25:10 I think your clarification on why you were taking that modern stance with Paul is pretty helpful. Your assumption seems to be if religion can't stand up to modernist critique, we can't take it seriously in a postmodern world, let alone a meta modern one. But what if there were some pre-modern understandings of faith and spirituality that actually are more real or true than the modern ones? What if we assume more than modernity has limits, but it also has flaws, and part of a meta-modern spirituality will involve recovering something of a pre-modern understanding of spirituality, instead of just dismissing everyone that has come before. Isn't possible the modern lens blinds us to some realities that other generations have seen better than us?
The folding of the miraculous into the "real" could be conceived as a miracle in itself.. think about it.. and rather than just moving phenomenon from one ledger to the other actually opens up the next miracle for us to ponder. We are always in the middle of the miraculous and the real each in our own unique way.
Very interesting. The problem of exclusivism as you present it is confused by two misconceptions: one referred to the framing and another referred to the assessment of Christianity. The framing you propose is naive, because you cannot exclude yourself from it and sit in judgment of the world religions (or any all encompassing ideology) as if you were above them all and immune to the tendency. You have no choice but to choose, and once you've managed to become somewhat more transparent to yourself, you'll realize that, the moment you start thinking and talking and writing about the problems of humanity, you are assuming a conceptual unity about what humanity is and, therefore, excluding everybody outside of that conceptual framework you're trying to use to judge all ideologies and religions. What is it that I'm proposing then? With all the inordinate amounts and depth that several thousand years of humanity's development of philosophical, moral, and religious thought have achieved, chances are that the solution will be found from within one of the great intelectual traditions (which I will argue are all religious traditions). Anyway, in the very far off chance that the wheel is still yet to be invented, what is the likelihood that one individual person such as you or Sam Harris will have the wherewithal to come up with the solution? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you are the next Moses, Mohamed, Confucius, Budha, Krishna and Jesus Christ all rolled up in one... (And this I say with no ill intent whatsoever, but maybe only with the intent to spice up the reading). 😊
Forgot to explain the second misconception-about Christianity. What you said about imposition and violence leads me to believe you don't understand Christian doctrine and its interaction with Church history or, again, you have a naive conception of human nature.
Hi Brendan! regarding miracles and physics - St. Augustine of all people wrote in City of God, XXI. 8.2: a miracle is not contrary to nature, but only to our knowledge of nature
19:10 thank you 🙏🏼 for the response Brendan. Exclusion is what allows for meaning hierarchy of value in religious structures. God’s exclusion of man in all of the Abrahamic religions is actually a binding axiom. Also the excision of sin from God for the individual is an important path in religious journey. Exclusion as a religious axiom is part of the idea underneath of holiness and reverence of being able to draw near to something/one holy through sacrifice. But the cross of Jesus is a way of radical inclusion. Meta religion, not dealing with source criticism but dealing with the reality of true value and meaning hierarchies that religion can offer. Give people the source criticism and atomization of the Bible, let them dissolve meaning and let Nitche tell his story and some people will still walk back into “irrational” religious structures and patterns to better orient life, because it appears that waiting on science to keep figuring every thing out isn’t enough to hold meaning for some people’s life.
I thought we had figured this out like 250 years ago, we called it Religious Freedom under Western Liberal Democracy and wrote up a whole set of papers..... I think they were called the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence... I'm not trying to be glib, it just frustrates me that we have all the tools at our disposal to address all these problems, but somehow everyone's forgotten about them
Ah. It certainly did not come across that you weren't arguing your own position or what your goal was. To be frank, it explains Paul's annoyance. Presumably, he was expecting you to front your own position, not the "challenges" of Historical Criticism. Metamodern Christianity is only going to laugh at that stumbling zombie. You guys could have a much better conversation.
23:48 mhe! confrontation with the modern is dumb, the modern is dumb and wrong, reject that framing and move beyond it, all fights in modernity will take you nowhere, it's all capitalism vs communism, left vs right, individualism vs collectivism, all in the modern is divided like this, no one can exists without both the one AND the many, but modernity demands to pick a side, which is dumb, don't pick a side, try instead to see what is the third thing that joins those together, and go towards that third.
