Understanding Violence in the Old Testament

we must distinguish between what's in the bible and what the bible teaches what's in the bible there's all kinds of things in the bible as i say proof texting i can prove anything from the bible what's in the bible but what the bible teaches plaker would say is often a function of the themes and patterns and trajectories inherent in the bible as a whole [Music] welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vott the senior content director at word on fire we've got a fascinating show for you today because we're going to look at some of the most difficult passages of the old testament ones that have caused christians trouble and confusion for many many years and we're going to look at how some of the brightest minds in the church have understood and interpreted them but before we get there bishop welcome good to see you hey brandon always good to see you let's give everyone a couple updates as we normally begin the show with the first one is you joined the good folks at the babylon b for a podcast discussion this is a uh primarily protestant satirical news site and i think they've recently started this podcast um what'd you guys talk about how did it go you know it's good i knew their work from you know facebook and their little kind of as you say satirical uh cartoons and comments and you know they're good i didn't realize they had this podcast show i think you told me about it um and they were good you know we we horsed around a little bit just you know joking around but then we got into some pretty serious topics about the culture where we are today evangelism um a little bit protestant catholic debates as you say they're more i think on the calvinist side of the equation so we talked about that a little bit but i enjoyed it um you know they're interesting fellas um they they think seriously about a lot of things but they also have this playful take on on the world and on the church so it was fun did gk chesterton end up coming up i know that was a shared bond between all of us yeah he sure did um one of the two guys especially into chesterton and uh we talked about orthodoxy quite a bit we talked about um chesterton's kind of personal style a number of his ideas like how he would you know respond to situations today etc so it was uh it was lively yeah another exciting update from word on fire is the latest book that we've released we've been working on it for almost a year now and it just came out it's titled the word on fire vatican ii collection now let me give you a brief word about where this book came from why we published it and i want bishop baron to talk a little bit about it we realized over the past couple years there's been a lot of debate discussion confusion about the second vatican council you know which lasted from 1962 to 1965. it was kind of the pinnacle institutional moment of the church in the 20th century but since then there's been again lots of debate and questioning and discussion about what happened at vatican ii what does it mean are we following it appropriately today or not what emerged out of a lot of these discussions is the fact that so few catholics have actually read the documents of vatican ii they are published in some forms but in most cases you'll find a big thick you know two or three inch uh book that has these 16 documents from vatican 2 in there and they're a lot of times unreadable because they're unwieldy so what we wanted to do about word on fire was to focus on just the four major documents of vatican ii these are called the four constitutions of vatican ii and we've taken these four documents put them into a gorgeously designed book that's very readable but then we've surrounded the documents with commentary from the recent post-vatican 2 popes so these would include pope paul vi pope john paul ii pope benedict xvi and pope francis so you get to read the documents of vatican ii along with the pope and interpret these documents as the magisterium intends them to be read bishop i know you've been personally advocating a revival of vatican ii and a return to its uh core documents i i have to imagine this is a great moment for you to see this book released through word on fire it is it comes out of a deep concern of mine as you've been saying um you know i'll oversimplify a bit but you have two camps very active in the church a kind of progressive catholicism that wants to go way beyond vatican ii it wants vatican 3 or vatican 4. then you've got another group the the radical traditional so-called that want vatican one i mean they want to go back behind the council and as you say i'm convinced an awful lot of catholics don't really know the text of vatican ii i'm the first one to say the implementation of vatican ii was very poorly handled in our country my generation was the first one to receive this kind of awkward translation of the council the result is i think a lot of people don't really know what these great teachings are and so a return to the texts is a desideratum and the text as you suggest interpreted by the post-conciliator papal magisterium so that's what this book really is all about we're not reproducing all the documents but you say the four major constitutions and so it gives you a very clear idea of what the central thrust of the council was and then interpreted by the great popes and you know word on fire as far as i'm concerned grows up out of that matrix namely the new evangelization as if you want the the pastoral translation of the of the great conciliar attacks i as you know follow cardinal george a lot saying vatican ii was a missionary council it was meant to send us out there's the the universal call the holiness right because all the baptized are called to be evangelizers and missionaries that's the um the council's teaching on liturgy the council's teaching on the church in the modern world the council's teaching on the nature of the church all of that is about this outward thrusting this this evangelical missionary church read pope francis now and i think now his magisterium sort of lights up in a fresh way when you understand this