https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Fn967vMnfr4
Finally, I call it the culture of self-invention is a very boring culture. Stanley Hauerwas is a Methodist theologian who said he defined liberalism or the modern attitude as I have no story except the story I invent for myself. And that’s finally a very boring place to live, it seems to me. In fact, you’re part of this incredibly rich and complex narrative, which I would refer to as God’s creation and God’s providential movement. I go back to Luke’s Gospel, you know, when Jesus says to them, Duc in Altam, is it the Latin, go out into the depths. You people have been horsing around in the shallows way too long. That’s where the fish are, by the way. But also it’s where adventure is, it’s where the glory of life is. Get out into the depth. And we have, I think, allowed our people to be kind of horsing around by the seashore all the time. It’s also where what protects you from hell is. Because you need to be engaged in something that’s deeply meaningful enough to justify the suffering. And so, you know, part of what happens in the story of Christ is the only thing deep enough to justify that level of suffering is absolute immersion in a cosmic drama. And then you ask yourself, well, are we each immersed in a cosmic drama? And it’s not so easy to say no to that. It’s a life or death situation and everything’s in it. I would say the instinct of a Christian is to go where the suffering is. So I spent a lot of my life forming priests, working in seminary. Eventually I was the rector of the seminary. So my job was to help these young guys discern the priesthood. And I would say that’s the test. I mean, do you have an instinct to go where the pain is, to go where the suffering is? If you want to live a comfortable life, then don’t become a priest. You might be a bad priest, you know, if you embrace a comfortable life. But it’s the Mother Teresa model. It’s the Duke and Altam go out into the depths, and the depths mean the depth of human suffering. So then what’s wrong with what you guys are doing? Why isn’t it working? Well, what’s the problem? It’s true that we’re not doing enough of that. And I do think we’ve succumbed a bit to the modern thing, which is a preoccupation with rights and freedom and my individuality and so on. Well, you see this with church activism so much now. So like the church seems to be replacing itself in some sense with social activism. It’s like we’ve got enough social activists. Yes. Well, but I’d say this. Pope Benedict XVI, who’s a great intellectual hero of mine, said the church always does three essential things. The church worships God, it evangelizes, and it cares for the poor. Poor broadly construed, as I say, anyone who’s suffering, right? But that first move, as we said earlier, is indispensable. The church worships God. It teaches the world right praise, because without right praise, the whole thing falls apart. Secondly, it evangelizes. What’s that? Well, that’s a cool thing too, because Oon Gelion in Greek, good news, they were playing with that because the Romans would have used that in the eastern part of the empire to announce an imperial victory. They would send an evangelist ahead with the good news. Oon Gelion, hey, Caesar won a victory. So these very edgy first Christians who had zero social status, no power, no military behind them said, oh, no, no, I got the true Oon Gelion. It’s about Jesus risen from the dead, who was put to death by Caesar, but whom God raised. So that’s the proclamation of the good news, that now we have hope. Now the sacrifice has been made, and God’s love is greater than anything that’s in the world. Okay? Now I got those two things in place. Now serve the poor. Now go where the pain is, go where the suffering is. But if you divorce them from each other, and that has happened, so who cares about worship, and that’s fussing around with altars and sacristies, and who cares about evangelization? Let’s just get down and serve the poor. Then it does devolve simply into social work, right? But if the three are together, worship God, evangelize the dying and rising of Jesus, and serve the poor, now the church is cooking, you know? All right, so let’s look at the second one of those. So, you know, it seems to me, I can understand this, not that whether I can understand it or not is a hallmark of its validity, but I have to try to understand what I can understand. I can understand the idea that bearing forward in a moral direction, acting as if being is intrinsically good, and that humanity as part of that is also intrinsically good. And if I bring all that up as a set of propositions, even in the most extreme cases of suffering, I can see that as a valid moral good. That’s Christ’s refusal to be, what would you say, corrupted by the injustice of his and terror of his fate. And so that might be something like, you don’t have the right to become a tyrant no matter how badly you were tyrannized, let’s say. And I think