Reclamation
The Hidden Soteriology of "A Christmas Carol"
Prologue
“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
I was five years old when I saw A Muppet Christmas Carol in theaters.
The year was 1992. Walt Disney Studios, then at the peak of its movie-making prowess, timed the film’s release for December 11th, just in time for the Christmas season.
I don’t remember much about the experience. For instance, I couldn’t tell you what candy I got at the theater, if any, but I doubt I much cared. And I don’t remember exclaiming, “Ew!” when the Marley brothers sang, “Our hearts were painted black.” But my sister tells me I did, so I’ll take her word for it.
What I do remember is my feeling of total surrender to the characters, the story, and Michael Caine’s unmatched performance as Ebenezer Scrooge.
It is probably a trick of memory, but when I look back on my experience seeing A Muppet Christmas Carol, I remember it as me reliving a story I had already known and loved for a long time.
But, as I said, I was only five years old. So, it must be a trick of memory. Or more of gravy than of grave, perhaps.
The Finer Print
Since it is my favorite holiday film, I try to watch it every Christmas. I did this year, and it was worth it. With every year that I grow a little older and, I hope, a little wiser, the more I see my capacity, if not tendency, to fall into Scrooge’s reclusive pattern, and the more my heart opens to the warning and the gift this story offers.
But this year, I decided to go beyond the Muppets and read Dickens’ classic novella for myself.
And I’m glad I did.
As it turns out, A Muppet Christmas Carol does not deviate far from the source. I’m not sure if that’s more a compliment to Dickens’ conciseness or the filmmakers’ respect for the work as written. Either way, I was pleased to find that the experience of watching the movie—apart from, you know, Muppets—is pretty much like reading the book.
(If I’m being honest, I visualized the characters as Muppets even while reading.)
Still, the movie had one deviation from the book that continues to haunt me (pardon the pun). It was in the changing of a single word in a dialog exchange that takes place almost verbatim in both the book and the film, where Scrooge first encounters the Ghost of Christmas Past.
The Exchange
In the film, the exchange plays like this:
SCROOGE
What business has brought you here?
GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST
Your welfare.
SCROOGE
A night’s unbroken rest might aid my welfare.
GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST
Your salvation, then. Take heed.
The One Word
Can you guess which word they swapped?
In making the movie more accessible, I appreciate that the screenwriters chose “salvation” instead of the word Dickens wrote. Often, in film adaptations, such deviations are justified. Given the younger and more contemporary audience, this case is no exception.
But the word Dickens chose is, without question, objectively the better word, modern preferences be damned. Dickens’ word is better because it reaches farther back in time and hints at a soteriology (doctrine of salvation) that we modern folk seem to have forgotten or, if not forgotten, dismissed in our glorification of personal responsibility.
To be clear, I am a big fan of personal responsibility, and I believe we are given the will to choose whether we will “take heed” and embark on the soul-saving journey—or resist love unto our final regret.
The only thing I won’t go as far to say is whether that regret, even in its finality, is irreversible. Why would I bear that burden? Why would you?
But where were we? Oh, yes, the mysterious word. In the book, the Ghost says, “Your reclamation, then.”
A Matter of Interpretation
Now, the way I see it, you can interpret this foreshadowing in one of three ways.
The First Interpretation
Option 1: Scrooge will reclaim something of value that he lost, likely from his past, given the immediate context. Or, more broadly, he will reclaim his generosity, love for life, and compassion toward his fellow humans (assuming he ever possessed any of those benefits).
Yes, I suppose you could read it that way. It’s not exactly wrong.
But I bet you can already guess where I’m leaning. So, I’ll save you time: I think Option 1 stinks. I think it stinks so bad it deserves to go to the dreaded dark place where all things that stink go. If Option 1 is how you interpret this exchange, then I think your soteriology stinks, too. And if you claim you have no soteriology, that stinks even more.
If Scrooge were the one doing the reclaiming, as Option 1 would have us believe, then the spectral messengers who come to facilitate his redemption serve no real purpose. They are merely projections of some deeper part of his innate will to discover secret knowledge, the lost part of himself which, if he would only make an effort, he can reclaim in a single night—miracle or no miracle.
In other words, Ebenezer Scrooge must reclaim himself. The act of salvation lies with him and him alone.
Bah, humbug.
The Second Interpretation
Option 2: Dickens was a closet Calvinist. So, while Marley may be “dead to begin with,” Scrooge was always destined for divine election.
