The Michael Knowles Show - December 25, 2024


＂The War On Christmas＂ ｜ Bishop Robert Barron

Topics
voluntarism freedom paradox
Hosted by
Michael Knowles
Guests
Bishop Robert Barron
Mentioned
Thomas Aquinas Advent Bishop Barron Jesus Christ Paul Regensburg Address Jonathan Rumi Lauren Daigle Donozo Cortez Francis Chan Gwen Stefani Russell Kirk Santa Claus Bear Grylls Kevin James Jeff Cavins Put Jesus Ibn Hazm Shakespeare Aristotle and 7 more
Ep. 1642 - Superman Is Political, Says Director James Gunn Blackface, Seed Oils, & Diddy ｜ YES or NO： John Crist

Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

174.33

Word count

4,741

Sentence count

423

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On this episode of Theology Thursday, we have a special guest on the show, Bishop John Barron of the Diocese of Winona Rochester, Minnesota. John and I discuss the role of faith in our understanding of the world, and how it relates to the Christian faith.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:30.360 For those of you who don't know, Bishop Barron is not only the bishop of YouTube,
00:00:34.780 Bishop Barron is also the bishop of Winona Rochester in Minnesota.
00:00:39.300 Your Excellency, I feel like I just saw you.
00:00:42.120 Well, you just did.
00:00:43.800 That's why. That's right. I was just up in Minnesota.
00:00:47.180 And we had a marvelous conversation, as I always find our conversations to be marvelous.
00:00:54.200 But a topic came up that we didn't have a chance to discuss too much.
00:00:58.500 So I said, all right, we have to talk about it on the show for Theology Thursday.
00:01:02.340 Your Excellency, people are going to expect us to talk about Advent or about Christmas, which everyone is trying to rush along, or about Santa Claus or something.
00:01:12.580 But I want to talk about something much more important, and that is voluntarism.
00:01:16.880 Does that work for you?
00:01:19.380 Well, it works for me for sure.
00:01:21.260 It's a great issue.
00:01:22.100 It's a great question.
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00:02:05.520 What do you want to know about voluntarism?
00:02:07.540 Well, what I want to know is, while conservatives typically, we play this game, we say, when did things go off the rails?
00:02:15.100 Was it in the 1960s?
00:02:16.640 No, it was in the 1830s.
00:02:19.520 No, it was in the Enlightenment.
00:02:21.240 No, it was in the French Revolution.
00:02:23.720 The 1360s.
00:02:24.980 It was the 1360s.
00:02:26.720 There is this issue that has cropped up.
00:02:30.200 And even as people discuss faith, sometimes they will say, well, look, faith means you can't reason about something.
00:02:37.400 You know, faith is the absence of reason.
00:02:39.220 You just have to take a leap of faith and forget about logic and reason.
00:02:42.480 And some will attack that.
00:02:45.320 The atheists will attack that. 0.99
00:02:47.200 And some will defend.
00:02:48.000 Some even Christians will say, no, it's fine.
00:02:49.800 I've got my logic and my reason and my science over here.
00:02:52.260 And I've just got my faith, my God's will over here.
00:02:56.340 That's called voluntarism.
00:02:59.540 Well, I mean, you're raising there the faith reason problem. 0.92
00:03:03.240 That's a very serious problem.
00:03:04.500 And the roots of that go back at least to the Reformation.
00:03:07.880 You know, Luther didn't hesitate to say that whore reason because he wanted so to emphasize the Bible and so emphasize faith. 0.97
00:03:15.340 He didn't like the scholastic method that used, you know, reason.
00:03:19.280 Well, of course, that's not the Catholic tradition at all.
00:03:21.560 That's always said, fides et ratio, faith and reason.
00:03:24.620 And construes faith never as infrarational or below reason, but suprarational.
00:03:31.240 It's beyond reason. 1.00
00:03:32.600 Anything infrarational, that's called silliness or superstition or stupidity or naivete. 0.99
00:03:38.140 We're against that. 0.99
00:03:39.920 The Church is against anything below reason.
