Christianity, History, and the Modern Age: A Conversation With Tom Holland

[Music] I get to share interesting conversations from week to week on a show called unbelievable and I've had both Bishop Baron and Tom in conversation with other dialogue Partners but it's a real pleasure to bring them together today and we're going to be discussing the question how can the church tell its story in a post-christian world and there will be opportunity for questions later on so you're going to use the slido app for that I'm told there's the hashtag there to be able to submit your questions for a bit later on but please again give a warm welcome to my guest Tom Holland and Bishop Baron [Applause] thank you well what a delight to be able to bring you both together I know there's been a lot of anticipation for this dialogue at the conference today um let's start with you Bishop Baron tell us firstly the fact that you're so influential in your ministry Word on Fire on YouTube in online spaces where's that come from what kind of fruit are you seeing through that yeah it's a question people ask me a lot and I I've reflected on it I'm not sure I have a really good answer when I started doing my work in this more kind of public evangelization and I do YouTube videos and various things all kinds of people said to me oh no no don't don't do it like that you can't be sitting in front of a bookshelf and with your Roman collar on and talking in a serious way no one's going to listen and this is the true story we had a kind of a PR fellow early on and he said father I'd recommend you should lose the collar and the bookcase and maybe come in on a skateboard I'm not joking and I mean thank God I didn't do that and they they proved nevertheless to be popular and I I think it would be some combination of Truth and Beauty I I've been a a passionate um critic of the dumb-down Catholicism that I got as a kid so my generation I'm not sure it's true here but it was in the states for sure after the council not because of the council but after the council we dumb down the operation and it was a pastoral disaster a lot of people have disaffiliated because religion seems stupid or they it doesn't answer the challenge of science or the new atheist or whatever so I try to do in a way that was smart and then in my longer form more like the Catholicism series we really emphasize beauty and my inspiration was your countrymen it was Kenneth Clark I watched civilization when I was a kid and that changed my life uh and I wanted to do something similar for Catholicism so I would say some combination of Truth and Beauty Is Right was popular so you'll your influence has also been felt in recent years and you've been increasingly involved in the orbit of Christian conferences like this because of this interest that you've developed in the Christian story history you've obviously become massively well known also not just through your your written work but through the podcast the rest is history that you do with Dominic sandbrook tell us though for those who aren't familiar with your story how how this interest arose for you in in telling Europe and the West its story again as regards Christian history well it actually goes all the way back to Childhood and I'm sure a group grown will be going across the conference so don't forget about that I just I do want to begin with that so I was um I was raised in the Church of England by my mother um who is still um you know an absolute example for me of um of moral Behavior so I never had any issue with with Christian ethics or teachings but the truth was that although I was always very interested in in the Bible I much preferred the Greeks and the Romans and even in the context of the Bible I I preferred Pharaoh I preferred Pontius Pilate I mean it's a terrible kind of confession to me um and over the course of my teenage years um I it was as though my my uh my faith started going down like a kind of dimmer switch um and i i as a as a a um when I kind of reached my my 30s I realized that actually what I wanted to do was to write history I turned to the great dramas of Greek and Roman history and the great kind of figures of them because that is what had most excited me as as a child the Spartans at Thermopylae caesaring goal and so on and I found over the process of writing those books um I found them more and more unsettling the Caesar who slaughtered a million ghouls landed us at thermopoly whose entire whose state was founded on systematic exploitation of of a conquered Greek city um and so it it troubled me how alien these people actually were in a way that I hadn't kind of faced up to as a child or up until my 30s really I and so I started wondering well where do my values where do my assumptions where do my ethics come from and began to realize that of course that it's Christianity it's Christianity it's the great revolutionary process that utterly utterly transformed Antiquity to the degree that most of us in in you know in the modern West don't even recognize that that Revolution ever happened but I I was thinking because this is a Catholic conference I was thinking specifically of my relationship to to Catholicism which was very a very Protestant one I now realized to the degree that when I first went to Rome and I actually saw a cardinal my assumption was that he was off to poison a nunnery yeah I I'd read so much Jacoby and tragedy that I'd obviously just kind of imbibed this and I began to realize that I I realize now looking back that that my kind of atheism was very Protestant it was a kind of and I think the the fusion of kind of modern atheism with Protestant anti-catholicism is very close to the degree that I think that you know uh the atheism of the Dawkins kind I mean it's simply protestantism that has reached a level where it doesn't believe in God which I'm sure you as Catholics may feel it's the inevitable endpoint of of protestantism I wouldn't disagree actually I would have disagree but but my there were two things I'm sorry I'm hogging the conversation here but I just want to say there were two things that that going into the 21st century changed my opinion on this the the first was precisely this issue of of well if everything everything has changed since the classical world into the present day where did that you know what is the process of change of course it's the coming of Christianity that's the Primal Revolution but was there something distinctive about what happened in