https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Fz3B3OGPhIw
So hello everybody I am here with Matthew Miller, Matt Miller. He, I should say Matthew because I just told him just now that I like formal names. So Matthew Miller, those of you might not recognize his face but a lot of you will know him from his YouTube channel Logos Made Flesh where he analyzes movies. He also has other kinds of presentations there. A lot of people have been telling me that I should be discussing with Matthew and it’s very strange because I had also watched some of his movie interpretations that I enjoyed them and I thought yeah someday it’d be nice to talk to him and then at some point I realized that I’ve already had contact with Matthew several years ago, four years ago. I was, I don’t even know how I came on to his blog but I saw he wrote a a blog post about the Samaritan woman and he described the relationship between Christ and the Samaritan woman as a courting where Christ was courting the Samaritan woman in the manner in which we see in the Old Testament a man finds his wife. And so I wrote him and we had a few back and forth in terms of talking about symbolism and I was really impressed by his symbolic intuition. So I’m very happy to get a chance to talk to him. We’ll talk about symbolism, talk about movies and also I’m really curious about how he kind of developed his own symbolic intuition. This is Jonathan Pajot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So Matthew maybe you can introduce yourself a little bit and we’ll go from there. Yeah well thanks Jonathan. I appreciate having me on. I remember that when you got on that blog post and when you started growing and coming I was like I know that guy. Yeah and then same thing I’ve had people get on my blog on my channel and said you need to talk to Jonathan Pajot. Is that right? That’s right you’ve got the right pronunciation. And so I kept saying it to me and and so I finally I think I contacted you and said let’s do it let’s let’s get together. So I think it was yeah I reached out to you and you were on board with it. So yeah I’ve been it’s for me it had just been a question of time like yeah it’s gonna happen it’s gonna happen. Several people have been telling me you know that I need to do this and and it was just like okay as soon as I you know it was just a question of opportunity and then when you wrote me I’m like out there you go there’s your opportunity let’s do this. Yeah yeah. Tell me a bit about yeah tell me a bit about you know because you you you told me that your your corrections I forget how you you brought you work in a in a prison right? I work in a jail yeah local jail our Clark County jail here here in Vancouver Washington and that’s how I make my living. It’s definitely an interesting place and I get a you know basically human psychology to see how people operate and in a different environment that most people aren’t aren’t used to so. Yeah that’s what I thought you must have quite an insight into the into the human mind and the human passions that you know like the you get quite a scope of the type of people that you have to interact with I imagine. Yeah people are people are people are no matter where they’re at and you see people with basically letting all their I know the raw side of humanity the the place where people are just let it all hang out so we a lot of people just hide things and you find out that a lot of people on the outside have known they had a good reputation the outside and they were all struggling with things on the inside so it’s it’s it’s you know you just get used to the fact that you know there’s kind of two sides to people oftentimes so I was disconcerting when I first started but it’s become second nature now I mean I know it pretty well. Yeah so tell me a little bit about your channel I mean I’ve watched several of your videos sometimes I’ve watched them without even knowing that it was you you know at the beginning I’d watch several ones and then when I started to notice your channel then I thought oh I’ve seen this video before I’ve watched it before and and so tell me a little bit about how you stumbled on to your way of seeing patterns because I noticed that you have a you have a good insight into patterns in storytelling and and you also seem to have a good grasp of typology in terms of the Bible and everything tell me a little bit about how you came on to that. Yeah I went to I guess became a Christian kind of like yourself you know I was an evangelical Christian still in the evangelical Christian I go to a Protestant church I became a Christian about the age of 13 pretty radical conversion loved God and everything like that read my Bible pretty often and so I ended up going to Bible College when I was after high school and it was a local Bible College called Multnomah Bible College and I don’t know they I had a class called inductive Bible study with a guy named Ray Lubeck professor named Ray Lubeck and we studied Jonah for like a I don’t know whole semester we tore apart the four chapters of Jonah yeah and Ray had a pretty interesting take on Jonah I didn’t like the class at the time because I thought it was overkill I thought man the Bible isn’t this deep I just thought it’s just take it it’s more or less surface you know take it as it is and he showed me that in fact there was something more there and I think about a year later after I had that class maybe a couple years later I was reading the gospel of John I came across the passage in my personal actually I was teaching the gospel John to my youth group my to my kids we’re going chapter by chapter just bringing out some things talking about things but we’re doing in Sunday school one chapter a week and in my personal devotions I was reading first John at the time and it just so happened that coinciding in those two moments I read John 3 5 and had a good discussion about John 3 5 John 3 3 sorry Jesus said you must be born of water I’m sorry John 3 5 says he must be born of water in the spirit in order to enter the kingdom of God but I read that passage at the same moment I was reading first John 5 6 which says he came not by water only he came by water and blood I’m sorry I’m very I’m just to let everybody know I’m working on four hours sleep here but getting those two passage together I saw that the water was being used in the almost the exact same way and I thought it was odd that in Protestant circles those the water is interpreted quite differently from in those two passages and one instance water is thought to be I’m gonna draw a blank on what it is water is thought to be something other than the spirit in John 3 5 and it’s thought to be something else in John 1 John 5 6 and I thought man they should be the same thing but because we’re talking about the same person here using the same symbolism using the same shorthand reference for something and and a long time I came back to so I went back and read John all the way through and looking for clues looking for maybe some kind of key as to what the water could mean and I saw that water was everywhere for the first time I mean I’d read John like three or four times I knew it pretty well and all of a sudden the dividers that I had in my mind between all these different separate incidences the you know Jesus changing water to wine the him healing the man by the pool of Bethesda also the flow of blood and water in John 19 34 all of a sudden those made sense together not not separate incidences not as if they were and we often read the Gospels in our Protestant circles as as as patently historical that it’s simply what happens that if I’m reading it’s simply what Jesus did last Tuesday and there’s no more significance than that other than the person picked it out and wanted you to say there’s no shaping there’s no editing there’s no artistic element involved in terms of bringing out the spiritual meaning of what Jesus was doing and that just absolutely opened my mind so I thought well then John 3 John 7 37 to 39 Jesus basically tells us that water and now those passes water equals the spirit and yet in other passages water is clearly contrasted with the spirit right so John 19 34 you’re like is it the spirit is it not the spirit and how does that work out in first John 5 6 so I had all these questions I thought I