The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 131 - The New New Testament ft. David Bentley Hart

00:00:00.260 Happy Easter! To celebrate, we will talk to American Orthodox theologian and scholar David Bentley Hart

00:00:07.420 to discuss his new translation of the New Testament, the New New Testament.

00:00:11.860 Then, after all that good news, a bunch of politically bad news.

00:00:15.360 I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:25.240 We have a very Easter-y show today.

00:00:27.500 I was going to, you know, obviously we missed April Fool's Day, which we could have done just a blank show.

00:00:34.100 I could have just sat here and stared at the camera. That might have been fun.

00:00:36.820 We did, Prager University did release a blank video yesterday that I'm in, so if you haven't seen that, I urge you to go over.

00:00:44.700 It's very educational. I highly recommend it.

00:00:47.640 But we've got a wonderful show today, and the timing, you might say, is providential just after Easter.

00:00:52.820 David Bentley Hart is an Orthodox Christian theologian and philosopher.

00:00:56.620 His major works include The Beauty of the Infinite, Atheist Delusions, The Story of Christianity, many others.

00:01:04.120 He's written articles everywhere. You've probably read him at First Things or The Wall Street Journal, lots of other places.

00:01:10.060 Now he has this new translation of the New Testament.

00:01:13.480 I have wanted to get David on this show to talk about it since the project came out.

00:01:19.040 It is a wonderful translation. It is being called fresh everywhere.

00:01:23.940 I don't want to be glib about it, but it is fresh.

00:01:26.160 It does give a new life to a lot of verses that are probably familiar to a lot of people.

00:01:31.600 And that's an ambitious project as far as things go, doing a translation of the New Testament.

00:01:36.100 So we have David. David, thank you very much for being here.

00:01:39.320 Thanks for inviting me.

00:01:40.520 Before we get into these specific words and verses and theories, why do we need a new translation of the New Testament?

00:01:49.620 What did you find lacking in other translations that prompted you to render your own?

00:01:54.320 Oh, the typeface never satisfied me in the earlier ones.

00:02:00.260 No, well, first of all, let me say it's not my Easter yet.

00:02:04.220 So I wish you a happy Easter, but I'm still in Lent.

00:02:09.040 So forgive me if I'm a bit melancholy.

00:02:12.080 Still penitential and absolutely, of course, absolutely.

00:02:15.260 And a bit lightheaded from the fasting, which the Orthodox always take to an extreme. 0.99

00:02:20.100 Well, I don't know if we need a new one, but I certainly think that it serves a certain purpose.

00:02:30.460 For years, when I was still teaching introductory courses, which you do when you're early on in your career,

00:02:38.900 students would come with whatever the standard translation was that had been assigned, usually the revised standard.

00:02:47.020 And like any other teacher who's dealt with the text, I spent a great deal of time saying, well, no, what the original Greek actually says.

00:02:57.280 And at other times, well, the way in which the Greek actually says it is.

00:03:01.640 So it didn't seem to me to be an outlandish idea that maybe a translation could be produced that tries to say what the Greek says and to do it as well as possible, at least, in the voices of the various authors.

00:03:18.700 I think that there's a kind of paternalist approach to a lot of translation, the assumption being that most Christians aren't particularly bright

00:03:33.860 and don't really need to be confronted with any ambiguities or unfinished passages or moments of broken syntax and that therefore it's the translator's job to tidy up all of that.

00:03:50.700 And in the course of so doing, decide what the text means in those places where it's not always clear what the text means.

00:03:58.960 It just seems to me that for Christians, especially who don't have Greek, they may as well have some sense of what the Greek reads like.

00:04:10.160 You've called the translation pitilessly literal.

00:04:14.480 And I would like to focus on those moments where you say there were strange grammatical structures and the tenses change

00:04:22.400 and it just reads as a little abrupt in ways that a lot of other translations don't bring to readers in the target language.

00:04:32.300 You know, I think you've said elsewhere that one aspect of your translation is you do the police in different voices.

00:04:40.160 And this does strike you.

00:04:42.180 There are different voices throughout.

00:04:43.900 Just to use Mark as an example, the word immediately appears frequently throughout the first chapter of Mark,

00:04:50.440 not just in your translation, but in other translations as well.

00:04:54.680 Your translation, however, gives that immediacy a whole new life with these bizarre grammatical constructions at times.

00:05:01.560 For example, in Mark chapter 1 verse 30, your translation reads,

00:05:05.860 And Simon's mother-in-law was laid out stricken with fever, and immediately they tell him about her.

00:05:11.580 And it sounds almost like how New Yorkers talk, you know.

00:05:14.120 So I says to him this, and then he tells me this.

00:05:16.880 Well, to be honest, everyone talks that way when they're telling stories from the past.

00:05:21.140 You know, there's a – for generations, New Testament scholars have been taught that this thing called the historic past was a normal stylistic device that to the people of the time sounded like past tense or didn't seem out of place.

00:05:36.980 And this is nonsense.

00:05:38.100 That was based on the misapplication of philological work that was true five or six centuries earlier in Greek.

00:05:45.780 It has no systematic application to what's going on in the first century of the New Testament.

00:05:52.680 What's really going on there is much more interesting.

00:05:56.160 In the ancient world, of course, you didn't sit down and write a book.

00:05:59.860 You dictated a book to an amanuensis.

00:06:01.860 There were only very few persons who had been able to practice handwriting and the materials and the skills.

00:06:08.940 You composed by speaking.

00:06:10.380 So Luke, who's a very educated person, writes in a syngrammatic style, to use a term I've invented just to scare the philologists, which is he's writing like a treatise.

00:06:23.020 And there are the tenses, irregular and uniform and very much as we would use them today if we sat – if you were to sit down and write a historical narrative.

