Thoughts on the Jordan Peterson Interview

welcome back to the word on fire show I'm Brandon fot the host of the show and the content director here at word on fire Catholic ministries joining us from Los Angeles is his Excellency Bishop Robert Barron Bishop Aaron good to talk with you hey Brandon always good to see you and talk to you hey before we get to the main discussion today which is about this awesome interview you did with Jordan Peterson I wanted to update people on another exciting event that recently took place this one in Santa Barbara it was our first ever Bishop Baron presents event where you brought Leyla Brasco sergeant on stage to give a talk and then you had a dialogue with her the whole discussion was about how to talk and answer atheism how did that go from your perspective it was a joy is a little kind of black box theater in Santa Barbara we got a small studio audience but it was being filmed for our Institute members and for a wider audience she gave a splendid talk with 20 minutes very punchy talk she's gone from atheism to now Arden to Catholicism so but her talk was not so much about how that happened it was kind of about the meta issues of how to engage and how to have an argument and it was a very I thought beautiful talk about friendship really that this has to take place within the context of a spiritual friendship and we had I think really interesting conversation afterwards so I enjoyed it a lot and I think it looked great I just love that the black box you know that's the black background and the lights were very good and so it was just a classy event so if you're a member of the word on fire Institute you can watch that whole video inside the Institute if not go to word on fire dot Institute that's the website sign up you get access not only to that but all sorts of video courses training and access to word on fire digital which means every video DVD series that Bishop Baron has ever created you'll get that in there too so go to word on fire dot Institute to watch that okay Bishop Jordan B Peterson so finally the long awaited discussion happened you were interviewed on dr. Peterson's podcast we're hoping I should add here that this will be the first of many get-togethers you guys have more are kind of already in the works but I wanted to talk about this particular discussion it was a lengthy one a wide-ranging discussion it's about an hour and 45 minutes I think by the time this podcast episode airs dr. Peterson will have shared that interview on his podcast so it should be available with a quick Google search but hey first impressions what did you think after you finished the interview I enjoyed it it was long as you say but it was very stimulating we covered a lot of ground I you know read him and watched him a lot over the years so I kind of knew where he was coming from but I found it very you know invigorating sometimes you have a conversation that where is he out or maybe it turns into a fight or something this was the kind that lifts you up and you feel you know excited about the life of the mind and ideas and here we have a lot of things in common not not everything but we have a lot of intellectual interests in common and I thought it would be a very you know kind of gentle when some guy to talk to so I loved it I loved it he started off the conversation by making this observation I'm gonna play a little clip from it okay people keep writing and saying you have to talk to Bishop Baron and then they come up to me and they say you have to talk to Bishop Baron well I mean the same thing from the other side everyone telling me to talk to you so it must be in God's providence I suppose that's the case so why do people want us to talk as far as you're concerned yeah how would you get through that now Bishop I mean we've we've been hearing from so many people on our side that you need to talk to him clearly he's been hearing from people on his side that he needs to talk to you why is that you know III think I think what I told him in response to that question is he some of us opened a lot of doors for people to think of a lot of young folks today who are under the weight of this atheistic secularism Peter said to me he opens doors to a deeper consideration of psychological and spiritual matters maybe they see me as someone that represents religion and the kind of the full-blown stones and he's from a bridge figure he's a bridge figure from materialistic secularists atheism to religion and I think to that you know we both talked about these deeper things in a more intelligent way we both use philosophers and psychologists and probably people here similar themes especially now with his interest in the Bible that's bound to bring him and me together so I think those are some of the reasons why you know a lot of Catholics want to pin him down on what he believes about God what he believes about Catholicism all these sort of in questions of interest to Catholics but before you could even go there he kind of beat you to the punch I'm gonna play a little clip here where he gives his answer to what he says when people ask him whether he believes in God here's what he says you know people have tried to pin me down multiple times with regards to my belief in God I actually did a two hour lecture in this was a 70 minute lecture in Australia about that question because I thought about it a lot and about I've always felt imposed upon I would say and boxed in when people ask me that question but I finally figured out that I didn't really feel that I had the moral right to make a claim about belief in God meaning it's not a trivial thing to to let's say proclaim yeah you know because it's not merely a matter of stating in some verbal manner that I am willing to agree semantically with a set of doctrines it means that you have to live you have to commit to living a certain way yeah and the demand of that life is so stringent and so all-consuming and and you're so unlikely to live up to it that to make the claim that you believe I think is uh to me it's smacks of a kind of I mean I understand why people do it and this isn't a criticism of people's statement of faith but for me the critical element of belief is action and the requirements of Christianity are so incredibly demanding that I don't see how you can proclaim yourself a believer without being terrified of immediately being struck down by lightning or cosmic so what do you think of that bishop it seems like he's his hesitation is that if I say I believe in God that comes with a whole burden of responsibility