https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rxrtZuyPvFw
So hello everybody I’m here with Paul van der Kley. For those who haven’t seen some of his videos on YouTube, he’s been pretty active in the last what two months now or maybe a month and a half, two months. He’s been pretty active in following what Jordan Peterson has been doing and giving an interpretation of what he’s doing, kind of trying to connect it and show how what he’s saying is similar and different from his own Christian tradition. And so I thought it would be a really interesting discussion to have with them to talk maybe about Jordan’s place in the big discussion right now about religion and then after that talk a little bit more about Bible interpretation and about symbolism. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So Paul maybe you can give a quick introduction to who you are and where you are and what you’re doing in life. Well Jonathan, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’ve been following your videos and really enjoying them and this is all new to me. I’m a pastor in Sacramento, California. I’ve been a pastor here at this particular congregation for 20 years. I’ve been in the ministry for now about 27 years but I’m also a third-generation minister so the church has always in a sense been our family business. And I got interested in Jordan Peterson a lot of the in many of the same ways that everyone else seems to have. Actually it was Rod Drears blog that I was reading quite regularly and he had made a comment about Peterson at one point and so I kind of followed it up and said oh here’s an academic in Toronto who’s kind of stepping out of the herd isn’t that interesting. And then I kind of I didn’t think about it much for a while and then I caught one of the videos of the protesters and what really struck me was how calm he was in the midst of the melee and that impressed me. And then I thought I want to hear more of what he has to say and then I saw that he was doing these biblical series and he’s selling out these this concert hall in in Toronto and I know I know I have some friends who pastor in Toronto and I thought well their churches are empty and this dude on a Tuesday night and people are paying to see it and people are traveling there to see it. I got to listen to this so then I start listening to it and I’m I’m a little bit addictive and once I find something that’s interesting I can’t let it go. And so then of course I listened to all the biblical series and I listened to Maps of Meaning and I listened to the personalities course and and and then I started and I’ve been blogging I’ve been blogging for a long long time and just a tiny little obscure blog. I’m known in my denomination but beyond it not too much and so I had written some blog posts about him and that was just kind of fun but then I was reading I always put point this up in my in my videos um Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. I was rereading that at the same point and I thought you know that he there’s something integral about Peterson and YouTube this medium and so if I’m gonna engage his work I really should maybe try and make a video and I’ve been playing around with video a little bit so I made a video and then I made another video and the second video just kind of took off and I had had like 15 subscribers for for six years on my channel and I wake up one day and I’ve got 300 I thought well that’s weird and then the next day I had you know 400 and 500 and by the time it hit 2000 I was thoroughly unnerved because I thought I don’t want this messing up my life and then after a while it kind of settled down and so and I kind of figured it out and then it was cool so and this is been what I’ve been doing but I but I do this because I am kind of I am kind of a pit bull when I get an idea that interests me and I don’t let the darn thing go and I’ve just got to process it to death and enough people are like oh do more so all right I’ll process it with the camera on so maybe you can tell us I mean I have my own take on this and maybe I’ll go into a bit later and I’ve talked about it a little bit in different talks but maybe you can tell us why you think it’s important to to deal with what Jordan is saying to the world especially coming from your own perspective as a as a pastor why you think that what he’s saying is important and why it’s it’s worth as a pastor getting involved in it and getting involved into the discussion well one issue was clearly I began so I put up my videos and the next Sunday you know in in comes a guy who’s been watching my videos and says I’ve been watching your videos and I’ve never been to church before and so here I am and he gives me he gives me this poster of Jordan Peterson and it’s as a pastor this is like well yeah this is this is you know shoot churches do all kinds of how many cockamamie things to meet new people and here people are just offering themselves and every in the next week another guy comes in and the next week another guy comes in and so my church is kind of so I asked my church says what do you think of this and there and they kind of look at me like well I don’t know I said well it’s easier than VBS so I’ll keep doing it vacation Bible school that’s you know yeah churchy stuff so but but when I listen to Peterson part part of the issue that I’ve done I’ve thought about for a long time is that there’s a real disconnect in the modern period between a lot of the stuff that you talk about in terms of the symbolic world of the Bible and the assumed world of regular people and so actually I’ve done a fair amount of teaching on this and some colleges and friends of mine who are university professors will have me come in and talk about this where everyone I last people you know is the world round or flat well it’s round well how do you know that it’s round well I saw that picture from the moon well now actually the Greeks figured this out a long time ago but so in other words in the imaginary space of the world you know we’re on a globe spinning through space but in the biblical story that the world looks very different and so what’s the relationship biblical story our actual existing life we don’t live we don’t live on a round world that’s floating in space or you know around the Sun we live on a world that has the ground down here and the sky up there and that’s our lived reality so that’s where the Bible that’s how the Bible talks about the world because that’s how we live exactly and and I think the disconnect in people as a pastor that disconnect that that separates them from the Bible and it separates them from God and so when you start getting into pastoral issues the Bible the Bible isn’t terribly useful for them and a lot of what’s happened in biblical theology and in biblical studies over the last 200 years hasn’t been useful at all it’s it’s been partly useful and so and so when I saw Peterson I said huh this could be helpful and so then I started and and the first thing I started when I started listening to Peterson was CS Lewis mm-hmm yeah and I and I thought I want to I want to have CS Lewis in on this conversation with Jordan Peterson now CS Lewis died the year I was born so what does that mean so so but he wrote a lot so that’s that’s where I’m where I’m going with my videos but before I’ve just started that process actually but I needed to talk a lot before I could get there yeah well you know it’s funny because when I kind of discovered orthodoxy in the West and I converted and everything one of the things I discovered is that a lot of Orthodox priests and people love CS Lewis and love Tolkien they almost feel as if they’re the kind of the medieval the the rediscovery of a medieval worldview that Lewis was was trying to get people to see is what needs