Rohlin is very much coming at it from a premodern angle (he's Eastern Orthodox). It's not necessarily a bad thing, but he's not interested in seeing how to bring these historical/symbolical insights into dialogue with the world after modernity.
Great set of responses. I really appreciate your temperament in addressing these comments. I've been following your work for awhile and was aware of your intellectual/faith development trajectory and share a similar storyline from a catholic origin but was unaware of your involvement with a reactionary anti technology community. That is very interesting and I'd love to hear more about it. I also find this moment of God pivot in the metamodern scene and uptick of interest in Christianity particularly fascinating and look forward to you leaning more into your Christian store of insights. At one point toward the end of the video, you made a claim that the modernist paradigm was more true than traditional devotional frame and being well versed in the integral theory framework I know exactly what you mean and agree to a great degree, but only after a couple decades of just assuming this progression of transcend and include, it seems less straightforward than that. In many ways, yes of course! But I think part of the metamodern and integral project is to restore meaning and the viability and legitimacy of spirit back into the secular lifeworld which has suffered a massive violence toward a non trivial aspect of what is true. In a sense, it could be seen (and has been by many postmodernists) as reactionary to go 'back' to correct for the pivot away from 'God'. I wonder your thoughts... And similarly regarding the question of reactionaryism, philosophically and politically, liberalism does not acknowledge that it emerged in a context that was heavily communally constrained and internally seeks to increasingly throw off all constraints even when they are externally lessening all the time. While I count myself as liberal, I increasingly feel the reactionary-like need to in a sense, go 'back' and be more explicit about the need for balancing freedoms and constraints, rights and responsibilities, of which the balance seems to have gone askew. Again, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Something to consider: talking to retired pastors, not necessarily deconstructed ones, but those who no longer rely on a salary from a church or denomination. Many are well schooled in theology, but a lifetime of experience combined with the freedom to speak their mind might be enlightening. Motivated reasoning is a significant barrier to sense-making on these subjects.
This talking point of pastors and their paychecks bugs me. No jab at you, it just keeps being a common rhetoric. Most pastors are getting by. I would also contend most clergy leave churches or the vocation on personal grounds of ethics/morals/theology. HOWEVER I fully agree with you that retired pastors would have interesting insight no longer being entrenched.
@@chrisfair11 That's fair and thanks for the balanced reply. I can see how this could easily turn into invalidating any speaker whose salary comes from an institution with a known worldview, which wouldn't be my perspective. But I definitely have a bit of an allergy to the widespread motivated reasoning I see everywhere (not just in religious circles, politics, media, corporate speak, etc). I sincerely wish people would disclose their priors, incentives, propositional redlines, etc. This new world of alternative media has made the concept of "audience capture" impossible to ignore, and I think many of us instinctively trust a speaker more if we know it's going to cost them something, but I realize that's a rare and nonscalable expectation. Thanks again for your comment.
@@roderickhare and thanks for your first and second. I understand the burn of megachurch pastors and prosperity gospel, granted I have not experienced that myself it was something I held against Catholicism when I was not a Christian (90s era-new atheist). Fully on board with your point on seeing the audience capture issue along other topics/disciplines. Peterson's clear bend to it is frustrating for his long time listeners. What would be good qualifiers of retired pastors to interview? (Again I genuinely think this is a good idea)
@@chrisfair11 Good question. My initial comment came from a hunch after watching the Brendan/PVK conversation. I'm new to Brendan's channel so I may not have a clear view of his goals, but it seems like he's pointing to metamodernism as a potential way forward - picking through the valuable aspects of premodern, modern and postmodern thinking to hopefully synthesize a robust answer to the meaning crisis. (Or something like that). Retired pastors who've been in the trenches for decades, dealing with real people, but also having a thorough education in theology and critical scholarship, but without burning out or losing their faith, and freed from denominational trip wires, would seem to be very well equipped to navigate these tensions.
You'd totally enjoy CS Lewis' 'Miracles', you sound an awful lot like Lewis in your answer to the first question. I'd also suggest Barfield's 'Saving the Appearances'. Vervaeke references Barfield at the end of AftMC. Barfield also has an essay titled 'Philology and the Incarnation' that was recently read on the RU-vid channel Grail Country that I think might be of benefit to your adventure.
