07/13/20 Philosophy Roundtable

[Music] good evening and welcome back to the journey home program my name is John mark Grodi I am the chief operating officer of the coming home network I'm guest hosting from my father Marcus tonight here on the journey home for a special episode special edition this is another round table and we're welcoming back to really neat guests that you might have seen recently on the show the first is dr. Rachel Liu she's a former Mormon a PhD in philosophy from Cornell and writer at various Catholic publications are multiple lots of different applications yeah and dr. jonathan fuqua a former evangelical protestant protestant and the assistant professor at a philosophy at conception seminary College in Missouri I think I got both those mostly right and welcome back to the show John thank you thank you glad to be here Rachel so we're really excited to have you back because there were some interesting connections between your two stories the first time around you both come from sort of beyond the mainstream Christianity you know oneness pentecostalism on one hand and then Mormonism and the other you know a bit a bit further beyond and many of our guests but you also have a background in roots and interest in philosophy in your various stories and capacities and we want to get to back together to talk about that so we'll start there I'll start with you Jonathan let's go back to the beginning because we haven't heard your story for a little while give us a little refresher on why you're Catholic but but starting at the beginning also talk a little bit about how the the role of philosophy the role of asking questions seeking truth played into that story and I guess real quickly before we go into that again philosophy what does you know what does the word mean it's the love of wisdom and so I think as we'll talk about later well you both have academic background in philosophy when we're talking about philosophy we're not just talking about these specific strict academic discipline you know but more that that way of life that way of approaching reality you know whatever whatever your position in life whatever your vocation is philosophy is something that we all participate in so give us a refresher on your theological background why you're Catholic and how philosophy played a role in that sure so one way to think of my story is as a journey from Azusa to Wheaton to Rome so Pentecostal begins with Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles in the early 20th century and in Wheaton this kind of the cultural epicenter of evangelical Protestantism right and so I began life as you mentioned as a oneness Pentecostal and meaning that I didn't believe in the dock of the Trinity I thought it was a polytheistic pagan corruption of true biblical Christianity I thought that you had to speak in tongues in order to be saved and so all that meant all the other Christians who had never spoken in tongues were lost and they were just as much a part of the mission field as an atheist or a Hindu and and my my oneness Pentecostal tradition was very anti intellectual and it was very anti-catholic so I was taught growing up that you know the Catholic Church is the of Babylon from the book of Revelation and that the false prophet that notorious sidekick of the the the Antichrist was going to be the Pope someday so when I went to college though my horizons expanded in terms of who gets to count as a genuine Christian my parents eventually took us to a more mainstream Pentecostal church and then in college my faith came under came under fire from professors and classmates who were all very respectful but they presented objections and intellectual objections I didn't know how to answer and I stumbled into Christian apologetics I started reading Christian philosophy and theology and most many of the people I was reading they weren't Catholic or they weren't Pentecostal at all some of them were Catholic in fact many of them are evangelical Protestants and so I started to learn a more historically grounded theologically sophisticated version of Christianity was possible you know and I and I was heavily influenced by many of these writers and so I kind of moved and shifted from being a Pentecostal to being an Evangelical Protestant that's how I saw myself when I went to graduate school one of my professors joined the Catholic Church that I'd gone to to Baylor to study with and several of my classmates also joined the Catholic Church and this really forced me start considering really for the first time the possibility that maybe Catholicism was actually correct maybe that Jesus really founded a church and it was a Catholic Church and so I was forced once again to expand my my horizons in terms of who got to count as a genuine Christian and mm-hmm so I started reading contemporary Catholic writers but then kind of work my way back reading Vatican two documents and as my philosophical training I was also reading Catholic philosophers like I'm saying Agustin and st. Thomas and I was thoroughly impressed with their brilliance in their and their synthesis of faith and reason and they weren't just clever intellects they were they were saintly virtuous people they had this combination of mind and heart that as a former anti intellectual Pentecostal who was was growing to this more theologically serious version of Christianity I was wrestling with how do you reconcile the mind in the heart faith and reason and I saw in these great Catholic thinkers and saints and doctors I saw the reconciler I didn't have all the answers but I saw the reconciliation it was attractive and so come I kind of read my way eventually all into the Catholic Church and realized at some point that Catholicism is not just a theory that I can evaluate sitting in the armchair as it were but that that if I'm gonna join the Catholic Church I've got to know that I can actually follow Jesus and be a disciple of Christ in the Catholic Church and so my wife and I started experimenting as it were by going to Mass on a regular basis and we really found that God was just drawing us into the church and so a few years ago we were all three here my three daughters and I and my wife were all received into the church and philosophy did play a significant role then throughout this entire process for one thing many of the objections just a Christianity in general that I think I first encountered in college were based on certain philosophical ideas for example the come the anti super nationalist reading of Scripture which requires us to sort of do supernatural eyes the biblical text was really based on a deistic or even naturalistic metaphysics but I thought no there are good reasons to think that God exists and so there are good to think that miracles are possible so right we shouldn't automatically assume before we open the book and start studying