Overcoming Disagreement Fatigue

disagreement in itself is not a bad thing uh because see when you make a judgment that means you made a decision you said there's a lot of bright ideas but but i think this is the right idea welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vaught the senior content director here at word on fire we're joined as we usually are by the great bishop robert baron bishop baron always good to see you hey brandon how's it going in orlando it's going well going well now we you had a an amazing incident in your in your region there of santa barbara ventura i'm going to let you tell about it here amazing might not even be the right descriptor but one of the priests there follow father aloysius who is known as father al in the ventura region just underwent an almost unbelievable series of events tell us what happened yeah it's beautifully written up by the way it appeared in the angelus which is our catholic newspaper here in la and we put it up on our facebook page so you can find the details there but father al is pastor in ventura he's from nigeria went home at christmas time to see his family make a long story short while he's driving to see his family bandits come out on the road with guns opened fire killed i think a couple people in the car behind him shot father al in the abdomen he made it eventually to a truck stop where he was in danger of bleeding out eventually got help was brought to a clinic where there was there were no doctors then from the clinic to finally a hospital they operated on them so he survived and i got the word back here when he was in that hospital so we knew he was alive and we also knew that if they found out that he had american connections he'd be in danger of kidnapping so we kept the story very quiet back here and we monitored the situation to make sure he was okay and we we tried to get him home as quickly as possible we finally did and now once he's back in ventura we decided we could tell the story but it's beautifully told in this article and he approached it with tremendous uh courage and and spiritual alertness so it's a it's a beautiful story in its own way how this priest really faced death but then came through this terrible struggle and i went the morning after we heard i heard on a saturday i went to the his parish and spoke at all the masses and told the people about this and i didn't tell them so many words but i was kind of preparing them for his death because we had heard it was a very dire situation so thank god he survived and he's back in his parish now in ventura oh i can't even imagine as a parishioner seeing the bishop come into your church and tell you hey got some news for you your your pastor has been shot and might be killed pretty soon it's almost unbelievable it was but thank god all right well let's turn to the topic of discussion for today which is something called disagreement fatigue now i'm getting that term from an evangelical christian apologist named natasha crane i've been reading her for a while and like her work she's a author and a mother and she writes books for parents teaching how to how to share apologetics with their children but she recently wrote an article titled disagreement fatigue in 2020 how the events of the year will shape christian interactions in 2020 and beyond now she's writing mainly for evangelicals but i thought there was a lot of resonance for catholics and you and i could kick around the article a little bit she she shared five points we're not going to go through all of them maybe we'll we'll tackle a few of them but in the introduction she says that 2020 was a year filled with disagreement and i'm sure none of our listeners will disagree with that statement right we all know from the political climate to the cultural climate to the even the church climate disagreement is everywhere but natasha says of course disagreement is a kind alert kinder gentler word for much of the chaotic nasty and sometimes even violent conflict that our culture responded to through this worldwide pandemic christians certainly weren't immune to this she says in many cases these wars were most heated within the body of christ maybe let's start their bishop was that your sense too that we could maybe categorize 2020 among other things as a great year of conflict and disagreement oh i think so uh we saw it on the streets of our cities but you also you know we live in the internet world and um it's a it's a pretty rough and tumble place to begin with but i i felt last year too there was a uptick in the sort of verbal violence on online in com boxes um on twitter places like that and yeah it seemed like everybody was mad at everybody else and there was a lot of snark and sarcasm and and personal attack odd hominem language and yeah i think it got worse last year for sure part of that could have been we were also cooped up you know we were in lockdown and we were probably venting our spleens a bit you know online but yeah i think it was a pretty rough year so that part's not too surprising that's not a revelation to say last year was a year of disagreement however natasha crane then says i've noticed a concerning pattern of response to all of this conflict in recent weeks particularly on social media fatigue has led many christians to avoid any kind of disagreement she says i'm concerned that the disagreement fatigue of 2020 will shape how christians interact with each other and secular culture for a long time to come and then so from there she shares these five trends let's let's talk about the first one here it's her prediction that in the coming years as a result of this 2020 conflictual year more christians will be hesitant to speak publicly about their faith can you see that pattern already