Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Jordan Hall: “The truth of Christianity is NOT found in APOLOGETICS” || SLP576

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Jordan Hall: “The truth of Christianity is NOT found in APOLOGETICS” || SLP576 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: All the struggles that people in ARC kind of get their uh panties in a knot about.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's all burning away.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's all burning away on its own terms.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: And you cannot resolve those problems from the secular frame at all.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Zero percent intelligence can't solve the problem.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I was very much one of the techno-optimists, put all of my time and energy into building companies that made this conversation possible.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: One was MP3, which is the rootstock of podcasting.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: The second one is more infrastructural, and then the third is Divx, which is the rootstock of the fact they were able to have a video conversation.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: This was a very deep exercise with some of the smartest people in the world, with substantial resources, coming to the conclusion that intelligence can't solve the problem.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: A big part of the point of Christianity is that it's not to be found in apologetics, it's to be found in the fruits.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Relationship has to be at the bottom.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it has to be the most foundational element, not information.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: If I accept this as being capital T true, capital G good, by the way, capital B beautiful, and begin to orient my life on the basis of this, I'm screwed.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Oh crap.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I guess I'm I'm a Christian now.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: The church, and specifically I'm focusing on the evangelical church, because I happen to be, I think, in a largely evangelical context, has really lost its way.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: In some sense, it has adopted the rationalist frame and then tried to constitute a Christian version of a rationalist frame.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that, of course, is perfectly wrong.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Jordan Hall is a tech entrepreneur who was in on the ground floor of MP3, in on the ground floor of DivX, but in the last few years, he has come to faith in Christ.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a long and wild ride.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: I met him in person at the ARK conference, and we begin our conversation by talking about ARC, about what it's attempting, and about why actually the Church of Jesus Christ is the answer to the cultural malaise that we're in.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: My sense of things, and whatever, this is just a perspective, but the thing that landed for me that seemed to have the most meat on the bones was actually to take ARK itself as symbolic.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so, for example, I noticed that to the degree to which there was a deliberate intent by means of understanding and strategy to do something purposeful, it was rather a mess.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the Excel Center in East London is uh it's like Heathrow Terminal 6.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's huge, vast, empty spaces, basically.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: The format, right?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: This notion of sage on a stage panel where thousands of people are packed into an auditorium getting something like content.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: The format's completely wrong for the kind of thing that it's endeavoring to be.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing about responsible citizenship where the core message is do absolutely nothing but listen to other people do spray content at you, particularly in a world where receiving content is now commodity.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: I could I could watch all of these people speak individually or collectively on YouTube without having to leave my house.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: So what's the point of becoming physically to be in a room where there's no possibility of relationship any more real than that?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: The the topics that were selected, the panels that were chosen to speak on those topics.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was just sort of like uh tepid, let's say, at best.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: With some things bursting through, but that's stochastic.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: What did you think burst through?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there was uh there was the the difficulty that Jordan had in articulating his point at the very end itself produced an effect of bursting through.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's a pivot point.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how did they rebuild it part?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, apparently David Brooks said some stuff that landed in a particular way.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: But in each case, I would say that the most meaty element of the experience was what was happening in the sub rosa, what was happening outside of the notion of the conscious intent, in many cases against the conscious intent.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Literally, Jordan is trying to articulate something and is struggling so mightily that the fact of his struggle is the primary message.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um I didn't even attend any of the panels.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: I went in as uh it was there for a few seconds, said, okay, this is this will be a waste of time, so what'll I do?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I just wandered around the floor.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and by the way, so now we're going to shift to the other side.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: I wandered around the floor and I spent most of my time praying.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I noticed that that was perfectly valid and legitimate.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's interesting.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: There was there was nothing well, that's not true.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe about 20% of the people there who I encountered had a little bit of a withdrawal from the notion of encountering what was I don't know what you would call me a strange mystic not dressed appropriately to be in England.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um But nonetheless, there was definitely a presence of the possibility of prayer, no question.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I noticed an an efficacy.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the the serendipitous encounter, the the the possibility of just noticing that there was something going on and being able to move into it, which really does take advantage of the fact that all these bodies are in roughly this, you know, a very walkable space, was profoundly rich.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: I had probably 20 or 30 encounters, of which this, by the way, is one, that were entirely off script and yet felt had a feeling of, okay, this is adding to my possibility, my reality.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: Either I am giving somebody something that it really seems like is earnestly a big part of what their story is, or the reverse, or both.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, some big, some small.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: It was uh powerful.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it was the the unscripted, the sub rosa, the guided that had real richness to it and substantial potentiality.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so then you could take these two and hold them next to each other.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, to the degree to which we imagine that we're even vaguely capable of something as audacious as redesigning civilization, re-engineering it from the bottom up, it will just look like the Excel uh form.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: It'll just look like some kind of wreckage, some kind of mess, some kind of disappointing gesture, but at the end of the day, a disappointing gesture.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: To the degree to which we allow ourselves to move back into a proper relationship with something that is much larger than us.