28:02 It may be interesting to see Guy’s conversation with PVK. They talk about the difference between models and narratives. Models are incapable of capturing the fullness of a thing, but narratives allow for more accuracy in exchange for not answering all the questions
Glad you were open to talking to PVK. EQ trumps IQ. McGilchrist gives a neurological view on this. I leave it to you young adults to determine a better future ;-) PS ... Eastern religions and mysticism? Hard to square with Abrahamic faith, few are able to. We can all learn more from the other half of human experience. Been there, done that.
I’m confused it feels like the goalpost keeps being moved. At one moment we are in agreement that we need to understand what needs to be preserved from modernity and post-modernity, but the next moment we shouldn’t think X because it harkens back to something in pre-modernity. We need to ask the question why X is bad and we seem to be flying by the seat of our pants here. I don’t know about you, but if someone told me that Brenden’s videos are more beautiful and true than mine that is no cause for offense I am working on it. This is the same for religious traditions why would you want to back something you don’t love. Love doesn’t require you to hate others but it does require a certain level of respect. Hope this wasn’t nonsense 😅
33:39 : Am I understanding you correctly to say that rational argumentation didn’t exist and/or wasn’t employed by religious systems before modernity? It seems the premodern authors of the Christian New Testament attempted to use or recounted uses of rational argumentation to “prove” their truth claims, particularly about Jesus.
Why could it not be that that God is pleased, indeed, WANTS, us to keep growing by finding out the processes by which the universe works? The idea that finding scientific or naturalistic explanations for things de facto argues against the existence of a creating Being, call that Being God or what you will, doesn't stand-up if you think in this way. Why wouldn't God want us to find these things out?
31:48 I think you are missing a Vervaeke point here. God has no-thingness the movement toward answering questions about boulders shows the failure of Naturalism in understanding the point being made. This is the basic monotheistic claim there is very little to disagree about among Christians, Jews, and Muslims who correctly understand that God is not a thing in the universe. The disagreement is about the agent not the arena
For feedback on the interview - you and Paul are both smart and invested in topics that use shortcuts for the sake of the convesation between the two of you. Some of the responses on that video (a portion of the complaints) are from people who didn't know how to keep up. Not that I was nimbly keeping up, but enough to understand where the two of you were going and where others got lost. If you amd Paul can talk without over diatilling some concepts/ideas it may help that inderstand. TLDR dumb it down for the rest of us, I'm not fast enough.
i think the whole 'body' argument could have been made stronger on paul's part. we have a body in the same way that school spirit has a body, there's not a meaningful difference if you are just taking a physicalist perspective to dispute the claim. there's a collection of cells, some with (almost) the same dna, many with wildly different dna, that work together in a particular way, and we metaphorize that collection as an imaginary unity called a body. in the same way, the school body is a metaphorized unity of a collection of individuals working together in a particular way. the way in which they're united is the 'spirit' of the thing. that's not to say i think this is a particularly useful framing, i'd likely lean into a 'body' as the means by which a spirit manifests towards the creation (emanation) or the creation moves towards the spirit (emergence). none the less, i think paul could have made it clear that the move he made was not a switching of contexts by outlining the manner by which we group things into unities (identities) in the first place - which he kind of did, but it came off more as an a priori claim rather than an argued one.
2:10 there's a more interesting point than "rejecting miracles a priori", because the funny thing is that in the modernist frame, you reject miracles but accept things like "human rights" or "the economy" or "capitalism" or "gravity" or "evolution", all of those things are the same as spirits, the only difference is the name, but really there's no real difference, you can call Zeus an idea, it'd still be Zeus, THAT is the most salient point for our time.