so that's what this this book is about and i'm i'm very proud and happy that it's coming out so i encourage you pick up a copy for yourself maybe consider getting a few extra copies for friends or family members and read it together we're going to be later this year launching some reading groups and guided discussions through these documents but you don't have to wait for us get some copies now and grab a group of friends and work through these documents together you can find it at wordonfire.org vatican2 all right let's turn to the focus of today's discussion which is on violence in the old testament bishop during this covet period you've had surprisingly a lot of time to write and you've been devoting that to this long commentary on different books of the old testament i don't want to give away too many details yet it's still a work in progress we're we're tentatively calling it bob's big bible book um and you recently got through a section of the old testament historical books where anybody reading these books is going to be struck by these pivotal moments where it seems as if god is encouraging the israelites to wipe out massive groups of people for example joshua chapter 6 says that under god's command they utterly destroyed all that was in the city both man and woman young and old ox and sheep and donkey with the edge of the sword this is often called harem warfare h-a-r-e-m it's a hebrew term meaning to completely destroy and it's also referred to as the ban as in god is laying the ban on a community such as jericho or the hittites the amorites the canaanites the parasites hives jebzeez all the ites um receive this band uh bishop first of all your work over the last several years engaging atheists it's these passages always seem to be the ones that the atheists know best they they can quote them like chapter and verse that's been your experience hasn't it yeah it's a major kind of apologetic concern because you say the the critics of religion often pounce upon these texts and they say well this god of yours seems like a moral monster i always remember that line from um richard dawkins you know that the god of the old testament is um as crazy as ozzie put it he's like king lear in act five except crazier you know so the sort of genocidal maniac god that's making these terrible you know moral demands and yeah so it's an apologetic concern it's often a stumbling block for people to read the bible now let me i'll make a general remark first brandon before we get into the into the details the bible can i just suggest almost automatically the wrong way to read the bible is oh look here's a passage see that therefore god wants this or oh see that see here the bible says to give it a technical term that's called proof texting you know you take one little uh quotation out of context and say oh the bible therefore god clearly says well there's so many problems with that but one is the bible is a as i've often a library it's a collection of texts from a wide variety of different eras written by a wide variety of different authors using a wide variety of different literary genre addressing a wide variety of different audiences right so all of that in this great library collection of texts therefore what's almost automatically the wrong thing to do is simply take one line wrench it out of all those contexts and say oh clearly that's what what god is saying or what the bible is teaching that's a bit like taking a lot one line from one character of shakespeare one of the plays oh shakespeare says you know i think i've used example before people often cite a polonius from hamlet neither a borrower nor lender b and all that well polonius is an idiot polonius is a clown he's a he's a he's he's a pathetic sort of buffoonish figure in in hamlet so now take one line out of one speech of a buffoon in hamlet and say oh as shakespeare says well there's something similar when you do something like that with the bible and say oh there's this one line let me take it out of every possible context and simply identify it with the divine will that is ipso facto a bad way to read the bible let me just say that right off the bat and once we get over that we can start looking at the bible with more sophisticated hermeneutical strategies in place and that's what we'll be talking about today let's stick for just a little longer at this 30 000 foot level of general principles because i want to focus on another way that i think the bible is commonly misread whenever i hear skeptics say the bible teaches blank blank blank it inevitably is falling into these same areas they pick one verse and they assume either this is what the bible commands or this is what god wants there's no nuance that sometimes the bible contains prescriptive commands but other times it's describing things that have gone awry or uh in the psalms for example you have psalms of lament that are are real men you know expressing their emotion or angst but that's not reflective of how god feels necessarily you know the famous one bishop you've heard this one too i'm sure you know we should take our enemies and bash their children's head against the rocks and yeah i hear so clearly god's a lot of time saying see yeah the bible teaches that we should do that or god wants babies heads to be backed against the rocks right is that a good reading no and see take now the psalms for example uh it's not like just the bible the psalms are a collection of um songs poems we probably say how do poems function well poems are very complex very complex literary genre uh they're doing and accomplishing all sorts of things one thing that a poem does is it often gives the author a chance to vent or express in a richly imagistic way his feelings his his aspirations his frustrations right is the spirit of god blowing through these texts and that's an indeed what the word inspiration means that they're inspired by the spirit of god does it mean that now every every word every phrase wrenched out of context that's what god is desiring no these are poems songs that contain the words of men now there's vatican 2 right the bible is the word of god