Dr. Peter Kreeft & the Most Destructive Belief in History

today on Spirit Inspire we talk about a lot of things about what is the worst idea in the world Mercy suffering and diaper poop with Dr Peter craff starting right now [Music] broadcasting from the Cathedral of the Assumption in Louisville Kentucky this is Spirit inspired and now here is your host welcome to another episode of spirit and Spire I'm Isaac Fox your host for today joined as usual with my good friends and wonderful co-hosts Mr Eric Huff hello everyone and Mr John Soul good day everyone we are also delighted and honored to have a very special guest for today's episode Dr Peter craft has authored over 100 books including a couple of recent releases such as how to destroy western civilization and other ideas from the cultural Abyss and also ha a Christian philosophy of humor he has also been professor of philosophy at Boston College since 1965 a regular public speaker father grandfather I have absolutely no idea how he manages all of this but welcome to the podcast thank you very much pleasure to be here yeah Dr Craig it's really great to have you um we've been really excited really looking forward to this and I know you're in town this evening to give a talk a little bit later on at Immaculata one of our great local Catholic schools and you graciously again with your busy schedule took some time out of the day to come and meet with us so thank you very much for that well I guess if we had all the time in the world we would like to ask lots of questions get your thoughts on various things but we had been discussing beforehand over the last couple of weeks maybe a kind of a big topic to address with you sort of a big question because in your career as a professor as an author as a philosopher you have spent much of your life engaging with the big Ideas good or bad of great thinkers throughout history of the last one two and a half three thousand years I suppose and in 1948 Richard M Weaver wrote a book called ideas have consequences and they definitely do I think sometimes it's easy for us to imagine that the ideas of the great thinkers are relegated to the halls of Academia and don't really affect our daily lives but they do they do don't they so the question we wanted to ask you today is when we look around our current culture Western Civilization with a lot of problems and very concerning issues and also look at all the various philosophies ideologies or isms that have influenced it such as post-modernism nihilism Marxism all these different ideas if you could sort of pinpoint or pick out one big idea that you would say has been the most influential or has done the most damage what would that be and I guess the short version of the question is what is the worst idea in the world today [Music] most dangerous idea ever conceived by the mind of man is the idea of God because it destroys all the idols it's a very destructive idea very threatening idea yeah if you were to take all the ideas that all the human beings in the entire history of the world have ever come up with and put them in one side of a scale and put the single lady of God on the other side of the scale the idea of God would infinitely outweigh all those other ideas because it's the idea of infinite Perfection yeah with no compromise so uh I'm going to give a very unoriginal question answer to your question uh what is the idea that is destroying Western Civilization uh Alexander Sally Anderson uh told us the answer to that question we've forgotten God it's God or nothing and we've got nothing yeah they're just kind of historically over the last couple of hundred years where do you see that Trend beginning at least in terms of ideas or thinkers if there's a certain incident in a garden about a snake and an apple yeah so it goes back a little bit before the last few hundred years but yes you know it's interesting because I had no idea how you're going to answer that question and I'm I'm actually really happy that you said that about the garden um just to share a little bit of a thought I've had over the last few years with you about the garden and the apple and the snake because I think we often think of that the apple is the temptation [Music] and when you look at the passage closely it seems to me that there's the beginning of a certain atheism there because the devil is working very hard to destroy the correct idea of God he's proposing that God is jealous not very great he's dishonest so do you think that's really kind of the original maybe the only temptation is to destroy the image of God in our minds yes because in the Bible the issue is not between atheism and theism only the four are said in his heart there is no God it's a question of of the character of God is he trustable is he good or does he have a dark side that's that's always the temptation to create God in our own image yeah one wag said once that God created us in His image and we have been returning to him the compliment ever since that's very good yeah that's great um and I think also looking at the Garden of Eden we see that the devil is kind of reflecting His Image there because all the things he's attributing to God are really what we would attribute to the devil isn't it interesting that Wicked people love it when good people are exposed as wicked uh everybody's like me everybody's got his price I believe that right because if they don't they're they're condemned by their own conscience right what would you say because I know you wrote this book very recently on how to destroy Western Civilization and other was it other ideas from the cultural abyss and at the beginning of the other one of ha you say uh you say it wasn't making you happy writing that that book yeah yeah although it made me very happy reading it especially when we get to the chapter with the numeric chapter well maybe the idea of happiness has been overemphasized well there's a great question what do we mean by happiness yes well what the Paragon of Common Sense Aristotle meant by happiness uh you diemonia is not a feeling and it's not temporary and it's not shallow and it's not obvious it's blessedness it's fulfillment what we would refer to as the beatific Vision in a sense and I suppose we spend a lot of our time sacrificing the beatific vision for the more obvious Joys and happinesses around us we can't avoid that uh in a sense there's no such thing as atheism everybody has to have something that's first some sort of God so it's a question of which God rather than whether there's a God or not I have a book of myself at home that I got a few chapters into unfortunately I've never finished it it got fairly dense it's by a late Jesuit priest the name of Father Vincent Miceli uh you may be familiar with it it's called The Gods of atheism and it's a very it's a very brilliant work he he starts with uh Ludwig of foyerbach and he comes up to pretty contemporary 1950s 1960s thinkers who are all atheists and he looks at their work and shows how each one of them is substituting something for God so it's the gods of atheism like you know Karl Marx has the perfect utopian classical society and you know a ghost Compton has got whatever his his idea was um yeah so you you would you think that it's pretty much impossible for us to completely the atheists without substituting something some kind of idol if God created us in His image uh he created us to worship and we can't erase that so we have to worship something and it's usually the absence the uh the lack of God or it's ourselves that's extremely popular lately uh commencement addresses usually say you can be whatever you want to be which is a outright lie in fact it's the devil's lie that's basically what devil said to Eve you know you can you can be like God so my teachers told me growing up you can be anything you want what a lie yeah okay I want to be the Archangel Gabriel yeah okay we're seeing a lot of that in our culture today of saying you can you know if if it's what you think or feel you can be that thing yeah well the desire of our heart is to be a typical Vision right to see God face to face but the scary thing is if you make God anything other than who God actually is you will see your God face to face for all eternity in some sense right this is true because the first word is out of Jesus mouth in John's gospel are what do you want what do you seek the Assumption there is that uh we will get what we want this is this is Ultimate Divine Justice if we want an alternative God we'll get that if we want the real God we'll get it yeah I uh I think of uh whenever I moved here to Louisville I think it's a great town and I love living here but I always tell people you know it's disordered but I'm not going to name my hometown because I don't want to dash it but it's disordered in a different way than my hometown is you know the top spot back home with something a little bit more ominous maybe maybe Drugs in My Hometown was number one and God was number two I like Louisville because it seems like it's always the wrong thing it's not God in that top spot but it might be family um it might be sports or something that needs to be two to three or four or five but they put the wrong thing the wrong emphasis uh a good example is I always hear about this about a high school um uh senior who had moved to a different school um because he had seen a t-shirt in the the gift shop that said um you know what makes us proud of our school number one Excellence number two God number two number two oh God what is it what you say is true but in a sense the opposite is also true because if you if you worship something that's close to God like family or religion or morality uh you're going to be stuck on that for a long time because that's a serious temptation but if you worship something as stupid as drugs yeah uh you're gonna hit the bottom pretty quickly yeah and uh God converts people who hit the bottom look at Saint Paul so do you think the the things that are closer to God the sort of the more subtle Temptations are really the more dangerous in that sense yeah look look at Jesus versus the Pharisees compared with Jesus versus the uh the murderers the prostitutes the rebels yeah yeah he converted them and against the Pharisees who are godly people in that sense it was you you vipers you snakes they they would not uh they they wouldn't listen um yeah that's interesting reminds me of that quote from Saint Augustine uh that people who are lost in their passions are less lost than those who have lost their passions and it's on some level where the subtle things that are good but they shouldn't be number one can have a tendency to make us think well I'm good I'm I'm living a healthy uh holy Pious life but in truth we can end up worshiping devotionals we could worship all kinds of really good things but that is not God and that can actually do worse for us whereas someone like you said who's an addict completely consumed in certain things they hit that rock bottom and it's gonna wake them to their senses like the prodigal son like where where have I been my whole life and I'm hungry still I mean hunger led him away hunger leads him back and he finds himself in the father's Embrace whereas his brother lived there the whole time and wouldn't come to the party this is part of the answer to the most difficult problem uh philosophically that a believer in God has to face namely the problem of evil why does God allow so much evil so much misery so much suffering uh it's a it's a Grace it's a mercy because if we were totally happy and satisfied in our Idols uh we'd be hopeless so he gives us a good kick in advance and I suppose John to to your point about you know the addict or somebody who's in a very bad place in life I think that that person usually realizes they're not in a good place the real danger is to think I've got a good job I got a good family I don't do anything really wrong is to start feeling like you've you're good right where you are and