https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lq6XcUL1O-4
So I’ve been trying to figure out I mean I really don’t know how I’m stunned at the The popularity of the biblical lectures. I can’t wrap my head around it, you know, no matter how hard I try And I can’t I can’t even judge their significance in so Small or great But they’ve attracted a lot of views. So we’ll stick with that. So then Assuming that they have some significance I’ve tried to figure out well, what was it that made them work? Why why did people come and listen to what I was saying about the though about Genesis? And I think partly it was because I wasn’t exactly telling people what I thought about them I wasn’t saying this is how you should read these stories. I was trying to investigate something I knew was beyond my comprehension and I was doing that on my feet now I talked to someone this week who is quite explicitly religious and I could hardly listen to him because he kept telling me what was right He kept telling me the dogma. It’s like Well for are you so sure you know that and like who the hell are you to tell me that and that and it just There was just no meaning being revealed from that. There was no investigation Like I approached the Bible as a psychologist in some sense But as if it was something I really didn’t understand a strange artifact God only knows what it is It’s this book that’s been around forever cobbled itself together In a manner we can’t understand it’s lasted for a very very long period of time it’s had an inestimable impact it’s full of extraordinarily strange stories that That we understand very little about in some profound sense and it was an investigation and I kind of pulled people along with me during the investigation and that that seemed to and Maybe when I when I go to church, do I see do I see that? do I feel that I’m being led along an investigation into the structure of deep meaning and Answer is not usually I usually feel as if I’m being told what to think or told what to believe and that’s just That doesn’t seem to work. It’s but the Church Fathers priest exactly the way you’re describing and We luckily have some of these sermons like of Augustine that he gave we’d say off the cuff There was a secretary out the crowd who take them down. He would probably polish them later But you get a sense of someone who’s doing what you’re saying. I think thinking through with the text as he goes He was theologizing Philosophizing but he was he was trying to draw his people. He was a pastor Augustine. He wasn’t an academic He wasn’t a professor of theology at a university He was a pastor trying to draw his people closer to God and he learned the method by the way from Ambrose when he goes to Ambrose in Milan, he’s a Manakee, he’s not even a Christian, but he heard that Ambrose was a great rhetorician So he went to hear his rhetoric and while he was there he learned the method of reading the Bible Which is this more allegorical spiritual method? That’s what Jung appreciated. That’s what you’re doing in many ways The young Augustine learned it from Ambrose and then he bequeathed that to us in his sermons and biblical commentaries But trust me when I tell you we didn’t study that we didn’t study that approach ours was a very scientific Rationalistic approach to the Bible and that’s why preaching is relatively bad I would say so you’ve in a way stumbled on something that’s very old But still has enormous power to transform people There’s also something important Jordan in understanding that at least that the traditional churches at least the liturgical churches that You don’t you don’t them like for example in the Orthodox Church. They always say if the sermon is more than 15 minutes. It’s pride Like keep your sermons as short as possible because you’re not there to know obviously Obviously guilty of that you’re not you’re not there. I mean, it’s propositional understanding is fine, but it’s participatory Right church is participatory. So you enter into the church You say like you imagine an orthodox church even a traditional Catholic Church you have a space which is structured as the hierarchy ontological hierarchy of being and then you see these images which are patterned and Are revealing to you these mysteries that are beyond words and then you participate in the singing these processions and it is it is a participative thing and so if you go there to kind of Get knowledge It’s not the same type of practice and as you’re singing these songs and as you’re hearing these hymns All of a sudden two images connect together and all of a sudden, you know these things start to connect inside you in somewhat in almost a kind of Super rational way and the insights you get sometimes your heart you have difficulty explaining them But they’re very deep and they’re they’re embodied as you bow down as you kneel as you eat the body and and and blood of Christ These are these are different types of participation than just and Jonathan I’m totally in agreement with you and what did we do in our Catholic churches in the West? The same time we were presenting the Bible in this in this flattened out historical critical way We also were flattening out our churches emptying out our churches of it Just that mystical cosmic symbolism the angels the Saints color The cosmic dimension and we flatten them out and we made them like, you know empty meeting spaces So there was a terrible rationalism that descended upon the church and it dried us up in many ways You know, so I this is again my mea culpa as a Catholic I think we passed through a period that was really problematic and and recovering the sources that you know They saw Simone we say right recovering the the great sources of the Bible and the fathers That’s what that’s what we’re talking about What the Bible had by its nature what the fathers understood that’s what we need to revive the church I think So look but Bishop you’re doing something right obviously you’re attracting some online attention some substantial online attention and Jonathan the same is true of you and well John it goes without saying for you to some degree because you’re a professor and you Have