The Ben Shapiro Show - The Dangers of Secularism | Bishop Robert Barron

00:00:00.000 Part of the problem is that we religious people, I think, we've wrung our hands too much.

00:00:03.000 We've, you know, the scandals and everything else, and we've kind of retreated to the sidelines, or we enter the conversations very defensively.

00:00:11.000 We shouldn't.

00:00:12.000 We represent, as you say, these ancient traditions that have fed, in fact, and shaped Western culture.

00:00:20.000 We should not be in a position of hand-wringing apologetics, but of bold proclamations.

00:00:26.000 Bishop Robert Barron is a renowned Catholic theologian and author, often cited as the Bishop of the Internet for his innovative approach to evangelization in the modern world.

00:00:34.000 Through his Word on Fire ministry, Bishop Barron produces and publishes books, documentaries, sermons, and podcasts that spread the gospel to over 200 million viewers online.

00:00:42.000 The bishop's distinctive articulation of faith, culture, and philosophy is also featured here at The Daily Wire in Dr.

00:00:48.000 Jordan B. Peterson's latest series, Foundations of the West.

00:00:51.000 While exploring sites across Rome like St.

00:00:52.000 Peter's Cathedral and the Catacombs, Jordan and Bishop Barron discuss the Church's pivotal role in shaping Western civilization as we know it.

00:00:58.000 In today's episode, Bishop Barron and I dissect contemporary myths about traditional religion and delve into the underlying presumptions of a secular society.

00:01:05.000 The bishop also highlights the ideological tension between virtue and freedom and how the pursuit of unqualified liberty is not as useful as we may think.

00:01:13.000 Bishop Robert Barron's monumental contributions to our modern conversations around faith and culture inspire both believers and seekers alike.

00:01:19.000 Stay tuned and join us for another excellent discussion on this episode of the Sunday Special.

00:01:23.000 Bishop, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:01:34.000 Really appreciate it.

00:01:35.000 Thanks, Ben.

00:01:35.000 Always good to be with you.

00:01:36.000 So let's talk about Foundations of the West.

00:01:39.000 That's a series that we both had a chance to participate in with Jordan Peterson.

00:01:42.000 I took him around Jerusalem for an episode.

00:01:44.000 You took him around Rome.

00:01:45.000 So what did you actually do with him in Rome for those who haven't seen the episode yet?

00:01:49.000 A number of things.

00:01:50.000 We started, I think, in the Colosseum.

00:01:51.000 We went to St.

00:01:52.000 Peter's.

00:01:52.000 We ended up in Ostia.

00:01:54.000 We were in Santa Maria and Trastevere.

00:01:56.000 So a number of places, both in classical Rome and in Catholic Rome, if you want.

00:02:00.000 And we tried to draw some links between those two worlds, how the first Christians used the sort of infrastructure, the cultural infrastructure of Rome to propagate the Christian message.

00:02:11.000 The continuity between, let's say, Rome's more imperial imagination and the church's desire to spread the word of Jesus around the world.

00:02:19.000 So some of those themes that connected classical and Catholic Rome we looked at.

00:02:23.000 And that really is a fascinating phenomenon because the way that many of us who have, I would say, More of a passing familiarity with Christian history, just as part of a general world history, is the sort of old-fashioned idea that Christianity and Rome are working in direct opposition to one another all the time.

00:02:41.000 How much of that is true?

00:02:42.000 Well, I think I said to Jordan during the show that there's a great yes to Rome and a great no to Rome that you can see clearly in the first Christians. 1.00

00:02:49.000 What I just alluded to is the yes to Rome.

00:02:52.000 You know, these two Jews, Peter and Paul, make their way to Rome because they knew they've got to be in the action.

00:02:59.000 They have to be in the center of things.

00:03:00.000 If they want this message to go out to the world, Rome was the place to be.

00:03:04.000 And they indeed use that infrastructure, even like literally Paul using the Roman roads to make his way around the eastern part of the empire and eventually to Rome itself.

00:03:13.000 So there is that.

00:03:14.000 There's the great embrace of Rome, I would say.

00:03:17.000 And even the fact that in the Roman Catholic Church, there are Roman elements that remain to this day.

00:03:22.000 I'm the bishop of a diocese.

00:03:23.000 That's a Roman idea. 0.88

00:03:25.000 I wear purple as a bishop, which is an imitation of the senatorial purple, etc.

00:03:30.000 So there's all of that, I would say, positive.

00:03:33.000 At the same time, there's a great critique of Rome.

00:03:36.000 Nowhere is it better expressed than in St.

00:03:38.000 Augustine.

00:03:39.000 So now, maybe the last of the really great classical figures in the West.

00:03:43.000 But Augustine writes The City of God, which is a very, very sharp critique of Rome.

00:03:49.000 Rome as politically compromised as a fallen culture, engaged in false worship. 0.96

00:03:56.000 And let's face it, the Church was brutally at times persecuted by Rome.

00:04:01.000 So, you know, there's no question about that, that the Church also says no, because it speaks of Christ as the true Lord, not Caesar.

00:04:10.000 So to me, that's part of the drama, the poetry of it, is we say both yes and no to Rome.

00:04:14.000 And it's wonderful that, you know, I'll be leaving just...

00:04:17.000 Shortly to go to Rome for a synod.

00:04:19.000 So the church still gathers in Rome for its major acts of government and so on.

00:04:25.000 So we're still saying yes to Rome, and I think we're also still saying no to it.

00:04:29.000 That is one of the fascinating things about the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

00:04:32.000 Again, the sort of modern conception of the Roman Catholic Church is almost sort of bizarrely sidelined the church in sort of Western history.

00:04:40.000 There's been an attempt really since the Enlightenment to take the church and pretend that the church was sort of an extraneous force pushing back against the progress that would have occurred in the absence of the church.

00:04:51.000 And that's completely false.

00:04:52.000 I mean, that is completely separated from the reality of history in which the church is the source of literally every great founding university in the West and is also the source of most of the great early scientific discovery.

00:05:04.000 And so that attempt to separate it off from the church is really bizarre.

00:05:08.000 Yes, it is bizarre.

00:05:09.000 But you know what it is?

00:05:11.000 It's the repetition constantly of the founding myth.

00:05:14.000 So the founding myth of modernity is both political liberation and epistemological liberation, if you want, happened after a long twilight struggle against the forces of obscurantism.

00:05:28.000 They want to keep us in superstition on the one hand and keep us in political oppression on the other.

00:05:33.000 And the convenient myth is all that's associated with the Catholic Church.

00:05:37.000 And so on a regular basis, you see it to this day, on a regular basis is trotted out this old myth of origins.

00:05:45.000 And so we have to beat up the Catholic Church over and over again to say it's out of a terrible struggle with this still-existent institution that modernity emerged. 0.70

00:05:56.000 When in point of fact, as you correctly say, from hospitals and schools and universities and science itself, The church is not the opponent.

00:06:05.000 The church is the matrix of all of these realities.

00:06:08.000 This is not to whitewash church history and to deny that there are bad things.

00:06:13.000 There obviously were.

00:06:14.000 But it's a complete caricature to say that modernity and its positive elements emerges after a terrible struggle against the church.

00:06:23.000 We've been battling this for several centuries now.

00:06:26.000 The simplistic version of history, instead of seeing, for example, Luther's 99 Theses as an attempt to course-correct what he saw as, for example, a corrupt church, and he was actually sort of a fundamentalist in that way, instead of seeing all of these debates as existing within a larger Christendom, there's been an attempt to basically posit sort of a good side of history and a bad side of history, and the modern mind has put the church at the center of the bad side of history, and it's that most clearly in the way that the French Revolution sees itself.