yes indeed but in the words of men now that means in historically conditioned particular contexts under certain literary forms of expression with often the baggage emotional psychological cultural that's involved in any particular historical situation therefore we've got to be very careful as we try to discern what is of the spirit of god here in the midst of a text that is very particular and historically and psychologically conditioned another distinction brand i think i've made on this program before is from william plaker the late protestant theologian where he says we must distinguish between what's in the bible and what the bible teaches what's in the bible there's all kinds of things in the bible as i say proof texting i can prove anything from the bible what's in the bible but what the bible teaches flaker would say is often a function of the themes and patterns and trajectories inherent in the bible as a whole so what's the bible teaching well i think we tend we would attend to those matters is there a consistent theme that can be found throughout the biblical text is there a pattern of meaning that emerges again and again is there a trajectory going from genesis all the way to revelation when you say ah under the under that trajectory i can sort of gather the meaning of this whole text that's a much better way to get at what the bible teaches now i'm going to add something because i'm a catholic plaker was a protestant is we've got the church that now helps us read the bible we don't just pick it up and oh there it is there's the line i understand that here's what it means up got it no no but we catholics say no in fact you shouldn't read the bible that way you should read the bible liturgically and you should read it within the context of the church which means the magisterial teaching of the church and that long tradition of interpretation of theologians and poets and popes and writers etc all of that context is much needed when we approach this complex set of of texts that we call the bible all right well with those general principles in place those interpretive tools about how to understand the bible let's narrow in on this issue of violence in the old testament again it mainly crops up in the historical books of the old testament you'll find some of it in the psalms as well in your book that you've been working on bishop baron bob's big bible book you offer three different ways to read these violent passages and it's it's not as if the church requires only one of these three ways um these different views have been held by some of the brightest minds in the church we'll get to them in detail in a moment the first way is held by irenaeus the second way is held by saint augustine and saint thomas aquinas and then the third way is held by many of the earlier church fathers such as origen john cassian and others so there's a wide diversity of ways to read this but before we get to those three ways i want to get uh uh out of the way the marcia night temptation um talk about who marcion was and how he read the old testament in general but these how he dealt with these violent passages in particular yeah it's a way of dissolving the problem so mercy is a second century figure based ultimately in rome who teaches very clearly it's very clear and in some ways um helpful doctrine because if you want to solve these problems it's an easy solution namely the old testament represents the revelation of a fallen god so like within a gnostic framework you've got the creator god is a sort of fallen compromised deity and so what has to do with him is is going to be morally problematic and spiritually uh misleading et cetera so the god of creation the god that declares all things good are you kidding say only a fallen god would do that and who you know rages with with anger and commands all these terrible things well that's a fallen god we should get rid of that god and it's only the god revealed in sections of the new testament so mercian was was actually unhappy with a lot of the new testament because there was too much of the old testament in it for him so certain passages in the new testament that he felt was about the true god now there are a lot of people today who are at least crypto-marcianites because they'll say something like well i don't like all that old testament stuff you know the angry god of i like the god of jesus you know now that's simplistic and problematic in so many ways but one of its problems is it's a neo-marcianism the church and one of my heroes saint irenaeus is one of the key figures here said no to marcion and has said no over and over again across the centuries by the way read someone like rudolph bulman who was much read when i was going through seminary very influential biblical figure in like the 20s 30s and 40s of the last century he was a self-confessed martianite and and he was hugely influential in biblical circles and is there in fact a kind of anti-semitism in a fair amount of contemporary biblical scholarship yeah sadly there was that's the that's the ghost of marcion howling again you know so we have to avoid that temptation rather see and i'm anticipating my conclusion here a little bit but we have to read the old testament in light of the new uh we don't eliminate the old testament in favor of the new rather we read the old and light of the new and then we're going to shed a lot more light i think okay so we can move past the the simple but unacceptable approach of martian which is just to say yeah there is an old testament god there's a new testament god they're different so let's get rid of the old testament god catholics wouldn't follow that path but let's look at these three paths that are positive acceptable approaches so the first one and i'm going to quote here a lot from your book in progress here bob's big bible book you call it the divine pedagogy approach and it's embodied or represented by saint irenaeus talk about this approach well you know irenaeus is one of the most important figures as i record these words it's the feast of saint polycarp and irenaeus said i was taught by polycarp who was taught by john