Proclaiming and Encountering Christ in the 21st Century: Bishop Barron at @BiolaUniversity

[Music] what an honor there's all sorts of introductory things i want to say and laudatory things that i'd love to say too and about bishop baron um but let's just get into it we don't have a ton of time um there's so much we had a really nice dinner we did tonight with some colleagues and there's so many avenues we could follow um but tonight one of the things that protestants and catholics hold in common is is a deep commitment to evangelism to the mission of the church to witness to the gospel of our lord jesus christ and bishop baron sure is fair to say i think is is one of the great evangelists in the world uh today and one of the things i love about about that is he does so um without ever dumbing it down and we'll i think we'll talk more about that but that's a that's a deep commitment of his um so he's a first-rate theologian in the midst of his evangelizing but we want to just jump in tonight um so i'm going to start here most simply put evangelism is an announcement of the good news about jesus it's not an indifferent announcement however but an announcement that hopes for a warm reception by those who hear the good news evangelists want people to repent and believe so to start how do we come to believe anything oh gosh i don't know no you know i'm a john henry newman man i think as you know and john henry newman has this idea of the illiterative sense and he says when we come to ascent to anything so whether it's a very simple truth or it's a very high complex belief we rarely do it on the basis of a clinching argument there are a few sort of simple basic truths that might come to us just by means of a purely rational argument but newman says typically we do so by sort of conjuries of influences from arguments to hunches to intuitions to conversations to experiences to traditions that are received from beauty that's experienced and then guided by what he famously called the illitive sense he invented that term it just means a kind of instinct for the truth the same way that the the conscience is a kind of instinct for the good the illitive sense assesses all of this and with with its its uh instinct for truth moves us in the direction of ascent and very often when you're asked how come you believe that we can't say that's why my first response was was meant to be flipped but not entirely because i can't always articulate it if you ask a married man how can you marry that lady oh i'll tell you why because i constructed the syllogism of major premise minor premise and conclusion was well no i never say that and he probably couldn't tell you in explicit detail but guided by this intellectual intuition he came to ascent the same is true of religious ascent but i like the instinct behind your question which is religious ascent really isn't substantively different than any other kind of ascent they all happen in this in this complex process that's guided by the illiterative sense that's great i i can imagine so possible objection here would say go something like this that that that's fuzzy um that is that are you exposed in that to a kind of wishful thinking or to a projection when you say well i don't know i look at the whole and it just seems like this is the case how would you respond well i'd respond the way newman does which is in a higher world it might be otherwise so maybe among the angels you know they just intuit everything immediately and they just get it so an angel wouldn't need an illiterative sense but here below newman says that's just the way it is and it's a kind of angelism which is a problem a kind of angelism that says well we should think in a in a higher way i mean that's the way it goes i'll add this that's why it's so important see i don't like rene descartes the founder of modern philosophy i tend not to like him for a lot of reasons thank you the the society you're gonna become the cartesian haters yeah but descartes you know famously withdraws into this heated room in the town of um we know when where modernity was born it was born in a little room in the town of olm in germany because descartes went in there and that's where he was wrestling with this great problem of how do i know what's true and he comes up with the famous kojito ergosum right i think therefore i am and that becomes the foundation of what he claims to be true well see i'm not a kojito guy as a catholic i'm more koji thomas that we think that we we think together so you're right i might have gone through this illiterative process of my own arguments and intuitions hunches experiences but then the beautiful thing is i talk to you about it and what do you think about this and and i throw it to you like like two tennis players and i hit the ball to you with my own spin on it but then you hit it back to me and then we sent it to somebody else and then we even like chestered and said uh like the democracy of the dead you know is that we we let the dead have a vote so now i talked to aristotle about it and i talked to thomas aquinas about it and and in that process of the koji thomas across space and time i come to a sure grasp of the truth so i think i like the instinct again behind that question because it's rarely the individual that knows it's the koji thomas more than the kojito that's great you use the analogy sometimes of coming to know a person and you say it's a similar can you walk us through that i think you know i imagine most of us here in this room are people of faith and i think it's the best analogy when i'm talking to people are really rationalistic they're very naturalistic scientific even what is faith what do you mean by faith i always make the distinction faith is not the darkness prior to reason it's the darkness on the far side of reason the darkness prior to reason that's just superstition that's credulity that's naivete you know i'm against all of that and i think the church classically is against all that and we don't want to confuse that sort of infrarational superstition with faith faith as i say is on the far side of the light of reason and then the example of knowing a person i think is really illuminating because when you come to know somebody your reason plays a role obviously you you look at the person you you assess that person you probably google that person and find out what you can you use your mind to uncover a lot of facts then you might come to know the person directly and by by conversation and so on you come to know them even better but there will come a point and anyone this room has ever fallen in love notice the language falling in love that doesn't mean i'm in control of the situation right there comes a point where that person is going to say something to you that you would never have known from a google search you'd never have known from just your own observations you'd never know from casual conversation you only know because she has decided to open her heart to you and at that point you got to make a decision right anyone that's become a great friend to someone else you have to decide now do i believe that or not and let's say the person is saying something just crazy that's totally out of step with everything else you know well you might say no i i don't believe that that's not trustworthy but if you've come to trust the person you've come to love the person and they say something that's not how to step with reason but it's not something you you'd access any other way and then you say yeah i i believe that because i love you and i trust you i think that's the best analogy for faith let's say in the biblical revelation so i mean i'll say as a catholic there's a lot that reason can tell us about god i'm happy to use philosophy all that i can science mathematics to understand truths about god but at a key moment we claim god also spoke do i believe him or not right now that's faith it's faith when i say yeah i believe i accept because i've come to know and trust the person who speaks i think that's the best analogy for the faith reason relationship nice if that makes sense yeah that's great no that's fantastic um i'm gonna i think i want to talk a little bit about some of your evangelists to work through new media and just want to start kind of low on the ground you spent all this time one of the things i've loved he spent all this time engaging in the comments on youtube which first says something about uh the thickness of your skin um and your patience but