you don't need to go any further you know you just told me something I should have put in that book called how to destroy Western Civilization uh some people who read that book get the false impression that I'm idealizing the past the 50s as a kind of a bubble of innocence and demonizing the present as getting more and more decadent well there's something to that but there's also something to the opposite uh we're getting more desperate we're getting more addicted to false gods and and and they're they're clearly not working right right so we're closer to hitting bottom as a as a society and if we do we might just bounce up in a way that we couldn't if we got stuck in the laodicean middle where we're lukewarm right well maybe that was why so many people in in ancient Pagan Rome were eager to convert yeah yeah this is where I think John Paul II in his new Springtime of evangelization might come into play here where we could actually see greater conversions in fact I'm witnessing it more than I've ever done when I was younger in the 90s early on but uh my mom also brought a different perspective to the new Springtime she said well how did the the early church start John it was a bloodbath of martyrd number yes and that was the new spring time so it's like oh thanks Mom it's not just a bunch of people loving Jesus and coming back to the church it's a lot of sacrifice and persecution that's been true throughout history and it remains true uh there are an immense number of converts now in places where Christianity is persecuted in communist China in in Islamic countries uh in a very unhappy and corrupt regimes yeah I've heard of uh you know missionaries coming from places uh I'm thinking specifically I think Protestant missionaries in Korea going back to Wales to re-evangelize you know the Welsh people who had originally brought the gospel to them but have have completely uh have completely fallen off to one degree or the another you can just look at the statistics um it makes me think I always think of the the lukewarmness and and it kind of goes back to what I said about Louisville here is that there is so much good there's so many good things the food is good my house is really nice you know it's really warm um and it's a lot easier here for me to I don't know just you know get get swept up in that and just go by the day-to-day just enjoy it and that's a turning away from God in itself I feel like that's it's it's weird how we're on both this very comfortable it's like the days of Noah where they're they're eating and drinking up until the rain starts to fall yeah uh I almost feel as if we're there but it is it's just so comfortable there's so there's so much they're it's still plentiful when I go to the store there were good martinis on the deck of the Titanic yeah that's true yeah I think we still haven't quite caught up to John Paul II's notion of the new evangelization because what's most new about it is not so much the means the technology as the audience we are the ones who need to evangelize ourselves the new evangelization is in the church yeah there's there's this wonderful bunch of missionaries called Focus uh and they go less most macheries do to the depths of degradation what what is the uh what is the most desperate Mission field Catholic universities yeah tells you something oh my no I am I wanted to Circle back around to something you said a moment ago because it's of great interest to me you were talking about how we ask why does God allow suffering allow pain and how this has universally been the number one argument against God or maybe the number one existential question that humans ask and it kind of historically Eric and I were talking about this on a podcast episode a few weeks ago a big fan of St Thomas Aquinas and I love the fact that in the Summa when he starts talking about the existence of God and he starts with the objection first he proposes two arguments against the existence of God and they are precisely the same and only two that I think have ever been used except that he frames them better than most you know he steal man's the position uh better than most modern atheists do but the most powerful of those is of course the argument from evil and I feel like we do spend a lot of time trying to philosophically explain it or perhaps explain it away and it kind of it Bears me here because it's hard to explain exactly what I mean by this there is something we have to be very cautious about we understand that maybe something that seems light relative to something dark but as Christians we never want to say that God needs evil to make his goodness go known right that would be that would be definitely heretical and yet the allowing of pain suffering and Evil brings out virtues in us we could not have known otherwise and I think it it brings out attributes of God we wouldn't have known otherwise including what is frequently considered the greatest which is Mercy I am I was reading a book the other day and it had a quote in it from Saint Thomas's commentary on Hebrews and he speaks of a Sacrament as being something secret and sacred and he talks about how the most secret things are those in the heart of man the most unknown things and he transfers that idea to God so the most sacred secret thing is the heart of God Christ reveals that to us right so Christ is the ultimate sacrament and yet Christ came to save us to show us Mercy so he refers the Incarnation as the sacrament of Mercy I've never heard that before um in Thomas's style is very logical of course but really beautiful is that somehow it feels like we got to see more of the depth of the heart of God because of suffering could you speak to that for a bit well to quote Aquinas himself there's only one possible reason why God allows the depth of suffering that he does suffering that we can't explain that apparently does no good whatsoever he does everything that he does for one very simple motive is love so aquinas's words are something like this God he quotes Augustine on this word for word God who is infinitely wise and infinitely powerful would never allow any evil to creep into any of his Works unless his power and his wisdom were such as to be able to bring out an even greater good from that evil it's truly evil now take take take take the the most difficult thing to explain the Holocaust right perhaps one of the most spectacularly evil events in human history uh God could have undone that by simply sending a thunderbolt into Hitler's brain in 1932 before he got elected right he could have done it he didn't why not I've talked to a number of people who uh are or know Holocaust Survivors uh and read a bit of literature about it and uh it doesn't look as if Thomas aquinas's answer works because although the Holocaust did make some people Saints it didn't make them all Saints and most of them lost their faith and didn't get it back or were just uh suppressed and and bummed out and and and into despair it doesn't look as if we have any empirical data that uh that justify God and then I remember reading the book of Job and God finally answers job when we all are all job and we want to know yeah and God doesn't give job an answer to any one of his questions yeah uh he he says basically uh I'm going to answer two questions I'm going to answer the questions you should have asked who are you and who am I yeah and job's answer to God is now I know who you are and now I know who I am I'm the man with empty headed words I'm a fool I'm a little baby I can't understand you I have to look up into your loving arms into your face and simply trust you like a little baby and he and job says at the end I had heard of you with the hearings but now my eyes see you and isn't that alone at least in our personal lives worth the suffering if we've gone from hearing or knowing about God to actually seeing God that's the beatific vision and if that's not worth anything nothing's worth anything and you know I've experienced this viscerally with young people like in youth ministry in our parishes that for years Catholic Education has always been focused it seems on teaching kids about Jesus about the history of Christianity and not focused on teaching and showing young people how to meet Jesus actually get to know him not to know about him and it used to be sadly and I feel like the lack of Catholic authentic education uh in the world has led to this but on some level 20 years ago you might have asked a young person you know would you like to have a relationship with Jesus and they might have said well who's Jesus now it's games when you ask someone would you like to have a relationship with Jesus they say what's a relationship yeah and we're facing a totally different world of people who literally have no concept of what it means to love to give to receive to be attentive to one another and meet people's basic needs well when Jesus himself in John's gospel chapter 17 is high Priestly prayer defines uh heaven or beatitude or eternal life he says this is eternal life to know you the only true God he doesn't say to know about you and just to know you and the English language can't quite translate that right because in most languages there's two different words for knowledge one is the knowledge of a person and the other is a knowledge of an impersonal fact can an Envision in German in French so the beatific vision is to know God and not just know about him I'm sure the Devil is a great Theologian there's a there's no way he's got to know a lot about it he says do do you know that do you believe that there is one God oh good for you the devil knows that too yeah so it's like in it and I mean this more in the kind of classical uh traditional Latin way intuitive knowledge versus discursive knowledge right that direct apprehension of that that contact with the thing known the catechism quotes that the wonderful line from the Corey to ours he uh discovered this old peasant who was uh very Pious and very happy sitting alone silently in church for hours just praying and he said what what do you do when you pray and the person said I just look at him and he just looks at me yeah yeah it's beautiful and interesting on that point too that the the Bible uses the word no for the relationship between a man and a wife yes a deep kind of Knowledge from which Springs forth New Life you you mentioned a moment ago and I really like this that in the in the Book of Job God doesn't answer job's questions and staying for a moment with this this idea of evil of pain of suffering we are as humans naturally always looking for answers and I can think of times in in my life where I've had frustrations annoyances compared to other people's lives they probably weren't very great I thought they were sufferings and I wanted to be able to make a formula out of it well maybe God's letting this happen so I'll develop patience right or something like that and then there was moments where it seemed so much more than that like we just sort of overwhelming you know some about with depression or something and things seem just Dreadful where I couldn't figure out a reason like why do I have to go through this but I begin to believe that it is when we can't answer it with some reasonable this bad thing happened to me because somebody did this or it it happened to me because maybe my own stupid mistakes or it happened to me because God's teaching me a lesson you know when we can't answer those questions anymore then it just has to become Jesus I trust in you and then you start to get to know God a little bit yeah yeah if God had answered job in ways that would have satisfied job more uh job certainly would have looked at those answers and said thank you very much God now I've got a couple more questions and do you have a couple more answers and uh then job would say the same thing to those answers and it will go on forever and ever that would never end do you think a lot of our of our modern um I know I think this is true like with atheism