00:03:42.360 But what's above reason, when reason becomes aware of its own limits?
00:03:46.980 And that's a very interesting question philosophically.
00:03:49.440 Like when the sciences become aware of their own limit, that's when things get really interesting.
00:03:54.760 When you begin searching out in a kind of meta-questioning way, what are the conditions for the possibility of science?
00:04:01.000 Now you're getting into something much more like mysticism, much closer to faith if you want.
00:04:06.900 So that's the right way to construe faith and reason.
00:04:09.500 Voluntarism, in a way, you're right, is kind of a modality of that.
00:04:14.660 The voluntarist position, which is very ancient, but boy, it crops up throughout the centuries and it's present today.
00:04:21.180 And it's always a source of mischief, says, I'm going to privilege the divine will, voluntas, hence voluntarism,
00:04:28.800 the divine will over the divine reason, over the divine mind.
00:04:32.580 But God is so sovereignly absolute that his will determines everything.
00:04:39.120 Now look at the upshot of that.
00:04:40.960 How come 2 plus 2 equals 4?
00:04:42.940 Well, God willed it.
00:04:44.380 How come adultery is a sin?
00:04:46.020 Well, God decided.
00:04:47.640 Could God decide 2 plus 3 equals 5?
00:04:50.100 Sure, he's God, after all.
00:04:52.140 Could adultery be a virtue?
00:04:54.120 Sure, if God determined.
00:04:55.880 Well, you can find that position all throughout the tradition in certain extremist folks.
00:05:00.560 The Catholic tradition has always militated powerfully against it because it turns God into an arbitrary tyrant
00:05:09.300 and it causes us to lose complete confidence in anything like reason.
00:05:14.200 If 2 plus 2 could be 5, well then, how do I know anything in mathematics or geometry or whatever?
00:05:21.640 I think we talked about this the other day.
00:05:23.420 Look in certain extreme forms of wokeism where you have even mathematics is being questioned as a kind of expression of patriarchy.
00:05:33.020 That's in its own way an expression of voluntarism.
00:05:36.380 The church stands athwart voluntarism.
00:05:39.520 The solution, if you want, is in our hero Thomas Aquinas, who sees the divine mind and divine will basically coinciding.
00:05:47.480 See, will is a modality of mind.
00:05:51.140 What I mean there, what Thomas means, is the good, once known as good, is ipso facto willed.
00:06:00.640 The will is a modality of the intellect.
00:06:03.000 When the intellect knows the good as good, it wants it, it desires it.
00:06:07.920 So, what's God's will?
00:06:09.720 It's the same as the divine mind.
00:06:11.400 God knows himself as supremely good and so he wills his good.
00:06:16.200 But that's why the divine mind and will coincide.
00:06:19.240 When they split apart, as they do in voluntarism, all kinds of mischief ensues.
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00:07:34.860 The first time I ever even encountered the notion of volunteerism was actually not from within the Christian tradition or even the liberal political tradition or wokeism or whatever.
00:07:46.320 It was in Pope Benedict's Regensburg Address when he was discussing Islam.
00:07:50.900 And he was quoting a medieval Islamic writer, Ibn Hazm, who said that Allah is totally transcendent, such that if Allah willed for you to worship idols, you ought to do that.
00:08:04.680 And that this is different than the Christian version, which understands our Lord as the divine logic of the universe, as the logos.
00:08:12.040 So I always considered it to be some foreign thing.
00:08:15.340 But you do see it crop up within even the broad Christian tradition.
00:08:19.400 You do indeed.
00:08:21.460 And that's a very interesting test case of it.
00:08:23.420 And that's exactly what happens.
00:08:24.860 When you give pride a place to voluntas, to will, well, then the thing is open-ended.
00:08:30.400 That's why Descartes, who was certainly a Christian, certainly a believer, said, yes, two plus two could be equal to five if God so desired.
00:08:38.640 But that means something's broken apart in our fundamental metaphysics.
00:08:43.000 The metaphysics, again, it's that of Aquinas, which is the divine simplicity.