00:06:31.020 But the other three are living voices captured by an amanuensis who's transcribing with sort of like the fidelity of a dictaphone.

00:06:42.380 And if you suppress the tense changes, I think you do great damage to the text because they were not systematic.

00:06:50.380 They are exactly as you say.

00:06:54.700 It's the way we tell a story when we're, say, among our friends.

00:06:59.000 And so, you know, I went to see my girlfriend.

00:07:01.400 I went up and knocked on her door and she comes to the door there with a knife in her hand, you know, and I step back. 0.91

00:07:07.100 You know, the shift –

00:07:08.160 You're relating stories of my recent past, but that's fine.

00:07:11.780 That might just be providential.

00:07:13.860 I think that – I can imagine, you know, looking at you.

00:07:19.460 That might be – but it is – it's something we do intuitively, spontaneously, unsystematically.

00:07:25.460 But for that very reason, it's expressive.

00:07:28.520 And as opposed to the syngrammatic style of Luke, it's what you might call a frastic style, just an expressive style.

00:07:36.080 And it captures the voice of someone who was not a scholar, not a writer, not a particularly educated man probably.

00:07:42.360 And in the case of Mark, I tried to capture the terseness and the abruptness and the brokenness of the prose by trying to keep the English as terse as the Greek, which is kind of hard to do.

00:07:56.180 But I think it's placed as I succeeded.

00:07:59.800 What does it tell us?

00:08:01.300 Obviously, I understand the purpose to it.

00:08:03.420 I see its use in English as well as what I assume to be its use in Koine Greek.

00:08:08.960 What does it tell us about the experience of the text, how people would have experienced this text in the first and second centuries, and how Christians today, genial, regular old American Christians, what it does to our experience of that scripture and maybe our experience of faith to get it in this urgency and to get it in this immediate language?

00:08:27.940 Well, I think the immediacy of the voice is instructive in two ways.

00:08:33.900 One, it reminds us of how the early Christians heard these stories.

00:08:37.480 They would have been read out, just as you didn't sit down to write, you didn't sit down to read, for the most part.

00:08:43.820 These were heard.

00:08:45.000 And so little devices that many translators remove, in Matthew, in all of them, but Matthew especially, says,

00:08:52.860 either look, in the old King James, that's behold, which even at the time was a somewhat hieratically ornamental term, not quite appropriate.

00:09:03.980 But the look actually goes along with the style of hearing, the manner in which the text was heard.

00:09:12.040 It was almost like reading to a room full of children today.

00:09:14.280 Look, here comes a bunny. 1.00

00:09:16.680 Only in this case, the bunny is a magian from a Parthian priest wearing gifts from the king.

00:09:22.860 But at the same time, also, the immediacy seems to me, and I find this even more in Paul than in the gospel writers, there is an urgency there.

00:09:34.020 There is a vitality there, as if somebody who's not really a gifted writer, not an educated man, is attempting to communicate something that has gripped him with absolute and undeniable power.

00:09:48.780 And I think even in translating, even though I've been reading the Greek since I was a boy, because I just had the luxury of a classical education.

00:09:58.580 In translating, it struck me again just how extraordinarily passionate, urgent, what a sense I got from the text of men who would not necessarily have written anything at all if they didn't feel they had something very vital to communicate that they had experienced at a very deep level.

00:10:20.240 Paul, I'd like to talk about Paul.

00:10:23.660 You write, quote,

00:10:25.240 Now, in the ESV, that verse reads,

00:10:54.140 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned.

00:11:03.720 The KJV renders it just about the same.

00:11:06.340 So death passed upon all men for all that have sinned.

00:11:10.780 Instead of the ESV or the KJV, the DBH translation, your translation, reads,

00:11:17.240 Therefore, just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man and death through sin, so all death pervaded all humanity, whereupon, at which point, as if to say, all sinned.

00:11:29.800 You've also criticized the American Protestant understanding of Paul.

00:11:33.360 To use your words, how does the genial Presbyterian get Paul so wrong?

00:11:39.440 Well, you know, you've just asked about 12 different...

00:11:44.700 You can answer them in any order you prefer.

00:11:47.940 I mean, I want to point out that the ESV and the KJV translations also don't quite capture what happened in the Vulgate, which is what had the theological consequences.

00:11:58.640 In the Vulgate, that last phrase becomes in quo omnes peculerum, in whom all sinned.

00:12:05.680 And because the pronoun quo had retained the masculine form of the Greek pronoun, f-o-pontes, but the prior noun in the Latin went from being male, thanatos, to female, or feminine, masculine to feminine,

00:12:25.040 mores, what in the Greek looks like a reference to death becomes a reference to Adam.

00:12:32.360 And with a different preposition, it seems to be saying that we in Adam sinned.

00:12:36.700 Now, from the time of Augustine right up through the Council of Trent, when these issues were defined in Roman theology,

00:12:46.560 that is the only verse that is routinely cited as evidence of an inheritance of original guilt.

00:12:53.660 And it's simply, it's one of the large differences between Eastern and Western Christianity,

00:12:59.540 that in the East, the idea of original sin has no notion of an inherited culpability.

00:13:07.100 And I would argue that's an illogical notion in any event.

00:13:10.480 It's like a square circle, the notion that you can inherit guilt.

00:13:14.420 So there isn't the same rather grim Augustinian picture of humanity born as a Massadamnanda, 1.00

00:13:22.640 already damnably guilty in the eyes of God.

00:13:25.960 If you wanted a nice chilling picture of the direction in which that kind of language can go, 0.98

00:13:32.900 I can cite you some passages, both from Augustine and Calvin, that would keep you up at night.

00:13:40.000 As for the other thing, I would say that the Protestants, it's not just the Protestants.

00:13:44.160 I mean, Paul has been, Paul is a difficult figure to deal with.

