https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Mh_MmdIMsH4
I see many very deep advantages in symbolic interpretation, but can it become a slippery slope where the resurrection itself is only reduced to symbolism? I like the way Peterson has approached it so far. He seems to try his best to not reduce it to just the symbolic and psychological. So I think this is probably a really good opportunity for me to address this question because it’s been a question that has just been going, I think that has been coming back over and over. People write me, people ask me if I believe in the resurrection. And I’ve rewatched my video where I talk about the resurrection again, and I don’t know how it is that people come to that conclusion. When I use the word symbolism, it does not mean that there’s an absence of manifestation. It does not mean that at all. The word symbolism, if you want to know more about that, watch the video that I did with my brother called What is Symbolism? Where we talk about how symbolism is this bringing together, bringing together of meaning and multiplicity or potentiality. It’s the way in which things come together to have meaning. The word symbol means to bring things together. And so symbolism does not exclude manifestation. And so it’s not that the resurrection is just symbolic. It’s that the resurrection is the ultimate symbol in the sense that the resurrection brings everything together and manifests, brings all the whole history of the entire world together into one event. Part of that is that it had to be an event. It had to be an actual event that happened in the first century. Because if you don’t have the particular, then it’s missing something. It’s missing the particular. And so for Christ to be who Christ is, he could cannot have been just a mythical figure. He cannot have been just a figment of someone’s imagination. Christ has to have had an actual physical manifestation for him to be what he is. For Christ to be what Christ is, that has to have happened. And so the events in the Bible, the events in the Gospels are describing events. The narrative in the Gospel are describing events that happened in the world. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t mystery in those events. There’s definitely mystery. Even in the resurrection of Christ, there’s definitely mystery. And maybe that’s why people have been always wondering because I want to slap people around when they think they’ve figured out the resurrection. I just want to slap them and say, no, no, no. Don’t think you’ve figured out the resurrection, my friend. Don’t think that you’ve captured it. Don’t think that you framed it. That story is a lot bigger than you think. And so I’m not denying that it happened. I’m just saying be careful when people just have this mental image in their mind of a dead body just kind of sitting up and walking out of the grave. That’s not how the story is told. The story is told in a very strange and mysterious way because it’s trying to point to you that the resurrection is mysterious. It is something that keeps its mystery within its own telling. So yeah, so I think that’s something that I’ve been wanting to say for a little while.