to live up to that belief well it's a good instinct I think that's what I told him is I remember it's a good instinct that's right it's never simply a theoretical matter I mean one can entertain the issue of God theoretically you're your own philosopher you're kind of detached thinker but in the religious sense when you say for example credo in Unum Deum right I believe in one God as Yosef Rossier said that's that's a revolutionary claim that your your disempowering all false claimants to Ultima see in your life that's an existential decision not just a move of the mind right you're saying I don't believe in this full sense in in money or power or the state or presidents or governments I believe in one God Unum Deum you know so I like that instinct he's right about them and I like the moral seriousness of it he realizes that's not a trivial claim to make now I know he's a seeker I get that my job I'm in some ways operating in the courtyard of the Gentiles right I'm you know I'm a priest I'm a high priest as a bishop so I am in the Holy of Holies and that's true like liturgical II but as an evangelist my job is to kind of go out into the courtyard of the Gentiles and try to engage people there and Peterson is I think a very fine and good and intellectually curious member of that community he's not like Hitchens and Dawkins or you know ferociously anti religion even though I'm happy to engage them too you know as I have very often so it's simply to say to Jordan Peterson all right you know come on man get with it believe here's the argument accept it well I mean you never deal with him that way I think you do it in a much more inviting and interact and honoring his convictions like this one good it's a good conviction to have so that's how I look at it Brandon he's he's never you know I've seen this to his credit he's never claimed to be a Christian theologian or that here's here's what Christianity really means he doesn't do that like let me debunk all that old stuff and here's what it really means I think he's a seeker he's a searcher he's trying to figure these things out so okay I'd say go out from the Holy of Holies go out to the court of the Gentiles and meet him start talking to him that's what I've been trying to do one thing I appreciate so much about dr. Peterson when he speaks is he's so careful and slow and thoughtful and sometimes yeah that makes his speech long like I tried to play a little soundbite clip and it was two minutes you know but you you heard that throughout this hour and forty-five minute interview is he doesn't just have these sort of answers that are prepackaged that he just spouts off he was carefully thinking about everything you said he got choked up several times even this question when you asked him about his belief in God you could tell his thought was going all the way down into him that it was like an existential question for him yeah and I do I respect that too I I think that's it's not just a pretense I think he really is kind of thinking on his feet and as he says the words he's trying to find his way it's not like I've got all the prepackaged answers let me lay him out for you so yeah I respect that okay here's another clip this one's much shorter it's only about thirty Seconds here's something he said about what the church is missing when it comes to helping young people specifically so what the church could do better here's the clip and you know when I talk to my audiences it's so interesting and I think it might be something that the church is missing if I could be so now go ahead well you know I've talked to about a hundred and fifty live audiences now about this sort of thing independent of all my classroom lectures and I'll tell you I tell people I suggest to people that the really the ancient idea that life is suffering and and that it's tainted by malevolence that there's no more true ideas than that in some base sense and that that's something that everyone has to contend with and if you don't contend with it properly then you become embittered and and you work to make things worse and everyone understands that everyone knows that's true and then I suggest to them that the proper way out of that isn't the pursuit of material satisfaction or impulse of happiness or rights from the individual perspective the adoption of responsibility and I'll tell you every single time I talk about that you can hear a pin drop in the area yeah I believe that I think one of the things the church has failed to Munich a properly is that you need a noble goal in life to buttress yourself against its catastrophe do you agree with that assessment yeah yeah and we talked a lot about that in different ways the harder-edged side of religion the summons to heroism living in a way on the edge and I think religion does bring you there I would say no and I think I told this from a Catholic perspective I came of age after vatican ii and there was a kind of softening of religion you know in reaction to probably a hyper stress especially on sexual sin I understand that talk to older Catholics about that but this heroic element and the demand of Christianity was muted when I was coming of age you know God loves you you're good you're a good holy person and you're you're in our language today now you're included and all that yeah yeah yeah fine fine that's language of grace but then grace never leaves us alone grace always is you know kind of harsh and dreadful and it calls you to something and I'll go out in the deep and go on mission and and realize that you're a sinner you know I've identified is one of the most important of the spiritual paths if you don't realize you're a sinner then this thing is gonna get dysfunctional fast so it's the interesting to me how an outsider like Jordan Peterson has intuitive that about the Christian churches that we've lost something of our edge and I think that's quite right he used this specific phrase that the church is not telling people enough how to nobly contend with suffering and malevolence nobly contend and when he said that I thought of a lot of the Saints that we've lifted up at at word on fire as examples of precisely this like I'm thinking of Maximilian Kolbe and how more his story needs to be known that in the face of great evil and suffering he and a christ move absorbs it but in some way diffuses it through that absorption he could have just collapsed and said you know my life is awful look at this predicament I mean this is horrible but he nobly contended with it and I think Peterson's right were not sharing that message