you know what have you learned whether it's about how to evangelize wisely using new media maybe it's about the state of the hearts and minds of the people who are watching your videos yeah no i appreciate that i do it much less than i used to so when i first got started i started doing youtube videos i don't know if anyone's watched any of these videos but in the year 2007 and youtube was invented in 2006 so it had just come into being at that point and all i knew was that youtube was like um a video of you know here's my cat jumping off the roof it was like just silly stuff but a friend of mine said you know what we could try something on youtube how about you do commentaries on movies or music or what's going on in the world and i said oh okay and i guess oh we could try it and we had a donation of the time somebody given us some money and said you know do something creative with this so we used it to start the youtube thing and in the early days i remember vividly when this friend of mine father steve who really runs the word on fire called me up excitedly we got 300 people watch the video i'm like no kidding 300 people watched our stupid video so i for for it for an academic 300 people looking at you right it's a miracle right this is like so i was i was thrilled at that point you know so to get things rolling in the early days i discovered that is that the two main things you need is freshness novelty you know if you keep putting things out and then interaction so in the early days i would i'd spend time going over the comments and responding it as you suggest there's something very kind of dark and negative about that world there is because people are just nasty to each other it's that's one of the dark sides of social media on the other hand you know what i loved about it is people would come on and you know they hated god they hated the church they hated me like roughly in that order but but okay they made some kind of argument they said i don't agree with this i got some traction yeah i say okay okay it sounds to me like you're not happy with whatever and let me try to answer that so even even those obnoxious early responses gave me a little traction a little toehold right in that person's world and then what happened is sometimes these great conversations would start to unfold because they okay he's listening to me okay the guy responded to me so they would you know come back hardly anyone on the internet ever says you know that's a really good point i agree with you i mean everyone's got the last word but you find out because people would tell me later you know i know i was pretty obnoxious to you on youtube but you know that really did have an impact on me or someone will say you never knew they existed but you know i i watched that thread that you had with that guy the back and forth and that really impacted me so in the early days i did it much more now i can i mean occasionally i'll jump on and respond but the early days i did and it it did give me a sense of evangelical uh confidence you know because here people let's face it would never darken the door of one of our churches you know 99 of people on who come online they're not going to come to our programs here's a program on faith and reason they're not going to come to that but i do a commentary on some film that everyone's talking about and hey there's this priest talking about the movie i'll watch that so i like that about it i think that's a gift i said this in fact in rome i was a delegate to the uh of synod on youth it was back in 2018 which was a month-long gathering of bishops with pope francis he was there every day to talk about young people and how to reach them and i said you know we are going through a crisis of dis affiliation we all know that a lot of people leaving our churches i said but isn't it interesting how precisely at this moment we've been given this gift of the social media we're people that would never come to our churches but yet i can move into their world to some degree and so those early days when hey hey with 300 we've now uh your your president was a little bit behind we're almost at 100 million views on youtube well it's amazing i mean if you told me that back in 2007 i mean i've never believed it but it shows you there's an interest and if the churches present themselves in this public forum i think we'll get a response i want to come back in a second to the unaffiliated and the disaffiliated yeah i wanna i wanna pick up on uh the spiritual formation required for someone to wade into the comments so i think about this you know for evangelists in a polarized age in an angry age i go into social media with a little bit i have left and i still sort of brace myself and and i feel like it's a spiritual sort of victory when i just don't weigh it in at all so can you talk about uh just just how how someone can be formed in such a way to be able to do that with grace and strength and confidence and yeah it's a good i'll say a couple of things it's a good question i do a holy hour every day so that i wake up in the morning i get a cup of coffee and i go to my chapel in my house i have the privilege of having the blessed sacrament in my house and spend the first hour of the day in prayer so that's just the way i get myself focused right for the day and i always make a point of praying for anyone that is going to use my social media today and it's just a way of you know god doesn't need to be reminded but it reminds me that i'm dealing with people and not just words and abstractions there are real people behind even the meanest words and you know in god's providence they've come and maybe with bad motives maybe you know they do hate me or hate the church but but by god and i mean that literally by god they've come and so you know lord i pray for all these people and give me the grace to engage them well so part of it really is steady formation and prayer otherwise we will turn into sputtering well how could you say that i'm going to tell you and especially if you have some theological training you know and someone makes a let's you know face it kind of a stupid remark and they say well but if thomas aquinas points out well what does that accomplish it maybe makes me feel good for a second but it doesn't help that person so one thing i've done is i still do it um and it's it's for my benefit really but i almost invariably when i'm responding to someone i'll say friend comma and then i'll make the response and it's to signal to me okay even if this person is super obnoxious i i'm i'm here for this person i they're they're someone that can be evangelized and so i call them friend on purpose um the other thing i would say is and a lot of people ask me especially in my catholic world like you know what do i do if i want to do that work too i want to get in that i said begin with the old technology of books and read and read and read and read and read so you've got something to say to people that's worthwhile the problem is hey i like social media hey i'm pretty good at that i'm going to get involved yeah but you're not ready you're not ready to respond to these questions you're not ready to give a properly nuanced answer so i'd say spiritual preparation and intellectual preparation yeah are really important i've told my brother bishops you know bishops will send students for like doctorates so i was sent years ago to get a doctorate to teach in the seminary which is great but i said i think you should get your best and brightest people young priests send them for a doctorate high level to do social media and then put them in charge of social media for your diocese and then do maybe do what i've done say i'm gonna just ask me anything i'll talk about a movie talk about music talk about the culture hey call me with a question but have someone that's really well trained to be able to do that yeah so those two things that's great and it encourages me too years in the classroom for you um that's right have been played a significant role there yeah yeah i mean so for 20 years i taught theology and you pray you hear all the questions basically yeah you know they're really in a way there aren't that many questions they're they're the classic ones that augustine entertain that aquinas entertain that the author of job entertains i mean the the standard questions are still pretty much the ones that come up yeah and it strikes me i've been reading a bunch of bishop baron's work to you know that you've you've got