The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:53.900 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Mikayla Peterson.

00:00:57.420 This is episode 14 of season 4 and was recorded on March 5th, 2021.

00:01:02.280 It's titled Christianity and the Modern World.

00:01:05.180 In this episode, my dad spoke with Bishop Robert Barron.

00:01:08.480 They discussed a variety of topics, including the importance of the Bible, the bridge between religion and biology,

00:01:14.760 the nature of good, how the limits of the Bible can be useful, why young people are leaving the Catholic Church,

00:01:20.820 the hunger for serious deep conversation on religious topics done intellectually, and more.

00:01:25.120 Bishop Barron is the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

00:01:34.260 He's also a number one Amazon bestselling author and has published books on theology and spiritual life.

00:01:39.980 He's been invited to speak about religion at the headquarters of Facebook, Google, and Amazon,

00:01:43.680 and is one of the most followed Catholics in the world on social media.

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00:03:05.100 Enjoy the episode.

00:03:06.640 Hello.

00:03:08.100 If you have found the ideas I discuss interesting and useful,

00:03:12.080 perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book,

00:03:16.400 Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life,

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00:03:49.280 Beyond Order can be read and understood on its own,

00:03:52.280 but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books,

00:03:56.580 12 Rules for Life, and before that, Maps of Meaning.

00:04:00.900 Thanks for listening, and enjoy the podcast.

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00:07:12.160 Hello, everyone.

00:07:13.540 I have the pleasure today of speaking with Bishop Robert Barron.

00:07:18.960 We've spoken before on YouTube, but felt that it was worthwhile doing so.

00:07:23.340 Again, it's been a long time, and many people have reached out to both of us continually, asking us to converse.

00:07:30.160 And so we felt that that would be useful and something, at least in principle, of public interest.

00:07:40.500 Bishop Barron is the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

00:07:47.760 He's a number one Amazon best-selling author and has published numerous books, essays, and articles on theology and the spiritual life.

00:07:56.320 He has been invited to speak about religion at the headquarters of Facebook, Google, and Amazon,

00:08:02.020 and is one of the most followed Catholics in the world on social media.

00:08:06.840 Thanks for agreeing to talk with me again, and I'm looking forward to this conversation.

00:08:13.080 Yeah, my pleasure, Jordan.

00:08:14.020 Great to see you, too.

00:08:15.900 So why do you think that people have written to you and to me suggesting that we converse?

00:08:24.320 What's your take on this?

00:08:26.280 It's surprising to me in some sense because it's not really my bailiwick, you know, although obviously I've been putting my nose in there anyways.

00:08:34.700 I think for a number of reasons, people see the work you do as at least opening a door to the religious dimension of life or a deeper dimension of life.

00:08:44.500 I'll tell you a story.

00:08:45.500 I got up in front of the bishops of the United States because I was chairman of our Committee on Evangelization,

00:08:51.300 and I talked about why we're losing a lot of young people.

00:08:54.600 I went through some of the statistics and then reasons why we're losing them, and then I gave various signs of hope.

00:08:59.640 And one of the signs of hope I gave was I called it the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, and what I meant was this.

00:09:06.240 I told the bishops, here's this gentleman who gets up in a pretty non-histrionic way and speaks for several hours in some cases about the Bible.

00:09:16.780 And young people all over the English-speaking world are listening to them in theaters and by their millions on YouTube.

00:09:25.040 And I said, you know, I'm not here to endorse everything that Jordan Peterson is saying, but I think that in itself is a sign of hope.

00:09:33.000 And so that became a source of some conversation among the bishops.

00:09:36.280 But I do think it's a sign of hope.

00:09:37.780 And I said to them, and it's really in some ways to our shame, that you were making the Bible more compelling and appealing in many ways than we were.

00:09:46.960 So that's our bailiwick.

00:09:49.680 That's our profession is the Bible.

00:09:51.460 But you were opening the Bible up in a way that young people especially were finding very compelling.

00:09:57.140 And you were indeed, I think, thereby opening a door toward a, you know, a richer and fuller understanding of the scriptures.

00:10:04.520 I think that's part of it.

00:10:05.900 But I also think it's the opening to the realm of objective value.

00:10:11.660 So I think as I read you and listen to you, you talk a lot about the objective realm of value.

00:10:18.580 That's not simply a matter of my subjective whim, that, you know, I'll decide what to do, or I make up my values as I go along.

00:10:26.760 But there's something about the tradition, something about what's been given to us, an objectivity to moral value, aesthetic value, intellectual value.

00:10:37.980 And see, to me, that's, I mean, it's a good way, a gateway drug to religion.

00:10:42.020 Because God, I would say, is the ground and the source of objective value.

00:10:47.600 And when you sort of hyper-subjectivize the whole operation, that becomes, you know, questionable.

00:10:53.940 So I think your work there, too, has sort of primed the pump for a deeper exploration of God as the source of these objective values.

00:11:04.180 There's a couple thoughts I'd have about it.

00:11:05.740 It's almost as if we need a third category, subjective, objective, and something else, that is an admixture of both.

00:11:16.040 I mean, there's things, I come across information in the biological sciences, particularly, that speak deeply of an intrinsic morality.

00:11:28.320 And you see this, you can look at the work of Frans de Waal, for example, who's a Dutch primatologist, and he's been studying the social interactions of chimpanzees.

00:11:39.360 And chimpanzees share a tremendous genetic overlap with human beings.

00:11:47.780 And from an evolutionary perspective, we diverged from our common ancestor with chimpanzees something like 7 million years ago.

00:11:54.560 So our cultures also share, or our biology also shares properties with that of bonobos.

00:12:01.200 But I'm going to talk about the chimps for now.

00:12:06.020 De Waal has been interested in what makes a chimp leader.

00:12:10.280 So chimps organize their societies essentially in patriarchal fashion.

00:12:15.000 The top chimp is male.

00:12:17.660 That doesn't mean there aren't high-status females.

00:12:19.880 There are.

00:12:20.400 But the fundamental power structure appears, let's say, patriarchal.

00:12:25.540 And it's, in the popular eye, it's easy to assume that the top chimp is the most physically intimidating.

00:12:38.720 But that's actually not the case.

00:12:40.620 What De Waal has shown is that alpha chimps who maintain stable sovereignty, let's say, are more engaged in reciprocal interactions than all the other chimps in the troop.

00:12:57.340 So they're very generous and reciprocal.

00:13:01.380 They play fair.

00:13:02.320 Now, you can get the odd situation where a chimp troop will be ruled by a tyrant, but the structure becomes unstable.

00:13:09.860 And the tyrant chimp tends to be overthrown by coalitions of other male chimps torn to pieces.

00:13:16.340 And so then if you think, well, maybe there is a pattern that constitutes, this is the crucial issue as far as I'm concerned,

00:13:24.540 is there a pattern of behavior that typifies stable sovereignty?

00:13:29.360 And I think that's, in some sense, the fundamental religious question.

00:13:34.320 Is there a pattern of behavior that constitutes stable sovereignty?

00:13:38.120 And if so, what does it consist of?

00:13:42.000 Jak Panksepp has looked at rat behavior.

00:13:45.120 And rats, juvenile male rats, engage in rough and tumble play.

00:13:50.900 And when you pair them together, if one rat is 10% bigger than the other, he can dominate the lesser rat.

00:13:58.700 And so they do that, and they establish their relative dominance.

00:14:02.740 And then if you repeatedly pair them together, which is a crucial issue, it has to be repeated pairings,

00:14:09.300 the lesser rat has to invite the dominant rat to play.

00:14:13.240 So that's his role, and the larger rat agrees and plays.

00:14:17.840 But if the larger rat doesn't let the little rat win 30% of the time across repeated play bouts,

00:14:24.280 the little rat will stop playing.

00:14:27.020 And what I read that, it just blew me away.

00:14:29.000 It's so significant because it shows, imagine that part of what morality is,

00:14:33.480 it's morality is precisely that pattern of behavior that serves to keep repeated interactions going.

00:14:41.900 And those repeated interactions might be across days, or weeks, or months, or years, or decades, or centuries, or eons.

00:14:52.060 Tremendously long time span.

00:14:53.640 And so what you get is the emergence of a pattern of behavior that's stable for the individual and stable for society.

00:15:01.240 And as that's instantiated more and more deeply, it becomes something we can observe,

00:15:06.140 and something that we adapt to, and something that then becomes part of our central nature.

00:15:09.680 And for me, that's the way into the, that's the bridge between biology and religion right there.

00:15:15.620 And because it looks like there's an evolved ethic that even goes beyond human beings.

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00:16:15.080 Because it looks like there's an evolved ethic that even goes beyond human beings.

00:16:21.260 Yeah, no, I wouldn't deny for a second there's a biological ground for a lot of this business.

00:16:25.540 And I'm with Lonergan, the great Canadian philosopher, that the condition for the possibility of real objectivity is a properly constituted subjectivity.

00:16:35.160 So I like your opening comment about something that bridges the two.

00:16:38.100 We don't just live in, you know, the subjective and objective as though they're discreet.

00:16:44.400 But it's a properly constituted subjectivity, which means one free of various prejudices, one free of various fears, one free of games of self-denial and all that, that can properly intuit the objective value.

00:16:58.480 And objective value does indeed come up out of the physical to some degree.

00:17:02.060 I mean, we're embodied creatures.

00:17:04.880 So the biological plays a role in that for sure.

00:17:08.220 But I think, too, it goes beyond it.

00:17:09.820 I mean, it goes beyond simply a question of survival of the individual or even of the species.

00:17:14.240 But certain values, you know, of the truth and beauty and the good that transcend that, although they're grounded in it for sure.

00:17:22.980 Well, this is one of the things I really wanted to ask you about, because I do think in evolutionary terms and across the timescale that evolutionary biologists and physicists have come to accept.

00:17:35.960 And so that's a universe that's about 15 billion years old on a planet that's about 4.5 billion.

00:17:41.340 And with life being three and a half and mammalian life, say, being 60 million years, that's my time span.

00:17:49.920 The biblical time span is much truncated in relationship to that.

00:17:55.320 And that sets up a certain tension between the biblical stories, certainly if they're read as objective truth.

00:18:04.240 But the Catholic Church, from my understanding, has, and this comes from the Pope himself, the Catholic Church has already accepted the basic tenets of evolution.

00:18:14.160 But I don't know, yes, is that wrong?

00:18:17.200 Sure.

00:18:17.480 Oh, no, absolutely.

00:18:18.140 Yes, okay, so, but that begs the question, because for me, and I'm sure this is part of the sticking point for young people, and maybe for people in Western culture in general, is that it's easy to say that evolutionary theory is being accepted, but that still begs the question.

00:18:33.700 It's right, okay, so fine, you can look at the span of life over three and a half billion years before you get to human beings.

00:18:41.880 But our religious stories talk of a reality that looks like it's about 15,000 years old, something like that.

00:18:49.280 And so, I'm not blaming the church for that, obviously, and I think the stories in the Bible are far older than 5,000 to 10,000 years.

00:18:58.400 I suspect they were part of an extraordinarily ancient oral tradition that stretches back tens of thousands of years, because that's the rule rather than the exception.

00:19:06.800 But, and I don't know to what degree the Catholic thinkers within the church are working constantly to attempt to reconcile these two viewpoints, apart from saying that they do accept them both.

00:19:21.620 Yeah, but I don't think they're apples and oranges in a way.

00:19:24.900 I mean, I don't worry too much about that issue.

00:19:27.980 I'm not trying to read the Bible as a scientific text.

00:19:30.660 It's not about the evolutionary process.

00:19:32.680 It's a theological and spiritual text that's discerning truths that are, I think, available within our experience.

00:19:39.880 But there are discrete moments there.

00:19:41.860 I mean, the scientist who talks about evolution, fine, I'd listen to him or her.

00:19:46.480 The Bible's not concerned so much with that.

00:19:49.100 But it's giving us a theological interpretation of history and, indeed, of the cosmos, but not in scientific terms.

00:19:56.560 So it has implications for our understanding of the cosmos, for sure, and of nature, of human nature, but it's not done in a scientific manner.

00:20:05.720 So it just predates, as you say, I mean, any of what we'd associate now with the scientific method.

00:20:11.180 The last biblical text is around the year 100 AD, and so it long predates that preoccupation.

00:20:16.460 So, to me, it's kind of an apples and oranges issue, and I think a lot of that religion science stuff, in that sense, is an early 20th century preoccupation that we should just get beyond.

00:20:29.840 Right, but I think that may be the case, but I don't think people have gone beyond it.

00:20:34.660 And I also think that, and this pertains to something we also talked about discussing, which was the continual drain from the church, the Catholic church, perhaps in particular, but perhaps not in the West, of young people.

00:20:50.600 And I think part of that is their inability to make intellectual sense of everything that they're faced with, a religious tradition and a scientific tradition, especially on the biological front.

00:21:03.340 But not only that, they don't know where to place these things in their view of the world.

00:21:08.940 I think that's partly why my lectures, because you asked about that, had become popular, because I am trying to do that.

00:21:14.320 And, no, I'll say this, you look at the surveys, there's a lot of surveys now that ask young people precisely that question, how come you left?

00:21:22.940 And people speculate, oh, it must be because of the scandals, or because, you know, they had a bad experience in church or something.

00:21:29.280 Number one reason across many years in all the surveys is, I don't believe the teachings.

00:21:35.320 And then to specify that, religion and science seem to be at odds with each other.

00:21:39.320 So, for young people, the scientific way of knowing is the way of knowing.

00:21:43.320 So, it's sort of scientism, at least implicitly, holds sway in the minds of a lot of young people.

00:21:48.880 So, once you make that move, knowledge equals the scientific manner of knowing.

00:21:53.120 Well, then the Bible is non-scientific, therefore it's, you know, old superstition, Bronze Age mythology, etc.

00:21:59.640 And see, what you were doing, Jordan, I think, you were doing what a lot of the church fathers did with the scriptures.

00:22:05.040 Because the church fathers are very interesting.

00:22:07.020 People like Origen and Augustine and Chrysostom and those people.

00:22:09.660 They knew fully well in the 3rd and 4th century that the Bible should not simply be read in a sort of, you know, straightforwardly, literalistic way.

00:22:19.700 Augustine knew that very clearly.

00:22:21.100 Origen knew that clearly.

00:22:22.660 And they talked, therefore, about the different senses of scripture.

00:22:25.760 What you're doing, I think, in a lot of your lectures is what Origen would have called the moral sense of the Bible.

00:22:32.580 The tropological, to give it its kind of technical term.

