While exploring sites across Rome like St. Peter's Cathedral and the Catacombs, Bishop Robert Barron and Dr. Jordan Peterson discuss the Church s pivotal role in shaping Western civilization as we know it. In this episode, Bishop Barron and I dissect contemporary myths about traditional religion and delve into the underlying presumptions of a secular society. 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. Bishop: I wear purple as a bishop, which is an imitation of the senatorial purple. I m the bishop of a diocese. I represent these ancient traditions that have fed, in fact, and shaped Western culture. We should not be in a position of hand-wringing apologetics, but of bold proclamations." His distinctive articulation of faith, culture, and philosophy is also featured here at The Daily Wire in Jordan B. Peterson s latest series, Foundations of the West . Dr. Peterson's latest episode is a series that we both had a chance to participate in with Jordan Peterson. I took him around Jerusalem for an episode, and he took me around Rome for a series of episodes. So let s face it: Rome was the place to be in the action. And that really is a fascinating phenomenon because the church was brutally persecuted by Rome. And let's face it, the drama of it is both Yes to Rome and No to Rome... And it's a poetry of it... So, you know, that's a poem of it? That's a part of the drama, isn't it, right? And that's not a synod of it, is not a ? And it s not a "yes to Rome to Rome? ... I'll just go to Rome for Rome to be a No to a Rome to a Rome to A Caesar to a A. Caesar, not a ... A ... I'll go to A. A A. C. B. A C. A B. D. A. D C. S. E. A G A C A B C A D G A D A D E N E N G A S G A B A B G A G E N A G G A N G E R A D C A G R A G M A D S A N E R S A D P E N F A P E S A G S A S P E R M A B E R G A V E R N A B S A B R A C E R E M A V A S A C N A N A S B A P R A B N A D N A Q N A C G A R A S V A Q A B P A B Q A Q
00:00:00.000Part of the problem is that we religious people, I think, we've wrung our hands too much.
00:00:03.000We've, you know, the scandals and everything else, and we've kind of retreated to the sidelines, or we enter the conversations very defensively.
00:00:12.000We represent, as you say, these ancient traditions that have fed, in fact, and shaped Western culture.
00:00:20.000We should not be in a position of hand-wringing apologetics, but of bold proclamations.
00:00:26.000Bishop 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.
00:00:34.000Through 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.
00:00:42.000The bishop's distinctive articulation of faith, culture, and philosophy is also featured here at The Daily Wire in Dr.
00:00:48.000Jordan B. Peterson's latest series, Foundations of the West.
00:00:51.000While exploring sites across Rome like St.
00:00:52.000Peter's Cathedral and the Catacombs, Jordan and Bishop Barron discuss the Church's pivotal role in shaping Western civilization as we know it.
00:00:58.000In today's episode, Bishop Barron and I dissect contemporary myths about traditional religion and delve into the underlying presumptions of a secular society.
00:01:05.000The 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.
00:01:13.000Bishop Robert Barron's monumental contributions to our modern conversations around faith and culture inspire both believers and seekers alike.
00:01:19.000Stay tuned and join us for another excellent discussion on this episode of the Sunday Special.
00:01:23.000Bishop, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:01:54.000We were in Santa Maria and Trastevere.
00:01:56.000So a number of places, both in classical Rome and in Catholic Rome, if you want.
00:02:00.000And 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.
00:02:11.000The continuity between, let's say, Rome's more imperial imagination and the church's desire to spread the word of Jesus around the world.
00:02:19.000So some of those themes that connected classical and Catholic Rome we looked at.
00:02:23.000And 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.
00:02:42.000Well, 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.
00:02:49.000What I just alluded to is the yes to Rome.
00:02:52.000You know, these two Jews, Peter and Paul, make their way to Rome because they knew they've got to be in the action.
00:02:59.000They have to be in the center of things.
00:03:00.000If they want this message to go out to the world, Rome was the place to be.