it that all that has to be d super naturalized I thought there the the the the main objection to Christian Christianity and theistic religion in general probably evil I thought that's really a philosophical problem and I thought there were never decent you know good philosophical responses and so studying philosophy really kind of saved my Christian faith in general and then a second way that philosophy helped was that in you study philosophy and you study the history of philosophy you're you can't escape Agustin you can't escape and some you can't escape Aquinas you can't escape Bonaventure or SCOTUS and even some even some of the early modern philosophers who are typically seen as taking the West kind of away from traditional Christian thought were themselves Catholic Descartes bringing the chief example and so I was as I studied philosophy I couldn't deny mm-hmm the intellectual firepower of the Catholic intellectual tradition and as a budding scholar who wanted to really become a philosopher that this was really impressive and I was I was most impressed by the Catholics for some reason it seemed but they were the most brilliant clever but also wise and virtuous people in the tradition yeah and I wanted to be like I guess and I want to be like Aquinas that was apart from you enjoy the first time around that I definitely wanted to get into and we'll talk more about it later but the connection here I think between the intellect and and virtue I think is an important one because we sometimes we tend to assume we think of ourselves as just really complex complicated processing machines yeah and these matters of truth are just matter of data and processing powers all right but is there a connection between you know between your your your virtue your moral direction and your ability to know and I think that you got into a little bit with even this idea that you needed to kind of try got Catholicism out you need to write it look at it from the inside right a bit yeah I mean - there's there's a moral traditional Western philosophy says there's a moral condition even on metaphysics you know because to submit to reality requires a certain certain level of humility yeah right if you're going to uncover the truth about reality you've got to be willing to sit to submit and follow follow the truth that you uncover yeah and so and philosophy really is and in the ancient and medieval world especially in the ancient worlds philosophy and the ancient world philosophy was really viewed as a way of life yeah these philosophers organize themselves into schools they even would live together and they had distinctive garb and they really had philosophies really viewed as the pursuit of wisdom yeah and then the way the fathers integrated this into Christianity was Christianity was the true philosophy the wisdom that fought the philosophers were searching for and partially found the wisdom of God was made man Jesus Christ yeah so Christianity is the true philosophy and then one final thing is about being a philosopher that helped me in this journey from Asuza to Rome is simply that when you get philosophically trained I think you develop an ability to look at the big picture and see underlying principles yeah and that allowed me to kind of step back I think and see that in the big picture and the scheme of things Sola scriptura was not only self-defeating because it's not contained in Scripture but also was not a workable prescription for how Christianity could actually work well thank you so much for that bringing us back up to speed Jonathan I Rachel I want you to do the same now because there's so many ways we could go hear something neat things we can talk about but we don't wanna get off foot too far ahead so we're joined by dr. rachel lu dr. jonathan fuqua and so on back to you Rachel you know give us a refresher on your journey and how the philosophy played a role in that I right thank you so I was born into a Mormon family and I talked a little bit about this son in my initial interview but it was a really Mormon world that I grew up in right a Mormon immediate family a Mormon extended family that was really our community and I was a pretty happy Mormon for quite a while but in my adolescent years I started to get frustrated with Mormonism in part because I just felt like there weren't very good answers to many of the question that I was starting to ask I would ask questions I wasn't that satisfied with the answers that I was getting and then if I pressed further it seemed like I was usually encouraged to seek out some sort of religious experience I was told pray or like get up in the in church on the microphone and bury your testimony to us or something along those lines right and to me it's it was partly the inappropriateness of those responses that further increased my sort of suspicions and my sense of discomfort in the church right it just seemed clear to me that if you have an intellectual problem you shouldn't just solve it by trying to pray for affirming feelings right you need to be continuing to seek the sort of answer that the question calls for right and there were there were various groans I think the grounds there were partly sort of historical ecclesiological types of concerns about the identity of the Mormon Church some of them had to do with Scripture but in general there was just this larger sense you might even say faith and reason we're not really harmonized in the Mormon faith I wouldn't exactly say that it's deeply anti-intellectual they certainly don't think of themselves that way but when they reach a point if you find yourself at the end of a dead end then they're just pretty happy to say well you know just just pray right so I actually started college at the University of Notre Dame that happened for contingent family reasons not because I was you know looking for Catholicism in any way but once I started studying philosophy and theology at the University of Notre Dame it really was like I discussed this in my original interview but I had the first book that I was given in my first theology class was a little collection of homilies from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger a Catholic understanding of the creation and the fall and just reading that book I immediately had this sense that I was dealing with something of a whole different order from any of the religious instruction that I had had previously just just the breadth and depth and wisdom that he had and and the way that you could see that this was a person who had the rounding and the confidence to approach difficult questions without fear right without feeling like you might find a place where you're uncomfortable with where you're going and then you need a back on which is a virtue you know they comes out with a certain courage and humility to really want to seek the answers whatever they are yeah exactly