00:06:56.000 As setting up a god of reason as opposed to this horrible Catholic god, which is, of course, why the French Revolutionaries talked about strangling the last king with the guts of the last priest. 0.87

00:07:05.000 The idea being, of course, that monarchy and the Catholic Church were in cahoots together and that the only way to overthrow tyranny would be to overthrow the Church itself.

00:07:12.000 That is a complete misread of history and is pretty obviously a misread of history given the fact that the French Revolution ended up becoming one of the great tyrannies of history.

00:07:19.000 Well, right.

00:07:20.000 I mean, I don't want to move into the space of the French Revolution and say, well, that's where we ought to be going.

00:07:24.000 I mean, talk about...

00:07:25.000 A corrupt, you know, political matrix.

00:07:28.000 And again, none of this is to deny that there was, let's say, real corruption of the Church, and Luther and some of the Reformers were responding to that, that there were elements of modernity that were correcting problems within the old, you know, the ancien regime.

00:07:40.000 And I don't deny any of that for a second, but it's again a gross caricature to say that the Church just represents the forces of darkness.

00:07:48.000 You know, just the fact that for many people, if they study philosophy in our universities, They might look at the ancient philosophers and they probably leap right over to Descartes and the founding of modern philosophy, where, you know, from Augustine to Anselm to Aquinas to Bonaventure to Duns Scotus, I mean, all these major figures, or Moses Maimonides, for example.

00:08:11.000 These are philosophically irrelevant figures.

00:08:14.000 Of course, they're of massive importance.

00:08:16.000 And I go back to an intellectual hero of mine, Etienne Gilson, the great Catholic philosopher, who began his career as a kind of more secularist student of Descartes.

00:08:27.000 And what he found as he read Descartes was, you know, there are so many things in Descartes that are not in the classical authors.

00:08:34.000 Where did we get that from?

00:08:36.000 And that led Gilson to go back to especially Aquinas and the Middle Ages and say, well, we shouldn't leap over this whole thousand-year period.

00:08:44.000 So that's another way that the thing gets distorted.

00:08:47.000 It's more of this in just a moment.

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00:10:03.000 I think it's really important to call out that distorted view of history because it does have very modern ramifications.

00:10:08.000 And the most obvious ramification is that if you set up sort of rationalism versus, say, the Catholic Church or religion more broadly, which is what it's become.

00:10:15.000 It's not just an attack on the Catholic Church.

00:10:17.000 The Catholic Church is at the center of that attack, but the attack By a sort of secular modernism against all forms of religion.

00:10:23.000 That would include Judaism.

00:10:24.000 That would include Protestantism.

00:10:25.000 It includes everybody who is a God believer who believes that there is in fact an ordered nature to the universe created by God.

00:10:32.000 The oppositional history is written for a particular purpose.

00:10:35.000 And that particular purpose is to basically suggest that everybody who is not on our side is an irrational tyrant who's attempting to bring us back to a time of total theocratic rule.

00:10:45.000 That's the old myth of foundation again.

00:10:48.000 So you just brought it out, but it's trotted out regularly.

00:10:51.000 But as you suggest correctly, in a Christian context, think here of Pope Benedict's famous Regensburg Address, where he talks about the primacy of logos within our tradition.

00:11:01.000 If we say Jesus is the logos made flesh, the word made flesh, that means he's linked automatically to all expressions of logos, whether that's in Culture, science, philosophy.

00:11:13.000 That's making a positive statement about the relation between religion and secular reason, if you want.

00:11:18.000 Then go back even further.

00:11:20.000 Go back into the wisdom literature in the Old Testament.

00:11:22.000 You have all kinds of references to the order of the cosmos and the heavens speaking of the glory of God, and we know God through the harmonies and intelligible patterns of the universe.

00:11:32.000 That's not just a Greek idea.

00:11:34.000 That's a deeply biblical idea.

00:11:36.000 But you're quite right in suggesting that the modern myth is, no, no, on one side is good light and reason, on the bad side is obscurantism and superstition.

00:11:44.000 But that's a complete distortion of the religious tradition.

00:11:48.000 And I think that it's a necessary myth for secular modernism, because secular modernism on its own can make very few affirmative claims.

00:11:55.000 I mean, this is an argument that I've had with sort of the new atheistic crew, people like Sam Harris.

00:11:59.000 I said that secular modernism very often uses the tools of religion.

00:12:02.000 They use the language of free will, for example, or the language of order in the universe, the language of scientific discovery, which is all about the idea that there are, in fact, these rules that govern the universe that are discoverable by a human mind.

00:12:12.000 All these are religious premises.

00:12:14.000 There's nothing in sort of the evolutionary biological record that suggests that your meatball of a mind is capable of grasping anything like a, quote-unquote, higher truth, which should not exist in the context of evolution.

00:12:24.000 There's merely what's adaptive and what's not adaptive.

00:12:27.000 But the secular modernists, their entire movement is predicated on the idea that they don't actually have to make an affirmative claim for why the world works the way that it does.

00:12:37.000 They just have to reject the religious claim, and the rejection is in and of itself an important quality, so important, because, again, if they were to lose, then we would revert right back to the quote-unquote dark ages.

00:12:47.000 Right, and they're overlooking that it's so surpassingly weird that the universe should be intelligible.

00:12:53.000 That's the famous quote from Einstein, right?

00:12:55.000 The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible, that it's marked by intelligible pattern.

00:13:02.000 And that's why many have argued, and I quite agree with this, that the modern sciences emerged where and when they did because of religious suppositions.

00:13:10.000 If you believe in creation, You know two very important things.

00:13:14.000 One is the world isn't God.

00:13:16.000 The world is not divine.

00:13:18.000 The world is not to be worshipped.

00:13:19.000 It can be experimented upon.

00:13:21.000 It can be observed.

00:13:22.000 It can be analyzed objectively.

00:13:24.000 But the second thing you know is it's endowed in every nook and cranny by intelligibility because it was made by an intelligent mind.

00:13:32.000 Those two premises are required, it seems to me, for the emergence of the physical sciences.

00:13:38.000 And that's why it's no accident that so many of the founders of the sciences were indeed religious people.

00:13:44.000 Einstein now takes on a more kind of Spinozan flavor.

00:13:48.000 But still, even in Einstein, you find a sense of kind of divine grounding and purpose.

00:13:54.000 So yes, it is being borrowed from religion, even as they're trying now to debunk religion.

00:13:59.000 But they're standing on a foundation provided by religion.

00:14:03.000 Yeah, and I think that there's something else that's going on too, which is, if you make the claim that everything secular, all sciences, all of the reason itself is posited against religion, this is like a hard gap.

00:14:13.000 On one side you have reason and decency and enlightenment, and on the other side you have darkness and obscurantism and faith, that if you posit those against one another, then that also suggests that there is no limit to human reason, which is how you get into some pretty dark areas of human activity.

00:14:29.000 Once you decide...

00:14:30.000 That everything can be reasoned out, everything, in terms of human relations.

00:14:34.000 And human beings are innately malleable because if you can reason everything out, that means you can change yourself.

00:14:38.000 And if you can change yourself, then that means everyone can be changed.

00:14:41.000 And human beings, there is no human nature.

00:14:43.000 There's just sort of a blank slate to be operated upon.

00:14:45.000 Once you get there, you get into some pretty dark spaces.

00:14:48.000 I think what religion tends to do, and this is particularly true in Roman Catholicism, it's also true in Judaism, of course, it says, yes, there are these things that reason is capable of doing.

00:14:57.000 And then there are also circumscribed limits to what reason can do.