because this has kind of been where all this conversation has gone but I think maybe it's true with Christians as well do you think a lot of our modern um attempts to Define what God should and shouldn't do this idea of Justice is really based on a very small view of God certainly uh but God shouldn't allow suffering even though it's not nice Pagan's new Justice better than that uh if you look at Plato uh he connects Justice with music and astronomy interesting wow the stars are just and musical notes are just they are right it's yes yes uh justice is predictable God is not predictable because God is love and love is more than Justice if we got Justice what a terrible thing that would be yeah who would have any hope yeah it makes me think uh there were the sisters who would pray for you know we we think of the Divine Mercy now and that devotion and and sisters who have a Devotion to the Divine Mercy there was a time I believed that I'd read about sisters who were devoted to the Divine Wrath these very twisted uh these Twisted ways well you know there's even a right way of being devoted to Divine wrath uh in the revelations of Julian of Norwich uh she asks God I know you are perfect love but your Bible says that there is wrath please show me your wrath and she says God showed me his wrath uh and there was no wrath on God's part the Wrath was on our part wow well that that goes to the idea of divine Simplicity because God is utterly unchangeable so everything we see in the Bible that speaks of changes of human emotions all these kind of things is really our relationship to God you know if you think of the sun if uh you know when it gets to be nighttime it's not because the sun went dark it's because the world has has turned so God just is his perfect being and if we're in the right relationship with that well then we have the beatific Vision if we're on the if we're in the wrong relationship with that it comes across as justice so to go on on top of that with the Old Testament you have so many examples of God's Wrath it seems right so a lot of people look at the Old Testament as God kills people God smites people God does this and he's a he's an evil God and they could some people thinking that the god of the New Testament is somehow a different God entirely how would you explain why it seems God is smiting people or doing all these things in the Old Testament uh why would he be written out because God being loved wants us to have perfect happiness and wants to give us a gift that is perfect and he can't do that because uh we are in a mess we are in garbage and he has to first take out the garbage and that's his Wrath if you want to cook a meal and there's a lot of garbage in the room you first need a garbage man that's why he sends Jesus Jesus is the garbage man he takes away our sins that's good actually takes them away doesn't just just take away our punishment takes away our sin sanctifies us not just justifies us yeah I've been thinking about that quite a bit recently because I'm I'm a convert I came from Protestant background and this is of course one of the very key distinguishing aspects of soteriology is penal substitution right the idea that well the punishment got taken away versus no God actually wants us to be holy not just call the holy but be holy really transformed Presbyterian Protestant preacher George McDonald whom C.S Lewis loves someone yes said uh the idea that that Jesus is a savior from our punishment for sin this is a low mean selfish notion yeah he was named Jesus not because he would take away our punishment really because you take away our sins yeah yeah um yeah she you said something that uh trying to remember where I was going with this well it speaks to the the original false Protestant theology I think that Martin Luther came up with the idea that human beings are by Nature dung and Christ is covering us with snow when in truth I think it's the exact opposite as if God is lying to himself There's No Going Under that snow but there is that's ridiculous yeah that's what really bothers me about that is there's this idea of kind of God looking at us through Christ and declaring us righteous and it's like okay even so God knows all things it's like he's Closing one eye and saying yeah you look good to me no you can't fool God and one of the other things that has often occurred to me about this is I think if we have that view of Salvation we also forget about what happens in heaven because nothing the Bible says that nothing evil can stand in the presence of God it's not just about God's not smiting us with lightning bolts right now because he's looking at us through his son and doesn't see the bad stuff there is no possible way that we could step into the presence of almighty God with sin and also the fact that because sin is an opposition to God we wouldn't want to no no that's why Purgatory is although very painful at the same time very Joyful We want that we want the truth even though it hurts yes and and divine wrath being we enact our own wrath and God allows us to that's really the definition of hell we choose to go there he doesn't send anyone to hell we reject his Mercy reject the very notion of sin and and create our own God essentially that we it's utter emptiness I couldn't imagine I'm an ex-calvinist and not all Calvinists believe that but many Calvinists believe in a double predestination that God wants some people to be in hell that's a terrible heracy it's kind of a God would would you want to worship if if he loved half the human race and hated the other half of it he created some chest to send him to hell like that's a guide burning ants on an ant hill and also the real challenge within that system to really have assurance that you are one of the uh one of the predestines so you might just be going around thinking it's possible that God hates me and wants me to go to hell and I can't do anything about it you know psychologically what a dreadful state to be in yeah but I remembered what I was thinking a moment ago back to John's question about why does God appear a certain way in the Old Testament um I think we do have this idea of the god of the Old Testament being the wrathful vengeful God and the god of the New Testament Jesus loving and merciful I remember hearing some interviewer debate a couple of years ago in which this was brought up and the person responded very well with if you look at the New Testament the harshest language in the Bible is to serve the New Testament because the worst that happens in the Old Testament is people get killed but Jesus is the one that talks about the Lake of Fire the Weeping of gnashing and weeping and gnashing of teeth the outer Darkness he's the one that gets uses some of the most harsh language and we apparently is completely overlooked that and go for just the merciful bits I wish I could remember which scholar wrote this but I remember reading that some scholar made a list of all the references in the Old Testament to the wrath of God and all the references in the Old Testament to the mercy of God and found out that the mercy references outnumbered the Wrath reference as 17-1 then he did the same thing in the New Testament about the same figures wow wow and then surprisingly he did the same thing with the Quran and got the same figures that's unexpected that is amazing to me speaks to the human capacity to hyper focus on the negative yep and that's really what it is it's our perception that it's more negative than positive or hopeful right gosh that's so intense if you ever read any uh Michael O'Brien's novels all of them I love Michael Myers he is the greatest living Catholic novelist but by far I first I'd heard of him for a while I first discovered him maybe two years ago and the first book I read was father Elijah and I bring this up because it fits into the the whole topic of when pain is suffering we don't understand it but how it transforms us and since you're a fan of his books I'm sure you remember the scene it's getting towards the end as when father Elijah has the Elijah experience he actually spends 40 days out in the desert right you know and he uh he's got the boy who turns out to be is it uh Gabriel or Raphael somebody who's kind of following him and assisting him but there's this moment where he is in utter Darkness inside outside he's walking along the edge of a deep ravine or Valley and he's utterly hopeless in fact there's a comment even made that he is a well-educated man could have explained like to any atheist why God allows evil and suffering but this has now gone beyond the intellect and has no experience right so he's without answers he's on the brink of despair and he contemplates suicide he contemplates throwing himself over the edge of the mountain but he knows well that's a mortal sin I can't do that so he starts seeing him walking close to the edge so maybe he'll have an accident and accidentally fall over and die anyway at some point I don't quite remember but uh I I think he strikes his head against The Rock goes unconscious and when he wakes up the angel is there just like in the story of Elijah with the little cakes of bread where in the Bible he tells Elijah to eat for strength for you have a long journey ahead of you and as they Converse father Elijah is just completely defeated at this point and he says something the effect of I just don't know anything anymore and the angel says good now we can begin yes that is my favorite line from the book um and I think I read it around or shortly after a point where I had gone through some fairly intense internal suffering and I couldn't make sense of and there's something just so beautiful about that of good now we can begin that's the profoundest level of what Socrates is doing uh the first half of a Socratic dialogue like the wrath of God is always a refutation of respectable ordinary opinions and soccer is very very appreciative he very rarely teaches you what to believe he spends most of his time saying this won't work that will work yeah right and then once his interlocutor accepts that then he begins but only then yeah which is probably why he's such a gad fly and uh it makes everyone angry and we're not polite company to keep around yeah of course like the use of pro dilemma he doesn't really have an answer it's a problem yeah no he doesn't do you think that's because he didn't know the answer or he wanted us to think about it of course he didn't know the answer well he's was a wonderfully Pious agnostic yeah and he knew that he did not know yeah and he knew that God could not be a Zeus or Apollo or any of the Greek gods right and he knew that atheism was wrong and that's all he knew and he knew that that was all he knew and therefore he didn't try to go beyond that because it seems very early on the Christian thinkers I think Augustine and others are very quick to be able to explain the use of fro dilemma you know based around the nature of God um but yeah that's that is interesting to me that he was fine with questioning even if you had to leave questions open at the at the very end you like Socrates a lot don't you I do he's in the back of my mind I can't get him out I love the fact that you've written a number of the socratic dialogue books um I I found one recently a used copy of Socrates meets uh or talks with Machiavelli and I just started actually reading it a couple of days ago but I remember reading or hearing somewhere in interview you commenting about why how you don't know why dialogue is not used more by thinkers yeah um yeah white it talk to that a little bit why do you think that's such a great tool I still don't know the answer to why everybody else doesn't uh imitate it because it works yeah yeah God himself is more than monologue he's trialogue which is a step up from dialogue so we're closest to him by dialogue true and well that that try log I mean to me speaks to just human Community right we oftentimes think that we image God in our Solitude right