https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=l9Ibs67ke6c
So, since last year I’ve received many emails probing the question of symbolism and its relation to the Christian’s insistence on the historical existence of Christ. Just last week I was sent something which summed up much of the issue and so I’d like to read the main parts of this letter that I received last week and then I’ll try to answer some of its concerns. Ok, so I’m 20 years old and I spent all of my grade school years at a fundamentalist evangelical Christian private school in Fort Worth, Texas. There I was educated and immersed in a deeply conservative theological tradition. However, after I graduated I began to doubt my faith and progressively adopted a rationalist, positivist worldview and became an atheist. I had been an atheist for a little over a year when I came across Dr. Peterson’s lecture videos and with those, your videos. Dr. Peterson’s perspective opened my eyes to a very different essential conception of religion from the one that I grew up with and helped me rediscover a sense of meaning and purpose in my life after wandering aimlessly as an atheist. I have begun reading other great thinkers to help further my newly developing understanding of religion and Christianity, like Carl Jung and William James. Here is where my problem begins. I would now say that I certainly believe in God, an objective morality. I would also say that I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the source of salvation, but I think perhaps that this is true in a symbolic sense rather than in a physical, literal, historical sense. More and more I am convinced that the symbolic reality actually points to the truest reality, but this conception is difficult to square with the way that most people interpret Christianity. For example, my peers and teachers from my old school would not consider someone with these ideas a true Christian. Because to them salvation depends on a faith in the literal life, death, and resurrection of Christ. I noticed that this specific point was also emphasized by one of your fellow speakers, Father Theodore Paraskevopoulos, in the resurrection of Logos Talk. All this being said, I am just trying to learn and I know that my overall grasp of these things so far is totally miniscule. This leads me to the questions I have for you if you are still willing to try to answer them. 1. In your view, what beliefs really make someone a Christian? 2. How much of the Bible do you think is symbolic truth versus physical fact? 3. Do you personally believe that Jesus lived historically and physically rose from the dead, as told in the Gospels? 4. If you think that the Gospel story is symbolic, how do you get along with your Christian community? And lastly, 5. For what reason do you align with Orthodox Christianity specifically? So I have seen similar questions arise around the type of questions that have been asked of Dr. Peterson. And I have seen on different study groups that people have felt a bit confused and frustrated by some of the answers, or at least felt like those answers didn’t fully answer their concerns. So I am going to try to answer this as much as I can, and I am going to try to answer the questions that were posed all simultaneously. So I think that the problem firstly arises because we still hold on to a kind of simplistic materialism, a kind of 19th century modernism, which thinks that the fullness of everything exists completely out there, exactly as we perceive it, a kind of neutral range of measurable phenomena which we can then add meaning to. So in this view, symbolism is opposed, or at least it is divorced from this truly objective And if in stories and myths and music or in art we find these patterns of meaning, they are like an abstract layer that we, let’s say, subjectively add onto an idiosyncratic and random world. The problem is that that is just not how it works. The problem of believing, we are only, let’s say, enumerating physical facts in a story, is problematic because there is constantly an overwhelming and seemingly unlimited number of facts all the time around us. When we look into the world, there is this field of potential being, and so we have two faculties that help us to deal with that. The first faculty is attention. It is our capacity to focus on something. We focus in and limit the world within our purpose activity at any moment. And so we don’t hear or see the same things when we are cooking or marveling at a sunset or shaving, let’s say. The second faculty we have to deal with the unlimited number of facts is memory. Most of the things we encounter around us just vanish in their specifics. We don’t remember them. Our memory only remembers the things which are important to us for one reason or another. Our memory will string things together, string events together into coherent hierarchies and narrative structures. These structures or these stories, they are already patterns. We often don’t perceive the patterns, but the structure of why we remember something or how we then order events for others is already symbolic. Symbolic in the sense that they are ordered and patterned around things that have meaning. And then you have to see that there is a kind of positive feedback loop between attention