Latin Europe and I fixed on the 11th century as being The crucial moment and I came to see the medieval Church the Roman Church of the high Middle Ages not just the kind of hide-bound reaction reinstitution that my Protestant upbringing had kind of instinctively led me to see it as being but actually as being the Primal revolutionary institution in Western history that the revolution that was initiated by reformers people who called it reformatio a Reformation in the 11th century set the pattern for the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century for French Revolution for whatever it is that we're going through at the moment or all of these it's it's it's it's really the Catholic church that blazed the past for that so that was one perspective and I wrote a book Millennium that kind of explored that idea um in in the first years of the first decade of of the 21st century at the same time I had I had children two daughters who went to a Catholic school Catholic Primary School and the reason for that was that my wife had been baptized Catholic and her parents had then spectacularly lost their faith when they um they at her baptism they had to confront um the doctrine that she had been born with original sin and they kind of lost their faith with a Great Wolf and became militant atheists and brought her up with an absolute ignorance not just of the Catholic church but of Christianity generally you know they were actively hostile to it and then her mother died very horribly of of Alzheimer's and cancer as my eldest daughter was was being born I mean it was in her first years and Sadie went I think as a way of of looking for for some way to understand why and what was happening went back to the Catholicism of her mother to try and understand what had made her mother what what she was and started going to the local church and because of it she then wanted our children to go to the local Catholic Primary I started going as well the Catholic church and it was a revelation because it was a it was a Jesuit church and you can imagine how I viewed the Jesuits again you know they're not offering me a cup of coffee after the mass but but they they were wonderful I mean they were they were they were brilliant brilliant um pastoral priests but also wonderful teachers and one of them um Damien Howard is the head of the Jesuits now in in Britain so we were very honored to kind of have have them and there was an absolutely wonderful priest Father Tom Hennigan whose uh memory I would like to pay tribute to here who was I think vesavius man I ever met and that experience kind of radically changed my opinion not just of Christianity but of Catholicism specifically um and definitely definitely informed my my desire to then then write dominion and see if that that you know what I'd explored in Millennium this idea that the Catholic Church I think it's wrong to call it the Catholic church I mean it is Catholic but it the medieval Church the Latin church in the 11th century going through the Middle Ages was this revolutionary institution could I trace that Insight back to um to the beginnings of Christianity and could I trace it forwards through the reformation and into modernity up to the present day so um I'm not just saying what I am saying that because it's a Catholic conference but it's but it's no less the truth it's been part of your reason for that yeah yeah and I'm sure you're somewhat familiar with with Tom's story and the way that he at an intellectual level came to see the way that all of Western culture has been shaped by the Christian Revolution 2000 years ago Bishop Baron what's your response though to Tom's own Journey as well as he's gone on that on that pilgrimage as it worked well I find it fascinating there's different dimensions to it some intellectual but some more moral I mean it's the witness of of great Christian saints that often makes a huge difference uh can I have my philosopher's hat on for a second um his comment about protestantism atheism and so on is very interesting because in the high Middle Ages in my the work of my intellectual hero Thomas Aquinas God is not a being God is ipsum essay God is the sheer Act of to be itself now what that means is God Is Not competing with us so God's not one being among many if God were just the Supreme Being there's all of us and there's this big Supreme Being God then we're jostling for superiority on the same playing field but God is ipsum essay which means and there's the burning bush example right as God comes close to us we're not overwhelmed or destroyed we're enhanced but that got lost at a certain point philosophically think of the rise of nominalism and so on where God is construed as a Supreme Being but what happens is that's at first you'll be still piously related to that Supreme Being but in time you'll begin to resent that Supreme Being you'll see that Supreme Being is a threat to your freedom a threat to your flourishing and then at the end of the day if I say who needs him you know we're doing fine without him I think there is a trajectory from the loss of aquinas's metaphysical view of God to atheism um so I think a recovery I I love the recovery of of the high Middle Ages not just artistically giving rise to the gothic Cathedrals and Dante but philosophically it was the right understanding of God now press that all the way back that Jesus is both Divine and human he the two Natures come together without mixing mingling or confusion in the unity of one person well that that's not possible if God were a being right that God and Humanity would be at odds with each other battling the fact that we can say Jesus is truly Divine and truly human Ah that's a distinctive view of God and it makes possible a real humanism total respect for human Freedom Etc so I I would Trace some of those links all the way back philosophically and theologically that undergird some of the historical realities now that Tom explores I mean you you yourself have obviously spoken at length and written at length time about the way that you see modern humanism modern atheism secularism as essentially an outgrowth of the Christian story and to that extent you've even described atheist secular humanism as a form of Faith itself explain what you mean by that and why why you think that actually it owes its roots in that sense to the Christian Revolution oh goodness how long so so my tip maybe I should just tease out what I think the the the kind of uh The