with our intellect and our our prayer life and there's truth in that because we will die and we will have to face God Alone on some level but we also exist in community and there's that I a conversation or rather what I think they call it the great conversation that I feel like we're very much a part of right now on some level and you know how the Bible defines the image of God the first time it appears in Genesis the image of God is male and female the great conversation yes yeah and that is perhaps one of the hardest conversations because to get men and women that understand one another on a deep level I think is is one of the greatest efforts in human society perhaps just think God didn't have to do that he could have made us like angels and that would have solved so many problems and made life so much simpler and easier and he didn't so and look look at all the misunderstandings look at all the the violence look at all the uh the perversions that come from from that invention of God it's almost like the it's like the almost like the invention of free will he could have made us uh Happy animals and we'd be in the Garden of Eden forever and there'd be no problems right but instead he made this crazy mess yeah thank God and it's terrifying but it's beautiful uh yes you did uh you did a series I saw uh at the Theology of the Body Institute because I've gone through the certification program with them and it's been a great gift and uh Bill Donahue there at The Institute shared uh clips from the humanum series I don't know if you uh remember doing this and um there was one scene that really connected with me that you said it was very transformative in my life and it was just a masculinity and femininity built into uh end all of creation would you perhaps speak to that on some level like how that fits in our understanding almost inevitably we moderns think that the ancient view that there was yin and yang masculine and feminine a kind of a cosmic uh dialogue uh between receptivity and activity is a projection of human sexuality which is our typically modern explanation of why almost all languages except English have gendered nouns and it's exactly the opposite uh we reflect the universe rather than the universe reflecting us or rather both we and the universe reflect God who is himself not just one person but a love relationship among persons and that relationship between the father and the son is so perfect that it eternally becomes the third person love itself so since since god is perfect being everything it has being is in some way in His image maybe uh man made in the image of God is more perfect than say a rock or a flower but I suppose with that line of thought we can say that in some way the image of God is reflected in everything that has been made so maybe it's not surprising that we see that in the in the universe in nature I remember reading a I think this is in a book by a man named validares called against all hope he was a prisoner in Castro's Cuba okay I think it was a Baptist Minister and uh like most tyrants uh Castro and his ilk wanted to conquer his mind as well as his body right uh and he couldn't do it he was he was strong and his strength came from the fact that he was in communication with the other prisoners by secret means and they found them out and took them all away and isolated him totally and he made friends with a little spider in his cell the only life form possible and tamed The Spider and when they discovered that they killed the spider wow and he wrote that that that almost got me that almost get me insane uh and at the last moment uh just as I was on the brink of uh despair uh a loose little Stone fell from the wet ceiling at my feet and I looked at that stone and I said to it God is there too that's God's Stone so he said I I kept up the dialogue and eventually he got rescued but he credits the existence of God in that stone uh saving his sanity that is that is beautiful so going back to this idea of the image of God in male and female in man and woman and you said God could have made us as angels which don't seem to need that relationship with each other we always sort of see the angels as a higher tier of being because they're perfect spirit and all of that um but do you think it would be accurate to say that the image of God is in some way more fully reflected in humanity relationally yes yeah uh the angels have an intellect far greater than ours and more powerful will right but they don't have the the completeness of the love relationship with each other so it's harder than the other just different well their relationship is vertical each Angel being a separate species is superior to every other angel and we have a kind of strange equality that is an equality of radical difference that the Angels don't have and that makes the love that humans have for each other in some way superior to the love that angels have for each other although when you factor God into it the angels are of course closer to God more Godlike than we are yeah is that why the devil seems to always prefer to attack the family sexuality of course yeah of course and he's getting smart now he's uh he's getting us at our weakest point and he is also realizing that persecution doesn't work it just makes more of us like killing cockroaches they just multiply you know Catholics are like cockroaches they used to be anyway they used to have kids uh and now he realizes that uh the thing to do is uh to uh to allow them a little comfortable religion which will be like um uh well it's like like the medicine you use against the pandemic uh it's like cowpox which is a mild version of smallpox which prevents you from getting the real thing yeah he likes a little bit of religion and that's working well you know I suppose I mean obviously this really this is a big contemporary conversation right now when we think of things like transgenderism and identification and all the pronouns and so forth that this is really hitting at the very core of what it means to be human about is about as deep as one can possibly our response to that has to be double it has to be on the one hand an absolute intolerance for that demonic lie and secondly an absolute tolerance and love for the people that are victimized by that lie it's very difficult to do both of those to be tough and tender at the same time because you want that Divine image in the human to be redeemed that's the whole point otherwise just saying we don't like or agree with something is not really doing anything even even simply to say that's not true and I'm on the on the side of truth yes but you also have to be inside of persons yes and because you have to brain you speak the truth with love and I was listening to a talk by Jason Everett recently about gender and he was saying there's got to be a way for love and truth to be able to get a beer together yes how do we do that otherwise the true absolutes contribute each other right you can't compromise either one ever and when it to gender it it's so visceral so volatile like some all of us have family members that we know friends that we know that are that are experiencing these uh dysphoric uh phenomenon that didn't seem to exist 20 years ago and I mean you can always try to pick one thing to explain why this is happening um but I feel obviously it's a combination of things but how do we how do we accompany people in ways that are loving and tender but when do you share the truth when do you say the obvious reality of what is actually going on I don't think there is any one clear and Universal answer to that question I think we have to find our way there's nothing like a science and technology in the realm of the spirit there's no spiritual technology there's no no owner's manual for for the human soul no button pushing no Computer Logic and each individual is different I had read a scholarly article about um someone who had gone through and had had you know um a transgender person their boss at work had never spoken to them about it but had just been a good boss to them and then there was like the day before they were supposed to go in for an operation um and they were an anomaly in this this this scholarly article because of their relationship with this with this good boss is what I'll call it the day before the operation uh the boss said hey before you do that why don't you come to my house when we talk about it or um I think there was some sort of prayer service that that he may have taken them too and they were the only ones out of like a hundred people to recant um but and I mean it was the day before uh the operation and I think it does speak to to that relationship um you do hear a lot of answers on What the truth is uh and I may I've asked the question to others before and it got turned back around well what's wrong or something but when you have people in your life and people that you love especially uh it's so difficult to to have these conversations and even lesser conversations uh of Truth with someone who may not be doing something you agree with or may not be in line with your morals and how do you express um you know what you believe in a charitable manner where it doesn't feel like you know you're you're at the gate that you're attacking them um I just it's just it's just so hard uh any advice there I'm not a psychologist so I can't detail the answers to how you do it yeah but that you do it is the most important thing people sense love even if they disagree with you if you love them and that comes through uh something in them has to respond to that you can't you can't argue with love yeah there's no refutation of love yeah uh I think the greatest piece of fiction about Jesus very difficult to write Jesus fiction is the granted wizard by Dostoevsky yeah and in that story when The Inquisitor who is brilliant refutes Jesus Jesus doesn't answer them not a word he kisses him yeah and this tough guy is so Shattered by that that he trembles and he has he has captured Christ and is about to re-crucify him and he says go away I can't stand your presence yeah yeah love is the most powerful force in the world and Christ is the ultimate you spoke about the need for truth and love to be combined in this Christ is a perfect example of this because he is perfectly true he is God he is perfectly loved isn't there's a verse uh somewhere in the Psalms I'm not going to get this quite right but it talks about um truth and mercy and Justice and peace yeah that was that was the verse that Thomas Aquinas chose to preach on at his uh I forget either ordination or uh final vows or something like that it's a brilliant sermon yeah I there's somewhere in that or similar verse it talks about uh justice springing up from Earth and I feel like that righteousness coming down from heaven the way they can be reconciled horizontally between truth and Justice is that both have to come uh from the earth as well as from Heaven that's the Incarnation because we can't so it's like it's not about Justice coming down from heaven it's like apparently there's going to be justness righteousness on Earth that's coming coming up if I remember that correctly and that can only be explained by the Incarnation because we we can't do it all right um one quick little thought total Sidetrack I just wanted to share and then this might be about due for a short break in more water or coffee whatever we need but um you mentioned something earlier about dialogues and God being a try log and I know that you are a fan of humor and jokes these guys know that I have a terrible addiction to puns and awful jokes so you may hate this but it pops God has an addiction to punishments too good thank you I'm okay then I had to share this because it popped in my head when you said that um You probably you may know it already but a man is in a forest he's about to chop down a tree and the tree says wait please don't cut me down man takes another swing with the ax the tree says what are you doing stop I'm a