and memory, and then between attention and memory relating to other people. Everybody is aware of this. You know people, and I know people, who when they tell you, let’s say, how their day went, they’ll just ramble on and on about disconnected and irrelevant things that happen to them. And when you’re listening, it doesn’t take long, like 10 minutes will do, and you just wish you could run away or you feel like you’re going to die of boredom. So symbolism is not opposed to a kind of neutral physical reality. Symbolism is the very manner in which we perceive and organize the unlimited field of information. One of the first things that I remember that struck me when I began to attend an Orthodox church, I went to a talk that was given after a service, and one of the parishioners was explaining how the Greek word symbol refers to a place where two things meet, where two rivers become one river, for example. And that symbolism does not come about by adding a kind of metaphoric meaning on top of events, but is the very bringing together of events, the formation of analogies, the process of synthetic compression of multiple level of events, of patterns, of relationships. And it’s the bringing of all those things together which constitute symbolism, but also constitutes the very manner in which we engage the world. So if some people are interested in pursuing this, I put a link in the description of an article that I wrote which talks about this in more detail. And so see, there is no reality which is not symbolic. The nature of our existence in the world is symbolic. This coalesce around centers of meaning through our attention and our memory. We all experience this constantly, and if one is attentive, what it does, it makes the world a magical place. Let me give you an example. We learned recently that my wife is pregnant. This was not planned at all. It was a complete surprise. A few weeks before she became pregnant, three people close to us had dreams of her being pregnant. And then the day that she did a pregnancy test and found out, she had decided not to tell me right away and wait until we had a bit of time together. That evening we went to an event where we ended up discussing with a couple that we barely knew who had brought their newly born child, and the man was asking us if we planned to have another child. And I was like, no, we’re done. Three is enough. And I utterly embarrassed myself. It seems saying that we’re not going to have any more children. And then when we were leaving the event and we went into the car, I started the car and the radio was already on. And then right away as the car started, the song that was playing on the radio was a song about a woman who was pregnant and going to have a baby. And I mentioned that to my wife. I said, that’s weird, considering the discussion that we just had with that couple. And so this type of synchronicity, this type of events coalescing in a manner which is not causal in any scientific way is something that happens to everyone. And it’s only maybe the pathological fedora wearing atheist who would deny this to himself. Now it’s easy to look back and say, well, if my wife had not been pregnant, then all her friends would not have remembered those particular dreams. I mean, we dream all the time, right? At the same time, if she had not found out that she had been pregnant, that event where we discussed having another baby and then hearing that song on the radio probably would not have stuck in my memory very long. I mean, we had all kinds of discussion that evening with other people. And so the cynic might say it’s only because she is pregnant that all those former events became important and were noticed by us in forming a pattern. And the answer to that cynicism is yes, that’s right. And you cannot escape that. The process of putting together important things is how reality works, because our existence in the world is symbolic. Consciousness orders and gives meaning to an indefinite potential of existence. The world does not unfold randomly. And if in some ways it does, consciousness, attention, and our memory does everything it can to fit things into a pattern. All the random things vanish in the margins of our perceptions. And if there is something truly random, something which both forces itself on our attention and then pushes itself into our memory, we formulate that thing into the category of chaos, of tragedy, of suffering. It’s a monster and we have to contend with it so that we can continue. If I am forced to remember something which is truly random, it’s probably a car crash, an accident of some kind, or something that completely disrupts, erupts like a revolution into the regular pattern of my experience. In terms of remembering events, there is a personal way of remembering events. There’s a communal way of remembering events, a broader social way. And I would even contend that there is a cosmic way of remembering events. And all these levels of attention and memory will not appear the same. The more we move away from the idiosyncratic how-my-day-went stories, the more we move towards remembering events which have universal significance. The more this memory will appear symbolic, condensed, it has to be, so that it can be attended to and remembered by larger