Athanasius of Alexandria (Wikimedia Commons)

A glance to the distant past provides useful and sobering perspective. Few people exemplify and clarify the fight for the true meaning of Christmas as powerfully as does Athanasius of Alexandria.

Born in Egypt at the close of the third century, Athanasius thought deeply and seriously about the mysteries of the faith. While contemplating the purpose of Christ’s advent, he penned an enduring classic of Christian literature, On the Incarnation. “The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father, Who could recreate man made after the Image,” said Athanasius.

This restoration of humanity by God himself in the person of Christ is the meaning of Christmas, and this understanding might have been lost had it not been for Athanasius.

Shortly after Athanasius penned his book, the popular and winsome priest Arius emerged, teaching that Christ was not actually God in the flesh. “What child is this?” Not God, answered Arius.

The emperor called a council, which Athanasius attended, to resolve the issue and keep the Church from splitting over Arius’s teaching. The atmosphere was tense and heated. St. Nicholas (yes, that St. Nick) famously socked Arius during one session. But from the turmoil arose agreement about the divine nature of Christ, validating the view that Athanasius advanced in On the Incarnation. Arius was anathematized and his supporters exiled. But despite appearances, the issue was unsettled.

Shortly after the council, the bishop of Alexandria died and Athanasius was ordained to the office. The weakened Arian faction worked against him almost from the start. After false charges were levied against him, Athanasius appealed to the emperor for help. But the balance of power was shifting, and the new bishop was banished.

This inaugurated many periods of exile for Athanasius, who tirelessly defended the orthodox view against the Arian heresy. It is impossible to adequately summarize the weight of opposition he faced. By political maneuvering and alliance with subsequent emperors, the Arians came to power and brought brutal persecution, the likes of which only pagan powers had ever before exercised.

One night in February 356 Athanasius presided at a midnight vigil. Other than the prayers and psalm-singing the room was quiet. Suddenly, armed men burst inside and, amid the flickering candlelight, fired arrows and slashed with their swords. Athanasius was almost killed in the struggle, but his supporters secreted him out of the church.

The ransacking was widespread. Churches were seized. Deacons and priests were killed. Widows were beaten. Taking refuge in the desert with monks, Athanasius led his fugitive church from hiding. In 357 he wrote his scattered and discouraged flock:

May God comfort you. I know . . . that not only this thing saddens you, but also the fact that while others have obtained the churches by violence, you are meanwhile cast out from your places. . . . They are, it is true, in the places, but outside of the true Faith; while you are outside the places indeed, but the Faith, within you.

The faith within you was the whole point. To betray it would reenact the betrayal of Adam, the very betrayal that Christ’s incarnation reversed. Whatever evil and danger befall the faithful, Christ’s advent restored communion with God because God himself came and walked among us.

Enemies of that faith rage and seem at times to prevail, but the gift of Christmas is something they can never steal or destroy. Despite all odds, that faith eventually triumphed and Athanasius with it. Despite a lifetime of persecution for Christ, he died peacefully of natural causes in old age.

“What child is this?” It is God in the flesh, coming in love to restore his creation. And we can celebrate Christmas today because of the life and sacrifice of Athanasius so many years ago.

Originally published at FoxNews.com in 2010.

'Christ Preaching at Capernaum' by Maurycy Gottlieb (Wikimedia Commons).

Jesus goes to the Psalter many times. Passages such as Mark 12, Luke 10, and Matthew 27, for instance, refer back to Psalms 118, 91, and 22. Dig into that last psalm. Not only does Jesus quote it from the cross (and I think it’s presented as an indictment on the people that they do not know their own Psalter), but the psalm itself unfurls the entire passion scene—the mocking words and wagging heads; Christ weak and thirsty; the pierced hands and feet; the divided garments; even in a sense his final words. “It is finished,” says Christ in Matthew 27. “He has done it,” say the people in Psalm 22. Christ lived and died with the Psalms on his lips.