to happen today and that’s what that’s that’s exactly what I think too is that we need to be able to rediscover the the lived experience and and and help people to see that that has value and once you see that then a lot of the stories of the Bible a lot of the problems in the stories of the Bible disappear I mean I just recently I told a priest that I said you have you have problems with dragons okay fine but just interpret the word dragon in terms of phenomenology the problem goes away it just vanishes because it just means a monster that’s kind of that’s on the you know on the edge of being and so then you don’t it’s gone so the story of St. George is not a problem at all who cares what it act like let’s say St. George killed some beast like it it doesn’t matter what it was in terms of its biological you know name even if you could give it its biological name you’re missing the point of the story which is that it’s a it’s a crazy thing that has that’s coming out from the pit and has it has a mixture I said you know maybe it was a like a like a two-headed you know a crocodile with with elephant Titus or something like who cares what it was it doesn’t matter it was a monster you know like there is no biological category for for a two-headed crocodile with elephant Titus you know it just and who has rabies at the same time or something like who knows yeah so that so so engaging with that has definitely been something that I’ve seen that has brought me close to it to Jordan is I never had never thought about it in terms of science ever I was actually quite hostile to not hostile but let’s say oppositional to science I wrote an article a few years ago called most of the time the earth is flat yeah and so it was it was trying to say like how much the scientific worldview had invaded our perceptions and how it was actually damaging to our understanding of traditional stories but also our understanding of our daily life how that how we don’t live in that in the let’s say in the cosmos described by black holes and in all these these we don’t live in that world it’s an abstract world but then when I heard Jordan I and he talked about neuro like neurology and and and the brain and and this idea that we’re kind of built in a way that these patterns are are physically built into our brain and I mean I had heard of Jung before and I’ve never been really interested in him and still I’m not that interested in him and the idea that we’re constructed that way no matter how it is that we got there like if evolution made us that way doesn’t matter that’s how we’re made and that the stories that the Bible bring out and that traditional stories bring out are actually tapping in or a kind of program that that runs and and they fine-tune our perceptions to to be aligned with that that that biological program I was like it really it that’s that’s what made me kind of reach out to Jordan when I heard him I heard him talk on the radio like a few years ago and I was like oh there’s something interesting here that’s worth exploring that can be helpful for what I’m trying to do and so yeah that’s how it all started for me and and part of what I really appreciated about him very early on was he’s a clinical psychologist with a clinical practice and so I my father was a pastor in a in in Patterson New Jersey a very distressed very poor community you know in the 60s full of heroin crime and that’s that’s where I grew up and and so I had always known chaos and and I had always been immersed in you know clinical psychologists sit in a room and people maybe I’m being a little biased people come in and meet them but as a pastor you’re kind of immersed in it you don’t have the clear boundaries and so you know when he’s telling his stories about you know the guy who you know a guy who loves his dog and I mean this is this has been my life my whole life and including the church I pastor in now I and and so when I when I hear I heard these stories and then I saw his kind of his chaos order construct I said oh boy that really works yeah and I can use that pastors are thieves we’re not only liars we’re also thieves and when we find something that’s useful we grab it and we run with it well one of the things one of the things that is one of the things that really attracted me I mean the word order and chaos is is is the word that that he uses you could use like in the in the Church Fathers you get the sense the notion of death like just the notion of death itself this really is this idea of fragmentation and a kind of falling apart at the edge and and the idea of Hades and all that so and so it was easy for me to map to map like the order chaos paradigm that he was using on to the this was the center periphery and like the order death image that’s using in the Bible and in the Church Fathers and then because I was already talking about that stuff before I was talking about logos before too that’s why he called me because I told him I said you have to listen to this talk I did where I’m talking about the logos and how the logos brings things together and and so and and you know he’s just kind of answering these quick emails and then finally he called me because he saw that yeah where does this come from like I never heard like I never thought other people were talking about this and I was like it’s there it’s in the it’s in the fathers like it’s this is it this is Christianity you know this is what Christianity is about so so so yeah so that was interesting so how has been I’m gonna ask you a big question what has been the reaction of other pastors around you in terms of this because that’s something that I’ve been having to deal with myself yeah it’s been mixed there so and I’m a part of a denomination it’s about quarter of a million people it’s called the Christian Form Church of North America it’s it was founded by Dutch immigrants and it’s the pretty it’s got a very thick culture and in some ways some people argue it’s it’s it’s a quasi extended sometimes literally because it’s an immigrant church and it’s not as much as it was say 50 years ago but so when I started talking about this there’s a Facebook group a closed Facebook group just of CRC pastor I started talking about this and a few pastors were very excited because they had also been secretly watching this stuff and they’re like oh you too and then other pastors usually I know especially actually Canadian pastors have been on both sides Peterson had been getting a lot of bad press in Canada right and this I’m also quite interested in and what I see as what is essentially a the culture war I think is essentially a Christian is a Christian Civil War because it’s two sides of Christianity you had the kind of the Cold War you had the Cold War civil religion and now we have this ascendant morality kind of probably neo-marxist civil religion that’s supplanting the Cold War civil religion and so and these divisions are even within my denomination which is a pretty conservative denomination and so we’re right away when people hear you know someone talking about pronouns or and I’ve never heard Jordan Peterson and everything I’ve listened to him say a word against you know gay people or trans people I’ve never heard that but his his his disagreement with refusing to signal along these culture war tribal lines you know even you know impacts people’s kind of low-resolution take on him so boom not he’s you shouldn’t be listening to you shouldn’t be talking about him and then the association with Jung doesn’t help because most people don’t know anything about Jung but what they do know is you know some vague connection with the occult or with new age movement so once Jung’s name comes up a whole bunch of people just check out but some pastors you know I’ve been around a long time in the Christian Form