43:15 so what I'm getting here, is the idea is that there's an evolution, tradition > modern > postmodern > metamodern, is that it? I see now what you were trying to get from Paul, he lives in that position but is not going to explain it to you, because he understands that's futile, Pageau on the other could engage with you on that. I think that's a wrong position thou, the metamodern christian that goes to church and says "in one way I don't really believe in it but I do believe in another way" is nothing but a compromise, the good is to fully embody your tradition, medieval people were not dumb, they understood that other people believe in different things, believing a tradition doesn't mean one can't understand that, or that even one's oncepts and ideas can never be fully correct, there're plenty of saints that said that anything said about god was ultimately wrong, that means that the saints said and many priests and bishops understood, that everything they said about the holy spirit and the liturgy and all that, was wrong, and yet they said it, that's the thing you're looking for, but you don't need to take "a view from nowhere" to understand that.
30:26 aaaaaand HERE we found the crux of the matter, the modern is not more true than the traditional (medieval christian) frame: suppose a normal person that as time goes on spends more and more time building ever more complex machines while becaming less and less able to understand and perform socially, making greater feats of logic and engeneering while faling further more to perform even the most basic of social graces, like wiping one's own ass or stoping oneself from drooling, would you say that person becoming better? because that is modernism. the way forward is not building on top of modernity, but to reject it, abandon it, going back to the traditional medieval and building that back up, keeping science, is a product of christianity, not of the alchemical gnostic modernity. edit: modernity doesn't have any new insight over the traditional, what modernity did was to ditch one of the elements of the duality and go "this is the real thing, the other one is illusion" and proceded to develop that one element to the exclusion of the other, so the move from tradition to moderntiy is only one of losing knowledge, not of gaining it.
16:25 yes, but there are no neutral framings, all framings are religious, therefore it's imposible for us to be "objective", so don't be so sure that "assesing" christianity or whoever to be of any real use.
2:42 you may not want to operate from a phisicalist frame of modernism, but you did, many times, every time you used words like "super natural" you went there.
36:42 the funny thing about that is that, this impulse to "deconstruct", this idea that idols are nothing but wood and stone, is right there in the old testament, so don't be so sure about the second part. edit: modernity will only end when kingdom comes.
10:39 whatever you see it as a devolution or a good thing, it cannot be avoided, the message of christ is at complete odds with the noble morals of the old religions, as christianity rose those old worlds of meaning were chopped off and destroyed. love your enemy is not a tellos that any society in the ancient world held
Since the frame you used wasn’t the one you hold as most valid, we didn’t get to know you, as such, inasmuch as is possible within a simple +\-1hr talk. Glimpses here and there, but this is a strange conversation tactic, or a LARP maybe. Anyway, this follow up format has a virtue to it.
Thanks. Very much agreed. Not a LARP per se, I just include the modern perspective within my own view, but include a lot beyond it as well. But I agree perhaps not the best approach to the convo.
I think the best conversationalists know how to do this in depth, Alex O'Connor for example is really good at steelmanning positions he doesn't hold in an attempt to find a higher synthesis Wisdom requires multi-perspectivity, right?
Thanks Brendan for the response to my comment. It seems the predominant observation was that you took upon the modernist perspective a bit too much. I watch your videos all the time so it did seem strange you were doubling down on the modernist paradigm and rehashing the new atheist era debates. I think the conversation has moved on from arguing about historical accuracy of traditional religions. Obviously there are many who still believe in the physical and historical claims of the Bible and are still in a modernist and premodern mind set but those sorts no longer command the attention they once had. I do think the historical critique does poke major holes in the historicity of the Bible but I think the main focus of the current conversation is about the function and cultural value of religion which can’t be contained within the physicalist paradigm. In other words the meaning crisis isn’t about having the wrong assumptions of physics. Regarding your last comment about relativizing Christianity and considering it as a religion among many I personally have no problem with this move as a self-identified metamodern Christian. Paul on many occasions is fine with a metamodern take at least within the sphere of Christianity. He’s fine with people joining any Christian denominations. I take it a bit further and have a non-exclusive approach towards other religions but I do insist in the value and validity of being a participant of the legacy religions. It can be the case one can value their religion not at the exclusion of other religions but perhaps think one’s religion is slightly more right or less wrong, has certain values and insights one deems more valid on a rational level or as simple as it’s the religion one grew up with therefore it’s easy to resonate with.
A great book to check out would be Saving The Appearances by Owen Barfield. Even just the first chapter on rainbows might really twist you up in a good way.
