https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ofRiW7iE59o
So here’s a question. We’ve been talking about the quest for a spiritual home. To what, you know, I’m a pastor, so I’m always sort of not just working in the thing, but always looking and working on the thing. And so my question is, to what degree has, over the last four or five years, this little corner become something of a spiritual home for you? It’s an excellent question. Nobody’s ever asked me that. Very good question. Very much so. Very much so that some, more than the university ever has. Hmm. So the sense of, I want it to exist if I don’t, and I feel I make some significant contribution to it, so it matters to me greatly. There’s definitely the belonging. I know in some ways I’m the odd one, but I feel like I do belong. And what you said earlier today, and you’ve said it before, but it’s always deeply appreciated. So there’s definitely the mattering and the belonging. There’s definitely a place, this corner has helped me to grow up in a very significant way. I hope that’s not pretentious, and I hope it’s not arrogant, but I feel like I’ve grown a lot, and not just grown, but grown up a lot in the interactions with the people in this corner of the internet. And this corner is very amorphous, and it has a semi-permeable membrane. And so, but you know, I hope this is not narcissistic. I like the John Vervecky now that has interacted with Jonathan Pageau and Paul VanderKlay more than I like the John Vervecky who had not yet interacted with them. And so that’s another way in which I feel at home. So in the three dimensions I was talking about, the last time, I think I can give a very strong answer to yes, to all of them. I feel that it, I’ve internalized the sort of generalized group, the generalized other of this corner, and it very much acts as a normative, even onto a normative orientation for me. It’s like the magnetic pole of my compass in that way. Mm. It’s interesting. Over lunch, I had a group of people that I hadn’t sat with before, and one woman, she was new to this whole thing, and she’s, I said, well, how did you like this morning? Well, it was really nice, but I’m not exactly sure what was going on. And, and that’s, and she didn’t mean it, you know, in a negative sense at all. The challenge that we have noticed and talked about a lot, and you touched on it with, to get the sense of what fittedness is in this corner. Mm, mm. You know, it’s a strange thing because for me too, even though, you know, the Christian, I easily, the Christian Reformed Church has been my niche intergenerationally. My great-great-grandfather joined the Reformed Church of America in Spring Lake, Michigan. Somehow my great-grandfather, I think after his wife died in childbirth, joined the Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids. My grandfather became a minister, my father a minister. My father a minister in sort of a fringe church. In some ways, the Christian Reformed Church is home. In other ways, this little corner is also very much a home for me. And even though we’ve got Orthodox who have questions about my ecclesiastical pedigree, which is absolutely okay, Paul, where are you? And you, John, even in the church, there’s a way in which, as a spiritual home, many, I think, especially in this little corner, whether they have sort of separated from it formally, or whether they have sort of distanced themselves informally, or whether they’ve never been apart and sort of looked in, I think, you know, and you’ve had a huge role in this, you’ve afforded an open door to it, and made the membrane and the border semi-permeable so they could sort of come in and look and explore. And I love the way that you framed the home and home base, home range, hearth and hospitality. I don’t think this little corner would be this little corner without you. Thank you, Paul. Well, I wouldn’t be in this corner if I hadn’t received a loving welcome from you and from Jonathan, so. I’ll say something that is meant to be a good thing, and I hope it doesn’t come off as a negative thing. I think this corner has, if this corner could expand, it could steal the culture in the way it needs to be stolen. I’m not sure that Christianity, per se, could do that. I understand Christianity has its own mission of saving the world. I have a much smaller saving the world mission. And, but I do think that towards that second project of stealing the culture so that we have some chance of not crashing against the storm clouds on the horizon and just getting swept away. I think that’s what I meant. I find that this little corner of the internet, both its matter and its manner, and even, as you said, the semi-permeable and the, right? And for me, it’s exemplary of what needs to happen just larger. And so I think I’m trying to say, without competing with the legacy of religions, that this little corner has, I think, a proper mission to it that needs nurturing and cultivating. And I find, I feel that I’m in service to that. When we think about the legacy religions, I don’t know if I’m, and no offense to you, I don’t know