Except, for all practical purposes, I’ll claim that Dickens was no Calvinist, in or out of the closet. And so, I say God bless him.
Granted, I’ll be the first to admit that Marley’s apparent irreversible state as an imprisoned, wandering spirit at the story’s onset raises questions about how the Divine Judge sees fit to give Scrooge one last shot while letting Marley die in his sins. But this is the arena of advanced philosophy, and I’m little more than a critic at my best.
Suffice it to say that A Christmas Carol isn’t Jacob Marley’s story. Suffice it further to say that even out of the haunting shadows of spiritual exile and despair may come something like a glimmer of hope—even if it takes the shape of a cold, jaw-detaching dread. And could it be that hope for one is also hope for all? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Again, I won’t bear that burden beyond daring to hope.
But I don’t believe Dickens paints a picture of Scrooge as, in and of himself, divinely elected. So, with Option 2 now ruled out, let’s move on to the third and final apparition—er, I mean interpretation.
The One That Sticks
Option 3: After all these centuries, and despite all our best efforts at reducing a profound and wonderous mystery to a pseudo-infallible instruction manual, we still don’t understand the breadth and scale of true, Incarnational, God-becoming-man, Merry-Christmas-ya-filthy-animal salvation.
Still, let’s interpret the original exchange of dialog through the lens of this third view as far as we can.
Reclamation. As in the reclamation of Ebenezer Scrooge.
This, of course, invites the question: the reclamation of Ebenezer Scrooge… by whom? While it is true that Scrooge does “take heed”, accepting the call to adventure, it is also true that the noun, reclamation, is not applied to him as the subject.
Scrooge is not the one doing the reclaiming; he is the object of another subject’s reclamation—that is, an implied subject, an unseen actor who works behind the veil of our immediate awareness, shape-shifting from past to present to future, hinting at a form beyond form itself, beckoning to us with one ghostly hand and pointing with the other toward the dreaded truth, etched in cold stone, that might yet set us free.
The Mystery of Reclamation
As the story crescendos to its iconic climax, Dickens gives us another haunting scene. In his final moments with the shadowy, hooded Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Scrooge, now on his knees, reaches out and takes hold of the “spectral hand” and, striving with it, detains it—though only for a moment before being repulsed. But the repulsion doesn’t stop him. He strives all the more. At last, he prays. And then, it’s over.
Scrooge has wrestled with God, and God has relented.
You know what happens next if you’ve seen or read the story. Scrooge welcomes Christmas and embarks on the day as a man forever changed in his heart and as one reclaimed.
Now, we return to the crux. If Scrooge is the one being reclaimed, we have a different story here—one that points to an irresistible Power hell-bent on reclaiming what has always belonged to it. That is to say, us.
This Power, beyond immediate perception, reaches into our broken, doomed existence. It incorporates time, space, and matter into itself, retaking them and us for its own—whether we know it or want it, though we must come to want it in the end.
Yet, this same Power compels us to strive with it, only to repulse us at the point of crisis, at the point of our wanting. Why? So that, in the final act, a dogged faith may take the stage. An irresistible power that longs to meet its match in an immovable faith. The perfect collision.
That, as best as I can describe it, is what we call a mystery.
The Other Protagonist
In A Christmas Carol, we find a story about a man, at his worst, so loved by God that this same God would descend into his reality and, in the span of a night, or three nights, or three eons in a night, lead him to the one repentance that restores his soul and reunites him with the fraternity of redeemed, image-bearing humankind.
At last, and if I may stumble into cliché territory, we have a story showing us the meaning of Christmas. You know, the reason for the season that the churchy folk just won’t shut up about. The mystery of God with us, despite sin, despite lies of separation, despite the thing I thought I defeated, rearing its ugly head yet again.
Despite the problem of evil and the gluttony of death.
Bah… humbug?
Epilogue
I’ll leave you with a quote from Clement of Alexandria (which I have the good fortune to include here, thanks to a well-read friend sharing it with me this week).
“All men are Christ’s, some by knowing Him, the rest not yet. He is the Savior, not of some and the rest not. For how is He Savior and Lord, if not the Savior and Lord of all?”
Allow me to put that in layman’s terms.
Scrooge was Christ’s: to begin with.
Merry Christmas.
References
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. First Edition, Chapman & Hall, 1843.
Henson, Brian, director. A Muppet Christmas Carol. Walt Disney Pictures, 1992.
Clement of Alexandria. The Stromata. Translated by John Ferguson, 1994.