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, was always the source and origin of Western civilization in the first place, which was a piece of content that I think was relatively clear uh at the event.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Not entirely, but relatively clear.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Then we're actually beginning to relearn how to engage in properly the thing that is the only way to answer the question of the conference itself.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: So if Jordan Hall is in charge of ARC 3 in 2026, what would it look like?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, well, okay, here's a couple of things that would be first, uh it would be continuous throughout the whole year.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's nothing about the notion of there being a single gathering that is independent.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: That could, can and should be very well part of something, but since you've got this body of people who've chosen to orient their time and attention towards something, and by the way, the very nature of what we're talking about implies relationship and engagement, then we should be building relationship and uh planting seeds and harvesting the fruits of that engagement in a continuous fashion.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Relationship has to be at the bottom and it has to be the most foundational element, not information.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: This is not a content story, and it's not even a distribution of strategic energy, which is the inverse of relationship.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's when a relationship is bound to information, you get strategic distribution of energy.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Relationship has to be the foundation.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, since relationship has to be foundation, it also has to have the sense of intimacy, which means locality, real relationship.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: And creating more relational fabric is one of the primary elements.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Even though that may not seem obviously useful, the point is that is what produces the possibility and the potentiality of really going up two or three levels from where we are.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe one theme is to say, look, we're actually not smart enough to deal with the questions we're trying to deal with.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: So the only viable thing is to learn how to become more capable, perhaps substantially more capable.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, learning has a very different shape to it than telling, right?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's not and teaching.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, if we think we already know the answers and all we have to do is convey those answers with something like precise clarity to a bunch of minds and then tell them what to do, then okay, maybe that plenary is vaguely the right approach.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: But if we know we not only we don't know the answers, but we are not yet ones capable of even engaging with them seriously, then that's a very different kind of problem.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: You said relationship is at the bottom of all things.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that's that's been part of your kind of spiritual journey, hasn't it?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: In in terms of figuring out what what is the metaphysics, what is the substructure underneath everything else that we talk about.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um these sorts of questions have consumed you for decades, but uh in the last few years uh you've come to some conclusions that you you you perhaps weren't aiming at Christian conclusions, uh, but you you certainly found yourself in Christian territory uh as as you wound up with a conclusion that that relationality is at the at the bottom of all things.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um can you take us through some of the staging posts in in that journey and let's and then let's get to Trinity.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so uh yeah, I think I actually is it's funny how this works.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: I I didn't even realize fully as I was talking the degree to which I'm a poster child for the narrative I'm articulating.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: So as usual, I'm really just projecting myself on the story.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um but you know back in the day, back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I was very much one of the techno-optimist uh autists who really did think that some combination of the right technology, the right technique, and the right information was going to solve the problem, or or to put it more broadly, change the world in a very positive way.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Not even not utopian, but utopian, like definitely in a positive direction.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um and for example, as a consequence of that, uh put all of my time and energy into building companies that made this conversation possible.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: My companies were there were three.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: One was MP3, which is the rootstock of podcasting and other things like music on the internet, but podcasting specifically.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the second one is more infrastructural, and then the third is DivX, which is the rootstock of the fact they were able to have a video conversation.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: And this was all intentional, right?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: There was a vision at that time of we have to change the shape or it's called the topology of the media landscape to enable the edge, the ground, the uh the distributed to have conversations across this new internet medium and displace the centralized broadcast medium, which by its very nature produces centralization and rigid hierarchy.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that was the intent.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but as we may have noticed, that did not in fact solve the problem categorically.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: It produced a new set of possibilities.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: We can have this conversation, right?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: People can go on Joe Rogan and produce a counter-narrative that is now stronger than the master narrative.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Fair enough.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: But the problematic, the question of, hey, how do we actually successfully do this thing?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: How do we um produce a better direction for the world?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, for me, just continue to be present and the reality of the failure conditions of all possible of intelligence.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Intelligence can't solve the problem.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Strategy can't solve the problem.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean this quite categorically.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: This was a very deep exercise with some of the smartest people in the world with substantial resources coming to the conclusion that intelligence can't solve the problem, that there's a a gap, there's a fundamental gap.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: A fundamental gap.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the is is this like a gap in virtue and morality?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a like what where does the gap?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, it's actually a gap in ontology.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's the relationship between epistemology and ontology.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so so at that point, I wasn't even able to enter into the category of gaps in morality and virtue.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, those are real, yes.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking 2009, 2010.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Those are real, but ultimately secondary.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we can we can cultivate better and better people through a variety of training.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: We can use this is hypothetical hypothetical.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: We can train people to be more virtuous.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: So the real problem is can we just get the right uh velocity of information?
