https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=l6-bLc0MCUQ
You know, even the way in which we grasp or appropriate this knowledge is not the way in which we in a modernist frame imagine what knowledge is and how we appropriate it. I don’t know if that makes any sense. Because I think, you know, when I look at what’s… It’s not just information. It’s not just… You can’t just get it from accumulating information. There’s a change that happens. It has to happen like a, you know, conversion, we could say, you know, in a small C conversion that needs to happen. Or else people will think… And you’ve seen it. Like, some people are saying, oh, it’s all gibberish. What they’re saying is just a bunch of gibberish. Because they listen, they hear, but they don’t… Because they can’t see what it is that… You have to change your worldview, basically, to really understand it. And that’s not a mental process. Something which actually precedes mental processes. It’s like an insight and intuition. It’s a… I don’t know. It’s a vision. Yeah. And I think… So when I listen to these conversations, I always try to see if I can translate it into terms that people who maybe didn’t go to college or… I mean, the kind of people that I preach to on a regular basis in church. The video I just put out this morning, I’ve been looking at Oliver Sacks’ work. And he had a really lovely chapter on the simple. And the simple are those who can’t do abstraction, but they very clearly live in the world of the concrete. And I was struck in listening to that chapter in his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. There’s a level here of practicality. So, okay, I look at this and I hear someone like Nate up in the UK saying, well, this is just gibberish. And I talked to him on Twitter a little bit about this and I probably will talk to him again about it. But I think still in sort of a modernist worldview, people look at this conversation and think, well, this will help me get what I want. Instead of understanding that this will change what you want. Yeah, that’s a great way to say it. This will change what you think is good, what you think is beautiful, and what you think is true. And it’s actually at that level of transformation that we do need to be changed. And I think part of what’s powerful in, let’s say, having these conversations with John Vervecky, with Jordan, and with, let’s say, David Fuller is that in some ways, because these individuals are on the different side of the Christian line, let’s say, in some ways that I think for the church, I mean, where I come at this thing is as a preacher, intelligibility is key. And what’s been happening for the last 200 years in a lot of ways is that we’ve seen the church accommodating to modernity and trying to do that translation through it. And now I think we’re beginning to see it from the other side, where there’s at least been enough of a sea change that the church can point to things that are not modern. They might be older than modernity, and they include things that are now coming after modernity. But the church can begin to make intelligible. For me, it’s making the Bible intelligible again, actually, because that’s my main job as a preacher, to make the Bible intelligible. And the more I, you know, the deeper I got into Lewis, let’s say, and, you know, part of the reason his book, Miracles, has been, to be quite honest, I remember seeing Jordan Peterson and I’d seen something there that was in the biblical series. And then in his classroom lectures, I said, wow, this is really helpful. And because I’d been reading C.S. Lewis’s book Miracles, like two, three times a year for a couple of years, sort of combat modernity in me, because I just felt myself increasingly becoming a reductionist modernist. And I knew part of me knew in my formation that this was this was untenable. This this this this doesn’t fundamentally work. And so then when I was listening to Jordan, I was connecting it with some of what Lewis was saying in that in that book Miracles. And I thought, boy, Jordan should really read this book. And then I thought I could send him the book, but that’s pointless. So then I thought what I really have to do is I shouldn’t really worry so much about Jordan, but I should I should address his audience. And so that’s that’s really how this thing got started for me.