00:15:00.000 And that is so important.

00:15:02.000 It is really important to see as a source of data things like revelation.

00:15:07.000 Not just that revelation once happened believing the historical truth of the thing, but as Thomas Sowell has suggested, these are rules that have stood the test of time.

00:15:14.000 When you're talking about the Roman Catholic Church, you're talking about something that stood the test of time for over 2,000 years at this point.

00:15:19.000 When you're talking about the Jewish religion, you're talking about something that has lasted past 3,000 years, and people are still attempting to live out those rules. 0.98

00:15:27.000 This is a time-tested way of actually looking at data as opposed to what reason suggests, which is, hey, look, there's a new study.

00:15:33.000 It came out from Stanford last Thursday.

00:15:34.000 Let's just try it out on all of humanity.

00:15:36.000 And we're going back to the very beginning of the book of Genesis, aren't we?

00:15:39.000 You know, when you're grasping at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a way to read that is I'm taking to myself a prerogative that belongs to God alone.

00:15:47.000 If God is the ground of epistemic value and moral value, I can't make up the rules.

00:15:54.000 I can't grasp at that and say, I'm going to make this for myself.

00:15:57.000 Rather, I want to bring my mind and my will into harmony with these objective intelligibilities that are grounded in the creative mind of God.

00:16:06.000 Now that's a formula for a happy life, a healthy life.

00:16:09.000 The trouble is, and it's right in Genesis, you see it, you can trace it up through Western history, it's rampant today that I have this kind of Promethean capacity to determine good and evil.

00:16:21.000 I can determine right and wrong.

00:16:23.000 I decide what's true, what's false.

00:16:26.000 Now we've opened up the abysses, as they say.

00:16:29.000 Now we've opened up chaos.

00:16:31.000 And the psychological and spiritual space a lot of people are living in, sadly, is precisely that space.

00:16:36.000 And the book of Genesis knew all about it.

00:16:39.000 That's the root of our fundamental problem.

00:16:43.000 Now, when I surrender my mind and my will to the objective values that are placed in the world by God, now I find real flourishing.

00:16:53.000 Now I find real joy.

00:16:55.000 That's a message that we religious people Have to say today, I think, with great insistence.

00:17:02.000 The thing I'm describing as Prometheanism is the default position of almost every kid in America now.

00:17:08.000 It's the basic philosophy they'd accept.

00:17:10.000 And part of the problem is that we religious people, I think, we've wrung our hands too much.

00:17:14.000 We've, you know, the scandals and everything else, and we've kind of retreated to the sidelines.

00:17:19.000 Or we enter the conversations very defensively.

00:17:22.000 We shouldn't.

00:17:23.000 We represent, as you say, these ancient traditions that have fed, in fact, and shaped Western culture.

00:17:30.000 We should not be in a position of hand-wringing apologetics, but of bold proclamation.

00:17:37.000 There's more on this in a moment.

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00:18:42.000 You know, and I think that's such an important point because one of the things that's happened in Western life is that the burden of proof seems to have shifted.

00:18:48.000 So it used to be that if you wanted to change all of the rules, you actually had to prove, as Chesterton suggested, why the rule was wrong.

00:18:54.000 You had to demonstrate that there was a better rule in the offing.

00:18:57.000 And now it seems that the burden of proof is on people who have historic rules on their side to prove why the rule is good.

00:19:03.000 And so the idea is, you have to prove to me why traditional marriage is good. 1.00

00:19:06.000 Now, that would have been a question that people laughed at for thousands of years.

00:19:10.000 And still in most parts of the world laugh at.

00:19:12.000 I mean, it's an obviously silly question in the sense that, well, of course a man and a woman produce children, and that is the foundation of the world going on for humanity, and that man-woman-child is the basic foundational unit of civilization.

00:19:24.000 I mean, this was seen for literally all of human history, and in most places in the world, as the foundational truth.

00:19:30.000 And then the West simply said, well, I mean, now prove it.

00:19:34.000 And if you can't prove it in a way that is sufficient to how I feel, and that is able to overcome my authentic desire for a thing, then that means that the rule has to go away.

00:19:34.000 Now prove it.

00:19:44.000 The burden of proof shifted, I think, specifically because of this long-lasting attack on the foundations of things like the church, or like the Torah, or like these historic institutions.

00:19:52.000 So it was an indirect attack.

00:19:54.000 Instead of attacking the rules directly, with those institutions sort of undamaged, they instead decided to go right at the foundations of the institutions And then they knew that the rules would topple if you go after the institutions.

00:20:06.000 Yeah.

00:20:07.000 And I'll go back to Billy Graham, who said one time, the objection to God on the part of atheists is not really an intellectual objection.

00:20:18.000 Because he knew, and I think most human beings know, that atheism is a fundamentally irrational position.

00:20:24.000 Where's the objection coming from?

00:20:25.000 It's a moral objection.

00:20:26.000 Because if God exists, then there is a ground for objective morality and intelligibility.

00:20:32.000 If God exists, there's a demand made on my conscience.

00:20:35.000 If God exists, my freedom is not unlimited.

00:20:38.000 It doesn't run amok.

00:20:40.000 And we don't like that.

00:20:41.000 We haven't liked it from Adam and Eve on.

00:20:43.000 Human beings don't like that.

00:20:45.000 And so we rebel against it.

00:20:47.000 And that's the form it takes today.

00:20:49.000 And it can express itself as a disdain for the church and all this.

00:20:53.000 But deep down, it's a moral resistance to the demand of objective morality and truth.

00:21:00.000 And that's the fight we're in today, I would say.

00:21:02.000 One of the things that's broken out in sort of conservative circles, politically conservative circles in the United States, is a deeper philosophical argument that exists in the world of politics.

00:21:11.000 And that is an argument between virtue and freedom.

00:21:14.000 There's always been sort of the tension inside of conservative circles going all the way back to sort of the Buckley days.

00:21:19.000 The idea was that there was a fusionism between virtue and freedom, but they were always in tension.

00:21:23.000 I mean, there was always this sort of dialectical conversation that was happening between virtue and freedom.

00:21:27.000 And the idea that there is such a thing as the good that should be pursued, whether that should be pursued by government or whether that should be pursued by the individual, or whether we're talking freedom.

00:21:35.000 And the idea is that that individual should be protected from those who are pursuing virtue if virtue is left sort of undefined.

00:21:41.000 And there's always been that sort of tension right there.

00:21:44.000 And again, I think the war on virtue has led to libertinism, not to actual liberty.

00:21:49.000 To pretend away the difficulty between the two, I think, is short-sighted.

00:21:53.000 But the tension needs to remain, for sure.

00:21:55.000 Let's stay with that.

00:21:56.000 It's an exceptionally important point, I think.

00:21:58.000 Because I'm not an advocate of a sort of libertarianism or just individualism and do what you want.

00:22:05.000 No, no.

00:22:06.000 Our country is based upon the idea of an ordered liberty.

00:22:10.000 And you read the founders on this.

00:22:11.000 They're not libertarians.

00:22:13.000 It's an ordered liberty.

00:22:15.000 In the great Catholic tradition, freedom is not the capacity to do whatever I want. 0.75

00:22:21.000 Freedom is the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good First possible and then effortless.

00:22:29.000 So you're a musician, you know, you're playing an instrument.

00:22:32.000 You internalize the rules and the practices of that instrument so that in time, you can play freely.

00:22:40.000 You can play effortlessly, right?

00:22:43.000 Learning a sport or learning anything, learning a language.

00:22:45.000 It's the same dynamic.

00:22:46.000 There are these objective rules.