had an answer and I thought it was pretty awesome so I just kept on reading and reading and reading and I picked up lots of books and so what is I’m sure is because I mean I have to me the the differences between water they’re pretty simple like but I but I let me tell you how this is how I take especially your question especially how I take and see if that’s the same conclusion you came to there’s a difference between streaming water or flowing water and and stagnant water or bitter waters or you know waters that are just there on the bottom like the all that all the images of bitter water in the Old Testament images of salt water all of that is very different from flowing water flowing water comes from above there’s no other way for flowing water to be flowing it has to come down and so because of that it tends to to echo the spiritual element coming down to earth whereas you have this water on the ground that’s a salt water which is dead and not living it has to be transformed by living water which comes from above you know so you have a lot of these images in your testament of changing bitter waters into freshwater all these all these these changes of fresh and bitter water and then you have all these images like we you know we I talked about we talked about the idea of the Samaritan woman where you have a well and you have flowing water which comes from above so you have like the water below and the waters above joining together as a image of sexual union but also an image of from Genesis right this union of the waters above and the waters below coming together in in in which can be in a flood if it’s negative but it can also be positive if it’s it’s happening at one place like you know like a masculine feminine joining together anyways that’s how I would interpret it but what did you what did you come to as your conclusion and how do you how do you see John 1934 I’m in terms of Jesus I’m not I’m not I’m not a chapters and verse guy so you have to spell it out right this is pierced in his side and blood and water flow so yeah that’s the culmination I think of the gospel it’s basically the capstone the the thing that brings the blossom the bloom brings it all together how have you interpreted that how have you interpreted that I interpreted it as the beginning I would interpret in in a way as in beginning in the end you would say and so water especially if you take the story of water being turned into wine so water being turned into wine is really is the creation process itself right from yeah from water into this created thing but then also death you know wine is also death it’s a it’s a death turned against itself right it’s fermentation which is which is captured let’s say and so and then there’s also water as something that you drink in terms of refreshing and then wine as something that is intoxicating and so it’s like the whole gamut of manifestation you would call it from you know and so water and wine could be equivalent to something like bread and wine as well in the sense of something which is meant for consumption which is let’s say pure which is which is the the the other extreme the left hand you would say something like that which is fermentation death intoxicant all of that and blood is that as well like blood was supposed to yeah that’s how I would see the so it’s like the whole thing it’s like the whole world is coming out of Christ you would say from the beginning to the end so it is it’s like a new creation coming from Christ’s side yeah absolutely absolutely that and new creation is the key right there I think that’s that’s the most important idea I think so when you look at the first if you start to read all the passages together so there’s something called the hermeneutic circle I don’t know if you’re familiar with it but I this is something I’ve latched on to and it’s kind of been helpful in terms of how do I read or understand anything but in interpretation the hermeneutic circle is pretty important pretty significant because it means that we can’t know the meaning of something apart from the whole of something right we look at the whole of something and we go back from the from the vantage point of looking at the entire completed text whatever context and we go back and we look at each individual part and we see how each individual part connects to the whole so it’s pulled apart part to whole it’s there it’s pretty significant so if you read the gospel of John in its entirety and you look at all of those water passages right and he’s well John’s trying to communicate something to us it’s not like he’s just you know brought this thing in just because but he has a meaning to it and it is symbolic so what is he how is he relaying the message of that symbolism what does he want us to get when he gets to that 1934 he says I saw the one who swears is true and he knows what he saw I mean that’s John 13 1935 just immediate verse after I mean he really swears to it and the only time the time he really gets that that personal with us is at the very end of John 20 which where he caps off the end of the gospel when he says these things have been written that you may believe and that you may have life in his name so what’s interesting is is that you go back and you follow the patterns you start to see that the patterns emerge and so in the first time it happens is in John 1 and if I go too long on this please go for it John you if you’re boring so there’s the first time we see water John the Baptist and John one states three times in rep he repeats himself three times I baptize in water he says yeah and the third time he then says but he will baptize in the Holy Spirit right and we get that from Mark’s gospel get it from Luke’s gospel that the fact is that there’s this the economy between water baptism and the Holy Spirit that what John is doing is somehow different from what Christ will do and then in John the second got the the second chapter just immediately after that Jesus goes to the wedding and Mary comes to him says they have no more wine and then Jesus takes the wine the water sorry and he puts it in six stone water pot set there for the Jewish custom of purification and they draw it out and they take it to headwater and it becomes wine he says this stuff is the best stuff then a chapter after that John 3 5 or 3 3 when he talks to Nicodemus at night he says you must be born again and Nicodemus says how can I enter my mother’s womb a second time and he says it born of water and spirit you can’t into the kingdom of God then after that then you obviously have the story of the Samaritan woman then after that you have the story of of Jesus healing the man by the pool of Bethesda anyway all that to say is there’s a pattern that emerges from those first five chapters because it’s in every single chapter and what emerges is that there’s a comparison and contrast made between water and something else which equals the spirit right well in the story the Samaritan woman you have the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman and him she coming down and he says and if you knew who I was you would ask me and I would have given you living water right sir give me this water so don’t have to come all the way here all the time to draw water to drink and the interesting thing about that is that you say you have well water like you said and you have our and you have living water which is freshwater flowing water you have well water which is lake water it’s it’s stagnant water it’s it’s water that’s you know that’s stationary from below just water yeah water from below you can say yeah yeah absolutely and but there’s two and here’s what the interesting thing is if you look at the Samaritan woman story there’s actually that pattern that that conversation that Jesus has John has shaped it in a very interesting way I mean maybe he’s shaped it I don’t know but how this is how it goes you have the first half of the story and then when she says go call your husband and tell him to come here she says I have no husband all of a sudden we have a shift in the con and the content of the subject of the of the conversation which is now about her marital status and then she shifts it again saying sir I perceive that you’re a prophet she says you worship on this mountain we worship on this mountain which mountain should we worship