00:03:04.000And 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.
00:04:19.000So the church still gathers in Rome for its major acts of government and so on.
00:04:25.000So we're still saying yes to Rome, and I think we're also still saying no to it.
00:04:29.000That is one of the fascinating things about the history of the Roman Catholic Church.
00:04:32.000Again, the sort of modern conception of the Roman Catholic Church is almost sort of bizarrely sidelined the church in sort of Western history.
00:04:40.000There'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.
00:04:52.000I 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.
00:05:04.000And so that attempt to separate it off from the church is really bizarre.
00:05:11.000It's the repetition constantly of the founding myth.
00:05:14.000So 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.
00:05:28.000They want to keep us in superstition on the one hand and keep us in political oppression on the other.
00:05:33.000And the convenient myth is all that's associated with the Catholic Church.
00:05:37.000And so on a regular basis, you see it to this day, on a regular basis is trotted out this old myth of origins.
00:05:45.000And 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.
00:05:56.000When in point of fact, as you correctly say, from hospitals and schools and universities and science itself, The church is not the opponent.
00:06:05.000The church is the matrix of all of these realities.
00:06:08.000This is not to whitewash church history and to deny that there are bad things.
00:06:14.000But it's a complete caricature to say that modernity and its positive elements emerges after a terrible struggle against the church.
00:06:23.000We've been battling this for several centuries now.
00:06:26.000The 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.
00:06:56.000As 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.
00:07:05.000The 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.
00:07:12.000That 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.
00:07:25.000A corrupt, you know, political matrix.
00:07:28.000And 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.
00:07:40.000And 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.
00:07:48.000You 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.
00:08:11.000These are philosophically irrelevant figures.
00:08:14.000Of course, they're of massive importance.
00:08:16.000And 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.
00:08:27.000And what he found as he read Descartes was, you know, there are so many things in Descartes that are not in the classical authors.
00:08:36.000And 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.
00:08:44.000So that's another way that the thing gets distorted.
00:08:49.000First, you all know that I find almost everything the left is proposing to fix our economy, like their ideas to make owning a home a reality for people.
00:09:37.000Also, current homeowners rates have in fact dropped, so if you're ready to keep more money in your pocket each month instead of handing it over to the bank, go to churchillmortgage.com slash Shapiro today.
00:10:03.000I think it's really important to call out that distorted view of history because it does have very modern ramifications.
00:10:08.000And 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.
00:10:15.000It's not just an attack on the Catholic Church.
00:10:17.000The Catholic Church is at the center of that attack, but the attack By a sort of secular modernism against all forms of religion.
00:10:25.000It includes everybody who is a God believer who believes that there is in fact an ordered nature to the universe created by God.
00:10:32.000The oppositional history is written for a particular purpose.
00:10:35.000And 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.
00:10:45.000That's the old myth of foundation again.
00:10:48.000So you just brought it out, but it's trotted out regularly.
00:10:51.000But 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.
00:11:01.000If 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.
00:11:13.000That's making a positive statement about the relation between religion and secular reason, if you want.
00:11:20.000Go back into the wisdom literature in the Old Testament.
00:11:22.000You 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.
00:11:36.000But 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.
00:11:44.000But that's a complete distortion of the religious tradition.
00:11:48.000And I think that it's a necessary myth for secular modernism, because secular modernism on its own can make very few affirmative claims.
00:11:55.000I mean, this is an argument that I've had with sort of the new atheistic crew, people like Sam Harris.
00:11:59.000I said that secular modernism very often uses the tools of religion.
00:12:02.000They 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.
00:12:14.000There'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.
00:12:24.000There's merely what's adaptive and what's not adaptive.
00:12:27.000But 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.
00:12:37.000They 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.
00:12:47.000Right, and they're overlooking that it's so surpassingly weird that the universe should be intelligible.
00:12:53.000That's the famous quote from Einstein, right?