emerging yeah no i would say my instinct is it's been there for a long time um it's in the etiquette of our society you know we tend to be wary of those who wear religion on their sleeve we live in a sort of tolerant society religion you know let's face it is is kind of a dangerous topic you know my mother used to say that when we were kids like don't talk about you know politics it was politics religion or i think in her day or your cigarette brand those were the three things you weren't supposed to talk about now people don't smoke cigarettes that much but in her day they did but you know okay politics and religion stay away from those if you want to stay away from a fight so i think it's been true in america for a long time but i would agree with her i think it's it's gotten worse and the woke culture has certainly exacerbated the situation because everybody is on eggshells you know it's like walking through an ideological minefield every time we open our mouths that we're going to be offending somebody and then religion are you kidding is one of the most volatile topics to bring up so i do get that that you know we're just afraid to say even that we're christians well the trouble brandon as we both know is you you just can't accept that scenario as a christian because it's essential to our lives that we evangelize you know as paul says i mean woe to me if i do not evangelize well that's true of every baptized person we're all prophets we're commissioned to announce the gospel so or you know and saint peter's saying always be ready to give a reason for the hope that's in you so that's not an option for us it's not something that a few christians do so that's dangerous it is it's a cultural scenario that is not helpful for christians i think i've noticed a lot of among a lot of my friends that they're increasingly hesitant to speak out about their christian beliefs in part because the conviction behind those beliefs isn't that strong and in decades past they might have felt free to talk about their faith even if it was privatized and subjectivized it was their personal preference that i'm catholic versus some other tradition but now the overwhelming pressures of the culture have reduced that privatization that subjectivized faith so deep within us that we feel well i don't you know i have nothing to offer people around me it's just it's kind of my arbitrary subjective preference do you find this correlation between a lack of conviction and a lack of willingness to publicly discuss your faith yeah i mean if religion is construed as a hobby so i got my little hobby and you got different hobbies and you know i might say hey i like playing cards or i like playing golf but i'm not going to become an evangelist for it i'm not going to try to you know knock you over the head with it and say well you should be a golfer too you know so if religion is seen along those lines not making truth claims not making any objective claim about the reality of things well then yeah just keep quiet about it and if you know if someone's interested i suppose you could say yeah i'm a golfer too and but but the move to evangelize is repugnant to that understanding of a privatized hobbyized understanding of religion but that's been around for a long time in our culture i'm afraid here's a second trend that natasha crane sees christians will increasingly see apologetics as a contributor to unhealthy disagreement she says our society thinks that christianity is not only false in many of its claims but also morally wrong and so it's the task of apologetics to show out of love for our neighbor that christianity is both true and beautiful natasha also says that it's not just that individual christians will be leery about offering a defense or an explanation for their faith but that the whole realm of apologetics will become less popular in the church that that the task of apologetics including people like us will be convincing christians that apologetics matters and is still worth engaging in this bishop gets right to the heart of your recent book arguing religion you're saying now is not the time to shut down apologetics and good argument but to raise it up we should be doing more of it now than ever before right but you know the trouble as we both know brandon is a lot of people have never really been trained in how to do that like how to have a good argument with someone which is why our exchanges on let's say the social media often devolve into like snarky quips and i find especially among younger people i don't want to sound like a old fogey here but that they've so learned that from social media that that's the way you respond by email or you know on twitter or in the comm box and so the snarky one-liner comeback is mistaken for an argument there's not an argument at all because an argument is done in love and it's meant to move toward the truth that's the mark of a real argument in other words you're willing the good of the other you're not you're trying to put the other down or just make a snarky you know sarcastic statement and it's meant to move you toward the truth let me give you a little hint people say okay well bishop and how do you argue can i propose a little uh two-step and it's inspired by thomas aquinas someone makes a claim right against something you believe here's the first step identify something in that claim that's right because invariably there will be unless the person is completely insane or cruel or whatever but there's a 99 chance that something the person said is right there's something true in the observation right so point that out begin not with you're an idiot or shut up but begin with yeah you know what actually something you're saying here is true and and a lot of people in our