Christ, Miracle, and the Beauty of the Church

well I'm very excited to introduce this next session it's a panel discussion between three extraordinary men Bishop Robert Baron Dr Jordan Peterson and father Mike schmidtz I know many of you have been very much anticipating this dialogue you've told us as much over the last couple days first a few introductions and I'll be very brief because I want to give most of the time uh to these three men First bishop Baron I introduced him last night to you but he's of course the bishop of the dicese of Winona Chester in Minnesota he's also the founder

of w on fire Catholic Ministries he's written dozens of best-selling books he has been invited to speak about religion at the headquarters of Facebook Google and Amazon and he has been described by Arthur Brooks as arguably the greatest Catholic Communicator of our time Dr Jordan Peterson is a bestselling author psychologist online educator and professor ameritus of the unity University of Toronto he has taught mythology to lawyers doctors and business people he's consulted uh for the UN Secretary General and he's lectured extensively throughout the United States and Europe Jordan has published over 100 scientific papers transforming

the modern understanding of Personality his book maps of meaning revolutionized the psychology of religion I know many of you have read uh his two more recent books both bestsellers the first one is called 12 rules for life an antidote uh for two chaos that was published in 2018 and has sold 5 million copies and then he published a sequel recently called Beyond order 12 more rules for life which was released in 2021 finally father Mike schmidtz is a renowned Catholic priest and evangelist well known for his YouTube videos on the Ascension present Channel father Mike

is theost host of the breakout Bible in a year podcast man' how many listeners to that podcast do we have here lots of you guys good very good that became not only the number one Catholic podcast in the world but for many weeks I think for several months it was the number one podcast in the world period among any genre among any podcast producer father Mike is currently wrapping up a sequel podcast called catechism in a year where he's walking people through the catechism of the Catholic Church see we got a lot of listeners to

that one as well very good and he serves as the Director of Youth and Young Adult Ministry for the dicese of duth also in Minnesota seems to be a Powerhouse state of evangelization and he's the chaplain for the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota duth in addition to these three men we also are are blessed to have as a moderator Dr Matthew petrusic Matthew is the senior director of the word on fire Institute and it's professor of Catholic ethics Matthew has edited or authored several books including evangelization and ideology and very relevant to this

discussion he co-authored a book titled Jordan Peterson God and Christianity the search for a meaningful life which I believe everyone here received a copy of that book as a part of your registration Matthew lectures broadly in English and Spanish on moral philosophy theology politics social issues in the Catholic intellectual tradition well as I prepare to welcome these men to the stage one final thing that really strikes me about all three of our panelists is that I don't think anyone in the world has done more than these three men to open up the Bible in fresh

and exciting ways especially for young people Bishop Baron of course is a world-renowned preacher his Sunday homilies are heard by hundreds of thousands of people he also launched the word on fire Bible series which is presenting the Bible with beautiful art and genius ancient commentary and it's become the best-selling Catholic Bible of Our Generation Dr Peterson especially through his biblical lectures on Genesis and Exodus has led a whole generation of young people to become infatuated with these ancient texts most of them for the first time and then father Mike schmidtz through his Bible in a

year podcast has helped millions of people go through the entire Bible cover to cover many of them for the first time these I think are the three great Proclaimers of the word today and I invite you to join me in welcoming to the stage Bishop Robert Baron Dr Jordan Peterson and father Mike schmidtz thanks everybody well thank you Brandon for that very generous introduction I would like to get right to it we'll Begin by asking each one of you a specific question related to the work that you've been doing and then I'll ask some general

questions and I invite you all to respond to each other as we move through the questions so first question for you Dr Peterson Christians understand Jesus in ways that are consonant with your Works symbolic depictions of Christ for example as the archetypal King of Kings responsible bearer of cosmic suffering and practical guide to avoiding temporal hell however we Christians additionally see Jesus as the historically real lord the myth in the language of CS Lewis who became fact the God man who was crucified died for our sins and was raised on the third day so my

question Dr Peterson how do you relate your own conception of the Christ to this Orthodox little o Orthodox Christian conception well I think this I really think that the CS Lewis formulation which is rather traditional formulation and also a formulation that was accepted by Yung by the way I think it's the simplest explanation you know i' I've been writing a new book which is a strange thing to say because it's by no means simple I've been writing a new book called we who wrestle with God and it's a it's a continuation of the work I

started to do diving into and attempting to understand the Genesis narratives and The Exodus narratives I've included a lot more books the abrahamic story um for example the story of Jonah the story of Job um other major biblical texts I'm working on the gospel U section at the moment probably mostly utilizing the the gospel of Matthew and Christ's claim essentially is that he was the Incarnation of the prophet and the laws and that makes that that's a very specific sort of claim and so what it means is something like it's an analog it's analogous to

the idea of the king of kings and so you could imagine organizing people in groups of 10 you might ask those 10 people to elect from among themselves the most noteworthy of the 10 people then you could imagine having the 10 the people who were nominated get together and getting to know each other and then nominate the most worthy of them from that group and you could do that all the way up to the most noteworthy possible per person of all the persons that ever lived and that would be the person who would most closely

approximate the spirit of the king of kings so to would most closely approximate the notion of kingship itself whatever that is and Christ claimed that true kingship was embodied in the law and the prophets and the law of course is the tradition that that had been extracted from human interaction over endless Millennia not least the period of time that's covered by the biblical stories and then the prophets are the manifestation of the spirit that generates the law right because the law is something that has to be in extracted from tradition let's say instantiated but also

updated so you need a a a a static element of the spirit that should guide us that would be the law and you need a dynamic element and that would be the prophets and then you could think that the combination of those two things would be an even more Transcendent spirit and then you could imagine that you could be guided by that Spirit which is what you would do if you were a follower of the law but then you could imagine doing what Christ told the Pharisees to do which would be to embody more than