00:12:55.000The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible, that it's marked by intelligible pattern.
00:13:02.000And 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.
00:13:10.000If you believe in creation, You know two very important things.
00:13:24.000But the second thing you know is it's endowed in every nook and cranny by intelligibility because it was made by an intelligent mind.
00:13:32.000Those two premises are required, it seems to me, for the emergence of the physical sciences.
00:13:38.000And that's why it's no accident that so many of the founders of the sciences were indeed religious people.
00:13:44.000Einstein now takes on a more kind of Spinozan flavor.
00:13:48.000But still, even in Einstein, you find a sense of kind of divine grounding and purpose.
00:13:54.000So yes, it is being borrowed from religion, even as they're trying now to debunk religion.
00:13:59.000But they're standing on a foundation provided by religion.
00:14:03.000Yeah, 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.
00:14:13.000On 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.
00:14:30.000That everything can be reasoned out, everything, in terms of human relations.
00:14:34.000And human beings are innately malleable because if you can reason everything out, that means you can change yourself.
00:14:38.000And if you can change yourself, then that means everyone can be changed.
00:14:41.000And human beings, there is no human nature.
00:14:43.000There's just sort of a blank slate to be operated upon.
00:14:45.000Once you get there, you get into some pretty dark spaces.
00:14:48.000I 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.
00:14:57.000And then there are also circumscribed limits to what reason can do.
00:15:02.000It is really important to see as a source of data things like revelation.
00:15:07.000Not 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.
00:15:14.000When 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.
00:15:19.000When 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.
00:15:27.000This 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.
00:15:33.000It came out from Stanford last Thursday.
00:15:34.000Let's just try it out on all of humanity.
00:15:36.000And we're going back to the very beginning of the book of Genesis, aren't we?
00:15:39.000You 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.
00:15:47.000If God is the ground of epistemic value and moral value, I can't make up the rules.
00:15:54.000I can't grasp at that and say, I'm going to make this for myself.
00:15:57.000Rather, I want to bring my mind and my will into harmony with these objective intelligibilities that are grounded in the creative mind of God.
00:16:06.000Now that's a formula for a happy life, a healthy life.
00:16:09.000The 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.
00:17:38.000First, folks, it is, of course, election season.
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00:18:42.000You 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.
00:18:48.000So 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.
00:18:54.000You had to demonstrate that there was a better rule in the offing.
00:18:57.000And 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.
00:19:03.000And so the idea is, you have to prove to me why traditional marriage is good.
00:19:06.000Now, that would have been a question that people laughed at for thousands of years.
00:19:10.000And still in most parts of the world laugh at.
00:19:12.000I 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.
00:19:24.000I mean, this was seen for literally all of human history, and in most places in the world, as the foundational truth.
00:19:30.000And then the West simply said, well, I mean, now prove it.
00:19:34.000And 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.
00:19:44.000The 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.
00:19:54.000Instead 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.
00:20:49.000And it can express itself as a disdain for the church and all this.
00:20:53.000But deep down, it's a moral resistance to the demand of objective morality and truth.
00:21:00.000And that's the fight we're in today, I would say.
00:21:02.000One 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.
00:21:11.000And that is an argument between virtue and freedom.
00:21:14.000There's always been sort of the tension inside of conservative circles going all the way back to sort of the Buckley days.
00:21:19.000The idea was that there was a fusionism between virtue and freedom, but they were always in tension.
00:21:23.000I mean, there was always this sort of dialectical conversation that was happening between virtue and freedom.
00:21:27.000And 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.
00:21:35.000And the idea is that that individual should be protected from those who are pursuing virtue if virtue is left sort of undefined.
00:21:41.000And there's always been that sort of tension right there.
00:21:44.000And again, I think the war on virtue has led to libertinism, not to actual liberty.
00:21:49.000To pretend away the difficulty between the two, I think, is short-sighted.