and so he claimed this very strong apostolic heritage and he's influential in so many different ways one of the great figures in the early church irenaeus said what you find in the bible is not just okay god speaks truth at the same level at all times across the board rather what you see he said is the ongoing education of israel in the direction of the fullness of revelation now brandon you're the father of young kids so you know exactly what he's talking about here so if if little gilbert said to you he's three right he said to you daddy where did where does the sun go at night you might say uh well the son goes to bed at night the way you do and so he's gone to sleep and now you have to go sleep appropriate for his age of course of course and that satisfies them and okay sun go to sleep um who's a little bit older now than than gilbert you got um augustine who's like let's say gianna right how old is she gianna is six she's six okay so gianna asks about the sun and you say oh well the sun you know it goes across the sky starts in the east and he goes across the sky and then he goes down to the west okay is that true well it's it's appropriate for someone at her age to kind of understand you know now one of your older kids so now let's say isaiah is asking about the sun and you say we know actually the sun doesn't really go anywhere at night the sun doesn't really move across the sky in fact it's the earth is moving around the sun and so it only looks that way wow no kidding that's boy that's an interesting i thought he just went to bed at night you told me when i was three then you told me it went across the sky now i'm getting a richer perspective okay now isaiah is in his early 20s and he's a smart kid and he's reading like crazy now you got him reading stephen hawking and you've got to bring all the top you know astrophysicists good what you've done there you've been educating your kids in a way that was appropriate to their stage of development right so this is ancient now this is not some newfangled modern theory this is irenaeus in the in the second century who says so you find something similar in the in the biblical revelation are there parts of the bible indeed the answer is yes let's say in the book of genesis where god is presented as a humanoid figure right he's got a body and he's got hands and he's got a voice and he walks you know through the garden of eden and and um to moses he said i'm gonna walk by but you only see me from behind you know well god's being understood there as like a figure like us you know like one of the olympian gods maybe now later on in the bible out of a burning bush comes a voice all right moses take off your shoes you're on holy ground what's your name lord if they ask me i am who i am okay are we to dealing with a humanoid figure kind of like us no it's a much more spiritualized right understanding now go forward to deutero isaiah so isaiah let's say around the chapter 50 or so what do you find with these magnificent descriptions of the creator god right who brings all things into being from nothing is anyone like me no there's no god like me i can't no one can compare with me i'm not like any creature i'm not like any god well now we're getting in the ballpark of of thomas aquinas that god is not a being but ipsum essay subsistence god is the source of all okay okay so what's happening there but a unfolding of revelation in a way that was appropriate to the various stages of israel's development right there's a gradual pedagogy irenaeus would say an education of the race all preparing us by the way for the fullness of revelation that will happen in jesus in fact irenaeus says the old testament is though god and humanity are sort of trying each other on like you're trying on clothes you know is they're getting suited to one another gradually so as to prepare for the fullness of the incarnation okay so with that principle in mind how do we look at texts like our famous problematic text from joshua and judges and you know the gods putting the ban and so on might we read those as a relatively primitive moment in israel's understanding of the intentions of god so you're war-like people right and you're reaching for metaphors to express god's power what are you going to say uh god god killed i think two-fifths of the people god god eliminated oh i think a hundred out of you know two thousand no you're gonna say things like god eliminated all our enemies god crushed our enemies he destroyed everybody well might we read that as a as a poetic expression of god's power at a certain stage of israel's spiritual and moral development might we read it and some suggest this as if you want to put it this way israel only partially understanding what the will of god is just as one of your little kids might partially understand you when you're talking about the sun and the planets right they're going to kind of get it but not fully get it what's the trajectory now we'll go from those texts all the way to this abandoned crucified criminal crying out god my god why have you forsaken me and over his cross is the sign saying jesus of nazareth king of the jews is that the full expression the authentic expression of what god's power is like mind you how god truly crushes his enemies not through violent warfare but rather through the love that absorbs the evil of the world now you see what i'm doing here is take that comparison with the sun goes to bed at night little gilbert the sun goes across the sky little gianna this the sun actually we go around the sun isaiah and now stephen hawking that we're getting ever increasing increasingly sophisticated account right and so might these texts in the old testament represent not so much false accounts but accounts appropriate to israel's educational development right but we want to read the whole thing from the standpoint of the fullness of the revelation in the cross of jesus that might be an iranian approach to this issue very good so that's interpretive path one the iranian approach again we might call it divine pedagogy that god is teaching or revealing himself gradually more and more over