talking tree the man says yes and you will dialogue so now that I have totally brought us back I think that would fit in with that book no no no the second one oh the second one how did this destroy Western Civilization if you want to be sad read what how to use right Western Civilization if you want to be happy read hot there we go which is why I was sad with how you read that title you should have read it when you started this whole episode with yes work it out a little bit all right very good well let's take a very short break we'll be back in a couple of minutes with more with Dr Peter Crafton on spirit and spire hey everyone this week's episode is sponsored by Family renewal project FRP is a local Theology of the Body apostolate in service to the Archdiocese of Louisville they're dedicated to renewing the culture through the renewal of the family they have so many amazing things going on so check them out at familyrenewalproject.com welcome back to Spirit Inspire we've been talking with Dr Peter craff today and just a couple of things before we get back into our discussion I want to say a couple of thank yous because kind of a little behind the scenes here we usually record this podcast at the Cathedral of the Assumption in downtown Louisville and a friend of the three of ours Michael Schultz tomorrow is being ordained as a deacon as part of his journey to the priesthood and we found out last week as some of the preparations for all of that the space we usually record in was going to be unavailable for today so father Jonathan Erdman here at St Francis of Assisi came through for us in a big way and gave us the use of this room today so uh John and thank you too got bright and early in the morning didn't it did I I interviewed Michael interviewed Michael this morning around 7 30 this morning yeah and then afterward we took down and packed up all the equipment brought it over here we set it up uh late late mornings early afternoon today so I just want to say a very big and very heartfelt thank you to Father Jonathan Erdman and Saint Francis for making this happen and also um he's not here presently but Justin found so I mentioned earlier that you're doing a talk tonight at Immaculata and Justin dear friend is the principal of Immaculata and he's the guy that really did all the hard work of scheduling communication the flight driving the airport all of that so um thank you Justin as well when you watch this and if you haven't checked out Immaculata wonderful good solid Catholic School here in in Louisville so well um Dr Craig we can ask you questions all day long I've really been enjoying this but maybe before we get into some more questions I know you've had a few books come out this year do you have any current projects books anything that you're working on at the moment I always do one book that's coming out soon is every word in the Lord's Prayer the commentary another one is called God on stage it's about religious plays okay uh and let's see what am I working on right now sometimes I forget I'm very absent-minded um this is planet Earth isn't it I'm not sure sometimes sometimes it doesn't look like that sounds like a good title of a book as well right yes I'm working on an introduction to Philosophy for beginners by Socratic dialogue Socrates is still there in the back of Life yeah yeah oh that's great I'll have to read that I have a passionate interest in philosophy but it's very much of the amateur level and good beginning books to get through big pictures are usually much healthier-minded people than professional philosophers so remain an amateur yeah there you go well yeah well I was going to say speaking of which um I've recently read uh the greatest philosopher who ever lived I won't give it away even though it does give it away in the first couple of pages um but really what stood out to me in in that book is there's a section you had on silence it was very short um but it says that you know silence isn't the absence of speech but silence is an entire world and I think before we took the break we were talking about you know some of the noisiness and messiness and craziness of the world um and I just wanted if you could talk a little bit about about silence um a very little bit Yeah the most precious thing in life in the meaning of life is love and the Supreme expression of love is not words but silence when lovers look at each other uh words are not necessary and that's the beatific Vision yeah this is why you don't need books in heaven it's the truth we're trying to learn from books is going back to an earlier part of our conversation it's not learning about God it's knowing god the truth we turn to books for is there in a person well the two are connected uh Christ who is the word of God and the singular eternally spoke quite a few words and said more in those few words they could be all put on one side of a page of a newspaper then the rest of humanity said in trillions of words the little book I started reading a while back on lectio Divina and the author used this wonderful word he might have coined it himself but he was speaking about the Incarnation of the word of God and he was talking about how the scriptures through through prayer meditation we can really encounter God encounter Christ or certainly something higher they're of a higher level than just ordinary books um there is a real encounter with God it's not still at the same level as the Incarnation like we would meet Christ in the Eucharist and so he had created I think maybe coined the term in verbation the uh sort of like incarnation of the word in the book I thought it was very very nice I like that yes especially since it's a verb and not just a noun not just a static thing but a deed an act that's something that has struck me about Thomas Aquinas and his notion of being is that being is an act yes most philosophers don't get that they think of existence as a fact but it's not it's an act it's dynamic well I think we also think that if something's an act it has to be very busy in moving around whereas God there is no motion per se in that sense and yet he is the Supreme Act of being this is why God doesn't have to fall in love he is love that's a wonderful thought how would you relate that reality of it being an act not just a fact to Rene Descartes concept of I think therefore I am because obviously we know that Cartesian worldview is what oftentimes devolves to I think therefore I am whatever I think I am right and so how do you move from being to thought where it's I actually I am therefore I think but it's still an act not a fact well Descartes was a genius and as far as anybody knows he was a believing Catholic but in making the human I am the source of all philosophical wisdom he's usurping the Divine I am which is in fact the source of all wisdom and when when Moses asked for his name God doesn't give him his name he says I am and then he doesn't fill in the blank which Aquinas interprets quite profoundly as I am Pure Unlimited existence without the finitization of an Essence therefore I will not give you my name my name is the one who has no name and all Pious Jews refuse to pronounce the name of God the sacred four consonant word it's interesting about that um we typically translate as Yahweh or Yahweh is an attempt to fill in the blanks but it's not clear that that's actually accurate nobody knows because after the destruction of the temple that was lost there was a time when the Jews knew the actual name they just wouldn't write it and the time frame there fascinates me because Christ is God right the name of uh that is above every other name is the name of Jesus I read something as recently too um that if you kind of put yourself in an Old Testament Jewish perspective some of the things we read in the New Testament about the greatness the name of Christ are are clear clearly attributing Divinity to Christ um but how fascinating that the knowledge of the the true knowledge of the name of God disappears almost identically to the point of time where the name of Jesus appears on the historical Horizon yes yes because that is the name of God the name of God for us as as God's savior and that name was heard and pronounced only in the holy of holies in the temple so that when the temple was destroyed in 70 A.D the name was forgotten right yeah only the high priest could say it right on Yom Kippur yep [Music] it's fascinating names are so important I think for the human person and I mean obviously the name of Jesus is the greatest name above all but if we were to be images of God in some way our names become I mean obviously at the first gift we receive is the very gift of life but I think the second gift we oftentimes received is our name and there's something to that it's very intertwined our names are important well you know I believe that still today Orthodox Jews will not name their baby without prayer God what is what is the right name for this baby because in your name is your destiny the name is not just a label it's not arbitrary a little story about that so my wife and I um when we had our fifth child Patrick we were at the hospital and after he was born so I should preface this by saying a year or two before this a dear childhood friend of mine and not well a friend of mine when I was in my teens not like early childhood he had married another one of my childhood friends and they had several children he's a wonderful person and they had several daughters they were expecting their first son and he was on his way to work and um 19 year old kid good kid from all accounts early in the morning out in the country didn't think anybody be around driving his truck too fast and took him out and this was maybe a few weeks or months before his wife was due to give birth so you know the children had no father now it's a very tragic situation and his name was Wade and he just he meant a lot to me so my wife and I are in the hospital and we we have our baby Patrick and we wanted to do the classic four names and we'd gotten Patrick Michael we liked that Patrick Michael and we were thinking of a third name and if memory serves me correctly I believe we decided on Patrick Michael's Xavier and the nurses come into the room for my wife to fill out various forms including the name of the child and my wife realizes somehow in our herding at the hospital we'd forgotten to bring a newborn onesie so she asked if I would drive to the town was a little country town over in Indiana and would I go and um you know find a little store and go buy a newborn outfit so I said sure I drove over there took a few minutes all the way around so I would have anticipated she would probably bend on filling out that form and we had just agreed to Patrick Michael Xavier and for some reason on the way driving back I thought my friend Wade I thought how I would love to pay a little tribute to him Patrick Michael Wade that's got a good ring to it I thought I like this I like this well it's too late she'll filled out the form and so I went in the hospital I was up on the third floor I went and I walked in the room and she had the forms in front of her she felt everything else she had her pen ready to write the name and hadn't written it yet and I said hold on a second what do you think about Patrick Michael Wade and she knew the whole story and she said absolutely so he wrote it down the doctor comes in a little bit later and says well so what do you name the baby and we told him and we did not realize this we had no idea he was the doctor that delivered Wade's son after his death oh my what a profound moment of the way you know let's play great chess don't they yeah all the poems are on the right squares absolutely my wife and I ran out of pre-picked names after our first few children the last several times in the hospital we just frequently spent time soon when she's going labor walking up and down the hallway and talking about names and see what happens you know no need to have it all figured