Join us for Episode 1 of The Gospel Seminar: Onward and Upward, Gospels, a new series from Daily Wire Plus exploring the foundational texts that sit at the foundation of our culture. In this episode, we'll hear from panelists from Exodus, Foundations of the West, and The Gospels.
00:22:05.680So, I'm Jonathan Pajot. I am a liturgical artist, a writer, but mostly I would say I'm someone who loves patterns and
00:22:15.680loves to show the beauty of the world, the beauty of art, the beauty of stories, the beauty of images. And the
00:22:25.680gospel is for me the key. It really is the place where these patterns come together. And I often say
00:22:34.680that, but it's rare that I have the chance to sometimes show it, to be able to point it out so that people can see to what
00:22:43.680extent the story of Jesus brings all the stories together. And so, you know, it's a huge undertaking.
00:22:53.680But because we're coming in the shadow of our Exodus seminar, that's the way that I'm going to approach
00:23:00.680all of this, which is what I'm hoping to do is to constantly help people see that the realities we
00:23:06.680are presented in Exodus, right? This fractal mountain of the world and how the world comes together.
00:23:12.680Some of the puzzles that were presented in Exodus and are presented in Genesis actually are brought together into this story.
00:23:23.680So that is my hope is to hopefully help people that are watching and everybody here see just how precious and beautiful this story is.
00:23:33.680And the fact that it has become the cornerstone of Western civilization is not an accident of history,
00:23:40.680but it is through the very nature of the character of Christ, but also his story.
00:23:46.680So whether the challenge in a way is a, it's pretty simple to state easily.
00:23:51.680It's that we're trying to cover all four gospels and really just a few hours.
00:23:55.680We're talking about perhaps the most influential, the most powerful, the most difficult,
00:24:01.680the most radically unexpected words and stories of all time.
00:24:05.680And, you know, we're trying to cover it quickly.
00:24:08.680And the temptation, if I can put it that way, will be to schematize so we can kind of make sense of it.
00:24:15.680And I think the challenge will be to sit with it in a way that what is most powerful and transformative
00:24:22.680in these unexpected words can speak to our own hearts and hopefully to the hearts of those who are listening.
00:24:30.680So I think part of the reason that we're in a crucial moment is because the enlightenment doctrines that have savaged Christianity have also now turned upon themselves.
00:24:46.680And partly conceptually, but also scientifically, one of the things I've come to understand as a practicing research psychologist is that we see the world through a story.
00:24:58.680In fact, that's a technical description.
00:25:01.680A description of the structure through which someone sees the world is a story.
00:26:41.680They drive us either towards a remarkably unproductive and bitter hedonism that cannot sustain itself psychologically or socially.
00:26:52.680And then on the power side, well, if everything's about power, then that claim to me is no different than the claim that, like, the spirit of Lucifer rules the world.
00:27:04.680It's the same claim in the different guise.
00:27:19.680And not only is that a stunningly hellish and dismal story, I think there's absolutely no evidence that it's true and plenty of evidence that it's not.
00:27:30.680The religious question, the monotheistic question, could be conceptualized as what could unite even power in sex and something higher and harmonious psychologically and societally.
00:27:43.680And I think that's what the biblical corpus is about.
00:27:46.680I think that's what the gospels focus on.
00:27:49.680And I've come to realize, to understand, not just to believe, but also to understand that it has something to do with sacrifice.
00:28:15.680And there's a spirit that underlies that movement towards integration and community.
00:28:20.680And that spirit is the spirit of progressive sacrifice.
00:28:23.680And the gospel story is the culmination of the sacrificial story.
00:28:27.680And so, I don't understand how it can be true.
00:28:31.680I don't understand how it can be right.
00:28:33.680But I now don't understand how it cannot be true.
00:28:37.680Because the converging evidence that something like the spirit of divine sacrifice animates the world, I think that's, I think we're there.
00:28:48.680Now, what I hope to accomplish in this seminar is to further my understanding of that.
00:28:53.680Because the story upon which our culture is based, the gospel story, let's say, is deeply mysterious and dramatically peculiar and hallucinogenic.