Church my father and grandfather were pastors in this denomination so in a sense I’m a known quantity and I’m kind of known for kind of being on the left side of the denomination so and I pastor at church that is at least half African American so I get a pass people don’t suspect me of being a racist so they can’t charge me with that and then I talk about Peterson and and then I just play the missional card on him I say hey you know there are there are thousands of people out there who are interested in following the Bible. It’s like where are you to talk to those people? Yeah you know this is my job and so you know so I and I’m also at a point in my career you know I’m 54 I you know where am I gonna go from here so I say what I want I’ve always said what I wanted so so when I when I when I started doing this some of my friends who know me just said oh well you’re doing what you always do you’re just doing it on YouTube that’s pretty much true. Yeah I’ve had I’ve had to deal with it was been very weird because at first my relationship with Jordan was very it was just I was friends with him and and then it we did this video the crazy metaphysics of Pepe video on his channel and that kind of that was very that was weird weird weird and then yeah and then recently I had a very very some strange events where some clergy that I was actually quite close to just told me that they had to disassociate themselves with me publicly they said because you’re an extreme right-wing guy I was like what like you’re almost a fascist and I was like where what like where in the heavens could you get and it was really I think it’s really just that somehow they somehow they heard something about Jordan being alt-right or being whatever or something and then they had this so they decided that to to put me kind of next to him and so I we need to disassociate with you because of that and even the idea of disassociating yourself with someone and not being willing to engage in a discussion with someone because there’s someone may they somehow make you less pure or something something like that that’s very that’s very disturbing to me and I had I had never had to deal with that and and now I had to ask myself questions about that about that itself about you know oh so if I speak to you now I’m like crypto Protestant like is that what it is and I thought I don’t know it doesn’t seem like that’s what Christ was doing he was you know he was talking and he was calling out people when they needed to be called out but he was also even the Pharisees like he said to the Pharisees you’re hypocrites but then he also said you know Pharisees are sitting in the seat of Moses you know like what they’re saying is fine they’re just hypocrites and so it’s so I just thought okay yeah I’m just not I’m just gonna keep going I’m not going to people were asking me like why don’t you denounce this why don’t you denounce that the Jordan saying why don’t you denounce this like yourself and I and then you and then you fall like I tweeted I think you saw that I tweeted something about how I never said never cited Jung before and after that I was like I shouldn’t have done that like you know it’s like it’s true that I’m not interested in Jung but it’s like I’m you know I’m giving them I’m making making people happy that oh now he’s disassociating himself with it’s weird that you have to ask yourself these questions all of a sudden well and I think I think we’re all getting an education in dealing dealing with this kind of context and and one of the things that you learn is self-defense is really hard and often counterproductive because people are going to think what they’re gonna think and the best thing you can do is is do what you know you should do and I again I really appreciate Peterson’s emphasis on this so one of the things that happened immediately after that so I had these people starting to come to my church and then as a pastor I always have an outstanding it I’d say if you’re a visitor to my church I will I will take you out to lunch because I want to hear your story and so then I’d start talking to people who who’ve been who’ve been interested in Peterson and he’s had a remarkable impact on a lot of people’s lives and and for the better and not just for the better in terms of a Christian sense but they you know they want to be better fathers they want to love their wives better they want to be more responsible they want to keep their commitments they want to tell the truth and it’s like I don’t I don’t care where you’re from this is you know this is basic yeah and so this is this is this is what you’re criticizing this guy for I mean okay well well what’s your agenda I actually appreciated your tweet about Jung because it you know when I when I try and kind of locate all of this I mean part of what’s beautiful about the Eastern about the Orthodox Church and now it’s I read an article a few years ago that talked about how I mean this church was in some ways kind of weakened and fragmented throughout you know the part of the Christian world that really took hits with with Islam and and and but but when as I’ve seen this church coming to America it’s it’s become less ethnocentric and and I think in some ways unleashed and so what this has meant especially for people whose traditions come from the West and the Latin route now suddenly we’re getting reintroduced to the riches that the Latin Church didn’t have access to and and I think ironically you know America and the United States is has always been a place that intensified both intensified religion but also forced it to be trans cultural and so I you know I’m fascinated by what’s happening with the with the Orthodox Church here well we hope so I think that I think that is definitely when you’re on the inside it feels like a war sometimes because of course the ethnic question is the big question you know in terms of the structure of the Orthodox Church in theory there should be one Orthodox Church in one place right so let’s say there’s a city there should be one bishop and there should be priests and you know like that’s how it should go but that’s not how it is so you have so every like every ethnic church has kind of preserved their own churches in in the the the country and so I would say that that in a way is the weakest testimony of Orthodoxy in terms of of its presence in the US but at the same time there’s been some considerable efforts from the part of the Russian coming from the Russian tradition and coming from the Antiochian tradition let’s say to really open up and to to talk about the Church Fathers and to try to talk in a way that that Westerners can understand and to to to use a language that is maybe more accessible to people and to also open up their churches and make them accessible for people because if you know you go to the if you go to like a really kind of strict Greek parish like you want you’ll go in there and it’s like you’re in another planet you don’t you don’t know what to do you don’t know where to stand you don’t know where to look like you know people are doing things and they’re speaking in another language but at least at the the OCA the Orthodox Church of America which I’m part of and the Antiochian parishes especially in the United States they have they have mostly in English sometimes with a little bit of Russian or a little bit of Arabic to kind of you know to to to connect to the to where they come from but in general like my parish is French my my it’s the only maybe not the only by now but it’s like it’s it’s one of maybe two or three French parishes in all of all of North America really that’s fascinating yeah that’s a fascinating yeah so we get I mean we get our translations from France and stuff but it’s kind of it’s kind of interesting my parish is very small we have