Hearing The Gospel Through Charles Dickens S A Christmas Carol

Most people don’t realize Charles Dickens has a biblical foundation. Each of the spirits that appear in A Christmas Carol directly correlates with an Advent lesson that is found in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer. Perhaps that is what attracts Christians to the story of A Christmas Carol. Every Advent Christians revisit this old Victorian moral story with its images of snow covered English cobblestone streets, the sentimentally portrayed ragged poor, and its familiar story line doesn’t seem to grow tiresome through the years. We revisit this story because it echoes with the ancient lessons of Advent. Hearing the Gospel Through Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” is a Christian devotional that uses A Christmas Carol as a tool to teach the ancient Advent lessons of Hope, Faith, Peace, Love and Joy. Each week’s devotion begins with a section from A Christmas Carol which dramatizes the Advent Lesson and is followed with a scriptural Advent lesson from the Church of England’s Book of Prayer. The word Ebenezer is defined in scripture as “The Lord is my help” (1 Samuel 7:1–2). As we travel through Ebenezer’s redemptive healing journey, the devotional invites the participants to examine how Christ is born in their past, present and future. As a Christian pastor, I am grieved that the modern evangelical church has diminished the Advent season to a single Christmas Eve service or Christmas Sunday service. As a community, we no longer spend time preparing our hearts for the season of “Christ coming.” This devotional is for Christians to use as private and family devotions to prepare themselves for the Advent season.

Charles Dickens wrote a great story, a story that resonated with his readers over a century ago and has continued to do so over the years. The story's power to touch people's hearts is undeniable and this version is offered for two reasons. First, the original version is, for today's readers, difficult to read and understand. Its verbiage and style were entirely appropriate for the day, but now are cumbersome at best. This version is written to be more reader-friendly while holding to the soul and integrity of the original. Our story also has been abridged to some degree to make the story line a bit simpler. Second, we take the liberty of reading between the lines of what Dickens wrote and making, we believe, the logical assumption that Scrooge's final transformation is a true spiritual rebirth. Many who have studied his life and work are convinced of his own Christianity as his work not only includes a beautifully written story about Jesus, but his other writings always told a story of redemption. Read it to your children and your grandchildren during this Christmas time and then put it on the shelf to be taken down and re-read Christmas after Christmas. This story doesn't get old. It is, indeed, a perennial favorite.

The first Christians lived out a new social order and envisaged the world anew. Divisions, inequalities and injustices would be overturned as the world would reflect a new kind of reign. In the Kingdom of God, the powerful are brought low, while the oppressed are raised up; the hungry are filled with good things, while the rich are sent empty away; the wolf lives with the lamb, and the leopard lies down with the goat; the slave becomes the son, the master is the servant of all and the meek will inherit the earth. This same upside-down Kingdom is echoed in the Carnival festivals of the Medieval era, which both parodied the oppressive structures of their day and dramatically portrayed an alternative reality. In this book, twelve scholars, theologians, and social activists from around the world take up the Carnival's call for justice and a renewed society, and portray in their own contexts the Kingdom of God coming in justice and fullness of life - the coming of the Carnival Kingdom."

Charles Dickens's 200th birthday will be celebrated in 2012. Though his writings are now more than 100 years old, many remain in print and are avidly read and studied. Often overlooked--or unknown--are the considerable Christian convictions Dickens held and displayed in his work. This book fills that vacuum by examining Dickens the Christian and showing how Christian beliefs and practices permeate his work. This historical work is written for pastors, students, and laity alike. Chapters look at Dickens's life and work topically, arguing that Christian faith was front and center in some of what Dickens wrote (such as his children's work The Life of Our Lord) and saliently implicit throughout various other characters and plots. Since Dickens's Christian side is rarely considered, Gary Colledge illuminates a fresh angle of Dickens, and the 200th birthday makes it especially timely.

This charming, nostalgic work includes illustrations of pages from the original manuscript, a portrait of Dicken's children, and engravings of biblical scenes in a style often used in family Bibles during Dicken's time.