00:08:47.000 God is not a being, but ipsum esse, the sheer act of to be itself, in and through which all things come to be.
00:08:54.460 So we're creatures through the power of God sustaining us.
00:08:58.380 Well, that means, furthermore, that the divine truth, logos, can be discerned in creation.
00:09:04.780 As I look, mathematics, science, psychology, sociology, any of the logoi are reflections of the supreme logos of God.
00:09:13.400 That's the ground for that whole approach to faith and reason, and that gives us confidence in knowing the world.
00:09:20.180 A voluntarism undermines that, because now logos is subordinated to will, and so things are up for grabs.
00:09:28.760 Why did the sciences emerge when and where they did, precisely out of the Christian universities?
00:09:33.980 Because of the supreme confidence that the world is marked by logos in every nook and cranny.
00:09:39.240 That's the mysticism underneath any science.
00:09:43.580 You have to assume, I'm going to meet a world that's marked by objective intelligibility.
00:09:48.340 Well, that's grounded in the logos of the creator God.
00:09:51.400 If you separate logos and voluntas, that all falls apart.
00:09:56.260 Now, welcome in some ways to a lot of the excesses of the modern world came from a breakdown in what we call participation metaphysics.
00:10:04.520 That's what Aquinas was defending.
00:10:05.820 So, how is that the case?
00:10:08.260 Because there are going to be a lot of people listening who say, all right, well, this is interesting enough, but, you know, does it really matter in my everyday?
00:10:15.560 I don't think about metaphysics.
00:10:17.940 You know, I say my prayers.
00:10:19.800 I do my job.
00:10:20.460 How does it matter?
00:10:21.780 Well, here's how.
00:10:24.540 We are meant to imitate God.
00:10:26.180 That's what it means to live an upright life, is that you live in imitation of God.
00:10:30.320 What does that look like on a Thomas reading?
00:10:32.040 It looks like I'm going to discern the objective values that are out there in the world, the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I'm going to try to bring my interiority into line with those objectivities.
00:10:42.520 So, I'm going to become the person God wants me to be, and those intelligibilities are on display within nature.
00:10:48.960 Okay, that's a classically Catholic view.
00:10:51.300 Now, take the opposite.
00:10:52.400 If the voluntarist God is supreme, will is the supreme thing, well, then I should imitate that.
00:10:59.920 My will becomes the determiner of being and truth and meaning and value.
00:11:05.420 Hey, what's good?
00:11:06.360 Well, I mean, don't you tell me.
00:11:08.000 There's good for you, good for me.
00:11:09.680 I've decided my value system.
00:11:11.860 You decide your value system.
00:11:13.620 Now, welcome to wokeism.
00:11:15.420 Welcome to the world that we largely inhabit.
00:11:17.480 See, I would argue, Michael, that voluntarism is the default epistemology of most teenagers in the West today, right?
00:11:25.580 I'm like a little god or goddess.
00:11:28.000 I determine the meaning of my life.
00:11:31.260 But see, the whole point of classical spirituality is not that awful game, but now to bring my life into alignment with objective, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic value.
00:11:43.340 So, it has a huge effect.
00:11:45.400 I think in many ways the patron saint of modern voluntarism would be Nietzsche, right?
00:11:50.460 Yes.
00:11:50.760 God is dead.
00:11:52.080 Okay, once God is dead, well, now I'm beyond good and evil, right?
00:11:56.220 Another book of Nietzsche's.
00:11:57.720 If I'm beyond good and evil, what's left?
00:11:59.880 Ubermensch, the uber, the supreme will, right?
00:12:04.140 So, I'm going to impose my will as much as I can.
00:12:06.900 You'll do the same thing.
00:12:08.180 What do we have?
00:12:09.400 A conflictual society.
00:12:10.880 Again, welcome to much of wokeism is a sort of popularization of Nietzsche mediated through Foucault, who was one of Nietzsche's great disciples.
00:12:19.840 So, my point is, and I'm glad you pressed it, is these seemingly, you know, arcane, logic-chopping medieval debates have huge implications for our situation today.