00:13:49.620 But the more removed that Christian thought became from the age in which he lived,

00:13:56.360 and the special concerns that tormented him, and the intertestamental literature that he read,

00:14:04.060 the further we move from appreciating what's most important in his theology.

00:14:10.360 And a new emphasis arose.

00:14:11.660 I mean, most Protestants, being inheritors of the late Augustinian tradition,

00:14:16.480 think that Paul's principal concern is how we're justified, that is.

00:14:22.640 And by justified, they don't mean really made just or even proved just,

00:14:27.660 but extrinsically, forensically pronounced just through the unmerited grace of Christ's sacrifice,

00:14:36.220 which supposedly pleases the Father, because there he pours out his wrath on sin.

00:14:43.940 Now, none of that's actually in Paul.

00:14:46.780 Some of the language there is based on distortions of Paul.

00:14:51.420 Paul's actual teaching is very different.

00:14:54.060 I mean, the word dicaosis or its verbal cognates doesn't mean justified in that sense.

00:15:01.060 It means literally either vindicated or corrected, made new.

00:15:04.400 And it's actually that aspect of Paul's thought shows up in Galatians and in Romans 9 through 11,

00:15:14.820 because in the first case, he's arguing with new Christians in Galatia from the Gentile world,

00:15:23.300 trying to explain to them that they don't need to obey the law of Moses to be enfolded within the covenant,

00:15:30.080 because the covenant goes back to Abraham, not just to Sinai.

00:15:35.140 And in Romans 9 through 11, one of the most notoriously misread passages in Christian history,

00:15:42.760 Paul's concern is principally how church and Israel are related.

00:15:46.540 Basically, did God forsake his covenant with Israel in embracing the Gentiles? 0.89

00:15:52.560 And in the end, he comes to the conclusion, no.

00:15:55.200 He raises the possibility that God created vessels of wrath to show the power of his dereliction

00:16:02.420 when he showed mercy to some and not to others.

00:16:06.500 But then he concludes in chapter 11 that this, too, is not what's going on.

00:16:10.520 That's a dreadful possibility for Paul.

00:16:12.700 What he concludes is, in fact, as he says quite explicitly,

00:16:17.220 God bound everyone in disobedience so that he could show mercy to everyone.

00:16:23.320 But that's not actually the thing that gets me most about reading Paul,

00:16:27.560 because all of that is actually—those are actually not central concerns for Paul.

00:16:32.320 If you actually go through all the Pauline literature, the definitely authentic epistles,

00:16:38.180 and those that are definitely in his school, even if they aren't directly from his mouth.

00:16:46.580 He's very much a man—he's a Hellenistic Jew of the first century. 1.00

00:16:50.700 He believes that he lives in an age that is passing away.

00:16:55.120 Another age is coming, and that this age is under the dominion of ancient angelic powers.

00:17:01.940 That in Christ, these powers on high, and Paulson's throne's dominion's principalities powers,

00:17:09.380 and we don't always appreciate that these are angelic beings who occupy the planetary and stellar spheres

00:17:16.040 in the cosmology of the time and below the Earth, have been conquered.

00:17:20.980 That this whole cosmos—and there's a reason why I retain the word cosmos there, too—

00:17:25.940 that was enslaved to death and to these mutinous or incompetent or apostate powers, 0.81

00:17:34.600 have been conquered.

00:17:36.060 Christ took them captive.

00:17:37.520 He ascended on high.

00:17:39.180 And in 1 Corinthians 15, you get the great synthesis.

00:17:42.840 Ultimately, the whole cosmos having been restored, a new age will dawn,

00:17:47.900 in which Christ hands over the cosmos to be directly governed by God,

00:17:53.480 no longer through the intermediate agency of these incompetent or fallen angels,

00:17:59.320 and God will be all in all, and the whole cosmos will be transfigured.

00:18:03.180 This is the burning heart of false theology.

00:18:05.640 It runs through all of his writings, but we tend not to notice it,

00:18:12.880 because we don't recognize what the language is.

00:18:14.940 For one thing, even the words principalities, powers,

00:18:17.620 we tend to think he's talking in terms of human political arrangements.

00:18:21.520 And for some reason, even though this is ubiquitous in his writings,

00:18:26.780 we tend to look past it, and especially in the West, I would say.

00:18:30.740 I mean, that's also part of the Western inheritance.

00:18:33.380 The notion of salvation as cosmic conquest is a little bit better preserved in the East.

00:18:40.820 Sorry, I won't have some time there, but you did, as I say, ask a dozen questions.

00:18:45.000 And you gave me the answers.

00:18:46.220 I want to get on to the cosmos.

00:18:48.960 It's an excellent place to launch from,

00:18:52.660 because you do maintain some words in your translation that we would not usually see,

00:18:58.560 one of which is cosmos.

00:18:59.820 For instance, instead of a blessed are the poor in spirit,

00:19:02.840 you write, how blissful the destitute, abject in spirit.

00:19:06.920 Instead of, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God,

00:19:10.360 and the word was God, in John chapter 1, you maintain logos.

00:19:14.820 You say, in the origin, there was the logos.

00:19:17.860 And then finally, cosmos.

00:19:19.580 Instead of, for God so loved the world, as we can all recite,

00:19:24.240 you write, for God so loved the cosmos.

00:19:27.640 What do blissful logos and cosmos offer us that blessed word and world do not?

00:19:33.820 Yeah, well, what they don't offer you, obviously, is a great deal of literary felicity.

00:19:40.220 I mean, obviously, it leads to a somewhat awkward English.

00:19:43.120 But then again, I'd point out that in none of those cases am I translating good Greek.

00:19:47.800 So the ultimate effect is sort of an even draw.

00:19:52.900 But to me, it's very important.

00:19:55.860 For instance, well, cosmos, let me start there,

00:19:58.540 because that connects to what I was saying about Paul.