00:21:53.000But the tension needs to remain, for sure.
00:23:32.000I'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.
00:23:56.000And I think that, in the measure that it's still a battle within conservatism, that's the side that I'd be on.
00:24:02.000You 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.
00:24:35.000And see, modernity in some ways teeters on that divide.
00:24:40.000There'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.
00:25:25.000Now, I'd precipitate on the Christian side forms of Calvinism that would see predestination, double predestination, as just the arbitrary will of God.
00:25:37.000That's a dangerous view of the divine freedom.
00:25:39.000And the interesting thing, Ben, is it's mimicked in precisely the kind of political freedom we're talking about.
00:25:45.000If you want that kind of freedom, you're mimicking the arbitrary, capricious God of the freedom of indifference.
00:25:51.000But 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.
00:26:01.000But it's a theological point, but has huge political implications.
00:26:06.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
00:26:08.000First, you know what's really keeping Americans up at night?
00:26:10.000It's not just the radical left's attempts to destroy our values.
00:27:10.000When we talk about freedom, this raises the deeper question of, so what is the value of freedom?
00:27:15.000So there's a philosopher, a Catholic philosopher, named John Finnis, who's written extensively on this.
00:27:20.000One 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.
00:27:29.000In 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.
00:27:40.000As you were suggesting, freedom is something that you cultivate in order to pursue the good.
00:27:44.000And if you didn't have freedom, you wouldn't be able to pursue that good.
00:27:47.000So if you're not freely worshiping God, are you actually worshiping God in a way that God wants?
00:27:52.000Or are you just being forced to worship God at points of gun, for example?
00:27:55.000And that's why we care about freedom of religion.
00:27:56.000When 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.
00:28:04.000The freedom of speech is instrumental.
00:28:08.000It'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.
00:28:20.000And you can see by example that's not true.
00:28:22.000If 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.
00:28:33.000My liberty to shoot the person next to me did not actually make the quality of the shooting better.
00:28:37.000It made the quality of the shooting significantly worse, which suggests, of course, that liberty is not in and of itself an additive excellent quality.
00:28:45.000Liberty is useful and necessary in order to achieve certain things, but liberty used the wrong way actually makes things more evil.
00:28:52.000If 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.
00:29:29.000And so you can't define it apart from the good.
00:29:32.000It emerges, in a way, out of the intelligent perception of the good.
00:29:38.000I would say of value, to use more contemporary language.
00:29:41.000But if you construe it as something in itself or valuable as such, you've misconstrued it.
00:29:48.000It exists only in relation to the good.
00:29:51.000And a class will say even a very wicked person is choosing what at least appears to be good.
00:29:56.000The at least apparent good is being sought, even by the most wicked person.
00:30:00.000So you can't escape the relationship to the objective good.
00:30:04.000So, 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.
00:30:15.000Why 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?
00:30:24.000Why 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?
00:30:29.000Because it goes back to the point you made a few minutes ago about God doesn't want us to be automaton.
00:30:39.000And 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.
00:30:50.000That's why John Paul II said, I think quite correctly, the first freedom.
00:30:56.000That 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.
00:31:05.000So the good coerces it, that's true, but we shouldn't have a secular arm coercing religious beliefs.
00:31:12.000That's why we'd stand to thwart a theocracy.
00:31:15.000So, 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.
00:31:23.000As the Bible says, everyone does what's right in his own eyes, and the minute that happens, the entire society collapses.
00:31:28.000I mean, that's an actual description in the book of Deuteronomy, which is clearly what we are seeing right now.
00:31:34.000Attempt 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.
00:31:57.000You can have broad rules, but if the rules are too broad, then they become too vague.
00:32:00.000And if they're too specific, then they become too...
00:32:05.000As somebody who follows an awful lot of rules every day, they become quite burdensome.
00:32:10.000Or they can become quite burdensome if not enacted in the right way.
00:32:13.000And 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.