00:29:24.680If you understand that the gospels call to you to bear the weight of tragedy and malevolence on your shoulders, along with the divine spirit that guides you.
00:29:36.680There is nothing more terrifying and no greater field of opportunity than that.
00:29:42.680And so, we've got our work cut out for us, gentlemen.
00:29:45.680This is one peculiar time and one peculiar text.
00:30:37.680And Christian theology recognizes that as a supremely high name of God.
00:30:41.680But higher still is the claim that God is love.
00:30:44.680And in fact, the Trinity comes from that.
00:30:46.680You know, if God is love in his own most nature, there must be lover, beloved, and love shared.
00:30:51.680So, I might suggest that's where the New Testament is going, is love is the supreme value, the supreme reality.
00:30:59.680Well, it's a hard thing to, what would you say, to come to terms with when that's the claim,
00:31:06.680but the arc of the narrative of Christ is the worst possible death for the least possibly deserving person and the full encounter with malevolence.
00:31:22.680So, I thought I'd start if you gentlemen are in accordance with John 1 to 4.
00:31:27.680And because it's one of the most peculiar paragraphs, let's say, in the Gospel account,
00:31:35.680we could talk about it for 10 hours, which we won't.
00:31:39.680But it'll set us up to start to investigate the metaphysical foundations of the text as well as the autobiographical foundations.
00:31:51.680One other thing I'd like to point out to people, perhaps, before we get going from a conceptual perspective,
00:31:56.680is that Dr. Headley, for example, pointed to the philosophical as part of the understructure of the cultural and made the claim that perhaps underneath that is the theological.
00:32:31.680It's still something embodied and dramatized.
00:32:34.680And if philosophy emerges from the story and then our other cultural concepts emerge from philosophy, you can see kind of an inverted pyramid with something at the foundation.
00:32:47.680And the foundation is the story itself.
00:32:50.680And at the base of that foundation is something like sacrifice in love.
00:32:55.680And that's the claim that's being made in the Christian context.
00:32:57.680Now, John opens up with an allusion to that whole set of claims because John does this extremely strange parallel by making the radical and improbable claim that Christ, the Christ of the Bible, who was born in a particular time and in a particular place, a no-account place in the middle of nowhere in an equally nondescript time in some ways,
00:33:25.680is equivalent to the spirit that gave rise to the cosmos at the beginning of time and has always existed.
00:33:32.680It's an unbelievably radical way of starting a book.
00:35:32.680But what I'd like to just propose is that what we'll see when we look at the narrative of Jesus is that what's described right there at the beginning,
00:35:41.680which is that the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness does not recognize it.
00:35:46.680But just this idea of the light moving down into the darkness is the whole structure of the life of Jesus.
00:35:52.680You'll see that happening all through his life, which is it explains everything that he does is that he moves from this mysterious meaning,
00:36:00.680this source of being, and then he moves out into death, into disease, into the margin, into all the things that don't fit.
00:36:08.680He basically fills the world with himself, but the world does not recognize him.
00:36:13.680And so that's the first thing that I would say is that as we read the rest of all the other scripture,
00:36:18.680because people will tell us that that, you know, John is the weird gospel.
00:36:22.680It doesn't it's not the same as the synoptic gospels.
00:36:24.680But I think this pattern here is the actual pattern of the life of Jesus that you see all through all through the story.
00:36:31.680And in some ways the what the story of Jesus and how he does that nonstop and in every single way that you even haven't thought of is going to be the proof of this.
00:36:43.680That it's like, do you know what that looks like for the light to move down to the darkness?
00:36:48.680And Christ will show that through his miracles, through his teaching, through through the through the through his crucifixion, all through the story.
00:36:57.680Can somebody explain to me, because I admit I've wrestled with this as long as I've studied Christianity.
00:37:31.680The idea is to say, I think this is ultimately the Christian understanding, is to say that the God speaking is not created.
00:37:39.680When God speaks, it's not not, it's not something else than him.