and and and that if we do it in the right spirit and if we and if we do it with God's help then it'll be okay we're not we're gonna go to places that will bring us back to God right and I think I just sensed that I got that impression immediately when I was reading that book and and it really did sort of start a whole new period of my life I remember my undergraduate years as being like this kind of intellectual romp in a way right I took all these I did a philosophy and theology major and you know take classes in all these different you know areas of philosophy in theology and and in each case right it seemed like all of those same qualities that made Mormonism so frustrating actually made this more fun right it's not that you understood everything immediately but if you didn't understand it then you were free to continue exploring it even if you did feel like there was some point where you know prayer or religious experience were appropriate they weren't they weren't in opposition to your intellectual energies the two were fused together right you could maybe you know go to the grotto and pray for inspiration but then you could come back and go on working on the problem intellectually and those things came together in a supportive way and that was just such a wonderful feeling over the long run then I so after that I went into the Peace Corps I spent a couple of years just reading lots and lots of books and then I came back and started a graduate program in philosophy at Cornell which is emphatically not a Catholic program right very much a secular philosophy program and it was really there that I started feeling like I needed to sort of make it official right I thought joined the side that I was on right like if I'm gonna be this sort of extreme outlier in this very secular program and most philosophers in sort of the mainstream discipline are very much committed atheists right it's not even really something they debate in general that's just how they are so if I was gonna be this kind of an outlier I felt like I needed sort of you know some kind of support and so I converted at the end of my first year of graduate school very cool you know one day I was thinking about with both of your backgrounds you know you you described it as intellect or anti-intellectual and you said not not maybe so directly so but maybe a bit of that there yeah would you say though that the the traditions very clearly articulated the doctrines because what's interesting to me here is if you don't have clearly articulated beliefs you can't ask good questions and so even if the tradition is a little suspicious of the reason if it's clearly articulated its beliefs its fertile ground for asking about those beliefs right you know what do you think about that was that a part of where those beliefs clearly articulated such that your questions could have fertile ground to kind of grow in yeah they were I mean that that's actually the paradox of the the Pentecostal background right is that there's an emphasis especially one is Pentecostalism on the truth yeah like we really know the truth the Bible really is true and it's extremely important your eternal destiny depends on knowing and living the truth but there was also this ID that you could get easy direct access to the truth with very little intellectual effort just by opening the Bible and interpreting it for yourself right yeah I think that's again it's something in the modern world and the treasure didn't made this point at one point in one of his essays up about how we've moved away from sort of dogmatic doctrinal points of belief in the hope that it it will lead to more fertile and respectful discourse but the opposite has happened you know when we have vague beliefs we can't ask good questions as we stay out of each other's way right yeah yeah be and because I care so much about the truth that was one of the seed beds in my foundation that helped me to fall in love with philosophy number suit of wisdom and then eventually led me all all the way into the church I think it's also really interesting this was something that I noticed when I first was encountering sort of you know the early church councils patristic some of that kind of stuff many of these sort of fundamental or these long stay Christian dogma we're things that I was taught as a Mormon to reject and was given a kind of straightforward relatively facile argument for why they were ridiculous right like three and one that just makes no sense it's three here is one right we can't do that or original sin babies are born guilty I mean come on you know so so in a way it's so easy to knock those down right but one thing that I realized when I was reading about sort of early church theology it's not like other people didn't realize that these were problematic or well problematics the wrong word I mean that this was very confusing and strange and didn't seem like it could be right but they didn't try to pretend that there was some simple answer to that right in some ways the fact that multiple councils in each of these cases or again the divinity and humanity of Christ is another one of those examples right now there were lots of easy solutions to the problem the church kept saying no no no no and they drew a kind of a fence around it right it's not this it's not that it's not the other thing but those ended up being these just unbelievably sort of fertile mysteries right they're remembered as mysteries and then their mysteries from which all kinds of other amazing things have have flowed right and so completely unlike many of the kinds of conundrums that I was budding my head against as a Mormon teenager where I was like okay so we just have no answers to this and you know the end that's not the way that real Christian mystery should be approached right when we have a brutal mystery no we keep coming back to it again and again and again but instead of feeling like we're butting our heads into a wall we find that you know sort of Springs of living water are falling from it some of the best most fruitful philosophy and the tradition was done in a theological context trying to think about these mysteries in a responsible way that respected both reason and revelation yeah try never to go either route of merely simplifying the mystery into one eat you know easy either/or right but nor abandoning the mystery you know and simply treating it Vidya Stickley like no we when we encounter a mystery if we if we've if we've you know dispersed all the things that it's definitely not and we're left with a mystery then we retain the mystery and keep hammering away at it right you know so you know again one thing I wanted to get into here you know something that that I think all three of us share with probably most people in the audience so we didn't set out to be philosophers you know even from your particular religious backgrounds