maybe on a good Sunday there’s like 20 people it’s like this miniature miniature parish God God loves small churches and if he didn’t there wouldn’t be so many of them so I was before before I was in Sacramento I was in the Dominican Republic and I worked with Haitians who were illegal mostly cutting sugarcane and picking coffee in in the southwestern part of the country and most of those churches to be a church you needed ten baptized members and at any given time two or three of them were under discipline and you know but and and so up dotted in the hills and in the sugar cane communities I mean they’re all these tiny little churches of five ten fifteen twenty people but you know God and quirky and odd and wrong and you know all over the place but I am convinced that that God just loves these little huddled groups and my congregation too you know on a Sunday morning there’s you know 50 or 60 or 75 souls here and but I I wouldn’t have it any other way I love it now that’s great that’s good I lived you know it’s funny I lived in I don’t you know I lived in Africa for seven years no I didn’t know that before kind of doing this icon carving I was in Congo for four years and in Kenya for three years and in Congo I really got like the extreme version of that small church where we lived with because our the organization I was with we really lived in local neighborhoods so we didn’t live in like white enclave and they’ve like really in with with with the local people and the first house where we stayed the neighbors to the left they had a church and then the neighbors two streets to two houses to the right had a church and the neighbors on the diagonal from us they had a church and there was like there was another church which was a little further down the street like I didn’t know exactly where it was but it was like a little further down the street and they would and they and they and they would like they would pray like pray all the time and like with like loudspeakers they love the loudspeakers so we would have sometimes we’d have like three churches going at the same time you know at like ten o’clock at night you know on a Wednesday and and you were sitting there in your house and and it’s like you think wow like this is what it means to another culture like seriously like you just you can’t believe what’s happening and yeah so that was I was a really like yeah it was a shocker to kind of plunge into that world of like all these these little churches everywhere it was amazing though one time there was a pastor like the pastor next door on the left he was going and going and going and going for like three hours with the microphone and I thought oh what is happening like I you know you think you know you think that you wouldn’t get tired of hearing the name of Jesus but it’s possible it’s possible for that to happen and so at some point I was like what is happening so I go out and I go to see my neighbor to like see like what is this and I walk in and it’s just him with one boy and he’s just like he’s going and going and going and I thought wow you know it’s like we go to church on Sunday morning you know and sometimes I don’t go because it’s too long too much traffic it’s down in the city and like I don’t make it all the time and and I think it’s like wow you know in Africa especially people are so spiritual it’s like it just takes up their whole life so much that me as a Westerner like I get tired of it like I’m like can you stop praying please I have to slap myself and say did you can you hear your thoughts right now like you’re actually criticizing someone for being totally immersed and in there and anyways so that’s my little Africa that’s kind of totally off the track there that’s my little Africa story and anybody anybody who’s who’s done that kind of work you just you just get so many stories I often tell people if you’re looking for something to do right out of college go overseas and live in a support community for you know for five or ten years or something you will learn more in that process than you can possibly imagine and and I think I think actually that I don’t think it’s accidental that these third culture experiences you know in some ways connect with what Peterson is doing and I think especially with respect to your symbolism because it it forces you to think in other ways and have have respect for other cultures and not simply be reactive dismissive which is or either dismissive or seduce like people yeah either either dismiss other cultures or think that you know other cultures are just the most amazing thing that ever happened one of the most amazing in terms of symbolism one of one of the most amazing experiences that I had was in Congo I was I was working with artisans and we were designing products that were being that were being sold locally but also sold internationally so kind of helping them jive with what the international market wants and then design products based on that and one of the experiences I had was I met a son of the of a tribal king of the Cuba King and the Cuba they have these amazing patterns they have these geometric patterns that they use on cloth and in carving and everything and it’s a really elaborate symbol system and when I saw it I thought this is more than just geometric patterns like there is definitely something meaning happening in these patterns and so I interviewed him for hours and hours and hours we recorded the interview and he was explaining the symbol the the geometric patterns and this each geometric pattern had a story that was related to it and then that pattern was used only in certain instances let’s say on certain for certain things and so it all of a sudden it’s I had this amazing vision into like a proto it’s really a symbolic language like a full-on fully developed symbolic language of geometric relationships and and and it was really related to the symbol it was almost like the symbols were kind of like abstract images and depending on what was happening in the symbol it actually meant something and and that was one of the things that it was weird because discovering traditional African art it really bolstered my desire to make traditional Christian art because I was seeing this amazing language and obviously I’m not gonna come back here and make African art that would be absolutely absurd so it’s like coming back to Canada and then saying no I’m gonna plunge into into the history of Christian art and see if I can find those same those same patterns there and obviously I’d already kind of seen that they were there so it was just natural that I would go from let’s say living in Africa and coming here and doing what I’m doing now it seems very weird but in the end it’s actually quite natural that they’d have in that way it makes sense it makes sense and for me too the the way that culture so for example the Haitians I’m working with many of whom had been Christians already but through successive waves of often American influence but of course the Roman Catholics had gotten there first so then you have all of this all of these ideas all mixed together along with ideas you know they’re Haitian so their voodoo comes from Western Africa and and you have all these layers of this and this then gets manifest so one of the things that often happened we’d have these baptisms well you get missionary stories here we go so we have these baptisms and I should you know you got these pictures all these people dressed in white you’re coming down the river you think okay this is kind of an American Baptist thing and then they go into the water and because I’m way out I’m way out there in terms of where we’re at we’re a long ways from the capital and you take the person for baptism and you put him in the water but now for Haitians there’s spirits in the water