on and then Jesus says it’s neither this mountain nor that mountain but but but the God seeks the Father seeks to for worshipers to worship him in spirit and in truth that’s speaking for is worship because God is spirit we must worship him spirit and truth now if you take look at this real quick you have that that first half of the conversation and the second half of the conversation the first half is well water contrasted with living water well water is a well of water I mean well water is dead it’s it’s but but she connects it to the traditional site of Father Jacob’s well she says are you greater than Father Jacob who gave us this well not word father’s important because it comes up in the second half and Jesus says my water will well up become a spring of life welling up to eternal life so yes I am greater than Father Jacob and his well the second half she says are she says our fathers get that our fathers worshiped on this mountain you say we should worship on this mountain which mountain should we worship on and Jesus says it’s neither this mountain or that matter but we should worship in spirit truth living water is connected with spirit worship in spirit and truth whereas the well water is connected to a traditional place a traditional place which is given by the tradition of Father Jacob he’s this old-time religion yeah is the mountain worship is the same thing our fathers gave us not worship on this mountain and Jesus is saying it’s not by location but the spirit breaks every border the spirit goes beyond borders it is you know not to say that there’s something negative in those things that’s fine but Jesus says as superseded what has came before his his he’s come for and we can see that in in John 2 where the story is of water and wine it’s not just wine the story doesn’t say it’s just wine it calls it water turn wine so there’s a contrast between water which is given out water which is is is has you know wine the basically the story goes in the wine they were drinking and it gave out and when Jesus makes the wine he goes to head waiter and the head waiter says this is how it always works people put out the best stuff first and when everyone is drunk then they bring out the cheap stuff but you have saved the best for last best till now and so you have a contrast between two different waters you have water which is impotent powerless and then you have water which is surpassing and awesome which is the spirit that’s why we call wine liquor we call it spirits it’s the idea that something intoxicating has happened so there’s there’s water which is given out and that water is based upon what she was tradition because he says he took the six stone water pot set there for the Jewish custom of purification and he transformed that he didn’t just take the wine jars the empty wine jars he specifically took something which was associated with tradition ritual ritual cleansing and transformed it into something which superseded that which was all-encompassing which was way better and this thing goes with John’s baptism what is John’s baptism in chapter one John’s baptizes in water I baptize in water he says but he will baptize in the Holy Spirit and what John’s baptism baptism was and it’s a significance important for Christians and everything like that but if you think about what John’s baptism was it was a Jewish custom of ritual purification because if you go to Israel today and you see all the archaeology is that everybody was doing ritual baths all the time even before you entered the temple you were going into a bath to wash yourself to purify yourself before you entered into any holy place yeah so John took that idea and made it a one-time baptism of repentance in the Jordan River and so in essence what John was doing was a ritual form of purification this is an act of purification but what Jesus does is he transforms the ritual and makes it something he super he supersedes it or surpasses it right all of those aspects the story of John 5 2 when Jesus has the healing of the man by the pool of Bethesda the man says he comes to the man and he says do you want to get well and the man looks to the pool of water and says hey I do want to get well but when the water is stirred up and it doesn’t what it moves yeah yeah it gets stirred active there is a passage in the King James Bible that tells us that it was an angel that came down but it’s actually not in the original text but the idea is the water gets stirred up and he he says I can’t get in because somebody gets down before me and Jesus says take up your palate and walk pick up your mat and walk and what’s interesting is is that story is there’s a contrast made the man’s looks to a traditional site a ritual site he sees in this place where all of these lame people are gathered together to get into the water when the water stirred up that’s tradition that’s ritual and what Jesus says is hey turn your attention to me pick up your palate and walk yeah this has superseded or surpassed and what’s interesting is in John 5 that’s the first time that you don’t have an active contrast made between the water the lower earthly water below with the water above Jesus has taken the place of that water that container of water and that’s what we’re going to see through the rest of the gospel of John is that Jesus is infused he has the water inside him and then we’ll see that in John 9 and John 11 Jesus weeping and the fact that he spits on the ground in John 9 yeah for sure and then and then when the the spear thrust happens in in 1934 yeah I would say in terms of I mean I think I agree with most of what you said I think that for sure that the language of the the language that I would tend to want to use is a kind of recreation or a filling up let’s say because when we when we use the language of supersession sometimes it can give the impression that we’re we’re how can I say this that it’s completely being left behind whereas whereas Christ fills up let’s say takes let’s say the ritual of Passover fills it up to overflowing and makes it into communion takes the ritual of of ritual purification fills it up into overflowing and so then we still have a ritual of baptism we still have communion but that but it’s it’s a it becomes this full full becomes full and and overflowing and also it overflows also into the you know into the into the nations right it’s not just for the Jews it becomes this thing that this Pentecostal thing which kind of flows out the question I have though is did you did you ever make the connection in terms of spirit and water to the very first passage in Genesis yeah absolutely right okay yeah and you’re like just this repetition of the same it’s just over and over the same pattern of the spirit above the water spirit above the waters and so Christ connects them especially at his baptism that’s where you see that actually Christ is the one who connects the waters with the spirit because he’s down in the waters and the spirit comes and lands upon him so he becomes the the connection between heaven and earth if you get even more deep into John and I didn’t get into this but the idea when John says I baptize in water three times and then the next day it says that he says it again and then he says but he will baptize in the holy spirit what John does in the first chapter of John into the second chapter of John is he gives us a series of of six to seven days John says the next day the next day the next day and if you if you follow out those days they end up to be somewhat comparable to the old the first chapter of Genesis which is you know Jesus God first second third fourth day and what’s interesting is in the first day what does God do he separates the light from the darkness right he calls the light day he calls the darkness night and it was evening the more in the first day and what’s interesting is is then John the one one one two we have that separation that in him was life and that life was the light of men and the light shines in the darkness and darkness has not overcome it and then that’s the first day so there’s a comparison made and then in a little bit later I think around I can’t remember a little bit later it says and the next day well that next day falls on the second day and the second day in Genesis is what happens God Jesus I mean God divides the water well