how I feel about that nomenclature, partly because I’ve been so, these legacy religions are so massive that identifying the boundaries of them is just so thoroughly difficult. And that’s very clear. One of these years, we’ll get Tom Holland in here with us, which would be fun. But I mean, his thesis of, and you point, you talked about this with John a bit, you touched on it, and some of the differences between orthodoxy as, in many ways, radical, and I think you’re exactly right. I’ve said this to many people. People look at Jonathan, and he’s kind, and he’s articulate, and he’s charismatic, and I think. He’s like a Japanese samurai, very polite, but man. That’s right. I hear him sometimes, and I think, you’re riffing on what he said about cult. Have you listened to the other things he’s saying? These are radical, and they bring back for the reorientation. And yet, Christianity, and believe me, in the specific drama I’m in with respect to my own denomination, these are very difficult issues. But Christianity has also had a way of somehow engaging these other strains. Christianity has had a way of, somebody once made the comment that nearly every other major world religion sort of is tied, is moored to its birthplace. The center of mass of Christianity, when they look at adherence, has continued to move around the world. Yes. And when we think of. Buddhism also has changed, though. Buddhism is largely dead in India. Yes. Interesting. And then when we think of a Christian father, and of course, Augustine, especially in how the conversation has morphed now with the fall of the Iron Curtain, orthodoxy becoming much more of a presence in the United States, I mean, the conversation is going to continue to get more interesting. But Augustine, in his story, lived his life within a Manichean worldview. And then, very much, deep neo-Platonist influences in Augustine. And if there is a sort of a foundational, especially listening to the orthodox point to him, sometimes with a fair amount of critique, pointing at him and saying, ah, it’s that Augustine. And so, especially when you say, if something of this little corner could steal the culture, often, John, when I listen to you speak, there is so much Christianity in your formation. Yes. That it’s amazing how these borderlines that we have, which are absolutely necessarily not going away, they’re also not exactly what we think they are. Yeah, yeah. So, I think that’s very astute and very careful and well said. There’s an analogous problem in science. It’s called the demarcation problem. How do you distinguish science from pseudoscience? And the answer after a lot of academic blood and dispute is, eh, we don’t know. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Because anything, any algorithm or rule will ultimately let in things that shouldn’t be let in and keep out things that shouldn’t be kept out. And this was Wittgenstein’s case. Other than sort of our mathematical concepts, most of our categories are like this. Like, he famously did it with what’s a game, right? And there’s no definition, because whatever definition you propose, you’ll exclude things that we count as game and you’ll include things that we don’t. And you can get really, oh, or you can realize, no, that’s a good thing. And so, I wanna be clear what I’m gonna say. I understand why within, and I sometimes use the amycetic distinction, but from within, it is important that the church or the churches set their boundaries, but I’m not concerned with the demarcation problem from the outside, right? My thing is, I wanna be as honest as I can and give as much due credit as I can, and I try to exemplify that. And I will not be dishonest about my formation from Christianity, but also my stance with respect to Christianity. But as long as people accept that and they want to enter into good faith dialogue with me, I want, that for me is what I’m committed to. Now, that doesn’t mean I include everybody. The people that come in and are not coming in in good faith, and you and I have both talked to people like that on our channels or gone on their channels, and they’ve got an ax to grind, they wanna prove a point, they wanna manipulate or deceive, but then I won’t talk to them. So, it’s not that I’m lackadaisical or just, oh, sure, whatever. I do have principles, but I think, I’ll be more quicker guardian. I’m placing my existential bets on something like a Zen neoplatonism, a post-nominalist neoplatonism that is in deep discussion with the great Eastern traditions, and that was already in the Kyoto School, Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, and by the way, it’s one of the top five books ever written, top five I’ve ever read in my life, Nishitani. If you want one of the most philosophically profound and spiritually deep responses to nihilism, that’s the book. I happen to think that that, because both of these things have a huge, so, one of the things you and Jonathan rightly point out, Christianity has a track history and a tradition, and that matters, but one of the things you have to then acknowledge if you invoke tradition