maybe 20 really significant kind of moves you make i see them so you make them again and again and so also for would-be evangelists strikes me that you need to find those pieces that you can deploy effectively well yeah i'll tell you i'm a great admirer billy graham and uh i actually saw him one time toward the end of his life he was he was preaching in cincinnati it's a long story i was there and heard him and he's he was an old master that's what struck me was this guy is a master you know but listen to billy graham homilies all over the world they have the same structure right and they have this basic evangelical structure which is you know you've tried this this this and that to be happy haven't you and it hasn't worked well i have what will make you happy i mean so there and they're variegated and and they're different audiences but there's a basic evangelical structure and they culminated in the altar call right that we had tonight um but i i think there's there's a lot of wisdom to that when you have a basic structure to the outreach um that helps so so just to test it if i say the problem of science and religion what what are the two or three places you're going to go with people well i'm going to go first to speak against scientism right that i love science and the catholic tradition certainly reverences the sciences the formulator of the big bang theory is a catholic priest most people don't know that george lemaitre catholic friar you know discover of genetics etc etc so we love the sciences but we don't like scientism which is the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge so the scientific method is great when it comes to analyzing the empirical world of nature fine fine but don't tell me that hamlet's not giving me anything true or that plato's symposium is not teaching me something true right so don't reduce knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge religion you know david tracy says religion is a close cousin of things like poetry and philosophy and so once you've opened the path to say there are other there are non-scientific ways of knowing well then i open the door to religion as a way of knowing so that's the way i would i would start to look at like a religion science issue i notice you pick up something from rat singer to his introduction to christianity uh there are two propositions about the emergence of science from the christian faith too right it's i think it's very important for again presumably most of us are christians in the room the sciences in a very important sense came from from religion the the myth and it is a myth you know of the hostility of religion and science all the great early scientists they're all trained in church-sponsored universities which is where they learn their mathematics and their astronomy and so on their basic you know physics but more importantly it's these two theological ideas really growing out of the idea of creation namely that the world is not god that's very important because if you think the world is god and a lot of people do look at a lot of the new age today but you know whether it's forms of paganism or animism or different types of nature religion that nature is demonized well if nature's demonized you'll worship it but you're not going to experiment on it or cut it up and analyze it and so but if the world isn't god the world isn't divine well then yeah i i can experiment and so on the second assumption is that everything in the world is imbued with intelligibility that's the right singer idea and that's the assumption and i don't know any word for it except mystical because it's not itself a scientific conclusion it's an assumption all the sciences have to assume that the world is intelligible but that's a weird thing the more you think about it we take it so for granted well of course the world's intelligible so i'm a physicist chemist biologist psychologist i'm going to go out to meet a world that's marked by patterned intelligibility well yeah but why should that be the case why should that be the case unless there's someone like an intelligence behind the intelligibility of the world so when those two things come together the world isn't god but the world is fully imbued with intelligibility now the scientists get off the ground and so it's no accident they come up out of a christian milieu you know and i think that's that's something that even a lot of christians don't understand yeah that's right and by the way i wanted to bring up the rat singer for you all um because when i hear someone like bishop baron i i'm amazed and intimidated and i think well that's not something i can do this feels like an inimitable thing this is he's a special person with a special intellect and a special gift for communication but i wanted to bring it up because notice he said what you do if you want to be an apologist an evangelist you read he read this book is it read all across the world an introduction to christianity by a man who became the pope and he noticed in there a really key point and he brought it out and he continues to make so just notice that that this very gifted man you also don't have to be a genius you can actually read and pick up on things file them away and then deploy them at the right time which i have been blessed again again by that in your work um why do people leave the church well i actually do know this one because because happily they tell us and we don't have to guess yeah i find that with the question of disaffiliation everyone's got an opinion trust me is whenever you speak about this everyone's got an opinion of why people leave what i like to do though is look at the surveys there have been tons of surveys that ask precisely that question especially the young people why have you left you know what the big reason and again and again in survey after survey i don't believe the doctrines uh there's an intellectual problem young people will say i never got my questions answered i just it doesn't make sense to me and then closely related a second reason science refutes religion science and religion are opposed science is obviously good and correct therefore religion is silly and and we should get rid of it the third reason i would say is it's born of our commitment to relativism is how could anyone claim that their religion is is right you know there's a thousand different religions and philosophies and how could you possibly say that yours is right i'd say a fourth major reason it would be uh scandals and now i'm speaking as a catholic out of painful experience of the scandals in our own church uh that has had an impact for sure on young people but i'm always struck by how the intellectual issues are often at the forefront young people are balking what they take to be either the irrelevance the stupidity the superstitious nature the non-scientific nature of religion um but those are some of the reasons they they classically give do you have you ever wonder if the intellectual reasons are smoke screens or or sort of a kind of a more acceptable excuse for something that might be more idiosyncratic could be i mean it could be though i'm kind of resistant to that and that's that has certainly been argued because i i don't want to diminish that i think it's very important that we engage people at that level and i think we should we should believe them unless we have really compelling reason to think otherwise having said that again i'll quote billy graham that most resistance to god he said is not intellectual it's moral and and i do think there's a lot to that namely if i believe in god that's not like saying oh i accept a particular scientific theory or i think that reading of caravaggio is correct i mean i mean those those aren't going to make that big a difference in my life but if i say god exists that means there's an absolute objective moral criterion and that i've got to bring my life online with this reality well there's a lot of us sinners that don't like that right uh now once you get past that sort of superficial resistance you see how splendid it is to believe in god but for a lot of people it's a real obstacle because if jesus is lord i'm not the lord if he's he's the criteria of my life my own will is not the criterion and so it does cost me to believe in god you know i find the old foyer block argument you know that religion is wishful thinking you know a little bit before about the father of modern atheism that religion is you know it's a it's a idealized self-understanding