00:20:00.660 Well, we use the word world today to mean two things generally.

00:20:06.180 One, the planet we're walking around on.

00:20:08.600 The other, the human world.

00:20:10.440 And by that, we mean just the way people are,

00:20:13.340 the moral order, the political arrangements by which they live, the social order.

00:20:18.860 And if we use the word world in our translation,

00:20:22.500 we lose, I think, a vital aspect of the way first century Jews and Christians and pagans saw reality. 0.88

00:20:29.740 When the Gospel of John, for instance, talks about Christ as coming from above into the cosmos,

00:20:37.400 he means just that, passing down through all the spheres.

00:20:42.540 Cosmos is an incomparably – it doesn't – not only does it not merely mean the human world,

00:20:49.620 it doesn't even mean merely the physical world.

00:20:52.580 It includes the world of spirits, of angels.

00:20:55.680 It includes the whole of the heavens, the fixed stars, the planetary spheres,

00:21:02.600 the ethereal realm, the realm of the aerial realm, the subterranean realm.

00:21:08.660 It means the whole of everything.

00:21:10.320 And there is, especially in John and Paul, but also elsewhere,

00:21:18.320 a very much a clear narrative structure to their language of salvation.

00:21:22.500 It is about this enclosed reality of an entire cosmos from the heights to the depths,

00:21:29.320 enslaved to death, being invaded by a divine conqueror, transfigured and redeemed.

00:21:35.600 And I think all of that is all.

00:21:38.520 We lose that cosmology and a lot of the language, especially, say, again, of John,

00:21:44.340 becomes needlessly obscure.

00:21:46.440 Although when you restore it, it becomes rather frighteningly unfamiliar, too.

00:21:50.940 When you really look at what the Gospel is saying,

00:21:54.320 the way it's imagining the reality in which the story of salvation unfolds,

00:21:59.600 it's an alien picture of reality.

00:22:03.440 So then, of course, we have to adjust.

00:22:05.380 I was trying to say, how does the Gospel survive the shift in worldviews?

00:22:10.380 And that...

00:22:10.980 I'm sorry, please go ahead.

00:22:12.980 No, just whatever the case,

00:22:14.300 that's the translation decision about which I get the most complaints,

00:22:19.560 not translating cosmos as world.

00:22:21.320 And that's the one on which I'm absolutely most adamant.

00:22:23.620 But it is an absolute folly to translate that as world

00:22:28.980 because it just gives all the wrong impressions by the usage of the word today.

00:22:35.400 The way that you translate Satan struck me, too.

00:22:38.120 All of this language, it being fresh, it being different, it being unfamiliar,

00:22:42.560 is striking, and it makes you approach the Gospel in an unfamiliar way.

00:22:46.660 You refer to Satan variously, but by what his name means.

00:22:51.180 The accuser, the slanderer, Satan means the adversary.

00:22:54.780 But you don't do this with all names.

00:22:56.840 So you don't refer to Peter only as the Rock or something,

00:23:01.240 which, as a matter of translation,

00:23:03.440 might conjure up images of Dwayne Johnson weeping bitterly as the cock crows.

00:23:08.540 Which I imagine Peter was a lot like Peter.

00:23:11.500 Of course, yeah.

00:23:12.740 Pretty burly guy, you know.

00:23:14.360 Why do you translate the name Satan?

00:23:19.560 What is it about the character of Satan, but not other names?

00:23:23.520 It's not a name, for one thing.

00:23:25.840 And there are two words.

00:23:27.500 And Satan is always translated as accuser.

00:23:30.540 When you see slanderer in the Greek, there is all diabolos, 1.00

00:23:34.300 or diabolos, if you prefer, or diabolos.

00:23:36.860 I'm sorry, in proper Greek, you would say diabolos.

00:23:42.760 And these are titles.

00:23:46.160 They're ancient titles.

00:23:47.280 They're not proper names.

00:23:48.980 When it comes to proper names,

00:23:52.320 all proper names have some meaning, if you go far back.

00:23:55.140 So there's no need to say Peter.

00:23:57.340 Where it's important in Matthew, I note the play on words on this rock.

00:24:02.300 But in the case of certain titles that have become for us just titles,

00:24:08.940 whose actual meaning, which would have been audible to the first century Christians,

00:24:14.860 has been lost,

00:24:16.320 I restore the meaning, or I translate the meaning,

00:24:20.860 rather than retain it as an opaque signifier, so to speak.

00:24:26.460 So I don't use the word Christ, either.

00:24:28.780 I use the term the anointed, or the anointed one. 1.00

00:24:33.540 Though Satan, or Satanus, is obviously a figure in Hebrew scripture,

00:24:41.560 but also changes character somewhat in the intertestamental period.

00:24:46.360 But it's basically just that.

00:24:47.800 It means that, a prosecuting attorney, basically.

00:24:52.100 Lawyer.

00:24:52.480 Satan is a lawyer.

00:24:54.060 But we knew that, didn't we?

00:24:56.520 So, and the Avalos, well, we have the word devil,

00:25:02.100 which may come from the Avalos.

00:25:04.760 I tend to think it comes from an earlier Indo-European root,

00:25:08.180 like the German, Teufel, or the devil in English,

00:25:12.300 come from the same Indo-European roots as the words for Deva

00:25:16.480 in the Indo-European language.

00:25:18.380 And that's not important.

00:25:19.240 But what is important is the Avalos, the Greek word,

00:25:23.260 just, it really means a slanderer, or one who divides with false speech. 0.92

00:25:33.180 What was the other one you asked about?

00:25:35.260 Makarios. 0.52

00:25:36.200 Ah, ah, blissful.

00:25:37.180 Now that's interesting.