and this kind of connects in with the ancient Christian connection between baptism and exorcisms and cleansing the spirits of the body so the pastor puts the puts puts the person they’re baptizing into the water and then there’s battle and that’s then the person starts to thrash and and then the pastor grabs them and puts them in again and they’re still thrashing the pastor just keeps putting them in until finally they surrender and and so what happens sometimes is some missionaries or even some pastors from the capital would come and they’d look at this and they’d oh you know this is this is horrible this is wrong and and I I was always of the sense of no this is this is theology manifesting itself as Peterson talks about in drama this is theology manifesting itself in drama it’s not a pretend drama for them that you know this is what’s happening in baptism is that you know old Adam is being drowned that’s one way to say it or you know that the spirits that have been inhabiting this person are being drowned and cast out and so I always looked at this practice which I think developed completely naturally in this context with all the successive layers of culture and said well this is this is the gospel working itself through all of this culture and also on the metaphysical level too because I don’t think I think it’s hard to live in a context like that and and walk away a materialist yeah yeah just see too much stuff yeah and it’s interesting because that is really like say the ancient way but we still in our in our church when there’s a baptism before the baptism there’s an exit there’s an exorcism of the person and then not only an exorcism of the person but there’s also like a chasing of the of the dragons from the water like in the in the in the prayer it’s like one of my favorite services and even during the often II like during the the feasts of the baptism of Christ we talk about like that these dragons that are hiding in the deep waters and so like we cast out these dragons from the deep waters and so yeah for me that’s why I mean coming back to Jordan when he kind of talked about you know that these the idea of chaos and the dragon at the bottom of the let’s say of the deep and all that it just made total sense because it’s still really part of of our of our worldview and it’s there in the Bible it’s there too and the whole idea of of the splitting of the waters and then the idea of Jonah going down into the waters all these images of going down into water all have to do with this is going down into death is going down into chaos all the way up to to st. Peter who goes down in the water and Christ pulls him out it’s like there’s this thread of water which I’ll probably make a video about it I did though I talked about the often in one of my videos kind of explaining that that thread that goes in to to that but definitely I think that the West like or the modern world like I would say the West but really it’s the modern world has has lost the capacity to see those natural connections that are are so intuitive to us right they’re just so natural we don’t we actually have to fight to to stop them from from coming up but once you’ve once you’ve kind of fought them then they they’re not there they still appear it’s like the reason why people play video games is because they can inhabit that world like that the world of video games is is basically made it’s basically a traditional world with the whole the whole structure of video games is is usually like some monsters kind of like dark under under something and then the and the world is world is flat and there’s a map and and the edge of it is kind of chaotic and so it’s always that world is so deep in us that if you make our world of ball that floats up and around the Sun we’re going to make a world for people to flee from that abstract world and go go live in it right that’s right that’s right and and so part of where so when I was in seminary for example the the work of Robert Alter who’s a Jewish scholar in Berkeley was was was really kind of hitting its stride and and what Alter did was kind of changed the conversation which had been focused on this grammatical historical scientistic tradition of biblical interpretation and wait a minute there’s this there’s intentional structure within this literature yeah and and that then became kind of a half step to say so so then for me I stopped I a lot of the commentaries that had been written were just completely useless as a pastor because no nobody cares how many different documents there were you know behind the Old Testament nobody cares and these new Bibles these new Bibles are our death for church like the Bibles with like the texts that are kind of like not really in the text or that have a different different because it’s like this is an addendum and there’s all these quotes I know this was part of this text and this I was like oh man those it like why would you use a Bible like that in church like use it to study but in church you want something you can read right you want an oral like something you can participate in that’s right and unfortunately so so the Christian Deformed Church was was kind of a in the Netherlands a breakaway from a modernistic church and so part of the part of the blessing of some of these rather even biblicistic traditions you know say even maintaining the King James which is an interesting translation I don’t personally use it a lot but you know at least within those realms for example as a child what did I learn I learned Bible stories yeah and you get enough of these Bible stories and you know modernists of all these are well you don’t want to tell children these stories it’s like no you don’t understand what a child is I remember had our church early on one of the mothers wanted to outlaw sticks because the boys were making swords and it’s like they’re boys you know if you take away so no we don’t want to give them guns well guess what you’re gonna cut off their fingers I mean this is how we are so leave the kids alone and yeah they’re gonna get poked and stuff but for the most part we’ll all get through and and the Bible is like that it’s this enormous playground and and so a lot of what I discovered over the years just doing basic pastoral work and because I have to preach every every week from the Bible doing all this Bible study I began to see these connections and say hey wait a minute something’s going on here that we didn’t talk a lot about at seminary why not really so before discovered before seeing Jordan you had already started to see or you already had some some insight into the fact that the the Bible stories function in in these in these these patterns like that there that there are patterns that run through and go all the way to to the end basically okay well it’s interesting because I grew up I grew up in a Protestant church and like there was gonna be none of that I remember I have this crazy story of someone I loved dearly who who was told that the word snake in that it says that the snake was was crafty right in Genesis or that was wise or something and learned that the word meant that it was naked and and it was like he was getting a hammer on his head like he was getting his whole world of being shattered he said well does that mean that we need to give a spiritual meaning to the story in Genesis I was like what I was like 19 years old and already I was like you mean you don’t you don’t see like you don’t see that it’s a story like even if you even if you believe in it literally still it has spiritual meaning I hope or else like what is it for like who cares about it and I think you know also what what I think a missing piece is if you I don’t know if you’re familiar with a another Protestant named Eugene Peterson he another Peterson he’s very big in the