so wouldn't it be great i'd love to be all-knowing i'd love to be all powerful i'd love to be all uh benevolent so i project this image outward and i imagine that it exists and that's god right it's wishful thinking freud picked up on that religion is like a waking dream it's a wish fulfilling fantasy right read the new atheists nothing new about them except they're kind of nastier but they they rehearsed all those old arguments but see i always wonder don't they ever ask but atheism is also i think a wish fulfilling fantasy or could be construed that way you know wouldn't it be great if there's no god then i'm god wouldn't it be great if there's no moral criterion i could do whatever i want i wouldn't have to feel guilty and so you know sure i think on both sides people might be engaging in that wish fulfilling fantasy so why don't we just say you know they cancel each other out and let's return to real arguments yeah you know that's how i think about that one um there's also seems to be a plausibility crisis and for a thousand reasons uh globe globalization you know we've got neighbors who look like us don't believe like us there's the scandals you talked about there's the kind of erosion of robust belief um but i think about how many people i've talked to who said something like um the church hurt me yeah um and and i wonder about that sometimes i wonder there about you know is that is that a fully told truth but it's certainly sincerely believed by many how do you how do you how do you minister to people who tell that story yeah and i do hear that story and that does come up in the surveys too and it could be the simplest thing like i called the parish and i got a rude response or here's one that kind of breaks my heart that people say i left the catholic church i stopped going to mass and no one noticed like no one called me no one from the church hey where are you no none of my neighbors said hey i haven't seen your mask for a couple weeks are you okay you know so yeah our own indifference to each other even cruelty to each other uh doesn't help go back to you know tertullian's famous line what convinced so many in the early church how these christians love one another that's what got them it wasn't the doctrines right away it was look how they treat each other and you know we talk about the internet stuff the social media i've i've scolded my fellow catholics publicly on this because occasionally and not just on my site a lot of other ones the battles that go on are so stupid and intense and you know i'm saying left and right and i'll tell you a story see what i'm seeing i'm doing right now this is called the pectoral cross right and bishops wear it uh i have it out now which would make some people happy because what we usually do is we tuck it in here just because when you're walking around it starts you know it trust me if you wore one of these you know why we put it there well i'm not joking the number of times if i'm on a video or something and i'm like this why are you hiding the crossway you're ashamed you're shamed for the cross i'm like yeah i've been a priest for 36 years because i'm ashamed of the cross you know well the other day i'm not making this up the other day it was my easter homily they they used a thumbnail it was a picture of me saying mass and i'm wearing uh a chassible which is the big you know vestment on the outside of the album and some bishops wear the pectoral cross inside the chasm so you can't see it others like myself wear it outside i got a four paragraph excoriating criticism of wearing the pectoral cross on the outside of my chasm and i've always found bishop the people that do this patient to do this have a deeper underlying psychological problem you know i thought okay this guy decided the best way to spend my morning is by writing four nasty paragraphs now here's the point i'm making because i'm used to this crazy stuff but imagine someone now who is a sincere seeker after the lord and and they hey you know this bishop baron i hear he's a he's a catholic let me let me go on his website and find out what he's saying and they maybe they start listening to the homily but then they're they're reading the comments and they come across this guy who's obsessed with where you wear the pectoral cross the way we disedify people by our own stupidity and nastiness to each other so one of the best things we could do i think in ordinary social intercourse and on the on the web is this being nice to each other we christians we christians should be pleasant until they're friendly that has enormous evangelical imports and so you're right that our own nastiness can turn people away i know it does let me ask one more follow up on people leave this out by the church and i'd be more comfortable if you tucked today i which is why i've been a priest for 36 years oh man um and this this isn't pulling out catholic dirty laundry because uh evangelicals have a lot of the same dirty laundry these days yeah but but going back to scandal i texted my favorite lapsed catholic today one of my oldest friends and i said what would you ask the bishop you're coming at this from a okay catholic i'm a protestant he's lapsed and we have good frank conversations and i just love him dearly and he just went straight straight to the sexual abuse scandal and just why hasn't the church done more and um so i just i don't so much want to know why hasn't certain son more but tell can you talk about how you've i just read your letter to a suffering church but how you responded uh to that yeah it's been god-awful you know when i was ordained 1986 it was not on the radar screen at all i'm catholic insider you know born and raised and catholic brought up through catholic institutions and may i say like the vast majority of catholics never had the slightest difficulty with any priest no one ever abused me in any way and that's true for the overwhelming majority of catholics so that's important to say but this issue of of clergy sex abuse was not on the radar at all it was in the early 90s in chicago that it came on and it's like a cloud it's been like a cloud over my whole priesthood practically i mean almost all the years i've been a priest there's been this scandal and it's i call that in that book you refer to the devil's masterpiece because um the devil i i there's a story i've told before it's true story i'm at this conference and i'm wandering around the area where the where the books are you know and i forget why but i was the only one there and there's this lady behind the counter at this publisher and she goes oh you're you're father baron aren't you and i said yeah and she said i i like what you're doing and she said you know the devil is very unhappy with you and i said well i hope so uh i don't like him much either so but then she said it's it's still in my heart she said well you know he's a lot smarter than you are and he's a lot more powerful than you are wow and i said yeah i know i know but uh he is and the clergy sex view scandal is is a masterpiece of wickedness because there's the original wickedness of the abuse of young people but look at the way the myriad ways it's undermined the church in almost every way it's undermined the work of the church and so you know your friend and like many others who i'm i'm gone because of that you know well the devil is delighted with that so it's been a nightmare it's been like this dark cloud it's been a demonic masterpiece i would say the church has responded and that's important to point out it has the dallas accords 2002 became a model for a lot of institutions as they responded to this problem and it's also fair to say since those accords the numbers have fallen off the table so there was a great increase in this thing from the 60s through the early 80s that's been well documented that that's where the numbers really climbed they fell off the table so it has come much more under control one abused kid is way way way too many absolutely true but progress has been made i think institutionally and god knows we paid i mean quite literally the church has paid out hundreds and hundreds of millions billions of dollars money that could go to the poor and could go to catechesis and education and evangelization again part of the devil's masterpiece i think so you know it's been um a horrific nightmare for the church and one thing i partly what i wanted to ask i was so struck by your biblical work um going going through sodom and gomorrah and