One of the great needs in our day is for pastors and Christian leaders to think theologically about the pressing issues of race and justice. To be sure, general biblical principles are discussed and promoted. We know that every person from every race has been made in the image of God and has inherent worth and dignity. We know that the Bible presents a beautiful picture of heaven where people from every language, tongue, and tribe gather around the throne to worship the risen Christ. We know that we are called to love our neighbor and that the Lord hates injustice. These are precious truths, and we ought to be reminded of them often.
But once these important convictions are quickly affirmed, then what? Can theological reflection—relying on the Bible and the best of the Christian tradition—help us sort through any of the questions that divide us? Do pastors—trained in Greek and Hebrew and steeped in centuries-old creeds and confessions—have anything meaningful to say? Should people who have spent years—in formal education and in daily study—learning 2,000 years of Christian doctrine (and only a few weeks reading articles about police brutality) try to contribute to the discussion?
Recently, I served on our denomination’s study committee dealing with issues of same-sex attraction and identity. These are highly charged, personal issues just like race. But at least in talking about sexuality, one can find immediate help from our confessional documents and from the best of the church’s theological tradition. Christians have done a lot of thinking over the centuries about marriage, sex, desire, temptation, original sin, actual sin, indwelling sin, and progressive sanctification. Even if the reason for the sexuality debate is new, many of the church’s categories and careful nuances—developed over centuries of reflection, argument, and codification—overlap with the most important theological questions Christians are facing.
It feels different with the most vexing racial issues. And on the one hand, it is different. The Bible can tell us about injustice, but it will not tell us what is going on (just or unjust) in American policing. The Bible tells us clearly that racism is a sin, but it will not tell us the reasons for continuing racial disparities. This doesn’t mean Christians shouldn’t write on these issues. We should care about them deeply, read about them widely, and put forward our best arguments with open hearts and with open minds.

These are massively important questions. And even if a basic consensus can be reached that we must do better in the areas above, we then have to determine how policing can be best improved (better training? end qualified immunity? break up police unions? get rid of the bad apples? rebuild from the ground up?) and how disparities can be best reduced (reform the criminal justice system? invest in education? teach personal responsibility?). All that to say, these are difficult, complicated issues, and we should not mistake our preferred YouTube explainer video—from the left or from the right—as the final word on the subject or the way that all good Christians should think.
Need for Theological Reflection
So where is this argument going? My point is not to discourage Christians from caring about these things, becoming experts in these things, and working for change where change is needed. I am not calling for less engagement in the political and civic issues of our day. I am calling for more theological work to be done on a number of related issues. The issues swirling around us are not just about disputing policing data, about which the Bible says nothing. The issues are also about sin and guilt and holiness and justice, topics about which the Bible speaks an authoritative word.
Over the coming weeks I hope to explore several theological issues related to our ongoing racial tensions. I fear that we are going about our business in the wrong order. We start with racial issues we don’t agree on and then try to sort out our theology accordingly, when we should start with our theology and then see how racial issues map onto the doctrines we hold in common. Good theology won’t clear up every issue, but we might be surprised to see some thorny issues look less complicated and more hopeful.
Lord willing—and with the caveat up front that this list could change as we go along—I’d like to write about three topics over the next month:

The image of God
Sin and guilt
Life together in the church

In short, I want to explore how Christian anthropology, hamartiology, and ecclesiology might encourage, confirm, clarify, and correct our thinking.
Concluding Thought
One last personal note as I wrap up this introduction.
I realize there is almost nothing harder to talk about in America than race. The pain is deep, the anger is often justified, and the fear on all sides—of being misunderstood, of being hurtful, of being hurt, of being canceled—is not irrational. For the past several weeks, my head and heart have been in constant turmoil. Like most pastors (or most people for that matter), I have wrestled with what to say and how to say it. Given the complexities and personal intricacies of these issues, I’m hesitant to say anything at all.
There is no way to speak about these issues that can possibly hit all the right notes. Even among those who agree on the same big ideas, there is still the question of what to emphasize and which audience we are trying to reach.