00:22:34.860 The biblical texts are about the moral life.

00:22:38.420 Now, we might say today, the psychological life, or what makes you psychologically healthier or more productive.

00:22:44.340 They would have said the moral sense.

00:22:45.940 They knew all about that.

00:22:47.180 And so, the texts begin to open up in these marvelous ways.

00:22:50.900 So, you know, Noah and the ark, Jacob and wrestling with the angel and the ladder going up to heaven, et cetera, et cetera.

00:22:57.760 If you start fussing about, you know, the literal truth of these stories, you're going to miss these really deep spiritual insights, which the church fathers knew very well.

00:23:07.620 And I think you were, in your own way, tapping into that.

00:23:10.120 And the fact that young people were responding to it, see, I think is very encouraging.

00:23:14.580 That's why I told the bishops.

00:23:15.940 It's a positive sign that you were getting the audiences you were getting around this.

00:23:19.920 Well, the problem with the scientific viewpoint, technically speaking, is that it's amoral within its own confines.

00:23:30.400 But by definition, it strives not to address issues of value.

00:23:35.480 Now, it can't help it because scientists have to investigate some things and not others.

00:23:40.000 So, value enters into it.

00:23:41.400 But by its own nature, science can't answer and tries not to answer questions of value.

00:23:47.680 Now, it gets more complicated when you look at work like the primatology I discussed earlier, the origin of morality in animals and game playing, say, among rats.

00:23:57.660 That starts to move into the domain of morality to some degree.

00:24:00.180 But the problem with science is that it doesn't, it strips out all subjective meaning.

00:24:05.320 It's designed to do that.

00:24:06.420 And that leaves everyone at a loss about what to do with the world of value.

00:24:11.620 And I do believe that stories, in particular, address the world of value.

00:24:17.860 That's their function.

00:24:19.180 And the world of value is the world that we act in.

00:24:23.580 They're guides to action.

00:24:25.480 Well, I come across it all the time in my work on the internet.

00:24:28.340 So, I have, you know, dialogues with people that interact with my videos.

00:24:32.260 And they'll say things like, well, the sciences give us access to the truth, period.

00:24:37.340 The scientific method, that's how we get to the truth.

00:24:39.960 And I'll say, so, Hamlet tells you nothing true.

00:24:44.800 Plato tells you nothing true.

00:24:47.880 T.S. Eliot's poetry tells you nothing true.

00:24:50.680 I mean, who would believe that except the most ideologically scientific person?

00:24:55.480 But my fear is a lot of young people are in the grip of that.

00:24:59.620 They're in the grip of a real ideological science.

00:25:01.680 They don't know how to think their way out of it.

00:25:03.580 And so, they just abandon the attempt.

00:25:05.940 But it leaves them nowhere.

00:25:07.560 What you were doing, though, is you're showing a way out.

00:25:10.520 And there is a way out.

00:25:12.000 And it's by, you know, an introduction into the great masters of these texts to show you how they function.

00:25:19.200 That's what a good preacher ought to be doing, you know?

00:25:21.660 So, let me throw another objection, and this is another stumbling block, I think.

00:25:26.580 And I think this emerges in postmodernism, in particular.

00:25:30.280 Because the postmodernists, there's reasons for their manner of thinking.

00:25:36.300 So, one reason is, so, artificial intelligence researchers discovered in the early 1960s that perceiving the landscape was much more difficult than anybody had ever suspected.

00:25:51.160 Originally, it was sort of felt that objects were just there in some simple way.

00:25:56.160 And the complicated computational problem would be how to move among the obvious objects.

00:26:00.940 But it turned out that it's really, really difficult to perceive the environment.

00:26:05.160 There's an infinite or near-infinite number of ways that you can perceive even a finite set of objects.

00:26:10.980 So, and that means there's a multitude of potential interpretations for every set of events.

00:26:18.840 And so, that was a radical discovery in the computational world.

00:26:23.720 But the same discovery basically occurred at the same time in the world of literary analysis.

00:26:27.820 For the same reason, is that every text is susceptible to an inordinately large number of interpretations.

00:26:35.380 And it's not easy to identify the canonical interpretation.

00:26:39.060 And maybe the canonical interpretation isn't canonical.

00:26:42.320 It just serves power, for example.

00:26:44.440 And that would be, you know, religion as the opiate of the masses or religion as a political tool.

00:26:49.580 And I think that takes things far too far.

00:26:52.400 But there's a real problem here is that if you divorce the narrative from the objective world and say, well, the narrative is valuable because it gives us a guide to value.

00:27:01.060 Then you have another problem is, which in instantly, which is, okay, which narrative?

00:27:08.120 And how do we make a hierarchy of value among narratives?

00:27:11.840 We would say Hamlet is deeper than Harlequin Romance.

00:27:17.840 Right.

00:27:18.140 But trying to specify why that is and what deep means is very, very difficult.

00:27:24.620 And you might say, well, the Bible is the deepest of all narratives.

00:27:27.700 But that still begs the question.

00:27:30.440 Well, compared to Buddhist writings, say, compared to the Upanishads, or compared to any long-term complex mythology that's developed over thousands and thousands of years,

00:27:41.340 what makes it canonical?

00:27:43.080 Why is it preferable to Shakespeare, for example?

00:27:45.320 And so, well, so perhaps I could get you to address that because that's a vicious problem.

00:27:52.780 There's a lot there.

00:27:53.900 And I'll start with your opening remark about postmodernism because I quite agree with you.

00:27:58.160 I'm not simply anti-postmodern.

00:28:00.360 In fact, I wrote a book called Toward a Post-Liberal Catholicism, where I took in a lot of the insights of the postmodernists,

00:28:05.320 postmodernists, one of which is, as you quite correctly say, a sort of legitimate perspectivalism, that we never get reality, you know, too cool.

00:28:13.540 I just open my eyes.

00:28:14.340 There's reality.

00:28:15.500 Again, that's Lonergan.

00:28:16.660 It's only a properly constituted subjectivity that opens the door to the properly objected.

00:28:23.020 But one of those ways of properly constituting your subjectivity is to put your subjectivity within a community of discourse.

00:28:30.320 So it's never the case that I simply intuit the way things are and end of the argument.

00:28:36.340 No, it's, as Lonergan says, it's not the cogito.

00:28:38.640 That was the trouble with the Enlightenment.

00:28:40.360 It's the cogitamos.

00:28:41.340 It's always we think.

00:28:43.340 And that means I have my perspective.

00:28:45.000 I bounce it off your perspective.

00:28:46.460 You bounce off somebody else's.

00:28:47.920 We have a disciplined and structured conversation.

00:28:51.000 And in that process, all the different aspects of the real begin to emerge.

00:28:54.480 Or like my intellectual hero, John Henry Newman, said the contents of a real idea is equivalent to the sum total of its possible aspects.

00:29:04.580 That's about 1870, he says that, which is really an extraordinary thing because he anticipates in many ways the phenomenologists.

00:29:11.700 You know, when they talk about walking around an object and to intuit its essence thereby.

00:29:16.700 And the walking around is not just I walk around, but you're walking around and someone else is walking around.

00:29:21.460 We're all exchanging our points of view.

00:29:24.820 And again, I bring this into line with Catholicism, which has always stressed the communitarian element that we know precisely in the community of the church.

00:29:33.380 Now, linked to the Bible, the Bible is never like, just open it up.

00:29:37.240 You're a single subjective viewer.

00:29:41.120 Now you take in its meaning.

00:29:42.240 Well, no, we've always said the Bible is read within the church in this long interpretive tradition where I'm bouncing it off of Augustine's perspective.

00:29:50.180 We've got it from Origen, who now throws it to Thomas Aquinas, who now brings it to Newman, and then through preachers and teachers, through the saints.

00:29:58.420 So you've got the technical intellectual interpretation of the Bible.

00:30:02.380 Then you have the saints who in many ways, they embody the Bible.

00:30:05.700 So I'm going to read a lot of the biblical stories in light of Francis of Assisi, in light of Teresa of Calcutta, etc.

00:30:12.580 So I like that side, if you want, of the postmodern, which is much more attuned to the communal way in which we come to know things.

00:30:21.960 The big question you raise at the end, we could spend some time with that.

00:30:25.840 How do you make ultimate judgments and determinations like this one is right?

00:30:30.320 Well, you hinted at it a bit there by saying, well, look, many, many people have worked on this for a very, very long period of time.

00:30:39.520 And in some sense, it's a living document.

00:30:41.980 Yeah.

00:30:42.140 Right.

00:30:42.420 Because it does have to be, the Bible just doesn't exist as a book on a shelf.

00:30:46.960 It's a pattern of meaning within a context, and the context has to be taken into account.

00:30:54.180 So you say, well, there's a powerful context for its interpretation.

00:30:57.080 It's also a fundamental text in that the Bible is implicit in all sorts of other great texts like Shakespeare or anything that's a product of Judeo-Christian culture.

00:31:08.720 That's a deep product, that's a deep product, is deeply affected by the Bible.

00:31:12.520 So it's there implicitly, whether you like it or not.

00:31:15.780 And so it has to be taken seriously, I would say, even if you don't believe it.

00:31:19.940 But then to the degree that you believe the central axioms of Western culture, you have to wonder how much of what's biblical you do end up believing because of its implicitness.

00:31:33.180 Well, yeah, I mean, it's all through the Western culture for sure.

00:31:35.600 And the question of belief, you know, in some ways is the most fundamental question in all of theology.

00:31:42.040 We call it fundamental theology.

00:31:44.040 How do you articulate the meaning of belief?

00:31:47.660 And, you know, for the best people in our tradition, belief is always on the far side of reason, not the near side of reason.

00:31:53.440 And that's a mistake that so many people make today, young people especially.

00:31:58.040 Faith or belief, they mistake for credulity or superstition, something sub-rational.

00:32:03.660 And our best people, of course, have always repudiated that.

00:32:07.400 Authentic faith is on the far side of reason.

00:32:09.620 So reason has done all the work it can and should do.

00:32:12.800 But then there's this moment when the claim is made, deus dixit, right?

00:32:19.240 That God has spoken.

00:32:21.800 Now, do I believe that or not?

00:32:23.920 I think it's precisely analogous to coming to know a person.

00:32:27.140 You know, so I know something about you just from watching you over the years, and I can Google you, and I can read your books, and I can come to some sort of objective knowledge of you.

00:32:37.160 Now, in this virtual means, I've, you know, met you.

00:32:40.500 And so my mind is working, trying to understand where you're coming from.

00:32:44.740 But let's, I mean, project into the future.

00:32:46.340 If you and I met in person, you and I eventually became friends, and at some point, you spoke a truth about yourself that I could never have gotten on my own.

00:32:59.020 I could never have gotten it from any objective source.

00:33:02.820 You revealed something to me, right, of your inner life.

00:33:07.040 And at that point, I've got to make a decision.

00:33:10.020 Well, do I believe that or not?

00:33:12.280 I can't prove it.

00:33:13.300 I can't ratify it.

00:33:15.740 It's congruent with everything I've known.

00:33:18.120 So that's one test I could give.

00:33:19.820 If you told me something that's just wildly incongruous with everything else I know about you, I'd probably not believe that.

00:33:26.780 But if you tell me something that's congruent with what I know, but goes beyond it, and I have to say at that point, okay, I have to believe that or not.

00:33:37.020 I think faith is like that in a way.

00:33:39.680 So the Bible, I can approach in all kinds of different ways.

00:33:43.300 But the claim being made at the heart of the Bible, of biblical revelation, is deus dixit.

00:33:49.560 God has spoken.

00:33:50.880 God has said something in this text.

00:33:53.820 Do I accept it?

00:33:55.120 And that has to be a decision that's born of something beyond reason, not opposed to it, but beyond it.

00:34:03.960 So that's, I think, where belief in the religious sense comes in.

00:34:08.460 So I understand that argument, but I have trouble with it, I would say.

00:34:15.520 So we could talk about faith a little bit.

00:34:20.540 And this is groping around in the darkness.

00:34:25.080 It seems to me that gratitude is a form of faith.

00:34:29.000 It's like a decision in some sense.

00:34:32.400 Because you could look at the world, and you could say, well, there's plenty of reasons to be grateful, and there's plenty of reasons not to be.

00:34:40.300 And so the evidence doesn't necessarily support one interpretation or another.

00:34:44.900 But a decision about whether or not to be grateful is going to affect the way I interpret the world, and also perhaps the way it reveals itself to me, and the way I act in it, and the consequences of my action.

00:34:58.460 So I would say it seems to me to take faith to be grateful, and that seems to be a worthwhile faith.

00:35:04.780 It seems to me to take faith to operate always when we don't know what we're doing, and we usually don't know what we're doing.

00:35:13.700 And so part of the reason that you have to have faith is because you're actually ignorant, and it fills in the gaps, right?

00:35:20.600 Because otherwise you'd be stuck with a never-ending regress.

00:35:25.180 You'd just ask why all the time, and then you could never act, because the why has to end somewhere.

00:35:30.260 And I think virtually by definition, it ends with an act of faith.

00:35:34.880 That might be akin to your idea about faith being beyond reason.

00:35:38.740 It's like, well, look, if I ask you why you're having this conversation with me, you'll give me a reason.

00:35:47.700 And if I ask you why that reason is valid, you'll give me another reason.

00:35:51.980 And if I do that five or six times, you're going to run out of reasons.

00:35:57.420 But you're still having the conversation.

00:35:59.720 So that means you have faith that the conversation can go somewhere good, and that's not actually a delusion.

00:36:06.220 No, no, no.

00:36:06.800 And actually, you're moving toward God, and I think that's a classic route in our tradition.

00:36:11.780 And just the way you were doing it.

00:36:13.500 Why are we having this conversation?

00:36:14.780 I can give these particular reasons, but then ask the why again, ask it a third, a fourth, a fifth time.

00:36:20.440 Finally, I'm going to get to something like, well, because I want to be happy.

00:36:23.980 You know, what ultimately motivates the will is some desire for happiness.

00:36:29.480 Well, no, what's happiness?

00:36:31.240 Well, keep pressing that question.

00:36:33.140 It can't be something simply in this world.

00:36:35.540 We all know that doesn't make us happy in the way that we're seeking.

00:36:38.580 It's something like the sumum bonum, right?

00:36:41.020 Something like the ultimate good.

00:36:42.320 I want to be happy in the fullest possible sense all the time, which is why, you know,

00:36:47.860 Teilhard de Chardin said this, that I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning unless I believe in God.

