then comes Charles Dickens and his “little Carol” to rescue Christmas from its “religiosity” and return it to it’s pre-Puritan status of revelry and merriment. Thanks to the influence of A Christmas Carol, many of “the decorative elements and amusements” of the holiday were “given a fresh gloss,” making their return to Christmas celebrations:

[B]lazing fireplaces, mince pies and wassail bowls, carol-singing, plum puddings, holly sprigs, mistletoe, fiddling and dancing, blind-man bluffings, and the parlor game of forfeits had been seen in holiday festivities previously, but the effect of Dickens’s tale was to make the incorporation of such elements seem obligatory for anyone’s proper Christmas.

Other practical implications on our cultural celebrations around Christmas which resulted directly or indirectly from A Christmas Carol include the replacement of the Christmas goose with the Christmas turkey, the development of the Christmas card, the exchange of gifts (though this is not specifically mentioned in the book, but derives from Scrooge’s charitable nature after his encounter with the spirits), the Christmas Tree, and the evolution of Father Christmas into the modern Santa Claus, personified in Dickens’s tale by the Ghost of Christmas Present.

“Charles Dickens,” writes Professor Standiford, “played a major role in transforming a celebration dating back to pre-Christian times, revitalizing forgotten customs and introducing new ones that now define the holiday,” and thus “singlehandedly created the modern idea of Christmas.”

In reading Standiford’s history of A Christmas Carol, if not Dickens’s book itself, one sees more clearly the humanistic understanding of salvation that is presented there. A Christmas Carol succeeds as a pagan alternative to the Nativity, and as such it is an alternative to the gospel itself: the story of Jesus Christ, his birth, sinless life, atoning death, and bodily resurrection. Standiford aptly summarizes Dickens’s gospel:

[He] complemented the glorification of the nativity of Christ with a specific set of practices derived from Christ’s example: charity and compassion in the form of educational opportunity, humane working conditions, and a decent life for all. Just as vital as the celebration of the birth of a holy savior into a human family was the glorification and defense of the family unit itself.

In fact, Standiford notes that “Scrooge’s only hope of salvation is to learn the concept of charity.” The alternative gospel is one enamoured with Christ’s example, but not enamoured with Christ himself. The story of Christ’s birth needs no complement, and nothing is more vital to the necessary change in our natures than a celebration of our Holy Savior’s birth for its own sake. Saint Paul warned us of being deceived by these alternative gospels when he wrote in Colossians 2:8:

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.

Interesting, isn’t it, that the hearts of the non- or nominally religious are warmed by the genuinely fanciful and unbelievable story of a miserly old man having his heart fundamentally changed by the appearance of three apparitions one Christmas eve, yet these same hearts assign to the category of myth the assertion of the Christian Gospel that God himself has visited us in the person of His only Son.

In the fulness of time God sent forthHis Son, made of a woman, made under the law; the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be made equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon himself the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men. 

What irony! Enlightened minds who believe in the power of ghosts to fundamentally alter a man’s nature, but can’t bring themselves to believe the story of an invisible God who condescended to us to take our sinful nature on himself, not to reform our natures but to replace them with his own new nature.

It is this God who created us, who became one of us, who died for us, who makes the necessary and fundamental change of Scrooge’s nature (and ours) possible through his resurrection from the dead and our union with him in that resurrection (Romans 6:1-12). This is the heart of Christmas.

Here is the ghostly visitation that holds the power to fundamentally change your nature – not just for the Christmas Season – but for eternity:

Forasmuch therefore as children are partakers of flesh and blood, he himself likewise took part of the same that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.