tradition would say the same thing and etc okay there's step one now you've accomplished a lot of things by that stuff you've you've um maybe defused a conflict you've complemented your interlocutor you've shown that you've listened right you're not just jumping to a to a snarky response you've listened to the argument that they've made okay so there's the first move is acknowledge something that's true in it here's the second little simple move distinguish make the distinction that brings out where you think uh what you're saying is true over and against the claim they're making so you've acknowledged what's good in it great now as thomas would say distinguo now i'll make a distinction that shows yeah but here's a point that i think you're missing or that here's here's the argument i i want to make and based upon that distinction this perspective now comes into the light in a fresh way you know i just make this a little more concrete someone classically will say you know there's no god because there's so much suffering in the world classical argument is it right yeah in a lot of ways that there is great suffering yes that it poses a challenge to belief in an all-good god yeah absolutely thomas aquinas admits that so yeah you're right and a lot of really smart people have said that but let me make a distinction now to show i think you're overlooking a possibility that there's a a third way namely that god permits suffering to bring about a greater good you know so that's how thomas does it it's a little two-step dance acknowledge the truth of it make the distinction now watch something here instead of simply fighting so you say a i say not a and b and now snarks knock snark we fight what i proposed is like a little dance so we'll take two steps together now a dance means we're kind of doing this together right more to it we're kind of dancing i hope in the direction of the truth we're actually moving together toward something beyond both of us which is the fullness of truth now let's say that person okay okay i appreciate you know he acknowledged something right what i said and he's made a distinction and so now i'm going to answer back yeah yeah but i think okay now same thing two-step yes something you've said there is right and here but let me make a further refining distinction now we've taken a little further dance together toward the truth that's called argument and see maybe brandon we we had a better word latin might be razio uh but no one knows what that means in english uh because argument just has a negative overtone argument sounds like i i i it's argument right but what i'm describing is what what word can we use it's a it's a raziosa nation but no one knows what that means you know what i'm saying but it's this little kind of two-step move acknowledge distinguish acknowledge distinguish and then together the two of you are moving in love toward the truth that's the way we can disagree with each other i'd encourage listeners to check out bishop aaron's recent dialogue with alex o'connor the well-known uh atheist online which was recently released i think by the time we air this episode it will have just came out um a long almost two hour discussion where you see this dance of of two smart people who disagree on a lot of major things but they're they're sharing this argument this disagreement in a healthy way bishop i've also noticed among my generations i don't know how true this is of of your peers and your uh generation but among millennials maybe the generation after me the generation z there's just almost a complete allergy to any kind of disagreement at all yeah we just don't sense we're not comfortable sharing different views with people we love our friends and our family i sense that in previous generations you could have people like we've used the example of gk chesterton and george bernard shaw who disagreed about basically everything and we're very close friends but today we want to dissolve any differences any disagreements we our hyper tolerance wants to you know wash over anything that distinguishes us from one another we're we're all equally good all beliefs are equally true do you detect this this allergy to disagreement and what effect do you think that's eventually going to have when my generation starts to get older yeah god help us no i'm teasing you know i brandon part of it is that little word that you hear all the time which is safe right i want to be safe safety safe space i remember talking about this with with jordan peterson you know because he does a lot of work in the heroes right journey which is a mythic archetype the hero begins in the ordered space right of of civilization but all the hero adventures involve a moving out of the safe space into a chaotic space a disordered space someplace that's that's frightening and it's it's un uh it's disordered and then the hero brings order to it and he expands thereby the the realm of order so i mean that's every story you could tell from the ancient myths to bilbo and frodo right the same thing of bilbo has to leave the safe space of his little hobbit hole to go on an adventure and frodo then the next generation same thing has to leave the shire to go out on adventure and that's how the hero accomplishes this great benefit for the rest of us right well see the word safety in all the hero journey stories the hero faces this temptation to stay in the safe space uh again tolkien is really good on that right is and these beautiful little hobbit holes with the doilies and the furniture and the fire and the food and everyone's well-fed and protected in the big door to keep enemies out and it's in very nice safe space but gandalf has to come kind of breaking into that safe space and summoning bilbo and eventually