00:36:52.280 And that's what he meant, was if you do that kind of horizon analysis of every act of the will,

00:36:57.280 even the simplest, like getting out of bed, you finally come to the sumum bonum.

00:37:01.740 Okay, so let me walk through that.

00:37:03.480 Okay, let me walk through that, because I think that that's a useful thing to think about.

00:37:07.060 Technically, I've thought about identity in this regard, because identity is a nested structure.

00:37:12.520 It's also a lens through which we view the world.

00:37:16.100 And so if I'm sitting at my typewriter typing, you might ask me what I'm doing.

00:37:22.380 And the answer is, well, I'm moving my fingers up and down.

00:37:25.840 But then that's true.

00:37:27.160 And the next answer is, well, I'm producing words on a page, but I'm also producing phrases.

00:37:33.980 And I'm producing sentences, and I'm producing paragraphs, and then chapters, and then a book.

00:37:39.800 And then you might say, well, are you writing a book?

00:37:42.760 Or are you being a professor?

00:37:43.760 And I'd say, no, well, I'm being a professor, pushing my fingers up and down on this keypad.

00:37:48.500 And then you might say, well, what's professor nested in?

00:37:52.560 And the answer to that would be something like, well, good citizen.

00:37:56.420 And then that's nested in good man.

00:37:58.800 And then that's nested in, well, then that's right where you start to encounter what I think are something like religious presuppositions.

00:38:06.440 It's like, well, what exactly do you mean by good man?

00:38:09.740 And I think psychologically, I think, well, that means to act out the mythological hero.

00:38:15.760 And that's exactly the point where that identity touches on something that's, I think, indistinguishable from religion at that end.

00:38:23.380 Now, I'm not sure what that means about God, per se.

00:38:27.000 I would say this, that God, in our great tradition, could be defined as the good in its unconditioned form.

00:38:35.860 So all the things you've been raising here, so the why, why, why, I'm answering with some kind of good, with a conditioned good.

00:38:43.120 The very fact that I can put it in a wider context means it's conditioned.

00:38:46.340 It's good, I'm seeking it, but it's not the ultimate thing I'm seeking.

00:38:50.020 So unless we have an infinite regress, which I think is repugnant to reason.

00:38:53.940 And immobilizing.

00:38:55.820 You know, there are people who have neurological conditions that put them into an infinite regress, and they cannot act.

00:39:01.620 Right.

00:39:02.280 So if that's repugnant, both, let's say, epistemically and psychologically, we have to come to something that's properly called the unconditioned good.

00:39:11.880 Good in its absolute form.

00:39:14.200 That which is desirable simply for its own sake.

00:39:18.140 So Aquinas will say God is called good because God is the supremely desirable.

00:39:23.400 What do we desire, Thomas says, some form of actuality or being?

00:39:27.360 That's why we call God the fully real, that which is most actual, octus purus, right?

00:39:34.940 But I like the analysis that comes not so much cosmologically, but psychologically, from what motivates me.

00:39:40.320 And finally, unless my life just sort of founders into irrationality, I am motivated, ultimately, by God.

00:39:48.540 Right.

00:39:48.820 Well, I think so.

00:39:50.200 Because, you know, I would also say, well, let's reject that argument and say, well, you're not nested in good man, good citizen, hero.

00:40:00.440 And then beyond that, you know, cosmic hero.

00:40:03.980 And I think, psychologically speaking, the figure of Christ is, if nothing else, a cosmic hero.

00:40:09.700 And I'm not saying it's nothing else, but it's at least that.

00:40:14.380 Well, what would the alternative be?

00:40:16.560 Well, you wouldn't be doing what was good.

00:40:18.540 Well, then what's on the outskirts of your value structure is something that's adversarial, something that's the opposite of good.

00:40:25.180 And maybe you're likely, in fact, your psyche is not pure, and you, you know, you vary depending on your faith, I suppose.

00:40:39.280 But there's no escaping being nested in some sort of transcendent structure like that.

00:40:45.960 And then I think of it this way.

00:40:47.540 So you have this outermost reach of your identity structure, which is something like whatever the idea of good man is grounded in.

00:40:56.020 And I do think it's grounded in this hero narrative.

00:40:58.500 But then I look at the hero narrative, and I think, well, that's a biologically, that's an emergent narrative.

00:41:06.300 It has evolutionary roots.

00:41:07.920 It's something like man has discovered that his goal is to move into the unknown, to confront what's predatory and dangerous, and to garner something of great value in return and to share it with the community.

00:41:24.120 And it's an ancient, ancient story.

00:41:25.920 It echoes through the Old Testament continually.

00:41:29.460 It's even there.

00:41:30.940 It's even there.

00:41:31.980 It lurks underneath the accounts of God's creation itself.

00:41:35.060 And that means that that outermost rim of identity is something that has an evolutionary origin.

00:41:43.660 And then you think, well, that means that it has to be connected.

00:41:46.640 It's connected with reality in some fundamental sense.

00:41:50.380 Does that demonstrate the existence of God?

00:41:54.240 Well, that's a different question.

00:41:55.960 But you can push, you can make a logical case for the necessity of that hypothesis of goodness to that point, as far as I can tell.

00:42:05.840 Well, stay first with your example of someone, let's say, who's really wicked.

00:42:09.580 And there are wicked people.

00:42:11.600 You know, we can analyze that psychologically.

00:42:13.840 Two of them are sitting right here.

00:42:15.320 Well, yeah.

00:42:15.860 I mean, because it goes right through the human heart, as Solzhenitsyn said.

00:42:19.320 But Thomas Aquinas says a wicked person, even the most wicked person, is seeking at least the apparent good.

00:42:27.060 So something that appears good to that person.

00:42:29.960 Now, they could be totally mixed up about it.

00:42:31.900 It's not, in fact, good for them.

00:42:33.180 But at least it appears good to them.

00:42:34.900 So even the most wicked person, Thomas says, is inchoately seeking God.

00:42:40.440 Because it's always some good.

00:42:41.740 And now he's got the wrong sense of it, but he's still being drawn and motivated by this first cause of the will, even the most wicked person.

00:42:51.500 See, but I think that's a sign of hope.

00:42:53.180 That means grace is always possible.

00:42:55.540 Now read, whether it's Dostoevsky or Flannery O'Connor and people that talk about the most wicked types.

00:43:01.600 But they're sometimes the place where grace breaks through, you know, because they are seeking God in their perverse way.

00:43:09.520 So in a way, he's got his coming or going.

00:43:12.720 You know, I mean, whether we're Mother Teresa or we're a wicked Dostoevsky character, we're all seeking God in some way.

00:43:20.700 And I agree with you, too, about the Bible.

00:43:22.380 The Bible—

00:43:23.060 Well, see, I'm not that optimistic because I think that—I don't think that all evil actions are misguided.

00:43:31.980 I think that—because—and I think that's best illustrated in the story of Cain and Abel.

00:43:40.140 And I took the story of Cain extremely seriously.

00:43:43.360 I think it has unbelievable explanatory power.

00:43:45.820 It's quite staggering, the power of that story, the explanatory power, especially for how short it is.

00:43:51.700 You know, Cain is resentful.

00:43:53.620 He has his reasons.

00:43:54.460 His sacrifices were repudiated by God for reasons that aren't made clear in the text, which is a great ambiguity, because often our sacrifices are repudiated.

00:44:03.960 And Cain is bitter and no wonder.

00:44:05.780 And he has Abel around to rub his nose in it as well.

00:44:09.120 But Cain's reaction is, I am going to destroy what God values most.

00:44:14.780 And that—now, you might say, well, Cain is conflicted and ambivalent about that.

00:44:19.020 And I believe that, but I don't think he was seeking the good when he struck down.

00:44:24.420 He was shaking his fist at God.

00:44:27.560 Yeah, indeed he was, objectively.

00:44:29.660 But he was seeking at least the apparent good for him.

00:44:32.600 In his twisted mind, he thought that was the good.

00:44:35.400 I don't believe it.

00:44:36.280 I don't believe it.

00:44:37.000 I think you can get to a point where you're so resentful.

00:44:41.480 I really believe this, that you're so resentful that you will do harm to yourself as well as everyone else.

00:44:48.540 No, truly.

00:44:49.980 But a suicide is seeking at least the apparent good.

00:44:53.280 A suicidal person thinks, my nonexistence is a good thing.

00:44:56.980 So they are seeking the good, but in a twisted, misguided way.

00:45:02.040 And to me, it's got metaphysical roots, because I would hold to the classical view that evil is a privatio boni, right?

00:45:08.060 It's a privation of the good.

00:45:09.560 So good is always more fundamental than evil.

00:45:11.820 It has to be.

00:45:12.700 They're not co-equal principles fighting away.

00:45:15.860 So I'd repudiate any sort of Gnostic or Manichaean system.

00:45:20.480 I believe that too.

00:45:21.820 I believe that.

00:45:22.480 I thought about that a lot.

00:45:24.160 Jung is being accused of Manichaeanism, for example, because he took evil so seriously.

00:45:29.200 Who has?

00:45:29.700 Sorry, I couldn't hear.

00:45:30.140 Carl Jung was accused of Manichaeanism.

00:45:32.780 But, you know, he took evil extraordinarily seriously, which is something that's definitely worth doing.

00:45:40.680 So look, you look at examples like the Columbine killers.

00:45:44.200 Well, you know, the suicide could have come before the murders, but it didn't.

00:45:51.280 And so I don't – I even see maybe in those situations the desire for nonexistence, not so much as a seeking of the good, but a desire to punish God for the inadequacy of his creation.

00:46:07.920 Yeah, it could be.

00:46:09.040 But at least in their mind, that's a good thing.

00:46:12.400 So that's the Cain connection, the resentment against God and getting back at God.

00:46:17.380 Sure, I see it in the pastoral life all the time.

00:46:19.820 It's a justified thing.

00:46:21.380 They think God deserves it because look at what's happened.

00:46:25.620 But see, but God has his coming or going because that is, in fact, a quest for God.

00:46:31.500 That's right.

00:46:31.780 I mean, even the most resistant sinner is, in fact, under grace in that sense.

00:46:38.540 That's why I've always liked both Origen and C.S. Lewis say this, that it's the love of God that lights up the fires of hell.

00:46:44.360 If someone's in hell, it's the resistance to God's love that's lighting up the fires, that's causing the friction.

00:46:52.420 And so God has you coming or going.

00:46:54.720 I mean, is God present in hell?

00:46:56.740 Sure, because whatever is has to be grounded in God.

00:47:00.080 And God's even present in the fires of hell because it's the resistance against God that's causing them.

00:47:05.860 So I think it's a metaphysical statement and a psychological statement about the primacy of the good.

00:47:13.660 But it's a source of hope.

00:47:15.660 And a lot of my pastoral work, you know, and you as a psychologist, too, when you go into people's pain in a very deep way.

00:47:21.840 And priests go all the time to these limit situations where people have lost loved ones, they're facing their own death, they're facing tremendous failure.

00:47:30.740 That's where priests go, you know, because that's often where grace is going to break through.

00:47:37.260 Well, there are.

00:47:38.160 I've encountered situations as a clinician where religious language is the only language that can be used to describe what's happening.

00:47:47.560 That's quite interesting.

00:47:48.540 It's difficult to relay those experiences outside the specific framework of the occurrences.

00:47:53.820 Yeah.

00:47:56.180 I always think of, you know, Hegel said, to know a limit as a limit is to be beyond the limit.

00:48:01.480 And I think that's true here.

00:48:03.560 So whether it's the physical sciences or psychology, our reason comes to a certain limit.

00:48:08.780 But then it recognizes the limit as a limit.

00:48:11.540 And that's to be already beyond it in a way.

00:48:13.780 And they often talk about religious questions as limit questions or it's a limit situation.

00:48:18.540 When I begin to ask the meta question beyond questions, or I come to a meta experience beyond any ordinary experience.

00:48:25.860 And that's why, again, priests tend to show up at those limit cases.

00:48:30.280 That's when we're looking into this abyss.

00:48:33.280 And it is, from our standpoint, rather abyssal.

00:48:35.600 I mean, what is it that stands beyond what I can know and control?

00:48:40.240 And there's this, I mean, do a Kierkegaardian.

00:48:42.140 There's a kind of leap that that abyss is something loving.

00:48:47.260 And what stands beyond what I can control is a force of love that's actually summoning me.

00:48:52.740 And that's where you go back to what I said about Deus Dixit.

00:48:55.440 God speaking through the scriptures.

00:48:57.300 I think that's what it means.

00:48:58.600 The voice from the cloud is a symbol of it, you know.

00:49:01.460 When someone hears the voice of God, it's coming from the abyss.

00:49:05.640 It always is.

00:49:06.940 Job, you know, the voice comes out of the whirlwind.

00:49:09.100 So your eyes are closed and, you know, you can't see anything.

00:49:12.360 But from the whirlwind comes the voice.

00:49:14.980 And again, that speech is so important because, Job, where were you when I did all this?

00:49:20.320 I mean, what do you know about what's going on?

00:49:22.140 You know nothing about what's going on.

00:49:23.740 But from the abyss beyond reason comes the voice.

00:49:26.520 And the Bible witnesses to that stuff all the time.

00:49:30.720 And boy, it happens in people's experience.

00:49:32.960 I mean, you and I both know that.

00:49:34.280 When you come up against limits, what comes out of the abyss is a very interesting thing.

00:49:40.300 Well, one of the ways that's interesting to think about this, I think, is that, well,

00:49:44.620 let's assume that at the outermost limits of your identity, you don't make the assumption

00:49:50.560 that you're involved in an enterprise that's good, nested inside a being that's good.

00:49:56.560 Let's say you take the opposite approach to that.

00:49:59.580 What happens to your behavior?

00:50:01.440 And what I believe I've observed, and I tried to document this particularly in my book,

00:50:07.480 Maps of Meaning, is that you start acting in ways that make everything worse very rapidly.

00:50:13.860 Yes, yes.

00:50:14.920 So, and that, and so for, I had a debate a while back with an antinatalist, David Benatar,

00:50:23.320 and he believes that existence is so rife with suffering, conscious existence is so rife with

00:50:31.040 suffering, that it would be better if it just didn't exist at all.

00:50:34.340 So, and Dostoevsky's Ivan makes that case in The Brothers Karamazov brilliantly, brilliantly.

00:50:42.680 He tortures his brother Eliosha, who's the novitiate.

00:50:46.840 And it's a very interesting book because Eliosha is nowhere near the rhetorician that Ivan is,

00:50:53.580 but he is the most admirable character in the book because of the totality of his personality,

00:50:58.860 not because of the brilliance of his rational mind.

