The Dangers of Self-Determination

if i'm friends with god i'm in the proper relationship i've found the theonimus god is the gnome off of my life welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vot the senior publishing director at word on fire our culture is obsessed with self-determination finding our own voice setting our own agenda doing things according to our own lights but is this problematic and what does the bible have to say about this path of self-determination that's what we're discussing today and we're discussing it with bishop robert baron bishop good to see you hey brandon always a joy to be with you a couple of interesting conversations you've had lately um the first one is with a young man named lex friedman not sure if he's a household name for all of our listeners here but he's a huge deal in the world of youtube and podcasting tell us about him and and how this discussion went yeah i love that conversation lex is a professor at mit and my nephew just graduated from mit and when we first got the invitation to be on his podcast i called my nephew and said hey do you know this fellow oh yeah of course i do and i watch his podcast all the time that's how he came on my radar screen and he does indeed talk to some of those interesting people in the world and he's a very interesting fellow uh dresses very simply dresses like in a black coat black tie white shirt very earnest uh not confrontational he's the kind of person that wants to draw his interviewee out like you know he might here's something you wrote and could you say more about that and so i remember uh i don't know when this comes out if the friedman thing will have already been published but the first thing he asked me was well who is god so we kind of took it from there but i enjoyed it immensely was about a two hour conversation yeah he specializes in these long form interviews i think almost all of them are two hours three hours sometimes four hour long discussions you know i we we should talk about that some time because when all this got started social media and all that everything was you know fast fast fast no one's got an attention span you can't get more than you know five minutes when i was doing eight and nine minute videos people were saying oh come on you'll never keep people's attention but then something happened in the zeitgeist and someone like joe rogan comes to mind jordan peterson so many of the other ones begin doing these really long form conversations and they get millions of views so something shifted in the zeitgeist so my theory is it's the podcast revolution so podcast took off people now listen to podcasts when they're driving when they're working out when they're exercising when they're mowing the lawn and so it's people are using time that that otherwise would have just been spent listening to music or thinking and so they've they've got more time for it um i think it's all to the good yeah and anyway um i hope that video will be out by the time this episode airs if it's not it'll be coming soon i think lex told us it's coming out sometime in june so uh we'll we'll have more to say about that soon the second interesting discussion you had was your continuing bishop baron presents series and in the latest instantiation we had a couple appear i think it was the first time you had two guests up here at the same time they're a husband and a wife heather hying and brett weinstein who are they and what'd you guys talk about yeah fascinating couple they came on the radar screen they're they're evolutionary biologists from uh it was evergreen state college in in washington and about five years ago there was this big kind of woke up rising because the as i understand it all the white people are more or less told one day you have to absent yourself from campus and they objected to that thought it was a racist move and their objection triggered this enormous counter-reaction and they eventually left the college but then took up a new role really as podcasters and became very insightful cultural commentators and i think it was through father steve he first started watching them and he would say oh they're really interesting and they something's really good to say today so i started watching them a little bit and then read their book and so we got them to come on bishop aaron presents and we covered a lot of ground not so much the woke stuff a little bit but we got into religion science and you know how an evolutionary biologist understands human being and human motivation and what philosophy and religion adds to that so that's really most of what we talked about but that's our that's al that one's been out for a while yeah that one's on youtube you can find it there i'm also planning on sharing the audio of that discussion as the next episode in the word on fire show series so you can listen to it in many different formats okay let's turn now to self-determination in a recent article you wrote you noted our culture's fascination with determining our own self finding our voice setting our agenda determining who we are have you noticed a rise in this over the last say 5 10 15 years and and if so what explains this obsession well it's an age-old issue it's been around for a long time obviously the drive toward autonomy but yes to answer your question i think in recent years there's been an extreme expression of it look at the movies listen to almost every song almost every story told in the popular culture ends up with someone shaking off you know the oppressive influence of a tradition or someone telling me what to do and i find my own voice um so yeah i think that's almost the dominant uh motif in the culture especially among young people you know it's always been attractive autonomy sure that's my life it's my decisions and so on but it's a dead end when it's one-sidedly emphasized and that's what we'll talk about we have to make some key distinctions there what differentiates autonomy from the authentic self-appropriation but yeah i think for sure there's been a revival of it in our time before we get into a more critical assessment of self-determination what are the positive aspects it's not all bad right why is it attractive why is it somewhat good well let me make this distinction early on here i think will help guide the conversation between autonomy on the one hand heteronomy on the other hand and what i call theonomy which is somewhere in the middle autonomy autonomous autos nomos i'm my own law good yeah as far as it goes because it's part