merely the Dogma but also the spirit and then you could imagine that you could open yourself up so that that Spirit possessed you fully that's a good way of thinking about it and that's what Christ claimed he was and that seems right like and now I have to say along with that that I don't understand what that means but I don't well well I don't understand it and this is something I think this is part of the reason why the religious tradition and the scientific tradition Clash you know because the Christian claim is that Christ

defeated death let's say and overcame hell and obviously one of the objections to that is that there's quite a lot of death still around and no shortage of hell and so it's not an easy thing to understand what it means that that's defeated and you could say I listened to this young man in Canada recently Josh Alexander who's been persecuted quite remarkably for being a forthright Catholic in Canada because that's where we're at in Canada by the way um he got kicked out of his Catholic school for making the claim I think he cited a

gospel line from Mark pointing out that there are men and women and that was unacceptable to his teachers and and and the administrative staff at the Catholic school so they gave him in the boot despite the fact that he was 16 and he was just interviewed I interviewed him I haven't released that yet but also my wife and he said that one of the things that gave him strength was the notion that good has already won you know and that's a very sophisticated idea for a young man and he's very forthright and solid character and

what he meant was something like in the space of Eternity good constantly triumphs over evil and that the sacrifice of Christ is the pattern of what made that possible and that's seems to me to be correct but we still have to what what do we do we still have to engage in the battle in our time in the present and so that this can be true in eternity and be in process in the present and I think that's I I think that's also correct I mean we have to conceptualize eternity in some manner because we

are related to it just like we're related to the infinite and yet we're constrained in the present and in the finite and there's a tension between those and one of the errors I think that religious people make and I think this is more on the Protestant side of things although Catholics aren't immune to it is that is to announce that if you know if you merely believe that Christ defeated evil that somehow culminates in your complete salvation and that strikes me as highly improbable given that we also have a fair bit of work to do

and that the work itself is also relevant and so anyways as I've been working through these ideas the simplest explanation for me has emerged that the claim that Christ made is the simplest explanation for it's the simplest explanation historically and narratively but that's bounded by the fact that even if it's true even though it's true we might say that doesn't mean we understand exactly what it means that doesn't bother me so much because even if we accept scientific explanations let's say materialist reductionist explanations for the structure of existence we still end up with Unsolved Mysteries

like scientists have no idea what happened to initiate the big bang for example or even if the Big Bang happens to be true we have no idea how DNA involved we don't know how life came about like there's Mysteries everywhere and the fact that there's still some mystery left at the bottom of our religious preconceptions well it's a bother because we'd rather know but the fact that we don't doesn't invalidate the whole system of belief so thank you Dr ferson Bishop B of father Mike could first of all M applaud your Catholic sensibility there where

we believe the victory has been won so that's what the cross would symbolize so what you've said I think very eloquently about the cross right every possible permutation and combination of human misery and failure and negativity is contained here in the cross of Jesus the resurrection signals that God's mercy in God's love is more powerful than any of that so that's why we really do know the victory has been won but then when you read someone like Paul when he says Yus curios Jesus is Lord that's a counterpart to Kaiser curios which they would have

said at the time Caesar's Lord get into his army and Paul's saying no no Yus was curious Jesus is the Lord get into his army so the idea is we know the victory's been won it's like the the Normandy invasion right the Norman Invasion World War II was effectively over that day yet there was still a lot of work to be done before the war was definitively over same with with now until the end of time the battle's been won on the cross but now we have the privilege of getting in the army of the

of the crucified and Risen Lord and to you know do the mop-up work so what why do you if you don't mind no go ahead why see one of the problems I have in understanding that I guess is that why do you think there is how do you conceptualize the the simultaneous fact of let's say the Eternal Victory with the proximal necessity of undertaking the fight in in in the domain of finite time let's say in each of our lives like how do you how do you mediate that Paradox in a way we've been given

the privilege of entering into that struggle so it's been won by Christ it's won by God in Christ on the cross and through the resurrection and now we're given the privilege of getting in the Army and and contributing to increasing good in the world and battling evil and we do it with a kind of panach and confidence because we know the definitive battle has been one so I think it's God it as you think that's the abrahamic adventure is that the same thing yeah I mean what begins with Israel comes to a kind of climax

through the cross and resurrection and now we're in the last Act of a a five act play I would say creation followed by the Fall followed by Israel so God's rescue operation Israel coming to its climax in the coming of the mashiach and now Act five we're in which is the mop-up work now we join the army of the mashiach and then we do our bit to increase good and decrease evil you know so we have to know what part of the play we're in that's very important we're in Act five but the previous four

acts have to be understood clearly or we won't know what we're doing in Act five if I could uh just add one more thing is that what I just but along those along those lines of like why I love that's a great great question why why not when Jesus dies rises from the dead ascends to Heaven it's over or Eden again and I think part of it goes back to if you go back to the very first chapters of Genesis where human beings are created in God's image and likeness and that means something not only

does it mean that we have an intellect and a will that only that not only means we're free also means there's a there's a there's an end there's a there's a thing God wants us to become yeah Jesus makes that possible and so now we get to become so I I I think that you know this this great Revelation in Christianity one of the many is that God is our father that is he's personal he's our father and he doesn't want a bunch of pets he wants children who are like him and we can only

become like him if we endure all the trials and yet still say I trust you so think we have something difficult and important to do and that that's necessary have to right right so that's part of the adventure or the privilege part of that story that's the privilege of yeah that yeah fair enough yeah M let me Sol that one huh I I just checked that off that's right what else you got there what else fall and Redemption check okay fall Redemption got it Bishop Baron one of the great Hallmarks of your Evangelical work has

been to respond to the cultures suspicion of morality and Truth by choosing to lead with beauty while this approach has been fruitful there are still many who insist that beauty is not only subjective but the most subjective of the three transcendentals the good the true and the Beautiful so how can Catholics make a case for the objectivity of Beauty in a culture a wash with relativism and one that even seems to celebrate ugliness yeah no I get all that um and as you know I've said in our postmodern culture there's such skepticism about the true

and the good you know here's what you should know here's how you should act so I suggested start with the third transcendal of the beautiful which just look look at this beautiful thing and let it draw you into its power but on the subjectivism thing to me the beautiful is just as objective as the true and the good when you see okay 2+ 2 equals 4 and you understand that relationship and you get it that has a power over you that has an objective hold on you that's self-evident seems to me or like when you

say here's what maxan col did at alitz and you say by God that was morally praiseworthy that that's something morally right it's never a matter of like your private opinion like you I'm really fond of Maxine Co I think he's great but maybe you don't and that's you know up to you no it has a it has a power over you it rearranges your subjectivity and I think the beautiful is exactly the same thing the truly beautiful not just the pretty or the subjectively satisfying but the truly beautiful you know the cysteine ceiling or Beethoven