00:37:44.680It is in some ways separate from him, but also God.
00:37:48.680This is coming to, to love that Bishop Barron was going to talk about.
00:37:52.680That, that God speaking is his own being that is speaking into the world.
00:37:58.680And there's, there's a, you, you would understand this in the Genesis context, is that there's an insistence on something like the primacy of the process that extracts the order that's good out of potential and chaos.
00:38:30.680It's the same thing as the word that extracts the order that's good out of potential at the beginning of time.
00:38:38.680And one way of understanding that more prosaically, I would say, is that imagine the order that you establish in your family.
00:38:48.680If that little microcosm of the walled garden, your family, to the degree that you embody the spirit of loving sacrifice as a father, then you'll create out of the potential that's your family relationships, the order that's good.
00:39:04.680And it's sacrifice because, well, that's what you do on behalf of your children, right?
00:39:22.680And all that upward aim is sacrificial.
00:39:24.680And then, well, then we get to the issue of what constitutes the ultimate sacrifice, which is partly what's explored in the gospel accounts.
00:39:31.680It's obviously explored in Abraham because Abraham is called upon to make an ultimate sacrifice.
00:39:35.680But this is an extension in a different, in a different direction.
00:39:39.680One thing I would say in response to your question is the logos being talked about here is, is the interior word of the father.
00:39:45.680So the word of creation is more of a word that goes out.
00:39:48.680But within the Godhead itself, there's an interior word.
00:39:51.680The father has an imago of himself that we call the son.
00:39:54.680The father and son fall in love with each other.
00:40:11.680May I just add to that in terms of the text, there are two words here that are very difficult to translate into English.
00:40:20.680And one, of course, is logos, which can mean obviously a word, proposition, meaning, story.
00:40:30.680The resonance of that word is very rich.
00:40:33.680But also the word that's translated as beginning, the ache, because in the Greek philosophical tradition, that word is used for God.
00:40:45.680So, and there are reasons why this should be the case, but the ache is a term which has a very powerful theological meaning within the Greek philosophical tradition.
00:41:07.680So, one way of looking at this is to say, well, in the source there was the word.
00:41:13.680To say, the Trinitarian reading, although that sounds like an absurd Christian interjection of a much later period, you could see that as making perfect sense with just these initial words.
00:41:28.680Yeah, I want to pick up on the fact that there's actually, I call them the four L's about God.
00:41:36.680There's love, agape, there's logos, there's light, and life.
00:41:41.680And these are all the identity claims that are somehow circling.
00:41:44.680And I'd like to propose we slow down a little bit because the familiarity of those terms to us, I think, is masking something more profound going on here.
00:41:52.680And if we think about all of these, they're pointing, well, to me, they're pointing to something very radical here.
00:42:02.680They're asking us to get out of a normal way in which we think about reality in terms of stable, substantial, independently existing objects.
00:42:11.680All of these are inherently relational realities.
00:42:14.680And think about how profound that is to say that ultimate reality is inherently, ultimately relational.
00:42:21.680And that, therefore, a relationship to it has to be primordially relational.
00:42:26.680And this is very, very hard for our way of thinking because we have got into the mode, and for all kinds of historical reasons we don't need, of thinking of, you know, that what there really is are individual things.
00:42:44.680All of that's in our head, and then that gives us a dualism because the mind has the patterns, the world.
00:42:49.680And there's something going on here in this language.
00:42:53.680And I want to slow down a little bit and get at, right?
00:42:57.680These terms are very familiar, and I think that's, I understand why they're there, but their familiarity is actually, in some sense, problematic.
00:43:07.680Because I think they're, it's easy, like, these are all nouns, and it's easy to think we're talking about four things.
00:43:15.680These are, these are attempts to disclose, and all four of them, I feel they're playing off against each other.
00:43:24.680The relation between them is as important as any one of them.
00:43:27.680And all of them are playing off against each other and trying to call us into a new way of trying to relate to ultimate reality.
00:43:34.680And so, like, when I try and, because Jesus makes these claims, too.