Are we trying to rebuke neo-Confederate sympathizers?
Are we trying to guard against a godless, entirely mainstream, leftist agenda seen all around us in sports, media, and entertainment?
Are we trying to correct Christians who see everything through the lens of electoral politics?
Are we trying to convince black brothers and sisters that we care and that we are listening?
Are we trying to help honest Christians worried about mobs and riots?
Are we trying to encourage godly police officers who feel discouraged and abandoned?
Are we trying to critique woke pastors dividing their churches?
Are we trying to critique timid pastors who don’t dare say anything?
Are we trying to express lament for obvious racial injustices past and present?
Are we trying to help confused white Christians who wonder if they are guilty of sins they didn’t commit or if they can disagree with any part of the social justice agenda without being racists?

These are all important questions, and one would be right to address any of them. But short of an entire book, it would be hard to meaningfully address all of them. My aim is to work theologically through a few issues, trusting that many of the audiences can be appropriately addressed along the way. No approach will be without its critics. Like everyone else, my read of the current situation depends on an imperfect sense of what I see in my circles, among my friends, and on my social media feed. Inevitably, I will emphasize some points more than others, highlighting those points I think are either underappreciated or misunderstood. I’m sure I won’t say everything that needs to be said.
And yet, sometimes it’s worth saying something even if you can’t say everything. As Christians we should always be eager to reason carefully and winsomely from God’s Word. While I don’t believe every controversial issue surrounding race in this country is theological in nature, I do believe that every culture-wide conflict is bound to have a number of theological issues at its core. The issues in the early church may have looked like practical disagreements about meals and food and ceremonies, but the apostle Paul saw in them the most important issues of the gospel. Paul always brought his best theology to bear on the most intractable problems facing his people. We ought to do the same.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