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Can we get the algorithm to point towards the right things?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: As it turns out, there's actually just a s a gap.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Reason, there are limits to reason, quite simply.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: And reason cannot address the category of this problem, reason cannot deal with the complexity of reality in this way.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Reason can navigate very narrow problems and one might imagine relatively complex problems like uh scheduling airplane trips across the world.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of thing that can be done using intelligence.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: But those are complicated, they're not complex.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And once you enter to complexity, it's a whole different ballgame, right?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: So that and there's a whole bunch of like serious concepts that I just threw out there, but just that gets you there.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: The next one was I actually had to engage in a much deeper investigation of what would I think the category would just be called philosophy.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: I had a degree in philosophy, I studied philosophy, I spent far too much time with the contemporary uh with kind of the 20th century and late 19th century philosophers.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell So, Jordan, we can go into some of the philosophical developments that you went through at that stage.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in our extended conversation on the Discord server, uh, we'll get into the difference between um you talk about uh elsewhere a substance ontology and a relational ontology.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get into that on the Discord server.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: But uh I take that to mean the difference between thinking that things are primary and thinking that relationships are primary.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And in that philosophical mode, that actually um is is a helpful staging post on the way towards uh faith in the triune God.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that realization that um your relationship to truth is also caught up in your relationship to goodness, is also caught up in your relationship to beauty, is also caught up in your relationship to others.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's it feels to me like in your story that philosophical frame of mind actually, as you think about that more and more, leads you to uh a more religious frame of mind.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Am I getting that right?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: We have to be in a religious mode to engage with all these uh problems and questions.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: We're no longer in a philosophical mode, but religions have a bad uh bad brand for a reason.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: They're uh uh ultimately, let's say for the moment, we've got to throw out the baby and the bathwater and see if there's something left over, something like that.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's what, another five years of trying to be in that mode.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: What does it look like to try to constitute a religion?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, okay, what does that mean?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: What does religion mean?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: What does it mean to begin to gather?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is a little bit like, for me, it was a little bit of the perennial philosophy two data work.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do a global survey of every religion.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what is it, let's reify the concepts so we have a clarity on what we actually mean by that.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then by the way, unfortunately, and I mean this in the sense of like, oh, it produces profound suffering.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: You can't just think about it, you have to actually do it.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: So now I have to begin practicing of this, these religions and being part of them.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I practice a variant on Buddhism, I practice a variant on uh Zogchen, I practice a variant uh this sort of weird syncretic new age thing.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: I uh go down to the jungles and take the ayahuasca with the shaman, I you know, sit at the foot of a uh Polynesian kahuna.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like, and I'm not necessarily saying that's the thing, but rather saying, unless you're immersed in it, you're not actually participating, you're not participatory.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: And religion is of the nature of participation, not of the nature of proposition.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Let's I can make it very simple.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: Like let's just talk about when you're writing a skateboard, as you've cultivated a capacity to trust your relationship with the skateboard, you notice a civility and a simplicity, which by the way now becomes a substrate for beauty, right?