00:43:39.680He talks about, I'm the light of the world, abundant life, like, you know, all of this.
00:43:45.680This, this to me, if I, if I could hear these words again, I could get to a place where I think the idea of, could have more real relevance to me.
00:44:03.680And so, I, we, we, we live in metaphor.
00:46:38.680And word is meaning that makes things happen.
00:46:41.680And so you can see that the analogies that, that John is putting together are there to say, like, if you don't understand what the word logos is, then light will bring you a little further.
00:46:51.680And if you don't know what light is, you know, then life will bring you a little further.
00:46:54.680And like you said, it's not that one of those is actually describing anything.
00:46:57.680It's that all of them playing with each other are pointing you to the mystery of the notion that there are, that there are invisible movers that make things move or make things happen, make things exist.
00:49:24.680You said that in the word for beginning is God, right?
00:49:28.680And so this goes into John, you know, the discussion of, well, what is a cup, right?
00:49:33.680A cup is, it's designed for a certain purpose.
00:49:36.680It is also the purpose and the end of it is also what it's intended to be.
00:49:41.680And so there's a, there's a circularity too.
00:49:43.680In God was the word and the word was with God and, and the word was God.
00:49:48.680That temporally, this is that same fractal thing.
00:49:51.680That's also being expanded across time and space.
00:49:53.680That the meaning is embedded in the object as it exists.
00:49:56.680What its uses and what its end is are all simultaneous.
00:49:59.680I think that's a connection back to some of your thinking.
00:50:02.680The other interesting aspects about that passage as well is that what we read as in the beginning is using another very important word in Greek philosophy.
00:50:16.680And that word is the, which means beginning, which means source, principle, and that usage is also very interesting.
00:50:33.680So, um, in ancient Greek and the philosophical tradition, the word God is not, so theos or theos is not used for the first principle.
00:50:47.680The word that is used is this word, ache.
00:50:50.680So, the fact that we start off this prologue with these terms which resonate with profound metaphysical questions is, I think, of profound significance.
00:51:08.680You made a comment about this, James, it was you, about this being a meta-scientific claim.
00:51:14.680And so, I want to add a couple of things to that.
00:51:16.680So, I watched Richard Dawkins yesterday talk about his existence as a cultural Christian.
00:51:21.680And he's also, he's not just a cultural Christian ethically, he's a cultural Christian scientifically,
00:51:27.680because the scientific program itself, which is a very particular sort of program,
00:51:33.680and only emerged in the context of a Judeo-Christian society.
00:59:01.680But they do not find an open sense of home.
00:59:06.680Not that anybody's rejecting them, but they just don't see the established institutions of the legacy religions, the axial religions, as viable for them.
00:59:16.680Okay, so I'm going to move us now to the first biographical detail, let's say, out of the realm of high metaphysics, and to the story of Zechariah.
00:59:26.680And so this is the announcement of the impending birth of John the Baptist, and this is really where Christ's story starts on the biographical side.
00:59:37.680It doesn't start with Christ himself in the Gospels.
00:59:40.680It starts with John the Baptist, who's an interesting and complicated figure, assimilated by Jesus himself to Elijah, who is the prophet of conscience, I would say, above all.
00:59:52.680And also, by the way, the figure in the Old Testament who brings the worship of nature to a halt.
01:00:18.680I'm using the single Gospels, by the way, in this journey forward.
01:00:24.680So it's important to know that when Jordan is reading the Gospel text, he's not actually reading from a Gospel, but it's a kind of compilation of different Gospels.
01:00:32.680So sometimes it starts in one Gospel and then it cuts to another.
01:00:36.680And so for people that know the Gospels really well, this might be a very frustrating experience.
01:00:40.680I know even for us at the table, it is a little bit of a frustrating experience.
01:00:44.680I think most of the people that are Christian around the table would have liked us to either pick one Gospel or, you know, follow a Gospel and then supplement with another.
01:00:53.680But Jordan is really adamant on going to the single Gospel.
01:00:56.680And so, you know, I mean, in the end, what's important is we do get through the story of Jesus and, you know, we get through the major events and the major teaching of Jesus.