00:51:01.760 It's an amazing book in that regard.

00:51:05.160 But the problem I had with Benatar's hypothesis wasn't its axiom, because I think you can make

00:51:14.280 a strong case that there's so much suffering in the world that the question of its validity

00:51:20.460 is a valid question.

00:51:22.240 The problem for me there is that if you do that, and you start to act that out,

00:51:27.880 things appear to take a vicious turn very rapidly.

00:51:32.720 You start working against everything that's alive and striving.

00:51:35.960 Yes.

00:51:36.540 And...

00:51:37.140 No, quite right.

00:51:39.360 Gosh, there's a lot there.

00:51:40.640 I was thinking of, as you were talking, Dante's image of Satan at the pit of hell, not in a fiery

00:51:46.660 place, but an icy place, much, much better symbol of stuck.

00:51:50.240 Right, surrounded by the betrayers.

00:51:52.960 Yeah, just chewing on the three great traitors.

00:51:56.060 But his great wings, he's meant to fly.

00:51:58.260 He's meant to fly up into the presence of God.

00:52:01.260 But all they do is he's beating his wings.

00:52:03.980 And that's our earlier point about he's seeking God.

00:52:07.500 I mean, Satan is seeking God.

00:52:09.020 You have to.

00:52:09.800 That's the way the will functions.

00:52:11.320 But all he's managing to do is make the world around him colder.

00:52:14.500 So as he's beating his wings, he's just, he's creating the meteorology of hell, you know?

00:52:21.080 So that's what happens when someone gets really stuck.

00:52:24.320 They are, in fact, seeking God.

00:52:26.660 But they, and he cries from all six eyes.

00:52:29.400 He's got six eyes and he's weeping and he's drooling from the people he's chewing.

00:52:33.600 And he's stuck and he's making the world colder.

00:52:36.060 It's a beautiful picture of what happens.

00:52:38.600 It's really useful, too, for listeners to realize, if you look at, this is my opinion, and you can take it for what it's worth, the images of Satan in Paradise Lost and in Dante's Inferno are unbelievably instructive.

00:52:54.240 If you start to understand that what these thinkers were trying to do was to produce an imaginative representation of evil, and evil as an embodied and transcendent being.

00:53:06.340 And the psychological rationale for that, I believe, and it has something to do with our ability to communicate, which you referred to earlier, is that the evil we do is informed by the entire human race's conception of what constitutes evil.

00:53:24.220 And stretching back from the beginning of the time when we began to communicate.

00:53:29.740 So, for example, you see this quite clearly.

00:53:32.560 I read the Columbine killer's notes in quite a bit of detail, and it's saturated with satanic thought.

00:53:40.640 And the reason for that is that that sort of thought is part of the culture, because we've come to represent these transcendent figures of evil in poetry and in movies.

00:53:50.940 And it happens all the time in movies, and it happens all the time in movies with characters, say, like Hannibal Lecter, and in horror movies.

00:53:56.440 And Milton's Satan, who's often viewed, at least by some, as a revolutionary hero, seems to me to be something like the rational mind.

00:54:11.020 It's what happens to the rational mind when it places its presuppositions in the place of God.

00:54:16.680 Because Satan seems to presume that he can replace the transcendent by his own presuppositions.

00:54:25.860 And I think that's my reading of that is that's actually what happened on Earth, not long after Milton wrote, when these totalitarian states emerged.

00:54:36.200 It's something Solzhenitsyn commented on, where the presuppositions, the utopian presuppositions of man, rationally thought out, were seen as sufficient to represent everything, the totality, to eliminate the need for something transcendent.

00:54:51.180 And the consequence of that was that they produced something that looked an awful lot like hell.

00:54:55.540 Like hell.

00:54:56.400 And Dante did that more psychologically.

00:54:58.720 And so Milton, being the great poetic genius that he was, had a poetic sense that that was what was coming down the pipelines.

00:55:07.000 I wonder if you read your countryman, Charles Taylor, much the Canadian philosopher, because Catholic too.

00:55:13.500 Taylor said that we in the West, let's say Western Europe, America, Canada, Australia, we might be the first civilization ever, ever, to think you can find real happiness apart from a transcendent reference point.

00:55:28.720 And everyone in human history has felt something like the alluring darkness beyond what I can control and know is necessary.

00:55:38.200 A relationship to that realm is necessary for happiness.

00:55:41.780 We're the first culture ever that said, no, I don't care.

00:55:45.780 I'm indifferent to it.

00:55:47.240 But that does produce versions of hell, for sure, because something will take the place of the transcendent point of reference.

00:55:55.820 Well, it seems useful even from the perspective of humility.

00:55:59.420 I mean, I don't know if this is a reasonable thing to say, but a tyrant who believes in God is likely preferable to one who doesn't, because at least in principle, the tyrant is held accountable by something that isn't him.

00:56:13.120 Where is the atheistic tyrant?

00:56:14.900 That's right.

00:56:15.300 And he would get caught, at least in principle, again, in the operation of his own conscience.

00:56:22.440 Don't you?

00:56:22.780 I love the fact in the scriptures, they're very unique this way.

00:56:25.820 They do not apatheicize their leaders.

00:56:28.460 And it's very different from so many other ancient cultures where the kings become like gods.

00:56:32.780 And there's the Bible.

00:56:33.580 I mean, the Bible is bluntly honest about its leaders and its kings, even the greatest, even David, murderer, adulterer, Solomon, Saul, the whole realm of them.

00:56:45.280 That's a brilliant insight of the Bible, that all these people are under God, and they're under judgment.

00:56:51.940 And that's a liberating idea.

00:56:53.980 And when we lose that, the leaders do become apatheicized.

00:56:57.320 Well, you saw that in Rome constantly, in ancient Rome.

00:56:59.880 That literally happened.

00:57:00.940 You know, and there's always a proclivity for that to happen.

00:57:04.220 That's the imperial presidency, you know.

00:57:06.860 Right.

00:57:07.040 And I think it's very important.

00:57:08.160 I always tell when I'm preaching on this subject to Christians, the fact that Jesus is called the son of God, it was so important because it was dethroning the Roman claim that the emperor was the, you know, so one of the titles after Julius Caesar is divus, he's divinized.

00:57:26.120 Then his son, Augustus, becomes the son of the God, you know.

00:57:30.280 So when the first evangelists were saying, I've got good news about Jesus, the son of God, they were saying, right, it's not Caesar.

00:57:39.480 He is not the son of God.

00:57:41.100 This one whom Caesar killed, by the way, he's the son of God.

00:57:45.000 But the Bible's always making that move of knocking our own pretensions off their pedestals.

00:57:50.280 I think that's an amazing observation, actually.

00:57:53.540 And it is one of the things that is extraordinarily striking about the Old Testament is that it's so sophisticated psychologically.

00:58:03.740 Because what's happening there is that the idea of absolute sovereignty is disconnected from the person bearing the sovereignty.

00:58:12.960 And so at the very least, again, speaking psychologically, what you have is the representation of God as that which is sovereign.

00:58:21.320 And now each individual can be a representative of that and can have that operate within them, but they aren't that.

00:58:28.940 And that, well, as I said, at the least, that's a brilliant psychological innovation.

00:58:34.300 And the fact that the biblical characters are so, they're realistic to the point of Dostoevsky and painfulness.

00:58:42.180 You know, Abraham doesn't leave home until he's what, 80?

00:58:45.400 75 or something.

00:58:46.400 He's a slow, he's a late starter, right?

00:58:49.420 And then his life is just one god-awful catastrophe after another for the first while.

00:58:55.060 It's like, you know, you have some contempt for him, let's say, because he's hanging around his father's tent.

00:59:01.080 And then he does finally pay attention to the call of adventure, to God's voice.

00:59:05.320 And he goes out and encounters tyranny and starvation and corruption.

00:59:09.620 And he makes all sorts of mistakes.

00:59:11.880 And it's easy to be contemptuous, I think, of the biblical characters because of that.

00:59:17.880 But it actually speaks to their intense psychological realism.

00:59:21.780 And it's so useful for people to see that because Abraham, for example, is blessed by God, despite the fact, despite his evident character flaws.

00:59:32.780 And that's the case for the patriarchs in general.

00:59:36.380 So it is remarkable.

00:59:39.180 Right.

00:59:39.420 A descendant of yours I'll put in the throne that will last forever to David, who was a deeply flawed character.

00:59:44.640 What I find cool is that even before you get to the human characters, go to the very beginning of the Bible, and you have a dethroning of the cosmic pretenders to the absolute.

00:59:54.260 So in the creation account, you know, sun, moon, stars, planet, animals, the earth itself, all the things mentioned were worshipped in different contexts.

01:00:02.900 So the author is saying, no, no, no, no, they're not divine.

01:00:07.160 They're creatures.

01:00:08.320 But then he turns it around beautifully.

01:00:10.260 But they have a purpose, which is to give praise to God.

01:00:14.160 So they're not God.

01:00:15.880 They should be dethroned from that.

01:00:17.360 But now they're given the privilege of praising God with their manner of being, led by the conscious creature, human beings, who, and Catholics know this, whoever comes at the end of a liturgical procession is the one that leads the prayer.

01:00:32.040 So Genesis, the opening verses, sound like a liturgical procession.

01:00:35.920 You know, the first this, then that.

01:00:38.560 Evening came, morning followed, and the fourth day.

01:00:40.880 And it's like a steady procession of liturgical actors.

01:00:44.500 The last figure, the human being, is the one now that will lead the chorus of praise.

01:00:49.460 To my mind, it's the master theme of the whole Bible, if you want, is we're rightly constituted when we give praise to God and can lead all of our creaturely brothers and sisters in the right praise of God.

01:01:03.120 Sin is bad praise.

01:01:05.380 It's without fail in the Bible.

01:01:07.600 It's they went after false gods.

01:01:09.340 They went after the gods of those people.

01:01:11.080 They abandoned the teaching of the Lord.

01:01:13.140 Bad praise leads to the disintegration of the self.

01:01:18.260 So that's now in the psychological order.

01:01:19.880 That's really very...

01:01:20.720 Well, praise is what you praise is what you pursue.

01:01:24.960 And so if you're pursuing the wrong thing, then you're going to fall apart.

01:01:29.100 Right.

01:01:29.900 One of the great biblical ideas, I think, is you become what you praise.

01:01:33.400 So what gets your worth-ship, that's the origin of our word there.

01:01:37.880 What's the highest worth for you?

01:01:40.060 You become that.

01:01:40.980 You know, so you become what you worship.

01:01:43.340 We're meant to become children of God.

01:01:45.740 But what happens, we end up worshiping something.

01:01:48.140 So every one of us worships something, and we become conformed to that.

01:01:52.480 And then if it's not God, we disintegrate.

01:01:55.560 And then like Satan, we start beating our wings and making the world around us worse so that the world around us disintegrates.

01:02:02.300 That's the Bible.

01:02:03.640 The Bible tells that story over and over and over again, you know, which is why, you know, from a Catholic perspective, a Christian perspective, that Jesus on the cross is offering the Father right praise on our behalf.

01:02:16.860 And see, now you're getting to the Mass, which is very powerful, you know, that the Mass is the great act of praise, where we join ourselves to the sacrifice of the Son, we say.

01:02:29.100 We conform ourselves to Christ.

01:02:32.660 I have to ask you about that, because it's just burning a hole in me.

01:02:36.320 Well, I'm in chronic pain, a lot of it, and it's constant.

01:02:42.260 And I'm not, I don't know what to do with it, generally speaking.

01:02:47.180 I know things that make it worse.

01:02:48.700 Of course, you said something, a lot of ideas were flashing through my mind, and I want to hit at it, because it's a crucial concern.

01:02:56.260 You said something so surprising, that Christ on the cross was offering up the proper praise to God.

01:03:01.800 It's like, well, I'm not going to just let you say that without noticing it, because that's a hell of a thing to say.

01:03:07.980 So I'm going to put together some things that you touched on, and then we can address this.

01:03:12.840 So you said in the Bible, one of the things that's remarkable about it is the conception of the divine.

01:03:18.000 So the conception of what is of highest worth is stripped from some of its obvious objects of projection, the sun, the moon, the cosmos, the stars, but then also earthly leaders of other cultures, idols, and also earthly leaders of your own culture.

01:03:38.580 It says, no, whatever the ultimate divine is, it's not to be found in its fullest expression in any of those examples.

01:03:45.300 It's something else.

01:03:46.480 Okay, so then the question is, well, what is that else?

01:03:50.240 Well, the Christian answer is, well, whatever it is, in its human form, let's say, it's something human.

01:03:57.580 It's something that humans can aspire to.

01:03:59.840 It's both of those.

01:04:02.660 And it's made manifest in the figure of Christ, something specifically human.

01:04:08.240 But then you have this terrible paradox with Christ, which is partly the paradox that you just laid out, which is a very difficult thing to get a grip on.

01:04:18.440 So what is it exact?

01:04:19.920 Why is what Christ is doing proper sacrifice?

01:04:23.000 Is it because it is, what is it?

01:04:24.580 His willingness to bear the pain?

01:04:26.800 What is it?

01:04:28.760 That's close to it.

01:04:29.920 So we say the Word became flesh.

01:04:31.700 So the Word, who is always in the presence of the Father.

01:04:35.660 So the Word doesn't worship the Father, because the Word is God.

01:04:38.700 So we shouldn't talk about worship within the Trinity itself.

01:04:42.000 But now the Word becomes flesh, because the Father, God so loved the world, He sent His only Son, that all who believe in Him might have eternal life in His name.

01:04:51.420 He sends the Son into flesh, but into flesh that's been so compromised by sin, so not into a pristine creation.

01:05:01.360 Now, what do you have?

01:05:02.020 That's an interesting question theologically.

01:05:03.460 Would He have sent the Son if creation had not fallen?

01:05:05.860 That's an interesting question.

01:05:07.340 Right.

01:05:07.480 In fact, it did.

01:05:08.260 The valuable fall that laid the groundwork for.

01:05:10.780 Yeah, the Phyllis Kulpa, right.

01:05:12.280 Yes, it's a remarkable idea.

01:05:14.880 It is indeed.

01:05:15.580 But like Don Scotus argued, you know, the Franciscan medieval theologian, that God would have sent His Son, even if we hadn't sent.

01:05:22.280 But that's another question.

01:05:23.400 Okay, so let's take that apart for just a sec, so that people are clear about it.

01:05:26.860 So the theory here is that there is something wrong with the structure of creation.

01:05:31.860 That's its steepness in sin.