there wasn't a necessarily that bent that emphasis that encouragement but you know as I mentioned earlier you know I guess who answered this question for the audience maybe starting with you Jonathan like so what is philosophy is this something that I mean does the audience have to go get a graduate degree in philosophy to be part of this discussion or is it maybe something more than that traditionally yeah I mean there are there's some really good accessible philosophy some of the best most important most profound philosophical thinkers in the history of of the Western intellectual tradition have ever actually written pretty accessible things that a normal person could read so you could go read play ohs dialogues for example and they're they're entertaining they're good literature there's a ton of great philosophy you could go read Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics and it's very accessible it's challenging it's gonna force you to think just like Plato but it's accessible that's actually in contrast to much contemporary philosophy which is written for specialists in which right not accessible to the normal person yeah but you know historically philosophy is is the love of wisdom it's the pursuit of wisdom trying to understand the nature and structure of reality and trying to answer the question how should I live and so every human being asks him or herself philosophical questions is there a God is there an afterlife do I have a soul does life have meaning or purpose what's the right way to live what's just what's knowledge what's truth so there's no question of having philosophical views there's only a question of thinking about these questions and trying to have it and trying to responsibly come up with a true set of answers so you can have wisdom yeah or just being the plaything of the cultural ideas which happen to dominate in the in the society you grew up in right and so Christians should pursue wisdom obviously and many of the preambles of the Catholic faith can be known by human reason and can even be buttress by philosophy we can know via human reason that God exists we can know be a human reason there's a moral law we can improvise arguments for God's existence we can we can provide arguments but the nature of evil as a privation a perversion of the good and so I think it's in Hebrews where the New Testament says he that comes to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek Him mm-hmm well knowing that God exists that God rewards those who seek Him that there's a moral law that you violated it those are all philosophical ideas that have to be believed before he can fruitfully approach Catholicism right yeah even even in the the word the love of philosophies I'm sorry love of wisdom I feel like you again even there have a connection between you can your ability to know your ability to approach truth is contingent on whether you have this love you know and that's something accessible to everybody right yep Plato Plato said you know there are three kinds of people you know honor lovers you know lovers of pleasure and lovers of wisdom yeah it's the foster is a lover yeah I mean Agustin picked this theme up as well yeah a lover of wisdom yeah and your two individual lives where do you think that that love of wisdom came from was it more sort of in your temperament your character Rachel or is it something that you learned was a part of your family culture to ask questions to pursue wisdom or how did it come about I think yeah I think it was definitely a part of the culture of my family so yeah my father is a conservative law professor my my mother was eventually trained as a historian you know we really enjoyed that he's a conservative law professor just because that probably gives people roughly the right associations although we really weren't a very political family right we didn't grow up you know talking a lot about electoral politics or that sort of thing but we were a family that was pretty oriented around you might say Western civilization and that kind of stuff so my parents exposed us to just the kind of wide range of stuff right but kind of from the Western Canon and actually when I was um probably I was temperamentally inclined that way anyway but when I was oh I think 14 I had a period when a complicated story but basically we were living in a place for a relatively brief period of time where there wasn't really time for me to make friends or sort of get involved in things and I was kind of hanging around without much to do and my dad gave me a copy of the apology just kind of well why don't you read this if you're bored today so Plato's apology right the the story of Socrates the trial of Socrates what it actually is but it's kind of one of those things that you give to freshmen in college to sort of get them thinking about philosophy and I read that and that would just seemed mind-blowing to me wow that is just amazing right so so I think I did get a fair amount of that such that when I got to college and you know those burden fields were opening I was already inclined to do it but I also think that in our time you just you know there are been other periods in history where it was more possible to just kind of do the done thing and you would be okay right you could you could just kind of you know follow along with whatever it was that was expected social norms kind of set certain boundaries and what could we're not living in one of those times yeah right so I feel with my children and I think my parents have some awareness of this too you know the basic idea that Aristotle has is just as rational beings we need to learn how to live in accord with reason that is we need to use our rational powers to figure out the right way to live and that should be applicable to really everything that we do and I think that basic paradigm is kind of invaluable in our time right when we're dealing with all of these questions about how to live we really need to have some kind of a discipline in place some kind of a paradigm to help us think how how is the right what is the right way to approach this how should I do this in a way that will make me a moral more moral person and make my life better yeah there's a kind of a baseline moral duty there you know I have a I don't have you know an underlying moral duty to go become an academic philosopher right we all have this moral duty to try to seek out that truth to approach our life reasonably and intentionally right so well that's a good place for a break so let's go to a break and we'll continue this conversation okay this is the journey home program I am John Margaret I guess hosting for my father Marcus and we're joined by dr. Rachel Liu and dr. jonathan fuqua and we'll be right back in a minute [Music] [Music] hello and welcome back to the second half of the journey home program I'm John Mark Braud I guess