00:22:48.000 You don't talk any way you want.

00:22:50.000 You subject yourself to all these...

00:22:54.000 Rules of syntax and grammar and vocabulary so that you so internalize the speech that you now can say whatever you want to say.

00:23:01.000 You can speak freely.

00:23:02.000 That's freedom in people like Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and also in the Bible.

00:23:08.000 The trouble is we've taken in a kind of libertarian sense of freedom.

00:23:12.000 Freedom of indifference has been called by the philosophers.

00:23:15.000 Like, well, yes or no.

00:23:16.000 It's up to you.

00:23:17.000 Don't worry about it.

00:23:18.000 That's not freedom.

00:23:20.000 That's a distortion of freedom.

00:23:22.000 And in the measure that that view of freedom has come into our political thinking, I'm against it.

00:23:26.000 And you call that conservatism.

00:23:28.000 It's not authentic conservatism, in my view.

00:23:30.000 But I'm against that.

00:23:32.000 I'm for the kind of Russell Kirk sort of conservatism, you know, that understands the religious underpinnings of our society, understands the moral framework for freedom, understands that the market, for example, is not just wildly free, but the market, as Catholic social teaching has it, is disciplined morally as Catholic social teaching has it, is disciplined morally and legally and so on, to try to move it in the direction of virtue.

00:23:54.000 That's what I'm for.

00:23:56.000 And I think that, in the measure that it's still a battle within conservatism, that's the side that I'd be on.

00:24:02.000 You know, it really is sort of fascinating how, a good indicator of how far society has come in its conception of freedom is the willingness to abandon the last half of the Pasuk in Hebrew, the verse in the Book of Exodus, where it says, let my people go.

00:24:15.000 There's an end to that verse.

00:24:16.000 The verse does not end with let my people go, right?

00:24:18.000 The verse ends...

00:24:18.000 That they might worship me in the desert.

00:24:20.000 Correct.

00:24:21.000 There's an actual end to that verse, and that verse is, we are not going to serve man, we're going to go serve God.

00:24:26.000 And the sort of idea that the freedom is just a freedom from as opposed to a freedom to is a huge mistake in sort of Western philosophy.

00:24:34.000 Right.

00:24:35.000 And see, modernity in some ways teeters on that divide.

00:24:40.000 There's a side of modernity, and the roots of it, if you want to get technical, the roots are back in people like Duns Scotus, I would say, in the philosophical tradition.

00:24:48.000 That tended toward a volunteerism.

00:24:51.000 You know, the view that God's voluntas, God's will, is what's primary.

00:24:55.000 So God has this kind of sovereign, indifferent freedom.

00:25:00.000 Descartes picks it up in modern philosophy.

00:25:03.000 Two plus two equals four because God desired it.

00:25:05.000 But God could have desired it to be equal to five.

00:25:08.000 Well, see, once you've made that move, you're into chaos.

00:25:11.000 That's not Thomas Aquinas.

00:25:14.000 Aquinas would never have understood God's nature that way.

00:25:16.000 God is, if you want, faithful to his own being.

00:25:20.000 The ground of his will is in his own being, in his own truth.

00:25:24.000 So it's not an arbitrary...

00:25:25.000 Now, I'd precipitate on the Christian side forms of Calvinism that would see predestination, double predestination, as just the arbitrary will of God. 0.77

00:25:37.000 That's a dangerous view of the divine freedom.

00:25:39.000 And the interesting thing, Ben, is it's mimicked in precisely the kind of political freedom we're talking about.

00:25:45.000 If you want that kind of freedom, you're mimicking the arbitrary, capricious God of the freedom of indifference.

00:25:51.000 But a proper conservatism, I would say, is ordered to acquaint his understanding of God, that God's freedom is grounded in the integrity of his own being.

00:26:01.000 But it's a theological point, but has huge political implications.

00:26:06.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:27:10.000 When we talk about freedom, this raises the deeper question of, so what is the value of freedom?

00:27:15.000 So there's a philosopher, a Catholic philosopher, named John Finnis, who's written extensively on this.

00:27:20.000 One of the things that he talks about is the idea that freedom actually ought to be treated not as inherent as a quality, not as something that's inherently valuable, but as instrumental.

00:27:29.000 In the same way that money is an instrument, that money is good because it can be used for a good thing, but it's not inherently good.

00:27:36.000 So freedom is instrumental.

00:27:38.000 It is to pursue the good.

00:27:40.000 As you were suggesting, freedom is something that you cultivate in order to pursue the good.

00:27:44.000 And if you didn't have freedom, you wouldn't be able to pursue that good.

00:27:47.000 So if you're not freely worshiping God, are you actually worshiping God in a way that God wants?

00:27:52.000 Or are you just being forced to worship God at points of gun, for example?

00:27:55.000 And that's why we care about freedom of religion.

00:27:56.000 When it comes to freedom of speech, we want to be able to have these open debates so as to come to the proper virtuous response to these things, not so that you can shout the N-word, for example.

00:28:04.000 The freedom of speech is instrumental.

00:28:06.000 It does not grant inherent value.

00:28:08.000 It's a case made by, again, another philosopher named Joseph Raz, actually an Israeli philosopher who is not of the right, who has suggested that it is a grave mistake to treat liberty itself as inherently valuable.

00:28:20.000 And you can see by example that's not true.

00:28:22.000 If I were to if somebody were to put a gun to my head and say shoot the person next to you and I did it, that would be less morally blameworthy than if somebody did not put a gun to my head and I just shot the person next to me.

00:28:33.000 My liberty to shoot the person next to me did not actually make the quality of the shooting better.

00:28:37.000 It made the quality of the shooting significantly worse, which suggests, of course, that liberty is not in and of itself an additive excellent quality.

00:28:45.000 Liberty is useful and necessary in order to achieve certain things, but liberty used the wrong way actually makes things more evil.

00:28:52.000 If you misuse your free will, you're doing something more evil than you would have done if you had not been allowed that liberty in the first place, which is, again, why this balance comes into play.

00:28:59.000 Right.

00:29:00.000 It's an ordering of an intelligent being toward the good.

00:29:02.000 So, in Aquinas, for example, the will is a modality of the intellect.

00:29:07.000 What he means is, when the mind knows the good as good, It ipso facto wills it.

00:29:14.000 So I can know, let's say, the camera in front of me in a scientific way.

00:29:19.000 If I'm knowing it as something good, well then automatically, ipso facto, I will it, I desire it, I'm ordered to it.

00:29:28.000 That's what the will is.

00:29:29.000 And so you can't define it apart from the good.

00:29:32.000 It emerges, in a way, out of the intelligent perception of the good.

00:29:38.000 I would say of value, to use more contemporary language.

00:29:41.000 But if you construe it as something in itself or valuable as such, you've misconstrued it.

00:29:48.000 It exists only in relation to the good.

00:29:51.000 And a class will say even a very wicked person is choosing what at least appears to be good.

00:29:56.000 The at least apparent good is being sought, even by the most wicked person.

00:30:00.000 So you can't escape the relationship to the objective good.

00:30:04.000 So, you know, the big question that comes up on the other side of this is, okay, so you're talking a lot about virtue and the good and ordering liberty in order to achieve the good.

00:30:11.000 So how do we avoid theocracy?

00:30:12.000 Or you're a religious person.

00:30:14.000 God has set a set of rules.

00:30:14.000 I'm a religious person.

00:30:15.000 Why not have a religious king who simply imposes the will of God from above and demands of everybody that they simply follow these particular rules?

00:30:24.000 Why have something like a freedom of religion or a freedom of speech if we know the best way to speak and we know the best way to worship?