00:12:31.460 And even, you mentioned Nietzsche, this means that this is not merely a problem for the political left.
00:12:37.560 I mean, I'm all for taking shots at the left, and I do it frequently.
00:12:40.500 But this also becomes a problem for the right, because there are people who are in thrall of Nietzsche.
00:12:46.560 Or there are people who come out of even certain aspects of Protestantism that seem to favor a more voluntarist view of things,
00:12:54.020 who I think will just even unthinkingly embrace that understanding of God.
00:13:01.660 If they believe in God at all.
00:13:02.440 You know, can I make a perhaps provocative statement?
00:13:05.780 What we call left and right in our political situation can often be just debates within a fundamentally modernist point of view.
00:13:15.960 And what I'm advocating, and here I stand with people like Russell Kirk, you know, it's that kind of conservatism that I would embrace.
00:13:22.340 Because, in a way, he tended to say a plague on both your houses, because he didn't want just to have a debate between elements of modernism.
00:13:31.440 He wanted this classical view that's really different from the modern view.
00:13:36.800 And even as that splits between more liberal and more conservative, what's needed is a really different point of view.
00:13:43.760 And I would say now, speaking as a Catholic bishop and theologian, one that comes up out of this very integrated participation metaphysics.
00:13:52.300 I find that's beautiful.
00:13:56.020 When I argue with some of my friends, even on the right, I find myself viewing left and right sometimes as just two sides of the same coin.
00:14:05.580 The same coin of a fundamentally liberal modernity.
00:14:08.300 And modernity, which looks back and mocks the scholastics, metaphysicians like St. Thomas Aquinas, and say, you know, they're all just quibbling over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
00:14:20.780 But it actually seems to me, I think it matters how many angels can, it matters at least what an angel is, doesn't it?
00:14:26.980 Yes, and of course, what you're putting your finger on there is a tendency within largely Protestant historiography, intellectual historiography, to mock the Middle Ages, to mock all this medieval superstition.
00:14:40.400 Well, come on.
00:14:41.120 Anyone that reads the serious scholastics with an open mind realizes these are some of those brilliant people that the West produced.
00:14:48.460 And they were wrestling with questions that, as we've been saying, have huge implications for now.
00:14:52.840 Here's another one, if I could just be brief about it.
00:14:54.780 The question of freedom, right?
00:14:56.880 We're Americans, we're the land of the free, and we believe in freedom, you know?
00:15:00.440 Well, so does the great Catholic tradition, but it tends to construe freedom in a different way.
00:15:06.640 On a more modern reading, and that's why I said 1360, because people like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham come into play here.
00:15:13.880 What's freedom?
00:15:15.140 Well, it's hovering above the yes and the no.
00:15:17.820 And on the basis of no constraint, external or internal, I decide.
00:15:22.420 I decide, I go A or B.
00:15:25.660 But see, that's not Aquinas' understanding of freedom at all.
00:15:28.600 It's not arbitrary self-determination.
00:15:31.240 It's rather a kind of disciplining or focusing of desire so as to make the achievement of the good possible and then effortless.
00:15:40.900 So, for example, you're a very free speaker of English.
00:15:44.180 It's not because you speak any way you want, but rather you allowed the syntax and grammar and vocabulary and people like Shakespeare and so many others to guide your freedom so that now you can say whatever you want.
00:15:57.600 You can express anything you want.
00:15:59.120 The same with the moral life.
00:16:00.940 It's not, I decide to live any way I want to.
00:16:03.700 No, I've discerned objective moral values, and now I've so disciplined my will to conform to them that now being good is relatively easy to me.
00:16:13.320 That's freedom, right?
00:16:14.900 I'm free from attachment so as to be free for the achievement of the good.
00:16:20.340 But that view of freedom, that's classical.
00:16:23.660 That's Aristotle, that's Aquinas, that's the Bible.
00:16:26.200 The other one, I'm afraid, came roaring up into modernity, out of the late Middle Ages into the moderns.
00:16:32.900 And then you find this view of freedom as spontaneity.