you can say you can say that’s the logo my hand all things were made it’s okay that’s right so the it says that he divided the waters so there was a firmament there was waters he divided the waters the waters above from the waters below and that ends up falling on the second day where John says I baptize him with water but he baptizes the Holy Spirit and that’s why I connect the Holy Spirit with water from above yeah the water that John has with the water from below that water that is traditional earthly you know but but he surpasses that and is overshadowing that and we see that in John 8 where Jesus I am from above you are from below I am of this world you are you are of this world I am not of this world if you know if you look at the old if you look at the old baptismal fonts you’ll see that they usually were cross shaped and they had they they often had a fountain in the middle so they had a cross shape and had a fountain so the the baptismal font would actually be a a water below and then it would have a fountain that would kind of drop back into the water so you would have this you would come to the place it’s like it’s funny because people people always ask me because the you know the Catholics they baptize from above they put the water from above and Protestants tend to baptize from below even the Orthodox also we tend to put down from below but I think that I think that if you look at the images the early images of baptism it looks like it’s both at the same time it really looks like you see Christ if you look at the images of the baptism of Christ you see that he goes down into the water then you see Saint John also pouring something above him either either has his hand up there you see the spirit coming down or he has a shell or something and he’s pouring water down from above and so I really think that it’s it’s this joining together of the both of the both waters you get a little bit of that in the Orthodox tradition now sometimes I’ve seen it where when someone gets baptized they’ll actually the priest will will create this this like flow of water right they’ll actually with their hand they’ll make this gesture so that the water will kind of kind of come back on top of the person’s head as they’re kind of you know going down underwater I don’t know like what how that started that tradition but I’ve seen that done quite a few times by some some priests anyway interesting I should I should add too when I talk about supersession or whatever in the gospel John I do not believe that John is saying we should have no tradition or that tradition is wrong in some sense because in John 1 he says for instance he’s talking about the law of Moses he says grace came through Moses grace came through the law but but grace and truth came through Christ so there’s this idea and and and it also says something about basically that what God has given is he gave it he gave us grace in the Old Testament but he’s given us grace upon grace in in the news so the fact is is that these things were not wrong they were not yeah I mean so tradition and ritual are but they only get you so far that’s the thing is and I think that’s what John’s point is is that we have we have these traditions we have ritual everybody does and protestants will deny that they do but they’re just as much tradition oriented as anyone else and but but the idea is is that it is a heart transformation that John is talking about he’s talking about a life transformed by the spirit of God in in in spirit and in truth yeah so my question is my big question for you I guess now I will go and get into the movie stuff a bit later but my big question is as you start to approach things that way in terms of of interpreting in terms of seeing the patterns and seeing the typology between the Old Testament and New Testament and how it plays out in in the New Testament so my big question is how do you let’s say how has this been received in your circles like how do people perceive what you’re doing like how do they interpret how do they see it how they interpret it well I think I think the way I grew up in a Pentecostal I mean that’s where I grew up I grew up in a Pentecostal circles which is very very literal I mean reads the scriptures very literally so that’s how I was I was taught I was and so I think the people that I know closest have been their eyes have been open they’re like wow that’s really cool I never saw that before they’re interested and I’ve gotten pushback from people like I don’t get it I don’t understand some people might just think I’m crazy that’s why I look at you and go man you got to have people that think you’re crazy and that you’re not you’re like where are you getting those ideas from you know because it’s not so obvious to people how you get from point A to point B or C or D when you when they don’t see steps in between so you know so yes it’s been good and yes it’s it’s also led to some confusion on people who look at me and scratch their head and go I don’t I don’t get it so because I think that’s and I think symbolism symbolism to a lot of people there there’s a tendency in Protestant circles particularly the Bible is historical so they read the Bible with this is what happened so like the gospels are essentially a diary of Jesus’s activity and it was written as it occurred almost like no editing nothing just just that this is what happened and then we did this and we did this and we did this so each individual aspect of what Jesus did is significant in its own right not in its larger context so what do you think that this has been the one the thing that I’ve been trying to get people to see mostly and maybe and maybe I don’t know if I’m going to be pushing you a little further than what you usually tend to think of is that there is no such thing I keep telling people there’s no such thing as literal there is no literal in the sense that there are plenty of things that happen to Christ that were not mentioned that even within even in the selection process there’s a form of symbolic compression yeah Christ you know Christ Christ did all kinds of things you know he put on his clothes he cleaned his fingernails he did all kinds of things that everybody does but we don’t mention those things because they’re not meaningful that’s right to me what I keep telling people that logos is a form of compression of meaning so you have all these details and the very fact that you choose certain elements within a narrative it means that already you’re in a form of meaning making or participating in meaning not just and and and ultimately what I I’m trying to to get people to to accept or understand is that the pattern that we see in scripture that the basic pattern the one from Genesis that we see all the way into the gospel is not just a literary pattern that it’s actually the pattern of reality actually the pattern by which we engage the world in terms of phenomenology so the very fact that even even in our own lives we have to create syntheses of meaning to create narratives like we exist in narratives we live our lives our stories we don’t we don’t live our lives as an indefinite amount of arbitrary details we rather compress them into to narrative form and that compression is the the structure of a reality because there’s too many details there’s like an infinite amount of them right the world if you if you don’t have logos the world scatters into dust like it’ll just keep scattering until it reaches it reaches dust but but the bible and and tradition gives us this this pattern by which to basically see the world with yeah absolutely I I take just to take off what you just said my my dad was a storyteller so my dad was he was a pastor for a bit but then he went on to become a teen suicide prevention counselor so he’d go to high schools all over the world the world and and basically do seminars so he’s a public speaker gets up and tell stories that’s what he was he’s a gifted storyteller he’ll tell a story anywhere everywhere he’ll and and everyone’s engaged by the stories that he tells but me sitting back and watching him do that I recognize that a story gets slightly shaped depending on the context in which is being delivered so the point of the story isn’t simply the story itself it’s the meaning or message which is shaped by the context and so that’s what the gospel