lot and his daughters a number of places and your work just sort of airing some of the ugliest moments in the history of the church because it was non-defensive it sort of looked the issue straight in the eye but also kind of kind of panned back to show the wider context because i think whenever there's horrific suffering we have this experience that it's it's it's the sort of thing that has no analogy and therefore it's the sort of thing it's the one thing that we can never come to the other side of and i found it really powerful the way that you you didn't diminish it at all yeah but also saw it in the course of history as something that sadly has happened too often yeah something we said at dinner you know how how the bible just provides the the template for all of life you know i i mentioned i'm with carl bart you know the purpose of preaching is really to draw our experience into the bible not the other way around like experience shouldn't become the measure of the bible but the other way around and on this issue the bible is so good it's so clear it's so clear-eyed about human depravity and and one form of that of course is sexual abuse and the cases you mentioned and then look at david bathsheba you know david the sweet singer of the house of israel the great king david and then we watch him on the roof of his palace not listening to god as the young david did right that was david's spiritual genius was even the simplest things he asked god what do i do and follow the will of god but how beautifully told that that chapter of two samuel is because he's up on the roof of his palace not listening to god but acting like god surveying the whole thing and then the the hebrew has him barking these orders you know he saw her he ordered she came to the it's it's david acting like god and abusing his power and gosh how frank the bible is you know then to cover it up murder david this is david this is not some some low life we're talking about this is the great king david and yet the bible is so clear-eyed furthermore as nathan told them the sword will never leave your house so the lord forgave him and but the the baby died and the sword will never leave your health which it never did read the rest of second samuel and it's the sword never leaving his house or the other one that really strikes me eli and his sons i think is the best analogy remember back in first samuel so eli high priest two sons both priests um they're abusing the people sexually and and financially the people complain to eli hey hey your sons yeah yeah i'll talk to him he talks to them they don't care they keep abusing the people and i remember i saying to catholic audiences does any of this story sound familiar to you priests abusing their own people complaints are brought to the high priest who should do something about it he pays it lip service but doesn't do anything and then what happens disaster for israel right that's when the the philistines come and they kill thirty thousand and the ark of the covenant is taken away i mean so the very spiritual heart of the people is ripped out and and then i say to my catholic people does any of that sound familiar you know that we were we were handed over to our enemies and the church went through this time of enormous chastisement well yeah that's the bible told us that story a long time ago and it's playing out again you know so i i've urged now we're getting in the weeds a little bit but we turned so much to the psychologists and the lawyers and there's something to that i'm not bad-mouthing psychologists and lawyers we had to but we should turn above all to the bible the bible is is our great matrix of understanding and it gives us the clearest understanding of these things yeah that's great and thank you for going there does it work i want to ask a question about the nuns not the nuns but the nuns the the non-affiliated not the people and where he is recognizable um uh you in an essay entitled looking for the nuns again not the nuns but the nuns uh you suggested that nuns this is this i found this fascinating that nuns tend to romanticize the quest for truth oh yeah but in such a way that to borrow uh from you too you two was my bob dylan for you you too i love you um they romanticize the quest for truth but in such a way that they never find what they're looking for yeah why do you think that is well it's it one of my intellectual heroes is bernard lonergan who was a jesuit mathematician scientist and philosopher of the last century one of the really masterminds i think of the last century and lonergan did an analysis of how we come to know he was very influenced by newman by the way and there are four stages uh lonergan said to coming to know the first stage is attention so you wanna know something you gotta open your darn eyes and you have to look and you have to be attentive to what's going on and there are a million reasons why we're not attentive i don't wanna see it i'm too lazy i don't have time i'm i'm affected by prejudice so the first thing is to overcome all that and really see what's there right the second stage lonergan said is intelligence and intelligence means form hypotheses so you've taken in a phenomenon you've seen something now what is that what's going on how do you explain that what's the form of that so a scientist would form hypotheses a philosopher begins musing about it right that's the level of intelligence at that level it's appropriate to be kind of really open-minded and really keep looking and it could be this could be that maybe this maybe you're right maybe i'm right maybe she's right that's appropriate at the second level but then lonergan says if you're going to make real progress you've got to move to a third level which is the level of judgment and that's how the cry went over the room because we hate the word judgment but judgment just means you make a decision you say okay i've observed the phenomenon i've now entertained lots of really bright ideas of what this thing might be but now i got to decide which one is the right and not just the bright idea what's the right idea now why is that unattractive because the word decision is from a latin word cesare which means to cut like scissors right to cut because you're cutting off it's not this not that not this not that it's that and so judgment is painful necessarily it's bloody judgment but you've got to do it if you're actually going to move to truth and not just having wild ideas to not answer your question i think a lot of people get stuck at level two is they say oh yeah it could be this and you got a good point and you got a good point yeah and i'm not going to judge you and don't you judge me and let's all just kind of tolerate all these wild points of view well fine fine but then we're not moving toward truth we're not actually moving toward truth it's painful to make a judgment and so people get stuck at level two and they romanticize it and that's why you get oh it's the quest that matters oh it's to just keep raising questions but he was chesterton one of my heroes said the open mind is like an open mouth it's meant to to close down on something nourishing so if you're like your mouth is open all the time [Laughter] you throw foot out see but that's stage two it's like okay i'm testing it could be this could be that uh do i like this i don't know if your mouth is open on time you're not gonna eat anything so is it i got an open mind well i mean good for you but if your mind is just open then things will just keep falling out of it is what it's meant to do is make a judgment and close down on something where you say this is right and then by the way the fourth step for lonergan is responsibility now that you've made that decision live with it and so so it could be that we want to stay in level two because we're actually afraid of level four yeah as much as yeah right i don't want to have to live with something right he might call me too quite right and so sure let's stay open and that's why the whole culture of non-judgmentalism well yes i get it you know judge not you'll not be judged and all that that there's an aggressive form of that but it can't mean that we never decide or we never make a judgment or we never come to truth it can't mean that but i think that the society has sort of valorized and it's striking how anti-scientific that is isn't it too yeah there's no hypothesis and i think about in my own learning when i've had the courage to venture a provisional conclusion