Protestant in the Protestant world he was a PC USA pastor he’s retired now but you know one of the one of the real issues the church has to figure out in this secular frame is what is the word spiritual mean yeah because it has so many current meanings that we’re not paying any attention to and this is part of the this is part of so so I start listening to Peterson and I’m thinking all right well what do you mean by that and archetypes all right well what do you mean by that and so actually a lot of what I’ve had to do in the last few months is to try to try to kind of nail things down and figure out Peterson’s vocabulary because he’s using terms that in different contexts mean different things and so then it’s really important because as he keeps telling us I’m very intentional about my words he keeps saying that and he’s right he is and so some of these skills that I use in terms of grammatical interpretation I kind of apply to Peterson and I track down all these little videotapes and say okay he’s using it here in this context and he’s using it there in that context what does he mean by being and and now in some recent videos he’s he’s talking more about metaphysics which is very interesting the end and so okay well and and I think it’s it’s it’s a it’s very interesting to me why certain things come up and why everybody already almost always focuses right down in on the resurrection because that’s that’s where the resurrection is one of these points where all of the streams come together just like the crucifixion yeah and and so yeah everyone’s drawn to this point say well what do you think about the resurrection and then he you know furls his brow and I don’t like answering these questions and you know because he’s and he says I’m not smart enough to figure it out and so maybe in three years I’ll know and so but I think one of the things about the resurrection which is important to say and I and I think that I think that Christians overestimate their capacity to understand what the resurrection is definitely you know and so I think that if you look in the text and you read what it actually says it’s not at all obvious what in terms of phenomena the resurrection is I mean Christ hides in his own resurrection you know he he he appears and the disciples don’t recognize him and then finally they recognize him and he they recognize him because he does a certain thing and and so it’s it’s it’s made in the text itself it wants to get take away the the simplicity of thinking that the resurrection just needed a dead corpse sitting up and walking out you know there’s something else happening and the idea of what it means for his body to be glorified what all these things mean like it’s it’s not at all simple and if then if you add what st. Paul says about the resurrection and he talks about spiritual bodies and he talked like what exactly do you even know what what what what exactly is a spiritual body it’s like it seems like that’s a total contradiction in terms and so if he’s using a neporia to talk about something something which is can’t you know it’s like either either a spiritual or it’s a body if it’s a spiritual body then he’s he’s he’s definitely creating a category that transcends other categories or a category that that is beyond our capacity to understand it and so I think that one of the reasons why people have one of the reasons why people have been hounding me they’ve been hounding me about the resurrection too like and and and I’m like okay well I think the resurrection is an event I definitely believe that and I believe it’s a it’s an event that happened but if you think that you can contain that event in your cat in your little definitions then you’re you’re you’re as much I would even say you’re as much a heretic as the person who denies it no it’s like that that that that resurrected body is not at all an obvious thing to understand and I think that’s exactly right so NT Wright has written about his anti right writes more than anyone can read I think but he you know he’s written about as much on this as anyone and and the point again and again is that all of these texts bear seem to bear testimony not of a group of people arranging their stories to fix to somehow develop a theological point but they bear witness to events that they couldn’t comprehend and so what the New Testament spends its time doing and actually I think one of my favorite books in the New Testament is the book of Revelation because I think essentially a book of Revelation is an attempt to update the Old Testament prophetic books with the new revelation of Jesus Christ and in many ways the only terms the the best tools they had at hand were symbolic tools and an attempt to represent the events that they’re trying to come to terms with and so then again I listen so this is where you know this is all stuff that I knew and think about and work on and all this and then I listen to Peterson and I hear him talking about this this psychological you know this psychological process by which we come to create symbols and how these symbols get refined over time and and eventually inscripturated and and you know and I began to say huh this is this is really useful not as in a sense explaining away the Bible or Christian belief or traditional Christianity but I think actually in terms of saying here is we don’t know the process but here is a plausible way we can understand why the Bible has the shape it has and why it’s enduring why it’s had this enduring power trans culturally throughout time why you can’t shake this book and why you can’t shake these images and so when you get to the book of Revelation one of the things that you recognize is that at least in Protestant hymnody so much of our hymnody comes from the book of Revelation yeah because it is just so rich but we’re all children before some some great thing that we can’t possibly understand well that if you look at in the Orthodox in the Orthodox Church we don’t we never quote the book of Revelation we never there’s no readings of the book of Revelation in the liturgy okay really right but the entire structure of the liturgy itself and the entire structure of iconography is based on the book of Revelation and so the way the church is built the Christ the image of Christ in the dome of of an Orthodox Church that’s the Christ who’s returning at the end of time right and so the structure and then below him there’s a hierarchy of angels and then below the hierarchy of angels then there are the the disciples are the prophets and then the disciples and then it comes down down down and then we are kind of part of that whole and so the whole church is an image of the last judgment in a way or the eschatological manifestation of the total church and so although although the although we don’t use the text in in the liturgy in terms of quoting it like the entire the entire liturgy is based on on on on based on on revelations and so yeah so when you say that the hint that it comes into the hymns in products and hymns it just makes sense because that’s what in terms in terms I think in terms of the more Orthodox perception of of of revelations is that it’s it’s a cosmic it’s like the ultimate cosmic puzzle like the ultimate cosmic image of the totality of all things and then the church is in a way like the kind of the temporary manifestation or no not the temporary but let’s say like the man one of the manifestations of the heavenly Jerusalem which comes down and so the church is is the heavenly Jerusalem physically the way it’s made with Christ coming down and and then the altar with the lamb on the altar you know and all that comes from the book of revelations when people a lot of when people talk about you know when I where I was growing up in the in the evangelical church we didn’t have an altar