writers are doing they’re telling us a story not just because it’s the story that’s important but it’s the meaning or the what we call the sits in laban in in biblical circles the life setting of a situation of the people to whom it was given so mark’s gospel is different from luke’s gospel and john’s gospel not necessarily because you know jesus life differed all that much but it’s the point that they’re trying to get their audiences to perceive and we see that in in adaptations of movies if we just bring in movies for instance we see adaptations for different settings if you see a movie made in the 50s and it’s remade there might be some radical differences between that and it’s significant of those those differences one illustration I like to use is the last supper by Leonardo da Vinci and everybody’s on one side of the table we all see it you know if you’ve got it in your head your mind that there’s something unique about the situation in which that painting was made it was made in a uh uh uh like yeah it was made in a dining hall and this is what people don’t get they see it on their wall they put it on their wall they see it in a magazine they see it wherever but they’re not getting the context of where that painting was made and it was made as an extension right you’re sitting at the table with us right at the seating arrangement exactly and that and and Leonardo knew that and we all know that that wasn’t literally Jesus having the last supper that’s not what it looked like but the meaning that it was it was it was bringing that application into the people who are now dining with Jesus and saying and the point at which we all know the point at which the the the painting was made was one of you will betray me and the question is every time you eat your supper with Jesus now you’re like is it is it me Lord will I betray you that question is now on the minds of everyone eating and and and and with Jesus so the meaning becomes the sit the situation the context of the painting itself becomes the means by which we interpret the painting um but yet but yet nobody says well that wasn’t the last supper you can’t say that wasn’t the last it is the last supper it is the last supper yeah and and and that’s the thing about image making too because I most my main job is being an image maker really when you’re making images you are you realize that you that you make choices that you’re compressing you’re compressing things into into a frame you have to bring things together and so you act you have to do that in a way that is making it meaningful because you could take you could have represented it from behind everybody’s head and have everybody from behind you don’t see or you could have represented from a fly’s view looking at you know the just the just the the tablecloth on the table so no you when you when you frame an event or you frame something in an image you have to make it meaningful you have to to participate in its meaning or else or else it’s relevant or else no one cares and it’s or you’re just being you know well we have people who do that today but they’re just trying to be innovative for being in a innovation to surprise you but even if they do that you know it’s like you could create uh you could create an image of the last supper by which you see everybody from the bottom and you just see the bottom of their feet and then you would see that it’s the last supper and and someone would think that they’re being extremely surprising and subversive and innovative but the only reason why you even care about that image because you have the referent of the actual normal image in your mind and now you’re seeing this as an exception to that norm so you know you can’t avoid it you can’t get out and that’s the hermeneutic circle right there is because we all have to have and this is the problem with the hermeneutic circle is that it’s circular meaning that we we have to have information in order to interpret right you can’t interpret without that information so there’s things that people miss all the time because they don’t have that referent you’re supposed to have the referent when you see the image or watch the movie or whatever and that’s that’s partly where I get into the movie thing is that people don’t know the bible and then you go well that’s what they’re doing they’re referring to the bible so uh which brings in the reference that people go well i don’t see that well of course you don’t see it because you don’t know the reference right exactly and and yeah you’re losing the main reference that all that all narrative in the west has been alluding to from you know from since the last 1500 years or whatever uh yeah it’s definitely lost that’s why someone like camille poglia who’s an atheist you know uh transgender lesbian she says the best thing we can do right now is teach the bible to our students because they’re losing the ref they’re losing the the mesh you know the underlying mesh for western society and they basically can’t read anymore because they don’t they don’t they have nothing to look at the world through that’s right and that’s the fragmentation of our society where everybody has their own little enclave of meaning there’s no grand narrative i mean that’s fine if you want to say there’s no grand narrative but basically you’re destroying society in the process you’re you’re breaking it down yeah so here okay so now i before we do get into the movie stuff here’s the big question this is kind of the question that because i’ve met several protestants who who have this kind of symbolic intuition and i and i’m always excited to to talk to to people that have this intuition but i always have the big my big question is why are what about liturgy like what about the rest right what about the architecture what about the the liturgy what about the liturgical year what about all those patterns which are because there’s the the pattern of reading which is an intellectual exercise let’s say uh but then there’s the lived pattern you know there’s the moral side which is there of course but there’s also the live communal pattern which is the making the world look like this pattern like let’s say this overflowing of the spirit into the world and the world being shaped by the spirit and so that’s how we see it’s a traditional christians that’s how we see the fact that our churches have a certain shape that our time is now marked by uh feast how you know the liturgy becomes the ultimate you know uh pattern of participation in the life of god in terms of of patterning itself on revelations and bringing all these patterns together and so how do you like what’s your take on on liturgy and architecture and art and all that i think it’s i mean like i said i think it’s fantastic i think that is the i think they they’ve reached the the peak the pinnacle of what we’re supposed to do i just my my take on it i guess why am i i guess i i’ve flirted with becoming both catholic and eastern orthodox you know the idea of i’ve been to monasteries and things like that and and and read um i guess why am i a protestant i guess because i’m i am a protestant i haven’t like you know swam the tiber or i don’t know the comparable thing for becoming eastern it’s it’s it’s fantastic i think that being devoted to the bible and i think that and i’m not saying that eastern orthodox or catholics aren’t but innovative american culture is innovative we want to do everything differently and i think that’s what we’re all doing exactly what you just said is to take the art and make it take our lives and um somehow be uh cruciform put in the shape of the cross uh for a whole entire life everything we do to be shaped and by that narrative by that story um i think protestants go about it a different way but they are doing that and i think that’s the goal of what we’re doing so they just have a different liturgy a different way of going about it so i’m not going to deny that we have a liturgy we do um we just go about it and it’s shaped a little bit different i don’t like and i i i preached a message at my church a while back and i actually went down to the local catholic church and i got a crucifix and i brought it up and i hung it on the wall for my pentecostal my pentecostal church and that to them is like anathema it’s almost like an idol you’re putting an idol on