00:25:38.880 Where the text says evloyuminos, you know,

00:25:41.660 evloyumini, evloyuminos, I leave the term blessed.

00:25:45.500 But makarios is an interesting word because it doesn't just mean blessed

00:25:50.080 in the sense that, oh, he's fortunate.

00:25:53.580 At least it doesn't have just that connotation, or he, you know,

00:25:56.560 he's comfortable or he's well off.

00:25:59.280 It has an, you know, both etymologically and when you see how it's used

00:26:05.140 in texts outside of Scripture, it has a special intensity.

00:26:09.380 It means bliss, and originally meant a bliss akin to that of the gods.

00:26:15.740 And so, you know, it appealed to me to write blissful.

00:26:20.000 Again, now that's an example of a translation.

00:26:22.360 Some people love it.

00:26:23.200 Some people hate it.

00:26:24.060 No one seems to be neutral.

00:26:25.540 I do love it.

00:26:26.340 I love it.

00:26:26.900 The images that it evokes are really, it strikes me really beautifully.

00:26:32.100 Well, Mark Timothy Johnson said he'd evoked images of stoners,

00:26:37.200 which is fine with me.

00:26:40.940 I mean, I was born in the 60s.

00:26:42.220 I was stoned while I was reading it.

00:26:43.760 Maybe there's some relation there.

00:26:46.740 My final question is not about the age, the age to come,

00:26:51.040 or the age that you were writing about,

00:26:53.480 that you're translating from, the first century or the second century.

00:26:56.620 My question is about this age.

00:26:59.020 You've written extensively about the new atheists,

00:27:01.480 Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins.

00:27:03.280 You've rhetorically just smacked them around for years, very powerfully so.

00:27:08.400 It seems to me that they are on the decline.

00:27:10.880 They're in mortal decline, and there is a hunger on campus for some meaning.

00:27:16.120 I think it's why Jordan Peterson's book is selling so well.

00:27:19.380 I think it's why everyone is so sick of the shrieking girl at Yale and all of this.

00:27:23.720 Jordan Peterson is your example, shorty. 0.99

00:27:26.220 Well, he's a very popular example.

00:27:28.500 That's why I bring him up.

00:27:29.740 I think even that, this is, you know, there's an age of,

00:27:34.320 I think there's a sense that the only moral thought these days,

00:27:37.500 the only moral framework is if it feels good, do it,

00:27:40.520 and there's no meaning to anything.

00:27:42.240 And so even the suggestion that one ought to make one's bed and clean one's room

00:27:47.240 is earth-shattering to a lot of people.

00:27:49.700 Do you share my hope for this culture right now, for the very near-coming age,

00:27:55.620 or do you think we're just going to hell in a handbasket?

00:27:58.520 Well, okay, let me unpack that.

00:28:01.680 I think you're right, the period of the new, I mean,

00:28:04.700 writing about the new atheists was convenient because it meant not having to construct straw men. 0.98

00:28:09.700 They more or less built themselves out of straw, and that was a silly group. 0.62

00:28:15.960 And that was a publishing fad. 0.81

00:28:17.400 I don't know if it was ever quite the movement they imagined it was,

00:28:21.900 but it answered a certain, for a niche market in publishing.

00:28:28.300 I don't know if there's a new hunger for meaning.

00:28:33.460 I think there's a perennial hunger that expresses itself differently from time to time,

00:28:39.100 from age to age, from period to period.

00:28:41.280 I hope it's not a hunger that Jordan Peterson would be able to fulfill,

00:28:45.320 because I think he's a hack,

00:28:47.280 but a mediocrity who's made a lot of money by doing from a different angle,

00:28:55.960 much what a new age writer would do.

00:28:58.980 This may be your angle to convert Jordan.

00:29:01.160 I had him on the show,

00:29:02.300 and I tried to get him to announce that he was getting baptized or something,

00:29:06.240 but this is like the good cop, bad cop, maybe.

00:29:08.580 This angle, perhaps yours will work.

00:29:11.520 My disagreement, my much profounder,

00:29:13.780 I just think that it's a pastiche of reasonably bad scholarship by a second-rate mind.

00:29:21.200 I don't care what his aims are, one way or the other. 0.95

00:29:25.320 I just think it's silly.

00:29:27.140 But it's profitable.

00:29:29.460 But maybe you're right.

00:29:30.580 Maybe what it answers to, but I don't know how popular he is.

00:29:33.940 I haven't seen his work popular with anyone that I wouldn't have expected it to be popular with.

00:29:39.600 That is, people who already like to hear that they should make their beds.

00:29:43.100 So I think that's not where you look.

00:29:46.400 You look rather whether there's fatigue in general with complacent disbelief, and I have seen that.

00:29:54.000 And the hunger can take many different forms.

00:29:56.300 It can express itself – I mean, it doesn't fit into a single obvious political pattern or social – but what it does, what I have seen is more and more students who are – students and faculty, too, who feel much more comfortable talking about the sense that they're not –

00:30:21.540 You know, they find the materialist view of reality not only unfulfilling but implausible, that they want more.

00:30:27.460 I have encountered that more in the past five years than I had in the previous 15.

00:30:32.020 So I think you may be right about that.

00:30:35.540 Where it will lead, I don't know.

00:30:37.020 I mean, I don't know if we're going to hell in a handbasket.

00:30:39.420 I always tend to think we're already there.

00:30:43.020 See, I don't actually tend to idealize the past.

00:30:47.100 I remember, you know, I'm just old enough to remember a Christian America in which people could go to church on Sunday and then go cast a vote for George Wallace a couple days later.

00:31:02.680 So I don't have a warm, rosy picture of the Christian America of the past. 0.98

00:31:08.800 What I do believe is that the desire for God is a natural eros in the soul that can't be repressed and that sooner or later it's going to break out in individuals and in whole generations in new ways.