00:30:29.000 Because it goes back to the point you made a few minutes ago about God doesn't want us to be automaton.

00:30:35.000 He doesn't want us to be compelled.

00:30:37.000 He wants us freely to respond.

00:30:39.000 And so if you construe a theocracy as a kind of use of the secular arm to compel religious activity or belief, that violates God's deepest desire for us.

00:30:50.000 That's why John Paul II said, I think quite correctly, the first freedom.

00:30:55.000 It's freedom of religion.

00:30:56.000 That all the other freedoms we talk about, of the press and of assembly and speech and so on, would follow from that most fundamental orientation of the conscience toward the good.

00:31:05.000 So the good coerces it, that's true, but we shouldn't have a secular arm coercing religious beliefs.

00:31:12.000 That's why we'd stand to thwart a theocracy.

00:31:15.000 So, you know, I've been working on sort of some theories about exactly what the limits of liberty should be, obviously, because you need limits to liberty, otherwise you end up with libertinism.

00:31:23.000 As the Bible says, everyone does what's right in his own eyes, and the minute that happens, the entire society collapses.

00:31:28.000 I mean, that's an actual description in the book of Deuteronomy, which is clearly what we are seeing right now.

00:31:34.000 Attempt to allow for spheres of liberty within still and ordered life is very difficult and requires a sort of moral view that is slightly broader than I would say is a rule-based sort of deontological system, a sort of rules-based system, because rules, by their nature, can only achieve what's been specified by the rules.

00:31:57.000 You can have broad rules, but if the rules are too broad, then they become too vague.

00:32:00.000 And if they're too specific, then they become too...

00:32:03.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:32:05.000 As somebody who follows an awful lot of rules every day, they become quite burdensome.

00:32:10.000 Or they can become quite burdensome if not enacted in the right way.

00:32:13.000 And so one of the theories that I've come up with, and I think is in line with much of what we've been talking about, is what I've kind of gradually termed role theory, which is the idea that Contrary to modern society, which suggests that roles are bad, roles, R-O-L-E-S, roles are an imposition on you, that basically your authentic self is being inhibited by the roles that society places on you, gender roles and familial roles and religious roles.

00:32:38.000 The reality is that roles are good, roles are very good, and that human beings were created in order to fulfill these particular roles.

00:32:45.000 And the book of Genesis is all about establishing what those roles are, Adam as husband, Adam Adam as father.

00:32:51.000 Adam as tiller of the ground.

00:32:52.000 Adam as the one who cultivates the image of God.

00:32:56.000 These are all roles that you're supposed to fulfill, and liberty exists within those spheres in the sense that there are, in fact, a great series of choices that you can make within each individual sphere.

00:33:05.000 In order to become a good father, there are many paths to being a good father, for sure, and many of them are matters of responsibility.

00:33:12.000 Moral indifference would be the wrong term, but they're matters of moral choice.

00:33:15.000 Without there being significant moral after effect, you can be a good father.

00:33:19.000 The minute that the liberty starts to threaten the roles, that's when society blows up.

00:33:22.000 So when liberty starts to say, okay, you don't have to be a father.

00:33:25.000 In fact, it's not important for you to be a father.

00:33:27.000 In fact, abandoning your kids is just another form of liberty.

00:33:29.000 Or you don't have to be a good husband.

00:33:31.000 In fact, any form of sexual relationship that you choose to enter is equally valuable.

00:33:36.000 And so you blow up the role of what it means to be a husband or what it means to be a wife.

00:33:40.000 That is when liberty turns into libertinism and has overstepped its boundaries.

00:33:43.000 No, quite right.

00:33:44.000 And that's, again, when you grasp the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you're trying to get to that point where I'm deciding what the basic structure of my life is.

00:33:52.000 Now, within that, as you quite correctly suggest, go back to our earlier analogies, There's no basketball team that's ever brought the ball up the court in exactly the same way.

00:34:06.000 Think of those five.

00:34:08.000 High school kids, college kids, pros.

00:34:10.000 No team has ever brought the ball up the court in the same way.

00:34:13.000 There's always a spontaneity and a freedom and a novelty and a creativity.

00:34:19.000 I grew up watching Michael Jordan in Chicago and Scottie Pippen and the way they would do a fast break.

00:34:26.000 There was nothing quite like it.

00:34:27.000 It had never been done that way before.

00:34:29.000 Nevertheless, all those guys were operating with a very clear structure of the game of basketball.

00:34:34.000 They were playing basketball.

00:34:36.000 If they picked up the ball and ran up in the stands, then they're not playing the game anymore.

00:34:41.000 And that's Chesterton's point about the kids who play a game with reckless abandon, even on the edge of a cliff, as long as there's a big, thick, high wall around the cliff.

00:34:50.000 If you know the rules, they're in place.

00:34:52.000 Now play with reckless abandon.

00:34:54.000 But that's devolved into an either-or.

00:34:57.000 To be really free, I've got to get rid of the rules.

00:35:00.000 It's up to me to decide, and I'm beyond good and evil, and I'm the ubermensch, and I'll decide.

00:35:04.000 But see, all of that is a recipe for disaster and for psychological collapse, which is why I've argued for years in my pastoral life The kids today, and we know this statistically with the anxiety and depression and suicidal ideation and the gender confusion and all of that, is born of this sort of now practical Nietzscheanism that's taken over.

00:35:28.000 Will to power.

00:35:29.000 It's up to my freedom.

00:35:31.000 But see, as we both know, the Bible knew all about this.

00:35:35.000 Genesis is eminently clear on this point.

00:35:38.000 It was true 3,000 years ago. 0.93

00:35:40.000 It's true now.

00:35:41.000 And again, we biblical people, I think, have to shout that from the rooftops.

00:35:46.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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00:36:49.000 I mean, it's perfectly obvious when it comes to raising kids.

00:36:52.000 So I have four kids.

00:36:53.000 The fewer rules you set for them, the worse it is by far.

00:36:56.000 Kids want responsibility.

00:36:57.000 They want clear lines of demarcation.

00:36:59.000 They want to know if they do X, then Y is going to happen.

00:37:02.000 They want to know that if they do something good, they're going to be rewarded.

00:37:04.000 And if they do something bad, they're going to be punished.

00:37:06.000 They want all these things.

00:37:08.000 Kids are seeking out this sort of stuff.

00:37:09.000 And our entire society has now told parents that they basically ought to treat their kids like Rousseau's a meal that you basically let them off free in the woods to do whatever they want and discover themselves.

00:37:18.000 And of course, there's a sort of famous story about Rousseau being confronted by a woman who'd read a meal and said, you know, I read it.

00:37:24.000 And I've been raising my child this way.

00:37:24.000 I loved it.

00:37:25.000 And Rousseau looking at her and saying, are you insane? 0.97

00:37:27.000 Why would you possibly do that? 0.97

00:37:28.000 It's supposed to be a metaphor.

00:37:29.000 It's not supposed to be reality.

00:37:30.000 But we've taken it as reality.

00:37:32.000 And talk about one of the people that shaped modernity.

00:37:34.000 You know, we mentioned Descartes.

00:37:36.000 You can mention Marx.

00:37:37.000 You mentioned Nietzsche.

00:37:37.000 But Rousseau's another one that's had a giant impact on the way we think about things.

00:37:42.000 And this is not some sort of defensive conservatism, but to say the Bible is just so much better on these matters.

00:37:52.000 It's so much better than what the modern philosophers have given us.

00:37:55.000 And the philosophers that we reverence who were very much conditioned by a biblical imagination, recovering those figures I think is eminently important.