hosting for my father Marcus and tonight's episode is a roundtable on philosophy we're joined by dr. Rachel Liu and dr. jonathan fuqua and we've had a little refresher on your stories and we've talked about some good good angles connected to that what we wanted to start into on this half the program was you know dad has often talked the story of how the journey home program came about was mother Angelica's concerned for many viewers is have they have students or children that have left the faith and so with this idea philosophy you know where I want to talk for a moment about you know what what is the state of you guys have exposure to philosophy departments but what is the kind of the state of philosophy today how does the world regard philosophy and then what kind of link that to you know our own friends and family how that plays a role in their lives Rachel how does the world regard to philosophy today you know are we are we a culture that seeks that seeks wisdom that loves wisdom I think we're a very confused culture I think we're a culture that sort of grasping at whatever sources of meaning or purpose we can find because we don't really have much of a foundation to work from in doing that so so in that sense then then people can be powerfully attracted to sources of wisdom because they they want it right but they don't necessarily know where to start from or where they're going right so you we really are kind of seeking lost sheep right and I think that that is one of the reasons why people who are not given good reasons to become or stay Catholic yeah often don't right because it isn't necessarily gonna seem like the natural or obvious thing to do in the world like ours and that's connected off with how the faith is presented you know what are some ways for instance Jonathan that we I mean how do we fail in doing that sometimes the way that we present the faith to our children yeah I mean I've noticed in the few years I've been a cap a Catholic that you know parish level catechesis is very intellectually superficial but both in terms of theology and in terms of any kind of philosophical rationale that might be understood as supporting the the the defense of the truth and defense ability of the faith mm-hmm I mean Catholics know for example that you know the church teaches that we shouldn't use contraception but they have no idea why mm-hmm you know Catholic the Catholics probably know that the church says we can know that God exists but they they don't know if there are any good reasons to think that God exists and I think and so when when Catholic high school high schoolers go off to college and they are they encounter very sophisticated objections to their faith they have no idea how to answer it and I think you see this in two areas of special number one science and religion mmm so there's there's a perceived conflict between science and religion in our culture and that that's a particular instance of a larger alleged conflict between faith and reason mm-hmm well obviously you you know if you're gonna be an intellectually respectable person you've got to acknowledge that the real power of the sign the natural science isn't giving us knowledge and so if there is a real conflict between science and faith mm-hmm then that puts us into the position of being a fee deist sticking our heads in the sand and ignore and the deliverances of the sciences or giving up the faith altogether or maybe radically watering it down so it bears virtually no resemblance to the faith of the great saints who came before and then with respect to morality I think a lot of modern people believe that Christianity is just immoral especially Catholic moral teaching is not only incorrect but even dangerous and and so there's this perceived conflict between what reason tells us about morality and what the Catholic Church says about morality it's really it's really the discipline of philosophy that can help bring back the reconciliation of faith and reason particularly in science and religion debates and also show that Catholic moral teaching is actually defensible it's actually based on a good understanding of human nature which can also be found in the best philosophers like Plato and Aristotle right yeah the you know faith and reason even the question of well is there a conflict or what is the conflict or can they be reconciled that itself is a philosophical question it is you know one thing I was thinking of is we we use a lot of these terms I think we're pretty clear on what reason is but what you know what do we mean when we use the word faith and not not necessarily the faith as a deposit of knowledge or of doctrine but what does the act of reason mean versus the act of faith I feel like that's an important question that that many parents wouldn't know how to answer for their children method the child asks what does it mean to have faith what would they what do we answer them racially and thoughts of that either of you good well we're given faith at our baptism right it's it's actually a little bit complicated to talk about that with children right that on the one hand faith is something that is given to us and on the other hand it's something that we develop right so it's a it's a supernatural gift and yet at the same time there's this very natural component to it as we continue to learn and develop our faith in different sorts of ways sometimes I think it can be it's you know not totally right but pretty pretty good to use some of these kind of like seed types of analogies right I mean there there can be things that are rooted in a miracle you know what causes that green leaf to spring out of the ground it's amazing but then requires a lot of sort of ordinary forms of tending you know it needs its water and its soil and its sunshine and all of those kinds of things I think that can be a good way to to think about it for children it's but and especially you know you can supplement that with things like the parable of the laborers that goes well with seed analogies right where you say well you know you can have something you know the seed just brings out of the soil in that sense it's a gift it comes from someplace else but the environment of the world is really harsh so we need to nourish our faith through the feeding of our reason right we use our reason to supplement it and build it up and make it tougher and stronger and more adaptable right so that we can survive the harsh environment of the world yeah yeah I think it's some sense I mean we can talk about in a very specific religious sense but and more broadly a certain type of faith is involved in all of our knowledge and all of our truth seeking yes right you know I mean we yeah I mean faith has faith in a more theological sense is a supernatural gift as Rachel said and it was understood by Aquinas as a kind of habit that perfects the intellects ability to