@@BrendanGrahamDempsey I am most interested to understand what is behind consensus. "We think Paul didn't write X" doesn't give you any context of the strength of the conclusion. How familiar are you with the details of NT text critical authorship determinations?
Question for Brendan: Ken Wilber always described the process of transcendence and inclusion (development/evolution) as a movement towards greater depth but less span (i.e. biology and chemistry come after physics, but atoms have greater span therefore more fundamental than molecules and cells). By that logic, what is it about the pre-modern that has greater span than the modern? You alluded to the fact that that latter stages produce an increase in knowledge, but according to the complexity/developmental models, the predecessor provides the foundation ON which the successor stands on. What is it about the traditional lens that is not only indispensable, but fundamental to the modern? Perhaps the meta-modern modality recognizes that the Hegelian God must transcend AND include the monotheistic or absolutistic notions of God? Just a thought😛
One way of approaching this is to see that premodernity addresses actual needs and find ways to meet them without causing harm. Needs like a sense of paternal and maternal care, local community, actual responsibilities, shared narratives and concerns, boundaries, direction, a sense of the sacred, vision and hope. And we have found many ways of meeting these needs, many of which are secular and well-established disciplines. But scaling that doesn't seem to work well, many are left behind and alone. Obviously this integration doesn't resemble the monotheistic and absolutistic notions of God and largely rejects their actual narratives and content but tries to retain aspects of what they do for social cohesion. That's a nightmare and outright evil to pre-moderns, I guess. But that's the voluntary commitment of modernity. We restrain our need for certainty and all bind ourselves to the rule that our narratives might turn out to be false in very significant regards. As Descartes put it, we could be wrong about everything, except about being conscious.
@@jeremyfirth That's true. But nothing has enough "glue" to hold groups together, not even religion. Show me a religious or otherwise ideologically coherent group that is not making use of coercion or unified by an enemy. But coercion and fear might be the necessary ingredients for strong sticky relationships between people.
Thanks for responding with a video I’d object to the notion that rational argument lands you in a modernist perspective, the modernist perspective is defined by foundationalism in my opinion. But rational argument is firmly all throughout the church fathers in the first thousand years of the church, i think scholastic foundationalism replacing the original apophatic notions of theology was where assumptions about the physical world were being made that had no grounding in reality, and that problem was resolved in the enlightenment. But ultimately it was in this very struggle that science was born. I think you’re assuming metamodern spirituality needs to be necessarily pluralist/ecumenist - i think this is misguided. Tolerance is all that is necessary. I can easily explain other religions “the gods of the nations are demons”. All that’s required is for other religions to accept that I think their gods are demons respectfully. It’s perfectly consistent that they’d have spiritual experiences. If we don’t have some notion of absolute truth, we haven’t developed past postmodernism. It’s not possible to have a universal pluralistic neutral frame that we can use to critique each worldview. We need to just inhabit each worldview and look for internal inconsistencies to judge each.
Hi Brendan, great answers. Your answer to acuerdox helped me with where you are with these things. You mention the frames we have are not the "end all be all" and so as we gain new knowledge they are adapting, are you saying that you are using a form of bayesial probability in terms of the resurrection of Christ? In that, rather than saying "it is physically impossible that this happened, I am without a doubt undeniabily saying this is not true" are you gesturing at "it is extremely improbable it happened because of our current state of knowledge and understanding of reality, but there could be a paradigm shift that is so transformational that I would say it is possible and likely he was resurrected?" If I can insert my own opinion, I think this paradigm shift is underway right now. Donald Hoffmans work on the (plauable) scientific inadequacy of space-time as the most fundamental piece of reality; Michael Levins work on memory and its (potentially) non-bottom up causal properties; and case studies like Albert Abraham Mason using hypnotism to greatly reduce the symptomology of a medical issue. If consciousness is not a physical thing than it greatly opens up how we can and do interact with reality.