of maturity uh when i can shake off a purely heteronomous so another person is my law heteros noma says other my parents or my society or my culture there is something about coming to maturity and coming of age when you say no i i'm going to shake off just that purely heteronomous influence and i'm going to say no this is my life on my terms this is who i am i'm going to live my own life yeah that's a good thing if we were to stay forever in a purely heteronomous position well we'd be like children then think of a little tiny kid who really has no thoughts or motivations or convictions of his own but takes them all from the outside appropriate when you're a little tiny child but you know you know this brand with all your kids is that part of good parenting is to recognize the seeds of a sort of burgeoning autonomy and not just crush them no no do what you're told no no stay there even if even if the child is is going off on a somewhat errant path there's still something right about burgeoning autonomy like okay he or she is finding you know himself the trouble is the oscillation between the two and that happens a lot is i'm so strong on autonomy it's my life it's my will it's my way that leads to trouble and then i can sometimes react from that and go all the way to heteronomy i turn my life completely over to parents or culture or you know pop stars or whatever it is that's got its own negativity where we're trying to go is theonomy which is god becomes the nomos of my life god becomes the governor of my life and that actually affirms what's best in both autonomy and heteronomy do you think that this increase in the culture of self-determination autonomy call it what we will that there's something uniquely american about it so in our country is is this something programmed into our national dna yeah i think so because look the people that came over to this country were almost exclusively shaking off the shackles and fetters of of the old culture the people that came here were not the aristocrats who were doing very well in europe they were the you know the downtrodden and the persecuted and the forgotten and the poor who were being oppressed by let's face it some very unjust social and cultural structures and so yes indeed freedom don't tread on me don't tell me what to do don't uh tax me without my representation i mean all of that as you say is very deep in the american dna and as far as it goes good my ancestors came over here from ireland because of the oppressiveness of of a british society that was effectively um committing genocide against the irish so i get that and irish have a kind of a natural you know don't tell me what to do like the fighting irish i get that that's in my blood too so as an irishman as an american i get all that uh i don't want some heteronymous imposition of an oppressive political or economic or cultural system so yeah i think it is deep in our dna well let's move maybe to a more critical analysis and in the article that you wrote on this topic you approached it from a biblical perspective especially uh and specifically the end of the book of judges in the old testament not a book that gets a lot of attention usually um maybe first let's start with with that what is the book of judges what's it about well let's go back one step brandon before we get to judges is look at exodus because look how the book of exodus talk about throwing off oppressive heteronomy it's about a people who are enslaved by a deeply corrupt political and religious culture and they throw off their chains they escape from that heteronomy but what's interesting where do they go they don't simply wander on their own steam into the desert rather they go to the sacred mountain where they receive what a law so yes they've escaped from oppressive heteronomy but they haven't lurched toward sheer autonomy what they've gone to in fact is what i just called theonomy where god and god's law becomes the governing principle of their lives yes indeed that's everything great about autonomy is contained in that story but it's not a one-sided affirmation of autonomy it's a journey from heteronomy to theonomy i would say so that becomes the master metaphor if you want for the whole bible how do you find real freedom not by just asserting your autonomy over and against the autonomy of the egyptians then it's just one more meet the new boss same as the old boss right as the who put it but you're trying to escape from an oppressive heteronomy into authentic theonomy now the book of judges i said that the book of judges is maybe the most brutal book in the bible and that's saying a lot because the bible is remarkably frank about human beings and about what we do and what we get wrong uh and mind you judges comes right after the book of joshua and the book of joshua is pretty intense itself i mean with this kind of blitzkrieg invasion of israel into the promised land and so it's a very very frank assessment of what we human beings are like i would say when our autonomy one-sidedly and massively asserts itself judges judges that certain figures were called upon by god to judge and to rule and to guide the people the rhythm of the book of judges is always the same it's israel becomes lost there's no direction everyone drifts into into dysfunction it gets so terrible that it becomes just a crisis and then god raises up a judge there are i think 12 mentioned in the book four are highlighted and then they bring some kind of stability some kind of order but it doesn't last long and soon they devolve again into autonomous disaster and then another judge is raised up so i would say it's a very frank assessment of what we human beings are like as we try to live our lives um autonomy that's really going back to egypt see that's the point if i'm just saying hey it's my life it's my will it's my way i'm no better really than the egyptians the key is escaping from that kind of heteronomy but not into autonomy rather into theonomy the book of judges has several of these violent gory unjust situations i don't want to go into all the particulars but needless to say everything you could imagine disregard from human dignity sexual immorality rape cooperation with sexual abuse all of it's in there but then we find at the end of the book of judges after these moral leaders these judges have faded away the law is no longer taught no longer enforced and hence the people wander into this appalling behavior the final line though of the book the last line of the book of judges is the one i want