00:16:36.440 Well, again, welcome to the mindset of every teenager in the West is that my freedom means I decide what my life is.
00:16:43.680 No, your freedom is in the beautiful adventure when guided by a mentor, you discern objective values.
00:16:50.340 And then you learn how to bring your life into line with them.
00:16:53.140 Now we're talking.
00:16:55.020 Now we're on the road to real happiness and not just an adolescent self-expression.
00:17:01.420 Yes, I remember I encountered this when I was reading Donozo Cortez, the counter-revolutionary writer, who made this point.
00:17:09.580 And it's a point that Dante makes earlier.
00:17:12.020 This is a point that the ancients make quite clearly.
00:17:15.520 That freedom is not neutrality of choice, but that freedom is willing, predicated on knowing, meaning that it is grounded in the truth.
00:17:25.980 And the way it clicked for me, you know, sometimes I'm a little bit slow, having had my very modern liberal education.
00:17:32.920 Liberal in the unfortunate sense, not the classical sense.
00:17:35.620 I said, how do I make sense of this?
00:17:37.920 And Cortez points out, if freedom were merely just neutral choosing, then we would be freer than God.
00:17:46.180 Because God does not sin.
00:17:47.980 God does not.
00:17:48.500 So, but I'm pretty sure I'm not freer than God.
00:17:51.780 Therefore, I must conclude the old version is right.
00:17:54.540 Right.
00:17:55.100 That's a very interesting observation.
00:17:57.180 Aquinas in the Summa entertains the question whether God can sin.
00:18:00.720 And you're tempted to say, well, sure, of course, if God's free and he's God, and I can sin, little old me, I can sin.
00:18:07.800 Of course God can sin.
00:18:09.700 And Thomas says, no, God can't sin.
00:18:12.400 Now, on a modern reading, well, that doesn't really make a lot of sense.
00:18:16.340 Classical reading makes perfect sense.
00:18:18.200 Why?
00:18:18.880 Because God's will is utterly congruent with his mind.
00:18:22.000 And God can't deviate from his own manner of being.
00:18:25.980 And so, of course, God can't sin.
00:18:27.540 But that's where his freedom lies.
00:18:29.780 See, that's why he's free.
00:18:31.640 Now, look at the saints.
00:18:33.600 A saint is someone who's achieved such a heroic virtue.
00:18:38.080 That's kind of an Aristotelian sense of virtue.
00:18:40.040 A heroic virtue that it's easy to be good.
00:18:43.840 It's easy for the saint to be good.
00:18:45.820 The trouble with us sinners is that we're always struggling against the person we're meant to be.
00:18:50.440 But, again, the idea is to imitate the way God is free, not the way the voluntarist God is free.
00:18:57.420 That's the teenager today.
00:18:59.020 I'm going to invent my own life.
00:19:00.540 But that's a fantasy both in regard to God and in regard to our own wills.
00:19:04.480 So, then, how do we shake off of it?
00:19:07.160 Because I totally agree with everything you've said.
00:19:11.000 And I see that the rot runs very deep.
00:19:13.520 And I see that most people entertain this conception of God and of freedom, this false conception, without even really knowing it.
00:19:21.040 So, all right, it's been a few hundred years now.
00:19:23.820 It's been about 700 years now.
00:19:25.520 Do we just throw up our hands?
00:19:26.800 How does one remedy the situation?
00:19:29.600 Here's something I've tried.
00:19:32.180 It's a kind of mockery in a way.
00:19:34.160 But what I say to people is look at your life in regard to anything you take really seriously.
00:19:40.380 You will have a classical view of freedom, not a modern sense of freedom.
00:19:43.900 And what I mean, let's say you're a kid.
00:19:46.360 I remember when I was a kid, I was playing baseball.
00:19:47.980 And I just wanted to get better at it.
00:19:49.860 I wanted to be a better player.
00:19:52.380 Man, I studied baseball.
00:19:54.500 I looked at my day pictures of how the batters lined up.
00:19:58.560 I listened to coaches.