and it's been challenged i've learned so much further yeah and when i when i'm not making a decision it becomes a cul-de-sac so i'm actually not questing anymore at all i'm just stuck in this little yes yeah yeah and but see it's again lottery is very good here because he was a jesuit and the jesuits are into this tradition of of the spiritual exercises right and how do you get rid of your attachments so as to follow the will of god well see lionel can apply that to the life of the mind what are the attachments that i have that are keeping me from being attentive intelligent reasonable and responsible and you just named some of them that there are a lot of things that block our access to those four moves and so we got to deal with that stuff if we're going to really come to truth that's great i want to ask you about beige catholicism something you've talked about what is it why have people opted for beige forms of christianity and what's the problem with it yeah it was one of the very first articles i ever wrote i just got back from my doctoral studies and i i wanted to be a writer i wanted to get into the game you know to write articles and books and one of the first ones i wrote was a critique of what i call beige and tell you the truth i was thinking of my home parish uh in western springs illinois uh it was built during the 1970s and i look i'm a devotee of like the gothic cathedrals i love light and color and and narrativity and symbolism and all that in the churches but the church is built in the 70s when i was coming of age where just kind of big empty rooms with high brick walls no decoration nothing that would stir the imagination that was seen as kind of distracting from the central action of the liturgy and all this um i i've never gone for that i never liked it never thought it was right and that church was literally beige right all the distinctive coloration it kind of bled into one bland beige so i used it as a symbol of uh the liberal catholicism that was remnant when i was a young guy where we allowed a lot of our catholic life i think to lose its color and its its vivacity and its narrativity and its distinctiveness we were so concerned about fitting in with the wider culture or not offending anybody that we became a vague echo of the culture and so the beige church the church building became for me a symbol of a beige um presentation of catholicism and i've long been convinced i'm convinced to this day it's anti-evangelical that it does if if the church is just in the case of the buildings literally blending into the neighborhood there's nothing distinctive about it if our ideas and rhetoric just sound like anything you'd hear on oprah well then what's the point right what's the point if you know you hear an easter homily and it's all about politics or something well then what's the point i get politics on i can watch you know the sunday morning talk shows and get politics whether it's left or right i don't care at this point but if your easter homily isn't about jesus christ risen from the dead then i don't know what we're wasting our time with so that's what i mean by base catholicism it was my term in a way for the liberal catholicism that i had grown up with and it's nice too because um it it both uh sort of militates against a dumb down the presentation of the gospel it's doctrinally rich it's not afraid of big categories um but it also uh pushes hard against an ugly kind of drab yeah presentation as well well you know at dinner we were talking about this i love this wonderful dinner with the number of faculty here and actually i love theology and they're all theologians and philosophers so we talked about that but a name that came up was carl bart and i don't know if you guys read much of carl bart here i found that barred in protestant circles when i first started years ago i'd say wait carl bart says thinking i get a huge positive response and uh i swear to the pope carl bart you know so anyway but but carol carl bart was battling um a form of protestant liberalism in his time that has its roots back in the 19th century and what he wanted to do it seems to me was recover this wonderful strange jungle of the bible that the bible is this world that opens up to us and all of it's splendor it's not like the environing culture it's not what everyone else is saying it's this odd word of god with these strange figures and characters and he wanted to to de-domesticate the bible you know what i'm saying is liberal liberalism in both its protestant catholic forms as a kind of domestication of the gospel and so i always stood with bart i always thought he was right about that and his friend and colleague who became a a great inspiration to me was the swiss catholic theologian hans ursman balthazar who made a very similar move within catholicism to get us back into the jungle of of the bible and this thick thickly textured biblical world you know what i'm saying that's non-beige that's the non-beige and a lot of my work so i wrote a little book years ago called the strangest way and i i wanted to say i begin by talking about the crucified jesus and in our culture we're so used to seeing the cross but come on everybody the cross i mean this this horrible instrument of torture that was meant to terrify the whole world and they didn't talk about it for centuries even after the rise of christianity because it was so gross and offensive do you know where the very first depiction is i've seen it it's in rome on the the wooden door it's not the sabina in rome it's a little tiny thing this big and it's a little image of these three figures on the cross because they just didn't it was too much it was too gross um good good bring it back what's paul say i i i pledge to know one thing among you christ and him crucified right because if paul knew it horrified his audiences but he wanted that thick texture of the cross because that is where the power was so it was he gave us a totally non-beige christianity and i think we needed to recover that that's great so i'm pontificating and i might want to come back to that in a second too um but to switch gears for a second in in his novel the idiot okay dostoevsky has this line where he says that beauty will save the world is he right yes you know i i believe in that very strongly um you know the three transcendentals right the good the true and the beautiful which kind of echo up and down western civilization wherever you find being that's why they're transcendental they wherever you find being you're gonna find actually unity as well unity goodness truth and beauty and we could talk about all of those but i've been persuaded recently balthazar had a big role in changing my mind here because he puts beauty in the first place but there's a contemporary catholic philosopher called dc schindler who writes a beautiful very high level but he said he thinks of the of the transcendentals the first one is beauty now why well uh truth is being in the measure that it beguiles the mind so think of intelligibility right so the scientist is beguiled by the intelligibility of the world that's the true the good well that's the will is awakened by goodness within the realm of being okay but schindler says before you get there those are are relatively derivative before you get there the first thing that strikes you is the splendor of being and it's that it is there it is you know the the beautiful the splendor of things first gets our attention so balthazar says it's it's the smile of the mother it's a beautiful image think the little baby looking up in the smiling face of his mother well the baby isn't thinking about truth or goodness the baby's thinking about beauty right it's the splendor of the mother's smile that awakens the baby to being right uh i think that's right and then i'm gonna apply it more practically today in our post-modern culture what do people hate being told what to think who are you to tell me what to think i got my own truth you got your own truth right so truth raises the hackles if there's something even more objectionable it's the good who are you tell me how to behave don't tell me how to behave i tell myself how to behave so the good tends to turn people off but the beautiful it's not as threatening right hey look look like even coming in here you know how how striking this is and when i walked in that door like what oh i'm not telling you what to think or how to behave yet we'll get there he is a bishop right but that's how it works