enough with the church and it's especially why young men he's appeals to young men are falling away in droves and they don't find that challenge they don't find the harder-edged and yet Col Bay talked about like a spiritual athlete and what prepared him for that moment that moment when he came forward at the concentration camp and said oh Sh was itself you know to say I'm a Catholic priest take me in place of this man and as you say that was purely a christological move that's a move of self-sacrificing love for the sake of the other even to the point of death doesn't make one bit of sense within a purely natural framework or a psychological framework it's only a theological truth live your life in such a way that it makes no sense unless God exists that's it line from Cardinal suab that I've always found very powerful the more you think about it if you're living your life in such a way that people say oh yeah that makes sense even if there's no God then you're not living it right it's only when they look at you and say okay that life is really bad or away of time unless God exists then you're living right you know so I like that hard edge stuff I know a lot of people were hoping that you and dr. Peterson would talk about the work of Carl Jung the famous psychologist of whom Peterson is a very prominent devotee and and you've taught young in the seminary so you're very familiar with him as well at one point in the interview dr. Peterson says that Jung had a very he describes it as indescribably brilliant view of Christ and the Gospels I want to play here another short clip and then get your feedback on that like one of the things you said about Christ in the Gospels which I thought was it was indescribably brilliant was that Christ not entirely but it's presented as a figure of Mercy hmm and you was wise enough to know that and and he used religious sources for this idea that God rules with two hands with mercy and with justice because if it's just mercy then well all is always forgiven and you have no responsibility and you're an eternal infant but if it's all justice then look out because every single transgression you you you commit you'll be held to account for in some infinite manner and people are so fallible that well you kind of see that happening in Twitter now you know if you if you make a mistake of any sort at any point in your life you're you're gonna roast it over the open coals for it and no one can stand that because everyone makes mistakes and so there has to be this balance between mercy and justice you regarded Christ's return in Revelation as psychologically necessary because any figure of perfection has this element of the judge because the only ideal is a judge what do you make of that description of Christ yeah we had a good conversation with that because I said the master concept so let's say if you want beyond an inclusive of mercy and judgment is love that's what God is right and love as I said to Peterson means willing the good of the other and that will involve judgment if you're if you're willing the good of an errant child you're gonna judge that child right because you want what's best not just that the child will like me or that will have an easy life together you know mercy of course because that's that's an expression of you're willing of the person's good but also judgment and his young reference there is two you know after all the language of mercy and the death on the cross and all this and Shalom and so on but at the very end of the Bible you know we got the winepress of God's wrath and you get to all the destruction and all that which you read psychologically as as the balancing you know judgment good good that's our tradition holds that I mean the two arms if you want I think I made reference tonight to True Grit the great film and book it's deeply biblical and the two arms of justice and and mercy if you only have one arm you you can't carry people that you need two arms so I think that's right that's the and I think the corrective we need is a greater stress on judgment now you know Pope Francis is the Pope of mercy as was john paul ii right that's permanently valid and we don't want to judgmentalism that's a one-sided it's always that delicate balance and the great spiritual masters know how to strike that balance near the end of your discussion he had this wonderful little clip talking about the adventure of following god i thought it could have come from the mouth of a christian evangelist but here's what he said there the other thing is that one of the things i really learned from reading abrahamic stories is that the fundamental call is to is it called to adventure yeah easier to happiness and and even the adventure the part of the relationship with God that's part of that adventure is wrestling with god yeah yeah itself means it's another aspect of that strange element of belief is like what does it to believe well it means to adopt this moral burden but it also means to wrestle with God right and not to not to blindly accept preposterous blandishments that nuran with any sense would ever swallow do you think he accurately described life with God well what that was prompt as I remembered by discussion of faith and I I said that I agreed with him one of his shows or podcast he says you know if you're accepting things that you know are lies that's never good for you or for others dead right dead right and I was making the point that faith does not mean superstition or accepting silly things or it's not sub rational you start doing that you're saying oh no I believe it even though I think it's false that's bad for you and bad for people around you and then I said that's where this came from that that authentic faith in the Bible is not that it's the sense of adventure it's the willingness to go out from what you know and that's of course his stuff on the hero's journey which i think is right and his reading of the kind of a yin and yang of what's known what's familiar and was unfamiliar in the hero is on the border between the two he goes out from what's known and now that's a psychodynamic reading of it but I said that's closed what faith means is the person of faith is willing to get like Abraham go out from what he knows in search of what God's gonna show them that's the Duke in Eltham like I know you're fine here by the shore you know that world but now come on let's go out into the depths so see the full implications of it is to say I'm not just doing this because I want to be more psychologically fulfilled I'm doing it because God has