01:05:33.440 And everyone has to ask if they believe that.

01:05:35.840 And it seems to me that people do, is there's a sense that things aren't how they should be, that we're not how we could be,

01:05:41.940 that something has gone astray and is continuing to go astray, which is a mystery in and of itself if it's a God-created world.

01:05:49.600 It's like, well, why is that precisely?

01:05:52.800 Well, the quick answer is corrupted freedom, you know, or a misguided freedom, you might say.

01:05:58.560 But the word comes into flesh, into fallen flesh, and the cross is what?

01:06:05.320 The cross is cruelty and hatred and violence and institutional injustice and stupidity.

01:06:12.880 And, you know, if you read the passion narratives, it's a beautiful sort of poetic presentation of all that's wrong with us that comes out to meet Him.

01:06:22.000 And bearing all of that, He continues in His relationship of obedience and unity with the Father.

01:06:32.600 So bearing the sins of the world, bearing all the dysfunction and twisted quality of the world, He brings us back online.

01:06:43.300 So in the attitude of the Word made flesh on the cross, we see a sinful, corrupt, hate-filled world now brought painfully back online.

01:06:56.180 That's the sacrifice of the cross that's pleasing to the Father.

01:07:01.400 So we should never play the game of, well, the Father is a dysfunctional, alcoholic Father that, you know, is now demanding this blood sacrifice.

01:07:10.280 It's rather, the Father is pleased by the Son's entry into our fallen situation and His bearing of all that dysfunction, even as He brings us back online to the Father.

01:07:24.940 Okay, so why does, okay, so let's say Christ maintains His, I know this isn't exactly the right way of thinking about it, but it'll work for rhetorical purposes, I think.

01:07:35.520 Like, it's, so Christ is tortured by betrayal, by, by, by, by physically and spiritually as well, because the best way to torment someone is when, is to punish them despite their innocence, right?

01:07:51.060 Yeah, right.

01:07:51.580 So, right, right.

01:07:52.420 Or maybe worse than that, to punish them because of their virtues.

01:07:56.740 That's even better.

01:07:58.340 And so that's, that's intrinsic in the story as well.

01:08:01.860 Christ bears up under that.

01:08:03.520 He doesn't repudiate God.

01:08:06.580 He doesn't repudiate His own essence.

01:08:08.540 It's something like that.

01:08:10.360 But then what, is the, is the example of that, is the example of bearing up under that exceptional duress and maintaining a moral stance, is that the example that redeems the world?

01:08:22.220 Is it that if you do that in your own life, the world is de facto redeemed?

01:08:27.500 It is that, but more, because if it's just that, then a Pelagian system would be true, that we just need a good, you know, moral exemplar.

01:08:35.700 It's something more, it's more metaphysical.

01:08:37.180 Well, a bit more than just merely good.

01:08:38.280 I mean, it's superhuman, what's being asked for.

01:08:41.060 No, true, but it's something more metaphysical about it.

01:08:43.880 It's a reworking of the way things are.

01:08:47.600 If Jesus takes upon Himself all the dysfunction of the world and swallows it up in the ever greater divine mercy.

01:08:56.760 So it's Christ bearing all of our dysfunction, but transfiguring it in His great act of forgiveness and obedience to the Father.

01:09:07.080 I think all of that coming together simultaneously is the sacrifice that's pleasing to the Father.

01:09:13.500 In some ways, the word from the cross, Father, forgive them, they know not what they do, is the most important.

01:09:19.160 Or play with this too, Jordan, that after the resurrection, so Jesus comes back precisely to those who had denied Him and betrayed Him and run from Him in His moment of greatest need.

01:09:32.920 And in almost any telling of a similar story, if that had all happened, and then the person who had died is back from the dead, and He appears to those who had abandoned Him, you'd expect Him to, you know, wreak havoc on them, right?

01:09:45.380 So Jesus shows His wounds, to be sure, because the wounds of Jesus are a sign of the world's dysfunction.

01:09:53.800 If I'm ever tempted, you know, when we were younger, the book, I'm Okay, You're Okay, came out, right?

01:10:00.020 So we're always tempted to say, well, you know, basically we're okay, just need a little fixing up around the edges.

01:10:05.180 Whenever we're tempted to say that, it's the wounds of Jesus that say otherwise.

01:10:08.540 Yeah, well, that's why I was insisting earlier that I don't, you know, that it isn't merely misguided good that turns people towards the darkness.

01:10:17.500 It's voluntary desire to produce the darkness as well.

01:10:21.720 Anyways, I do take that very seriously, and it's an interesting idea, is that the ideal is wounded in proportion to the degree that everything has deteriorated away from the ideal.

01:10:31.820 And that's almost by definition true, right?

01:10:35.080 Yeah, yeah, no, that's true.

01:10:37.660 But it's just the very act of the will itself is structured in such a way it has to be seeking some kind of at least apparent good.

01:10:44.120 But that's our earlier issue.

01:10:47.080 So the wounds show the dysfunction of the world, which the Son of God took upon Himself.

01:10:51.800 But then, then, the word of Shalom, which is in all the resurrection accounts, that Jesus says, peace.

01:10:58.320 So, when Paul, for example, says, I'm certain that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature could ever separate us from the love of God.

01:11:12.020 Well, how does he know that?

01:11:13.520 Because we killed God, and He returned with a word of forgiveness.

01:11:19.660 So, that means, it's like, it's like, the divine goodness and forgiveness can trump any evil, even the evil of killing God.

01:11:29.640 So, we killed Him, but yet He returned in forgiving love.

01:11:33.960 I think that's the moment when Christianity is born.

01:11:36.900 In the dual sense of, yes, we kill them, look at the wounds, but He says Shalom to us nevertheless, so that I can't run away from Him.

01:11:47.600 I can try, you know, that's what all the sinners do.

01:11:49.960 I can try, but ultimately, the divine love is such that it's greater.

01:11:55.320 That's why Paul can all say, where sin abounds, grace abounds the more.

01:11:59.580 That's Christianity.

01:12:00.860 So, the greatest sin, we kill the Son of God.

01:12:03.320 There's no greater sin than that.

01:12:04.400 Where sin abounds, grace abounds the more.

01:12:08.060 And see, all of that was made possible, in a way, by the great sacrifice of the cross, which is why it's a saving act.

01:12:16.640 Now, that's, I'm striving to understand, okay, so I want to ask you a bunch of questions about that.

01:12:22.480 So, we talked a little bit before about the church bleeding its people, they're leaving, the young people are leaving.

01:12:27.960 And my sense of that is, it's because the church does not demand enough of its, of the young people.

01:12:35.540 Yeah, I think that's right.

01:12:36.240 It doesn't demand enough.

01:12:37.380 And by not demanding enough, it doesn't indicate its faith in their possibility.

01:12:43.300 And so, now, in Orthodox Christianity, as I understand it, there seems to me to be more emphasis on the idea that it's each human's obligation to become like Christ.

01:12:55.560 That's the goal.

01:12:57.140 Well, that's, that's, that, by definition, we could say, and we could speak psychologically about this as well.

01:13:04.280 That means to become the ideal.

01:13:06.800 The ideal that's beyond rationality, even.

01:13:09.100 That's what you're aiming at.

01:13:10.540 That's what's hypothetically within your grasp.

01:13:13.080 For, and it seems to me as well, that that's what the mass symbolizes, is that, and I'd be happy to have any objections to this, I would be happy to hear, the incorporation of the host is the, is the embodiment.

01:13:29.540 It's the incarnation of Christ within.

01:13:31.800 That's what it's acting out.

01:13:33.660 That's the idea.

01:13:34.720 I mean, in some sense, it's, it's the consumption of the saving element, but the saving element is actually a mode of being.

01:13:42.060 And this isn't hit home.

01:13:43.780 It's like, look what the church, the church demands everything of you.

01:13:49.100 Yeah.

01:13:49.460 Absolutely everything.

01:13:50.620 And, and the reason that, that people are leaving is because that adventure isn't being put before them.

01:13:57.620 It's like, look, you can have your cars and your money and all of that, but that's nothing compared to the adventure that you could be going on.

01:14:05.960 Yes.

01:14:06.600 I wish you'd preach to our people because I think you're absolutely right about that.

01:14:10.840 Uh, the language we'd use is, um, be a saint.

01:14:15.800 That's what, that's the ordinary goal of every baptized person is to be a saint.

01:14:20.180 A saint means someone who's holy or utterly conformed to Christ.

01:14:24.280 Now press that to be conformed to Christ means you're willing to go into the dysfunction of the world to bear its pain and to bear to it the ever greater divine mercy and love.

01:14:36.220 Now fill in the blank, Francis of Assisi.

01:14:38.180 Mother Teresa may be in our time, like when we were younger, if someone said, well, who's a living saint?

01:14:42.940 We all would have said Mother Teresa, but what did she do?

01:14:46.020 She went into the worst slum in the world.

01:14:47.860 I'd been there.

01:14:48.940 And she bore the suffering of, of, of the world, literally picking up the dying and, and bearing their disease and bearing their psychological suffering.

01:14:58.280 And, and she, she took on herself the wounds of Jesus.

01:15:02.100 But then think of like, you know, the smile of Mother Teresa.

01:15:04.600 She brought to that place the ever greater, more super abundant mercy of, of Christ.

01:15:10.340 That's being a saint.

01:15:11.400 And you're dead right.

01:15:12.800 I think we're not sufficiently calling our people to that kind of heroics.

01:15:15.660 Mom, look, I can tell you one thing I've experienced.

01:15:17.880 This is, this is really something to see.

01:15:20.440 I spoke in about 150 cities sequentially with a day or two in between.

01:15:25.020 And it's to, to, to large audiences, three to 10,000 all the time, something like that.

01:15:30.500 And I always paid attention to the audience singly because I was always talking to one person at a time, but also on mass, you know, to see, to hear.

01:15:40.800 Because if, if the words are landing in the right place and hypothetically emanating from the proper source, then there's silence.

01:15:50.660 And sometimes that silence can be dramatic.

01:15:52.980 And that's why people say, well, you could have heard a pin drop.

01:15:55.720 It's no one's moving because their attention is 100% gripped by whatever just happened.

01:16:02.100 And one thing that reliably elicited that was the proposition that the meaning that sustains you and protects you from corruption during suffering is to be found in responsibility.

01:16:16.120 And people that, and I thought, I thought part of the reason that that produced silence was because no one says that now.

01:16:24.080 They say happiness or they say rights or they say privileges or, or, or they say reward or something like that.

01:16:30.500 They don't say, pick up the heaviest load you can carry and carry and care for that matter, and stumble forward.

01:16:38.200 And I've seen people cut those ideas and put them on T-shirts and, and play with them.

01:16:43.880 And, and so it's not that the church is asking too little of its people.

01:16:52.040 No, I, it is asking too little of them.

01:16:54.660 I, I quite agree.

01:16:56.180 It's precisely, and so there's no heroism in it.

01:16:59.080 Did they, there's, and there's no call it to.

01:17:01.800 Well, because, and because finally I call it the culture of self-invention is a very boring culture.

01:17:06.880 Stanley Hauerwas is a Methodist theologian who said he defined liberalism or, you know, the modern attitude as I have no story except the story I invent for myself.

01:17:16.540 And that's finally a very boring place to live.

01:17:18.640 It seems to me that in fact, you're part of this incredibly rich and complex narrative, which I would refer to as God's creation and God's providential movement.

01:17:28.320 But I go back to Luke's gospel, you know, when Jesus says to them, duk and altum, is it the Latin, go out into the depths.

01:17:36.740 You people have been horsing around in the shallows way too long.

01:17:39.660 That's where the fish are, by the way.

01:17:41.780 But also it's where adventure is.

01:17:43.300 It's where the, where's, where the glory of life is.

01:17:46.420 Get out into the depth.

01:17:47.520 And we have, I think, allowed our people to be kind of horsing around by the seashore all the time.

01:17:52.800 It's also, it's also where what protects you from hell is because you, you need to be engaged in something that's deeply meaningful enough to justify the suffering.

01:18:03.400 And, and, and so, you know, part of what happens in the story of Christ is the only thing deep enough to justify that level of suffering is absolute immersion in a cosmic drama.

01:18:14.880 And then you ask yourself, well, are we each, are we each immersed, immersed in a cosmic drama?

01:18:20.620 And it's, it's not so easy to say no to that.

01:18:23.620 It's a life or death situation and everything's in it.

01:18:27.580 Well, I would say the, the instinct of a Christian is to go where the suffering is.

01:18:32.060 So I spent a lot of my life forming priests, so working in seminary.

01:18:35.960 Eventually I was the rector of the seminary.

01:18:37.720 So my job was to help these young guys discern the priesthood.

01:18:40.800 And I would say that's, that's the, the test.

01:18:43.920 I mean, do you, do you have an instinct to go where the pain is, to go where the suffering is?

01:18:48.600 If you want to live a comfortable life, then don't become a priest.

01:18:51.520 You might be a bad priest, you know, if you embrace a comfortable life, but it's the Mother Teresa model.

01:18:57.260 It's the duke and ultim, go out into the depths.

01:18:59.780 And the depths mean the depth of, of human suffering and do what Christ did.

01:19:03.620 So then what's wrong with what you guys are doing?

01:19:05.140 Why isn't it working?

01:19:06.380 Well, what's, what's the problem?

01:19:07.860 It's true that we're not doing enough of that.

01:19:09.900 And I do think we've succumbed a bit to the modern thing, which is a preoccupation with

01:19:14.180 rights and freedom and my individuality and so on.

01:19:17.760 Well, you see this with church activism so much now is that so much, so like the church seems

01:19:22.600 to be replacing itself in some sense with social activism.

01:19:25.840 It's like, we've got enough social activists.

01:19:28.360 Yes.

01:19:28.780 Well, but see, I'd say this, Pope Benedict XVI, who's a great intellectual hero of mine,

01:19:33.380 said the church always does three essential things.

01:19:36.460 The church worships God, it evangelizes, and it cares for the poor.

01:19:41.540 Poor broadly construed, as I say anyone who's suffering, right?

01:19:44.840 But that first move, as we said earlier, is indispensable.

01:19:47.840 The church worships God.

01:19:49.360 It teaches the world right praise.

01:19:51.920 Because without right praise, the whole thing falls apart.

01:19:54.520 Secondly, it evangelizes.

01:19:56.240 What's that?

01:19:57.180 Well, that's a cool thing, too, because euangelion in Greek, good news.

01:20:01.340 They were playing with that because the Romans would have used that in the eastern part of

01:20:05.860 the empire to announce an imperial victory.