Enjoyed your conversation with Paul and what I caught of this video. Just one thing about your comments on naturalism: one needn't be religious in any traditional sense nor buy any particular miraculous claim to question the coherence of naturalism. See Hempel's dilemma, for example, or JL Schellenberg's critique. That said, I would hope that a meta-modern approach to spirituality would at least be open to the possibility that reality is irreducible to nature, if by that we mean what's amenable to scientific investigation, now or in the future.
if you used to be a ludite, there's an interesting idea I've been playing with for some time about that. That future that you're looking for. I imagined a story a book, a short fiction, about a future where a man goes to visit a monastery, he's dressed with traditional clothes, full of color and drawings, riding a horse, and the reason for his visit is because the monastery has a very powerful computer inside, that the monks mantain and use for their study, so these christian monks are electric engeneers and programmers, but they're at the same time very religious. So in this picture, ludism, technology and faith all come together without contradiction.
If I had to boil everything down to the essence then both metamodernism and Christianity are about responsibility. For the metamodern case, as you've described, there's a need to handle the disparate aspects of premodern, modern and postmodern attitudes. But this implies making careful choices about which aspects to apply in which situations and how. In contrast I think we all see the ways that contemporary society acts as a minefield, especially for those who haven't had the opportunity to inherit enough culture that inoculates against bad choices. Similarly for the Christian, there is a need to make choices about the theological tools that are brought into each situation. There are too many instances where the hypothetically correct faith fails to result in the expected harmony. The US has a strange paradox of simultaneously being one of the most religious and most sinful/criminal world powers. I can't help but think there could be tremendous overlap across camps in the desire to better learn how to deal with present issues and improve outcomes. Still, Christians (and anyone else) would have to take from what they understand to be palatable, so there's a challenge in making the right ideas explicit in the right ways so that they can ultimately be put to good use.
19:20 - 22:00 that's interesting, but what I was trying to hint at is that kissing the ring on the hand of the king and kissing the relic, is the exact same thing, the thinking is this "if I kiss the ring the king will be good to me" and the same thing applies to the saint and his relic, because the saint is dead but not gone and may still intercede to help you, since the saint is in heaven, the control room of the universe, from where time and space are controlled. more or less
I’ve always considered Gödel incompleteness to be a challenge to conventional portrayals of God; if He is complete, he cannot be consistent so there is no point in asking why he would do or allow something… I don’t see many treatments of this so I’d be interested to hear you friend talk about it
The basic premise as I understand it is that there are things that are true but unprovable with in any axiomatic system. I pulled this definition "a complete and consistent finite list of axioms can never be created: each time an additional, consistent statement is added as an axiom, there are other true statements that still cannot be proved, even with the new axiom ..." I believe the key distinction is finite list. God is not a potential Infinite, under the classical claim God is a completed totality or Actual infinite (greatest possible being). So He is a completed and consistent being. Aristotle prohibited this notion of an actual infinite and it carried through modernity. The interesting problem arises with actuality is how to avoid pantheism. That was Aristotle's logical claim; that an actual Infinitive substance would fill the heavens ( no space for anything else), in math it would destroy all numbers ... I've been working on this dilemma and have come to the conclusion that only a God that can self negate and remain a being can be both actual and Holy. I have a few videos on my channel playlist titled "What is transcendence" you may find interesting. This one is a good overview I think ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-SMt2VtjMfrU.html&pp=gAQBiAQB
Is there a specific video you can point me to where you have made the case that the application of the historical critical lens on the Bible is beneficial/worthwhile?
It is interesting though, that the critique against Christian imperialism could be made originally by Christians appealing to the pre-christendom situation. In other words, Christianity didn't have imperialism baked into it from the start, but rather an eschatological community on the fringes of a society, persecuted and marginalized. When it did finally gain power, it needed to appeal to the Old Testament in order to justify this revisionist project. And there were those within the tradition who saw this as an illegitimate development. Such that by the time you got to the Reformation and to the development of the enlightenment, they were already within a tradition of critiquing Christian imperialism. This is distinct from other religious traditions such as Islam, which have an Old Testament theocratic framework built in from the start.
I've listened to many talks with you in Layman Pascal, and Vervaeke. your hope to bringing care for others spiritual well-being shines thru all those conversations. just see Paul as starting down that road with tlc and estuary, hopefully its a start to more dialogs and filling those gaps you see were Christians have done damage. and ps please look at Todd McGowan take on Hegel, might bring new light to how you view him❤