7 Symphony or something that how like how impossibly trivial it would be to say listen to Beethoven 7 Symphony and say I don't like it you know it's not really my cup of tea see and your your laughter gives away the game that that's the point that there's something so objectively uh powerful about that that it rearranges you you don't sit in judgment on the beautiful it judges you um so that's why I I would resist any attempt to subjectivized the beautiful it has the same status as the other two transcendentals and then it leads

you as the other two do toward the source right so you see this is as old as Plato and it comes right through the Western tradition that you see the beautiful object or person or face and then it leads you by a steady progress The Plato right outward outward outward to higher higher forms of beauty arranged hierarchically until you come he says in that beautiful image to the Open Sea of the beautiful itself well that's a deep Instinct in the west right but if you subjectivized the beautiful that whole project will not get underway but

when the the truly beautiful grabs you it starts leading you on this journey upward and outward toward God I would say the Horizon of all Beauty um so that's why I use it not just decoratively like wasn't that a pretty decoration to evangelization I use it as an essential feature of evangelization it's why things like Gothic Cathedrals when I was a I was a kid I was 29 when I went to Paris and began my studies and when I went to notredam for the first time and it was the rose window as a yungi and

you know you'd appreciate the I all of the archetypal quality the mandalic quality of that but what was it about that Rose window that just sent me on this adventure and I talk about Rose windows and gothic church which is all the time to this day is because the platonic thing kicked in I I saw this beautiful thing and it sent me on this trajectory so that's why I think it's every bit as objective as the as the good and the true I wonder three things about that quickly one is that I think beauty is

a burning bush right it's something that calls to us and it's something out of which God can speak okay the next thing is maybe we shouldn't use objective maybe we should use Transcendent because I think part of the reason that people object to that is because obviously beauty isn't as easy to characterize as the existence of a simple material object right so but but having so we could say Transcendent which takes it out of the realm of the subjective and still points upward but then I'll make a counter proposition to that I I I did

a paper at Harvard with a couple of my students we we produced a a a measurement device a questionnaire as as it happens to assess people's lifetime creative production and and then we wanted to look at the relationship between various personality traits and their intelligence and their creative ability in relationship to their lifetime creative production and in in one of the steps we had people make a collage out of a collage kit and then we had artists rate the collage for its aesthetic quality and see if you do that so imagine you have multiple people

rating the same production for beauty then you can calculate how tightly related the the uh the the ratings are if if there's something that you could identify reliably as Beauty then a um a collage that one artist rated as beautiful would be much more likely to be rated by the other artists as beautiful and vice versa the ugly ones would fall to the bottom and the interrater reliability across the be judgments of beauty was extremely high and so it you know it's not as high as you might say if you asked a bunch of people

is that that black or white but but it was high enough so that you could extract out a single Factor across the Productions that you could call Beauty and so you could imagine that beauty is a category that has fairly wide boundaries but that doesn't mean there isn't anything Central to it and then your claim is that it points upward which I think is exactly right and that goes back to AC quaintance you know who says the beautiful come is what happens when integritas consonancia and claritas come together wholeness Harmony and radiance when those three

things come together and I always think for some reason of sports examples of whether it's a beautiful golf swing or I think when someone makes a great catch you know in football you say hey beautiful what a beautiful catch and someone let's say not experienced with football would say I don't get it why do you think that's beautiful well let me explain it to you and if CLS is right and James Joyce thought he was because this is right in the at the heart of a portrait of the artist is that you're noticing those three

things you're noticing integritas there's a wholeness to it you're noticing consono which is all the elements come together harmoniously in it think of like like a Rory maoy golf swing compared to mine is very interesting cuz his it's it's like every element of the Swing comes together with great uh Harmony mine doesn't mine is this Herky jerky and off you know so there's a hierarchical purpose in the swing then too it towards the end and then that the last one is very cool because it's claras which literally means brightness and in some texts aquinus even

suggests physical brightness like what a beautiful watch because it's shining you know but then what becomes clear in the tradition is what he really means is the claritas for the the clarity of form it's the Splendor of form so you you notice the Concord right the consonancia and then it sings to you it's the it's the Splendor of the form that makes you say ah beautiful right something that that would be something that would compel awe and imitation and and you could argue I would tend to agree with this that it's the first of the

transends for that reason because first being has to get your attention and only then can you reflect on it as good and true right but it first has to get your attention you say ah beautiful then you move to the good and the true um so that's where how coinus accounts for the objectivity those three elements have to be present so what would what would subjectively subjectively pretty art look like or the opposite of transcendent would that be imminent in this case or would how would you make that because we have objective truth and subjective

truth that makes that's clear distinction what be the opposite of non-trc beauty maybe something that this is Diet Von hillerbrand that only appeals to your kind of emotional state of mind it's what he would call subjectively satisfying as opposed to objectively valuable to it too well you you that might be akin to those sorts of pop music pieces that you capture instantly but you can only listen to like three times and you're done with them compared to some well there's lots of music like that compared to something like like a b piece for example that