01:20:08.940 They would send an evangelist ahead with the good news.

01:20:12.220 Euangelion, hey, Caesar won a victory.

01:20:13.920 So these very edgy first Christians who had zero social status, no power, no military behind

01:20:19.840 them said, oh, no, no, I got the true euangelion.

01:20:23.140 It's about Jesus risen from the dead, who was put to death by Caesar, but whom God raised.

01:20:29.380 So that's the proclamation of the good news that now we have hope.

01:20:33.240 Now the sacrifice has been made, and God's love is greater than anything that's in the

01:20:37.580 world.

01:20:38.160 Okay, now I got those two things in place.

01:20:40.700 Now serve the poor.

01:20:41.720 Now go where the pain is, go where the suffering is.

01:20:44.640 But if you divorce them from each other, and that has happened, so who cares about worship

01:20:49.280 and that's fussing around with altars and sacristies, and who cares about evangelization?

01:20:54.140 Let's just get down and serve the poor.

01:20:55.860 Then it does devolve simply into social work, right?

01:20:58.940 But if the three are together, worship God, evangelize the dying and rising of Jesus, and

01:21:04.780 serve the poor, now the church is cooking, you know?

01:21:08.700 All right, so let's look at the second one of those.

01:21:11.100 So, you know, it seems to me, I can understand this, not that whether I can understand it

01:21:17.380 or not is a hallmark of its validity, but I have to try to understand what I can understand.

01:21:22.300 I can understand the idea that bearing forward in a moral direction, acting as if being is

01:21:30.660 intrinsically good and that humanity as part of that is also intrinsically good, bearing

01:21:37.360 up under, bearing all that up as a set of propositions, even in the most extreme cases

01:21:43.740 of suffering, I can see that as a valid moral good.

01:21:46.740 That's Christ's refusal to be, what would you say, corrupted by the injustice and terror

01:21:56.640 of his fate.

01:21:58.560 And so that might be something like, you don't have the right to become a tyrant no matter

01:22:04.020 how badly you were tyrannized, let's say.

01:22:06.360 And I think that's an unshakable moral proposition.

01:22:11.080 But then there's the resurrection element of it, because I could say, well, the first

01:22:15.100 thing I would say is, well, I kind of understand that psychologically.

01:22:19.180 Parts of us die, and they have to die because they're in error.

01:22:23.060 They have to be cast off.

01:22:24.300 And we're reborn constantly as a consequence of our movement, our ascent forward.

01:22:29.740 There's no movement forward without some death of the past.

01:22:33.500 And so I can see the resurrection idea as a metaphor for the part of us that continues

01:22:40.700 onward despite our failures and constantly reconstitutes our spirit.

01:22:46.060 It's not something trivial.

01:22:48.280 But then there's the insistence in the church of the bodily resurrection, which is, well,

01:22:54.900 let's call that a stumbling block to modern belief.

01:22:57.740 No doubt about that.

01:22:58.880 That's something more than mere metaphor.

01:23:01.520 And so you might ask, well, why is it insisted upon?

01:23:04.600 Why isn't the proposition that you have a transcendent moral obligation to bear, to operate for

01:23:13.620 the good of all things, regardless of your suffering, a hard line, no justification with

01:23:20.480 the defeat of death necessitated?

01:23:23.860 I'm not trying to make a fundamental critique of the idea of the resurrection, because I

01:23:29.520 know there are things that I don't know.

01:23:31.580 I know that for sure.

01:23:34.160 And God only knows how the world is fundamentally structured.

01:23:37.220 But it seems, and this is a Nietzschean criticism in some sense, too, and a Freudian criticism.

01:23:42.800 It's, that seems in some real sense, too good to be true.

01:23:47.560 Yeah.

01:23:47.840 So, and so what do you make of the, what do you make of the resurrection?

01:23:52.240 How do you conceptualize it, even as it's related in the Gospels?

01:23:56.800 Yeah, good.

01:23:58.840 You're raising a lot of interesting things.

01:24:00.200 First of all, everything you said about it, in terms of psychological archetypes and metaphors,

01:24:05.580 good, fine.

01:24:06.440 I think those are legitimate.

01:24:07.640 I think those are our correct perceptions of things.

01:24:10.580 And it has indeed functioned that way in a lot of the literature of the world, resurrection-type

01:24:15.060 stories.

01:24:16.300 But I think what's really interesting about the New Testament, as Lewis said, you know, C.S.

01:24:21.060 Lewis, when someone said, well, the New Testament is just another iteration of the ancient

01:24:25.460 myth, and he said, anyone that says that has not read many myths, because there's something

01:24:30.380 so distinctive about the New Testament.

01:24:32.600 And what I, I would say, Jordan, first this.

01:24:36.520 I think from the first page of Matthew through Revelation, what you get throughout is this,

01:24:42.240 what I call this grab-you-by-the-shoulders quality.

01:24:45.080 They knew about literature that is conveying deep psychological and philosophical truth.

01:24:51.400 You know, Paul certainly knew that literature very well.

01:24:53.480 It doesn't sound like that, though.

01:24:56.860 It has overtones with it.

01:24:58.500 It bears some of that.

01:25:00.160 It has family resemblances with it.

01:25:02.400 But what you find on every page is this euangelion, this good news.

01:25:10.040 So everything you said is true.

01:25:11.980 I think it is true.

01:25:13.420 But it's not exactly news.

01:25:15.180 It's part of the philosophia perennis.

01:25:17.020 It's been around for a long time, and a lot of the great thinkers of the world.

01:25:20.280 And again, I agree with it.

01:25:21.620 I like the philosophia perennis, but the New Testament is people who grabbed everyone they

01:25:29.200 met by the shoulders to say, something happened.

01:25:32.740 Something's happened here that we were not expecting, that was not part of our thought

01:25:38.460 system.

01:25:39.100 And it's so shaken us up that we feel obligated to go careering around the world, and indeed

01:25:45.980 to our deaths, announcing it and defending it.

01:25:49.740 And what it was, was the fact, here in the 10th chapter of Acts of the Apostles, this sort

01:25:56.520 of almost tossed off line, we who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead.

01:26:02.900 I don't think people trading in mythic talk use that kind of language.

01:26:09.860 Mythic language, and again, I say it with high praise.

01:26:11.980 I love the myths.

01:26:13.600 But, you know, once upon a time, or in a galaxy far, far away, and then a mythic story unfolds.

01:26:20.200 But read the Acts of the Apostles.

01:26:22.040 Did you hear about what happened?

01:26:22.980 First, it was up in Galilee.

01:26:24.180 And then in Judea, you know, those people at John the Baptist, remember John the Baptist?

01:26:28.160 Well, and then there's Jesus, and then in Jerusalem, and then we who ate and drank with

01:26:33.680 him after his resurrection from the dead.

01:26:36.360 It's, that's what, and then look at Paul, Paul who saw him on the road to Damascus.

01:26:42.040 Now the Pauline letters, man, they do not read like myths.

01:26:45.780 They just don't.

01:26:46.920 And I love the myths.

01:26:47.920 I love the philosophy of Prentice, but it doesn't read like that.

01:26:50.540 It reads like someone who is, has been so bowled over by something, and he wants you

01:26:55.640 to know about it, and it's changed everything.

01:26:58.700 And I think what it was, was what we said earlier.

01:27:00.980 It's, okay, now we know God's mercy and love is greater than anything we can possibly do.

01:27:09.500 Why?

01:27:09.740 Because we killed God.

01:27:11.260 And that's why, you know, Paul will say, I'm going to hold up one thing to you, Christ

01:27:14.260 and him crucified.

01:27:15.360 And crucified, I mean, it was the most horrific thing they could imagine in the ancient world.

01:27:19.120 It was deeply embarrassing even to talk about a crucifixion.

01:27:22.640 Paul says, no, no, let me put it right in your face.

01:27:24.740 See, the author of life came and we killed him.

01:27:28.100 But I got the good news, euangelion, is God's mercy and love is greater because he brought

01:27:35.360 this Jesus back from the dead.

01:27:37.120 Well, you do have the following argument, which is that it isn't clear which is harder

01:27:43.040 to believe, whether that happened or whether people made it up.

01:27:46.180 Because if they made it up, that was really something.

01:27:49.300 And that does strike me quite frequently reading the New Testament.

01:27:52.960 There are lines in there that hit so hard, you think, hmm, it isn't obvious to me how

01:27:58.840 someone could have just thought that up.

01:28:01.600 So, and there is that, well, and Jung, Carl Jung, who I greatly admire, you know, he believed,

01:28:07.340 I think in the same way that C.S.

01:28:09.040 Lewis did that.

01:28:09.800 And he doesn't talk about this that much, but that there is this archetypal mythological

01:28:15.220 pattern of the dying and resurrecting hero that has this psychological reality, which

01:28:19.260 is extraordinarily deep, but that that archetype was realized once in history.

01:28:25.380 And that's fully realized.

01:28:27.220 So it came from the mythic realm, let's say, the realm of eternal truth, the realm of pattern,

01:28:34.200 instinctive pattern for that matter, and was fully realized at one point in history.

01:28:38.560 And you might think, well, if it's going to be fully realized, it has to start somewhere.

01:28:44.180 You know, it can't start everywhere at the same time.

01:28:47.440 Right, right.

01:28:48.840 What does an archetype look like when it takes flesh?

01:28:51.380 Might be a way to get at that.

01:28:52.920 Well, and the thing is, we do see this, and it does grip us.

01:28:56.980 Because movies, like, we see representations of this all the time.

01:29:01.580 And in my new book, I talk a fair bit about Harry Potter.

01:29:06.640 And, you know, Harry Potter is definitely an archetype taking flesh.

01:29:12.060 Well, clearly, he's in battle with Satan himself, obviously.

01:29:15.860 I mean, and she has an unbelievably profound mythological imagination.

01:29:19.640 And the thing that's so fascinating about all of that is that because her mythological imagination is spot on,

01:29:27.000 she captivated the entire globe and produced, you know, this immense storehouse of wealth

01:29:32.860 and dominated the entertainment landscape for a decade.

01:29:35.840 And, you know, people don't take that seriously.

01:29:38.060 But it's a great mystery to watch that.

01:29:40.880 Absolutely, they should.

01:29:43.100 It's a phenomenal—you know, anything that grips people's attention like that is obviously worth paying attention to.

01:29:50.220 Yeah.

01:29:50.920 So, you know, Lewis called them good dreams, right?

01:29:54.040 So all the sort of archetypal anticipations of the gospel, the good dreams of the race.

01:30:00.220 Or use the Jungian.

01:30:01.460 I love Jung, too.

01:30:03.160 But what happens if that archetype of the person perfectly pleasing to God, you know, Kant's language,

01:30:07.840 what would happen if that archetype became flesh?

01:30:11.520 And indeed, that's how they put it.

01:30:12.740 The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

01:30:14.960 Well, I think that's also the question we should each be asking ourselves in our own lives.

01:30:20.460 Yeah, quite right.

01:30:21.320 It's like, well, who could we be?

01:30:23.520 And you say, well, you don't have to ask yourself that question.

01:30:26.140 It's like, well, good luck with your conscience then.

01:30:29.200 You should be another Christ.

01:30:30.400 That's right.

01:30:30.660 That's the objection to the self-created person.

01:30:33.400 It's like—

01:30:33.980 Yeah.

01:30:34.260 Again, the idea that you can create your own values is, well, good luck.

01:30:39.080 Right.

01:30:39.500 Try.

01:30:39.920 Good luck with that project.

01:30:41.160 Yeah, good luck.

01:30:41.660 Right.

01:30:41.980 It's not going to work.

01:30:44.240 You know, Newman referred to the conscience, I always love this, as the aboriginal vicar of

01:30:48.720 Christ in the soul.

01:30:49.980 So he took the language descriptive of the Pope, you know, the vicar of Christ, but he said

01:30:52.960 the aboriginal vicar of Christ.

01:30:54.880 Which Newman?

01:30:55.540 Is the conscience.

01:30:56.420 John Henry Newman.

01:30:57.080 Okay, because, oh, I was thinking of Eric Neumann.

01:30:59.480 So—

01:30:59.880 No, John Henry Newman.

01:31:00.720 And it's a beautiful way of describing it, because we'd say the Christ dwelling within

01:31:05.260 you is the voice of the conscience that's calling you to sanctity, ultimately, to heroic

01:31:12.080 self-sacrifice, to being who Christ is.

01:31:15.700 It also is—it is what people worship, because here's a way of thinking about it technically.

01:31:20.960 Well, look, when I have a conversation with you, there's something I want from you.

01:31:26.740 I want everything you can give me.

01:31:30.120 I want you to be as there as you can possibly be.

01:31:35.560 That's what I've been demanding all the time.

01:31:37.340 If my attention—assuming a properly constituted subjectivity—if my attention wanders, that

01:31:45.880 means you're not delivering.

01:31:47.640 And so if you're wandering around and everyone's attention is wandering away from you, you're

01:31:51.580 not delivering.

01:31:52.240 And conscience, because we're so social, we're social creatures to the final degree, conscience

01:31:58.720 tells you when you deviate from the ideal.

01:32:01.020 Yeah.

01:32:01.160 And that ideal is what people worship.

01:32:03.180 They—by attending to that manifestation of the ideal in you, they worship it.

01:32:09.260 And so that's there—it's there in the demands that we can't help but make of each other

01:32:15.020 and of ourselves.

01:32:15.900 There's no escape from that.

01:32:18.800 And so I do think it's a perfectly good question.

01:32:22.020 What would happen—and this is the right question for your life—what would happen

01:32:26.580 if you took that seriously?

01:32:28.600 And so, again, what I see is that it doesn't seem to me to be—if the church can no longer

01:32:35.960 attract young people, it has to be that they're not taking that with sufficient seriousness.

01:32:43.180 Now—

01:32:43.380 Yeah, I think there's a lot to that.

01:32:45.440 I don't want to externalize the blame.

01:32:47.560 It's like, I know the church is a human organization and all of that, but it's still evidence.

01:32:53.320 When I was coming of age, so back in, let's say, the 1970s, the presumption of the church

01:32:58.400 was we should make this thing as easy as possible, because if we make it hard, these people are

01:33:03.080 going to run away.

01:33:03.700 So we don't want to make it—we don't want to make it intellectually easy.

01:33:07.180 So I got a very dumbed-down Catholicism.

01:33:09.740 It was through the grace of God that I discovered later in life the very rich Catholic intellectual

01:33:14.680 tradition.

