Luther and Calvin: Two Reformation Voices on Christmas

Many bloggers focus on the differences between the leading reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin. A popular topic of debate is their views on Christmas. This is especially true during Advent. While disagreements can be interesting, I have decided to take a different approach. I want to highlight their common ground and complementary contributions to Christmas. To accomplish this, I read their sermons on Luke 2:1-14 side-by-side and compared and contrasted them. This perspective fosters goodwill during this blessed season. However, the popular notion of goodwill toward men is hardly a Reformed understanding. So I offer the following meditation as a follow-up or bonus to the episode on Luther’s Christmas I posted a few days ago.

When Martin Luther and John Calvin approached the story of Christmas, they considered the same stable and the same Child in the manger. But what they emphasized reveals two different Reformation sensibilities. They agree on core convictions, though their spiritual imaginations differ. They are telling the same story with different personalities and objectives. We need all the New Testament gospels, each with its own objectives, yet they tell the same story. Similarly, the Reformers’ diverse perspectives give Christmas its richness.

Both Reformers begin with the same foundational truth:

Christmas is God’s gracious descent. Humanity cannot climb to God; we “scarcely crawl upon the earth,” as Calvin puts it. So God bends low. He takes on our flesh, poverty, helplessness, and imperfect parents who laid him in a crib. This crib was a feeding trough. Neither Luther nor Calvin is sentimental about the village of Bethlehem. It is the first step on the road to Calvary. It is the beginning of Jesus’ humiliating emptying. At Christmas, the celebration of the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, the infinite steps into the finite. In a shocking turn of events, a startled young mother holds the everlasting God in her arms. He disarms the world as the light of God's holiness exposes sinful hearts.

Once they establish that God became man, Luther and Calvin tell the story in different ways.

Luther preaches like a storyteller, almost as if he had wandered into the stable himself. He imagines Mary’s exhaustion, Joseph’s worry, the darkness of the night, and the roughness of the manger. He brings the Nativity down from the stained glass of medieval cathedrals and places it in his own world. He sees the cold stalls of German farms and into the bare rooms of simple houses. Luther’s Christmas is earthy and charged with emotion. He wants us to feel the embarrassment and tenderness of the moment.

For him, the miracle of Christmas is that God took on our vulnerability. Luther dwells on the humanity of Jesus: His crying, His nursing, His helpless and defenseless body. In this humility, Luther finds comfort. Christ did more than become a human; He became ours because the Nativity is personal. “Christ is born for you,” Luther says again and again. Faith makes you a participant in this birth—it is, in a sense, your new birth.

For Luther, good works emerge from this personal union with Christ. One cannot claim to have welcomed Christ in Bethlehem if one ignores Him now in his needy neighbor. The manger is a call to action rather than barn furniture most of us are unfamiliar with, except in a creche.

Calvin approaches the Nativity in a different way. When he enters the stable, he sees the glory of divine majesty alongside the squalor. For Calvin, the angels’ song is a theological marker. It tells us that the Child in the manger never ceased to be the sovereign Son of God. Jesus’ plain poverty reveals Jesus’ divinity without any diminishment. Prophecies and angels work together to magnify the King. And they glorify Him despite unwelcomeness, shepherds, and rags.

Calvin’s imagination is theological and precise. He juxtaposes two grand movements: Christ’s deep humiliation and His undiminished glory. Lowliness and majesty stand side by side in Calvin’s Christmas. They are the twin pillars of hope in the Christmas story.

And while Luther sees neighbor-love emerging from Christmas, Calvin emphasizes the courage of faith. True faith must push past what seems foolish or unimpressive. The shepherds accepted a strange sign: “You will find the Savior of the world lying in a manger.” For Calvin, that sign becomes a pattern for the entire Christian life. God continues to hide His glory under simple forms. We will notice God in gospel preaching, in baptism’s water, and in Communion’s bread and wine. The great of this world overlooked Christ in the stable. So people miss him in humble demonstrations of grace. Yet there, Calvin insists, we find Him.

To exercise faith, we must bow low. It must come without presumption, with a willingness to have shepherds teach us. We must cling to a Christ who does not look glorious to the world but is, in fact, the only source of peace with God. Calvin’s Christmas leads us to worship, obedience, readiness, and endurance. Reconciled, God assures believers of his reign despite poverty, affliction, and persecution.

So how do these two Reformers compare?

Luther treats the Nativity as human. He places us beside Mary and Joseph, and we see humanity honored and redeemed. Calvin gives the Nativity in proportion with humility and glory joined. He fulfills the prophecies and assures his people of deliverance. Luther warms the heart. Calvin steadies it. Luther says, “Christ is born for you, so make His birth your own.” Calvin says, “Christ is your Mediator, so trust Him and do not stumble at His lowliness.”

Together, Luther and Calvin show us that Christmas is both tender and immense:

 A Child in the straw,  the eternal God in the flesh.

 A scene that humbles the proud and lifts the lowly.

 A moment where heaven bends to earth and offers hope and deliverance to those who will receive it.

And when you listen to both Luther’s warmth and Calvin’s clarity, you begin to hear the complete harmony of a Reformation Christmas. It is a biblical Christmas about the God-man, and, most of all, about God with us and for us.