is these two things have a tradition of being able to enter into reciprocal reconstruction, Augustine, neoplatonism and Christianity, Islam, Sufism, Kabbalah, Judaism, science, the Renaissance, and again at the beginning of the 20th century, and then Zen is doing the same thing. Unless you think I’m proposing something really weird, there has been a long-standing tradition since the 60s of Zen Christianity and Zen Catholicism. There are books you can read on it. This is a thing. I’m not making this up. I’m not drawing this out of nowhere. So, Zen and neoplatonism have this tremendous capacity to enter into reciprocal reconstruction without, they’re not parasites, they don’t destroy, like, it’s a marriage, if that’s a better analogy, and so I’m placing my bets on something like Zen neoplatonism, not as the religion, I keep saying that, but as the possibility of, like, the equivalence of what the Silk Road was that can allow all of these different homes to have a proper road or highway between them, along which people feel safe to travel, and theoria, originally meant to travel to see something you haven’t seen before, and it’s the basis of both theory, and it’s related to terms like theosis, and so that’s the vision I’m articulating. That’s what the third series is going to be about, and I’m starting to work on it right now. Your question, I think, I want to say I’m not interested in the demarcation problem, but I’m not unprincipled, and I’m trying to make a case for how I can give a space for the greatest possible promulcation of what’s happening here. I’m placing my bets there, that that’s where we can grow what’s the spirit of this, how we can grow it as much as possible in the world. How we can grow it as much as possible in the world. I could be wrong, I don’t believe that there’s any teteology to what I’m doing other than the one that comes from my investment in it. I could be wrong, but at some point, and this is Kierkegaard, at some point you have to place your existential bet, that’s where I’m placing mine, that’s what I’m committing myself to. And I’m hoping, it’s a very fervent hope, that that will afford me maintaining and deepening the relationship I have with you, that I have with Jonathan and other people, that it won’t put it at risk. That what won’t put it at risk? This project that I’ve just outlined. Oh, okay, okay. That, hmm. I want to try, not individually, which would be ridiculous, but that’s what I mean about growing what this is, right? To afford this, I don’t know what it is quite yet. I keep doing like Zen from the east and Neoplatonism from the west, and they meet in San Marcan somehow, right? But that this could be the thing that can enter into reciprocal reconstruction, and thereby afford a place that we can all come to, that we can, it’s like what I was talking about with home. We can come to this, and we can meet, and then we can go where we need to go because of how we are committed in the world. We may be committed as Christians, we may be committed as Jews, we may be committed as Buddhists, but could we come, is there a way in which we can come and at least we can have the home base, and then we go out again and come back in again? And I think of it almost like respiration and relevance realization at the collective level, not the creation of a religion that’s, or a philosophy that supplants any of the other things. That’s why I keep saying, I’m not trying to replace anything. It’s interesting when we started this conference, I very much had the sense of, when we’re talking about, so you very much have, you very much have something you’re looking for. I mean, I played YouTube, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. I love that album. Yeah. I know, I’m old enough to like, No, I, Yeah, yeah, the old guys, we get it. Yeah, great album. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great album. Yeah. Part of the challenge in all of this is this quest. And when I listen to you talk about the Silk Road and when I listen to you describe this, I see, and I really see a love, I really see a love for lost people. Very much. And I think in some ways, that’s been another element of this little corner. And it’s been another element of what we’ve been doing. Because I think when I look at Jonathan’s work, I see sort of the recession of modernity. There’s a lake just over the Sierra. If you go over to Yoga Pass in Yosemite, you come down to Mono Lake and there’s all these tufa formations. And people wonder what’s with those tufa formations. It’s because the LA Water District took all the water going into Mono Lake for a while and the lake level went down and it revealed all of this. Well, as modernity has receded, there’s been a revelation of, Oh, oh, look at what was here before. Look at how symbolism worked. There’s a way we can get at that. And if we get at that, we can get at that thing that we’ve been looking for. Go ahead. So that’s part of what I mean when I say somehow Jonathan went into a room that took him back to the fourth century and then he came back here. And it works. But so have you ever read Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold? And he talks about the sea of faith. And he hears the sea rolling in and rolling out and the grinding is making this disturbing noise. And then he lifts it off from the sea and then he talks about the sea of faith that once and is now receding. But for him, that all that’s being disclosed are, everything is receding in the dark and the dreary. And he closes it towards something like, oh, my love, let’s you and I be true together because the world that seems so bright and beautiful and promised all this happiness has none of these things. And all we are at, we are now like people on a darkling plane where ignorant armies clash by night. And that’s how it ends. And you’re like, oh, right. But I think what’s happened is we’ve gone from the recession being that, being, and Arnold was a Christian and then he wrestled with it, right? What I’m trying to get at is that is a predominantly an exclusive negative reception of the recession. But now, and I think you’re putting your finger on it and I’m trying to make it more salient so we pause and savor it. What’s happened is we are now getting the positive disclosure from the recession. And that to me speaks that we’re in a kairos. That’s part of the evidence I have for a kairos, that we’re gone from a purely negative, privative sense of the recession to a positive providential sense of the recession. And that means I think we’re on a pivot point. I think it’s important just to pause and to note that because I think that is something that gives us a better sign of the times that we’re actually in. I just wanted to blow that up for a sec because I think that’s really important. And I think you’re right. In terms of the part of the spiritual home I’ve always wanted to look for or I’ve always been looking for is, in a sense, a place where we can do this. Yeah. A place where we can… One of the things you, it’s a very basic thing of course, that you, home is the place that you get dressed up to leave and you come back and can sort of be at home. You can relax. You can put on something more comfortable if you’ve watched movies from the 1960s. You do all of these things in a home. And part of what I see this little corner as is, I’ve always known that people have been able to have conversations like this behind closed doors. Yes. And part of what we’re doing, despite obviously different identities, in some cases, history of warfare and animosity between us, which is, I think it’s why important. I thought I saw Paul walk back in the room. Where’s Paul? Who came up and asked about my… Oh, maybe he walked out again. I think it’s important to have a space where we can come and talk about the wars that we fought and the conflicts that we’ve had. But in a way now that hopefully, yeah, there have been divisions. There have been differences. There continue to be serious differences among us. But I remember C.S. Lewis complaining about the Protestant Reformation saying, you know, it would have been a very different world if some of the key people could have sat in a room with a fire, some good cigars, some good wine and talked about transubstantiation and all of these issues. And when I think about what we’re able to enjoy, at least right now in this Kairos moment, I see that very much as a gift that we have received. I feel so too. So retrospectively, like looking back to Dover Beach, to now, I agree that there’s a sense of now, we can come together in a way we couldn’t before. And then prospectively, I think there are looming things on the horizon that if we… AI is gonna be different than anything we faced in our history. And most of you don’t believe me when I say that. I feel like Cassandra. But it is. And only our very best collective intelligence and our very best distributed cognition and distributed labor is going to give us the wherewithal to be able to come into relationship with it. Because the attempts to prevent it from coming, my considered opinion, and I’m something of an expert in the field, is those projects are doomed to fail. We’ll make rules to make it so that it never occurs. Good luck with that. I think that’s a failed project. This is part of the thinking that got us into the place where it… We’ll replace wisdom with rules, and then we’ll replace rules with laws. Well, we’ll just make laws and then it’ll be fine. And that hasn’t worked for almost all of the big problems we faced. And this problem is orders of magnitude bigger than any of the problems we faced. And so we have to get… We have to figure out how to work together, and profoundly so. We have to find a home base and a common orientation that, like I said, doesn’t destroy our other commitments. But if we don’t do this, and many of you have a faith commitment that saves you from this, and I mean this really sincerely, I hope you’re right. I’m not sure you are. And if we don’t do this, we will really lose our humanity. And so, looking forward to the horizon, looking backwards, like I said, the difference between Dover Beach and now gives me hope, because now there’s a positive. The