My goal is much more modest: to help Christian and non-Christian readers understand what classical vanilla Christians mean when they identify the baby in the manger with God on high. That means taking on the most controversial and complex idea in Christianity; the doctrine of the Trinity is wrapped around that baby in the manger even tighter than the swaddling clothes.

For believers, the question isn’t why there are presents under the tree. It is whether the love around the family circle speaks of a larger reality and in some way reflects the meaning inherent in the universe as a whole, or whether that happy Christmas morning feeling is nothing more than the biologically conditioned response of a collection of primates in a kinship setting.

For most people, their religious convictions don’t come from the realm of myth and fantasy; they come from that part of the human personality that sees the moral and physical beauty of the world and the people in it, and attempts to respond to that beauty in a serious and worthy way.

Everybody wants to reduce Christmas to a Christmas card: we’d like this to be a pretty and sentimental tale. But today, the third day after the orgiastic opening of the presents beneath the tree, is also the day that the traditional liturgical calendar tries to slap us into serious reflection on the meaning of the event, jolting us out of our turkey comas and eggnog overdoses with an unforgettably grim story.

Conventional manger scenes don’t show it, but besides the ox, the ass, the sheep, and the camels, there was another animal in the room at Christmas: an elephant. And the elephant in the room was the idea that Jesus’ mother was a virgin when He was born.

The manger scene these days really is the face of Christmas for most people and, perhaps not surprisingly, it is one of the aspects of the season that keeps causing trouble.

John Scott Redd Jr., president and associate professor of Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary near Washington, DC, spoke about…