According to the Letter to the Hebrews, Christ entered the world with the Psalms on his lips as well, specifically Psalm 40, which discusses his self-sacrifice on our behalf. Several times the writer of Hebrews refers to the Psalter with Christ in mind; browse the first, second, third, fifth, seventh, and tenth chapters (the last being where Psalm 40 is so powerfully quoted) to see what I mean.

Finding Christ in the Psalter has preoccupied the church since its earliest days. You see it throughout the New Testament (it’s not just Hebrews). You also see it in the writing of the fathers. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Athanasius, and Hilary of Poitiers only start the list. The whole point of the Psalter, says Hilary, “is our instruction concerning the glory and power of the coming, the Incarnation, the Passion, the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of our resurrection.” To drive it home, Hilary refers to the psalmist primarily as “the prophet.”

As with Psalm 22 in particular, the prophetic links to Christ in the rest of the Psalter are impossible to miss:

• God’s only begotten son (2, 110)
• Christ’s supreme kingship (2, 45, 72)
• Role as the suffering servant (28, 55, 102)
• Healing ministry (107)
• Quelling of the raging sea (65, 107)
• Hated without cause (35, 109)
• None of his bones broken (34)
• His atoning work (69, 72)
• His ascension (24, 47)
• That he is judge over the earth (50)

Through these and many other passages we discover a striking fact about the Psalter: It invites identification of and with Christ. Come find Christ, the psalmist says. Come take on Christ, he further encourages.

Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon provides a perfect example in Psalm 119. Since “[e]very line speaks of Jesus” we can pray the words as referring to him, a prayer in a sense about Christ. Or we can pray it “as the prayer of Jesus to His Father, filled with the resolve to do in all things the Father’s will” (emphasis added).

By praying Christ’s words after him, we enter into his life of obedience. We suddenly identify with him. His life becomes our life; his words, our words; his thoughts, our thoughts.

We are called in Scripture to live as Christ, to suffer with Christ, to be holy like Christ, to grow into the image and likeness of Christ. How can we take our shallow souls, our frail bodies, our divided hearts and do this? By adopting the Psalms we can begin to read the words, pray the words, sing the words as if they are our own. We take the Psalter upon our lips in prayer and worship and discover sometimes midsentence that we are saying Christ’s words after him—that we are sharing in the pains he bore for us, participating in the victory he won for us. We say the Psalms and we become more like him.

When we pray the Psalms in Jesus’ name, they submerge our shallow souls to deeper fathoms in Christ. They ready and prepare our bodies for the tasks of the savior. They unify our hearts to him. Christ has made provision for us in the Psalms to find both our cross and our path to follow him.

Detail of 'Jews Praying in the Synagogue' by Maurycy Gottlieb (Wikimedia Commons)

What if someone could guide you to God in those moments, could take you before the throne, lean over and whisper, “Just say it like this,” and then unfurl a stream of words that meant everything your heart was feeling but cannot communicate? That someone is Christ, and he whispers in the Psalms.

The church has always recognized the Psalter as its first tutor in prayer, just as it was for the saints of the Old Testament. Early Christians, ministers and laity alike, turned to the Psalms to learn what, when, and how to pray. Sts. Athanasius of Alexandria (293–373), John Cassian (360–435), and Benedict of Nursia (480–547) all, for example, wrote about using the Psalter in prayer. The latter two focused on monastic use, but Athanasius’s words apply to any believer.

Says that ancient defender of the faith, the Psalms not only enjoin us to be thankful, encourage us to endure tribulation, and point us to repentance, they also give us the words to use for those moments. And it’s not just these things; the Psalms provide words fitting for the myriad “movements of the human soul. . . . In fact, under all the circumstances of life, we shall find that these divine songs suit ourselves and meet our own souls’ need at every turn.”

And the supreme grace of it: God has provided the words. They are the words of Christ himself. Standing in total solidarity with us, Jesus, the New Adam, is in every way like us. He assumed our total human experience and thereby healed and redeemed it. But unlike us, Christ is without sin, and so has complete and perfect communion with the Father. Only he can truly pray, and for this reason we can only truly pray when we do so in his name, following his lead. One place he leads is in the Psalms.