you might bounce off on First Contact because it's very sophisticated but with repeated listens you can delve into it and then it's inexhaustible right right so and there so the question is akin to something like what's the difference between something that's shallow and beautiful you know or pretty and something that's deep and beautiful I would say too if something's deep it moves you in more Dimensions simultaneously right that's like a definition of deep and a deep story has multiple meanings and not just so it's something shallow and beautiful is exhaustible in its beauty and something

deep and beautiful isn't it's inexhaustable rearranges your Consciousness right right I maybe some of I wrote about this many years ago but there was an article in Rolling Stone magazine many years ago and they asked rockers what was the first song that rocked your world and it was a cool way to State the question it wasn't what's the first song you liked it was what's the first song that that changed you right and I knew right away what my answer was mine is Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone which I heard when I was 18

for the first time probably and that's a song that continues to rearrange me the first song I liked was Sugar Sugar by The Archie right right and I I remember vividly I love I was like eight years old in sugar but it it doesn't it didn't rearrange my Consciousness you know I mean so that might be the distinction uh yeah so the so deep stories like one of the things that's true of the biblical stories is because they are they hyperlink with other stories in the in the biblical Corpus so almost all their plot lines

and characterizations reflect many other plot lines and characterizations and so you can delve into them and never stop and part of the consequence of that is that if you have an apprehension of one of the stories and you can see how it echoes with all the other things that it that that it includes it does have that deep rearranging effect right so one of the things that deep literature does is it brings you into harmony with the spirit of the literature yeah right and that's akin to that idea that Christ was brought into harmony with

the spirit of the of the law and the prophets and partly as a consequence of being educated in the tradition I mean that wasn't that wasn't all of it obviously but you know but and the point you're making is missed by a lot of biblical people today because the historical critical method came so to dominate The Way We Catholics read the Bible that we missed that along with lots of other things but you look for example at 1 and 2 Samuel which I think is one of the masterpieces of the Old Testament whoever wrote it

we don't know who wrote it but whoever it was boy did he have access to the other text because there's all kinds of the hyperlink stuff all through it like a phrase from Genesis suddenly pops up here a phrase from Leviticus is now over in this part of 2 Samuel so they were well aware of that so the book is woven together in the same way that you described something beautiful and all the parts serve the whole that's right yeah yeah yeah and you know your brain is linked like that too so so the this

is actually the case that in many ways the structure of the Bible is reflective of the structure of the brain even at a neurophysiological level and that makes a certain amount of sense because the Bible was transmitted orally and had to arrange itself in a way that would be remembered so you would expect a certain concordance but the brain is arranged so that not every nerve neuron is in contact with every other neuron because that would just be well that would be a total there would be just a an absolutely undifferentiated Unity of structure then

but that parts of it are linked to other parts and parts are separate in a manner that optimizes both the Simplicity and the complexity and you you have this exactly the same thing reflected in the biblical Corpus so which is also why it's an inexhaustible book like there's an infinite number of pathways through it right so well even that that the beauty communicating depth not being and not being exhaustible um I remember the first time I read a Brave New World ELD the suckley and it was just it was it was remarkable because I was

also in a Shakespeare play at the time it was in college and taking a Shakespeare class and in the story there's there's a man he's been separated from the uh the dystopia and he's out in the wilderness he's the Savage and at one point he he's going he's experiencing life he's experiencing all these emotions he's experiencing suffering he's experiencing his love for his mother all these kind of he's experiencing Injustice but doesn't have a language for it and then he comes upon the works of Shakespeare and it's just like he he even says in the

in the in the in the book it says that he finally had a language yeah for the the the hatred he had for this kind of stepfather figure he finally had a language for the Injustice that he was going through and was like yeah cuz Shakespeare had that that's again it's Transcendent there's a beauty there that even the Savage would say this applies to my life multivalent right right right right well one of the things I noticed in my clinical Pro practice when I was dealing with people who had been severely traumatized which almost inevitably

meant that they had not only met with tragedy but with malevolence because you really need you really need to run face first into malevolence to be truly traumatized just tragedy won't do it that the conversations would immediately get so deep if we were near the core of the problem that it was almost inevitable that the language that they were using and that I was using took on like biblical overtones because that was the only language that we had at our disposal to be able well if you're if you've really been hurt like if you were

sexually assaulted by the uncle that was supposed to take care of you you know that was trusted by his sister when you were four you you've encountered a level of malevolence that requires a language of Good and Evil even even to explicate much less to understand and you know one of the things you do do to people with people who have been severely traumatized is that you bring them into an advanced philosoph opical or even theological understanding of the relationship between good and evil because without that especially if sometimes people are traumatized because they've done

malevolent things themselves and then the only pathway forward for them at all is to develop a sophisticated formulation of Good and Evil and that's almost inevitably in fact it might have to be inevitably a religious formulation you know you could even Define a religious formulation that way is that a religious formulation is a story that provides a phisticated representation of the deepest levels of Good and Evil it's perfectly good description of religion infuriates you because it does me when the the new atheists in that kind of cavalier manner will just you know toss the Bible

aside Bronze Age mythology you know oldfashioned pre-scientific nonsense and what dangerous magic they're dealing with there I mean because here's this thing that has defined Western culture and as you say undergirds most of our artistic expressions and tracks with our deepest psychological aspirations and needs what what a tragedy when the Bible is is trash that way you know yeah well it's a such a it's a strange combination of utter oversimplified misinterpretation right to read the Bible as an uh what would you say an archaic scientific theory because it wasn't partly because there weren't scientific theories

2,000 years ago we could start with that but then well seriously you know and then and then to to insist upon the most simplistic possible depth less misreading of the stories uh but then to throw the baby out of the bathwater on the moral side is it's it's surprising you know it's surprising Sam Harris for example you know Sam partly insists upon his scientism let's say because Sam Maybe somewhat uniquely among the new atheists really did wrestle with the problem with evil and part of the reason that he wanted to ground a Morality In The