time let's turn to the second approach this is approach favored by two of the greatest doctors and minds in the church saint augustine and saint thomas aquinas and you describe it as the divine justice approach to reading these passages how is this reading go you know and a contemporary uh example of this brand someone that we both know namely william lane craig i think would adopt this sort of interpretive uh program well what you find in augustine aquinas is this god's the lord of life god gives life it's god's prerogative to take life away now we're not the lords of life that's why we have a commandment like don't kill i mean it's not my pride i don't give life and i have no right to take life away self-defense you know those exceptions etc but the general principle is i i don't have command over life so i i can't just do that without moral blame but god can because god is the lord of all things and god you know that what does the psalm say that god breathes life into us and when he when he takes the breath away we return to the dust i mean so god gives god takes away does god at the end of the day kill all of us if we keep our distinction from last week in mind god's active will god's permissive will yeah yeah i mean look we all die whether we're killed by a sword we're killed by a bomb or killed by a heart attack we're killed by cancer were killed by a car accident at the end of the day god has given us life and god takes life away that's god's prerogative right now next step does god sometimes express this in terms of his justice that god punishes people for their sin precisely by taking life away yeah i think you'd have to do hermeneutical acrobatics to avoid that in in the bible that god sometimes punishes just that way next step does god delight in using secondary causes yeah that's a good domestic principle right that god often involves us in his work so this is now augustine aquinas william lane craig might god be using israel the israelite armies of joshua and so on to exercise and express his justice as he punishes wicked people so again and again to be fair in these texts in joshua and so on the various peoples of of canaan and palestine are described as wicked people as idolaters and murderers and they're perverted in so so many ways so is god punishing them and using the instrumentality of the israelite army to affect his will yeah say augustine aquinas and william lane craig um something right in this approach yeah the principle strikes me as right god the giver of life that god uh has the prerogative of taking life away that it's you know finally is god's business if he chooses to punish in that way i think we can't really quarrel with that is there a limitation of this approach yeah i mean if you say the harem the the ban every person every woman every child every animal are they all are they all such sinners they deserve that sort of fate now aquinas way out is to say well look original sin through original sin everyone deserves punishment everyone is is liable to divine uh punishment okay but but still do we hesitate a bit at this as the only approach to this question and i would i'd be more at home with the iranian uh sort of education approach and i'd be more at home with irenaeus but um or rather with um uh with origin but is there something right in this yeah i think it provides some illumination as we look at these texts through this lens all right so that's the second option on the table the divine justice approach favored by augustine and aquinas we've heard the iranian approach we've heard that one let's turn to the third way to interpret and read these passages and it's the allegorical approach probably best associated with origen the great church father and biblical interpreter but also many other early church fathers you'll find this way of reading in their writings including john cassian among others how does this approach work bishop well this is a very ancient tradition so uh go back to someone like philo in the in the jewish tradition he's a contemporary of jesus in the first century but it was very popular among the church fathers to allegorize the scriptures so to read the literal text as as a kind of allegory of spiritual themes and christological themes so here origen you know this again there's nothing new about this the ancient figures understood this problem origen knew look how do you square the the god of of um of jesus who dies you know as a crucified victim on the cross jesus says love your enemies bless those who curse you pray for those who male treat you resist not evil how do you reconcile that jesus with these commands from the old testament well origen his first move is very important i think he says we should read the whole bible from the standpoint of the last book of the bible and more specifically he means the scene in the book of revelation where the lamb standing as though slain emerges we're up in the in the heavenly court and this the scroll with the seven seals is presented and the scroll that's representative you might say of the whole of scripture the whole of history and they say well who will open these seals to the scroll and no one can do it and people are weeping and then we hear oh oh the lion of judah the lion will come and open the the seals but then out comes not a lion but a lamb the weakest of creatures and then in this weird greek formula standing as though slain so a lamb but slain like the weakest type of figure and of course the reference is to the crucified lamb of god right and it's the lamb standing as though slain who opens the seals opens the scroll origen's point is christ crucify is the ultimate hermeneutical lens interpretive lens through which we should read the whole bible so he opens all the seven seals he opens the scroll everything from genesis to revelation is now read through the lens of this lamb standing as though slain therefore what if you do what richard dawkins does and you read these ancient texts from the old testament as indicative of a wildly cruel insanely genocidal figure you are reading them wrong you are just not reading them correctly okay so therefore