01:33:15.560 But when I was going through school, including through high school, you know, banners and

01:33:19.880 balloons and collages, and it was very superficial.

01:33:22.400 We got the clearer impression when I was a kid that English and science and math and all

01:33:27.300 that were serious subjects.

01:33:28.900 Religion was like—religion was like gym or it was like, you know, I don't know what else,

01:33:34.280 like art class or something.

01:33:35.360 It was considered not that serious.

01:33:36.580 So we dumbed it down intellectually, and we lessened the moral demand, for sure, because

01:33:42.320 we didn't want, I think, people to run away.

01:33:45.140 And then, you know, I'll say it bluntly, rather pathetically, we tried to be as relevant as

01:33:49.620 possible.

01:33:50.100 That was the term from our time.

01:33:51.860 Right, and that's like the uncool guy at the party, man.

01:33:54.860 Right.

01:33:55.260 You know, if you have to strive to be relevant, you're not on the cutting edge, that's for

01:34:01.720 sure.

01:34:01.940 Right.

01:34:02.120 And so there's a study I read some years ago that I thought was very plausible.

01:34:06.960 The conclusion was what young people find compelling in a mentor figure are the two things.

01:34:11.860 One is that the person knows a lot about the subject that he or she is sharing.

01:34:15.680 And secondly, they're really committed to it.

01:34:18.880 And when the kid sends those two things, there's a lot to know here.

01:34:22.100 And this guy or this woman, they really believe it.

01:34:25.420 They find that compelling.

01:34:26.720 You don't need, you know, the games of relevance.

01:34:29.260 You don't need to dumb it down.

01:34:30.300 In fact, smarten it up and make it as intellectually challenging and morally challenging as possible.

01:34:37.260 We dropped a lot of practices that were much more common years ago, you know, to kind of

01:34:43.040 draw young people into the challenge of it.

01:34:46.040 So that is a problem.

01:34:47.680 Absolutely.

01:34:48.740 Well, you know, one of the things that I've been so delighted by is my observation that

01:34:53.800 there's a tremendous hunger for serious conversation, public hunger for it.

01:34:58.940 And when I have engaged in my lectures, I'm always extending myself to my limits of thought.

01:35:07.320 Like, that's what the lecture is.

01:35:08.520 It's an attempt to go past what I think.

01:35:11.180 And there's absolutely no doubt that everyone in the audience is on board with that.

01:35:19.220 I mean, it was the case when I debated Sam Harris, for example, that discussion, which,

01:35:24.300 you know, was as technically complex as Sam and I could make it.

01:35:27.960 And, you know, and that might not be as philosophically complex as the absolute ideal, but it was,

01:35:33.140 it wasn't dumbed down by any stretch of the imagination.

01:35:35.560 And there's just, there was, there's no reason that that, if you spoon feed that material,

01:35:44.440 it catches no one.

01:35:47.600 And I can tell you this, those new atheists, so Sam and Hitchens and Dawkins, those guys,

01:35:54.380 they were good evangelizers.

01:35:56.360 I mean, for their position, I deal with young people all the time.

01:35:59.480 Yeah, and they didn't dumb it down either.

01:36:00.740 They didn't dumb it down.

01:36:02.200 They had the two things I talked about.

01:36:03.520 They were intelligent, and they were passionately committed to it.

01:36:07.220 But every day on the internet, when I go into these comm boxes, I hear the phraseologies

01:36:12.140 from Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris.

01:36:14.440 A lot of young people read them.

01:36:16.680 They didn't hug them into atheism.

01:36:18.920 They argued them into atheism.

01:36:20.340 So I've been telling our people, we got to stop trying to hug people back into the faith.

01:36:24.900 We have to argue them back into the faith.

01:36:26.700 We have to make it compelling.

01:36:28.660 And morally challenging.

01:36:29.700 I've been walking with this friend of mine and talking with him, and he said something

01:36:35.520 quite interesting.

01:36:36.820 He was raised in a communist country and was an atheist after that.

01:36:42.000 He said his family observed Christmas, and he criticized them for that, because it was logically incoherent.

01:36:53.680 And then he realized that all that would happen if they abandoned Christmas was that they wouldn't have Christmas anymore.

01:37:01.740 It wasn't like he had something to replace it with.

01:37:04.520 Right.

01:37:04.860 And so it's magical.

01:37:06.880 You might even call it naive if you're of the sort of mind that would call that naive.

01:37:12.100 But do you want to have it or not?

01:37:14.460 And if the answer is, well, I'll replace it with another weekend, then that's really not helpful.

01:37:20.080 And the problem with the atheists is that they don't have – the best they can offer is something like a materialistic utopia.

01:37:27.120 And I've got nothing against that.

01:37:29.140 I've been talking to people like Bjorn Lomberg who lay out this vision of an increasingly wealthy world where absolute poverty is a thing of the past

01:37:43.180 and where people can take the levels of health that are more or less taken for granted in the West for granted everywhere in the world

01:37:50.160 through a process of incremental economic improvement.

01:37:53.140 And, you know, more power to that, I think.

01:37:56.520 But I also know that that isn't a sufficient story.

01:38:02.140 And there's a kind of despair that goes along with material security because the adventure is drained out of it.

01:38:10.160 And Dostoevsky touches on this.

01:38:11.780 And this is where I really learned this when I first encountered this idea.

01:38:14.760 You know, Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground says, look, this is something you have to understand.

01:38:21.620 If you gave people everything they need so that they had nothing to do but eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species,

01:38:32.340 if they were so happy that nothing but bubbles of bliss would appear on the surface of the water that they were in,

01:38:38.580 they would smash it all to pieces just so that something adventurous and unique could happen.

01:38:42.900 And so, like, there has to be a call to a higher order of spiritual being, let's say,

01:38:49.300 or psychological being that accompanies that materialism or it's or we won't even accept it.

01:38:54.140 It'll kill us.

01:38:54.720 No, absolutely.

01:38:55.380 It'll kill.

01:38:55.800 It'll smother us.

01:38:56.940 It's got to be the call to sanctity.

01:38:58.860 And the call to sanctity is a call to love.

01:39:01.920 And they're Dostoevsky, you know, love is harsh and dreadful.

01:39:05.580 It's not a cute little emotion or it's not a sentiment.

01:39:10.020 Real love is harsh and dreadful because it means going into the place where people are suffering and becoming another Christ and bearing the burdens of the world.

01:39:19.300 That's serious business.

01:39:21.280 Love is something awful about it, you know.

01:39:23.640 But when you summon someone to that.

01:39:25.340 But there's also something awful about the judgment, you know, because if you love someone, you also hold them to a standard.

01:39:30.560 Yeah, you will their good, right.

01:39:32.640 And that means holding to a standard.

01:39:34.680 Do you know, Russia triggered this in my mind.

01:39:37.120 I'm reading these wonderful books by this priest, Walter Chizek.

01:39:40.920 I don't know if you know that name.

01:39:42.420 He died in 1984, but for 23 years he was a prisoner in the Soviet system.

01:39:48.120 So he was arrested in 1939, right when the war got going with the Germans.

01:39:52.520 And make a long story short, he was in Lubyanka prison for five years in Moscow, basically in solitary confinement.

01:39:57.800 Then he was sent for 15 years or so to Siberia, to the worst work camps, you know.

01:40:03.820 And he describes it in this book called With God in Russia in this kind of bald, just straightforward way.

01:40:12.240 But all through it, he says, okay, I went into Russia to be a missionary, to announce the gospel.

01:40:17.960 It's not the way I expected it to be.

01:40:20.160 I didn't expect to be in a prison camp.

01:40:22.060 But, okay, this is what God has willed, obviously.

01:40:25.940 At least his permissive will is that I be here.

01:40:28.160 So I'll do what I can.

01:40:29.940 And so for 23 years, this man set up, when he was in solitary, a Jesuit program of prayer.

01:40:36.560 And he would go through his day.

01:40:37.640 He had the prayers of the mass memorized.

01:40:40.220 Then when he gets to the camps, they would smuggle in little bits of bread and wine.

01:40:43.240 So he would say mass on a little table clandestinely, you know, and he would minister in his own quiet way to the people around him.

01:40:53.160 I'm telling that story because in the most horrific circumstances, in a way he never saw coming, he said, okay, but I'll try to be a saint here.

01:41:02.840 I'll try to be Christ.

01:41:04.720 Bear the sufferings of those around me and bring the grace of God.

01:41:07.260 He was finally sprung in 1963.

01:41:11.080 JFK was involved in getting him out with a prisoner exchange.

01:41:14.000 As he left Russia, the plane's taking off, and he did the sign of the cross over the country, bless the country.

01:41:21.700 And it's an incredibly moving story because it's not at all flashy.

01:41:25.260 It's told in a really almost bland manner.

01:41:28.240 But it's someone who decided, no, I'm going to go in the depths.

01:41:32.640 I'm going to deal with what I've been given.

01:41:35.040 And it's horrific.

01:41:35.880 I'm in a Soviet-Siberian concentration camp doing hard labor, but I'll be Christ for the people here.

01:41:45.040 That's it.

01:41:46.060 I mean, that's the adventure.

01:41:47.360 There's the hero's journey that he went on.

01:41:50.160 Well, so let's get back to the resurrection idea there.

01:41:53.920 Because, again, see, that story, to some degree, doesn't require the resurrection to underscore his heroism.

01:42:03.800 In fact, to say, in some sense, to say, well, that was motivated by faith in the resurrection, in some sense, undermines the heroism of the action.

01:42:11.560 And, again, I'm saying I'm not trying to casually dispense with the idea of the resurrection, not least because of its undoubted metaphorical structure.

01:42:21.500 But there is this crazy emphasis, this crazy idea that somehow bearing up under all that burden reformatted the entire structure of being.

01:42:36.080 And that's associated with, I believe, and I'm no theologian.

01:42:40.260 And I believe that's associated with the idea of the harrowing of hell.

01:42:44.080 Is that?

01:42:45.220 Well, yeah, there's something.

01:42:47.200 But what I do as a first step, though, that's the church.

01:42:50.700 The church, Christ's resurrection is the seed from which the church grows.

01:42:56.620 And the church is the means by which God wants to reconfigure the world.

01:43:00.180 That's right.

01:43:01.080 We're not there just to kind of whisper our convictions among ourselves.

01:43:03.940 Our whole purpose is to go now and recreate the world.

01:43:08.000 Well, that's the church's purpose.

01:43:09.840 It reminds me, I read history, and history is so interesting that it's unbearable, right?

01:43:15.160 If you read history, it's unbearably interesting.

01:43:18.280 And yet, if you go sit in a history class taught by the typical history teacher, it's so dull that you can hardly keep your eyes open.

01:43:25.980 You know, you need to memorize what happened in 1612.

01:43:29.280 And that's not the point.

01:43:30.640 The point is the unbelievably magnificent drama.

01:43:33.720 And so then again, if that story that the church is telling is not being taken up, it's not being sold.

01:43:41.920 There's something about it that's not being sold properly.

01:43:44.320 I'm not saying I have the answer to that.

01:43:45.720 No, that's true.

01:43:46.540 But like I saw this kid once when I was in Montreal, and he was about 17 years old.

01:43:52.420 And he was a big guy, big, like six foot five guy, and, you know, like a physical specimen.

01:43:59.060 And he was standing on the corner of like a shopping area, and he had two pink shopping bags in his hands, and he looked kind of bereft.

01:44:07.120 And I thought, you know, if you came up to him and said, I've got some heroism in battle for you around the corner, he'd drop those.

01:44:15.460 And you said it right, he'd drop those damn pink shopping bags in a second and be off for the adventure of his life.

01:44:21.280 Yeah.

01:44:21.920 And, and you, you, you, it, it has to, what is it?

01:44:27.200 Is it a lack of faith that, that a fundamental faith that, that is sapping the lifeblood out of that story?

01:44:33.700 Because you're saying, well, here, I'm calling you to an adventure that's as great as any adventure you could possibly conceive.

01:44:40.220 By definition, this is the ultimate adventure that you're being called to.

01:44:43.920 Yeah, but, but the hobbit hole is so attractive.

01:44:47.340 I mean, there's so, Bilbo would rather stay in his hobbit hole.

01:44:50.380 I mean, it's comfortable, and I got my doilies, and it's nice, it's comfortable here.

01:44:53.460 So, Gandalf has to summon him to adventure.

01:44:56.200 It's a, it's a, it's a burden, it's a task, you know.

01:44:59.520 And so the church has got to play that role of, of Gandalf to get into these hobbit holes and get people motivated to get them out.

01:45:06.260 You know what was Walter Chizik?

01:45:07.320 I'll tell you exactly, he's a Jesuit novice in Pennsylvania, 1930-something.

01:45:11.840 And Pope Pius XI at the time, from Rome, says, Russia's just gone communist, the church is being persecuted.

01:45:19.700 I need, and he said it this way, I need heroes to go into Russia, and you Jesuits, you're kind of my shock troops.

01:45:28.040 I'm going to summon you into Russia.

01:45:29.760 And young Walter Chizik, 18 or 19, says, he just knew, that's where I'm going.

01:45:36.060 And he went up to the speaker and said, I'm in.

01:45:39.440 Okay.

01:45:40.260 They sent him to Rome to study Russian language and Russian liturgy, and they sent him into Russia.

01:45:44.760 So, I mean, he was summoned.

01:45:45.940 He was summoned to adventure, and he took it on.

01:45:48.040 You're in?

01:45:49.400 Why?

01:45:49.760 Why?

01:45:50.300 Like, what happened in your life to pull you in this direction, and how has it worked for you?

01:45:57.680 You know what was it, Jordan?

01:45:58.560 For me, I was a Catholic kid, you know, going to Mass on Sunday, but not all that interested in religion.

01:46:05.400 And I was interested in baseball when I was like 13, 14.

01:46:09.360 But I'm in high school, freshman high school class.

01:46:12.260 And it was a Catholic high school, so it was a religion class.

01:46:14.680 And one of the teachers laid out for us one of Thomas Aquinas' famous arguments for God's existence.

01:46:21.500 And I did not disbelieve in God, and I believed in God.

01:46:24.680 But I never in my life thought that you could think about God in a serious way.

01:46:30.640 And it opened up something.

01:46:32.100 It set my mind on fire.

01:46:34.140 And I started going to libraries.

01:46:36.580 Back in those days, we went to libraries.

01:46:38.600 And I was taking these books of Thomas Aquinas off the shelf.

01:46:41.720 I had no idea what I was reading, but I still, to this day, think of those as like magical days.

01:46:49.780 That I had discovered something that just turned my mind on, you know.