01:01:05.680But even at the table, if, I don't know if the camera picks it up, but sometimes we're bewildered because we don't know, we're like flipping through the Bible and we don't know where we are, you know.
01:01:14.680And so, yes, that's important to understand because even for the viewer, while you're watching it, you'll have a little bit of that experience yourself.
01:01:21.680One day when Zechariah's group was on duty and he was serving as a priest before God, he was chosen by lot, randomly, according to the custom among the priests, to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense.
01:01:33.680At the time for this burning, all the assembled worshippers were praying outside.
01:01:37.680Then an angel of the Lord appeared to Zechariah, standing on the right-hand side of the incense altar.
01:01:43.680Zechariah was shaken when he saw the angel, and fear fell upon him.
01:01:46.680But the angel said, Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.
01:01:54.680And you shall have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice that he was born, for he will be great in the eyes of the Lord.
01:02:01.680And he shall drink neither wine nor strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb.
01:02:09.680And he will turn many of the children of Israel back to the Lord their God.
01:02:13.680He will go as a forerunner before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of fathers to the children,
01:02:21.680and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, and to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
01:02:26.680So Elijah calls the Israelites back to conscience.
01:02:30.680John the Baptist is the forerunner and the announcer of Christ.
01:02:34.680This is the announcement of his conception and birth.
01:02:38.680And so, what do we make of John the Baptist?
01:02:43.680Greg, maybe you can start us off here.
01:02:45.680Why do you think it's necessary in the narrative flow of things for there to be an unroller of the red carpet, let's say, for someone to make the way ready?
01:02:56.680It's almost like the association with conscience.
01:02:59.680The conscience is what has to lead the way first to prepare the people to receive Jesus.
01:03:06.680Because if he just arrives without there being...
01:03:10.680Look, so first of all, I mean, in a dramatic sense, right, every introduction for dramatic effect,
01:03:16.680and I know that we're talking about this on different levels,
01:03:18.680but for the theatrical, the introduction of a character is always key.
01:03:22.680I mean, you think about in Casablanca, the number of times that Rick is mentioned before his back is turned in a chair,
01:03:28.680and you see the cigarette smoke and he turns around.
01:03:30.680Dramatically, and I'm not implying this is merely dramatically, you want to set the stage for the arrival of a major character.
01:03:37.680And I think you have a culture in which the stage must be set before his arrival.
01:03:43.680One is that one's a psychological point or a theological point, which is that it might be that it's conscience that alerts us when our sacrifices are insufficient or something like that.
01:03:56.680It's conscience that alerts us to the necessity for a higher form of sacrifice than what we're currently performing.
01:04:03.680And so conscience is continually the forerunner of the sacred.
01:04:07.680But then there's a dramatic level here, too, where you need to prepare the ground for the introduction of a major character.
01:04:14.680Yeah, and we do this all the time dramatically.
01:04:16.680You have an opening act for a concert.
01:04:40.680Everything, you know, you need to repent because the fire is coming, you know.
01:04:43.680And so everything is in a very dire state, you know, before the main character comes in.
01:04:48.680It's worth making the point that, I mean, Luke is seen as effectively a Greek physician, having a Greek mindset.
01:04:56.680He refers back to the Old Testament a little bit less often, say certainly, than Matthew.
01:05:02.680But it's worth saying that the reference to Elijah is, seems to be a fulfillment of the last two verses of our Old Testament, as it were.
01:05:10.680In Malachi, which, this is Malachi 4, 5.
01:05:13.680Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord, and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to the fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.
01:05:25.680So it's a clear, the sense is that he's fulfilling, that John is fulfilling something, that he's preparing the way for a sequence of events that is going to be a fulfillment of what is hinted at in Malachi in the Old Testament.
01:05:44.980And the precursor to Elijah, in certain regards, is Enoch, right before the flood.
01:05:50.400The other thing I was thinking is that there's these different sides, as we're discussing, of what Jesus is.
01:05:55.620And he also is a man, because if he's not a man, then the story doesn't make sense.