00:38:04.000 You know, I don't know if I, when we were in Rome, if I told you this story, but when I was a little kid, I read Chaim Potok's novel, The Chosen.

00:38:11.000 It was sort of my introduction to that wonderful world of, you know, Judaism and all of its practices, and it was that Hasidic form, etc., etc.

00:38:18.000 But you remember that the basic thrust of that story was, this brilliant kid raised by the rabbi, and he knows the Jewish tradition really well, and he's brilliant.

00:38:26.000 But yet he wants to read Freud.

00:38:28.000 He wants to become a psychologist.

00:38:30.000 And the whole thrust thing is to help him get out of this narrow ghetto and to get into the wider...

00:38:35.000 Well, I read it as a kid.

00:38:37.000 I loved it, you know.

00:38:38.000 Well, I reread it, I don't know, a couple years ago, maybe.

00:38:42.000 The whole time I'm saying, no, don't go to Freud.

00:38:45.000 No, no, no.

00:38:46.000 Stay with your father and stay with the rabbis. 1.00

00:38:48.000 Much, much better.

00:38:50.000 But I don't know what Potok had in mind exactly, but how much I changed over the years having grown up a bit is to say, no, no, Freud is not where you want to go.

00:39:00.000 The rabbis have it much better than Freud. 0.99

00:39:02.000 Yeah, I mean, what's interesting about that book is that in the end of The Chosen, and then in the sequel, The Promise by Potok, then what ends up happening is that Danny, who's the name of the character you're talking about, Danny ends up basically retaining his orthodoxy.

00:39:16.000 He ends up becoming effectively a modern orthodox psychologist.

00:39:20.000 And the problem with the book, of course, is that there is the possibility that when you seduce somebody away from, you know, what are time-tested truths and toward Freud, they don't stop at becoming sort of a modern orthodox psychologist, that they end up basically having their brain rotted.

00:39:34.000 And I think that one of the points that's fascinating about that particular book, and we don't have to get into a literary analysis of The Chosen, which is a fascinating book, But one of the points is that the rabbi, for those who've never read the book, it's a really good book, the rabbi basically doesn't talk to his son.

00:39:49.000 He doesn't talk to Danny at all.

00:39:50.000 And the reason he doesn't talk to Danny for nearly the entire book is because he sees that his son is not sympathetic to people.

00:39:55.000 He sees that his son is incredibly analytic and he doesn't actually have sympathy for people.

00:39:58.000 And so what he decides is that he is going to use this treatment essentially on his son in order to get his son to be more sympathetic to other people.

00:40:05.000 And again, there's this sort ofthe one thing that does come through, aside from the sort of secularism versus religion point, is that good fathering is good fathering.

00:40:15.000 And I think that that's one of the points of that particular book, That does bring us to something else that you've been talking a lot about for a very long time, of course, and continue to talk a lot about, and that is the relationship between Jews and Christians.

00:40:26.000 We've talked about this, obviously, at length many times, both Off-air and on-air.

00:40:31.000 One of the things that's been happening that really is, I think, a shame in today's age is there are some people who seem to be attempting to divide Jews from Christians in an era when you do have much broader divides that are much more dangerous than the divisions between Jews and Christians.

00:40:46.000 The divisions are obviously very real.

00:40:48.000 Belief in Jesus versus not belief in Jesus is a massive issue in Christianity and also in Judaism.

00:40:53.000 But the sort of orientation of A Judeo-Christian West, or a Christian West with Judaic roots, versus the secular modernist world and its allies and sort of woke-dom.

00:41:06.000 That is the real battle, and I'm sort of bewildered by this attempt to divide Jews from Christians in this moment.

00:41:10.000 No, I'm actually right about that.

00:41:12.000 And the common enemy, I've been saying for a long time, is a materialist secularism, but now with a particular accent of wokeism, which is, I think, a really nasty consequence of that materialism and so on.

00:41:25.000 So, yeah, that's absolutely true.

00:41:26.000 And the other thing I would say is this, that I love those scholars in the last maybe 30 years or so within the Christian world who've been really stressing the Jewishness of Jesus and the importance of Judaism and understanding the faith.

00:41:41.000 I'll tell you the truth, when I was coming of age in the university and seminary, Catholic liberalism was very much renient.

00:41:48.000 And, you know, we define liberalism in different ways, but one way is trying to read Christianity kind of relentlessly through the modern lens.

00:41:57.000 So, beginning with, you know, Schleiermacher and coming up through Tillich and Rahner and many other figures, That's the style of a liberal Christianity.

00:42:05.000 Now, one of the marks of that, and you can see it from Schleiermacher through Bultmann and up until the present day, is a tendency to de-Judaize Christianity. 0.90

00:42:15.000 So, to present Jesus as sage or as mystic or moral teacher or...

00:42:22.000 Read something like Bultmann.

00:42:23.000 Bultmann wants to just rip him up from the roots of his Judaism.

00:42:28.000 Look at much of the historical critical approach to the Bible often effectively does that.

00:42:34.000 I love those scholars, and there are a lot of them now on both the Protestant and the Catholic side, who are insisting on the Jewishness of Jesus.

00:42:41.000 Without that, we're not going to understand who he was, nor what the first Christians were even saying about him.

00:42:47.000 Take him out of his Jewish context, and he becomes this avatar of liberal Christianity, who is as boring as it can be. 0.99

00:42:55.000 That's the problem.

00:42:55.000 Liberal Christianity is not a compelling vision.

00:42:59.000 It's the Jewish Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, the culmination, we would say, of the great story of Israel.

00:43:07.000 That's the one Paul was talking about.

00:43:09.000 That's the one Peter was talking about.

00:43:11.000 That's the one Thomas Aquinas was talking about.

00:43:14.000 So that's something I feel very strongly about as a Catholic theologian and bishop, is rediscovering Jesus' Jewishness.

00:43:23.000 It is kind of a point of astonishment.

00:43:25.000 Sometimes when I talk to Christians, they'll make a reference to something in the New Testament, and I'll say, well, right, that's also in the Old Testament. 0.59

00:43:31.000 And people will say, well, yeah, but I've never read the Old Testament.

00:43:34.000 It's like, well, I don't understand why you would read the sequel without reading the actual first thing that came out.

00:43:38.000 You're not going to understand half the references in the New Testament unless you actually read the Old Testament.

00:43:42.000 Exactly.

00:43:42.000 It's like reading Act 5 of Macbeth, but you've just overlooked Acts 1 through 4.

00:43:46.000 You'll have no idea what's going on.

00:43:48.000 But see, it has been true and unhappy.

00:43:53.000 That we Christians have often presented it just that way.

00:43:56.000 And this goes back to one of the oldest heresies in Christianity called Marcionism. 0.95

00:44:00.000 Marcion, second century Roman figure, who proposed, you know, the Jewish God's a fallen God, and so any references to that should go away.

00:44:09.000 Anything in the New Testament that's too Jewish, get rid of that. 1.00

00:44:12.000 So he kept little bits and pieces of the New Testament.

00:44:15.000 But see, Marcionism, Irenaeus fought it.

00:44:18.000 God bless him, one of the great doctors of the Church, one of my heroes, St.

00:44:21.000 Irenaeus.

00:44:22.000 Fought it, tooth and nail.

00:44:24.000 But it comes back, and it's back today.

00:44:27.000 Whenever you hear someone casually say something like, well, you know, I'm for the God of the New Testament, the compassionate, gentle God of Jesus, not this old, mean, you know, oppressive God of the Old Testament. 0.91

00:44:37.000 First of all, that's silly and false. 0.80

00:44:39.000 But secondly, it's Marcionism. 0.94

00:44:40.000 It's, I want to read my Christianity apart from Judaism. 0.99

00:44:45.000 Whenever you have the kind of Oprah-ization of Jesus, where he's a guru, he's a spiritual teacher, you know...