that’s an unshakable moral proposition. But then there’s the resurrection element of it, because I could say, well, the first thing I would say is, well, I kind of understand that psychologically. Parts of us die and they have to die because they’re in error, they have to be cast off, and we’re reborn constantly as a consequence of our movement, our ascent forward. There’s no movement forward without some death of the past. And so I can see the resurrection idea as a metaphor for the part of us that continues onward despite our failures and constantly reconstitutes our spirit. It’s not something trivial. But then there’s the insistence in the Church of the bodily resurrection, which is, well, let’s call that a stumbling block to modern belief. No doubt about that. That’s something more than mere metaphor. And so you might ask, well, why is it insisted upon? Why isn’t the proposition that you have a transcendent moral obligation to bear, to operate for the good of all things, regardless of your suffering, a hard line, no justification with the defeat of death necessitated? I’m not trying to make a fundamental critique of the idea of the resurrection, because I know there are things that I don’t know. I know that for sure. And God only knows how the world is fundamentally structured. But it seems, and this is a Nietzschean criticism in some sense, too, an Freudian criticism. That seems in some real sense too good to be true. And so what do you make of the resurrection? How do you conceptualize it, even as it’s related in the Gospels? Yeah, good. You’re raising a lot of interesting things. First of all, everything you said about it in terms of psychological archetypes and metaphors, good, fine. I think those are legitimate. I think those are correct perceptions of things. And it has indeed functioned that way in a lot of the literature of the world, resurrection type stories. But I think what’s really interesting about the New Testament, as Lewis said, you know, C.S. Lewis, when someone said, well, the New Testament is just another iteration of the And he said, anyone that says that has not read many myths because there’s something so distinctive about the New Testament. And I would say, Jordan, first this. I think from the first page of Matthew through Revelation, what you get throughout is this, what I call this grab you by the shoulders quality. They knew about literature that is conveying deep psychological and philosophical truth. Paul certainly knew that literature very well. It doesn’t sound like that, though. It has overtones with it. It bears some of that. It has family resemblances with it. But what you find on every page is this one Gellion, this good news. So everything you said is true. I think it is true. But it’s not exactly news. It’s part of the philosophy of Parenas has been around for a long time and a lot of the great thinkers of the world. But again, I agree with it. I like the philosophy of Parenas. But the New Testament is people who grabbed everyone they met by the shoulders to say something happened. Something’s happened here that we were not expecting, that was not part of our thought system. And it’s so shaken us up that we feel obligated to go careering around the world and indeed to our deaths, announcing it and defending it. And what it was, was the fact, here in the 10th chapter of Acts of the Apostles, this sort of almost tossed offline. We who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead. I don’t think people trading in mythic talk use that kind of language. Mythic language, and again, I say it with high praise. I love the myths. But, you know, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, and then a mythic story unfolds. But read the Acts of the Apostles. Did you hear about what happened? It first was up in Galilee, and then in Judea. You know those people, John the Baptist, remember John the Baptist? And then there’s Jesus, and then in Jerusalem, and then we who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead. That’s what, and then look at Paul, Paul who saw him on the road to Damascus. Now the Pauline letters. Man, they do not read like myths. They just don’t. And I love the myths. I love the philosophy of Prentice, but it doesn’t read like that. It reads like someone who has been so bowled over by something, and he wants you to know about it, and it’s changed everything. And I think what it was, was what we said earlier. It’s okay, now we know God’s mercy and love is greater than anything we could possibly do. Why? Because we killed God. And that’s why Paul will say, I’m going to hold up one thing to you, Christ in him crucified. It was the most horrific thing they could imagine in the ancient world. It was deeply embarrassing even to talk about a crucifixion. Paul says, no, no, let me put it right in your face. See, the author of life came and we killed him. But I got the good news, Ewan Gileon, is God’s mercy and love is greater because he brought this Jesus back from the dead.