We’ve heard it so many times that it’s practically part of the Christmas story itself.
The Romans celebrated their seven-day winter festival, Saturnalia, starting on December 17. It was a thoroughly pagan affair full of debauchery and the worship of the god Saturn. To mark the end of the winter solstice, the Roman emperor established December 25 as a feast to Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun). Wanting to make Christianity more palatable to the Romans and more popular with the people, the church co-opted these pagan festivals and put the celebration of the birth of their Savior on December 25. For whatever the Christmas holiday has become today, it started as a copycat of well-established pagan holidays. If you like Christmas, you have Saturnalia and Sol Invictus to thank.
That’s the story, and everyone from liberal Christians to conservative Christians to non-Christians seem to agree that it’s true.
Except that it isn’t.
For starters, we should distinguish between roots that suggest a rip-off and roots that suggest a rebuke. The presence of some connection between a Christian celebration and a pagan celebration could imply a synchronistic copy-cat (“Hey, let’s Christianize this popular pagan holiday so as to make our celebration more palatable”), or it could mean a deliberate rejection (“Hey, this pagan holiday is horrible, so let’s put something distinctively Christian in its place”). After the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, Christians did sometimes adapt and Christianize pagan festivals. Whether they did so wisely and effectively is open to historical debate, but the motivation was to transform the paganism of the Roman world rather than raze it to the ground. Even if Christmas was plopped down on December 25 because of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, that by itself does not entail that the Christian celebration of Christ’s birth really began as a pagan festival.
But in the case of Christmas, there is good evidence that December 25 was not chosen because of any pagan winter holidays. This is the argument Andrew McGowan, of Yale Divinity School, makes in his article “How December 25 Became Christmas” (first published in Bible Review in 2002). Let me try to distill McGowan’s fine historical work by addressing three questions.
When did Christians first start celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25?
Unlike Easter, which developed as a Christian holiday much earlier, there is no mention of birth celebrations from the earliest church fathers. Christian writers like Irenaeus (130-200) and Tertullian (160-225) say nothing about a festival in honor of Christ’s birth, and Origen (165-264) even mocks Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries as pagan practices. This is a pretty good indication that Christmas was not yet on the ecclesiastical calendar (or at least not widespread), and that if it were, it would not have been tied to a similar Roman holiday.
This does not mean, however, that no one was interested in the date of Christ’s birth. By the late second century, there was considerable interest in dating the birth of Jesus, with Clement of Alexandria (150-215) noting several different proposals, none of which was December 25. The first mention of December 25 as Jesus’s birthday comes from a mid-fourth-century almanac called the Philocalian Calendar. A few decades later, around AD 400, Augustine would indicate that the Donatists kept Christmas festivals on December 25 but refused to celebrate Epiphany on January 6 because they thought the latter date was a recent invention. Since the Donatists, who arose during the persecution under Diocletian in 312, were stubbornly opposed to any compromise with their Roman oppressors, we can be quite certain they did not consider the celebration of Christmas, or the date of December 25, to be pagan in origin. McGowan concludes that there must have been an older North African tradition that the Donatists were steeped in and, therefore, the earliest celebrations of Christmas (we know about) can be dated to the second half of the third century. This is well before Constantine and during a time period when Christians were trying to steadfastly avoid any connections to pagan religion.
When was it first suggested that Christmas grew out of pagan origins?
None of the church fathers in the first centuries of the church makes any reference to a supposed connection between Christmas and Saturnalia or Sol Invictus. You might think, Well of course they didn’t. That would have been embarrassing. But if the whole point of basing your Christian birth holiday on an existing pagan birth holiday is to make your religion more popular or more understandable, surely someone would say something. Besides, as McGowan points out, it’s not like future Christian leaders shied away from making these connections. Gregory the Great, writing in 601, urged Christian missionaries to turn pagan temples into churches and to repurpose pagan festivals into feast days for Christian martyrs.
There is no suggestion that the birth of Jesus was set at the time of pagan holidays until the 12th century, when Dionysius bar-Salibi stated that Christmas was moved from January 6 to December 25 to correspond with Sol Invictus. Centuries later, post-Enlightenment scholars of comparative religions began popularizing the idea that the early Christians retrofitted winter solstice festivals for their own purposes. For the first millennium of the church’s history, no one made that connection.
Why do we celebrate Christmas on December 25?
The first answer to the question is that some Christians don’t. In the Eastern branch of the church, Christmas is celebrated on January 6, probably for the same reasons—according to a different calculation—that Christmas came to be celebrated on December 25 in the West. Although we can’t be positive, there is good reason to think that December 25 became the date for Christmas because of its connection to the (presumed) date of Jesus’s death and to the date of Jesus’s conception.
There are three dates at play in this calculation. Let’s start with the date of Jesus’s death.
Around AD 200, Tertullian of Carthage noted that Jesus died on the 14th day of Nisan, which was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman solar calendar. In the East, they made their calculation using the 14th day of the first spring month in their local Greek calendar. In the Roman calendar, this was April 6. So depending on who you asked, Jesus died on either March 25 or April 6.
In both the West and the East, there developed the same tradition that Jesus died on the same date he was conceived. An anonymous Christian treatise from fourth-century North Africa stated that March 25 was “the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the same he suffered.” Augustine in On the Trinity mentioned that same calculation. Similarly, in the East, the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius of Salamis maintained that on April 6 Christ took away the sins of the world and on the same date was “shut up in the spotless womb of the holy virgin.” The fact that this curious tradition existed in two different parts of the world suggests it may have been rooted in more than mere speculation. If nothing else, as McGowan observes, these early Christians were borrowing from an ancient Jewish tradition that said that the most important events of creation and redemption occurred at the same time of the year.
From the date of Christ’s death, to the (same) date of his conception, we can easily see where the date of Christmas could have come from. If Jesus was conceived on March 25, then the best date to celebrate his birth must be nine months later on December 25 (or, in the East, January 6). While we can’t know for certain that this is where December 25 came from—and we certainly can’t be dogmatic about the historicity of the date—there is much better ancient evidence to suggest that our date for Christmas is tied to Christ’s death and conception than tied to the pagan celebrations of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

Collin, Justin, and I enjoyed sitting down with Dr. Miguel Núñez, Pastor for Preaching & Vision at IBI and President of Ministerios Integridad & Sabiduría, who left his medical practice to follow his passion of preaching the Gospel. When COVID-19 broke out in 2020, he used his medical expertise to assess the situation for The Gospel Coalition. Now, one year later, he offers his insights along with a conversation about how the preaching of the Gospel is spreading in the Dominican Republic.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.