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: You can actually ride the skateboard.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's faith.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's something that's, you know, there's big faith, like the faith in God, the faith in Christ, but that's actually a particular kind of this whole thing, which is the fabric of how you actually engage in reality, is to have cultivated a capacity to have a trustworthy relationship, which then affords a possibility of a deeper growth, a deeper emergence of a new capability, which is to say more beautiful relationships.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that starts to be okay.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now we have the epistemology and the ethics, we discover that that's actually not a separate epistemology and ethics in the Trinity are the same thing.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: God is love is an ontological as well as obviously a very ethical statement, isn't it?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, yeah.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um okay, so take take us to this period of life.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we're in sort of 2017 to 2022, and you're you're sort of uh you're you're trying to participate in different kind of religious practices.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like what what are you experiencing as as you you take ayahuasca as you as you participate in in you know Buddhism and Buddhist rituals and okay, well, I I'll kind of I'll put it into a couple of different buckets.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: In in each particular religious context, there are insights that I had I learned and that I think maybe are the foregrounded characteristics of the of the of that particular religion.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: So for example, Buddhism does a really, really good job, a remarkably good job of being able to identify the characteristics of the interior of your subjective experience and having practices that allow you to notice what I think they would call the ego mind or how the ego operates, and to notice that you are not your ego mind, right?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: You are not your identity, and that there is a deeper self that you can be with and practical techniques for doing that, right?
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of like uh I don't know, medicine, uh surgery, yes, or uh PC, physical therapy, spiritual therapy, put it that way.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it does that very, very well.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's neat.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, many of these different traditions, I'm actually just gonna call them lineages because I think that's the proper word to use, um accomplished profound breakthroughs in what Verveki would call psycho technologies that are real and useful and good.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I to some extent have been able to achieve facility with some number of them.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um another orthogonal insight is that oh reality is very different than uh Neil deGrasse Tyson would lead me to believe.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um the spirit, the thing that is called spirit, is not just real, but like super double plus real.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's easier or no, it's better is more proper and more useful to try to understand what's happening in reality by means of a way of thinking about things in terms of the spirit of the spiritual, than endeavoring to do so entirely using causal mechanical processes.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: Practically speaking, I and my family, by the way, right, because it's relational, you really have to be all in, participatory, are now swimming in these deep commitments to these religious efforts, trying to find something that is a yeah, it's a syncretic, higher tone integration of a variety of different religious traditions, which usually will include three, actually.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: It'll include something like an indigenous autochthonous tradition, a uh something like a new age sensibility that's gathering different pieces, and then some kind of integral effort to figure out how to bring these things together.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: That was sort of generally the map of what it looked like from in this period of time.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't work.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like the simple answer is you get into it and it's not load-bearing.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: It can't hold even a small thing together.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you see these profound cracks that break when at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is smuggle intelligence back into this thing.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: You're trying to use intelligence to fabricate religion, um, which is weird because you know you can't, and yet that's exactly what you're trying to do.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: So in these in these efforts, um I mean crit Christianity is conspicuous by conspicuous by its absence in terms of what what you're trying to do.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: Completely.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: How come that's a really interesting question?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um my basic sense of it is Christianity had become branded as either old-fashioned and maybe somewhat useful as a place to mine a couple of good ideas or just outdated or actually simple-minded.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so which is interesting, you you could you could go to like ancient you could you could sit and talk with Aborigines and say, okay, wisdom traditions, that has valence.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: You can talk about wisdom traditions, you can go to the East.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: I I think at the end of the day it's very practical.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you just go back and look at the culture war that was waged on Christianity starting in the Enlightenment and moving forward, uh they won.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Not that hard actually.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: A profound slander was prosecuted for f 300 years, and that profound slander worked.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: It was effective.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: It took my mind and the mind of many, many, many people, and specifically on, by the way, Christianity and Christ.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like I was able to get to the point of Christianity where I could get to the Father and the Spirit and still couldn't say the name Christ.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so that slander was effective.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the the the slander at its at its heart is is what?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think it I think at least a major piece of it, who that's a really good question.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: So part of it is this great inversion, like the meaning of faith.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: So part of it is a double trick.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: One trick is faith is ideology, and Christian faith is a hypocritical and stupid ideology.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so that's that's a that's a double move.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: The first is to remove you from faith.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: And the second is now that you're removed from faith, you can say, hey, look at Christian faith.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's rather silly.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: And look how silly it is.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: They they make a bunch of claims that are sort of absurd and easily debunked, etc., etc.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um And therefore to uh to attach yourself to that is somewhat shameful.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's like, really?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: That one?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's weird.