evolutionary links between modern atheism and and protestantism are because I think they are also you know go back a very long way um the ambition of modern atheists is uh it's an Evangelical one it's they have they have good news to preach and the good news is that if you um if you overthrow the idols of superstition if you banish Superstition if you bring people who have walked in darkness into light then they will be better people they will be morally better people they will live better lives and the link to the arguments made by the Protestant reformers there is is very very evident because the Protestant reformers were saying exactly the same um that the world is admired in darkness and Superstition that there are Idols everywhere that you topple these Idols you pull down the rude screens you paint over the um idolatrous images in churches you whitewash them and so on then people will be brought into light but it's not like this is a completely radical break because the missionaries in the early middle ages are preaching exactly the same they are going into um Pagan shrines and chopping down trees that are identified with gods and and all kinds of things and and this is exactly the language that they are using and of course the language that they are using in turn ultimately derives from the from the Hebrew prophets this is language that Isaiah is using um the idea that the gods worshiped by the Babylonians or the Egyptians and mere um stock and stone and so in a sense you could see the entire history of Christianity going back even before the birth of Christ as being an expression of the conviction that idolatry once it is overthrown will bring people into the light and it's in that sense I think that that contemporary atheism you know wonderfully bearing in mind that Richard Dawkins is one of its Chief evangelists you know that is the course of evolution that is where the evolution has led any thoughts on that my thought is in the Bible but option is not uh you know belief or unbelief that's a modernism the the option is true belief or false belief right so it's people always have some relationship to assuming bonum some highest good we wouldn't get out of bed in the morning unless we did everyone has to have their values finally ordered in a hierarchy in relation to some highest value it might be you know pleasure money power your country or something but everyone's got some highest good that they worship and the biblical option go back to people like Isaiah and Company is say no stop doing false worship do true worship then read Augustine's city of God the same thing he thought the Romans had a bad super bonum they were they were abortion worshiping of false gods and I've got the true God to give you and August into me is very Illuminating there because he saw the Roman gods as as you know violent and contentious and jealous and so on and so we become what we worship that's a basic augustinian principle and that's true you become conformed to what you think the Suman bonum is so if that's the highest good you become conformed to it Augusta proposed the god whose name is Love and so that the non-violence of God is very interesting to me in the city of God it becomes very important if I worship the god whose name is love then then the city of God will break out in relation to it I think those are still very relevant categories for us what's the highest good what are we worshiping if it's something like sex or pleasure or country or money or power we're going to have a messed up Society if it's the god whose name is love then we got a fighting chance I I think that's the central argument of the city of God so I would see that as the Bible and in a post-christian culture that we're now living in how is that message landing and why what are you seeing in terms of the people you're reaching do you find that they are tiring of the the secular version um even as it has been informed by the Christian tradition do you think they're looking for something different now yeah for sure I mean I would I don't really Target so much young people but a lot of let's say people in their 20s 30s would watch the things that I do and I think they know deep down there's something deep really off about the society and if they if all we have is the buffer to self to use Charles Taylor's language but just the self it has no connection to the Transcendent it's just the goods of this world those are the highest Goods that we we get messed up on the inside so we have all the psychological and spiritual struggles and then the society becomes skewed and I think when religion is proposed in an intelligent beautiful way in a confident way people respond to it we became very apologetic by we I mean the Christians we came I'm sorry and you know I'll present my religion in a very uh superficial or domest domesticated way I think when we do it boldly and confidently the way Augustine did you know Augusta said no I we shouldn't worship the Roman gods I've got the true God for you whose name is Love who's revealed in the cross of this first century Rabbi it used Tom's language the weirdness of Christianity I think is very attractive to people you know but it's a weirdness from which rightly ordered Society comes do you feel like you're represhment with Christianity yourself Tom is that just a an eccentric thing of your own or do you see that as a something that might be suggesting there's something going on in our culture that people are content any longer with with the secular story well this I mean there's it it's on two levels um I mean the argument I mean it maybe it's eccentric but I think it it is it is true uh it seems to me patently true that we live in a still a society that is utterly utterly saturated with Christian assumptions and that it has ceased to be Christian for utterly Christian reasons I mean that's the Paradox of it and and and why I think it's it's so hard for Christians actually now to make the their case is that by and large the people there are opposing kind of agree with them indeed have kind of made a massive land grab um so much of what made Christianity distinctive I mean you know from the perspective of of of the Ancients weird is now taken for granted and the state has has nationalized so much that the church did be it education or Healthcare or um you know concern for the for for the weak and the poor and the suffering so much of that has been appropriated by the state that you know what is left