Good morning and Merry Christmas to you and your family.

This morning I'm joined by Bishop Robert Barron, the 9th Bishop of the Diocese of Winona, Rochester,

and the founder of Word on Fire, which I recommend to everyone.

Bishop Barham, welcome. Thank you for joining me

on Newt's World. Here at Christmas, would you mind starting us off with a message about Christmas

and what it means to you? Well, first of all, thank you for having me on. It's good to be with you,

and Merry Christmas to all the listeners today. You know, something the Church Father said over and over

again was God became man that man might become God.

And it might seem a little peculiar at first, but it's based in the Bible, namely that God becomes one of us, precisely to draw us into his life.

So the Greek fathers talked about theosis in their language, but Thomas Aquinas picked

it up in the West. He used the word deificatio, deification, that we become sharers in God's

nature. God became one of us, that we might become sharers in his own life. And that, I think,

is the deepest meaning of Christmas.

It's the message of the incarnation. So not just a sort of a strange one-off, but something

that's at the very heart of our human life, that God is not just a moral exemplar for us,

but God is calling us into intimacy with himself. And that happens through the incarnation.

And that's the message of Christmas. God becomes this little baby. God joins us in our weakness,

our vulnerability, our finitude, that we might become sharers in his own nature. I always call it

the marvelous humanism of Christianity. There's no

humanism, ancient or modern, that holds out a higher ideal for human beings than Christianity,

because the ordinary goal of the Christian life is to become a sharer in God's nature. So the

humanism of our tradition is grounded finally in this great feast of Christmas.

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