because the transcendentals are related to each other so it has to work that way but the beautiful first gets our attention um you know where the word beautiful it's interesting to me is used very frequently is in regard to sports i think when you're watching a goal for football or baseball or whatever how often the commentators say something like hey beautiful beautiful catch that was a beautiful curveball what a beautiful fast break look at that beautiful swing right um well that's right see they're you're first struck by the beautiful and then you want to play right if you've really watched beautiful athletes i think the only greeks here you know that sports were an expression of the beautiful before they were competitive and all that they were an expression of the beautiful you watch a beautiful fast break i'd like to try that you know i can't now but when i was younger you know let me try that or i watch you know rory mcilroy swinging a golf club like wow i mean let me gotta try i know i'll never be that good but let me let me try and then from the beautiful to the good and then finally you say oh yeah now i kind of understand how the swing works that's that's why it's beautiful that's what he he puts together you know elbow and the in the shoulder turn and the so i've gone now from the beautiful to the good like hey it's splendid and then i want to try and then oh yeah now i understand and i i think that's how it works with the gospel too is this walk us through that what would it look like to to the evangelistic beginning show them jesus talk about jesus tell the stories of jesus uh put the cross what does paul say the cross was displayed before you you know christ was displayed as crucified before you um now from my catholic background uh the saints begin with the saints look hey look mother teresa um when i was i did this thing a ten part series called catholicism and i went all over the world to do it and uh i'd never been to india before and we got to calcutta which is one of the one of the poorest cities in the world right and um it's i mean it's horrifying in a way to be in calcutta and then we go right to the worst section of calcutta and that's where mother teresa's nuns are and these mostly young women in those beautiful blue and white habits and there they were um i saw this pulling maggots out of people's ears and stuff and with these radiant smiles um i don't know your life changes when you see that and what you're seeing is beautiful how beautiful that look at the beauty of that you know and then the saints have that uh effect on you i i want to try that i i should i should live more like that and then maybe in time i'll understand oh yeah those are the dynamics of this life i come to understand it so show them jesus show them the great biblical patterns show them the saints who are exemplifications even now of the biblical patterns and then draw them in that way you know i love the example of mother teresa because i was wondering earlier when you're talking about the offense of the cross one thing you could say is wait it could be that the cross is just not beautiful at all yeah um so there's there's a tension there but i love how you come back with mother teresa can speak of the the clearly i mean maybe we call it a moral beauty or but the deep spiritual beauty of rice because it's a very interesting thing in the history of the catholic protestant debate because luther was uneasy with that language you know of glory and didn't like a theology of glory how interesting that von balthazar writes seven volumes called heritage kite as german which means the glory right so balthazar who gives a great friend to bart had deep appreciation for luther but said no i'm going to give you eight volumes of glory and and he actually played on that idea of the cross that yes in the conventional sense how horrific and ugly the cross is but what do you see on the cross aquinas says the beautiful occurs at the intersection of integritas consonancia and claritas meaning i'd say wholeness harmony and radiance what you see balthazar said in the whole life of jesus is the great concordance or harmony between the divine and human wills between his divine and human natures where does it come to full expression in the obedience of the sun on the cross and so you see in the integrity the wholeness the unity of his life the coming together of the natures and what is that well it becomes splendid it becomes radiant it has claritas you know and didn't he himself say i'm the light of the world i'm the light i i'm the source of the splendor of the world the transfiguration which shows his splendor but what's he talking about but his his transition his exodus is his passion um so the cross yes is ugly in the conventional sense but if you see with the eyes of faith it's a supreme expression of the beautiful it's it's the glory of the lord revealed you know well and often when you talk about the evangelistic role of beauty you talk about it's a resting character anyways and so that strikes me that that's another way that the cross and it's very horror if you play uh play a similar role it kind of arrest a person i got that from baltimore too the you know we talk about aesthetic arrest it's a cool idea isn't it you know that the truly beautiful stops you in your tracks and think of like we're leading our ordinary lives we're just we're making our way and we're but we're moving but then the beautiful breaks through and it stops you it stops you from doing what you're doing or thinking what you're thinking it stops you and then balzard says it sends you on mission so once you've taken it in then you say i want to share that with other people i want them to know what what i've come to know and so he would say the beauty of christ and this is it's the resurrection here really isn't it the beauty of christ the splendor of the lord stops us in our tracks and then sends us on missions so we become evangelizers of it remember if you were a student of literature the great james joyce who's a deeply ambiguous figure catholic of course irish catholic deeply imbued with the catholic spirit left the church hated the church but remained i think catholic and spirit but what did he say at the end of his portrait of the artist as a young man his great autobiographical novel is i shall become a reporter of epiphanies so he had an epiphany a manifestation of the divine and now my job as a writer is to report epiphanies that's pretty good see because they remember in the book his alter ego wants to be a priest stephen daedalus and then decides no i'm not gonna be a priest but he became a kind of priest because as a novelist as a poet he became a reporter of epiphanies evangelists do something similar i think yeah yeah that's great oh there's so many more questions i want to ask you about that um it's it strikes me that your i mean you said that catholicism um the documentary series might be your life's work you would you could happily die and point to that as a legacy um how how does that exemplify this leading with beauty well that was very much in our minds when we made that series i was inspired maybe some are old enough in the room to remember kenneth clark civilization remember that show kenneth clark was a great english art historian director of the british not the rich museum but the national gallery in london did this show back in the 1970s when i was a kid and he went all over the western world and he showed the great works of art paintings and sculpture and buildings and so on and it just captivated me you know i love that show and he was just kind of quirky english eccentric guy brilliant little tweed suit and he's clamoring over rocks to show you things and but i just love that show and so when i you know started this ministry and one of my board members said um you know hey father if you're if you're dreaming big you know what would you dream about and i said a catholic version of civilization so i laid that out that i'd go like kenneth clark all over the catholic world and i would show the great monuments of catholicism the beauty of it as i talk about the truth of it and they said well why can't you do that and i said well i need to get permission first of all from my bishop and then secondly i need about you know six million dollars so make a long story short we ended up eventually getting both those things and we did it and we did that series and it was very much in my mind that i'm going to lead with beauty