Traditionally, the primary speaker of the Psalms is David. But Christ is in the shadows. “In the Psalms of David the promised Christ himself already speaks,” explains Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “The prayers of David were also prayed by Christ. Or better, Christ himself prayed them through his forerunner David.” This perspective on the Psalter is shaped and informed by two millennia of church tradition and interpretation—by men like Athanasius, Cassian, and Benedict—which sees Christ in the Psalms as our elder brother teaching us how to pray.

When we pray the words of the Psalter, we pray with Christ at our elbow. Again Bonhoeffer:

It is the incarnate Son of God, who has borne every human weakness in his own flesh, who pours out the heart of all humanity before God and stands in our place and prays for us. He has known torment and pain, guilt and death more deeply than we. Therefore it is the prayer of the human nature assumed by him which comes here before God. It is really our prayer, but since he knows us better than we know ourselves and since he himself was true man for our sakes, it is also really his prayer, and it can become our prayer only because it was his prayer.

When we open the Psalms and begin to read, begin to pray, we are often surprised at how fitting they are, how they capture our moment, whatever we feel (or want to feel). It should not surprise us that the Psalms speak our secrets. They know both the open spaces and dark corners of our heart because they are the words of the one who first fashioned our heart and then later took its joys, sufferings, hopes, and struggles upon himself for our sakes.

In his little book on praying the Psalms, Thomas Merton talks about people who “know by experience” that through the Psalter “Christ prays in the Christian soul uniting that soul to the Father in Himself.” I want to be one of those people. How about you?

George Orwell

Orwell characterized Lewis as enjoying some “vogue at this moment,” which permitted him to offer “chummy little wireless talks.” But Orwell saw these chummy talks and books as subversive. Lewis was a “reactionary”—conservative—and Orwell considered his apologetics as part of “an outflanking movement in the big counter-attack against the Left. . . .”

This perhaps does not rise to the level of great discovery, but it occurs to me that Orwell’s essay is a window through which to glimpse our basic intellectual limits (whether in theology, philosophy, economics, politics, sociology, biology, whatever).

Our ideas are not solely our own. We live in specific contexts and react to things in those contexts. What’s more, we usually have very little awareness of how dependent upon our context we truly are for what we assume to be true. My context includes living in Nashville, Tennessee, being married, having kids, being Christian, being Caucasian, being 34-years-old, balding, enjoying books, working for a publisher, driving a stick-shift, liking Tom Petty, and a million other particulars that uniquely form the matrix in which I live my life. That context conditions my thoughts and also limits them. (I, for instance, have no idea what it’s like to be a 54-year-old Muslim woman in Somalia.)

George Orwell had a context too, of course. He was a socialist at a time when fascism had ravaged Europe and was quick to see it wherever he looked, including in Lewis’ “chummy little wireless talks.” His context shaped his thoughts. To purposefully belabor the point, Lewis also had a context, and it shaped his views as much as Orwell’s affected his. But much of their contexts overlapped; they lived at the same time and interacted with the same problems and issues. And like mine, their contexts had built-in limitations.

Lewis himself helps us understand this in his famous (also 1944, by the way) introduction to St. Athanasius’ book, On The Incarnation. “Every age has its own outlook,” he writes. “It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.” Why? Because “All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.” He could have easily used Orwell’s name there.

The problem is that every period ends up sharing “a great mass of common assumptions” and contemporaries (or locals, etc.) have trouble thinking beyond those assumptions. Lewis offers one help: “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries [different contexts with different assumptions] blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books,” in his case then one by the great Alexandrian bishop Athanasius. (As Lewis suggests, future books would be great too, but Barnes and Noble doesn’t stock them yet.)

Old does not equate to good or right, of course. People were just as prone to follies and fumbles in the past. But, as Lewis says, they were prone to different ones than our own because their thinking was conditioned by different contexts. In a sense, it comes down to an application of crowdsourcing: “Two heads are better than one,” says Lewis, “not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.”

We can use ideas from different times and places to check our own. The trick is being aware enough of our contexts so that we can see the need to look outside them in the first place.