Objective truth was because he wanted to develop a morality that was sufficiently robust that evil could be properly categorized and then pushed back against and I I think the problem with Harris's approach is the kind of objectivity that he is attempting to base science on cannot be reconciled with an with morality itself he's got his philosophical categories mixed up badly and and his project has to fail which and I I think it has so yeah question number three father Mike and out of time thank you all for coming father Mike Go your work with the

Bible and the catechism is well known for its Evangelical impact on young people the younger gener the younger Generations however are also infamously skeptical of organized religion and anything like the existence of Miracles that smacks of violating their secular conceptions of science so how can Catholics speak about the Bible and the miraculous in ways that young people will find both attractive and convincing it's good question what do you think Bishop um you're on your own kid no I I so so I think something that's really fascinating is a lot of times um because I work

on a college campus that a lot of stuff that I'll do and also gets used in a lot of high schools or you know Junior High kind of thing that it it um people Point people point to the impact it has on on younger folks which is awesome incredible the number of people who have approached me um having gone through the Bible they always they always begin their emails or the letters with I know that you are primarily speaking young people but I am 85 and you know kind of thing and uh which I'm really

grateful for I don't know if if you know familiar with the work of Christian Smith Christian Smith he's sociologist out of Chapel Hill originally and then now he's at Notre Dame and goish he um he uh wrote a book 15 20 years ago called uh soul searching where it was about the spiritual lives of American adolescence and he and his team they went out across the country and they did a survey of the spiritual lives the faith lives of American Americans who were raised Jewish raised agnostic atheist raised Mainline Protestant Evangelical Catholic and he came

to the conclusion that they all believe the same thing regard essentially regardless of how they were raised they all believe kind of the same general ideas about life about God about how what they're called to and he termed it uh moralistic therapeutic deism and I if you heard that term but the idea is that that there's a God and he's good he's not really necessary in your life you don't need need to have a relationship with him unless you are in some kind of problem in which case he's your on call therapist slm helicopter parent

you know the best opter parent ever um good people go to heaven when they die and basically everyone's good unless you're Hitler um and and it was this remarkable thing was just the that was when I was first getting into youth ministry and campus ministry and I just was on the lookout for this because it was a fascinating kind of depiction and I just kind of would would see this again and again but wonder where it came from like does it come from a simple skepticism does it come from a a kind of a postmodern

way of looking at the world does it come from this independence of a new generation like what is Millennials now gen Z there's another scholar at notan who um asked the question same question you know for generations for thousands of years Faith was passed on through families passed on through culture and he asked the question how come the previous generation failed to pass on the faith to Millennials to gen Z and his conclusion was remarkable and his conclusion I I when when he pointed it out I was this is true the conclusion was they didn't

fail to pass it on the conclusion is Boomers and Gen X xers did pass on their faith they also are moralistic therapeutic theists that that that the religion of America not just the religion of American Youth religion of America is moralistic and therapeutic and deistic in that sense of it's not a Biblical religion and and so he how do anecdotal evidence now um all of the many of the emails and letters I've gotten about the Bible have been either I'm 85 first time through the Bible I'm 50 first time through the Bible been going to

mass every Sunday in my life been Catholic my whole life this is the first time I've ever encountered the god of the Bible right I would get my pastor's version and not nothing no you know shade against pastors or against anyone else but this is the first time I had to come face to face with God as he has revealed himself and it's changed my life there's also been the people who have said going through the Bible I don't like it like honestly I remember I I got recently got an email from a woman I

think she said maybe in her 70s early 70s and she said I'm like I'm on day five like what give it a little time give it a little time on day five and she's like but there's so much violence that I never expected there's so much Brokenness I never expected there so much disorder that I never expected I don't know if I can keep pressing play because why because we are in a culture we we're all moralistic there utic deists so I think that the rise of the nuns which Bishop you've talked about a ton

I think I don't know if there's a rise of the nuns I think we simply have the rise of the people who are unwilling to check the box so we have generations of Boomers and gen xers who have checked the Box CU yeah I was raised Catholic I'm Catholic and now we have a kind of generation of gen Z and Millennials who are saying like I don't want to check the box just for the sake of checking the box if I don't believe it like my like my parents and like my grandparents so I think

that we're just seeing now what's already been there so I don't know if there's any extra cynicism or extra skepticism there may be and this might be a silver lining and I don't want to jump to the Silver Lining too quickly there may be just extra honesty and this is actually where I'm standing because I don't have maybe maybe I don't have the cultural baggage that I have to check the box maybe I'm just now free finally to uh tell the truth I think the point you're raising is very interesting about because America has this

dual inheritance from the enlightenment of from the Bible we have a strong biblical tradition but also the enlightenment tradition and deism in its various forms comes out of the Enlightenment tradition and I think that's right that a lot of people Catholics included don't really know the biblical God who is very strange but but in forms Augustine and aquinus and our great people but we've been very infected by an Enlightenment kind of rationalistic deistic view you know I'm always in my more theological moments fighting against the view that God is as a being well that's a

very deistic you know rationalistic view that God's the biggest thing around which is not at all what our great theologians say and it's not the biblical idea God's not not the biggest thing in the world but the creator of the heavens and the Earth ipsum acquaint says not enum not highest being and that's there's a world of difference there and that biblical God who was not competing with my freedom it's like the burning bush the closer that God gets the more luminous and beautiful the world becomes he's not in competition with it cuz the D

that God is finally we're in competition with it's up there out there and maybe impinges once in a while but that's not the Bible that's a kind of perverted form of a of an Enlightenment view but America inherited both of those forms yeah and I think there's an openness an openness to the miraculous I think there's what I see with the young people I work with there's a there's an openness to the to the fact that God is present and is active in this world and they long to see those times so I I I

again when I when I talk about here's moments where God is interacting with us they're like yes yeah even if it's on the level of mere Spirit I'm mere Spirit but you know if we want evidence you want material evidence but when there's even like the oh I recognize God's presence prove it I can't I can only point to my experience of him and I think there's a longing for that go ahead well young people tend to be resistant to the notion of structure and Dogma first of all because they're young right and so in