the wall and i’m like no i’m not this is the moment of jesus coronation this is the moment of you see a picture of of a of a queen being crowned queen or a king being crowned king there’s there’s emblems and symbols that are that are associated with the globe you know the little you know i mean if you see you know napoleon you talk about the crucifix in your sermon like you kind of yeah yeah this we we eradicate the cross as not the moment of christ glory we say it’s the moment of his death and it’s empty now and therefore it’s empty and the tomb is the most important thing in the fact that christ is resurrected and i’m like that’s not the moment of his glory the moment of his glory is when he was crucified that’s the moment he was crowned king and that’s biblical that’s based upon the gospel mark and the way the gospel writers interpret it um so also the cross the thing about understanding let’s say how christian imagery works is that it works in a pattern as well and so we have the cross but we also have the anastasis for example in the orthodox tradition where we see the harrowing of hell we have christ in glory sitting on his throne at the last judgment we have christ in the manger uh being born and showing you know showing this this first moment of the logos entering into the world and so all these images they don’t exist in a in a in a bubble so it’s not like all we have is christ dead on the cross we have christ dead on the cross which is speaking to christ at the ascension on his throne you know all these images are in a pattern together just like in the just like in the bible we don’t only have the moment of christ crucifixion we have it in a pattern of of storytelling but we also have a pattern of image making in which all these images are talking to each other the way that they’re talking to each other in the bible as well so but i i understand like i i remember when i was young too i remember that argument saying it’s like why would you show christ on the cross you know just christ dead and it’s like yeah that’s one image you know we have all these other images yeah it’s um so i don’t know um what to say about that i i i have a an element blog i have a series that i did um not a series but a one-time shot deal where i talk about the bible being our grand unifying narrative and that the bible isn’t complete it tells us the beginning tells us the middle and tells us the end but there’s a point in in that story which isn’t finished yet and that we stand in that place improving it’s it’s basically directed improv we look to the past and we look to the future and we we read the bible and sense of because most most of the bible people go to the bible and say i need an answer for my life i need to answer so they find a verse or proof text or whatever but it’s not doesn’t work that way and i think that the eastern orthodox uh get this is the idea that it’s a story and we find our self in that story and we are becoming part of that story and in some sense that’s all been worked out by the history of the church and i think that simply protestants are just recreating it uh you know 1500 years ago they’re they’re they’re doing the same thing but they’re going back in time to redo it all and eventually i think that it’ll it’ll start looking somewhat the same so Well too it would that be great if it did like it would be it would be great if it if it starts to uh well let’s talk about so let’s talk about movies so this is i you know one of the reasons why i do making movie interpretations and you said something before is is that seems to connect to the reason why i’m doing it is that i i notice that people don’t they they become blind to the bible stories people they they don’t see them anymore because it’s it’s as if either they they’ve been soaking in them and they just see them as things that happen like you said where they don’t they don’t see them as this patterning or they they’ve turned away from them and they and they don’t care and so they they think they’re boring and that these stories are just a bunch of superstitious nonsense and so the the thing that i thought is if i can show people the patterns in our other stories right the movies is a great is easy to do because we’re into video medium and everything i can show people patterns in our other stories then i can slowly point them to say oh you think those patterns are cool let me show you some let me show you some real storytelling let me show you some amazing uh you know patterning here yeah so you bring you you build your cred your credibility by saying we we all know that this movie is um you you have no expectations about a movie you don’t have any condition about a movie a movie comes out and you say it is or it isn’t and and people are fairly open-minded when it comes to the interpretation of that and it allows us to have kind of a halfway meeting point about the idea of interpretation what interpretation is hermeneutics and then you can take them back to the scripture and say if that’s symbolic perhaps something in the bible is symbolic as well becomes that absolutely what you’re saying sam and i’m curious about how like i imagine people are writing you sometimes and and and uh in terms of let’s say you you feel like the a lot of the people that are watching your videos are mostly kind of christians who are waking up to the take the meeting in scripture or that you’re reaching out to the outside let’s say people that are that are agnostic or atheist and then all of a sudden they haven’t seen the reference that you’re talking about like they don’t they’re not seeing that underlying our storytelling is this story of of christ basically which is which kind of keep popping up no matter what we do even if sometimes the movie maker doesn’t even do it on purpose yeah i i think that i’m getting quite a mixture of of all sorts of people i’ve got atheists that got on there and says you know like for instance my shar shank redemption video got on there and says i’m an absolutely atheist and i think that religion is the vein of society but i think you’ve absolutely nailed this movie and you did a fantastic job or something that affects so you you can get a wide array of people i think that there’s literalists and there’s non-literalists non-literalists and i think that’s that that that runs the gamut of people who are religious and non-religious i think that there’s religious people who are very literal and there’s non-religious people who are very literal and there’s religious people who are non-literal there’s non-religious people who are are are non-literal so that it seems to be that there’s just a um that’s an odd thing i mean people the conversations that that I’ve had with people, I see that Christians will often get upset, you know, that can’t be the case, you know, even just in a movie, because they see things, all things literal. An atheist might say, no, I totally get what you’re talking about. There’s an interesting story kind of around my circles. I did a movie interpretation of the movie Gravity by Cuaron, and I did Thomas Winant-Van Rizan from the Storyteller Channel, I don’t know if you’ve heard this. Anyway, so, they have great things. It’s Jonathan, he’s doing it on the story, because I love the storytellers too, and I was like, man, you hooked up with them. Yeah, pretty much, I would say Thomas by now is one of my partners, like we’ve been doing several videos together on my channel, and he edits my videos and everything, and so he kind of took, he had some intuitions about Cuaron as well, then he took the stuff I’d done in Gravity, and he made a video about this pattern in Cuaron’s movies, where in every single one of his movies, someone will go down into water and almost die and then come out, right? Yeah. And so Cuaron had invited both of us to the premiere for his latest movie, Roma, and Thomas got to meet him, because I couldn’t go to the premiere in New York, I had to go to the premiere in Montreal, and so I didn’t meet him, he wasn’t at the premiere in Montreal, but Thomas got to meet him, and he started talking to him, and Cuaron knew about his videos and my videos as well, and he asked him about that, about this pattern, about this baptism pattern that is in his movies, and Cuaron looked at him and said, you know what, I never noticed. It’s like, in