frodo off to adventure you know can you see argument here's my point can you see argument as i was describing it as a kind of moving out of a safe space the safe space of what i know what i got figured out someone's threatening my safe space with a counter position so okay snarks knock snark fight fight fight close the door close the windows leave me alone well okay that's one way to do it but it means you're never gonna go on an adventure you're never gonna be summoned by your interlocutor into a a new space um dangerous yeah it is a little bit okay grow up that's what's that's life that's the adventure so intellectually speaking a real argument is going on adventure it's saying okay i'm going to follow this now where it leads i'm going to i'm going to see how far this goes and and um it's threatening me a bit yeah yeah making me uneasy probably so that's the danger to me brandon is a generation that's so predicated upon keeping ourselves safe will be a generation that's afraid of adventure and if you're afraid of adventure then you're not going to grow you won't be alive you know it's the old the old cliche of the boat in the harbor you know it's safe in the harbor but boats aren't meant for harbors they're meant for the open sea so that means they're going to get knocked around eventually they're going to sink okay that's the way it goes but at least um it got out in the open sea so that'd be i guess sound like an old foggy i suppose but that would be my fear of of a generation that's so predicated upon keeping ourselves safe your descriptions and your analogies there call in my mind call to my mind all the great evangelists and missionaries of our church people who were most effective at convincing people to change their views about god or faith or religion but as a as a prerequisite they had this easy comfortability with disagreement they would go into new cultures or to meet new people that they knew believed diametrically opposed things than they did but they didn't avoid them they went into it knowing and and becoming comfortable with that fact as a prerequisite to then engaging in in dialogue and argument you know a good example there again is carl voitiwa so in his polish context he deals first with the nazis then the maybe slightly less obnoxious communists come in but voitiwa who's a philosopher by nature decided well okay i'm going to learn marx better than these people know him i'm going to study marx and so he was able to out argue them on their own terms i love the story i've heard from a couple sources that when voitiva went into the conclave that elected him pope in 78 they all bring in reading material right he brought in a marxist philosophical journal and that's that was typical of him like well okay i've got to know my opponents here i have to know their best arguments and i'm not going to read some little popular straw man that i can knock down i'm going to try to read their most serious people good that's a good instinct but see he was a he was an adventurer uh carl voitiwa which is why his pope he says duke and altum you know go out in the depths stop horsing around in the shallows you know and see the shallows are safe space i can sort of put my feet in the water and splash about but we're not meant for that we're meant to go out in the deep that's where the fish are and that's where excitement is you know so um intellectually duke and altum go out into the depths uh but you can only do that if you've got some smarts and you've got some courage right you need both those things otherwise we're to see in our hobbit holes let's look at one more of these trends that natasha crane predicts as a result of the disagreement fatigue of 2020 she predicts that belief in a generic god will continue to be acceptable in culture but belief in jesus as god will become increasingly gosh she says personal belief and a generic god will be acceptable because it requires very little from a person she thinks that uh general god sentiments such as prayers for you or god bless you or god love you will continue to be safe and used because they aren't specific enough to to offend anyone but any mention of jesus or the particularities of christianity will increasingly become offensive do you see this trend already happening right now yeah yeah and uh you know again it's been around in a way for a long time uh think of the enlightenment's instinct to move toward a kind of a deist conception of god that's a generic god it's sort of literally at a safe distance from the world not posing any particular threat to us wouldn't all people of good will kind of accept the existence of some ultimate cause of things so yeah it's you know true as far as it goes but it's true in a non-threatening way jesus here's god in the flesh who awakened the absolute rebellion of the human race to the point where they kill them that's a really subversive message in itself the cross therefore is judgment upon the world and it reveals the deep deep dysfunction of the world better than anything else and then jesus risen from the dead which means god's love is more powerful than anything that's in the world and that jesus is the rightful lord of all people and all nations yeah that's very subversive and the powers from the first century until today have always intuited that which is why either this generic sense of god or a sort of vaguely symbolic account of the resurrection has always been attractive because oh well that's fine you know sure believe that if you want it's nice little myth and so on but the real thing you know uh christianity with um the gloves off that's a different proposition because now we see god in judgment upon the world and god assuming in christ lordship over the world that's a much more