for the church to do it cannot what often that that's the the question then I suppose is is you know our question before is how can the church tell its story in a post-christian world where yet arguably a lot of what it offered has been kind of in a sense taken on by the state how do how do we make a distinctive story so for what it's worth uh and I have you know I'm not in any way um really qualified to to opine on this but for what it's worth my feeling is that um what the church has to do is to Major on what still makes it distinctive and so I think there is a risk at the moment that churches try and accommodate themselves to the new uh kind of elite dispensation rather in the way that that people in England say did in the 16th century that they started to accommodate themselves to um to protestantism because it was Protestants who who were now you know leading the state in the government in universities and so on and so bit by bit people just adjusted themselves to that as being the way that the country was organized and I think that Christians likewise are now doing that to a fundamentally secular order that that and it's easy for them to accommodate to that secular order because that secular order in all its assumptions and values and ethics tends to be Christian so you can do it the risk with that is that you end up as Christian leaders or as as as you know the Christian laity becoming completely indistinguishable from the broader kind of secular blog so I think the the emphasis has to be firstly on reminding people that stuff that they take for granted is actually very odd you know there are no human rights if you're an atheist you know where do they come from they they don't exist anymore the angels exist if you're an atheist if you don't believe in any of that stuff um assumptions about how and why you should behave that clearly derive from Christianity the assumption that we should care for the weak or the poor that the poor weak or the poor have any inherent value this is a a Christian Insight that that our society in the west would not have were it not for Christianity so to remind people you think this is just naturally you think this is a given you think this just Rises you know it's it's a kind of default assumption it isn't it's something that you believe you have beliefs just as much as Christians have beliefs um but I think also there's a need to emphasize the well with what what's the theme to today telling the Christian Story the Christian story is amazing and I I think that the the ball the churches have dropped and I'm talking about England here I don't know whether it's the same in America is that they they have allowed generations of children to grow up with an unfamiliarity with the most basic stories that I think have done more to structure how people in the west over the past thousand years and more have come to think that than anything else that more than catechisms more than statements of principle it's the stories it's the idea it's the story of the passion it's the it's the story of Christ's suffering and then his triumph over torture and death and horror that has made the Christian people what they are and the modern West what they are it's the story of Exodus the idea that slaves have been brought out of bondage and brought to a new land it's the story of the Good Samaritan you know well if if people want to understand why there is the current debate about how we should treat refugees or how we should treat those who who are less fortunate than us The Good samarit the parable of the Good Samaritan has done more to hardwire that into the collective consciousness of the West I think that any number of kind of statements of principle from political parties or philosophers or whatever it's that story at the most basic level and that reflects the fact that the Jesus of the gospels is the greatest short story teller of all time his stories have had a greater impact on the way that the world thinks than any other Storyteller and it seems to me lunacy that uh children can go to church schools and come out of it lacking the familiarity with the most basic Parables it seems insane [Applause] I wonder if you want to pick up on that because one thing I noticed you mentioned in your opening address was it's not necessarily about modernization of the church and I think that's what a lot no modernity is a Christian heresy so no that and I quite agree that I pick up on at every Point time just made um the trouble is we Christians have come hat in hand to the secular culture hoping to find their approval it's getting it completely backwards that's the integrated Orthodox view coming to a heretical position and saying can you please take us seriously and we we stopped taking ourselves seriously and then we did what you know content company uh recommended just turn Christianity into kind of a vague ethical system but it's it's the very weirdness and distinctiveness and dense texture of Christianity that should be in the in the driver's seat culturally it seems to me my example of the principle that Tom was articulating if I can can I uh make reference to an American revolutionary um so when when Jefferson blithely says in the Declaration of Independence you know we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal well I mean in the classical World Plato Aristotle Cicero if you said oh it's self-evident that all people are equal what I mean it was the opposite of self-evident to them it Plato's whole political philosophy is predicated upon the assumption that we're not equal and that the more we recognize that the the more just Society we have Aristotle thought that only a handful of people should get involved in politics most are incapable of it the equality so what happened that's the interesting question what happened to go from that to Jefferson late 18th century saying it's self-evident well of course the giveaway is that little word that all men are created equal what intervened was the Christian sense of of creation and then furthermore from Jefferson they're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights well nobody in the ancient world believed in inalienable rights for everybody you know a handful of privileged people or they were the gift of of the state or something but that everybody's got inalienable rights well again the giveaway they're endowed by their creator with these and so there's the intervention of Christianity into the conversation so Things