00:20:00.000 I practiced.
00:20:00.880 I tried.
00:20:01.620 I was trying to bring my life into conformity with the objective intelligibility of being a baseball player, right?
00:20:08.860 Or you're a golfer.
00:20:10.060 I'm a golfer now.
00:20:10.900 I'm an older person.
00:20:11.720 I can't play baseball anymore, but I golf.
00:20:13.480 Golfers are obsessed with the law.
00:20:15.280 We love the law, right?
00:20:16.940 It's not an imposition.
00:20:18.540 We're all, hey, hey, tell me, how do you put your shoulders?
00:20:21.240 And where's your elbow going?
00:20:22.520 Wait, my shoulder turn isn't right.
00:20:24.140 Give me the law that I might bring my bad golf into conformity with the norm of golf so I can be free to golf, right?
00:20:34.320 So, or playing a musical instrument or speaking a language, anything you take seriously, you don't think, play any way you want.
00:20:41.660 Just grab that club, swing any way you want to.
00:20:44.460 You'll be the worst golfer in the country.
00:20:46.820 Or, you know, hey, you want to learn French? 0.84
00:20:48.800 Don't worry about it.
00:20:49.460 Just, you know, do whatever you want.
00:20:52.200 Well, of course not.
00:20:53.440 If you take it seriously, you will adopt a classical view of freedom.
00:20:57.160 You will spontaneously move away from a modern sense of freedom.
00:21:00.820 I remember years ago when I was in parish work, there was this young mother came and she was bringing her son to be an altar server.
00:21:08.940 And she said, you know, my husband and I have decided that we're going to let him make up his own mind about what religion.
00:21:15.920 And we want to give him now a little experience of Catholicism.
00:21:18.560 And I said this same argument.
00:21:21.000 I said, yeah, but ma'am, you would never operate that way in regard to anything you take seriously.
00:21:26.360 If you wanted this young guy to play the trombone, you wouldn't say, hey, just horse around.
00:21:31.800 You'd give him trombone lessons, all right?
00:21:35.100 Or even if it were a matter, Bishop, of the, you know, the boy had an illness or something.
00:21:40.880 And the mother, you know, wanted to help him and to get better.
00:21:44.900 She wouldn't say, well, look, you go to this witch doctor. 0.99
00:21:47.740 We can go to this shaman.
00:21:48.680 We can go to this medical doctor.
00:21:50.520 And you just pick whichever one.
00:21:52.300 She would never do that.
00:21:54.600 See, it's freedom run amok.
00:21:56.080 It's a false sense of freedom now run amok.
00:21:59.440 And that's a lot of, sadly, to my mind, a lot of the contemporary scene.
00:22:04.440 And what do you see now among young people?
00:22:07.220 Spiking numbers, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation.
00:22:11.700 I'm not the least bit puzzled by that.
00:22:13.700 If you adopt a fundamentally voluntarist modern view of freedom, that's what you're going to get.
00:22:19.860 If you move into the classical view, now it's the intuition of value, the alignment of your life toward those values, which now make you come alive, right?
00:22:33.380 You know, the great image of freedom in the Christian tradition is Jesus on the cross.
00:22:39.260 And you say, well, what are you talking about?
00:22:40.660 I mean, he seems to be the most unfree person possible.
00:22:43.160 He's free from wealth, pleasure, honor, power, any of the attachments of the world.
00:22:50.480 And he's aligned utterly to the will of his father.
00:22:54.520 So it's ironic, but the great image of freedom is the cross.
00:22:59.240 Now, what does St. Paul say?
00:23:00.400 It's for freedom that Christ has set you free.
00:23:03.740 Right.
00:23:04.720 On nominalist grounds, it doesn't make a lick of sense.
00:23:08.040 On classical grounds, perfect sense.
00:23:10.260 So my message, I'm a Christian Catholic apologist and teacher, is to say, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you'll find the freedom you want.
00:23:20.720 Don't follow these priests of Baal, I mean, these false prophets.
00:23:25.420 They're not leading you to freedom.
00:23:27.060 They're leading you down a path of despair.