01:46:54.240 So that was the opening of the door.

01:46:56.840 Then the other book I read at that time that was so influential was Thomas Merton.

01:47:00.460 Do you know Merton?

01:47:01.460 He's a Trappist monk.

01:47:03.320 He'd been a man of the world, you know, all the way, and then had this huge conversion experience

01:47:07.820 and becomes the most radical kind of monk you can become.

01:47:12.000 And those two Thomases, Aquinas and Merton, had a big impact on me when I was a kid.

01:47:18.360 Because there's something romantic about it.

01:47:20.120 You know, Merton's was the story of someone kind of falling in love with God totally.

01:47:24.220 That's what got me in the door.

01:47:26.560 And then I followed a lot of the intellectual path.

01:47:29.580 I was always kind of a thinker type.

01:47:32.040 And that got me into the priesthood.

01:47:33.900 And then, you know, off I go.

01:47:35.360 But at every stage, it was something like a summoning to mission is the language we would use.

01:47:41.720 Summoning to a mission, an ever greater kind of mission.

01:47:44.720 That kept me going.

01:47:46.420 I always found it, I don't know, the most compelling option on the table.

01:47:50.380 It always struck me that way.

01:47:51.460 As you look at the options of life, like, well, serving God?

01:47:54.740 Yeah, duh.

01:47:55.660 Wouldn't that be the most exciting?

01:47:57.460 Well, yes, that's the thing.

01:47:57.820 Well, that's it.

01:47:58.640 Is that apart from the terror that that might reasonably evoke, it is the best by definition.

01:48:04.620 And again, you could just speak psychologically here.

01:48:06.800 By definition, that's the best game you can play.

01:48:10.220 That's how it struck me when I was a kid.

01:48:12.260 Yeah.

01:48:13.100 Well, it's almost a tautology, you know.

01:48:15.680 Right.

01:48:16.140 It struck me that way.

01:48:17.820 And I understand everyone's different.

01:48:19.720 Everyone's path is different.

01:48:20.740 But that's how it struck me, how grace, I would say, you know, entered my life.

01:48:25.820 And I truly, I've been a priest now for 30, what, five years?

01:48:30.360 Bishop now for five years.

01:48:33.360 I've never been unhappy as a priest.

01:48:37.620 I mean, I've suffered, certainly, and have gone through difficult times.

01:48:40.800 I've never been unhappy, though, as a priest.

01:48:42.740 I've never been tempted to leave.

01:48:44.820 Never felt like, oh, God, why did I do that?

01:48:46.960 I've never felt that.

01:48:47.720 And this social media enterprise of yours, you know, when I introduced you, I noted that

01:48:53.980 you're perhaps the most well-known Catholic speaker in social media circles.

01:48:58.740 I think that's a reasonable presupposition.

01:49:01.360 Do you have competitors, so to speak?

01:49:03.960 Oh, yeah.

01:49:04.480 There are some people.

01:49:05.460 I was one of the pioneers in a way, because I know when YouTube first got started, it was

01:49:10.340 2006.

01:49:11.800 By early 2007, I did a review of Scorsese's movie, The Departed.

01:49:17.960 Because my instinct was, let's talk about the culture.

01:49:20.180 Let's talk about things going on that have a religious overtone, you know?

01:49:24.140 So I started early 2007, right when YouTube got off the ground.

01:49:28.620 And then everything else, Facebook and Instagram came along.

01:49:31.480 And then others sort of saw what I was doing and got into the game, too.

01:49:34.560 But I guess I was one of the first ones to do it.

01:49:36.820 Not that I know that world that well.

01:49:38.440 I got all these young people that helped me navigate that world.

01:49:41.960 But I've been providing a lot of the content.

01:49:44.520 And so what's that been like?

01:49:46.760 And how is that received by your peers or your superiors, for that matter?

01:49:51.640 I would say, well, to answer the second part first.

01:49:55.340 I think, well, I think they saw, oh, yeah, this is good.

01:49:57.600 I'm glad he's doing it.

01:49:58.540 I'm glad someone is taking the initiative.

01:50:00.460 And they began asking me early on, like, hey, tell us more about this.

01:50:03.480 And how are you doing it?

01:50:04.300 And what are the pitfalls?

01:50:05.200 And how's it working?

01:50:06.040 So I think my superiors have always been, you know, very open to it, interested in it.

01:50:10.860 When I've spoken to the, now that I'm a bishop, I'll speak at the bishop's conference meetings

01:50:14.720 about it.

01:50:15.500 And there's always tremendous interest.

01:50:17.820 Now, these are all older men, for the most part.

01:50:19.680 They don't know, you know, Facebook from, you know, French fries.

01:50:23.100 But they get it.

01:50:25.220 They get the importance of it and why it's worth doing.

01:50:29.440 And the success of it, in a way, has been a source of surprise and delight to me.

01:50:34.920 When I started YouTube videos, I mean, we thought if we got 300 views, we're doing great.

01:50:41.380 I was thrilled when I, my first one got the 300 views.

01:50:45.660 You know, and then it just grew.

01:50:47.080 It just grew from there.

01:50:48.360 And I think it was a willingness to talk about the culture and then engage people.

01:50:54.600 So I can't do it as much now.

01:50:55.940 But in the early days, I would get in the comm boxes and I would really enter into these

01:50:59.420 debates.

01:50:59.800 And, you know, as you know, 97% of people that come on comm boxes are mad at you for

01:51:04.820 some reason, or they, you know, don't like what you're saying.

01:51:07.780 So, okay.

01:51:08.540 I was able then to at least have an argument.

01:51:10.560 I could get into the, you know, lists with them.

01:51:13.200 Well, I'll tell you, it's interesting you say that because I've certainly met my fair

01:51:18.640 share of opposition in the media domain, let's say, especially with, you know, the legacy

01:51:25.200 media.

01:51:25.700 Um, but I'm stunned by the positivity of the comments.

01:51:31.860 It's absolutely overwhelming.

01:51:33.800 I can't really make heads or tails of it, that it's so consistent and it's been very

01:51:38.600 sustaining to me.

01:51:39.700 So, and I, I don't really, I don't, I guess the reason I think that's the case is because

01:51:46.520 I think I'm encouraging people, you know, who haven't had any encouragement or enough.

01:51:53.360 And that's lots of people, maybe everyone, because I mean, how much people should be

01:51:58.940 encouraged to the ultimate degree, right?

01:52:01.360 They should say, well, you want to reveal the divine within in your own particular way.

01:52:07.400 You could do that.

01:52:09.020 And what, you know, I'm curious about, you did the Reddit AMA, didn't you, a couple of

01:52:13.440 times?

01:52:14.820 Well, I did that.

01:52:15.920 I've done it twice now.

01:52:16.720 And I think one, one year I was like, you were first and I was third and not because

01:52:23.440 they knew me.

01:52:24.280 I'm sure they didn't, but I just got on and said, I'm a Catholic bishop who loves to dialogue

01:52:29.120 with non-believers and atheists or something.

01:52:32.820 Right.

01:52:32.920 So you were also inviting some pushback there as well.

01:52:36.740 So yeah, but, but it was, I loved it.

01:52:38.740 We got an enormous response.

01:52:40.240 Now, a fair amount of obscenity and just people that hate religion.

01:52:44.340 See, part of it might be religion and I'm so institutionally identified with religion.

01:52:49.220 So all that, but, but I love both times I did that.

01:52:52.880 The questions that emerged and the themes that emerged were very illuminating to me,

01:52:58.240 you know?

01:52:58.580 So no, I, I've, I've loved that world too of entering into it.

01:53:02.180 And it's, you know, it certainly gets attention.

01:53:04.480 People watch these videos and then I've done a lot of, you know, writing and so on, longer

01:53:08.640 form things.

01:53:09.140 I've done documentary films as well about the Catholic faith.

01:53:11.960 And so what kind of crowd are you getting now with your YouTube channel and your podcast?

01:53:15.660 What, what's your audience numbers?

01:53:17.880 Yeah, we have like 77 million or something, you know, total views.

01:53:24.280 Oh yeah.

01:53:25.120 On your, on your channel?

01:53:27.020 Yeah.

01:53:27.420 Wow.

01:53:27.840 That's, that's, that's a lot.

01:53:29.720 Are people cutting up your, your videos and posting them in pieces as well?

01:53:34.620 Yeah, sometimes, sometimes.

01:53:37.200 I'm trying to think about the, an average.

01:53:38.680 It depends on the type of video we're doing, but yeah, we're getting, you know, good numbers,

01:53:42.300 solid numbers.

01:53:43.400 Um, not in your ballpark, but, uh.

01:53:45.800 Well, 77 million total views is like, that's far beyond respectable.

01:53:50.640 That's, I mean, you'd think about comparing that to something like a published book.

01:53:55.020 I mean, YouTube has a reach that's absolutely staggering.

01:53:59.740 Right.

01:53:59.980 And I appreciate that very much, you know, that all these different forms, and then that's

01:54:02.900 just YouTube, you know, many of all the other forms of social media.

01:54:06.020 So, you know, I'm, look, as an evangelist, as someone trying to speak for the church, I'm

01:54:10.420 delighted by that.

01:54:11.500 And, um, you know, we just did it.

01:54:14.120 We just, as you did, I mean, I think the first video of yours I saw, you were in a, like a

01:54:19.520 poorly lit room sitting in this chair talking about Nietzsche or something.

01:54:22.860 And I thought, wow, this guy, someone said, oh, he's getting these enormous numbers.

01:54:26.200 And I thought, wow.

01:54:27.100 But it speaks to the fact.

01:54:28.200 It wasn't the production quality that was doing it.

01:54:30.900 Yeah.

01:54:31.140 No, it wasn't.

01:54:31.840 It was, it was the, it was the content and the willingness to talk about important ideas

01:54:36.140 and to do it in a way that respects the audience.

01:54:38.280 I think all that, uh, is, is worthwhile, you know?

01:54:43.780 Well, look, that was, that was really good.

01:54:46.760 Um, we got, we got nice and deep into it.

01:54:50.580 That, yeah, I appreciate that very much.

01:54:52.720 Um, loved it.

01:54:53.900 I wish it, I wish it could have gone on longer.

01:54:56.920 I had more questions, but I think I've, I've exhausted my capacity for, for concentration.

01:55:03.660 We went for a couple hours, huh?

01:55:05.240 Yes.

01:55:05.540 Well, it's a good natural end, I would say as well.

01:55:08.320 Yeah.

01:55:09.140 No, I loved it, Jordan.

01:55:10.260 Thank you.

01:55:10.700 I appreciate your taking the time, you know.

01:55:12.360 Anything else that, that you, um, want to say or that we didn't cover?

01:55:19.860 Just, you know, tell, your wife's name is Tammy, right?

01:55:22.960 Yes.

01:55:23.480 Tell her, you know, we did, just came out with it.

01:55:25.840 It's on YouTube.

01:55:26.920 A series of reflections I did on the rosary.

01:55:29.540 And I know with her interest in the rosary that she'd just go on YouTube and check it

01:55:33.320 out.

01:55:33.820 She might find that interesting.

01:55:35.540 Yeah.

01:55:35.700 It's too bad we didn't have a chance to talk to that about that because.

01:55:38.820 Yeah, but just tell her that because I, I love the rosary too.

01:55:41.720 It's a great prayer and it, it works at so many different levels.

01:55:45.220 You can look at it psychologically and even physically, you know, what that does to you.

01:55:49.360 So have her look at those maybe and, uh, you know, give her my best.

01:55:52.500 Listen, I remember we were in Rome right after you and I spoke the first time.

01:55:58.020 Our team was in Rome doing some filming.

01:56:00.280 And I think we, I forget who we sent it to, someone in your office, but we did a little

01:56:04.040 video.

01:56:04.920 And I knew that your wife was very sick at the time.

01:56:07.220 I didn't know that you were on the verge of your issues, you know, but I just said, we

01:56:12.420 said mass in my room there in, in, in Rome, which is in the hotel room and set it for your

01:56:17.120 wife.

01:56:17.360 So we sent that to you.

01:56:18.820 So let her know that we have been for a long time praying for the two of you.

01:56:22.840 Well, that's much appreciated.

01:56:24.000 And certainly all the care that people have shown, including the care that you've shown

01:56:28.520 has been extraordinarily helpful.

01:56:30.460 And she's listening to you on a regular basis.

01:56:33.180 So, and she's certainly found the practice of the rosary.

01:56:37.320 Tammy is quite a physical person.

01:56:39.160 And so she's, it's practice for her rather than an intellectual endeavor.

01:56:44.160 Not that she's incapable of intellectual endeavor, but she's an adept practitioner.

01:56:49.500 So she's, she does yoga for years.

01:56:53.000 In your hand matters, you know, it's a very physical thing.

01:56:55.600 Yes.

01:56:55.960 Well, it was, it was, it was, it, it, it helped her maintain peace while she was facing

01:57:02.000 death.

01:57:02.380 Yeah.

01:57:02.880 Essentially, continually.

01:57:03.960 And, and so the, the, the, that's the ritual element, which we never talked about at all.

01:57:10.380 Partly, I suppose, because we know we tend towards the abstract and the intellectual, but

01:57:14.680 the ritual, the ritual shouldn't be, yes, exactly.

01:57:18.520 The ritual shouldn't be dismissed.

01:57:21.280 No, I'm a Catholic.

01:57:22.180 Heck, ritual is our whole thing, you know.

01:57:23.580 Yeah, well, there's peace in ritual, right?

01:57:26.720 That's the thing.

01:57:27.500 You know what to expect.

01:57:29.120 That's right.

01:57:29.560 It's a place of safety.

01:57:30.800 And, and, and in a world that changes constantly, ritual is the only thing that provides order.

01:57:37.260 And so we may need that now more than ever, because things are changing so unbelievably

01:57:41.620 fast, which is also partly why the church should be careful about being too relevant.

01:57:46.420 It's like.

01:57:46.760 Yep.

01:57:47.040 I agree.

01:57:48.440 I agree.

01:57:48.980 Yeah.

01:57:49.540 All right.

01:57:50.100 Well, thank you very much.

01:57:51.380 No, I enjoyed it immensely.

01:57:52.880 And God bless you.

01:57:53.380 Me too.

01:57:54.340 Thank you.

01:57:54.980 I need all the blessing from God I can get.

01:57:57.580 I can tell you that.

01:57:58.640 So.

01:57:59.520 I'll keep praying for you.

01:58:00.480 Thank you very much.

01:58:01.440 We'll be right back.

162. Christianity and the Modern World ｜ Bishop Barron

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