know to know God yeah but in this broader sense of trust yeah everybody has faith right no even to try to inquire about the nature of the world whether it's in physics or chemistry or to do history or psychology or math you have to trust that your cognitive faculties right actually put you in touch with reality yeah and there can be no non circular argument for the reliability of your cognitive faculties mm-hmm because any argument that you get for their reliability would require you to use them that's presupposing that the Hara liable which is the very thing that you're supposed to prove and an inquiry also requires faith as Trust in the sense that you have to trust that the world is intelligible yeah that being as medieval philosophers would say that being is intelligible and so those assumptions that drive human inquiry and the progress that can be made in reason those assumptions are best made in a context of faith in the sense of a deposit of faith right so I think really faith I mean faith saves us a reason I think it allows reason to pursue the task of understanding right rather than devolve into skepticism exactly you know it's makes me that a lot of the questions that you know viewers as children or people are asking in the culture oftentimes we're asking about the surface level moral conclusions for instance not recognizing that to get there you have to address whether or not we even are in on the same universe in terms of the underlying philosophical worldview right yeah yeah that seems right and it it seems like a lot of times so part of the problem that we have is that we get a lot of the instruction or our faith is nourished through deep kind of traditional roots the deep roots of a lengthy tradition in some ways that's a really wonderful thing in many ways that's a wonderful thing but the world is moving so quickly that that tradition can't always sort of grow quickly enough to offer super OnPoint nuanced perfectly applicable answers to all the contemporary questions as they arise right it's just moving so fast and sometimes they're quite it's not that we can't answer them or we have no resources to answer them it's just again like we haven't necessarily agreed on and worked out perfect answers to them yet right and so when that happens then a lot of times people either want to answer the question too quickly or with insufficient nuance which can end up driving people away right oh is that the Christian answer well I don't believe that I guess I'm out the door right or just sort of give up and conclude well oh I guess the faith is not that good it doesn't have any answers for us right and so we just need to have the the patience the willingness to stick with things to keep working at them but also to be willing to kind of live with a level of uncertainty sometimes as we continue to formulate answers to and I'm thinking here about lots of difficult questions questions about the nature of work and social justice and how we're supposed to live to get in together in one nation with people who don't believe what we believe and you know all of these questions that are really pressing on us right now it's hard to have patience as we try to figure out the answers to those but sometimes that's what we have to do yeah and there's another virtue again coming up in this that you know again to do that well we need that patience there's this this deep connection between the kind of people we are and whether we're able to think these kind of thoughts and pursue the truth but also our ability to have that dialogue with other people mm-hmm you know we have a question here I'm gonna read this question mark from Ohio asks scripture says that the quote fear of God is the beginning of wisdom few people in the church today though talk about the fear of God is the lack of the fear of God a reason lack of wisdom in our culture Jonathan yeah I think so I mean obviously you can't fear God unless you take God seriously and if you don't take God seriously you're not going to find real wisdom mmm right so I think fear of God means to me even the question of God taking that seriously right you know right and and and and the fear of God I think includes a willingness to submit yourself to reality as it is in itself and and and we're seeing a buck against that right we're seeing a culture that wants to create reality in its own image it wants to construct reality we're seeing a constructivist culture that that that rejects the giving us up creation and says no I'll I'll create I'll make reality conform to my desires rather than conforming my desires to reality and so I think if the fear of God is probably a key to being willing to conform your desires to reality rather than the other way around right Rachel they you know so they're we know that the the world today is very confused and muddled in these points but is there a hunger for this underlying that like how do we how do we wake people back up to asking these sorts of questions I think there's definitely a hunger for it I think that people want more meaning they want to find places that can supply answers to some of these questions and that makes me hopeful a lot of the time because I feel like well we do have incredible opportunities if we can find you know if we keep working at it sometimes you can find the right thing to say to put someone on the right track you can find different ways to help people find these sources of meaning that they're seeking it's really actually quite depressing sometimes to think about the number of people in the world today who are living with these tremendous burdens of emptiness and loneliness and guilt I think that relates to the fear of God - right that when we don't have a culture that can really make sense of sin people end up living with these enormous burdens of guilt that they don't know what to do with because they don't even understand what sin is right and so I think there is a tremendous hunger for help in sorting all of those problems out and sometimes with just individual people in our lives if we keep working at it sometimes we can find a place to offer that help yeah without forgetting this the moral law is pretty demanding and without the pot and we all know that we violated yeah without the possibility of forgiveness it becomes too much to bear and so we're depressed and and and we have to reject the moral law and say because we can't live we can't live by it and we can't live with a thought that we are every day of violating it and often we can't even articulate what we've done wrong in the first place right you even have to start with okay so here's what a human being is supposed to do and there's why you're not doing it right you can't even articulate that problem right yeah yeah let's take another question here so this is Glenn from Tampa Florida in your opinion who are a few of the best philosophers