https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0kjEtOqTzG4
I agree with most of what you’re saying. I think that the only place, and I saw this when I was reading the book, there were these little places where I wanted to push back on your thesis a little bit. It started right away at the beginning when you mentioned that St. Paul talks about, of course, this passage that you mentioned, that there is no Jew or Greek, there is no man or woman. But then there are other texts where St. Paul talks about a natural hierarchy between man and woman, for example. I remember the way you phrased it was that he doesn’t dare to go to the end of his own thinking, let’s say. He doesn’t want to push it to the end. I think that for me, that is the place where I’m not sure that I agree in the sense that, like I said, I see even in the story of Christ, for example, there’s a reason why Christ is shown as entering Jerusalem in glory before he’s crucified. He’s hailed as king and then he’s crucified as a criminal. Those two images are there to act as this joining of opposite. The cross is there, yes, as this idea that the last is the first and the weak, that there’s a joining of these opposites, but there’s also the moment right before where he’s hailed as the king and coming into the city. We see that all through, in my vision, when we see that all through Christianity, where, for example, Christianity never does create, at least at the beginning, doesn’t create a social revolution. The Christians martyrs die and they die and they die, and then the emperor converts. Then you find this strange balance, and you see the balance happen over and over. The Germans and the northerners come in, they kill, they kill, they kill. Then they convert, and then they become knights, and they integrate the hierarchy where at least the ideal of the knight is to use power and authority to protect the weak. Then you have this balance of this idea that, yes, we have an hierarchy, yes, we have power, yes, we have even empire, but the purpose of empire is to protect the weak. It’s not the same as the weak rising up and taking power. That I don’t see. I don’t see neither in the Christian story, nor in the early church or the early martyrs. I see that you frame it like, for example, you framed the Gregorian reforms that like that. Well, go ahead. Well, clearly, Christ’s death on the cross would be meaningless if he were not the king. Otherwise, it’s nothing. Yes, it’s a guy dying on the cross. Unless Christ is risen, then what we believe is folly. It’s nonsense. It has no hope at all. It is fundamental to Christ’s mission that he is indeed God as well as man. Otherwise, there’s nothing there. Yes, absolutely. I completely agree that Paul is not interested in preaching social revolution. That’s not what he’s about. I think that he’s not absolutely certain what he’s about. I mean that coming from other ways, I suppose particularly Jewish and Muslim, the immense bodies of law, whether it’s the Talmud or the Sunna or whatever, what’s really striking about Paul is that his letters are not meant to be prescriptive like that. They are, in a sense, dramatic monologues. They are quite close to, say, Cicero’s speeches. When he’s writing to the Galatians, you sense what the other guy might say, as you do when you read a Cicero’s speech. You only get Cicero’s… OK, but what you also get with Paul is the sense that he’s thinking aloud. So in that sense, it’s a kind of dramatic monologue. And you constantly feel, and that’s what I found so powerful about it, he is wrestling with something that he cannot put into words. He’s struggling to compute what it means. And my guess is that whether he has a vision on the road to Damascus or not, I mean, I don’t know whether we can trust that account in Acts as being a historical record, but something like that clearly does happen. He clearly does have some overwhelming experience in which he comes to realise that this crucified criminal is in some way God. And I can only assume that he comes to that conclusion because he has the revelation. And then he has to think, well, what’s going on here? I mean, how? And then he’s a highly literate man, steeped in the scriptures of his people. And so he goes through and he reads the scriptures. And it’s reading the scriptures that gives him the kind of sense of what’s gone on. He interprets the scriptures retrospectively through his experience. And so he then has to try and formulate what this means. And the letters seem to me an attempt to try and explain that. And that’s why they are so incredibly fertile for future generations, is that in a sense, Paul himself isn’t entirely clear what it is that he’s trying to say. But because they are kind of marinated in the incredible richness of the Jewish scriptural tradition. And also, of course, the fact that Paul is someone moving around the Roman world, this globalized world, and he has a working knowledge of he writes in Greek, he knows about Stoicism. All of this is a kind of blends together to create this incredible. Well, I mean, I kind of think of it as a depth charge that goes off underneath fabric of the Roman world. And it it ripples outwards in ways that perhaps Paul would would find completely shocking. And so that that thing, you know, the the there’s no Greek or Jew, no man or woman, no slave or free, which which seems so fundamental. To the way that that we in the West now think and organize ourselves morally, ethically, societally, of course, the key phrase in that is in Christ Jesus. You know, it’s not a manifesto for social revolution, but but the potential is there. You know, you can see those ripples go spilling out and spilling out and spilling out. Or it’s an acorn, you know, it’s a tiny acorn from which this great oak would grow. And part again, part of the power of Christianity is that it lends itself so. Prodigiously to metaphor to parable. I mean, that’s the other great thing is that is it’s. I hope I don’t just focus on Paul, because there’s also the parables, the power of those parables to effect change. And in a way, they are even more influential. So the last chapter, you know, I begin with the migration crisis in Europe, where you have Angela Merkel saying, yeah, OK, come on in. And Victor Orban saying, no, don’t come in. You’re a bunch of Muslims. We’re defending Christian Europe. Let’s put up the let’s put up the barbed wire fence. Merkel Merkel is clearly inspired by the. By the parable of the Samaritan, you know, the whole of this transformative convulsive episode that had such an impact on on on Europe is ultimately due to a short story. Interesting.