become self-evident to us because they've been hardwired through the Christian influence we should claim that and that's why I very much admire Tom Holland's work because we should claim that as Christians confidently and boldly and stop coming hand in hand to the culture begging to be taken seriously I think it should work the other way you know I wonder one of the things Tom mentioned I'll just give it to you Bishop Baron then give it back to Tom was was that his his wife said he's baptism was the foot to which her parents said actually I don't think we can believe any of this this idea of original sin and so on and that perhaps still is the stumbling block it's it is the weirdness because some things in Christianity do seem to jar with modern sensibilities um and of course just this past week the Church of England has been going through its own uh debates on sexuality and what modernization versus you know uh historic biblical Faith might look like in in their scenario so in the midst of all that happening while we recognize that the church has been informed by the the Wester has been informed by the church and tradition how do we tell that story in an atmosphere where a lot of what the church perhaps is saying is no longer felt to be relevant or even welcome in the in the world boldly and confidently I mean I think like the doctrine of original sin I'm with your Countryman G.K Chesterton it's the only Doctrine for which there's clear empirical evidence you know because but a properly under right it's gesture to properly understood an original sin it's it's the poisonous atmosphere in which we're all born and we're inescapably affected by it it's like the best example to me is is like a child whose mother's addicted to crack or something and the child is born in complete innocence in one sense but nevertheless addicted to this terrible drug and suffering from all the effects of it well look at the Council of Trent the wonderful statements on anthropology there we're like members of A Dysfunctional Family someone that's born into a family that with alcohol abuse or physical abuse or sexual abuse the child is born in one sense in complete innocence but willy-nilly affected deeply by the dysfunction of the family into which he's born right well that's us you know again Chester said what's the uh we're we're all in the same boat and we're all seasick right but that's how that's how we're born and so to me the doctrine of original sin it makes perfect sense and it's programs of perfectability there's the problem you know from Karl Marx on people that say we can be perfected God protect us from them because then they'll come up with some social program that will affect this Perfection so no no I I like the doctor of original sin and we should Proclaim it from the rooftops what do you think of original sin Tom we're all Sinners does that they're all Sinners so um my wife is born in 1967 so I guess her baptism was I don't know I mean late 60s and I I think that um the 60s will come to be seen by Future historians as a decade as convulsive for what we might call Christendom as the 1520s were and I think the repudiation of the doctrine of original sin was actually the the single most dramatic kind of theological intervention of the 60s because it came to to be kind of paradigmatic of everything that The Cutting Edge of 60s culture was all about um it was the idea that um you know if you only the the the people who affirm the idea of original sin were blue meanies and if you only got rid of them then it would be non-stop pepperland there'd be Beatles music and psychedelic colors and it'll all be groovy and hang out and free love and Brilliant and um even though even as this Doctrine was being propounded in the 60s events of the late 60s were suggesting that perhaps there might be problems with this kind of hope I think that that um we live in a pelagian age now so pledge is the great kind of opponent of Augustine who became the the the the who I guess Augustine is the is the figure who who for um Catholic and Protestant theologians alike stands behind them when they they have talked about the doctrine of original sin uh he he Augustine has been repudiated it seems to me over since the 60s Pelagius has been enshrined even though lots of people wouldn't necessarily think of it in those terms but I think the to an extent we live with the corollary of that because actually the great thing about the doctrine of original sin more than anything else is that it's Democratic all of us share in it and as the bishop suggested the the notion that perfectability is possible is dangerous because it implies that if you don't become perfect then it's your fault and I think that the sense of those who are possessed by a desire to make the world better you know which is the most admirable Instinct and has been one that generations and generations of people in the Christian West have always had that instinct is now combined with a sense of contempt for those who those who Define themselves as virtuous tend to feel for those who have been left behind and so I think that um the Paradox of those who are simultaneously radically anti-christian anti the doctrine of free sin and who see themselves as virtuous they are actually becoming the kind of parody of a malevolent Christian that they feel that they're opposing even even the most every Christian even this the most saintly has to know that he or she is Fallen and therefore has to feel compassion with the sinner but if you have if if you feel that someone can wash him or herself clean of sin then you're entitled to feel contempt for The Sinner why haven't they made themselves better and that's where you start to get really really vicious virtue spiral so you see that happening in some areas of culture where you're seeing certain types of ideology that almost say now we know the truth we are in the light and everyone else has essentially I think I think I think contemporary culture seems like nothing but a kind of you know a great spiraling of endless virtue virtue quick quick respond virals Bishop Baron and then we'll we'll go to some of these questions well the struggle between Pelagius and Augustine is one of the most Titanic in the history of Theology and everything hinged upon it if plagias had won and indeed in many ways he has today but if he had won Christianity is over because we're a Salvation religion if I could save myself I don't need a savior and then Jesus devolves