00:31:26.300 And I think you're right.

00:31:28.300 I can only say in a vague way – I'm not sure where it's going – but at least there's – they're no longer intimidated by the new atheists.

00:31:37.340 They don't believe that they enjoy the rational high ground. 0.99

00:31:41.880 And I think part of that is there have been very effective answers, not just from me, but from a lot of you who pointed out just how irrational and fideistic and intolerant and rather stupid this movement was. 0.98

00:31:55.340 You know, I was asked a question at Ithaca College about the new atheists, basically.

00:32:00.440 And I do hope that there is this response now, and I think we're seeing it happen, which is not sentimental, it isn't shallow, it involves serious words and new fresh translations and serious scholarship,

00:32:16.500 and which basically punches the intellectual bullying and the absurd intellectual bullying of the new atheists right back and says,

00:32:25.480 no, they don't occupy the rational high ground, they don't occupy any particularly intellectual or sophisticated ground at all, and all shallows are clear.

00:32:35.200 Yeah, there's not a single genuinely distinguished philosopher among them.

00:32:40.280 And the only trained philosopher is Daniel Dennett, but that's different from saying distinguished.

00:32:45.420 I think a more honest atheist aware of the relative plausibility of atheism or theism or something has yet to be defined would be someone like Thomas Nagel,

00:32:59.860 who is unable to believe, who is unable to believe, doesn't want to believe, has a real revulsion at the idea of belief, as frankly all of us do at times, you know,

00:33:10.800 but nonetheless recognizes how deep the problems are just at a logical level with the project of a metaphysical naturalism or a physicalism.

00:33:22.440 And I think the veil of illusion has been somewhat pulled back.

00:33:29.540 I think more and more sophisticated answers to the very unsophisticated books that the new atheists produced have made more and more people realize that these are not rationalists, 1.00

00:33:42.720 they're just fundamentalists of a particularly dreary and intolerant kind.

00:33:47.200 Well, that's a good reason to hope. That's a good place to leave it on an Easter episode or an Easter adjacent episode post-Easter for us

00:33:55.420 and still in the fasting and penitential period for you.

00:33:59.000 Well, happy heretic Easter to you. 1.00

00:34:03.900 Listen, I not only get called a heretic for my religion, I get called a heretic for many, many other reasons.

00:34:09.940 So I'm...

00:34:11.380 I'm glad we didn't talk politics.

00:34:13.380 I did. I will tell the audience, I promised David we would not talk politics.

00:34:18.640 And another reason I don't want to talk politics with David is he's much smarter than I am.

00:34:23.100 So I don't want to even open up that.

00:34:26.420 Thank you.

00:34:27.780 The only thing I will suggest, and we won't talk politics online,

00:34:31.960 but because I've so enjoyed your wonderful translation and so much of your writing for years,

00:34:37.100 I could send you my literary magnum opus, which I published last year.

00:34:41.880 But I will send that in the mail.

00:34:44.220 It's much lighter reading.

00:34:45.640 Is it called the blank pages?

00:34:46.600 It would be the blank pages.

00:34:48.280 And if perhaps there could be translations, there are ample opportunities.

00:34:53.860 But I will say I probably took a fair bit more out of your translation of the New Testament.

00:34:59.140 Well, maybe we should talk politics sometime.

00:35:04.100 The problem is that I've not...

00:35:08.180 Since I dislike both political parties in this country, the major political parties, ferociously,

00:35:15.900 that I only...

00:35:18.140 You know, I abstained so long from voting for the major party

00:35:22.340 that I don't know if I have a right now to complain at the state of affairs that bothered me.

00:35:28.140 But anyway, all right.

00:35:30.220 I think there are probably a lot of people watching and listening who would agree with that take as well.

00:35:36.320 David, thank you so much for being here.

00:35:38.380 David Bentley Hart, you can read him all over the place.

00:35:41.320 I've been reading him for years, and I really hope the fear with things like a new translation of the New Testament

00:35:49.120 or the writing of a distinguished philosopher and theologian

00:35:52.720 is that it reaches a smaller audience or a more distinguished audience.

00:35:56.860 And I hope many more people will engage with it because the reading can be blissful.

00:36:03.080 David, thank you for being here.

00:36:05.020 All right.

00:36:05.280 Well, thank you.

00:36:05.960 Take care.

00:36:07.240 We have got...

00:36:07.940 Now we've got to talk about politics.

00:36:09.320 Now that I promised David we wouldn't talk about politics,

00:36:11.780 but now we have to talk about politics, and I've got to sign off.

00:36:14.960 If you are not on DailyWire.com, I'm sorry.

00:36:18.220 You cannot get the...

00:36:19.240 And there is...

00:36:19.860 We've gone through all this good news.

00:36:21.340 Now you've got to get the bad news.

00:36:22.420 Because there's some political bad news, but there's a glimmer of hope in there too.

00:36:25.820 Go to DailyWire.com.

00:36:26.780 Why?

00:36:26.940 You get me.

00:36:27.400 You get the Andrew Klavan Show.

00:36:28.160 You get the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:36:29.500 You can subscribe for $10 a month or $100 for an annual membership.

00:36:34.940 That's okay.

00:36:35.480 You get the shows.

00:36:36.020 You get to ask questions in the mailbag.

00:36:37.400 Blah, blah, blah.

00:36:37.920 Who cares?

00:36:38.280 No one wants that.

00:36:39.940 This is the real key.

00:36:41.520 This is the real key, folks.

00:36:43.200 The leftist tears tumbler.

00:36:45.720 Now look, I was without this for a week.

00:36:48.300 I was in New York.

00:36:49.480 I was in one of the lefty capitals of the entire world.

00:36:52.540 And I almost drowned.

00:36:54.520 I made it through by the skin of my teeth.