that the Western world needs to better appreciate and understand today how can a non scholar become more familiar with some of the basics of sound philosophy where are some starting points for viewers perhaps maybe we mentioned a couple of them earlier or some of the Greeks yeah I mean start with the dialogues of Plato it's not the only place to start but that's that's one of the great places to start there's a lot of truth in Plato I mean some some of the early church fathers as I mentioned before I think viewed Plato and Aristotle as sort of being God's way of preparing the Gentiles for the gospel and so there's a lot of truth in Plato and Aristotle that's very consonant there's some error right and then this is partly why Aquinas says we need theology in addition to philosophy because the stuff we can know about God through reason is mixed in with air mm-hm and so so theology certainly has to correct philosophy but yeah I say start start Plato and Aristotle read Agustin I mean Agustin's prose is beauty is beautiful and there's a lot of great theology and a lot of great philosophy and Agustin as well and I think st. Anselm medieval philosopher it can also be pretty accessible hmm Aquinas I think is more challenging for beginners but there are lots of books about Aquinas that that are written for for laypeople you know I think Peter crave just got you know asuma of the Summa and a shorter Summa and there are there a lot of good Catholic philosophers today people like Edward fazer or Peter craved dr. Rachel ooh who are who are who are presenting the ideas of the Catholic philosophical tradition to a broader audience in a ways that are accessible right I would also mention we were discussing earlier our shared love of Yosef p-per I think he's very good and has some really readable work and work that is really applicable to ordinary people's lives I think that one of his gifts too yeah again when we when we discovered perhaps we need to point out to people when we're talking about kunti's not surfers I don't say surface level questions but you know moral conclusions that are very far down the line from your worldview and we need to help those people recognize we need to back way up and talk about our foundations you know I think the the again the virtues or the the the grounding of the moral life is a good place to start because it's something we all experience at least you know the moral demand or moral failure and if we exploring that demand you know help people be awakened to philosophy you know their search for wisdom well I think you know in the end of in the perennial tradition one of the main questions of philosophy is how should I live and classically conceive ethics is really about answering that question right which which is really pretty close to the question of how can I be happy mm-hmm and you know hairstyles nicob icky and ethics is really all about human flourishing eudaimonia how can we be happy and live good well-ordered lives and the virtues are our critical critical for that and that's another benefit of starting your philosophical reading sort of deep and the tradition is that many of the concerns in egg they go back deep in the tradition are the concerns of the ordinary person mm-hmm why is there something rather than nothing whoa what is the meaning and purpose of life how do I live a happy and good life if you start with modern philosophy there's a lot of clever puzzle solving but there's not as much of an emphasis as on those perennial human questions yeah I would also say you know if if you're an ordinary person trying to bring faith and reason together I think combining some sort of exploration of some of these works of moral philosophy with just making sure that you have a regular sacramental life and are going to confession and so forth it's really gonna help you to bring faith and reason together right like confession really should be an opportunity for us to evaluate how we're doing and confess how we're doing and then you know set out and try to do better the next time right and if you think of that as being this sort of intellectual and practical almost like what you would do with a physical trainer at the gym right except you're training your soul instead of your body right then I think that really helps you to kind of get those things in sync to some extent yeah yeah this connection between between you know the knowledge and virtue would you say that the that as Catholics having role models in the Saints and the great writers and in the church does that help us kind of learn that connection through their example would you say I think so it certainly helped me the the most you know in the Catholic tradition what you often see is the most saintly people are also some of the most brilliant thinkers in the history of what the Western tradition there really is a bringing together of virtue and knowledge that's very attractive right and if you if you study those people their lives and their writings that can really inspire you don't to be to be to be like them and part of the emphasis in in and thinking about morality from a virtue perspective is the importance of having moral exemplars yeah you can follow what should you do it's what the you should do what the virtuous man does and looking at these Catholic saints and philosophers and theologians these are good exemplars for us to take our cues from I would also say as just a bit of practical advice when you're exploring Saints and philosophers which is absolutely a good thing to do but sometimes you encounter someone who for whatever reason they rub you wrong they're really not speaking to you you're finding yourself really turned off it's it's not always a good idea because I mean to benefit from any of these people you're gonna have to have some discipline and stick to it a little bit but if it's not really just a matter of this is hard but more like I'm just not really is not really speaking to me sometimes is better to just put those people aside right the church has so many resources there can be so a particular example to me somebody I don't even remember who anymore when I was kind of not that far from conversion so in the year or so before I became a Catholic gave me st. Louis de Montfort and some of his Marian writing so they had some questions about Mary ology and so on and so forth and I read that and I was just it did not please me at all and and I realize now you know I just it's sort of like a personal taste of mine that I don't really like sort of overwrought language and like really emotion filled rhetoric and that sort of thing and and just seeing Louise just not the guy for you if that's how you are right at least at that period in my life so a lot of times you might pick up an author and be you know turned off for whatever reason and then feel like oh you know this intellectual exploration thing