and they would say no we don’t have an altar because we’re not in the Old Testament anymore and we don’t want alters but the altar in the church doesn’t come from the Old Testament it comes from revelations that’s where the altar comes from the lamb on the altar and and and the idea that it flows out like his blood or the or the river that flow out into the into the world then that is then joining that with communion and bringing communion out to the people it’s all these images that are kind of fused to create what has become the the liturgical liturgical service so maybe that’s that’s like maybe a big question that I want that I want to ask you is that as you start to see the stories and the patterns and and the idea that there are these structures let’s say in in in the patterns and the stories that are the way we’re made or you could even say the way we’re made in God’s image let’s say we could say it that way how does that affect the way that you would see then like a church service because in terms of the Orthodox tradition you would say that the reason why we have liturgy is because we participate in that we actually live in the patterns and then we act it out and it’s not it’s not so much a theater the way Jordan presents it that’s one of the places where I disagree with Jordan like he tends to say we act it out before we understand it I don’t think that I don’t think that’s the right way to see it I think that we we inhabit it so that the patterns can become we act it out as a group right in terms of a community so that the patterns become the unifying the unifying structure which holds the group together and so you know the procession the bowing all these things they create a a they create a way that we can physically and spiritually participate in that giant pattern which is basically the Bible or ultimately like the book of revelations I’d say like the final manifestation of all those those patterns into one kind of crazy you know story so I’d like to know like kind of how you because I know that the Protestant I mean the Protestant ethos or the Protestant tradition tends to emphasize more the the sermon and let’s say some hymns and the sermon so maybe you could talk about that a little bit well that’s a big conversation I guess coming in here no I didn’t and but it’s a really important conversation so I’m my little church was like the first Christian Reformed Church that was planted in Sacramento because hollanders moved in here and then it was in an African-American community because the crazy missionary said you know all these all these second and third generation hollanders want to make money and have nice houses but here the black folks are you know they’re interested in the gospel and so that’s kind of how my church got going and and I grew up in a church that was similar in some ways because it was here my father was planting a church amongst African Americans so so I had liturgically I have this this Dutch Calvinist liturgy and then an African-American twist on it and then I went overseas and so liturgically I’m a complete catastrophe but I just am I mean I’m one of these beasts that comes out of the sea in the book of Daniel I’ve got different heads and arms and body parts and I’m a mess but so one of the things that we’ve been doing in Sacramento are planting new churches and one of the things that’s been interesting is that a lot of the younger church planters are far more far better attuned to liturgy and and I won’t I got to be careful here because some of my friends will watch this video and I don’t want to rat them out but there’s some there’s some serious there’s some serious Orthodox and Roman Catholic envy going on in the heart of a lot of Protestant church planters for the reasons you just described because they have seen how liturgy can especially I think culturally right now can help younger people get the gospel at a different level via liturgy than they can through let’s say a sermon and so in the Midwest where the culture is a little different when they do a church plant they’re still kind of in this seeker mode with guitars and you know big music and big sounds and a ball pool and all that kind of stuff out here on the West Coast a lot of church plants you know when they plant the thing they’re doing they’re having weekly Eucharist they’re calling it Eucharist and not Lord Supper they’re they’re paying a lot of attention to liturgy they are including much more symbolism now again in my iconoclastic tradition I got to be careful with some of these things they can’t go full-blown icons but this is happening in church plants because church planters of any more than any other type of pastor usually are much more sensitive to what’s happening in the culture and and so they’re saying you know the sermon alone can’t carry the freight we need to embody this in liturgy and this is bringing young church planters to study liturgy and and and and and and and bring in a lot of elements that were cast out in the Protestant Reformation and and and let’s see that’s not entirely fair either because if you actually look at John Calvin John Calvin had weekly Lord Supper John Calvin loved the church fathers a lot of this stuff that gets associated with real iconoclastic bare Protestantism is really third fourth fifth generation things that happen further on down the line so when you get into say Luther whose first generation and Calvin whose second generation a lot of that stuff from the church fathers was still in there and I think as modernity really got going people decided that they wanted to keep up with the cultural Jones’s and that’s when you know liturgy kind of goes out the window in some cases and that’s when you know the kind of what I call the iron box of secularism really gets in and so now we’re gonna we’re gonna demythologize the Bible and we’re gonna take out all this stuff and we’re gonna study it as scientists study you know something over here so a lot of this a lot of that there’s if you dig down deep into Protestantism the the possibilities are not as grim as they might appear in 1975 evangelicalism well I’d see it seems like I think that what you’re saying I’m getting a whiff of that too in terms of I’ve noticed that certain that there is a I think that with the breakdown of modernity I think there’s something positive that post modernity brought in terms of its capacity to show the limit of just rationality or the limit of only you know living up in the mind and the necessity for the embodied experience let’s say which which goes with it which can go towards kind of more Pentecostal experiential stuff but that has its has its own limits and its own downside let’s say but I think I mean at least for me it has been the going towards the more let’s say into integrative and symbolic understanding and these patterns as well because the patterns the patterns we intuitively get them right if you can explain them properly you know and that’s why I think that’s why I think a lot of people also they like what Jordan’s saying because he has no matter where he gets it from like even if it’s from Jung you know even if I don’t like Jung or whatever there’s some of the patterns that Jordan gets so intuitively that he’s really integrated them very profoundly so when he gives an example if people just it just you can people just click like they’re like yeah okay yeah that makes absolute sense and I think that that’s something that if we as Christians can go back into the Bible and go back into those stories and and find those those those those gold nuggets then then then we can do the same when we talk about patterns to people and we say you know that’s why that’s one of the reason why I’m doing these movies interpretations is to say these are the patterns of reality people like they’re not