to spend a little time on with you because it gets right to the heart of this spiritual situation here's what it says in those days there was no king in israel everyone did what was right in their own site what's what's the bible trying to convey with this line it's trying to convey that what we got today which is a hyper hyper stress on autonomy is not the path forward see kingship is the bible very aware of the corruption of kingship yes in fact more than almost any other ancient text that i know the bible is aware of how kings go bad so it's not guilty of some kind of one-sided valorization of kings on the other hand is is the king something good yes in the measure that the king represents the divine authority if the king is the embodiment of god's law he's operating according to god's purpose then he's providing the guidance the people need if you throw off all kings you throw off all the judges and everyone does whatever he or she wants to do you're right back into the chaos of of self government self-governance and uh i think when judges ends as it does on this incomparably brutal note there's a story that's told about this man felt getting this concubine and then she's exposed to to rape all night long eventually she dies she's dismembered and the parts of her body are sent as a warning to other parts of the country talk about scorsese or talk about of quentin tarantino by the way when people sometimes you know will criticize me for like reviewing a tarantino movie or a scorsese movie and finding you know some themes in it that are worth thinking about how could you bishop how could you watch such movies i always say if you read the bible recently if you were to film the book of judges just as it is you're going beyond tarantino you're going beyond uh scorsese you know but that's the great brutal honesty of the bible when it comes to what goes wrong with us getting rid of the divine king that ain't the answer oppressive human kings sure like pharaoh you know overcoming that kind of heteronomy sure but the answer is not a lurch to autonomy it's a surrender to theonomy god becomes the nomos god becomes the law and norm of my life you've noted that elsewhere in the bible outside the book of judges the heroes of the bible are rarely those who find themselves on their own but rather those who listen to the voice of god and then remain obedient to the mission that god has given them can you maybe share some of those examples of those heroes well it's every single one and it's so important isn't it brandon because as i say today look at every story every movie every song they're all about someone who finds himself and now i can walk my own path and now i'm truly free well the bible is just not interested in that the bible is interesting now this is whether you're talking about abraham about jacob about joseph about moses about isaiah about jeremiah about david i mean every one of the great heroes of the bible isn't finding himself and boy now i know what i'm supposed to do they're all people who come to listen to hear it begins with abram right becomes abraham the father of many nations he hears the voice of the lord he hears a higher voice not mind you mind you not the voice of the cultures around him not his own voice but rather a qualitatively different voice which is the voice of god and when he surrenders to that he finds his authentic self would anyone ever say that abraham in the bible well he's just some little mealy-mouthed you know wussy person that is just you know being bossed around no he's a fully realized personality full of intelligence and courage and purpose but he finds that precisely in his surrender to god david at his best now see david falls into autonomy doesn't he the bathsheba incident and uriah and so on he falls into that but david at his best who listens to the lord who abides by the lord's command would anyone ever say david is some kind of you know wimpy put upon figure no david is courageous and and full of of a distinctive you know personality and all that he's most himself when he surrenders to god's purpose now that's the bible that's the bible stop the oscillating between autonomy and heteronomy that's the story of most of us you know we oscillate between them find theonomy which is beyond an inclusive of if you want the best of both of them because see in a way god's law is beyond me that's true it's heteros if you want it's other but it's not other in a conventional way it's other in such a way that it affirms me and brings out the very best in me right that's the bible but that's a tricky place to find that's a tricky spiritual space to move into i surrender lord to you utterly and now it's you who have accomplished all that i have done that's isaiah the prophet right i've done it yes my life and my my accomplishments but lord it's you who've accomplished them through me that's the biblical imagination and that's a tricky space to find you know it seems to me a lot of the the problem we have with escaping autonomy and moving into uh theonomy is where a lot of us are still stuck in this zero-sum game that we're we're jostling with god it's a whole uh uh non-competitive transcendence doctrine that you've been teaching for years and so we we feel as if we don't get that isaiah adage in our heart that you'd have done all that we've done it's either i do it or god does it either god god directs it or i direct it and we're not comfortable with this space where we're both together on this mission well and may i say brandon going back to earlier conversations we've had about the protestant catholic difference is i do think as i read the great protestant reformers um there was this temptation on their part to fall precisely into that into that problem so for god to get all the glory i've got to get no glory so if it's god is responsible utterly i'm justified by grace through faith i have no credit no merit comes to me i don't it's not my accomplishment in any way it's all god as you say the trouble there is that we're imagining our will and the divine will in a zero-sum sort of competition when in fact as i often cite from saint irenaeus the glory of god to god all the glory is what a human being fully alive so god doesn't need to put me down to be glorified on the contrary he's glorified the more i'm elevated by his grace that is a i mean i learned that principle years ago and i think it's a hinge upon which so much of of christian doctrine properly turns let's close with this um you observed that our world might not be