some ways they're Inc competition with the previous structure and the Dogma as they start to take their place but also because one of the things that's intrinsic in that deism that you described is the rousan view that tradition and structure does little else than interfere with the full flowering of untrammeled of the Untamed subjective Hedonism that's the true Freedom let's say of self-actualization right and that we're intrinsic Al good except in so far as our institutions make us bad and that's an extraordinarily foolish way to think and it's extraordinarily counterproductive because what it leaves you

with is an identity whose freedom is confused with your subjective whims and you might say well why shouldn't I be allowed to just pursue my subjective whims and the answer to that is that you won't be any more successful in your life than an undisciplined 2-year-old because most of what will be good in your life is isn't a consequence of you just getting exactly what you want when you want it every second but entering into increasingly sophisticated sacrificial relationships with other people in the world so if you get married for example which is generally a

good idea then you're going to have to sacrifice a certain degree of your subjective hedonic whims to the Integrity of the marriage and with any luck that will be way better for you than your own stupid impulses will be and right over right over multiple decades right that's part of maturation and you give up part of yourself to your family but you receive far more in return and you give up something of yourself to your community and to your tradition and one of the things that we've done a very bad job of of educating young

people and perhaps even ourselves about is the need for Collective ritual and belief and some of that's to be found in well traditional the traditional teachings of the church you know as as flawed as that Pro may have been but this is something Jonathan Paso has really helped me understand more deeply too like we all understand that maybe it's more fun to go to a stadium and watch a sports team with 20,000 other people but we haven't really generalized that to the point maybe the Evangelical Protestants do this better some people do understand that maybe

it's better to aim at the highest good possible with a bunch of other people because it is in fact partly a collective Enterprise and that will also butress your own will and that's definitely something that the church can offer but we're fighting the church is fighting against that deep-seated notion especially in the hedonistic atomized liberal West that all tradition and structure is to be viewed as nothing but an impediment to the full flowering of your intrinsically wonderful subjectivity it's infected every young person in the in the west yeah well it's as a point no there

was a was it what is I I I'm sure Bishop you have a better sense maybe both do of uh languages but I remember coming across this that sin our our English term sin uh comes from the German word Sund which which means to split Sunder to Sund put a sunnd right so sin come etymologically that Sunder and religion means to bind and so if I don't think I'm split if I don't think that I've I've experienced sin if I don't think that I have any need of like you mentioned jeano like the noble savage

that that that sense of like I'm fine just the way I am if I'm not split then I don't need religion I can I can be fine with spirituality but if I've been split then I need something to bind me together not because it restricts my freedom but because it makes me whole I think there's a different well in part of that binding part of that binding is found in the hierarchical arrangement of the community and right and the church should be occupying a relatively High position in that hierarchical Arrangement if it's functioning optimally and

yeah and the it is the noble savage imagery that's at the bottom of this and part of the pathology in that is that so one of the things that psychologists have discovered even though they didn't really think it through all the way and and haven't understood its full implications is that there's very little difference between being self-conscious so let's say thinking about yourself and being concerned about yourself or for that matter even being aware of yourself those states of being thinking about yourself being concerned about yourself being aware of yourself they're absolutely indistinguishable technically from

negative emotion there's no difference between being concerned with yourself and being miserable those are the same thing in fact one of the things that being miserable does is make you self-conscious and so one of the corollaries of that is that you're certainly not going to find your way to the meaning that will sustain you through life by concentrating only on what it is that's you and what you want or what something fractured and broken and partial and desirous and impulsive within you once you want to meld that all together into some form of higher integration

maybe that would characterize a well- integrated personality but then beyond that you weld that into all the different levels of social Community right which is why for example you're in service to your husband or to your wife within the confines of the marriage and both of you are in service to your family and that's all not merely a restriction on your domain of subjective Freedom that's such an appalling way to think about it because that makes your the people people you love into burdens that do nothing but get in your way which is not a

favor that you're laying at their feet instead of opportunities which is really what they are to find through the love you have for them a much higher expression of yourself than you'd ever manage in any way if you were only concentrating on what you or something in you wants right now and we've done a very very bad job and this is certainly true of the psychological community of pointing out the relationship between harmonious existence let's say in relationship to being which is more which is a better definition of mental health we've done a poor job

of pointing out the relationship between that and the adoption of these higher order forms of social responsibility and that's that's probably even to some degree that's a consequence of of Enlightenment influences and its stress on individuality in the west but also characteristic of a kind of consumerist heathenism that's also part parcel of a modernistic materialistic Society you know and it's good to have good things and all that to live life more abundant in the material sense but if all you're after is the next bout of material gratification you're going to be a never-ending cycle of

well what what desperate pursuit of something like infantile satiation which isn't going to satisfy you anyways I wonder Jordan do you find this that the religious people themselves in the course of my lifetime lost confidence in themselves I mean the religious leaders that we felt the program was to kind of justify ourselves to Skeptics and you know well we got try to explain to the Skeptics of religion but in fact look we're the we're the keepers of this great tradition of value that's given meaning to to Western society and individual lives for for Millennia we

shouldn't be ringing our hands I mean we should be proposing confidently to the society the good the true and the Beautiful in their final link to the Supreme good true and beautiful that's God and that's your point which I really like about religion reare to link back so all these things have fallen apart for different reasons and it's a sort of preening self-regarding you know existentialism that would say I invent value that's a road to disaster and the church's job it seems to me is to propose to especially young people here's this world of value

look how wonderful that look how rich that is and get out of yourself I I think that's right when we're what did Augustine call Sin incurvatus Inay right when you're caved in on yourself it's a beautiful definition of sin get out of that get out of that little Bor ing space of your own will and what I can figure out and what I'm going to do I mean bore me to death with that is show show people the realm of objective value leading finally to God but I think it we're at fault in a way

