https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=e8okaD0fbzM
What appears to happen, as far as I can tell, in the post-Paradise Lost transition in Genesis, is that human beings are called upon to sacrifice, right? And you see that particularly in the story of Cain and Abel, because two patterns of sacrifice are laid out in that story. And one is genuine sacrifice, and that’s Abel, and the other is half-hearted, self-deceptive, instrumental sacrifice, and that’s Cain. And not only does that not go very well for Cain, it engenders bitter, murderous resentment, and then eventually the horrors of war, because Tubal Cain, who’s Cain’s descendant, is the first artificer of weapons of war. And it’s after that story that the flood comes, and also the Tower of Babel. And so there’s two forms of sacrifice outlined, and someone reading that, who’s a rationalist, might object, well, why is sacrifice necessary? And I think that’s actually an utterly clueless rejoinder, and here’s why. So, for example, if you’re going to be a scientist, you know, there was a woman, I think her name was Barbara McClintock, and she spent her whole life studying variations of colour in so-called Indian corn. And with a consequence of that was she discovered a variety of facts about genetic structure that led to technological improvements in cancer treatment, but she laboured in isolation for decades. Now, you might say, well, what was her sacrifice? And that’s pretty obvious. Her sacrifice was that there was a trillion things in the world she could have been interested in and pursued. And she sacrificed every single one of them to the curiosity that made itself manifest in relationship to this strange genetic anomaly. Right? And the thing is, every time you focus your attention on one thing instead of the multitude of other things, you’re making a sacrifice. Okay, so you have to sacrifice in order to attend and act. There’s no way out of it. And so then the next question emerges. Here’s another element of sacrifice. If you’re immature, there’s only the present. As you become more mature, there’s only the present and there’s only you. As you become more mature, there’s the future at longer and longer durations, and there’s other people. And so what you do as you mature is you sacrifice you and the present to the future and everyone else. And if you don’t do that, then you stay dangerously immature and psychopathic, right? Because you’re completely self-centred and narcissistic. And so that’s not good for you because narcissistic psychopaths tend to fail and it’s certainly not good for everyone else. So you have to sacrifice to attend and act and you have to sacrifice to mature. And then you might say, well, what’s the sacrifice that’s most pleasing to God? And the answer to that has to be something like, well, yourself, right? You have to offer up everything to what’s transcendent. And I think that is the sacrifice that you described. It’s an a priori act before the coming of the law, right? It’s the willingness to voluntarily lay everything on the line in the pursuit of truth and life more abundant, something like that. And I think that is the pattern that’s laid out in the Christian story. It looks to me like that’s the pattern. Yeah. Well, let me comment on that. I’m very interested that you mentioned Barbara McClintock because actually she discovered the so-called jumping gene and she really was the pioneer that’s led to this third wave of biology I mentioned earlier. That’s just a point aside, but it’s extremely interesting. She was a pioneer and she sacrificed a great deal. But it seems to me that we may need to think in terms of different kinds of sacrifice. You see, at the heart of Christianity is not my sacrifice, but God’s sacrifice on my part, a sacrifice that I could not have made, but that sacrifice demands my sacrifice. Offer up your body as a living sacrifice is what Paul says to me as a Christian. But I’m prepared to do that. The power to do that comes from the fact that my acceptance with God depends on a sacrifice that’s entirely outside of me, but can be appropriated by me. And that is when Christ died and rose again. Now, this goes very deep, but it goes to the heart of God doing something so that he can forgive me and deal with the guilt that I’ve incurred by messed up behavior and all the rest of it. That’s one thing. Now, in response to that, yes, of course, we’re called upon to sacrifice. There are all these different levels. A mother sacrifices for her child. She doesn’t sacrifice to some God. She gives up her time and her energy and sometimes slaves very hard working to make ends meet for the children. So she’s given her all in that sense and at that level. But there’s a much more fundamental level that deals with the problem of human relationship with God that’s gone wrong ever since Genesis 3. 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The app literally has one button. You tap it to connect and your browsing activity is secure from prying eyes. So stop letting strangers invade your online privacy. Go to expressvpn.com slash jordanyt. That’s expressvpn.com slash jordanyt for three extra months free. Expressvpn.com slash jordanyt. So you mentioned that the mothers, the maternal sacrifice, and so there were archaic societies where people sacrificed their children to the gods and that meant in some sense that they were giving up something that was valuable and vital to please fate. But what we have come to regard as the appropriate sacrifice on the part of the mother is, as you pointed out, it’s herself to her child. And there’s something deeper there in that, which is that it’s the voluntary sacrifice of the more powerful, and that would be the mother in this case, to the least powerful, right? And so that’s the service of the higher to the lower. As the exemplar of the highest form of service, that’s the proper form of sacrifice. And I saw the Pieta when I was at St. Peter’s a couple of times I’ve been there, that great Michelangelo statue. And that really is emblematic to me of something approximating the female crucifixion, right? Because you have Christ offering his own being in this cataclysmic way to the incigencies of being, let’s say. But you have Mary making an offering that’s of equivalent pain in some ways, right? Because I think it’s a toss-up whether having yourself destroyed by the mob, for example, is a more painful experience than the experience of a mother watching her child be torn apart by the ravenous mob, right? But we would also say, I think to the degree that we have any sense, that a mother who is performing her role properly, she offers herself to the glorious adventure of her child, right? She puts herself secondary to her child’s needs, but she’s also doing that in a way that offers the child to enter upon the full adventure of the world. And that would mean the voluntary acceptance of something like suffering and death, right? Because that’s the destiny of everyone. Now, a mother could try to protect her child against that, and against the knowledge of that, but that turns her into, well, a devouring mother, right? Someone who destroys the burgeoning ability of the child to thrive. And so there’s a dual acceptance of sacrifice on the part of the properly behaving mother. She has to sacrifice herself to the child, especially in infancy, but then she has to be willing to let the child go to be broken by the world. And that that is the route to, well, as you pointed out, that’s part of the divine pattern. It seems to be part of the divine pattern of eternal salvation. It’s something like that. It’s very paradoxical, right? Because it means you have to take the full weight of mortality onto yourself voluntarily and maintain your moral orientation. And that that’s actually the key to, well, that’s the key to paradise, I suppose. That’s one way of thinking about it. That’s a key to reacquiring what you lost in childhood. Yeah. Taking the full weight of mortality upon yourself is hugely important. It’s transformed, of course, if we believe that death is not the end. And as I am convinced that Christ rose from the dead, this introduces up for me a huge, a huge new world of possibility. That I am mortal, but death isn’t, physical death, that is, is not going to be the end. So as I get older, my own personal orientation towards the future, it gets brighter and brighter because I know that whatever happens if I am taken by cancer or COVID or anything else, that there has been a new life that I already possess, according to the New Testament, a power within me that enables me to live, but will also raise me from the dead in the last day. That’s a huge hope. Of course, it’s the central Christian hope. And it would be unfortunate not to hear that side of Christianity. And I feel many people today don’t listen to the whole, in a sense, the whole meta narrative that Christianity offers, because they would see in it that there’s a real prospect for the future, that it does answer the problem of physical death in a much better way than the possibly pseudo promises of transhumanist engineering.