what is the more correct method and here origen begins to allegorize israel under joshua now mind you joshua say it's jesus name yeshua right uh jesus in greek is just the greek rendering of yeshua so joshua is an anticipation of jesus joshua now entering the promised land well what's that now entering into the land of salvation but what's he going to face he's going to face all those bites you mentioned the jebusites and hivites and amorites he's going to face these figures who are symbolic of evil in its various forms so don't think primarily here of real people on on the ground think of these now as allegories of sin cruelty hatred violence superstition idolatry see they symbolize all of that yeshua jesus with his army the israelites who are they but the church right the church militant the church that's fighting its way now to to conquer for christ the earth but in battle against all of these uh opposing forces how should you battle evil well don't mess around with it now take a text now we're going up to like first samuel and saul's failure right when the lord says to put the ban on the amalekites and saul conquers them defeats them but then doesn't put the ban he preserves some of the livestock some of the people and the king right ag for himself and prophet samuel comes in no no no saul what's this i hear there's that king and there's livestock what are you doing oh you know i conquered them all right but i kept a little bit for myself and samuel hacks ag to pieces you know and we said okay what is going on there well saul represents the way a lot of us deal with evil we kind of play around with it we fight it yeah we resist it yeah to some degree but we tend to keep a little bit for ourselves right take any form of evil your pride your envy your lust your your hatred your violence we deal with them we bring them kind of under the control of yeshua of jesus but then we kind of leave a little bit for ourselves right but the point is you got to hack ag to pieces man you got you got to deal all the way down with these powers of resistance um i think i've used this image before but you know if i went to um pope francis and said you know for instance i i love you know being a priest loved being a bishop and you know i'm i'm celibate 95 of the time you know i i really love celestine but you know five percent of the time well i mean who'd be happy with that arrangement or you said that to your wife you know i'm oh gosh i love you with my whole heart but and i'm faithful to you 90 of the time well no i mean you have to eliminate totally from your life these forms of of infidelity and of evil um yeah i've kind of conquered my pride but i i still kind of keep a little to myself for you know my my lust it's kind of under control but there's still a little bit that no no you got to deal with evil all the way down so now origen has the way to understand these texts they're not about a cruel marauding genocidal god they're allegories of the spiritual struggle that we have to if we want to enter the promised land we can't mess around with evil we have to deal with it all the way down and bring all of it under the control of joshua of yeshua now for my money brandon we look at these three paths each one i think has value i've always liked this one the best i've always found this the most satisfying way to read these texts and not not rejecting what's legitimate in the first two nor nor denying there might be other paths of interpretation that are valid but bottom line read everything in the bible from the standpoint of yeshua of of jesus and you won't go wrong i like the third path because it doesn't require you to soften the level of violence in the passages like maybe the first path if israel is relatively young or new in understanding god's will you might have to soften these commands and say well they were just engaged in exaggerated rhetoric when they said i'm going to wipe everybody out it's like muhammad ali saying i'm going to destroy my opponent or wipe the floor with him but in the on the origin approach you don't have to do that you could say no he really means he wants you to wipe out every man and woman and child and animal that's right and it was right what's helpful there too is all the animals you know god bless them well that's evocative of the ways that again we kind of play around with evil like oh well you know that's not going to do me any harm is it this little this little sin of mine yeah man that little sin of yours i know it looks attractive to you but that's going to cause trouble or it's like you know the doctor hey i got i got 97 of that tumor out and you know you'll be fine would you be comforted by that no you got to remove evil in its totality i've used the example too brandon of the cross of jesus that's hacking ag to pieces what i mean is he went into battle with sin and death all the way down um you're talking nerd stuff think of you know gandalf and the descent right when he he has to battle these forces all the way down and he can't just say oh we'll be fine i think we got him under control he won't bother us no man he will bother you trust me you got to battle him all the way down i think those are good ways to get at it i think a lot of my friends favor this allegorizing approach as well as you do um the one hesitation i found some people have with this approach is they're they're nervous about untethering events in the old testament from history so they would say like you know i could read the exodus story for example in an allegorical way and it'd have these beautiful and profound spiritual parallels to the new testament but does that mean we assume nothing that happened in the exodus story really happened or in this case was there not really someone like joshua or someone like samuel who really did these events talk about the connection between the allegor allegorical approach and then the historical nature of these texts well you know in the church fathers you have the four senses of scripture and the historical sense or the literal sense uh is always the primary one and that's the primary reference so that our biblical