we religious people because we started in this hand ringing routine and you know we should boldly go out I always like the assault of the luciferian in intellects fundamentally and that's in in some sense the negative part of the Enlightenment spirit it's it's not surprising that it put everybody back on their heels including the more classically religious types because untangling the sometimes apparently paradoxical relationship between the scientific method and the claims of religious tradition is a very challenging intellectual Enterprise and it's easy to fall prey to the notion that and this is an Enlightenment notion

that all the judeo-christian tradition was was something like poorly formulated proto-scientific theories that we've now dispensed with and the thing is there there's a tiny element of that that's kind of true but unless you can separate the wheat from the chaff I'm going to mix metaphor is terribly here you throw the baby out you throw the baby out with the bath water and in this case it's the Holy Infant that you throw out and that's a very bad idea right right right right I got three metaphors in there yeah but there is there seems to

be you know the the Highlight we get the idea concept of the individual and individual dignity from the judeo-christian tradition we also get this but but what that's introduced how it's introduced into a family so here's Abraham and his family so he's called but he's not called by himself he's called with Sarah and become from them comes what not just those two and they drift off in the sunset from them there comes Isaac and from that comes this bigger family bigger family so we have this double necessity of the individual and the sanctity of the

individual and the sanctity of the family so talking about like the levels that we have to be bound in such a fractured and atomized world where I mean think about the the Tik toks and the reals of like I'm alone and I just get to live for myself I got to get up whenever I wanted today and my cat and we're happy together but but there's no one makes demands on me and I'm the happiest I've ever been and you think like but that's that's the opposite because we need family we need friendship and we

need this body of Christ I mean it goes from the smallest to the greatest we possibly could well the ab Abraham reference there I think is particularly apropo because what happens in the Abraham story is that Abraham is living a life of infantile satiation at the beginning of the story right because he's 70 years old or thereabouts and he's has Rich parents and he has everything that you could need materially at hand so there's actually no reason for him to do anything and so that's like the Socialist Utopia has actually come to bear fruit in

some way but then this voice comes to him that announces itself more or less as the voice of the ancestors right of the voice of tradition and says to go have the adventure and it's quite a brutal Adventure like your life will be you know I Abraham encounters famine and totalitarianism and the necessity of sacrificing his son and War and and and terrible conflict between his kin members and um and and and fractious relationships within his own family he has the whole catastrophe of life but he has this glorious adventure and he makes the proper

sacrifices along the way and it is very telling that even though the abrahamic story is an adventure story it's one that integrates his wife and his family along with it you know it's as if you went and saw a James Bond movie and when James Bond is going around the world the romantic adventure he has is one with his wife and the children come along for the ride right and but that's well that's a sign of an integrated life but it doesn't mean it's not an adventure it means it's the proper adventure and he heard

the higher voice I think that's the key thing with that we we're built to hear the higher voice not just listen to our own little puny voice but to hear finally the voice of the unconditioned of God and what went wrong is so Adam and Eve stopped listening to God and that's when all the sundering takes place and then Along Comes Abraham who finally hears the voice and then watch that theme throughout the Bible whether it's Jonah or people that hear the voice that's still the game it seems to me you know the voice coming

from Heaven is a symbol for this this openness to the unconditioned to the good the true and the Beautiful that lie beyond the categorical and that calls out to us that claims me and sends me on a mission I totally get that that's exactly the right description of what makes life worth living right well that's the that's the part of life that is worth living beckoning yeah right that that higher call but I would all tell me what you think about this so you you you know you talk about you're pointing I suppose for young

people and and older people as well to where they might search for The Voice or the appearance of God and you're suggesting that one of those places in what's in what's beautiful and that's reminiscent for me of moses' Encounter of the burning with the burning bush which is something that calls to him which he goes to investigate that's a pathway to God what you see with Elijah is that that pathway to God isn't so much something that beckons in his situation it's more something that that imposes Transcendent limits and so Elijah is the first prophet

who firmly he he he he he engages in combat against Bal who's a nature God you can think of nature the nature God is very similar to the Gaia that the environmentalists worship right it's the projection of what's of the highest value into the natural world and so even if the environmentalists claim that they're not deistic doesn't matter they have an implicit di deism that Associates the highest good with the natural world and it's a powerful argument because and this is what Elijah contends with because if you're in a thunderstorm or a hurricane or you

experience an earthquake or a volcano or you look up at the Heavenly Skies you can feel a sense of awe and you can feel that there's something Beyond you that's let's say embedded in the mysteries of the world and it's easy to confuse that with God now what Elijah realizes and this is his famous statement is that he's in a cave and he experiences a number of powerful manifestations of the natural world this is after he's defeated the prophets of Bal and he hears the still Small Voice called to him within and that's really that's

not even so much the voice that calls to Adventure or beauty which is part of that it's conscience per se and this is another place that people can look for God you know and it's it's it's it's a rough search in some ways you know God at least in part is the spirit that wakes you up in 3 in at 3: in the morning when You' violated a higher part of yourself and calls you on your misbehavior and you might say well why would you associate that with a Transcendent spirit and let's say with God

and part of the answer to that is try controlling it right or try convincing it that it doesn't have a point which is what you're going to be doing desperately at 3: in the morning when you'd rather let yourself off the hook for your stupidity but something within you absolutely refuses to allow you to do that and it's something that you can't control and so since it since it calls you on your misbehavior and you can't control it I would say that the impetus is on the atheistic types to account for its phenomenology it's like

well it's a spirit it has autonomy seems to have a voice it calls you out your misbehavior so it has a moral it knows you completely even better than you know yourself rightly why that's why John Henry Newman took that as the best argument for God's existence he felt that after Hume the more cosmological arguments were suspect so he went in the typical modern way inside but found that path cuz I would say it's the it's the unconditioned good that is is summoning you to to goodness right and it does you by by it does