into being a moral archetype of some kind but why not Oprah why not anybody else could be a moral archetype so if I can make myself better by you know just putting my shoulder to the plow and so on uh but if I'm I'm broken in some fundamental way again like someone who's let's say born addicted to a drug you can't say I'm going to will my way out of this no no you're you're fundamentally compromised in such a way that you need something from outside the broken system itself right to save you hence by the way everybody why Jesus is both fully human and fully Divine again if he's simply human okay he's our brother and our friend and all those good things but then he's as broken as we are and he might be inspiring and he might be this and that but he's not going to save us uh if he's Divine he comes from outside the broken system in some very fundamental way but enters into the broken system now look at the cross too that the one who can save us entering in every possible sense into our Brokenness thereby to heal it that's what the church father saw that that was key to Christianity if you take say original sin as we've been describing it out of the equation that whole thing falls apart and you get the Jesus that we get today which is our friend our brother our moral Exemplar well okay then he's like you know anybody else he's like a Sufi Mystic or like any other wisdom figure but then the heck with them then there are a thousand gurus out there I could follow but if Jesus Christ is Lord and savior now we have Christianity you know we have our our problem that's so fundamental that we can't solve it has been solved by the one who can you know so it much hinges on that peligious Augustine debate we want to go to some questions that I'm sure there are lots of and will any scratch the surface of but perhaps we could have up on the screen I know that the the team have been busy putting together some of these so that we can see what some of our folk in the uh in the audience wanted to ask here we go Tom who is your favorite Roman Emperor or general and who is your favorite Saints oh my favorite Emperor by miles is Nero interesting choice it's helpful but I love him um he's by Miles the most entertaining Emperor right um you know so he okay so there's the whole mattress side there yeah but we'll draw a veil over that and uh so he he raced you know he won he won gold at the Olympics racing Chariot he uh he appeared on the stage he played the liar and it's basically the equivalent you know if I was Emperor of the world I would jig things so that I could win Formula One headline at Glastonbury uh win best awesome you know best actor Oscar every year I mean that's basically what he's doing he's he's a tremendous lad and because because it's very charismatic does it you know the horror of Babylon and all that kind of stuff you know um favorite sites as well favorite my favorite saying is uh um the the great northumbrian Saint um who uh would would stand in his neck in the North Sea praying uh and then he would come out onto the beach Barefoot and anyone who's come out of the sea Barefoot and you know in the northumbrian beach there are a lot of Pebbles um and and then sea otters would come and warm his feet and I love that sense of um the the engagement with the totality of creation that that Cuthbert embodies and the totality of his um his commitment to God um and I love the fact that of all the saints uh who were came to be enshrined in the cathedrals of medieval Europe his relics alone survived the Reformation that cromwell's men turned up in Durham Cathedral um demolishly try and dug up his body and it was it was preserved you know it still it's still intact and they went what are we going to do about this and so they laid it in a side Annex and didn't really know what to do and then they just reburied it so the cuthbert's remains are still behind the high altar at uh in Durham Cathedral and as someone who feels very kind of I love the the the Anglican tradition the Protestant tradition that I was raised but I'm also incredibly moved and inspired by the the uh the the traditions of medieval Christianity in this in in this country and particularly I think the Anglo-Saxon Saints the the SE Titanic moral figures who first taught Christianity and what must have been an unbelievably harsh and and hostile environment um the Cuthbert seems to me the same that that best expresses that and I also love the fact that um he uh he played his part in the second world war um I've been told this by several geordies that um when the luftwaffe were heading towards Newcastle and Durham People Prayed to Cuthbert and a fog came and fog on the tine and uh and the liftoff I had to go back I don't know where that story is true I suspect it probably is a great but I love the way I love the thinking and I think it shows the you know cuff but struck down a viking who disabused him and for for about 60 years he ruled the whole of uh the lands between the time and the teas even though he was dead and uh current political Shenanigans makes me think that perhaps we should get in background but yeah um he's I I think he's great and I think he should be England's national Saint great wonderful maybe we'll go for another question um and uh see see what's being us if the world gets harsher and more unstable and people lose confidence in the state and the market to provide hope will the Need for Transcendent hope return perhaps you could start us off on this one Bishop Aaron well the Transcendent hope is always there it might be buried a bit or it might be implicit rather than explicit I think it's always there I I take page one of the confessions as my as my uh marching orders in a way you know Lord you've made us for yourself and therefore our heart is restless till it rests in thee and the fact that Augustine didn't put that in the plural but the singular right cornustrum meaning everybody's got this in common we're all Bruce Springsteen said all right everyone's got a hungry heart but everybody has a Restless Heart the the heart that's ordered to God so the hope is always there for the Transcendent but we have to awaken it you know we have to appeal to it there's again the danger of the buffer itself that's denying the longing of the heart that's the trouble with secularism as an ideology that convinces people you can be satisfied by enough wealth power pleasure and honor the four Great substitutes and the the churches have always been