we're going to show the beauty of the faith as i talk about it i wanted i was against dumbed-down catholicism and i was against a de-uh beautified catholicism and i wanted both those to come to the fore what who's the most beautiful saint most beautiful saint well my my great heroes thomas aquinas um and there's a lot about thomas that would correspond to the beautiful my motto you know when you become a bishop you have to choose a model and um i chose aquinas the story about toward the end of his life when he had written you know in his great sumo theologia in the last part he's writing on the sacraments and he's he's just finished the treatise on the eucharist which is one of the great statements of catholic theology if you want to try to understand what we mean by the real presence um you know read john 6 but then read thomas aquinas in the third part of the summer but but he he put according to the story very dramatically he put the text at the foot of the cross as if to ask judgment on it because he didn't know if he had done justice to the sacrament and the story is that the voice came from the cross and said uh um then he scripts history matoma so jesus spoke latin to him of course uh you've written well of me thomas what would you have as a reward and he said non-nizite domine which means i'll have nothing except you lord which is such a great answer because uh and that's where i took as my model i took non-nizite domine um because it's just that it's it's summing up your life what do you want right what do you want oh i want i want pleasure i want power i want money i want honor i want you know a big career i want who cares i mean those are all fine things but only if what you really want is the lord and then then he'll show you how to use those things right but if you say you know what i want is i want pleasure and power and then your life will be a mess and welcome to the sinful world that we all inhabit right because we seek all those things so that's what i find beautiful in aquinas is that move the non-nizite dominate that's lovely we're running out of times can we do a speed round yeah sure one thing you wish evangelical protestants knew about catholics really new um how biblical the mass is um great you know let me say this real real quickly uh thank god the evangelicals have helped us so much i say this very humbly as a catholic um though you know obviously the bible is always part of our our life but thank god for evangelicals for bringing so to the fore the bible and ever since vatican ii it's been a huge emphasis within catholicism we haven't done it that well to be honest with you but but we have the resolve to be biblical and then i think the evangelical focus that to really proclaim the lord jesus and to do it in a you know not not ashamed you know do it with panache and with confidence we got a lot of that from the evangelical world thank god but i guess so the one thing i want is that evangelicals realize that the most distinctive catholic thing the mass is entirely biblical from the sign of the cross to the greeting which comes from paul the curie right which comes from the bartimaeus story the the first reading comes from the old testament the psalm from the psalms the second reading from the new testament the gospel the creed is the some summary of history of salvation you have the barakah prayer from the old testament you've got the institution narrative from the synoptic gospels you've got the our father you've got the lamb of god from some john the baptist i've just walked through the whole ritual of the mass and there's something beautifully austerely biblical about the mass so that's that's what it would be that's great and then uh another speed round can you can you name one maybe two things that we as evangelical protestants can steps we can take to help evangelize our city here los angeles this region as i said earlier first be kind to each other how these christians love one another it's very important secondly i'd say and you're good at this let the language of the faith be on your lips naturally don't hide it we catholics are bad at that we tend to hide it and you know we want to whisper it among ourselves or it's like our little private hobby let it be on your lips naturally let people see the joy you have and then also i'd say following st peter you know always be be ready to give a reason for the hope that's in you is read read up you know we got challenges out there in the culture the people that don't like us think that we're stupid and superstitious be able to answer their questions and those are all things we can do that's great so finally just in a minute or two um yeah i suspect that many young evangelicals are shy about the work of evangelism yeah and i can think of a bunch of reasons maybe it's because all the evangelical church scandals maybe it's a response to an arrogant argument culture and a reluctance to wade into treacherous waters maybe it's a lack of confidence in the solidity of the christian faith maybe it's simply a failure of nerve but i wonder if you could just in a minute or two cast a vision for us of the beauty of evangelism and the part that an average lay person can play in it that's that's the question isn't it um the beauty of it is declaring the lordship of jesus go right back to paul right yes was curios that's what paul says is why you end up in prison a lot right because what people said at the time was kaiser curios caesar's the lord and so when paul started saying no yes was curious um that was deeply subversive and it was meant to be subversive i think in the beginning of of mark's gospel when you know i've got iwan galion for you uh what uh was a the good news of an imperial victory when the emperor general won a battle i'd send euwon gillian and mark is saying no it's not about that i got good news it's about uh jesus not caesar in fact someone that caesar put to death and just to rub it in i'm going to call him i'm going to call him the son of god well that was caesar's title right from the time of julius caesar and then his adopted son becomes the austro the son of the god and so mark is saying i've got the real good news not about caesar but about jesus who's the real son of god and that's why they ended up in prison and killed most of the first christians because it was a deeply subversive message still is because if jesus is lord then no one else is lord and that means he's the dominus put that curios now in latin dominus he's the he's the lord he dominates all of life he dominates every aspect of my life he i love c.s lewis he wants to be in every room of the house right we want to keep him in the front parlor you know 45 minutes a week and and goodbye jesus thank you for coming good i'll see you next week but he wants to be the dominoes of every room in the house and he wants to be dominoes of every aspect of our society and it doesn't mean we're advocating for theocracy it means that he's the lord though he's the curios so that's the beauty of it i think is is that we have the same call now um what's that lion is i think n.t wright recovered it and i don't know who actually said it but it was an anglican bishop who said when paul preached there were riots when i preached they served tea and it's the problem is because paul paul knew what he was saying it was enough to cause riots because it was a revolutionary message and we preach now and oh let's thank you father thank you bishop and you know but to recover some of the radicality of our of our message that's great and then what was the second part is what can we do or what are that's a pretty good place to finish okay okay that's good discover who you're called to be at biola university a leading christ-centered university in los angeles with programs on campus and online subscribe for more of our videos and learn more at biola.edu [Music] you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 98,088

Keywords: biola university, bishop barron, bishop robert barron, bishop barron talk, catholic, catholicism, christianity, christian, catholics and protestants, bishop barron biola, biola university talk, bishop, evangelization, proclaiming christ, catholic talks to protestant, protestant talks to catholic priest, protestant university talk, catholic and protestant conversation, the good news, the gospel, sharing the good news, sharing the gospel, proclaim christ, evangelize

Id: 5mkehI385e4

Length: 71min 26sec (4286 seconds)

Published: Thu May 19 2022