dangerous business but that's what we're about that's evangelization right so i i do get that if we can you know we flatten out the idea of god and we mythologize jesus sure we become inoffensive but gosh name one great christian saint who was inoffensive i can't think of one all right natasha closes out the article with this line i want to see if if you think this is good advice for christian she says friends 2021 is not the year to succumb to 2020 induced disagreement fatigue it's a time to speak boldly when opportunities arise yes we're all tired but it's the joy of the lord that is our strength may we rest in that more than we rest in our desire to avoid disagreement good advice yeah yeah i think so uh you know because disagreement in itself is not a bad thing uh because he when you make a judgment that means you made a decision you said there's a lot of bright ideas but but i think this is the right idea among all the different bright ideas so when you say i'm a christian you are i'm sorry you are saying i'm not a hindu i'm not a muslim i'm not a jew i'm not a buddhist i'm not an atheist so you're saying not not not not you're cutting a lot of options off now there are points of contact and yes yes yes all those good things but it's also making a judgment i'm disagreeing with you okay fine now now let's do the dance if you want to have you know an ongoing discussion great acknowledge distinguish acknowledge distinguish acknowledge distinguish fine fine it's non-violent it's loving it's moving toward the truth but it's predicated upon some fundamental disagreements great fine that's part of the adventure well it's time now for our listener question if you have a question for bishop baron please send it to us by visiting the website askbishopbaron.com there you can record your question on any device today we have a good one from marcy in newberry park she's asking about jesus and how he existed before the incarnation pretty interesting question here it is hi bishop baron this is marcy from newberry park and my question for you is what form was jesus in before the incarnation so we know that christ existed for all time but at one point he had a human life and he had the dna of his mom mary the blessed mother but before that how could we envision christ thank you yeah good thank you it's a question that uh been entertained by a lot of theologians and you kind of gave the answer in some ways there so from all eternity the logos exists as the word of the father so within the life of the trinity the word that will become flesh has always been always will be and so i can recognize jesus in that sense some of the fathers talked about this that there never was a time when the logos was ah sarcos meaning without flesh and what they meant was that from the beginning the father always envisioned the sun becoming flesh it was part of the divine intention from the beginning now that's a more scotus understanding than thomas to use our western terms that even if we hadn't sinned the word would have become flesh to bring creation to its fulfillment so in that way you could say the incarnation was always in the mind of the father from all eternity and therefore the sun the word was at least implicitly connected to flesh but at a particular point in time you're right at this moment in history we say that the human nature of jesus emerged now the human nature of jesus is a creature just as i'm a creature the human nature of jesus is is a created you know material reality which then began to have a relationship to the logos we say the logos took to himself a human nature and so it didn't change the logos but there was a there was a new type of relationship between this created human nature and the logos and we call that the incarnation um so i guess i would parse it that way the basic answer is from all eternity jesus is the is the logos but maybe with the incarnation the becoming sarks becoming flesh always in the mind of the father well thanks for that great question marcy and thanks to all of you for listening and watching this episode couple reminders i shared them last week but i wanted to mention them again first if you haven't already seen our new rosary initiative i encourage you to check it out it's at wordonfire.org rosary we have a bunch of videos and audio downloads there including a short video on why pray the rosary this might be good to share with friends who have never prayed the rosary before and are a little curious about it another on how to pray the rosary maybe to share with that same group and then we have four videos that walk through each of the sets of mysteries of the rosary with bishop baron offering reflections on each biblical mystery so they're beautifully made gorgeous music stunning artwork very mystically profound i encourage you to to watch them pray with them maybe get family and friends to join you while you do it again you can find it at wordonfire.org rosary also i encourage you to pick up your copy of our new book the word on fire vatican ii collection it includes the four major documents of vatican ii surrounded by commentary from bishop baron and each of the four post-conciliar popes so it helps you to not only become introduced to these documents but understand them in the heart of the church you can find that at wordonfire.org vatican2 well thanks so much for listening and watching we'll see you next time on the word on fire show thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video i invite you to share it and to subscribe to my youtube channel

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 83,275

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Id: yCGSOXu8ix4

Length: 31min 31sec (1891 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021