there to say no those things are fine but they're creatures that's what the Hebrew Prophet said too you don't hook the infinite desire for God onto something finite it'll make you crazy and addicted look at the story of the priests about to me is so uh telling there you know they're they're calling upon their gods and they're they're hopping around the altars and then wounding themselves remember until they bleed that to me is a beautiful metaphor of what happens when you hook the desire for God onto a false god is you become crazy and then addicted to it and Elijah calling upon Yahweh and the fire comes it's not just isn't that great my God's bigger than your God it's it's making that spiritual point that only the true God will answer the longing of the heart and secularism is a kind of hopping around the altars of the pre of the of the priests about all the time and I think you can see it on clear display in the society that people are are becoming deeply addicted to all these things and we've got to be there with the word of of Salvation and Liberation you know can I say too I love the Durham Cathedral I've been there twice anyone from Southern cure um when I came to Leeds many years ago I was invited to give Talks by at the time Bishop Arthur roach who's now a cardinal in Rome right and he invited me and I was picked up at the airport Manchester by John Wilson the the current Archbishop of Southern and he picked me up and he were going I said how far is it to Durham from here I forget what he said but it wasn't all that far and I said can you take me there I just I want to see the Durham Cathedral so that was that was the first stop we made and uh I've always loved that Cathedral wonderful Tom I need to add on this sense of with the current political and social atmosphere out there are people looking for something more I I think people always do in in times of plague and War and and and kind of dread um and simply as a statement of historical fact Christianity has has proven itself to be the most successful attempt devised by Humanity to explain why humanity is here and why there is hope in a world that might seem oppressed by horror um it is not I mean it is the Marxist take on that is that it's it's an opiate that it it Dums numbs and and dulls people but I would I would say that um perhaps Christianity can only most fully it's it's it's it's that the potential of its explanations and its dramas and its narratives Perhaps Perhaps it takes difficult times fully to kind of accentuate what it has to offer perhaps um it's kind of like you know a a sculpture that's in darkness or Shadow and difficult times kind of sharpens the light so you can see it more clearly um because Christianity emerged in the time you know in in times of plague and it survived the implosion of of the Roman piece and and flourished amid violence and horror um and so but I'm reluctant to say well what what the Revival of Christianity needs is a really good war no it's uh well I I appreciate that and who knows what the future may hold but I guess from your point of view God in his grace uses all kinds of means be they good or or evil um to to bring about his ultimate purpose yeah I mean the church has been around from ancient empires through medieval monarchies into Modern Nation States through totalitarian systems up to the present day sometimes flourishing sometimes under Fierce persecution no need to remind you of that it happened here for a long time um that to me is a rather amazing fact in itself does the simple endurance of the church across the Ages Tom Holland can tell that story in much more detail than I can but the very fact that we're still here matters to me enormously if anyone's seen the Catholicism series I did years ago I I reflected on Cardinal George's experience I mentioned him earlier when they elected Pope Benedict and they came up on the on the balcony of Saint Peter's there and he had this very tensive look on his face and the camera came in on him and people asked him when he got home what were you thinking about and Cardinal George who had a keen sense of History said well I was kind of gazing out toward the Palatine Hill and I was wondering we're we're a Caesar's successors they're they're long gone but Peter's successor is right there and he's smiling and waving at the crowds and there's something deeply weird about that you know now Caesar has indirect successors of course but I mean the Roman Empire that's long gone but yet the Church of Jesus that Peter and Paul and Company brought to Rome it's still alive and kicking and that's interesting I I remember the um during the pandemic the one of the most the the moments that still absolutely resonates with me was the pope conducted a service uh in Saint Peter's Square I can't remember exactly what it was it was quite early in the pan yeah it was early in the pandemic and he was doing it you know socially distant so there was no one else really with him in Saint Peter's square and as he performed the service you could hear the clanging of Bells and The Wailing of Sirens from all the ambulances taking people to hospital in the background and then he went and prayed before um an icon of the Virgin and the infant Christ that according to tradition had been sent from Constantinople to Gregory the first Gregory the Great the pope who sent missionaries to to Britain um and Gregory had become Pope in a time of plague so the Castel santangelo the the great statue of Saint Michael sheathing his sword um alludes to a legend that dates back to the time of Gregory the Great that he that he opted you know the plague arrows were raining down and Gregory LED A procession through the streets of Rome offering up prayer and and said Michael appeared on the tomb of Hadrian as it it was and sheathed his sword and this is what's shown in the famous statue of Saint Michael on on the castle Angelo but but the thing but the further kind of distance is that Gregory the Great wrote a commentary on the Book of Job and job is you know I mean it's the possibly the greatest text ever written on the great imponderable question of how an all good God can allow bad things to happen basically and that sense of the fact that what we were going through in 2020 was something that people back in the sixth Century had gone through and wrestled with and that they in turn were looking back to whenever the Book of Job was written and the feeling that uh we had this immense resource of