00:23:29.500 Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.
00:23:31.040 If I can use Paul's language again, become the slave of Christ Jesus, Paul calls himself that.
00:23:37.600 I'm the doulos Christu Jesu.
00:23:39.060 I'm the slave of Christ Jesus. 0.59
00:23:41.520 And therefore, I'm free.
00:23:44.200 So that's the paradox, but that's the gospel.
00:23:47.400 This reminds me of, you know, our Lord tells us that man who sins is a slave to sin.
00:23:52.560 You think you're free when you shoot the heroin, but you're actually a slave.
00:23:55.560 And then he says, you know, follow me, take my yoke upon you.
00:24:01.120 He's saying, take my yoke upon you.
00:24:02.480 My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
00:24:05.160 But it is a certain kind of yoke.
00:24:07.540 It is a certain kind of slavery to Christ, but it's a yoke of truth.
00:24:12.640 So you are a slave to the truth.
00:24:15.880 A good place to be.
00:24:18.260 And look how that coincides perfectly with the theology we were talking about.
00:24:21.720 See, in God, mind and will coincide because of God's simplicity.
00:24:25.740 God's mind and will are coincident.
00:24:28.340 Well, that's what we want.
00:24:29.900 See, in a way, the fall, you could describe as a falling apart of mind and will.
00:24:34.820 It's my will has gone this way away from where it should go.
00:24:38.660 And the drama of salvation, see, look at that image from the Lord of the yoke.
00:24:43.180 You yoke two animals together.
00:24:45.760 Put my yoke on yourself.
00:24:48.200 So you and I are yoked together because I am the way, he says.
00:24:52.960 So let's get yoked together, you and I, and we're going to walk together toward the Father.
00:24:57.880 And now you'll find freedom.
00:24:59.560 The trouble is you're running off trying to plow your field in some crazy way that you've decided.
00:25:04.640 It's like golf. 0.92
00:25:05.920 You'll be the worst golfer ever. 0.79
00:25:07.480 No, put my yoke on you. 0.82
00:25:09.320 And it's actually light.
00:25:10.780 It's not burdensome.
00:25:12.120 And then together we're going to walk toward the Father.
00:25:14.400 And it's a brilliant point too, Bishop, on it had not occurred to me that those who would divorce will from reason are reenacting the fall.
00:25:24.540 This is the essential cracking of the fall.
00:25:29.260 Right.
00:25:29.840 The story of the fall is our, it's every sinner's story. 0.99
00:25:32.800 That's why you're meant to move into that space.
00:25:34.340 And that's the spiritual dynamic of any sinner.
00:25:38.040 Oh, you know, that won't be true.
00:25:40.280 You'll be like God.
00:25:41.580 See, well, yes, that's exactly the problem.
00:25:43.800 You think you'll be like God, but you'll be like a false God.
00:25:48.020 See, you'll be aligning yourself to a phony false God.
00:25:52.980 Jesus says, be perfect as your heavenly Father's perfect.
00:25:56.580 Yes, we're meant to be like God, but the right one, right?
00:26:00.160 The right God, not these false gods.
00:26:03.920 Put Jesus' yoke on you and you'll make your way there. 0.97
00:26:06.980 That is a beautiful Advent message.
00:26:10.300 And, Your Excellency, there's so much more we could have talked about with Advent and Christmas and, I don't know, St. Nicholas or something like that.
00:26:17.880 But I think, actually, this topic is much more urgent, especially as we consider the final things in these days of Advent.
00:26:25.840 Your Excellency, thank you so much for coming on the show.
00:26:28.680 God bless you.
00:26:29.240 Thanks, Michael.
00:26:30.040 I'll look forward now.
00:26:30.940 I think I see you every two days now.
00:26:32.400 So I'll look forward.
00:26:32.840 I don't know.
00:26:33.080 I guess I'll go see you on Saturday or something.
00:26:34.760 Thank you to all of you for watching.
00:26:37.260 I'm Michael Knowles.
00:26:37.920 This is the Michael Knowles Show.
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