maybe I'm not a very intellectual person or maybe this didn't work try someone else right like every every person is not gonna speak to you at every point in your life right but if you sort of pick up this book in that book and then sometimes you find the one where you say this is the book that I need right now in my life okay and it might be the third or the fourth one that you pick up right so you have to kind of keep working at it right you see that reaction to Aquinas I think some people find them dry crusty impossible to understand mm-hmm other people say no it's so clear so succinct you know it's so so concise and so thorough if you try Aquinas and and you you find that it's you can't handle it pick up a Gustin yeah if you pick up a Gustin and find the rhetoric to be to floor it put it down pick up Aquinas I mean like like a Rachel said the tradition is so big yeah yeah there's virtue in in in coming up against something that is beyond you yeah that's that's something I think we all experience it in right in reading this kind of stuff as sometimes it is pushing you beyond you know what your comfort zone beyond the sort of questions you've asked at this point you know we're we have about six minutes left and one thing I want to ask both of you is again the the the type of questions of philosophy they put as you said earlier they point us to the big picture to see what's what's underlying you know the the things that we deal with every day you know our particular doctrinal beliefs our practices virtue what's the underlying worldview how do we see the universe that we live in and I you know from from both of your traditions you know what were some of the the aspects of worldview how you conceive of the world and of Gaudin of the human person you know that are very different now that you know you're a Catholic mm-hmm maybe Jonathan start with you sure yeah I I think the sacramental economy of grace yeah is something that was it was a new to me when I came into the church I think growing up the way that I did I really had a Cartesian view of the human person as a kind of ghost in a machine right and so that the body you know didn't seem to matter that much almost a gnostic deprecation of reality really you know what why care about the world yeah you know where it's like you know if your car is about to go over a cliff you're not gonna try to you know stop it and change the oil yeah you know but the sacramental economy of grace is is itself really based on to two ideas in Catholicism this incarnation of view of the world sure I think and then this view of the human person as a soul body compound the the traditional Catholic view is where that the human person is a compound object not just a ghost in a machine and if the human person is a compound object of soul and body in the communication of divine grace through physical instrumentality makes a whole lot of sense yeah and so all of a sudden it makes sense that I should genuflect when Jesus is present in the tabernacle it makes sense that I should dip my fingers and holy water to remind myself of my baptism yeah it makes sense that I should put my knees in the kneeler during the consecration right because I'm a soul body compound it makes sense that I should dress up for Mass mm-hmm because what I do with my body affects my soul just like what I do with my soul affects my body yeah so I think that sacramental incarnational view of the world is one of the biggest different says for me as a Catholic now yeah Rachel anything any thoughts on that from your background I I guess the first thing that occurs to me is just that when I became a Catholic da the world but also the universe felt so much bigger yeah you know the the sense of being part of this huge Catholic family going back through the Saints that there was this sense of historical perspective there was this sense of just the incredible diversity of the Catholic family and then also of course you know Mormons have this idea right that we're sort of like growing ourselves into gods right and if you are a Catholic you don't have to grow into a God right I actually found that kind of kind of comforting in a way right I'm sort of like oh okay now I feel like I have assumed a more proper place although the Christian vision is still is still glorious right I mean we're still promised you have the potential to become something much better than what you presently are so it's not like we're just you know settling for our present selves but still there's a sense in which it does it did feel like I was kind of cut down to an appropriate size yeah yeah yeah another thing for me is a oneness Pentecostal yeah I had a Unitarian conception of God but what you know as a Trinitarian Christian have you got as a basically a community of three divine persons right and the Catholic idea that God is inviting me into his divine family mm-hmm that's that's a beautiful picture of the the end of its end the purpose would tell us about human existence right so I think I have a much richer view of the very purpose of my life not just some place to go to heaven yeah but to be invited into the Trinitarian life of God himself yeah and it gives a dignity to family and friendships and community life which isn't which is a wonderful bulwark against the kind of fragmenting individualism yeah that is this kind of atomistic view of the human person yeah that we have today oh all I was gonna say is that it does seem to me I though that broader sense of what God has planned for us and of Providence having this sort of direction right also makes it easier for us to simultaneously take very seriously the sort of the sinned and fallen ascend the injustice of the world and at the same time not be completely dragged down by that right right because we know that there is something else out there right it's that classic both and of Catholicism it goes back where we started in terms of mystery and in terms of I think Peter Kreeft calls it the hamlet principle like we're all you know as as Hamlet says there are there there's more in heaven and earth than you've dreamt of in all your philosophies right this is expectation of morna's as Catholics when we when we encounter a mystery we we don't reduce the mystery we don't simplify it we expect there to be more right and with that we're out of time but thank you again for joining us for the journey home program and thank you Jonathan and Rachel so much for your stories and for your witness and for this this wonderful conversation we were able to have so again thank you for joining us and and we'll look forward to seeing you next time on the journey home program good night [Music]

Channel: EWTN

Views: 6,498

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Keywords: ytsync-en, jht, jht01705

Id: U-UWmiOLQG4

Length: 55min 56sec (3356 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020