00:44:52.000 That's also ripping him up from his Jewish roots.

00:44:55.000 But you're right, you will not get Act 5 of Macbeth if you've not read Acts 1-4.

00:45:00.000 And we would say, as I mentioned, Jesus is the climax of the great story of Israel.

00:45:05.000 Now here we disagree, obviously, but...

00:45:09.000 I won't get him apart from the story that came before him.

00:45:12.000 Right.

00:45:12.000 I think that that is so important because, again, the differences are great and really matters, but the commonalities are also intense and really, really matter.

00:45:22.000 I mean, pretending that the trunk of the tree in the Catholic Church is not related to the root of the tree, which is in Judaism, would be to completely deracinate.

00:45:30.000 I mean, it would deroot the entire substructure, I would imagine, if you're a Catholic. 1.00

00:45:35.000 Right.

00:45:35.000 And, you know, think of...

00:45:38.000 Yesterday I said mass in two different places.

00:45:41.000 I'm on an altar.

00:45:42.000 I'm dressed in temple vestments.

00:45:44.000 I was wearing a miter.

00:45:45.000 I'm a bishop.

00:45:47.000 I had incense.

00:45:48.000 I incensed the altar.

00:45:49.000 We had candles on the altar.

00:45:51.000 I offered a sacrifice.

00:45:54.000 So what am I doing?

00:45:55.000 I can't begin to articulate that apart from the temple sacrifice of the Old Testament.

00:46:02.000 Without the book of Leviticus, without sections of Exodus, I can't begin to articulate what I'm doing.

00:46:09.000 Now, mind you, a lot of Catholics don't get that.

00:46:14.000 If a Catholic says, oh, the main thing I want is to hear you preach, well, I mean, that's fine, the preaching part of it, which is, I think, where the synagogue service comes into the Catholic Mass.

00:46:23.000 But the temple side of it, the sacrificial side of it, It's entirely Jewish. 1.00

00:46:31.000 We would see all of that coming to its fulfillment in the great sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

00:46:36.000 But I'll just do one more connection there because the temple, the temple, is so important.

00:46:41.000 Ezekiel chapter 10, when the Shekinah of the Lord up and leaves the temple and goes east over the Mount of Olives, how important in the Gospels that Jesus, when he comes to Jerusalem, is coming over the Mount of Olives from the west and re-entering his temple.

00:46:59.000 And then he says, well, I'm going to tear this place down in three days, rebuild it, referring to the temple of his body.

00:47:04.000 And then what do we see at his death when his side is pierced and out comes blood and water?

00:47:09.000 And we say the blood of the Eucharist, the water of baptism, true. 0.54

00:47:13.000 But also it's the Ezekiel prophecy that when the glory of the Lord returns and the temple is restored, Water will flow forth from its side for the renewal of the world.

00:47:24.000 Well, in that little detail of the blood and water coming literally from the side of Jesus, the audience was meant to see, ah, Ezekiel has been fulfilled.

00:47:34.000 The Shekinah returned, and now the water's going forth. 0.98

00:47:37.000 We would read that then as the grace of the sacraments and so on and so forth that renews the world.

00:47:42.000 But see, apart from a Jewish background, none of that makes a lick of sense. 0.81

00:47:46.000 You won't make sense of this...

00:47:49.000 This insistence within the Gospels, and I can multiply that across all four of the Gospels.

00:47:54.000 By the way, this is a great place to mention.

00:47:56.000 Not only, obviously, the foundations of the last series is great.

00:47:59.000 Bishop, you went with Jordan to Rome.

00:48:00.000 When you go to Jerusalem, you can actually see these sites.

00:48:02.000 I mean, it is totally worth, whether you're Catholic, Jewish, Protestant...

00:48:06.000 You should absolutely go and visit Jerusalem.

00:48:09.000 Jerusalem is an unbelievable place, and you can actually see the place that are being talked about.

00:48:13.000 The Mount of Olives is directly above the Temple Mount.

00:48:16.000 You can see exactly where it was, where the Dome of the Rock is now.

00:48:19.000 It's pretty amazing to see all of it in person.

00:48:22.000 So, Bishop, one of the things that you've talked about a lot is the relationship of Jews and Christians.

00:48:27.000 You've contrasted a couple of different visions of that, one Jacob Neusner's vision and one Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sachs' vision.

00:48:33.000 What if you want to talk about that a little bit?

00:48:35.000 Yeah, I mean, I find both those figures fascinating.

00:48:37.000 I might have mentioned this during our Peterson conversation, but I loved Rabbi Sachs' remark, and N.T. Wright, I think I read it in him, that, you know, let's face it, the Christian churches...

00:48:52.000 It brought the God of Israel to the world.

00:48:54.000 And so those texts, like in Isaiah, what's envisioned is the coming of all the tribes of the world to the God of Israel.

00:49:01.000 Well, the fact that the God of Israel has gone all over the world is from the Christian churches.

00:49:08.000 And what I find interesting is that it's not just Rabbi Sacks, but that goes right back to Moses Maimonides in the Middle Ages, said the same thing.

00:49:15.000 And Maimonides, who had no great affection for Christians, but said, let's face it, the Christian churches have brought the Torah to the world.

00:49:23.000 And so I think it's just a fascinating bit of divine providence there that what was anticipated in the Old Testament, and I would say as a Catholic, has indeed come true through the ministration of the Church, which is exactly how Paul read it.

00:49:36.000 If you look at Romans 9-11, which is the great text on Judaism in relation to Christianity, And here's Paul, Rabbi Shaul, he's a Jew, and he proudly says, I'm a son of the tribe of Benjamin, and he's an Israelite, Israelite.

00:49:52.000 And he's talking in those terms about the relationship between Israel and Christianity.

00:49:57.000 But that's how he saw his own mission, that he was the means by which, now, the Torah and the God of Israel and the commandments existed.

00:50:05.000 And the salvation offered in God would go out to the world.

00:50:09.000 So I think that's really fascinating in Rabbi Sachs, in Moses Maimonides.

00:50:14.000 Neusner I also find really interesting.

00:50:16.000 And he was a great friend of Benedict XVI, of Joseph Ratzinger, who read him very carefully.

00:50:21.000 I think they met on a number of occasions.

00:50:23.000 And Neusner, I love his honesty and his directness, that if he were a first-century Jew listening to Jesus preach, he said, I would have found so much of it compelling and so much of it Redolent of the prophets, like Hillel, and all these wonderful things.

00:50:40.000 He said, though, I would have balked the minute he said, you've heard it said, but I say, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, and what he's referring to, of course, is in the Torah.

00:50:52.000 Well, he's claiming an authority beyond the authority of the Torah.

00:50:56.000 Or even like a little reference in the Capernaum synagogue, when he's expelling the demon, and they say, He preaches with authority, not like the scribes.

00:51:07.000 And it's a subtle reference, seems to me, to the divinity of Jesus.

00:51:13.000 He's not speaking based on the authority of his teacher, who spoke on the basis of his teacher's authority, going all the way back to Moses, who received it from God.

00:51:24.000 Jesus You've heard it said, but I say.

00:51:29.000 And Neusner, I think, honestly, says, look, that's where I would have walked away, because a Jew can't say that coherently. 1.00

00:51:36.000 And I would say, as a Christian, yeah, that's the point of demarcation.