01:05:59.700And so it comes along to say, why is Jesus baptized?
01:06:05.760But if there's not a human being who predates him with some moral authority who represents the voice of conscience, then he can't be baptized as a man.
01:06:13.800He just comes down with a full glory and righteousness and fear of God.
01:06:19.240Well, that touches on something, Peugeot, maybe you can speak to this.
01:06:23.520There's a very deep mystery there, because the story of Christ doesn't really get going, apart from some description of birth and youth, which we'll cover, until the baptism.
01:06:33.620And so that question immediately arises, well, if Christ is the Son of God from birth, why the necessity of the baptism?
01:06:49.520Now, there's a lot of work on the anthropology of religion that's focused on this issue.
01:06:54.340And it's very frequently the case across cultures, anthropologically distributed, that men in particular must undergo a initiation ceremony, which generally bears some symbolic relationship to the modern, to the Judeo-Christian concept of baptism, before they can adopt their full individuality.
01:07:15.140And it's often associated with something like a passage or re-immersion into the sacred waters or into the chaos.
01:07:22.200And it's a dissolution into chaos and then a restructuring, right?
01:07:25.860That's the, that's the, that would be the neurophysiological take on it.
01:07:30.380Well, so Elijah, so there, in Elijah's, in Elijah, in St. John's story, there are many things that are going on.
01:07:37.620Now, I think the best way to understand is that he's there to kind of end the, end the world.
01:07:43.140So you imagine there's, Christ is the new beginning, is a new world, new creation.
01:07:47.780And then he's there to end that world.
01:08:54.460She's the, and the Spirit of God descends on her like in Genesis 1, where the Spirit is above the waters.
01:09:01.140So you can see that it's all of this relationship between the baptism, between the birth, the Annunciation to Mary, the Annunciation to Elizabeth are showing the end of a world and the beginning of a new world that is happening.
01:09:13.740And it's layered, like it's layered in all these different versions.
01:09:20.680The very fact he's introduced as the son of a temple priest, his mother's from a priestly clan.
01:09:25.940So the question is, why isn't John the Baptist in the temple?
01:09:28.720And part of it, I think, is there's a really pronouncing of judgment on the temple.
01:09:32.940He's proposing a kind of new temple out in the desert, a new washing.
01:09:39.820There are people seeking forgiveness of sins, not in the temple, but from him.
01:09:43.940And so, and then his announcement in the Gospel of John, when Jesus comes, is, behold the Lamb of God.
01:09:49.940So he's a radical, is he doing the same thing, do you think, with the temple that Moses is doing after the Israelites leave God with the golden calf?
01:09:59.900And he sets up the tabernacle outside the center of the community?
01:10:03.480Is that associated with Jonathan's claim that John the Baptist is signifying the end of the old world?
01:10:10.140Part of the Messianic expectation was the renewal of the temple, right?
01:10:13.440So he would gather the nations, he would reign as Lord, and he would renew the temple.
01:10:18.400So I think it's the beginning of a temple renewal program.
01:10:21.620And then when Jesus comes, he goes, well, here's the Lamb of God.
01:10:24.000Here's the one who's meant to be sacrificed in the true temple.
01:10:27.080And, of course, Jesus picks that up with, you know, I will tear this place down in three days, rebuild it, referring to the temple of his body.
01:10:33.840So I think that's the liminal thing, too.
01:10:35.660He's the end of the old temple, the beginning of the new.
01:10:38.160And if you look at John 1.14, it says, and the word became flesh and tabernacled amongst us.
01:10:45.440The word there is the verb from skene, which is the tabernacle, which is the word that the Greek translators of the Old Testament used of the tabernacle.
01:10:55.100And the movement to the desert, to the River Jordan, is a movement from the strictures of law and architecture and ritual, right?
01:11:05.660It's all a movement out to take it out.
01:11:09.140But he's also, I mean, John, like from a Christian interpretation, John is also telling people Jerusalem is going to be destroyed.