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you do that?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you attach yourself to Star Wars?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: At least that's got good special effects.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's that's that's one.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: The second is wow, that's really deep.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see if I if I can get to a point where I can actually say it.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um That's pretty funny, actually.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, as you I guess as you well know, to actually be Christian is excruciating.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: To actually accept the responsibility of um laying yourself down before the cross and accepting the Lord as your Lord is excruciating.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: To put it another way, the m the amount of sin that we've accumulated when realized, even in the least, in the most unconscious element.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: It would be wow.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it's very unconscious, but like wow.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: If I actually have if I accept this as being capital T true, capital G good, by the way, capital B beautiful, and begin to orient my life on the basis of this, I'm screwed.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's a whole lot of change that's gonna happen, and the magnitude of that change is so intrinsically uncomfortable, all the way down to the I think the core, but the most basic, and it's so interesting.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like we're talking about um, you know, I can be somewhere on the edge of enlightened in the sense of, hey, my ego mind is no longer in charge, my deeper self.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: But think about the trade-off.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, my highest self is exactly the thing that must actually be laid down at the cross.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not laying down my ego mind at the cross, I'm actually laying down my highest self, the thing that that the many of these traditions would identify as being the most proper thing to be seeking and seated in is precisely the thing that is sacrificed.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then everything downstream of that.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: In order to receive it back, you know, we we Yeah, but on his terms, right?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: We're to say, whoa, yeah, yeah.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, exactly.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: And his terms are not necessarily going to be, well, I I would say certainly in my experience, they're confusing.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: They're very confusing, right?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: So this idea of intelligence, well, guess what?
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: You're now living it.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: You you you can't understand.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: I was just reading Job, by the way, oddly enough.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: You can't understand.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: He's giving it back to you, but all you can do at the end of the day is say, okay, yeah, he's he's he's real, he's good, he's faithful.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so while I cannot understand what the heck is going on, I begin to get sort of like a a longitudinal study that it you know it's probably ultimately in the interests of the best, and at the end of the day, my best, but there's a lot of it, you know, as soon as I try to project something on top of that that I can understand, um, I'm at I'm I have to keep it at very low fidelity like watercolors, or I'm just deluding myself and I'll be uh what do you call it?
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: Abused of that delusion soon enough.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: So probably sooner rather than later if you're really committed.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: So tell me take me back to all right, so you're you're starting to think that there is actually a conceptual framework that makes sense of your world and makes sense of your world a lot better uh than some of the other presuppositions you'd held.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: So Christianity is back on the table in terms of something to consider.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um what comes next?
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, as it turns out, um at exactly this moment in time, I have uh physically found myself in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: Which is just down the road from Montreat, by the way.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: I literally have I actually have Billy Graham's desk in my possession.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like I now own Billy Graham's desk.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Alright, so we're that's the that's the place I'm at.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in the place where that is the kind of thing that can just happen.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um which is to say Christ is not he's present.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean that both in terms of like he's part of the conversation and he's actually here.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: People are living in a in a Christian fashion, both by intent and effectively, which is a really powerful possibility, right?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because the whole a big part of the point of Christianity is that it's not to be found in apologetics, it's to be found in the fruits.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I happen to be now in a place where the fruits are real.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, neat, right?
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: At just the moment.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, so I've I've exited Ecuador, and that's the last stop on the on the kind of that journey.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: In uh, okay, this is I this is none, this is definitely not gonna work.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like this, this program is not gonna work, and I'm I have no idea what could possibly work.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like, okay, that's not no broken and contrite heart.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: I have a broken and contrite heart.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: And this is we haven't even talked about this, but we've been a lot of places, like maybe 50 or 60 distinct locations that we were actually living in over just a you know four-year period.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exhausting.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, we have a baby, or two to she went from one to four during this time frame.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: And my wife is super not having it, very exhausted, and like, what are we gonna do?
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer was, well, the only place left, oddly enough, that we hadn't been, is this place.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: So, okay, let's just check it out, why not?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we'll just sort of like give up on any high intent, and maybe it'll be a nice place that we can more or less kind of retire and you know, I don't know, grow plants or something.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we come here, and I'll sort of skip over a little bit of the noise there, but we eventually find our way to Black Mountain, where the fruits are very present in in all kinds of beautiful ways.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a neighborhood beautification committee entirely composed of you know octogenarian ladies who really, really take care of the beauty of the neighborhood entirely out of the goodness of their hearts.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh hey.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: Which is very uh, how do you say?
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: The word wholesome is a religious word, right?