exactly as bad as what we read in the book of judges yet thank god yeah thank god but the biblical author does seem to suggest at the end with that haunting final line this is the direction you're going in when people start doing what's right in their own eyes do you feel like we're heading down that path today and if so how do we avoid it and get back on track yeah we're we're always heading down i suppose brandon in a way it's built into the sinful human condition that's where we tend to go is down that path i think it's intriguing in the bible so you have joshua judges ruth and ruth has a little bit of a interruption of the narrative but what comes right after that is first samuel and what's first samuel now that's the story of samuel who chooses saul as king and then when he fails anoints david as king the paradigmatic king of the old testament followed by lots of failures i get that lots of failed kings but david is the paradigmatic king who looks forward to the son of david the definitive king who's christ now here's my point judges ends with there was no king there was no direction whatsoever so what does god do god's going to raise up a king whose job is to provide moral and spiritual direction now david he's a failed figure too we we know that so david looks forward to [Music] his definitive son the son of david whom we know as the mashiach the anointed one the the definitive david figure christ becomes the new law i love how thomas aquinas speaks of the eucharist as the taking into ourselves of the new law that marvelous he christ himself is the nomos so when i eat and drink his body and blood i'm taking into myself the law now what did jeremiah say is the days are coming says the lord well i will make a new covenant with the house of israel i will write the law not on stone but in their hearts well when did that happen it happened last supper when jesus said here this is my body this is my blood to eat and drink take my nomos my law into your very body so that now you're under my aegis and now i no longer call you servants right that's heteronomy i'm the master you're the slave i don't call you that i call you friends well friends are if i'm friends with god i'm in the proper relationship i found the theonimus god is the gnome off of my life that's how i draw from judges through the story of david all the way to christ and then through christ to the eucharist i think there's a golden thread that runs through all that [Music] [Music] well it's time now for our question from one of our listeners if you have something that you'd like to ask bishop baron send it in to us at the website ask bishopbarron.com today we have a question from a good man named charlie brown a great name he's a word on fire institute member from london and he's got a good question for bishop here it is hi bishop brown charlie brown here from london england with the return of baseball yay thanks be to god my question is as a fan myself who absolutely loves the game but which as you know can easily take up a lot of time focus and even study how do we properly balance a passion like that with the one necessary thing upon which we're all called to focus our entire lives now obviously being a word on fire institute member is a great help but any other advice would be much appreciated thank you and dare i say it go mariners go marines so you're from london but you're for the seattle mariners unless there's a mariners team in london i'm missing but uh no thanks for that and fellow baseball fan there's no competition in other words like something like baseball which you're right is very contemplative it might take you you know hours and hours to watch a game if you're doing it properly you're you are really into it just like you know playing golf which i love a round of golf will take four or five hours and it requires a lot of concentration but that's not in competition with our love of god in fact um those are kind of modes of contemplation they're they're modes of entering into something of god's creation and finding the beauty and truth and goodness in it it's like contemplating in that way a work of art or contemplating a great cathedral it doesn't have to be explicitly religious but whenever i notice something good true or beautiful i'm participating in something of god's being so now i don't see any any competition there obviously if you become an obsessive all you're doing is watching baseball games but if you see that opportunity as a contemplative opportunity and i love that about baseball you're right that it's not like just a whiz-bang but it's you got to really think and and spend time and muse over the game and think about it rather deeply but those are our beautiful moments if we approach them in kind of a contemplative spirit well thanks charlie for your question thanks to everybody for joining us for this episode it's been a couple months since we've released a new book here at word on fire but we do have a new one it is titled the new apologetics defending the faith in a post-christian era this book was edited by matt nelson from our word on fire institute but it features contributions from over 40 different writers and i don't want to tick through the names at the risk of of not getting through all of them but it's it's a who's who of the brightest apologists and evangelists and philosophers and theologians across the english-speaking world um what the book is doing is charting the next stage the next phase the next path for apologetics in the 21st century we look at new audiences that we're trying to reach new approaches new topics new issues so it's a delight i encourage you to learn more about this new book um it features a uh introduction by cardinal uh collins from toronto and then afterward by our own bishop baron i'll include a link to the book um in the show notes for this episode well thank you so much for watching and listening and we'll see you next time on the word on fire show [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Keywords: bishop barron, bishop robert barron, word on fire show, brandon vogt, the word on fire show, word on fire podcast, dangers of self determination, problems with the culture, voice of god, god's will, the will of god, catholic podcast, christian podcast, wof show, brandon vogt podcast, find yourself, finding yourself, catholicism, christianity, religious podcast, the bible, catholic bible, word on fire, catholic, word on fire ministries

Id: ypzrWzq16bo

Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2022