00:36:56.380 I had straws up, you know, trying to breathe in like people in, you know, war ravaged countries.

00:37:01.380 Make sure you have the leftist tears tumbler.

00:37:03.080 It's the only FDA approved device to handle all those salty, delicious, leftist, la, la, la.

00:37:07.640 Salty, delicious, leftist tears.

00:37:09.400 We'll be right back with all of the bad political news.

00:37:19.480 All right.

00:37:23.840 Here's the news roundup.

00:37:24.760 Here are the things you haven't heard about.

00:37:25.940 Maybe you have heard, but you haven't heard the whole story.

00:37:28.020 Facebook is now fact-checking photos.

00:37:31.160 They're fact-checking your photos.

00:37:32.560 We knew this was going to happen.

00:37:33.920 This is being reported as though this is something new.

00:37:36.460 This is nothing new.

00:37:37.720 I actually had the experience of this on election day in 2016.

00:37:41.640 And it wasn't really written about.

00:37:43.240 It wasn't reported.

00:37:43.920 I posted a photo making fun of Hillary Clinton and Democrat voters, you know, just a little joke meme or something.

00:37:51.280 My account was shut down for 24 hours.

00:37:53.460 My account was suspended on Facebook.

00:37:55.020 They've been doing this for a long time.

00:37:57.220 Now it's being reported that they're going to fact-check images.

00:38:00.900 How are they going to do that?

00:38:01.880 I don't know.

00:38:02.240 They have all of our information.

00:38:04.500 Fact-checking is not a good thing.

00:38:06.180 Fact-checking is one of these new euphemisms that we use.

00:38:09.420 Fact-checkers or fact-checking.

00:38:11.400 It's a euphemism used by the left to mean left-wing opinion that we will present as fact.

00:38:18.220 That's what fact-checking is.

00:38:19.880 It's why sites like PolitiFact lean so far to the left.

00:38:25.140 They're much harder on Republicans than they are on Democrats.

00:38:27.800 It's why now when you look for right-wing sites on the internet, on Google, they will serve you left-wing fact-checkers in there.

00:38:35.620 It's just another euphemism.

00:38:37.720 And they're trying to say, we have facts and all you have are your feelings or whatever.

00:38:42.040 And that's why we have to have people who say that facts don't care about your feelings.

00:38:45.300 It's really disingenuous.

00:38:46.940 It's really dishonest.

00:38:48.160 This also is funny being juxtaposed with what former Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth wrote in 2016 in a memo where he wrote,

00:38:55.840 Okay, he's been criticized for this.

00:39:14.480 He's now disavowed that.

00:39:15.560 He said, I didn't believe it at the time.

00:39:16.720 No, no, I don't really believe it.

00:39:17.940 But I actually agree with him.

00:39:20.200 I don't know that it is connecting people, but it's the freedom.

00:39:24.320 It's the freedom.

00:39:25.120 This is the argument against freedom or for freedom, which is that freedom involves risk and freedom involves the possibility of death.

00:39:33.180 When you have freedom, maybe someone's going to abuse that freedom and hurt someone else and attack someone or bully someone or whatever.

00:39:40.380 That is an actual negative cost of freedom, but that is the price.

00:39:44.180 That's why freedom isn't free.

00:39:45.480 That's the expression freedom isn't free means there is a cost to your freedom.

00:39:50.260 Ronald Reagan talked about this in A Time for Choosing.

00:39:52.840 He said the only way that you can be guaranteed to have peace is surrender.

00:39:57.980 When did life become so dear and peace so sweet that they would be purchased at the hands of chains and slavery?

00:40:03.260 You can have this totalitarian malaise where attacks aren't quite likely to happen except by the government on you,

00:40:10.360 except by the people with the power against you, or you can have freedom.

00:40:13.900 Freedom involves a lot of risk.

00:40:16.520 Unfortunately, Facebook clearly wants to have its cake and eat it too.

00:40:20.640 It changes its tune depending on the news cycle.

00:40:23.320 They're very upset that Republicans are using their tools and succeeding.

00:40:28.140 When Democrats used their tools, no one cared.

00:40:30.100 Everyone was happy.

00:40:30.800 It was wonderful.

00:40:31.360 It was a great strategy.

00:40:32.520 Now that Republicans are doing it, they're very upset.

00:40:34.580 They're going to keep fighting it.

00:40:35.440 This is going to really further hurt the conservative media industry.

00:40:41.100 It's already put some people out of business.

00:40:43.040 It's already put others, non-political people out of business.

00:40:45.860 You're seeing a lot of thought pieces, think pieces coming out today saying,

00:40:50.960 oh, it doesn't really matter.

00:40:52.220 Conservatives are whining.

00:40:53.180 They're exaggerating.

00:40:54.220 This is targeted.

00:40:55.400 This is to put us out of business.

00:40:57.220 And hopefully something else will come up.

00:40:58.760 But don't believe a word of it when they say this isn't trying to attack conservatives.

00:41:01.440 Conservatives, that's explicitly the point.

00:41:03.580 In other news, students at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs,

00:41:07.000 have been given extra credit for attending a white privilege conference.

00:41:10.300 Some of the classes at this conference are breaking the chains of capitalism and white supremacy,

00:41:16.060 the whiteness of law, and how whiteness kills.

00:41:20.180 And the last part, that is true.

00:41:22.500 Whiteness can lead to skin cancer. 0.89

00:41:24.520 That is true.

00:41:25.080 So it can kill.

00:41:26.320 It's very sad when that happens.

00:41:27.800 That's why I try to remain a little swarthy, keep my tan all year long.

00:41:30.960 They're getting extra credit for this.

00:41:32.700 And I spoke to students last week.

00:41:34.160 I was on the campuses last week.

00:41:35.880 Some students said that there are professors who won't call on white men.