every single one of his movies, he has this pattern, but he himself had never noticed that he was doing it. Just shows you how powerful these stories are, like how underlying they are. So let me just get this straight, so Sandra Bullock character falls into the water at the very end, right? Yeah. And crawls out, right? And stands up, you know? Yeah, crawls out and then stands up on the ground, he didn’t see any symbolic meaning in that? He had never noticed that he would do something similar to that in every single one of his movies, that he had a kind of a baptism resurrection or death’s resurrection image that went into water and came out, in Roma, they have the same story. The lady in Roma goes into the water to save the child, and then she brings them out, and then they have this moment of a reconciliation, like everybody comes together in this almost communion moment, and he’s like, my goodness, seriously? And then he never noticed that you do that? To me, it really is it. But he didn’t deny that he did that. No, no, he was like, yeah, yeah. He thought it was awesome, that’s why he liked the videos, the interpretation videos so much, because he’s like, oh, that’s great, but I just never knew that I did that, I think it’s great that now I’ve seen this pattern in my movie making. But like I said, it just shows you just how underlying the stories are. You can use them without even knowing that you’re using them. It really is like a reference in our existence that just basic tropes, you know? I remember writing a song with a friend of mine who was very young, and we ended up spending hours writing this song, and we kept singing it, and then we go, why, this sounds really familiar, and we pulled up another song, and it was the exact same song. It was the exact same song. Oh, we totally ripped it off. It was so much part of us, we simply just started regurgitating what we already know, and that so often happens. I mean, the artists are not just regurgitating, but they’re creatively working. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Axis of Awesome, the show, not the show, but the group, and they take the four chords that are in every song. Oh yeah, I’ve seen that, yeah, I’ve seen that. I think they’re a whole variety of different songs, and it’s like everybody does it, because we only have so many chords to play. Right, and there really are just so many patterns that you can actually tell the story with, because a story is basically that. What is it, this idea of the U-shaped story, this basic pattern. I remember when we were younger, my brother and I, we would try to take the dumbest pop songs, and then we would show that they had cosmic patterns in them, like you take Red Hot Chili Peppers songs, and show that they had this cosmic image in it. I don’t think we were making it up at all. It was just, you need a pattern in order to create any coherent unity, and so he was like, okay, here in the story, I can show you, here are the elements, everything kind of follows this normal pattern. Yeah, absolutely. It’s hilarious. So what are your plans for your channel? For a while, I think you kind of slowed down, but I saw you seem to be picking up pace again. I’ve been doing about three a year. I’d like to do more, I’d like to do it faster, but I really, I’m kind of a perfectionist that way, and I feel like I don’t wanna just, I don’t wanna say what other people have said, simply that I like to say things that are new, and I like to get to the heart of something, so sometimes I’ll be working on something, and I’ll find something new, and I’m like, I gotta rework the whole thing again. So right now I’m working on Arrival, and I’ve been working on Arrival. I started with a three-part series on Memento, Arrival, and Signs. I’m in Arrival right now, I just did Memento. Are you gonna do Signs too? Yeah, I’ve been wanting to do Signs too, because that’s a great, that’s great. Okay, so, all right, so we had a little bit of a cutoff here, but I was just gonna ask Matthew about, and say he’s gonna do the movie Signs, because I’ve been thinking about making that, doing that movie as well, I thought it is very meaningful. So I think the way I was gonna take it is, I’m kind of doing about interpretation, meaning in the problem of evil. That’s where it’s headed. The question is, is that in Signs, the reason I thought about doing Signs, not just Signs in itself, I think Signs in itself is fairly straightforward, but how do we answer the problem of evil? And that’s the question is, how can a loving God, all loving, all powerful God, allow evil and suffering? You’re gonna answer that question there. Yeah, I think Signs answered the question, but it answers it in a narrative format. And if you go back with memento, is the question of interpretation and meaning. Memento fragments meaning by having the person be with short-term memory loss, and it works everything backwards. And it comes from that phrase, it works with that idea from Soren Kierkegaard that says that life can only be understood looking backwards, but it must live forwards. And if you take those two ideas together, it means that temporal life can never be understood. Because we don’t have the complete context yet. Let’s go back, going back to the urban area. Yeah, that’s what Signs, oh, you’re right. You’re totally right, that’s what Signs does. It’s like nothing makes sense until the final moment, and then it all comes together. Absolutely, and when you get to the idea of Signs, it’s the idea for most atheists and Christians, you have the idea of, we all know that evil and suffering exists, right? We look at the world and that’s what we know. It’s very plain that that shouldn’t have happened, that felt bad. There was nothing that child did, there was no moral order, at least apparent moral order in what took place. And that child, apparently from what we see, will never get anything back or receive anything good from that event. And so people say that that can’t be. I think Steve Brei has a thing out there about how dare you God, if I ever met God, how dare you, you’re evil. So Christians and atheists both look at that data, but they come to very different conclusions. So the atheist looks at that and says, and this is just like signs, if you walked halfway through signs and you got halfway through signs, you would say, well, God isn’t good. I mean, he couldn’t be because- All this stuff happens, yeah. His wife dies, his daughter has a problem with water, you know, I mean, these aliens are coming and his brother didn’t make anything of his life, his life is a wreck, living with his brother and working at a gas station where he could be playing baseball, but something bad happened. So you get to the center point, and that’s in essence in our lives, we get to the center point of our lives and we looked at the past and we see these bad things have happened and we have to make a determination. This is our future hole. I love you say the center point, are you making a Dante reference consciously or not? After it happened at the middle of my life, that’s when he has his vision. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. Even lost in a wood, yeah, yeah, the first canto. So the idea is, so we’re making a determination and it’s a faith determination because neither the atheist nor the Christian knows what’s gonna happen in the future. But the atheist prejudges the future based upon the knowledge of the past and their knowledge of the past is bad things have happened, therefore the future will only be as it was in the past. Because we see that there was no moral order in the past, there was no God, there was nothing there, therefore the future will be exactly like that too. The Christian comes to it and looks to the past and says, I know that evil exists, but I also know that pain and suffering can lead to a good result. So for instance, my father disciplined me and I became a better person as a result. I tell the story of my daughter when she was younger, she had the flu and I had to hold her arm down, this is when she’s like less than one years old and they had to put an injector with some medication and she looked at me and tear her as they put a needle in her arm. What are you doing to me, daddy? And she has no idea what I’m doing because I’m doing it for her good, she has no idea, but she looks at me like I’m evil, but I had to do it in order to not save her life, but I mean, in terms of making her feel better. But the point is that Christians look to that and they say, well, if that’s true of the past, if evil and suffering can happen, we can look to the future and say, well, that could be true of the future. Neither the atheist nor the Christian know with certainty what will happen in the future, but the Christian stands in faith, just as the atheist stands in faith and says, I believe in a future that will be like that. And that’s part of the Herman Wood circle because we don’t have the complete story yet. The story isn’t finished yet. We haven’t seen it all written. What we have is a promise, a hope written in the Bible, but we haven’t seen it with certainty yet. And therefore we come, as you said, with symbolizing our lives with that expectation and that hope, writing that story into the things we do in our lives, how we build our buildings, how we go about our actions. And I think that’s the answer to the problem of evil. The answer to the problem of evil is that it could be, and it’s a matter of faith. And in fact, this is that by faith, by living in faith, we actually do in some sense, bring about the future that we hope for. And so it’s- Participate in the story. That’s right. In some sense, that’s an existential idea is that we become who we want to be. We make the future we want it to be as we want it to be. And so by believing in God, by believing in Jesus, we are in some sense, participating with God in bringing about the future that he has promised us it will be. Yeah, no, yeah, I agree, I agree. And I think that there’s also in our very perception of the patterns, like I said before, that we also see a hint of what you’re talking about because we can see that for the world to exist, the accidental and the arbitrary actually have to come together into a meaningful pattern or else the world doesn’t exist or else it’s just dust. And so because we see that, and once we understand, once we perceive that’s how Logos operates in the world, then we can understand it. We can also see that, yes, okay, so that means that the big story will also have to have that element where things are going to have to come together in a bigger story than the one I can even perceive because I see it at every level of reality. And so even the one that I can’t, that I’m participating in, let’s say, that I’m a part of and looking, trying to see how it’s all gonna coalesce, that it should follow the same pattern because that’s just how the world exists. It’s like there’s no other way for the world to exist besides that. And that goes back to art and in terms of how we interpret the meaning of our own lives, we have this idea that I can make meaning for my life and my life is meaningful because I declare it to be meaningful. You know, atheists will say my life is meaningful without God, God doesn’t make anything meaningful and my life can be meaningful, et cetera. But the problem is with that is that in terms of the Hermetic Circle is that meaning is bound up in context and that it’s bound up by the people who understand the meaning. So language is meaningful because they’re people who speak the language, right? So I understand what you’re saying because we both speak English and so on and so forth, but if you get outside the boundaries of what English is, you know English is no longer in some sense meaningful. Now we can agree to be meaningful, but as you extrapolate out, meaning is only found in humanity, in humans. We interpret the meaning and what happens is is that as you extrapolate further and further out into the context of the universe, if there is no God, if mind is not a fundamental aspect of the world, then there is no meaning because ultimately all of this is going to be gone. You know, nothing holds it together and if that’s the atheist perspective and I think that, you know, so people say, well, I can make meaning for my life. Well, I mean, in some sense you can’t because in terms of the macro, you might think you’re creating meaning, meaning for the moment, but there’s nothing that is ultimately meaningful, yeah, all meaningless. But I think that we’re at a good time in terms of a lot of philosophers and a lot of scientists, not a lot, but at least a good few, even atheists or even agnostics are starting to notice the problem of consciousness and the problem of meaning and qualia and the notion that things have qualities in the world and are realizing that we have a problem. Like we have a problem because like you said, you know, meaning seems to be an elementary constituent of the reality. Without it, we don’t have anything. We just have quantum flux. Like we just have this field of nothingness. And so it’s a good time. I think it’s a good time for people who understand Christianity in an ontological way that we understand that what we’re talking about is not just these arbitrary stories. We’re talking about how reality actually exists and how we can participate in that existence. I think it’s an interesting time. I don’t know if you know, if you ever heard of St. Maximus the Confessor and some of these fathers like St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus the Confessor. I’ve heard of him, I haven’t read him. You might enjoy St. Maximus because he really, I think he gives us the key today in terms of how logos exists in the world and how as human beings, we are the image of God in the world and we actually gather all of phenomena into ourselves and then we kind of offer it up to God and we become also the receptacle of that grace by which the world kind of holds together. And so it’s like the human being and the incarnation being the summit of that, like the ultimate version of that is this place where all the meaning kind of comes together. And it seems to be a manner of speaking which people can understand today, which people who are not Christian, don’t even believe in God can kind of say, okay, all right, I know what you’re talking about at least. You’re not just talking about some bearded guy in the sky who sends lightning bolts and you’re actually talking about reality. Ha ha ha ha. All right, Matthew, I really enjoyed this conversation. I definitely had a lot of fun. I would suggest there’s a lot of people that you should talk to. Do you know, have you heard of Paul VanderKlay? I’ve heard of him but never met him. He would love, I think he would like to talk to you. You would probably really enjoy talking to him. There’s a few other people as well and maybe we could also organize another talk at some point. Absolutely, absolutely, very much enjoyed it. Yeah, it was great to find someone who’s engaged and interested in this stuff. Like I said, my world is not, I would look for people who are really engaged in this stuff and they’re like, wow, that’s kind of interesting. That’s great about the online space. That’s one of the positive things about the online space. I always joke with people, I’m not joking, I’m actually serious when I tell people that before I started making these YouTube videos, I never talked about symbolism with anybody. I don’t talk about that stuff because it only matters to a certain very small amount of strangely minded people who kind of see these patterns but for most people, if you’re living a good life, you believe in God, you pray, you go to church, you don’t even need this, you’re fine, keep doing your thing. But for some people, because they have this intuition, it’s helpful for them to see through the veils, you could say. Absolutely, absolutely. And so all the best with your channel and we’ll all be looking forward to seeing more content and yeah, hopefully we’ll talk soon. All right, see you later. All right, bye bye. If you enjoy the Symbolic World content, there’s a lot of things you can do to help us out. If you’re not subscribed, please do. Go ahead and share this to all your friends if you can. Get involved in the discussion. We have a Facebook group in which people can talk about these subjects. I will put all those links in the description and also if you can, please support us financially by going to my website, www.thesymbolicworld.com slash support and I also have a Patreon and a Subscribestar. So thanks again and I will see you soon.