that whole you know that whole world at your fingertips in some sense and you’ve been very successful at that But in the more specifically religious domain the more specifically Christian domain you two are having some some public success What are you doing? Right? Do you think I? Let you know I say I think you know, I think Bishop Baron and I are doing very similar things Which is why I always felt akin to what he’s doing. I’ve written for his for one of his publications I always felt we’re close in the approach which is first of all a Avoiding just argumentation, but I would rather this kind of presentation of beauty You know Bishop Baron also even in his publications and this desire to kind of have a beauty first approach It’s kind of encounter with these powerful patterns of being and you know how they kind of point to Christ and I think that Showing the deep coherence a deep narrative coherence in in scripture and then pointing back out to the world and saying This deep coherence in scripture You’re going to encounter it in movies and in all these cultural phenomena that you’re going to see you’re going to encounter the same Deep patterns that you find in scripture at a lower level we could say but that all of these kind of culminate into And so it really is like a meaning first approach and a beauty first approach I think which is which is which is attracting people because the insights they get at first they can’t I have people who watch my videos for two years And tell me they don’t understand what I’m saying and I’m like well why don’t they understand what I’m saying? And I’m like why are you watching my how can you been watching my videos for two years if you don’t understand? And they seem to express that they get these insights and they can’t totally explain them And and then it keeps them kind of wanting to continue on in in on this path let’s say towards Ultimately a lot of them end up moving towards Christianity and entering a church at some point Mm-hmm. Yeah, my thing has been a beauty and truth. I mean, so don’t dumb it down. I live through dumbed-down Catholicism And it was a pastoral disaster you look at all the surveys I studied them very carefully why young people are leaving The scandals come up the scandals will be mentioned but by far the most prominent reason is I don’t believe the doctrines I never had my questions answered It’s in conflict with science. It doesn’t make sense. They’re intellectual problems. Well, yeah, I get it. We dumbed the project down for about 50 years So smarten it up and and reintroduce people to this tradition We’ve been talking about the second thing is the beautiful we also as we dumbed it down. We also Ugly fight it, you know, we we De-emphasize the beautiful so one example, you know, we put out this word on fire Bible So the text of the of the Gospels but it’s a bit like an illuminated manuscript idea that we surrounded it with Glosses from the fathers and the Pope’s and the great theologians, but also lots of artwork lots of color So I want to reintroduce people to the Bible but not in a flat rationalistic way, you know So that’s what I’ve been trying to do I know well, I was certainly attracted to Jonathan to begin with because of the quality of his artistic endeavor Like this absolute these absolutely beautiful and archaic. Yeah Well traditional let’s say not archaic traditional this traditional medium that he was revitalizing and in such a stunningly beautiful way and That’s that that was the entry point into getting to know him and getting to understand his thought and yeah and beauty isn’t The thing you can’t argue against today beauty just smacks you and and and and that’s really something So and you can also help people notice that it’s like well notice Beauty book beauty Brooks no argumentation. Right? What do you think that signifies? What’s it pointing to? Is it pointing to something higher? It certainly seems to what might be higher We need to figure that out with the least threatening of the transcendentals in the postmodern context So people today you say here’s something that’s true. Who you gotta tell me what’s true. I got my own truth Even worse. Here’s the way you ought to live. Here’s the good who are you to tell me how to live? But the beautiful doesn’t preach in that negative sense it just is you know, it shows itself So it’s more winsome and it’s a more it’s a less threatening way into the project So that’s why I’ve tried to lead with it, especially in a world. It’s ugly like our world is just so Modern the modern world is just so banal that no There’s a reason why tourists go to cities and visit churches even though they’re not Christian and they don’t care about it Because they go someplace and they’re looking for a beautiful beauty and then they end up in a church rather than in a mall Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s definitely worth thinking about, you know, and the intent Incredible value that’s to be found in those unbelievably beautiful beautiful constructions It’s like what is that beauty and why do we experience it there? Those those lattice like creations of stone and crystal with color and the addition of the music that all goes to your liturgical point The drama that’s part of that and and and the celebration of beauty Shark is definitely absent in the modern culture. Yes. Yeah, when I was a student in Paris, I’d go there all the time And it’s sharp to me is the most beautiful covered space in the world But I remember this years ago. I brought a classmate of mine So priests from Chicago to see shart and we walked through it and I explained everything We looked at the windows and all this and he said gosh, it’s something It’s just too bad. It’s so liturgically off And I knew what he meant because I was formed in the same way You know that no the church would be in the round so we could see each other and there should be clear sight lines And you know should be brightly lit and all this stuff and like you said shark cathedrals liturgically off It’s like it’s the supreme liturgical space in the world But that shows that the quality of the bad quality of the formation that we got in my generation You