out in advance the name is not just a name it's a presence yeah when you go to the bank and you try to cash a check in your own name and you only have a few dollars in the account they're not going to give you the money but if your father's a millionaire and he wrote about a check you check out in his name and you get the money yeah it was not just a label it's a real presence yeah my name is John Allen Soul III and so it's like for me it's always been a sense of Legacy but it's also been difficult times in my father and my grandfather my great-grandfather in one back and yet I've witnessed the heroism of my dad you know kind of breaking a lot of generational chains that have been perpetuated through and um and so for years I I never really thought about my name other than it's kind of cool that I'm the third but as this deep sense of healing and conversion that's happened between me and my father and uh what I've come to terms with with the Redemption of my grandfather uh is that it's it's something to be proud proud of in the healthiest way you know that your name is sacred and of course my confirmation name is Saint Maximilian Colby you know that's that's for me also part of it because connects you to past Generations it's part of the whole Human Experience of life itself yes one of the profoundest lines in Elie wiesel's a harrowing account of the Holocaust Knight is that the worst thing the Nazis did to them was to take away their names they had no names only numbers numbers yeah you remember the the musical version of Les Mis the the classic song number 24601 and yeah the chaver is singing and Jean Valjean keeps replying with the name in Jean Valjean he's like number two four six oh one is that that destruction of your identity um I know you're a big fan of Jara Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings uh which I am too my favorite my favorite books but a name is ideally an identity it should say something about who we are and that made me think of the ants when the hobbits first meet them and they asked tree beard his name and you know he has to give them a short version Treebeard because he said our names are growing with us all the time you know we basically take forever to tell you the name well you know when Jesus changes Simon's name to Peter that's an implicit claim of divinity only God can change your name I think today even today Orthodox Jews are not allowed to change their name I didn't know that because that's that's given to them by God I've got that saying who the person is so God changes your name he's changing you and that happens in the Old Testament and Abram versus Abraham Jacob versus uh uh Israel right and Simon versus Peter I had a whole list of names I've got one child one son so far and uh I had this list of names and these are the top choices there's about 20 names and my wife and I had gone on a trip in 2021 and uh and I was praying at the uh the the Our Lady of leyche Shrine there and uh whenever I was praying I felt like if you have a son from this trip you should name him David and I'm like that's not on my list I'm not going to do that so we kept praying I kept thinking it and then I tell my wife hey this is crazy but if a son comes from this trip you should name him David uh not one of the list of 20 other names we came up with and then sure enough you know nine months later I remember seeing that I remember seeing the ultrasound and knowing we had a baby on the way and I'm thinking well we have to name him David and then uh you know months later you know you find out it's a boy and I go okay well it is and David for sure I wasn't given a girl's name there was no on the on this trip so uh I'm like I guess I have to name him David now not Ambrose which is what I initially did so I I met it in the middle and I made the middle name Ambrose yeah you have to tell me what is the tradition with the four names because she brought it up yeah that's true I've never heard yeah I didn't know that tradition well I mean I don't know if it's a particular tradition but it seems like with the adding of saints names and so forth Catholic many cultures traditionally have had a lot of names yeah you know you find people's multiple names and where you suggest the first middle and last which is what we did with our first children and then we decided to start Thursday morning fourth name the confirmation name I suppose so yeah I would assume yeah yeah I think some people have done multiple things Peter John Thomas yeah so maybe I'm completely wrong in that anyway we just gave our kids extra names then for the heck Thomas yes well this this also speaks to in the Book of Revelation right where uh Jesus talks about those overcome will be given a new name yes that's not just like a new label to stick on you it's a it's a new you yes or you as you are all already right always we're supposed to be unique that no one knows that name except God right yes because no one can fathom who you are to the depths of your being except the one who made you I'd never thought of that before that's beautiful it speaks to the reality that you're not done you are actually snow covered and done and Christ is the only way there's no dung in heaven obviously but it's all snow of them yeah we're also knowing Heaven okay sure but Christ is the only one who can enter in and like the garbage man but in a way that's impossible as far as what we understand it separate the filth and the Darkness from our souls and transform us and if we want that above all things in this life and if we get that Burgatory Purgatory will be part of Heaven not part of L it's not an in-between it's a the ante room to have in the washroom the washroom yeah it'll hurt you know please let me have the bath well I think that that goes back to something you said in the in the last segment when we were talking about pain and suffering um there's a difference if you're sick and you say I don't want to be well we may not we don't need to enjoy pain right that would be rather that would be rather masochistic but if you say then to the doctor I don't care how bad it hurts please make me well there is a certain Joy then or can be in that process because you know it's doing the right thing because you want to be well it's your genuine love of yourself that accounts for that but it's your genuine love for other people that account for the difference between some Tyrant making you do a deed and you're wanting to do that deed for your beloved be denied on Shining Armor yeah it's difficult but you Embrace that difficulty talked about Free Will earlier and speaking of that you know he said God could have made us all you know fundamentally robotics happy animals in the in the garden but perhaps the the greatest thing is without that free will we could never have understood love we could never have had the choice to love it's amazing that we can do something that God himself can do we can choose to love him in creating us he didn't quite literally take away any of his power but something like that he gave us a god-like power the power to be a first cause that's what Freedom means it's not something something simply determined by prior causes you initiated a new chain in that that's amazing and you can change outcomes through your choices yep yeah yeah it's so important and love that's not free is not really love right and you see the soul played out in families you know men not taking responsibility for the children they've conceived or using women and dispensing them or women manipulating men because obviously we know it goes both ways and that and children oftentimes are neglected and we've created a whole society where it seems that parents want to have a right to children when in truth it should be the opposite on some level children should have a right to parents yeah uh and Dr grafe I just wanted to let you know and ask ask for your prayers for the Archdiocese of Louisville and for um and all our the apostolates and movements that are starting to take place within Louisville because there's a lot of goods it's starting to Bloom from a lot of many years of wondering and wandering perhaps and the apostle that I served with which actually my bosses are the ones who brought this podcast connected us to Isaac which is a great give that's Donna and Gary bury they they're directors and founders of family renewal project and uh I gave me my copy of uh wisdom of the heart over there yeah their names are in there yeah yeah they're great great a great family great couple and uh they have lots of spiritual children but I serve as director of discipleship for that apostolate and we have a lot of different courses and classes and it's basically the Tob Apostle in Louisville that is our entire bread and butter that's what we hope to well you know what George Weigel said about the Tod it's the greatest uh thing since Thomas Aquinas it's revolutionary it's the answer to the sexual Revolution and so how do we share that more effectively I mean what's your experience with Tob I guess or how would you everyone that I have ever talked to read or heard about that has investigated to be Has Come Away impressed it's try it you'll like it it's definitely something that's changed my life and I'm I'm very thankful for it because as we've been talking about the breakdown of the family and the confusion with gender and all of the addictions people suffer from it it's how can we better Reach people with love and truth I feel like Theology of the Body gives us a language of some sort to actually address these things with the right timing and tone and this is this is something of a part of the answer to the problem of evil if if there hadn't been the sexual Revolution there wouldn't have been the need for the DOB no the church comes out with Creeds only in response to heresies right that's exactly right you know it feels like some of this conversation has has nicely come full circle with this because you took us back to the Garden of Eden the very beginning which John Paul II does as well in Theology of the Body and we talked about how it is destroying the image of God that brings about the first fall and it seems to me that Theology of the Body is as you said the antidote of the sexual Revolution but it is that way of restoring the authentic image of what man is supposed to be and this is why when that is restored it's not just the Garden of Eden over again it's something much better yes one of the most daring lines of any Theologian in history is Augustine's famous oh Felix sculpa it's dangerous life very dangerous line but profoundly true yeah yeah the worst thing that ever happened is in a sense the best thing that ever happened to him oh happy fault that it's merits so great and such and so great but that's true of the crucifixion too here's the greatest evil ever perpetrated the deliberate torture and murder of God himself yes which is the source of our Redemption I know you've appeared a number of times uh with Matt fratton from pints of Aquinas a show love to watch and I was watching an episode recently and I cannot remember the priest's name but it's about the Shroud of Turin and I don't know if you've seen or Melissa that that episode and I turned it on because it said new evidence for the Shroud of Turin thinking it was going to be more or less academic which it did have a fair amount of that in it and uh far more evidence than I was even aware of but about halfway through what came home to me was not just the knowledge about the Shroud of Turin it was the overwhelming visceral reality of the suffering of Christ in a way I never and never realized before um and it was it was moving it was powerful it was it was beautiful um and I think the that the uh you know maybe it's it's one thing to have the cross or have the crucifix and and look at it from time to time but we don't maybe connect always with the horror of the reality of that of just how bad it really was because we hear Saints being horrified