they’re not just in the Bible they’re in reality so they’ll appear all over the place I can I can show you like okay here here’s a kind of less profound but still it’s still there like and it’s the same as when King David did this and when you know and so I think that that’s a an interesting way to to be able to awaken people to to to to these to like the structure of reality basically and then final and hopefully it will help them see that there’s something you know that there is a transcendent aspect which which goes beyond all of it and which kind of out of which everything flows like it’s it’s interesting to see what’s happening now who knows it’s hard to know exactly how all of this is going to how all of this is going to go but for sure it’s an exciting time to to kind of be alive and to be able to talk to people yeah it sure is it sure is and I you know and part of what this project for me has been getting my mind around technology because I’ve also always been interested technology and so part of me figuring out okay what does what does YouTube mean and because what we’re seeing now so what I’ve done in some of my videos is you know if you look at John Walton who’s a who’s a scholar from Wheaton Wheaton College Old Testament basically ancient Near East cultures their impact on the Old Testament you know he reminds he reminds people that first you know before before the Bible was inscripturated it was it was likely oral and and so YouTube is in a sense the new orality and and so I’ve been for example I’ve watched obviously way a lot of hours of Peterson videos and now I’m reading his book and and Jordan Peterson in text and I’m also listening to the audiobook which is Jordan Peterson’s voice but Jordan Peter Peterson reading his book is different from Jordan Peterson on YouTube mm-hmm okay how what does that mean how does that work how does that change things and so you know I think you know especially when it comes to liturgy well what are you doing with liturgy so you’re taking stuff from the printed page and now you’re in a sense you know let’s think about Tang you know you’re you’re taking it and you’re you’re bringing it to life right in congregation yeah well it was there right in the beginning I mean it was there from the beginning that the the the Hebrew text was only consonants and you can you can see it really in that way where it’s like a dead thing it’s only it’s only stop sounds right it’s only it’s only guttural sound and stop sounds and then you literally breathe into the text you literally add the vowels which are the the the breathing and the the the the continuity so as so the text would take life as you would read it out loud because it’s not actually even fully there in the in the written it’s not even fully there like the meaning is actually missing from it and the meaning the meanings plural of also were were were kept in the community and kept as an as an oral tradition it had to be because each word maybe had four several words would have several possibilities of interpretation so so yeah so there’s definitely a deep oral I mean even the idea of reading scripture in private it’s it’s not it’s not a it’s a pretty recent thing which comes with with modernity like scripture it was made to be read out you know and that’s why I like even in the Orthodox Church until today we have these super long services like during during Lent during Holy Week we have these long services that read like the read the 12 Gospels of the the the the passion and you want for like three hours and they just read every single passion narrative in the text and we have these we have during during the during Lent and and Holy Week we have these these services where there’s like all the readings from the where every almost every single prefiguration of Christ is like read out loud so you stand there for like five hours like listening to our wimps protestants are wimps at least American Protestants Haitians boy we go four hours no problem but Americans go forever yeah Africans too like they they they you know like churches their life like they live and breathe it you know they just keep going forever yeah we get where I mean I I struggle through these long services oh my goodness the Russians and we sit down like the Russians they don’t sit down like they have we have chairs in the on the sides of our church where you could sit if you need to but the Russians just stand for five hours you know like the iron legs one of the things that one of the things that impresses me is these ancient practices endured and they formed communities and people and beliefs in ways that for all of our technological flashiness you know we’re we we just I think I think we are I think in many ways and CS Lewis makes this point often I think we are as it in the Sun the Lord of the Rings we are we are lesser sons of greater men you know because these these practices in these communities that we so quickly dismiss you know built civilization and you know and and and and developed faith that you know the orthodat the Russian Orthodox Church you know they endured they endured communism and you know the and the the Chinese Church you know grew and took root during communism and and so there’s there’s very much kind of a Darwinian there’s very much a Darwinian reality that it’s I mean these these churches have been purified and and yeah they’re they’re churches so they got all all our messed up baggage with them too but I think we are so dismissive when we should be respectful yeah yeah all right I think we’ve gone for quite a long time I think you’d have a conversation for a long long time right exactly so maybe we could we will try we’ll do this again at some point that’d be great that’s what I will do I will do I will wish you all the best I thought I’d follow your your YouTube channel and I wish you all I’ll suggest that people go and check it out I’ll wish you the best as you continue to talk to people and try to to mince out show the good and and you know how Jordan connects to Christianity how he disassociates himself with Christianity trying to find that balance that’s something that I that I try to find myself in terms of my discussion with people too I always tell people okay Jordan is a heretic like that’s it’s obvious that he’s a heretic he makes he does everything to tell you that he’s a heretic he’s told you that he started his own church called the church of St. Joe of Kim of Flora like what more does he have to tell you to tell you that he’s a heretic okay now once you’ve gotten that don’t write ten-page like articles about how he’s a heretic he’s told you that he’s a heretic now let’s move on to something else and have a real discussion right it’s like so hopefully we can keep doing that yeah thank you and thank you for having me and thanks for this conversation this was I really have appreciated your work and I you know I’ve got a you mentioned that I’ve got a preacher sermon and on the Moses and the and the bronze serpent and I thought oh boy I’ve you’ve got resources in that that I don’t have back here and so I really I appreciate your work and I really pray for God’s blessing on your work and your family and on your little church I’m thank you thank you for that story I’ll have a whole nother image now of you and your and your blessed tribe and I do pray that that God blesses you richly I think thanks a lot thanks a lot I really appreciate it so until next time all right all right thanks all right take care if you enjoyed this content and our exploration of symbolism get involved I love to read your comments in the comment section below please go ahead and share this on social media to all your friends and also please consider supporting us financially on patreon you’ll find the link to the patreon page in the description below