00:32:38.000The reality is that roles are good, roles are very good, and that human beings were created in order to fulfill these particular roles.
00:32:45.000And the book of Genesis is all about establishing what those roles are, Adam as husband, Adam Adam as father.
00:32:52.000Adam as the one who cultivates the image of God.
00:32:56.000These 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.
00:33:05.000In 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.
00:33:12.000Moral indifference would be the wrong term, but they're matters of moral choice.
00:33:15.000Without there being significant moral after effect, you can be a good father.
00:33:19.000The minute that the liberty starts to threaten the roles, that's when society blows up.
00:33:22.000So when liberty starts to say, okay, you don't have to be a father.
00:33:25.000In fact, it's not important for you to be a father.
00:33:27.000In fact, abandoning your kids is just another form of liberty.
00:33:29.000Or you don't have to be a good husband.
00:33:31.000In fact, any form of sexual relationship that you choose to enter is equally valuable.
00:33:36.000And so you blow up the role of what it means to be a husband or what it means to be a wife.
00:33:40.000That is when liberty turns into libertinism and has overstepped its boundaries.
00:33:44.000And 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.
00:33:52.000Now, 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.
00:34:36.000If they picked up the ball and ran up in the stands, then they're not playing the game anymore.
00:34:41.000And 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.
00:34:50.000If you know the rules, they're in place.
00:34:54.000But that's devolved into an either-or.
00:34:57.000To be really free, I've got to get rid of the rules.
00:35:00.000It's up to me to decide, and I'm beyond good and evil, and I'm the ubermensch, and I'll decide.
00:35:04.000But 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.
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00:37:08.000Kids are seeking out this sort of stuff.
00:37:09.000And 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.
00:37:18.000And 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.
00:37:24.000And I've been raising my child this way.
00:37:37.000But Rousseau's another one that's had a giant impact on the way we think about things.
00:37:42.000And this is not some sort of defensive conservatism, but to say the Bible is just so much better on these matters.
00:37:52.000It's so much better than what the modern philosophers have given us.
00:37:55.000And the philosophers that we reverence who were very much conditioned by a biblical imagination, recovering those figures I think is eminently important.
00:38:04.000You 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.
00:38:11.000It 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.
00:38:18.000But 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.
00:38:50.000But 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.
00:39:00.000The rabbis have it much better than Freud.
00:39:02.000Yeah, 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.
00:39:16.000He ends up becoming effectively a modern orthodox psychologist.
00:39:20.000And 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.
00:39:34.000And 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.
00:39:50.000And 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.
00:39:55.000He sees that his son is incredibly analytic and he doesn't actually have sympathy for people.
00:39:58.000And 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.
00:40:05.000And 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.
00:40:15.000And 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.
00:40:26.000We've talked about this, obviously, at length many times, both Off-air and on-air.
00:40:31.000One 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.
00:40:46.000The divisions are obviously very real.
00:40:48.000Belief in Jesus versus not belief in Jesus is a massive issue in Christianity and also in Judaism.
00:40:53.000But 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.
00:41:06.000That is the real battle, and I'm sort of bewildered by this attempt to divide Jews from Christians in this moment.
00:41:12.000And 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.
00:41:26.000And 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.
00:41:41.000I'll tell you the truth, when I was coming of age in the university and seminary, Catholic liberalism was very much renient.
00:41:48.000And, you know, we define liberalism in different ways, but one way is trying to read Christianity kind of relentlessly through the modern lens.
00:41:57.000So, beginning with, you know, Schleiermacher and coming up through Tillich and Rahner and many other figures, That's the style of a liberal Christianity.
00:42:05.000Now, 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.
00:42:15.000So, to present Jesus as sage or as mystic or moral teacher or...
00:42:23.000Bultmann wants to just rip him up from the roots of his Judaism.
00:42:28.000Look at much of the historical critical approach to the Bible often effectively does that.