people from ancient times till today have always realized that groundedness in history matters um so yeah i would never say we untethered these things from history now having said that do we find in the bible history in the modern sense of the term well clearly no the way we would write history you know with ten 000 footnotes and trying to be as as sort of journalistically accurate as possible about exactly what happened well no one in the ancient world wrote history that way that's not just the bible but look at at classical sources no one wrote history that way they always wrote it in a kind of um interested manner that's to say they were trying to to propagate a point of view or they were trying to bring out a moral point well the same is true in the bible book of exodus book of joshua historically grounded sure yeah i'm no hesitation saying that but is it history in the modern sense no it's what i would call theologically and spiritually elaborated history it's history told with a theological and spiritual purpose you know just give you one example brandon i don't know any scholar or archaeologist today who thinks what's described in the book of joshua namely the overcoming of jericho just in that manner the conquest of the city of eye the destruction and the putting the haram the band on all there's there's almost no archaeologi there is no archaeological evidence for that so did it happen just as it's being described i would say no did it happen yeah but what we have in the bible is theologically elaborated history and then origen comes back into the picture like okay yes this happened yes israel moved into the promised land yes there was a conflict with the peoples that were there but now how do we read and interpret the theological elaboration that's going on in those texts and i think that's what's you know uppermost in his mind well it's time now for our question from one of our listeners every episode we take one question from listeners like you if you have one for bishop aaron send it in to us by visiting askbishopbarren.com today we have one from dennis he is in santa cruz california kind of near your neck of the woods there bishop and he's asking about a really well-known 20th century psychiatrist and psychoanalyst named carl jung here's his question hello bishop baron my name is dennis and i live in santa cruz california my question to you uh somewhat general but i wanted to know your thoughts on carl jung what do you think about him what do you agree with and what do you disagree with thank you yeah thanks for the question it would take us a whole semester course fully to answer it um jung is a fascinating figure to me one of the really great intellectuals of the 20th century i think disciple of freud begins very much in the freudian school but then departs from freud in all sorts of interesting ways jung with his doctrine of the collective unconscious and sort of an archetypal consciousness moves you might say into the ambit of of religious texts think of his influence now on people like joseph campbell the comparative mythologist was deeply jungian campbell then influences george lucas who makes the star wars movies in fact yoda is jung a lot of the sayings of yoda are things right out of jung's handbook so he's sort of the wisdom figure behind campbell hence behind lucas hence behind the star wars movies and the star wars movies as you know are dealing with all these archetypal elements jung's theory that they belong to a kind of collective unconscious so we have a personal unconscious that freud knew about but jung felt there was a shared sort of unconscious awareness that all human beings have and then expressed itself in mythic and and archetypal systems you know um interesting yeah important absolutely look at someone like jordan peterson a peterson is like a um joseph campbell of today i mean he's revived a lot of the jungian approach the way he reads the bible is is very jungian it seems to me so with all of that i think yeah interesting important where do i draw the line with jung he's agnostic in many ways uh he does in fact dissociate a lot of the bible from an historical point of reference he does almost completely psychologize the language of the bible does he believe in god he has that famous line you know i'm not i don't believe in god i know there's a god you know now what does he mean by that welcome to a world of interpretation so you know there's a lot in jung that i think is fascinating interesting he's a big improvement over freud having said that in some ways he represents a revival of gnosticism and there i would really quarrel with them you know so beyond that we have to take a whole semester course probably to answer your question fully well thanks for your question thanks for watching and listening to this episode if you enjoyed this very detailed and invigorating commentary on the bible look forward to bishop's new book i think we'll probably release it within the next year or two but as you're waiting for that pick up a copy of the word on fire bible which covers a lot of this similar territory um at least in the gospels and then we're making great headway on volume two which covers the rest of the new testament and volume three is finally where uh we'll get back into the old testament as well also i wanna encourage you to pick up your copy of the new word on fire vatican ii collection we talked about it at the beginning of this episode you can find it at wordonfire.org vatican2 these four constitutions from the second vatican council arguably the most important catholic documents of the last 100 years you want to read them if you haven't they're beautiful they're profound they give a vision for the direction of the church in the 21st century so check it out wordonfire.org thanks so much for listening we'll see you next time on the word on fire show [Music] thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video i invite you to share it and to subscribe to my youtube channel

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Length: 48min 43sec (2923 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021