recession of modernity isn’t just Heidegger’s and Nietzsche proclamation that we’re falling, forever falling. It’s like, no, we fell, and then we hit some ground that we forgot was down there, and oh, and that’s good. Now that we can have a place to stand on, can we stand together? Because if we don’t stand together, we’re gonna get cut to pieces. And I really hope we can do this. I really hope we can do this. And I really hope, and Jonathan and I are gonna talk about this, and he probably wants to interrupt right now, and I’m sorry. But I really hope we can do this, like I said, in a way in which we’re not requiring people to give up their spiritual homes, but instead finding a way, like the Silk Road, of knitting them together so that we can be what we need to be. So I’m just, I think the kairos not only is a kairos that we can see retrospectively, but I think it’s also a kairos we can see prospectively. I want to, you’re right, I really do love and want to save without it, sorry, without that being sacrilegious lost people and lost ways. But I’m, and I know you might not completely agree with me, and I’m just stating, you’re asking me what I’m thinking. I am, we’re facing the really, the greatest possible loss we’ve ever faced. This will make the Bronze Age collapse look like a day in the park. It’s, but we don’t have to, we don’t have to get scared. Like the fear mongers who just say, we’re doomed, I’m not saying that either. I’m not doing that, I’m saying we can, I believe, rise to this challenge, but we have to do it in a profoundly organized way. Individual effort is gonna be massively insufficient. Sorry. No, that’s fine. And I think, you know, as a pastor, I deal with a lot of people’s anxieties. Most of them are local for them, even within their home. And I, when you note the way that I hear sometimes Christians talk about various threats and anxieties, global ones, I don’t want to name any, because then suddenly the room goes in different ways. Well, God won’t let that happen. And I always think, well, the second world war happened. You know, the 20th century happened. The killing fields happened. Yes. And anyone that just basically says, God won’t let bad things happen to me. And then I also think, well, yes and no. And I thought Jonathan addressed that well. One of the things that really came to light for me in this conference was a lot of the, I think a better conversation about eschatology and origins. I thought that was brilliant. I mean, sorry, that sounds a little bit self-congratulatory because I was talking with him, but like, I don’t mean it that way. I thought what he was doing there and I hope I helped him clarify it. That’s what I hope I did. I think that is tremendously helpful and brilliant. And I think there’s a way, and I hope Jonathan and I get to, well, we’re going to talk about it. I think there’s a way of bringing that into the point I just made. I don’t think I can do it by myself, but I think I will need to do it with him. But I think that’s very powerful. And the video I did with Ryan, like, Ryan, like Christianity has a response to the problem, right? Like, first of all, like I say, well, I hope some people, oh, it’ll be okay. I hope you’re right. I don’t think you are. But I’m calling on Christianity, but I’m also calling on all the other legacy religions to like turn to this problem, please. Please turn to this problem. You do have the resources to significantly help frame, formulate, and respond to this problem. And if you don’t, I’m sorry, I think we’re doomed if you don’t. When I hear that, part of me thinks you’re looking, you’re looking because Christians are so unified and organized that we can somehow, you know, and I think that’s- I’m sorry, that’s a piece of position on my part. Yeah, I get that. And, but, so part of me looks at that and says, no, we can’t even, you know, again, the anonymous person who said to me on the bus, wouldn’t it be great if we’re all in the same church? And it was like, yes, but Christians hid the Jews during the Holocaust. Yes, so, and when I say, you know, we can’t even agree on how to do communion together, which has ironies that go very deep, but, and this is where I don’t want Christian hope to be misunderstood as, let’s say, certain others imagine it to be, but rather, and I’m not speaking about other traditions that’s certainly not my place, but what I see in the, what I see in the story of Christianity again and again, and, you know, this is where I very much agree with John and I agree with Chesterton and I agree with others that Christianity itself keeps dying and Christianity also continues to somehow be with the world as it crucifies its best and it rises again. And so I think we need to very much pay attention, but I think we also need to, I think in our frame when we hear here’s a threat, we have to counter it. Sometimes that counter is along the lines of, let’s say, handling the ozone problem, if we remember that from a number of years ago, and we’re gonna get these problematic refrigerants out and, you know, that ozone thing isn’t what it was, so on and so forth. When I look at something like AI, I think, number one, I certainly don’t know really what we’re facing. I think probably only a handful of people do and many of them disagree, and this is where I sort of pull back to the larger frame and say we can have hope and as Christians, I believe that’s where we do have a lot of resources because to not be Pollyannish and say, well, God won’t let bad things happen, and again, you mean like the 20th century? Like for the Orthodox Church, the rise of Islam, you know what that did to the church in the east? Like the Soviet Union did the church, I mean, Christianity has suffered enormous catastrophes and Christianity is almost at its worst when it seems to have the preeminent place of power in the world. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. So I believe, though, that you’re right in that we have enormous resources, they just don’t tend to be the kinds of things that we tend to look at as our strengths. Well, I think you’re right, I think there’s a lot of hyperbole that is masking ignorance around the AI issue. That’s why I did not make predictions. I talk about certain choice points that were, if we do this, we will move them closer to that, and if we do this, and we’re not there yet, but the point is we can be there, and we’ll have choice points, and I think what’s going to happen, one of the things that’s going to happen is every time we cross one of those thresholds, what we consider to be the human is going to be receding like Matthew Arnold’s Sea of Faith, and that I think the spiritual somatic dimension of us, the ineffable way in which we’re embodied, and then the ineffable way in which we transcend, that is going to become more and more what human beings are going to turn to in order to get a sense of where their humanity is still being honed, and I think that is going to be, so this is, I guess this is a prediction, but I think that’s going to be a special responsibility for the legacy religions, and especially in the West of Christianity to bear. There’s going to be, I hope you’re both right about the death and birth of Christianity, because I’m going to say this, and I hope it’s understood properly, I think the most important discipline in the next coming decade is going to be theology, and that’s going to be one of the greatest inversions since modernity that we, because you can mark modernity by how far down theology falls from being the queen of the sciences in the Western world, the queen of the sciences in the academy, and it’s suddenly going to be that’s the place, if it rises to the occasion, if it rises to the occasion, let’s also remember that in the Second World War, there were lots of theological capitulators, right? And I think every time I hear you say we, I think it depends what we is, and I think in that sense, that’s where I see this little corner coming to meet this moment. Oh, that’s a very, I hadn’t thought about that. Because, so just let me show you, sorry for interrupting, I just want to get it. Instead of the we being, it’s like, no, no, this little corner is a nexus point of many different Christian groups and non-Christian groups, and that nexus point is perhaps the place we should look for as the thing that will rise to the response. Is that what I’m hearing you say? Yes. That’s, that’s really good, Paul. And that’s what I hear when you say, this is how this little corner should steal the culture, because it is the we-ness of even these Christians that can’t figure out communion together, that have figured out a way to at least have a conversation across things that people have shed blood over in years past. No, I just, sorry, I’m not saying no, I’m yet, I just, sorry, I mean this as a compliment. I should have thought of that. That’s really good, that’s really good. And that project and the stealing the culture, this little corner is a better place to look for the kind of spirit and the kind of theology as I’m talking about it, that we’re going to need to address this, and that that is commensurate with the stealing the culture, which helps to address the Moloch part of the AI. That’s brilliant. Like it’s, I’m sorry, I’m not, it’s not flattering. I’m just being seized by it. That’s really good. Taylor, we should note this, this is really good. No, no, but like, I mean, it’s like, you can tell when it’s a really good thing when you go, of course, afterwards, right? And it’s like, that’s what I meant with, why didn’t I think of it? That’s a really good answer. I’m just, I’m sort of in a porio right now. I mean, you said lots of good things, and I mean this as a compliment. That’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard you say. I really appreciate that. I think that’s a great, that’s a gem. I’m thinking, like, thank you. Are we out of time? That’s what I think this project is. That’s, that’s, that’s just, oh my gosh. So we are just gonna take a minute to bring up some more chairs, reset, and then in two minutes, we will have response to that with Jonathan, and John is going to talk about what’s happening in the other room. In a moment.