exactly but spiritually oh God and in his his foreseeing event in the Garden of Gethsemane almost brought him to uh to despair father if if it be possible let this pass from me yeah and he swept Blood Sweat blood well that was and I wanted to go there because that's one of the things this priest mentioned he speaks of the the psychological condition rare but it can happen in which such a tremendous fear of death leads one to that sweating of blood which I'd heard this roughly before what I didn't know though was he said when that condition happens it causes an increased sensitivity in the nerves of your skin so every touch is painful even a breath of wind across the skin hurts the first Contact that Jesus had after that was Judas kissing him so he points out how the kiss of the betrayer actually hurt and yet he called him friend yeah it's like almost brings you to tears it's a great episode but I mean it just brings you to such a visceral reality of the sufferings of Christ I think what what brought on that Terror and that sweat of blood was another Temptation Of The Devil where God permitted the devil to show him all the people that would go to hell despite what he would do for them on the cross is there any suffering greater than the suffering that is self-inflicted on the part of somebody that you deeply love and then it's futile right and I did all this for that person and then they still didn't wow yeah that would be and to think of our own family members the people we deeply love that we want and pray for their conversion for their openness and you know that no matter how much we pray or sacrifice or long for them to open their hearts you can't control that and that there will be a day where they will have to make a choice and respond to the invitation or not when how can we be happy in heaven if our brother or sister or parents or people didn't make it I mean how can that make sure we certainly couldn't be happy on Earth if we knew that yeah we just talked about this in a sacramental theology class last night that um it's a great gift that we that we don't know yes State yes because you know if if a mother was to know that her child was was going to go to hell or had died and gone to hell um you know how how could she yes on Earth um and likewise you know um not knowing any one state or the presumption that someone had gone to heaven uh again um you don't want to just say oh you know God's Mercy is so great we don't really need to do anything we don't really need to do the right thing because that Mercy is always there and it's endless you can't presume these things it's a gift for us to grow and virtue so many things that were blissfully kept and ignorance of I mean take the positive thing suppose suppose God showed us every good effect that every one of our good prayers made we pray for somebody and that somebody is gifted with a Grace and therefore pray for somebody else who is gifted with the grace and therefore praise and some for somebody else there's an Easter Orthodox saying uh if if you uh do one good deed to your neighbor this afternoon somebody that you never dreamed of 300 years from now on the other side of the world is going to have enough Grace to overcome their Temptations and if not not so if God ever showed us all the good that our prayers did we would be so overwhelmed with the responsibility we'd never be able to get off our knees for the rest of our lives so spiritual Butterfly Effect yep that's what I was going to say yeah there's a talking about this this knowledge or lack thereof of who's in heaven who's in Hell uh reminds me of the great Divorce by C.S Lewis uh because it's been a year since I've read this saying correct my memory on it but there is the lady who gets the trip to heaven and she's concerned about the state of her son yes she finds out he's in heaven he's he's gone way way further on up towards the mountains into the kingdom you know whatever and she's being encouraged to follow and basically her response is well if I get to be with him I'll I'll do it right and she is being told that basically she's replacing god with her son and she needs to let go of that and then eventually she will see him again right and she eventually uh doesn't she kind of reject the whole idea and she chooses to go back to health yep yep it shows her something good and high and holy can be nevertheless a Temptation and and become an idol yeah our own children our spouses our parents the best things in the world an integrated divorce the only one visitor from Hell who does get to stay in heaven is the most miserable one of all that little boy who has that lizard on her shoulder shouting obscenities into his ear yes and he's so disgusted with her that he finally says to the angel oh kill it I don't care and then he rides off on the White Horse and the stallion is so beautiful my favorite thing about the great divorce is uh this one little bit but I I think there's this great misunderstanding and I think maybe it's a modern misunderstanding of Heaven as being something just a silly ridiculous frou-frou sitting on a fluffy Cloud plucking a heart because we hear all the you know the comedians uh Mark Twain and people like that always I'd rather hang out with the people in hell and smoking cigars and telling good stories this is where the real people are this is where it's going to be fun right and and so there's this this very false notion of Heaven whereas Heaven is the richest most real thing we can imagine we can't imagine it or exactly and there's my favorite part about the great divorce is where the people who have come to heaven to check it out from hell are pained walking across the grass because the grass is so real it's hard it cuts their feet they can't handle it but those in heaven who are so fully real so fully actualized uh no problem to them whatsoever they can handle that reality it's not saying that heaven is softer than hell it's more real it's tougher it's bigger it's harder than hell yes I like how you say that you can't imagine what heaven's like and yet having written a book about yes it's a joke oh the great divorce is a masterpiece yeah if any of our audience has not read it yet please do it's the Divine Comedy brought up to date yeah wonderful wonderful and I I think I've seen it perform four times on stage by four different groups I didn't know it had ever been made into a play all group all your parameters uh I think who were proudest and one was Catholic one was secular every single time the audience was stunned to Silence by the play and it was done very differently one one had elaborate sets one had no sets at all it's stunning you mentioned George McDonald earlier who if memory serves me correctly I believe was a Universalist right like the fun Balthazar he hoped for universalism he was not dogmatic about it and he was very influential on Lewis and would I be correct in saying that maybe this was kind of Lewis's answer to that problem because he he doesn't make it a condemnation to go to hell they all have the option to go to heaven they don't know yeah we just don't know when the disciples asked Jesus Lord our men be saved they're probably thinking hey let's let's get the data on the comparative population statistics of Heaven and Hell from him before he leaves right so we'll know if he says 90 are saved we'll relax if he says 10 are saved we'll sweat if he says 50 are saved will be confused but at least we'll know the data yeah strive to enter in yeah it was about what you said it's good to not know these things yes they will lead to presumption or despair here's a question for you because I've asked this a couple different times and I only gotten one answer that vaguely answered it but you know so many people that I grew up with in high school they would often talk about confirmation as confirmation because they didn't understand their faith and a lot of people were like well if Jesus was real then why did he leave you know and there's many of my high school friends I remember even in college when many people are losing their faith now we're saying well eventually some archaeologist is going to just find Jesus's bones and disprove all these myths right so my question for you is why would you say Jesus ascended into heaven when he had resurrected it was obvious they were witness and that he could have remained alive and proven himself for centuries well he himself gave you a direct answer to that question in John's gospel when he says to the apostles if I do not go I will not send the holy spirit it's better for us to have the Holy Spirit than to have Jesus I mean suppose you could have Jesus Christ in person personally on this podcast you'd get a billion listeners yeah but Jesus said no that wouldn't be so great which God is better because the holy spirit is in a subtler way but but a profounder way inside you it's not Jesus walking around out there right right it's it's like a good haunting he's the Holy Ghost yeah we chose the right uh person of the Trinity to include in our title Spirit Inspire yeah yeah I would agree yeah because that's what love wants intimacy already in the Old Testament God is the father an intimate relationship with the absolute Transcendent being and then he becomes one of us which is even more intimate in the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit is even more intimately present in the soul although all three persons are that then Jesus is he gets inside you not just beside you and he hints at that at the resurrection with Mary Magdalene when he says do not cling to me I have not yet ascended to my father and so you could I think it would be the easy human choice to make to cling to Jesus don't go away as you said be here on our podcast have dinner with us stay in our home but he says I'm going to visibly go away but send you the holy spirit so you have faith you have the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of you and he's still present with us in the Eucharist inside even in that realist of presences in the Eucharist he rarely gives us a sense of this person the Eucharist tastes like ordinary bread thank you for saying you don't have mystical experiences every time you receive communion it's so important one of the one of the things that was really been really important to me is when I became Catholic and I was in that process on that journey and I had come to believe in the real presence I could not imagine how awesome that must be like I'm going to really receive God I'm going to have Jesus inside of me and I expected and of course if you read the lives of the Saints you know you hear about some amazing experiences so I expected to be emotionally just overwhelmed from from the get-go and rarely for many years did I ever have any kind of emotional feeling at all when covid started and we couldn't go to mass for a while I had never been a person who went with any frequency to Daily Mass and for all the tragedy that kovid was little silver lining at least for me was sometimes you don't realize what you've got until it's gone and I remember thinking then when we can go back to mass I'm getting every daily mass I can possibly get to but one of the things that I have discovered is that and I've had some moments of maybe prayers you know and some emotions seem very deep to me but for most of my life as a Catholic oh the majority of times that I receive communion for many many years I didn't have any clear feeling of anything but what I did notice and I always noticed it in hindsight was something changing which is the whole point of the grace is not to give us Happy Feelings it's to make us knew to make us different people and [Music] um I think I had I think it's a lesson I needed to learn because I think I probably had a little bit of an addiction to emotions right you're in the right relationship with God if you're having these powerful feelings Jesus has and right and God's saying um but you're still behaving rotten so you're not in the