00:42:34.000I 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.
00:42:41.000Without that, we're not going to understand who he was, nor what the first Christians were even saying about him.
00:42:47.000Take him out of his Jewish context, and he becomes this avatar of liberal Christianity, who is as boring as it can be.
00:42:55.000Liberal Christianity is not a compelling vision.
00:42:59.000It's the Jewish Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, the culmination, we would say, of the great story of Israel.
00:43:07.000That's the one Paul was talking about.
00:43:09.000That's the one Peter was talking about.
00:43:11.000That's the one Thomas Aquinas was talking about.
00:43:14.000So that's something I feel very strongly about as a Catholic theologian and bishop, is rediscovering Jesus' Jewishness.
00:43:23.000It is kind of a point of astonishment.
00:43:25.000Sometimes 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.
00:43:31.000And people will say, well, yeah, but I've never read the Old Testament.
00:43:34.000It's like, well, I don't understand why you would read the sequel without reading the actual first thing that came out.
00:43:38.000You're not going to understand half the references in the New Testament unless you actually read the Old Testament.
00:44:24.000But it comes back, and it's back today.
00:44:27.000Whenever 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.
00:45:12.000I 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.
00:45:22.000I 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.
00:45:30.000I mean, it would deroot the entire substructure, I would imagine, if you're a Catholic.
00:45:55.000I can't begin to articulate that apart from the temple sacrifice of the Old Testament.
00:46:02.000Without the book of Leviticus, without sections of Exodus, I can't begin to articulate what I'm doing.
00:46:09.000Now, mind you, a lot of Catholics don't get that.
00:46:14.000If 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.
00:46:23.000But the temple side of it, the sacrificial side of it, It's entirely Jewish.
00:46:31.000We would see all of that coming to its fulfillment in the great sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
00:46:36.000But I'll just do one more connection there because the temple, the temple, is so important.
00:46:41.000Ezekiel 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.
00:46:59.000And then he says, well, I'm going to tear this place down in three days, rebuild it, referring to the temple of his body.
00:47:04.000And then what do we see at his death when his side is pierced and out comes blood and water?
00:47:09.000And we say the blood of the Eucharist, the water of baptism, true.
00:47:13.000But 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.
00:47:24.000Well, 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.
00:47:34.000The Shekinah returned, and now the water's going forth.
00:47:37.000We would read that then as the grace of the sacraments and so on and so forth that renews the world.
00:47:42.000But see, apart from a Jewish background, none of that makes a lick of sense.
00:48:00.000When you go to Jerusalem, you can actually see these sites.
00:48:02.000I mean, it is totally worth, whether you're Catholic, Jewish, Protestant...
00:48:06.000You should absolutely go and visit Jerusalem.
00:48:09.000Jerusalem is an unbelievable place, and you can actually see the place that are being talked about.
00:48:13.000The Mount of Olives is directly above the Temple Mount.
00:48:16.000You can see exactly where it was, where the Dome of the Rock is now.
00:48:19.000It's pretty amazing to see all of it in person.
00:48:22.000So, Bishop, one of the things that you've talked about a lot is the relationship of Jews and Christians.
00:48:27.000You've contrasted a couple of different visions of that, one Jacob Neusner's vision and one Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sachs' vision.
00:48:33.000What if you want to talk about that a little bit?
00:48:35.000Yeah, I mean, I find both those figures fascinating.
00:48:37.000I 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...
00:48:52.000It brought the God of Israel to the world.
00:48:54.000And so those texts, like in Isaiah, what's envisioned is the coming of all the tribes of the world to the God of Israel.
00:49:01.000Well, the fact that the God of Israel has gone all over the world is from the Christian churches.
00:49:08.000And 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.
00:49:15.000And Maimonides, who had no great affection for Christians, but said, let's face it, the Christian churches have brought the Torah to the world.
00:49:23.000And 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.
00:49:36.000If 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.
