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Today is Christmas. The Feast of the Nativity of the Lord. The day when we celebrate the fact that God became man, a human being, in Jesus, who was born at Bethlehem.

Here is a video with Eleonore Stump, a very intelligent, thoughtful Christian philosopher. In this video, she discusses how it is possible to think of Jesus as God.

She says that, to understand the mystery of the Incarnation, the old patristic formulations help. In particular, the Chalcedonian formula states that Jesus is one person with two natures. The person Jesus is both divine and human, man and God: he has both natures.

If that dogmatic formulation sounds abstract and cold, it nonethelss communicates a reality that is full of love. Because the formulation helps you see how God can come closer to humanity in the person of Jesus.

Stump puts it this way:

The Difficulty

Jesus is interested in making God closer to human experience. He is always saying: Come to me.

But how canGod get closer to humanity? A perfect, all-powerful God can’t stop being perfect or all-powerful. How can that kind of being empathize with a weak, limited human being?

What can be done?

The Solution

God cannot subtract from his nature, becoming less perfect, which would make Him other than He is. You’d run into contradiction. But He can add a nature: a human nature. That nature is limited and finite and weak.

The Simile

Stump offers a simile. God adopting a human nature and operating through that additional nature in Jesus is like an actor putting on blurry contact lenses. The actor actually has perfect vision, but if he’s playing the role of a blind person, the contact lenses will help the actor understand what it’s like to be that blind person, by experience. The blurry contact lenses will help bring that actor closer to the blind person and his blind reality, without detracting from his perfect 20/20 vision.

Similarly, in Jesus, you have a person who knows what it’s like to be human (because he is truly human), but who is also at the same time all-powerful and all-loving (because He is truly and totally divine).

(Note: I am sharing this video, because I am grateful for Stump’s discussion of the mystery of the Incarnation, and I think others might enjoy it and find it helpful, too.)

Here’s a note I made three months ago:

Stress and Fear: What if “stress” is fear? We talk about stress at work, but isn’t that just fear that you will fail? Fail to deliver on time? Fail to live up to some standard, be judged, and expelled from the community of those worth belonging to?

Here is a note I took earlier this year:

What you do daily is the most important part of your life. Get that part right. If you can improve that daily part, you can improve your whole life.

I took that after listening to Jordan Peterson.

I was listening to Nathan Barry’s interview of David Perell.

Perell made the point that what you write is going to come from your own experience. It’s going to be uniquely yours, because of the mix of interests that you bring to it.

So even if there’s a process for writing that everyone can go through, that process is not going to eliminate the personal quality of the product.

Your interests will not be my interests, even if we express them in writing after following the same process.

For about a month, I’ve been using Readwise. It’s transformed the way I engage with content on the Internet.

I was a reluctant reader of online content. I favored paper-based material, where I had an easier time annotating while I read.

But now, with Readwise, I’m hitting online articles hard, because I don’t feel like my time is wasted. I move most of what I’m interested in to Instapaper. And if I read articles on Instapaper, my highlights get into Readwise, which then pushes them into Roam. It’s magical.

I’ve also found that Readwise’s spaced reptition feature is enjoyable. I see highlights that interested me, re-presented to me by Readwise. The app also shows me something that it thinks might interest me, even if I’ve never seen it before.

Here’s an example:

To put a value on the digital world by only tallying the money that changes hands is a little like trying to place a value on sex by simply measuring the amount spent on prostitution.

Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man.

I liked that. I like Readwise. Today I paid for a subscription — undoubtedly a more honorable expenditure than the one referenced in the quotation.

(Note: It was the Focused podcast that spurred me into trying Readwise.)