right relationship with me and what I find the Eucharist does over time is you start to look back and say I didn't even notice but my life has been changing I didn't feel it I didn't even notice but something's been happening Eucharist is not like a hurricane blowing on the surface of the water spectacular waves it's like the tides it's Unstoppable it's deeper and more mysterious you know I have to say this because I looked outside we have Windows Snow's falling see the snow is falling right and uh as we're speaking of the Eucharist I think of you know the body of Christ being within each of us and our own physical bodies and the importance of celebrating the eternal life that we are striving to enter and yet the human life that we oftentimes forget or snuff out in even in the womb right and so praise God that Roe versus Wade was overturned and all of what we've experienced and last month they had the March for Life in the victory march and I wasn't able to go um I've gotten to go many years but uh my wife works at the Kentucky School for the Blind and so I I was there and celebrating them win first place for their cheerleading competition so on some level with these many of these kids who had severe disabilities I was kind of at my own March for Life but that morning of Roe versus way the 50th anniversary I walked outside and and that morning here in Louisville it was snowing very intensely and um it was it was like a Grace from God but it was almost like the snow sacramentally represented the countless children that have interceded for that decision to be overturned quietly and silently like the flakes yes and the and then the recognition of what we've been discussing here it's snowing and and there's that purity of heart that utter transformation of the human person so that it's we can't cling to Jesus but it doesn't mean he's disembodied in his resurrection you know I would say he was not saying don't touch me he's saying don't hold on to me stop hugging me you can't you gotta let go she was probably like bear hug and I'm like I can't let you out of my sight you can't keep me this way you're gonna keep me deeper in yeah and that's what I don't know I just had to share that as we were reflecting the greatest of sayings have the greatest of uh Dark Knight of the souls Mother Teresa almost a lifetime of it hmm I feel like that's when I get the most stuff done is the the less I feel um it's really hard to explain or the less that I see obviously I've got great stories in my life of of tangible signs I feel like God has given me but it it's on those weeks when when things are just very hard the baby's up all night um it does seem like that's when the mo the most emotion of God is is actually in my life is when I can't I can't feel it spinach doesn't taste as good as sugar but it does more healthy yes there is uh God doesn't want us to get a spiritual Sweet Tooth yeah you probably know the reference I'm not going to get this right but there is a story I don't know if it's just a story or if it's actually from some vision of the life of the Saints but of someone having a dream or Vision in which there were three nuns and Jesus comes spends a lot of time talking to one of them um and she's very happy you know with this conversation with Jesus the next one doesn't spend quite so much time last one he just kind of smiles and passes by and the person who had the dream revision says well I assume that he loves the first one the most she was the best and the last one and you know where this is going right it was completely the opposite the the first one was the weakest the youngest the least formed who needed those sensible consolations the most and it was the holiest the closest to him was the one that could just do with the smile when he walked by yeah that's very true which is why we shouldn't be hooked on Miracles yeah if you need a miracle there's a problem and if an age and a culture like us needs Miracles it's in deep doo doo yeah yes so um well Dr Craig I know here in a few minutes we're going to be getting some dinner for you and you're going to be going over to Immaculata but I would just kind of like to ask one or one sort of final broad question we started off today with asking about what's the worst idea in the world and you referred to Alexander solzhenitzen's you know men have forgotten God I think it is unquestionable that we do see a lot of concerns and challenges and really big problems in Civilization uh right now but we never want to focus purely on the negative either that's why we have uh yes yes we've got the how to destroy western civilization and then I think humor could be involved in helping civilization back but of course we see humor even getting uh steadily what um what thoughts would you give on a positive note in the current state of affairs I mean I think we could be really basic and say the world's a mess because we've forgotten God we need to remember God for to not be a mess but anything more more specific more kind of practical what what is what is our Western Civilization need right now by choice there's a Jewish legend about I think it's the 12 righteous men who keep the world alive if it goes down to 11 God will destroy the world so nobody knows who those 12 are so you might be number 12. and uh that much like Abraham's prayers about lot and song yes but that also reminds me of in Christian times of Saint John Vianney was Hammer Padre Pio I think it was Saint John Vianney the devil in one of his appearance system actually said if there were three priests like you my kingdom of this world would be broken yep you know um we don't realize the power of a single saint but I liked what he said about the 12th one might be you um because I think and maybe this is a great reflection to kind of end with we all think of saints as people out there other people who have done these amazing things and we forget the fact that God calls each and every one of us to be a saint it doesn't mean we jump straight off the cliff and start trying to perform penances right follow God's grace but that is ultimately the only thing that each one of us has been called to and yeah it could be anybody in this room each of the most recent posts has emphasized the universal cause of holiness uh and and the saint usually doesn't think of himself as a Saint Paul call himself the chief of Sinners yeah so if you think of yourself as a saint you're almost certainly not one Padre Pio said I am a mystery unto myself yes it's like what's going on with me yes again maybe one of God's blessings of not letting us know or see everything anyone of God's Great jokes yeah what that's a saint yep you thought you were the worst the most miserable of creatures and yet you're a crown on the star the star in the crown of God so yeah of all the books you've written what's your favorite book uh if you mean what is my best written book it's probably the one on Pascal because it quotes Pascal who's the most brilliant contemporary apologist if you mean which book I would most want everybody in the world to read at gunpoint if I could it's probably Jesus shock because that gets to the uh the thing we talked about earlier namely who is he is he your lord is he your everything if it's the book that caused me the most Blood Sweat and Tears and time it's my novel or non-novel an ocean full of angels uh which is not a great novel because it's not a novel at all but it's not great either but uh but uh I think those who like it will be few but they'll like it a lot because there's a lot of me in it I actually meant what was the book that you enjoyed writing the most Heaven the hearts deepest longing okay it's about what Lewis calls joy that mysterious longing for something we can't Define yeah you did a you did a talk a few years ago I think it I think maybe at Steubenville on uh 10 books that what was it no Catholic should die without reading I think it was in immaculato it was an Immaculata right same place yeah that's a great that's a great video and can be found on YouTube but check it out and on on that note kind of a final question for me since the topic of your talk at Immaculata tonight is uh raising Saints in the digital age and I know that many people who will watch and listen to this podcast will also probably be there tonight so we don't want to go over the same ground twice but just on a practical note for those of us who have children this is a big concern right um I have eight children um Eric and his wife just were blessed are there first last year John still is a child I'm just kidding okay we're still waiting and praying my wife says hi by the way she didn't get to be here but what would be one or two of the biggest practical tips that you could just maybe as we close throughout there for those of us who are Catholic parents that are very worried about the the concerns and challenges of this digital age what can we do one thing above all I love them to heaven love them like crazy no matter how embarrassing that is to them or to you and it will be yeah I've often said that I think that children are partly there to embarrass us to teach us humility I uh I had all these Notions before I got married of having children and being the the perfect father and you know teaching my children things and they would understand it all and they behaved perfectly and I would say that the rosary by the the baby's crib and he would fall asleep and I knew all these pictures in my head none of which was was accurate but uh just the last little story I'll share you we'll share with you so uh the parish that my wife and I attend the St Martin of Tours in downtown this was some years back well quite some years back now and the priest at the time was father Frederick clotter and our third son was fairly young at the time and he was a child of great energy great kid but especially a young age he was a handful there's no denying it and you always assume that children especially when they're trying to climb all over the pews and distracting and you know I can't hear the homily because I'm trying to take care of this kid you assume they don't either but children hear everything they're always little antenna up all the time so he had recently just had the opportunity to see Toy Story and he was very taken with Buzz Lightyear and so I remember my wife and I and our three kids were in the Pew and he's definitely everywhere he's being his usual handful and father somewhere in his homily says something about the Divinity of Christ and it filtered in a little bit into my son Ezra's ear and he popped up on the Pew and says after hearing the word Divinity to Infinity though yeah it was it was a great it was a beautiful moment so I think I think children are designed to keep us humble not not in a bad way but to remember we're all children so we don't take ourselves too seriously just identity God teaches us something about ourselves and everything and I suggest that it might be useful to contemplate what he's trying to tell us in designing diaper poop [Laughter] the first diaper I changed of my sons when I take it off it's in the shape a perfect heart yeah I don't know if it was beautiful I didn't keep it but uh emotionally it's beautiful not in the actual object yeah yeah right about it or something yeah that's wonderful this has been this has been absolutely wonderful um Dr Crepes thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to be with us today any any final thoughts anything you want to share God love you and you're as well thank you so much thank you for everything God bless you it's been a real honor to have you with us today and we will see you all next week on Spirit Inspire don't forget to like And subscribe to YouTube channel and we'll see you all next week God bless you all [Music] thank you foreign

Channel: Spirit & Spire

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Id: 7otyYZ6exJI

Length: 105min 15sec (6315 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2023