00:49:52.000And he's talking in those terms about the relationship between Israel and Christianity.
00:49:57.000But 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.
00:50:05.000And the salvation offered in God would go out to the world.
00:50:09.000So I think that's really fascinating in Rabbi Sachs, in Moses Maimonides.
00:50:14.000Neusner I also find really interesting.
00:50:16.000And he was a great friend of Benedict XVI, of Joseph Ratzinger, who read him very carefully.
00:50:21.000I think they met on a number of occasions.
00:50:23.000And 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.
00:50:40.000He 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.
00:50:52.000Well, he's claiming an authority beyond the authority of the Torah.
00:50:56.000Or 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.
00:51:07.000And it's a subtle reference, seems to me, to the divinity of Jesus.
00:51:13.000He'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.
00:51:24.000Jesus You've heard it said, but I say.
00:51:29.000And Neusner, I think, honestly, says, look, that's where I would have walked away, because a Jew can't say that coherently.
00:51:36.000And I would say, as a Christian, yeah, that's the point of demarcation.
00:51:41.000Jesus 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...
00:52:10.000And I think that's the point of demarcation, fundamentally, between Christians and Jews.
00:52:14.000So, 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.
00:52:26.000What you are seeing is a revival in sort of traditionalist versions of this.
00:52:30.000So you can say overall the number of people going to church or synagogue is going down.
00:52:34.000Within that, the number of people who are going to traditional church and synagogue is radically increasing.
00:52:38.000That's certainly happening in the Jewish community.
00:52:40.000What you've seen over the course of...
00:52:43.000Modern Jewish history is more and more people falling completely out of Judaism.
00:52:47.000They still identify as Jews and Poles, but they're not actually practicing any form of Judaism in any serious or authentic way.
00:52:54.000That might mean that they go to synagogue once a year, they fast for half the day on Yom Kippur, that kind of thing.
00:52:59.000But you are seeing a radical increase in the number of people who are going back to traditionalist synagogues, which are starting to thrive again.
00:53:06.000You're seeing that both in the United States and in Israel.
00:53:08.000You'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.
00:53:23.000What do you make of that, and can that continue to grow beyond the boundaries that it's currently established?
00:53:28.000You'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.
00:53:37.000He referred to liberal Catholicism as an exhausted project, and it was just the right way to describe it, I think.
00:53:44.000Cardinal George, as a younger man, was, and he would have admitted this, a liberal Catholic.
00:53:49.000But he intuited over time that it was an exhausted project.
00:53:53.000That 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.
00:54:06.000It's a flattened out version of Catholicism.
00:54:09.000I 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.
00:54:26.000The 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.
00:54:39.000I think that people are disaffiliating from that, but they are finding more compelling what we've been talking about.
00:54:46.000The liberal conservative thing distorts it.
00:54:48.000So I'd use more the language of this sort of flattened out, culturally accommodating religion versus a biblically dense and confident Catholicism or Judaism.
00:55:02.000I think that's what's appealing to people.
00:55:05.000I see it all the time in my pastoral work.
00:55:08.000So I think we continue riding that wave.
00:55:11.000I mean, I would stay with the trajectory that you and I have been talking about.
00:55:17.000Biblical, densely textured, confident, colorful, morally rich and dense.
00:55:24.000I think that's the version of it that we want to keep propagating.
00:55:27.000So 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.
00:55:48.000So in terms of Catholicism, you do see a wing of Catholicism now that is attempting to, for example, wholesale reject Vatican II, for example.
00:55:57.000So 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.
00:56:06.000And that's one of the marks, you're quite right.
00:56:08.000I 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.
00:57:09.000He wanted a boldly confident Catholicism that goes out to meet the world.
00:57:13.000Based 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.
00:57:24.000So it's not a defensive, fearful, ghettoized Catholicism.
00:57:31.000That to me would be the rad trad side of it at its worst.