called me into this depth and I'm now going to believe I'm gonna accept I'm gonna go even though I don't see right so it's it's the the confidence and things I'm seen we hear from the letter of the Hebrews good that's authentic faith and that's the hero's journey if you put it in a properly religious you know framework I noticed a bishop that you guys spoke a lot about Genesis a lot about Exodus and even a good deal about Jesus Christ but whenever dr. Peterson would speak about the archetypal value of Jesus how he sort of embodies the hero making this hero's journey you would kind of try to press him to the more metaphysical questions yeah but like who is Jesus yeah but then he kind of pulled back did you did you notice yeah and fair enough I mean he again he's not pretending to be a Christian theologian but that's you know this is the first time we met and I don't think was the time to you know ask all kinds of real challenging questions but that's where I would I would challenge him is to say yes we can read these stories cycle dynamically and you can see Jesus is kind of the archetype of the person perfectly pleasing to God has con characterized them but the fireworks start you know when you see no Jesus is actually God on a hero's journey if you want to put it that way you know mutata Smoot andhe's but it's God Li you know though he was in the form of God did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped but rather emptied himself and took the form of a slave being born the likeness of men in accepting even death death on a cross God's on a hero's journey to find us you know it's not just a story of our quest for God but of God's great passionate quest for us that's what's really interesting in the story of Jesus so yeah I would sort of press in that direction and you know again he's not a not claiming to be a theologian so I think he didn't follow Bette prompt but that's where I would keep pressing it if I could alright let's let's wrap up with this final question it's one that I think dr. Peterson has considered a lot in relation to his own work but I liked that he asked it of you I don't the exact clip but he said something like oh yeah what are you hoping for in this coming year for you and what do you think you're doing like I think he's trying to sum up your mission what is it you're about what is it you're doing how would you answer that yeah and I remember is it's very end and it did in a way you know put me on this when you got a question like and you know cuz you look at it in different levels what's the ultimate answer is I want to bring people to say in Christ and membership in his church I mean that's my that's my purpose as an evangelizer now to get from point A to point B there's a lot of area in between so a lot of my ministry is yes with that ultimate goal in mind I want to bring people to salvation in Christ would be a way to put it but in between I'm a maybe militant atheist or I'm a total secularists to that we got to cover a lot of this ground and so I said that's where we're on fire kind of lives in that space I want to keep going into the courtyard of the Gentiles and keep engaging those that are interested you know so it's a it's a kind of a proximate answer an ultimate answer ultimate one is fullness of life in Christ and the church but then in between engaging people in the courtyard of the Gentiles is kind of what I I want to do [Music] well that sound means it's time for one of our questions from our listeners if you have a question for Bishop Baron just visit ask Bishop Baron comm that's the website you can record your question on your phone your tablet your computer any device today we have a question from Duane from Western Kentucky and he asks about a word that Bishop Baron often uses but that he's not sure what it means so here's the Wayne's question [Music] hello Bishop Baron this is Duane from Western Kentucky often in your homily some podcast you will use the term logos or the logos can you please explain what that means thank you very much yeah good it's cuz a Greek term most famously used in the very opening of the Gospel of John in the beginning was the law Gauss and the law Gauss was with God the law Gauss was God right well Goss is a Greek term that means basically word you could also translate it as language or even tongue like lingua and all of that language is related that word the era saw were first human beings as the xoan politican that means the animal that lives in a polis right the political animal we say he also calls them the Zohan lucky calm and we say the latinized version is the rational animal but see that's to Zola and lucky Khan means the animal with a tongue an animal with speech an animal that can articulate his ideas so the logos is mind speech intelligibility idea all that's the pattern even that God the Father speaks his law goes right and then through that law Gauss makes the whole universe it's very important idea that's the ground of the sciences that something logical right something intelligible is available in the universe Joseph Ratzinger's said when you say credo in Unum Deum I believe in one God what you're saying is I believe that law Gauss has primacy over matter three interesting that reason or mind is more primordial than manner because its mind that spoke matter into being and gave it intelligibility so it's a master idea and you know may the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus says Paul may your mind conform to the mind that became flesh in him so it has all those overtones I'd say Lagos but mind word rationality intelligibility pattern it means all those things well thanks so much for listening to this episode of the word on fire show again if you haven't watched the interview between Bishop Baron and dr. Jordan Peterson do a google search or go to word on fire org slash Peterson will make sure that that URL links to the interview if you want to help bishop bear and reach more people become a patron of this show go to word on fire show.com slash patron join us and get free books exclusive content and a whole lot more so go to word on fire show.com slash patron well thanks so much for listening to this episode of the word on fire show and we'll see you next week

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 140,757

Rating: 4.873147 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Bishop Barron, Interview, God, Atheism, Jung, Philosophy, Religion, Catholic, Catholicism

Id: 0JsIBB847I8

Length: 28min 49sec (1729 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2019