writings and examples and communion with generations and generations and generations of people who had gone through what we were going through during the pandemic I found unbelievably powerful um and that is something that I suppose Christianity offers perhaps as powerfully as any tradition that's ever been thank you well with time yes please do um I I I think that's very powerful with time I think for one more question and this probably is going to be our summary of our conversation today Tom and Bishop Barron what is the role of the church in society today and what can it be so just a small one to finish with but what what okay what I'll start with you Tom and then Bishop Baron um what's the role of the church then well the church I mean what do we mean by the church I guess it's a Catholic conference so you'll have a a view on what that is you know but there are many churches are they all one church I guess but I I think the problem for all the churches is precisely the fact that we are living through what is a great new convulsion of refer Mario remaking a remolding of society in the way that people within it understand it I think that what is animating people on The Cutting Edge of this derives from Christianity but I think that without the framework of uh familiarity with scripture familiarity with with um with doctrines with uh Church the simple functioning of the church I think that those those that inheritance of Christianity is starting to mutate in often to christianize it's quite strange it's quite strange ways and I I I I don't know where that will lead I also can't remember what the question was well I mean off in all kinds of directions what was the question well what what should the role I think was right so I think the role of the church for Christians should be to Define themselves very very clearly against that against this process because what is happening is the cannibalization of the historical inheritance of the church and if the church isn't careful then it will be cannibalized as well okay that's really helpful Bishop Baron I wonder if I could rehearse something I did at Parliament on Monday night um I quoted I mentioned Dorothy day earlier right well her um co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement was a guy named Peter Morin and Peter Morin said um we've taken the dynamite of the church we put it in her medically sealed containers and have sat on the lid it's time to blow up the dynamite of the church right well I'm telling that story and I caught myself and I said okay wait a minute I'm a Catholic bishop in Parliament talking about blowing up dynamite listen [Applause] I said it might not be the right the right time and place for that metaphor but of course with Peter Morin who is a great advocate of non-violence what he meant dunamis right power in the Greek that there's a power in the gospel and now he's writing that back in the 1930s that we've taken the power of the gospel and we've kind of covered it up and we've we've domesticated it somehow well the other thing I did at the parliament I began the talk by talking about this young Hindu law student who comes to London 1888 and at first he's so shy he won't even leave his room he's so afraid of speaking English it's Gandhi of course and eventually Gandhi falls in with a group of Christians who challenged him to read the Bible and like most first time readers the Bible the Old Testament was pretty opaque to him but he read the New Testament this young very curious Indian law student and it was chapters five six and seven of Matthew that electrified him he read The Sermon on the Mount and said yeah the love of enemies and non-violence and turn the other cheek construed not as passivity but as a real way of engaging evil in a you know creative loving way all that and he ran to his Christian friends and he said I found this most extraordinary thing in your in your book and they all said well no one really takes that seriously you know I mean that's nice ideals but we don't really follow that but by God he did he goes back to his native country eventually with the message of the gospel and then used it to enormous you know effect and I find wonderful then he's imitated by people like Martin Luther King in my country how beautiful by the way when I was strolling around this Central area of London when I first arrived and there was a statue of Gandhi and I thought of that young law student you know coming here and they're right across on the facade of the Abbey is Martin Luther King well King the Christian preacher but he is inspired by Gandhi who got it from Matthew 5. see but that's the dynamite of the church that's it because the non-violence Jesus is talking about is reflective of the non-violent God who made the universe not through violence but through an act of love and all of that the non-violence of the Cross right and then what's hovering above the whole Parliament I said was the Union Jack which is three crosses so you have the cross on which this young Jewish rabbi is put to death 2000 years ago weirdly hangs over the whole of the Civic life of this country well that's worth thinking about that's part of the dynamite of the church and I think that's that's the role of the church is to keep proclaiming it in season and out when they're throwing flowers at us and when they're killing us we should keep announcing that message thank you what what a privilege it's been to to sit down with you both I apologize we didn't have time for more questions but uh I hope that you'll go and uh listen to the rest is history uh Tom Holland and Dominic sandbrook's podcast uh read Dominion uh it's it's an amazing book uh and uh obviously watch word on fire in all its various incarnations but for now would you again give a great big thank you to come and Bishop Baron [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 150,674

Keywords: Bishop Robert Barron, Word on Fire, how to live your faith publically, catholic, bishop barron, catholic church, word on fire, christianity in england, catholicism in england, catholicism, christianity, christianity in the uk, religion in england, tom holland, christianity and the modern world, christianity and history, tom holland historian, tom holland history podcast, tom holland christianity, bishop barron historian, catholic talk, Justin Brierley, catholic conversation

Id: GqJszmO8Bhs

Length: 56min 38sec (3398 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 24 2023