00:41:39.240 They'll call on every aggrieved intersectional group in that hierarchy of victimhood. 0.93

00:41:43.920 They'll call on all of them first before they will call on white men. 0.93

00:41:47.900 We're talking about religion a lot for this Easter episode and the New Testament episode. 0.96

00:41:51.800 White privilege is original sin for atheists.

00:41:54.300 That's all it is. 0.93

00:41:55.240 It's just a religious construct for people who pretend that they don't have religion.

00:41:59.100 Everybody's got to serve somebody, and that's what they do.

00:42:02.400 And atheists have a lot of religious concepts.

00:42:04.640 They have the carbon tax.

00:42:06.180 That's their version of buying indulgences. 0.51

00:42:08.620 That's what white privilege is. 0.67

00:42:09.920 And it's the reason why when you disagree with it, they attack you like you are attacking somebody's religion.

00:42:14.680 Because they don't hold it like a rational view or like a view that is scientific or something like that.

00:42:21.260 They view it as a religious tenet.

00:42:23.500 And so when we debate this with them, we have to understand we're debating religion.

00:42:27.140 We're not debating some sociological observation.

00:42:31.040 This is all very not good news for the culture, but this is good news for politics.

00:42:35.340 And I'll close on this point.

00:42:36.400 50% of likely voters now approve of President Trump's job in office.

00:42:43.060 This is according to the daily presidential approval poll.

00:42:46.500 50% of likely voters approve of President Trump's job in office.

00:42:49.980 49% disapprove.

00:42:51.300 This outpaces Barack Obama in the approval ratings.

00:42:53.900 At this time, on this date, in Barack Obama's presidency, he only had a 46% approval rating.

00:42:59.980 Donald Trump has a 50% one.

00:43:01.360 Now, you might be shocked to hear that because you watch CNN or something,

00:43:04.020 and you think he had a 3% approval rating.

00:43:06.580 50%.

00:43:07.020 We did a whole show on the silent majority.

00:43:09.200 We did a whole show on Roseanne representing the silent majority.

00:43:12.560 Look, Roseanne's ratings blew every other sitcom out of the water for a long time. 0.99

00:43:17.600 Why?

00:43:18.000 Because it represented that silent majority.

00:43:20.560 This is what we're seeing.

00:43:21.680 Now, we shouldn't forget Barack Obama had a pretty good approval rating,

00:43:24.660 and he got killed in the 2010 midterm elections.

00:43:27.220 He got blown out of the water.

00:43:30.240 That said, models only work in normal times.

00:43:32.600 President Trump is not a normal character.

00:43:34.640 With Barack Obama, people really liked him personally, but they just despised his policies.

00:43:40.240 We don't really see that with Donald Trump.

00:43:42.260 If anything, people don't like him personally, but they do like what he's doing in office.

00:43:46.820 So this could be not just pretty good news for Republicans.

00:43:50.980 This could be excellent news for Republicans.

00:43:53.240 CNBC is reporting if the midterm elections were held today,

00:43:55.900 five Senate Democrats would lose to Republicans.

00:43:58.240 That's according to surveys by Axios and SurveyMonkeys.

00:44:00.620 In six of ten states with seats up for grabs, President Trump's approval rating is higher than his national rating.

00:44:07.920 This is all good news.

00:44:09.300 We shouldn't get complacent.

00:44:11.180 But there are two things happening here.

00:44:12.820 What you're observing is this awful culture, and all of the culture makers, 1.00

00:44:17.360 the universities and Hollywood and the technology companies like Facebook,

00:44:20.980 that pretend to be tech companies, but really they're media companies,

00:44:23.900 the largest publishing company in the history of the world.

00:44:25.900 You're seeing all the culture makers destroying the culture, doing their best to destroy this culture and knock it down.

00:44:32.480 And then what you're seeing is the people who have to live in that culture fighting back,

00:44:36.180 and they're reacting, and they don't like it. 0.95

00:44:38.160 It's why Hollywood has spit out how much garbage in the last however many years,

00:44:42.500 including reboots, including nostalgia reboots, Will and Grace. 0.83

00:44:45.500 The one that people like is Roseanne.

00:44:47.580 The one that's different.

00:44:48.840 The one that talks to reality.

00:44:50.600 The one that talks to the silent majority.

00:44:52.020 You're seeing this at the polls, these people reacting and saying,

00:44:55.820 huh, you know, first of all, clearly the silent majority isn't totally silent

00:45:00.260 because they're answering these polls with some of their voice.

00:45:04.480 They are saying, oh, 50%, okay, we approve of what he's doing.

00:45:07.700 But you're seeing them pushing back and pushing back against that culture.

00:45:10.640 Keep fighting back because they have all of the cultural power.

00:45:13.920 So what we can do is go to the ballot box and be prepared because if they beat us,

00:45:18.700 if they even sort of plausibly beat us, even though all of history is for the Democrats

00:45:23.720 to win these midterm elections, they are going to clobber us with it.

00:45:27.560 They are going to clobber us as hard as they can.

00:45:29.620 They're already trying to shut down our venues that we have in new media

00:45:32.580 and our few strongholds in the traditional media industry.

00:45:36.820 Don't let them do it.

00:45:37.880 You have to be vigilant.

00:45:39.140 We have to work twice as hard, but there is a glimmer of hope there.

00:45:42.320 A little hope, a little good news for this Easter.

00:45:44.860 There's a lot of other good news too.

00:45:45.880 I am Michael Knowles.

00:45:47.820 This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:45:49.020 We've got a lot more to talk about, but we'll just have to do it tomorrow.

00:45:51.700 See you then.

00:46:15.880 This is Anthony Wright, Forward Publishing 2018.

The Michael Knowles Show - April 02, 2018

Ep. 131 - The New New Testament ft. David Bentley Hart

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Summary

Transcript