https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=v8m0Kfp9yG4
Michael Regnier said, St. Luke and St. Paul were among the apostles who appealed to eyewitness testimony. Without diminishing the power of symbolic truth or the inevitability of interpretation, what role do you see for the historical, this actually happened in the Christian message? Thanks. I think, I mean, this really touches on the usual problem or the usual misunderstanding people have of what I’m talking about. And so what I’m talking about is not, I’m not talking about interpretation and I’m not talking about, the idea is very simple. The idea is that the world manifests itself through meaning, that there is no neutral description of something. Like even when you choose the facts that you describe, you are already participating in meaning. And then when you do that, then you’re already in the symbolic world. That is when you string together a certain amount of facts, you know, and you do that with the telos, with the reason, because there are a million other facts going on at the same time, even within your eyesight. But when you string together certain facts, you are already participating in storytelling and meaning. And so what I, my contention is that the events in scripture, in the Bible, in the New Testament, are obviously talking about events that happened, but they’re not doing it in this weird idea that we have, this like misunderstanding of reality that we have, that it’s just this bland neutral description on which we add interpretation. Like, no, the way the story is told is there to make a point or else you wouldn’t tell the story in the first place. And so the story is symbolic. So the description in scripture are all symbolic. There are no, there’s no description in scripture that is just there to be there. Yeah. That you know, that doesn’t happen in scripture. It’s all there to bring about the meaning and the image of Christ ultimately. Yeah. You know, believe it or not, we got like three different questions that were essentially asking the same thing. Yeah. Well, people are such modernists. Like people are so, I understand, look, I have sympathy for that, but that’s what I’m, I would say that that question is an example of what exactly it is I’m trying to break in people’s thinking. I want to shut that type of thinking down. Because it leads to very dangerous places. Right. Yeah, it does. Yeah. And we actually kind of talked about this a little bit in our last mind bender on Lord of Spirits where we talked about the world as being essentially the product of human consciousness. And people are like, wait, what? It’s a good way to say it is, is, is to use the word, the idea of notion of St. Maximus. It’s rather to understand that the human person is a microcosm and that the human person gathers the Logie in himself and then offers those Logie to God. So, so the, the identities of the world are gathered within the human person and that person acts as a mediator between heaven and earth. And that’s why God created Adam in the first place. Exactly. Right. That was the role that Adam had. And so that’s the role we play. And so to say something like consciousness plays a part in the way that reality lays itself out. There’s nothing weird about that. It’s like, that’s what God created us to do is to, is to look at the world and to order it even in meaning, even in look at the chaos, the potentiality of the world, which is still there, right? The Tohubohu is still there, right? It’s, it’s, it’s underneath everything. Like that, that, that, that chaos is still underneath the world. And so we look out with the, with the God given logos that we receive and we order reality. And then we, we, we gather it into ourselves, into stories, into our communion of love, and then we offer it back up to God. And so that’s our actual role in the world. Amen.