that in part by calling you out on your misbehavior too right that's the part of God that's the judge rather than the invitation the Aboriginal Vicor of Christ in the soul Newman calls the conscience which is a marvelous description right even before the pope is the Vicor of Christ the the conscience is the Aboriginal Vicor of Christ in the soul so so so you might ask yourself why would why would the would conscience be associated with Christ in the soul and so you could imagine this so one of the implicit messages of the story of

the Christian passion is that you're called upon to sacrifice everything in the pursuit of what's highest right absolutely everything which is why Christ's passion is a story of the confrontation with the most miserable possible death and also with the deepest reaches of malevolence right so so so and the the implication of the story is that the existence of those two things that you're called upon to act in the most positive manner and so then if you're sinning you're violating that pattern of action and the conscience is what calls you on the violation of that sacrificial

relationship and that's why there's an association between the conscience and Christ in the soul right because you're not what the conscience tells you is that you are not being sufficiently what would you say you're you're not being sufficiently sufficiently religious in your sacrifices that's exactly what you're being called upon and you might think well I don't want to give that up it's like well yeah you don't want to but that's not the point is that if you're going to pursue what is truly highest you have to give up everything that's lowest and if you don't

pursue what's highest and give up what's lowest then life will arrange itself against you very rapidly and that you can just think about that practically it's like if you conducted yourself so that you took the Lesser victory over the greater Victory and you did that constantly then you would lose it's the definition of losing and what your conscience does is inform you when you're losing even in ways that you would rather not admit right and so there there is no difference between that the call to the highest sacrifice Jonah heard the voice of his conscience

and then didn't follow it right right follow that is disaster for you and for the people around you right right so it's not just the private thing oh boy I did something wrong it's going to really hurt me it'll hurt people around you yeah worse even maybe well I mean if you miss behave when you're a child if you misbehave and this might even be true when you're an adult when your parents are still around it isn't obvious at all that your misbehavior hurts you more than it hurts your parents right and and in totalitarian

States there's a good example of this a totalitarian state is a state where every single person is lying about absolutely everything all the time and so each person lies in the moment to protect themselves against the consequences of the truth at least momentarily they pretend to believe things that they don't what the Soviets used to joke we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us it's like yeah that's a great Russian joke that is and that leads right to unbelievable poverty and misery and you know every person who's rationalized lying in the system is

saying well I have to lie because the consequences of telling the truth will be so great but the cumulative consequence of those individual lies is literally that everyone lives in hell and so one of the things your conscience tells you and it really tells you this is when you lie you are moving towards hell and not just for you but for everyone around you everyone you love and all your descendants and like it's a terrible thing that swallow up your errant will and spit you out exactly where you're supposed to be so the whale there

the fish is not a negative thing it's swallowing up this errant will of Jonah and then confining it so it needed confining it needed restriction but then it spits them up needed the suffering Poss it needed the suffering right and then spits him up exactly where he's supposed to be and so like how do we read times of depression and Times of of deep Darkness you day profundus you from the depths I cry to you lord well good it might be a depth imposed upon you by God to limit this errant will but then God

will take you where you don't want to go where he wants you to go and and to what end is you know to what end I think it goes back in so many ways um because he wants you to be like him yeah because there's that sense of like okay I'm going to give you these gifts give you and and and this burden why because in bearing this burden well you'll become like me that's one I think why one of the reasons Jesus says if you want to be my disciple deny yourself pick up your

cross and follow me say do this do this whatever the burden whatever that cross is I'm not far from you I'm here I'm doing something in you and in doing so you become like me even if you have to go through hell like there's even that process even though you will have to go through you'll unleash tremendous is good so Jonah becomes the greatest Prophet ever Nineveh is converted from top to bottom and even the cattle put on sacko he's like the most he's the most powerful Prophet ever because he finally cooperated with the the

voice of his conscience right well and and part of the problem that you have to wrestle with too is a time frame problem so in the story of job job is punished unjustly and and and and that's part of the pain of the story like Christ is punished unjustly and and that's part of what we have to wrestle with with as we say pass through the world is that the there are times when we'll have be called upon to Bear suffering for the sake of the good you might say and part of that's the necessary

consequence of things unfolding in their appropriate time and that's something that perhaps you have to have faith in and it's a very difficult thing to to justify I mean part of the reason you want to lie is because you want to get away with what you did right now so that there are no consequences or that you can gain should gain some Advantage right that's why people lie and so then you might say well you'll pay a price for telling the truth and it's you know it's it's definitely the case that you will my experience

with that has been that if I say something that's true but that's unpopular there can be a vicious firestorm in the aftermath but if I Stand My Ground then that Firestorm exhausts itself and the situation reverses so that what were negative consequences to begin with become the consequences that were much better than I could have possibly imagined before that occur Ur and you see that in the story of job now It's tricky because you know you don't want to justify your suffering by the fact that when you emerge through it things are better because that's

too easily transformed into a post ha talk justification of the production of suffering that's not exactly the point the point is sometimes you have to withstand in order for the higher good to make itself manifest in its proper time and things do have a proper time and part of faith is that what's good will unfold if it's given the proper time right you may be called upon to bear that and then you might ask yourself too is like well why do you have to bear a burden at all in order to develop and and maybe

that's a fundamental mystery in in its Essence but you can ask yourself in your own life it's like part of the reason sometimes that you have to suffer in order to develop is because you're so damn stubborn and you won't give up your foolishness when you could have and so like the Pharaoh you double down and the suffering intensifies but some of the time too you have to think that you wouldn't be as sophisticated and welldeveloped as you are in your best sense if you wouldn't have gone through the difficult times that demanded from you

that level of development you know and when you're trying to nurture a child you don't protect them from everything that challenges them you put them in a in a in a ring of combat let's say where they're optimally challenged so the best in them can reveal itself and we none of us know how much challenged we have to be offered in the world in order to be highly motivated enough so the best within us will r itself know if you abjured all sin you'd suffer the least amount possible but perhaps that still wouldn't be [Music]

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