and larger groups over larger and larger spans of time. There are specific idiosyncratic objects or ways of doing things which must disappear, which must be made to fit with a larger and more universal image or universal images so that they can be remembered. So for example, in the Bible you can actually see that in the very unfolding of the large story. The more you go back, let’s say, towards Genesis, the more the stories appear condensed, symbolic, universal. The forms are compressed through images that reveal more and more meaning. So does that mean that what’s in the Bible does not describe events? Of course it describes events. The problem is that we think that all events are the same. We think that Adam, which means man as such, ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, becoming self-conscious of his mortality, having been tempted by a serpent, is on the same level, the same type of event, than when I’m picking my nose or washing the dishes. That’s the problem. The events in Genesis happened. They’re just being remembered at a cosmic level, using narrative structures and images that compress so much into them that people have written thousands of books unfolding the implicit meanings contained in those primordial stories. There will be no one writing thousands of books of how I did the dishes last night. It’s like, if any event in the entire world has definitely happened, it is the story in Genesis 2, and the fall. And just because computer brains like Sam Harris cannot perceive hierarchy in being, a hierarchy of events, and a hierarchy in the manner in which we describe events, just means that they’re forced to discount those stories to their peril, and to our peril, the stories which our ancestors for thousands of years considered to be the most important and foundational structures of our being, and the underlying origin of what it means to be human. And then you wonder why everyone is so confused and disillusioned. And so when the question is asked whether I believe, let’s say, that the resurrection of Christ is physical fact or symbolic metaphor, I don’t know how to deal with that question. I mean, what do you mean? What do you expect? Do you expect the telling of the resurrection to fit some kind of technical description? The kind of description a police officer would give at a crime scene? How could it and why should it? The problem with the resurrection, and with miracles in general, is the modern person thinks that the point of the story is understanding a kind of technical description of what happened. Their minds immediately try to calculate the miracle in terms of something which could be reproduced through scientific method. And I just want to slap myself when I see this. Obviously, the resurrection, by its telling, is referring to an event. But why do you think you know what that event is? Why does that event have to fit the level of analysis you want to impose on it? Look at the story itself, even the way it is told. First off, no one witnessed the actual resurrection, even in the story. When the people encountered the risen Christ, they don’t recognize him at first. The disciples on the road to Emmaus walked with Christ and talked with him without even knowing who he was. There are numerous details in the story which are there to tell you that you should not presume to think that you know what the resurrection is. I believe that the resurrection is an event, yes, but it is obviously an event which is not described directly for a reason, which is told in a matter which should avoid a kind of forensic analysis. So does a Christian have to believe that the Gospel describes events? Yes. Does a Christian have to believe that those descriptions have the modern journalistic or forensic type of description? No. Does a Christian have to believe in the resurrection of the body? Yes. Do we need to technically describe, like a surveyor would give a detailed analysis of a terrain, what the resurrection is? No. The resurrection imposes itself as the culmination of a giant pattern, a pattern which includes the natural patterns of death and rebirth, the seasons, the rotation of the cosmic bodies, a pattern which includes all the stories of the escape of the underworld, the crossing of the flood, and all the other tales of life rising out of death found in cosmic stories we remember and attend to until today, even in our movies, in our TV shows, video games, comic books. The story of the resurrection is everywhere, if you can see it. That brings me to the final part of the questions that were asked, the reason why I chose orthodoxy. The reason why I chose orthodoxy has to do with all of this. We believe that the world is symbolic. Our services, our prayers, the manner in which we remember through the Bible, through the legends and tales of the saints, is because we know how memory and attention have certain forms, how they lead us to and keep us in the heart, in the memory of the center, let’s say. We’re not bothered by stories which do not fit the rigorous forensic description of a crime scene, because we know that such a description cannot, will not, and should not be remembered. But our stories, as they join the cosmic pattern, as they participate in the eternal pattern, they will have a memory eternal.