01:12:41.960For Christians, what does that mean to you, to have somebody proposing a ritual that's supposed to give the forgiveness of sins before Jesus has even appeared?
01:12:52.200So, what happens, the way I understand the baptismal event, let's say, if we can jump to that momentarily, is that it recapitulates the time at the beginning of time.
01:13:04.720You have the water, which is the tohu vabohu, right?
01:13:08.180I would say that's the deep pool of possibility.
01:13:11.200And you have the spirit descend that sets on the water, and that's a recapitulation of the initial state.
01:13:17.960You can think about that as a neurophysiological transformation writ large, right?
01:13:22.880It's the dissolution of the old personality, the re-instantiation of the process that brings order out of chaos and the generation of a new order.
01:13:32.220And so, and it's new in the sense that you said, but it's very, very archaic.
01:13:38.080The baptismal idea is unbelievably old, right?
01:13:40.380That initiatory idea, tens of thousands of years old, insanely old.
01:15:04.740They're saved, but they're not forgiven.
01:15:07.200I don't, I never understood the Jews on the other side of the sea.
01:15:11.280Being forgiven for anything, because that's not what's said.
01:15:16.400It's, they were just saved from the death of the Egyptian army.
01:15:20.640Well, my sense is that they're comparatively forgiven, because the Israelites and the Egyptians both have to face the chaos of the Red Sea.
01:15:32.380But the Egyptians are so tyrannical and so bent beyond redemption that that flood of chaos destroys them.
01:15:41.980Now, that doesn't mean the Israelites are finally saved, but they're, they at least managed to pass through the chaos alive.
01:16:26.060Yeah, I mean, I'm not, I can't find the verse that says that John intended by baptism, the efficacious sort of salvation of people who are being baptized.
01:16:37.960And he says at various points, he says, he actually draws a distinction.
01:16:41.360So Matthew says, this is what, 311, I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance.
01:16:47.700I mean, you're repenting and there's an external mark of your having repented.
01:31:00.400And so, it's again and again with the gospels is the...
01:31:03.280All the way through, you know, Peter denying Christ three times.
01:31:06.520I mean, it's all the way through is the doubt and the disbelief even in the face of what is.
01:31:10.800And so, I think that these intimations are also a way of...
01:31:13.660Like, they sort of naturally build suspense from a narrative perspective.
01:31:17.160But they also are trying to move along at a pace that human comprehension can possibly keep up with.
01:31:23.680If I could just pick up for a second on something, Dr. Peterson, you were saying about motherhood.
01:31:30.060It's very interesting here, the pattern that is emerging.
01:31:32.860You know, the angel, an angel comes to both, both, in both situations to prophesy the birth.
01:31:39.940And in one sense, you know, pregnancy is one of the great examples of fulfillment of nature, right?
01:31:46.240It's the actualization of the potentiality for motherhood.
01:31:50.240And yet, you know, that fulfillment in both cases is a radical self-othering.
01:31:56.400Both of these sons will die brutal deaths.
01:31:59.700And so, I think what's being indicated here already in a very fundamental sense is the inherently non-instrumental character of love itself.
01:32:12.540And so, that you are fulfilled precisely in the transcending of your own fulfillment.
01:32:18.320And, you know, when Jesus says that my kingdom is not of this world,
01:32:21.600I mean, it seems to me what the scriptures are speaking to us of already here in the announcement of the angels about the pregnancy and birth of the children who will die deaths that are not for themselves is the radical self-othering that is the nature of self, you might say, the realization of the self in the deepest sense.
01:32:47.580And you see this in Christ at the very end, this is mirrored on the cross where he is going to say, as his last act, as you might say, reconstituting that family between, in a sense, between Mary and John.
01:33:00.280So that the ultimate act of self-othering is the principle that is able to bring together some harmony in us and in what is around us.
01:33:11.600And I think we're also looking at this tragedy, especially in comparison to, let's say, Abraham and Isaac, where his hand is stayed and he gets to keep his son.
01:33:19.540But the actual end of the Gospels is that the same thing happens with God.
01:33:24.420He gives his, you know, like in a way.