00:51:41.000 Jesus does indeed, and not just in the Gospel of John, my generation would have still learned that, that, oh, it's only in John, this high Christology, that synoptics don't... 0.95

00:51:51.000 Nonsense.

00:51:52.000 The divinity of Jesus is affirmed In more Jewish language, but affirmed all throughout the synoptics.

00:51:58.000 And that's the point of demarcation. 0.97

00:52:01.000 Was he a crazy man? 0.95

00:52:02.000 Was he deluded? 0.99

00:52:04.000 Was he deeply mistaken?

00:52:07.000 Or was he who he said he was?

00:52:10.000 And I think that's the point of demarcation, fundamentally, between Christians and Jews. 0.89

00:52:14.000 So, to go back to sort of where we stand in current society, one of the big problems for all of us in traditional religious circles Is the declining levels of church membership, if you're Catholic, the declining levels of synagogue membership.

00:52:26.000 What you are seeing is a revival in sort of traditionalist versions of this.

00:52:30.000 So you can say overall the number of people going to church or synagogue is going down.

00:52:34.000 Within that, the number of people who are going to traditional church and synagogue is radically increasing.

00:52:38.000 That's certainly happening in the Jewish community.

00:52:40.000 What you've seen over the course of...

00:52:43.000 Modern Jewish history is more and more people falling completely out of Judaism.

00:52:47.000 They still identify as Jews and Poles, but they're not actually practicing any form of Judaism in any serious or authentic way.

00:52:54.000 That might mean that they go to synagogue once a year, they fast for half the day on Yom Kippur, that kind of thing.

00:52:59.000 But you are seeing a radical increase in the number of people who are going back to traditionalist synagogues, which are starting to thrive again. 0.98

00:53:06.000 You're seeing that both in the United States and in Israel.

00:53:08.000 You're seeing the same thing happen In Catholic churches, you're seeing overall decline in Catholic church going in places like the United States, but you are seeing an increase in the number of people who are going back to more traditionalist churches and traditionalist teachings of the Catholic Church.

00:53:23.000 What do you make of that, and can that continue to grow beyond the boundaries that it's currently established?

00:53:28.000 You're going to lure me into Catholic liturgical wars here, but I'll make a general comment first from my mentor, Cardinal George of Chicago.

00:53:37.000 He referred to liberal Catholicism as an exhausted project, and it was just the right way to describe it, I think. 1.00

00:53:44.000 Cardinal George, as a younger man, was, and he would have admitted this, a liberal Catholic.

00:53:49.000 But he intuited over time that it was an exhausted project.

00:53:53.000 That whatever value it had, going back to people like Schleiermacher and coming up into the 20th century, as a critique, it's run out of steam.

00:54:03.000 It doesn't have persuasive power.

00:54:06.000 It's a flattened out version of Catholicism.

00:54:09.000 I think what people are responding to is, okay, that liberal Catholicism is just not compelling, but a biblical Catholicism, a confident Catholicism A colorful, unapologetic Catholicism, that is more appealing.

00:54:26.000 The one that tells me, hey, do whatever you want, and I'm caricaturing here, I don't want to get my liberal friends mad at me, but one that is trying to make it easy, let's make it as accessible as possible, that one's run out of steam.

00:54:39.000 I think that people are disaffiliating from that, but they are finding more compelling what we've been talking about.

00:54:46.000 The liberal conservative thing distorts it.

00:54:48.000 So I'd use more the language of this sort of flattened out, culturally accommodating religion versus a biblically dense and confident Catholicism or Judaism.

00:55:02.000 I think that's what's appealing to people.

00:55:04.000 And I get that.

00:55:05.000 I see it all the time in my pastoral work.

00:55:08.000 So I think we continue riding that wave.

00:55:11.000 I mean, I would stay with the trajectory that you and I have been talking about.

00:55:17.000 Biblical, densely textured, confident, colorful, morally rich and dense.

00:55:24.000 I think that's the version of it that we want to keep propagating.

00:55:27.000 So the sort of countervailing effect of that is that you've seen this, and this occurs in the Jewish community as well as in the Catholic and the Protestant community as well, is that in a sort of rebellion against sort of the watercolor version of the religion, you do see people embracing a version that is, is, you know, so sort of reactionary to that that it moves beyond the boundaries in the other direction.

00:55:48.000 So in terms of Catholicism, you do see a wing of Catholicism now that is attempting to, for example, wholesale reject Vatican II, for example.

00:55:55.000 What do you make of that?

00:55:56.000 No, and that's the problem.

00:55:57.000 So as I've been a longtime critic of Catholic progressivism, I'm also a critic of what we call kind of the more radical traditionalism within Catholicism.

00:56:06.000 And that's one of the marks, you're quite right.

00:56:08.000 I would say a disdain for the Pope, and you see that in some Catholic circles, I mean, almost a disrespect toward the Pope, but even more importantly is the rejection of an ecumenical council.

00:56:19.000 You can't do that and be a Catholic. 0.93

00:56:21.000 It's as simple as that.

00:56:22.000 I mean, that to us is the highest doctrinal authority there is as a council.

00:56:26.000 If you say, well, I don't like Vatican II, well, then how about Vatican I? How about Trent?

00:56:32.000 How about Nicaea?

00:56:32.000 How about Chalcedon?

00:56:33.000 Can I pick and choose which councils I like?

00:56:36.000 I've told some of the radical traditionalist Catholics, you become really a Protestant at that point.

00:56:41.000 You've given up on the authority of the Church.

00:56:43.000 So that's the problem.

00:56:45.000 Yeah, you can move this thing in that direction.

00:56:47.000 See, one of my great heroes, of course, is John Paul II. Everything we've been talking about, he understood and believed and propagated.

00:56:55.000 And he was a great student of philosophy.

00:56:57.000 He loved St.

00:56:58.000 Thomas Aquinas and the sciences and cultural engagement.

00:57:01.000 He didn't want a sort of ghettoized Catholicism or crouching defensively behind walls.

00:57:08.000 He didn't want that.

00:57:09.000 He wanted a boldly confident Catholicism that goes out to meet the world.

00:57:13.000 Based on Logos, that's what Ratzinger again saw, is if we're the religion of Logos, that means we can meet any scientist, we can meet any philosopher, we can meet any representative of the culture.

00:57:24.000 So it's not a defensive, fearful, ghettoized Catholicism.

00:57:31.000 That to me would be the rad trad side of it at its worst.

00:57:34.000 So I don't want that.

00:57:35.000 I don't want Catholic progressivism. 1.00

00:57:37.000 I want what we've been talking about.

00:57:40.000 That's the trajectory that I want to stay on.

00:57:42.000 Well, Bishop, it's always amazing to see you.

00:57:44.000 Thanks so much for the time.

00:57:45.000 Thanks for the conversation.

00:57:46.000 Folks, if you haven't seen Bishop Barron in Foundations of the West, you should go check it out right now at Daily Wire Plus.

00:57:50.000 It's an awesome series with a lot of conversations just like this one.

00:57:53.000 Bishop, really thank you so much.

00:57:54.000 Great being with you.

00:57:54.000 you.

00:57:55.000 Thanks, Ben.

00:57:55.000 The Ben Shapiro Sunday special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp.

00:58:05.000 Associate Producers are Jake Pollock and John Crick.

00:58:07.000 Editing is by Katie Vandercoy.

00:58:09.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.

00:58:11.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.

00:58:13.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Christina.

00:58:16.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

00:58:18.000 Executive Assistant Kelly Carvalho.

00:58:21.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

00:58:23.000 Executive producer, Justin Siegel.

00:58:25.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:58:27.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - October 27, 2024

The Dangers of Secularism | Bishop Robert Barron

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