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's very wholesome.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: The ordinary is sacred.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's a sacred practice embodied in the most ordinary reality.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um the neighbors are kind and genuine, and not just and they have the southern thing where they may be a little bit more formally friendly than they really are, but they're actually kind of genuine.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: We've been treated incredibly well by so many neighbors.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: So we begin to just be guided by that.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, let's allow the beautiful and the good to pull us and not worry about the true so so much.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, at that moment, Pageot's thing, the principalities, so I'm in a place of like, huh.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: In just the same way that I had looked under every possible rock for where to be.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm noticing I've also looked over every possible rock for how to be.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: And let me look under this last rock.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: What's that rock?
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh, this has a big the the the you know the Cairo symbol on it.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: What a what a weird rock.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I noticed every time I looked at it, I always looked away.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm gonna look under that rock now because that's kind of where I am.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um what does that look like looking under looking under the Christian rock?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like what what what are you reading?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: What are you are you starting to go to church or what's the not yet, but we'll we'll get there.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're very it's not long.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's like two months.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: So we go we go from zero to eighty in two months.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um well now what I'm doing is I'm beginning to pay attention to the Christian discourse online, which you're more familiar with than me.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um because I just happen to be online and I'm having conversations, open conversations about Christ with my neighbors, which just happen to be my neighbors, some of whom, by the way, are not believers and many of whom are.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: But because it's uh an availability, it's like a curiosity.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like, tell me more about this.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what's what's going on.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: And here's the key your family is healthy, you're multigenerational, the teenagers get along with the grandparents, the fruits are present.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: I know as a as a deep student of the underlying nature of civilization, like as a deep student of the underlying nature of culture, of somebody who has spent now 20 years looking at the the the apocalypse, looking at the collapse of civilization stead in the eye, to have been able to produce a healthy family in this context is not a triviality.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: I need to learn something.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: What's going on there?
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm, interesting.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of these folks are doing this Christian thing, still eh.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: But but okay.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so basically what happens is it lands on my wife's heart that she thinks we should go to church.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: No idea exactly what that means or what church, but a Christian church.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: And she was raised Catholic and left the Catholic faith, so probably not Catholic.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: And we're in Black Mountain, so probably Protestant.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: But just as as vague as that.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: And as it turns out, that very the very next day, um, we get invited to a birthday party for a two-year-old girl, a girl who's turning two, who we don't know, and we don't know the family.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we're invited by people who are not members of the family.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: But this sense of like, I don't really know how the world works, but we've been following this path of wholesomeness and invitation and relationship.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: And okay, what worst thing that can happen is we get kicked out and apologize for being crashes being from the West Coast.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so we show up and we have these you know beautiful bunch of conversations.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's like 60 people there, so very alive, all kinds of basic, sort of good, wholesome stuff going on.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: People playing basketball and grilling and talking about things.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: No drinking, by the way, no alcohol.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, which was pseudo-noticeable, which is to say that there was no Bacchanalian energy, right?
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: There was wholesome fun.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: And my wife is uh has a beautiful conversation with a gentleman who's like weeping before her about the how he was held by the church when his wife had died and he suddenly had to take responsibility for his four kids.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: And and she's an extremely empathic woman whose heart is tremendous, and she's touched.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, you know, I think he might want to be interested in visiting our church.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: So afterwards, she says, What do you think about us going to visit this church?
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: And my response is, okay.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: And what do again, the same response to go to this birthday party, like, okay, I don't I don't know what's going on.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: I know that whatever schema I have for right behavior is probably going to get me on the wrong path.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm just gonna notice if an if an invitation comes and it feels like a proper invitation, like it's an earnest invitation, then I'll just say yes and see what happens next.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this story has been told now many times, but the the basic what happens next is that Sunday, I'm actually already preloaded to go to an AI conference in San Francisco, which is the first time I've been in San Francisco since before COVID.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: And she goes to church in Swantanoa.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: And um, we have like antipodes experiences, like we compare notes, and my and my response is it's far worse than I had feared.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: They these guys have totally lost the plot.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: They can barely even function as humans, it's not good.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, Man, it was a lot better than I had expected.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not quite sure what.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think the pastor will be willing to come talk to us about Jesus?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, oh, maybe.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: Let's, you know, feel free to ask.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do that.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so this begins the next step.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the next Sunday, I walk into that church and and it's beautiful.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not, I mean, it's actually in some sense very tawdry as a physical edifice.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's a probably Baptist or something like that, received church.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: We we took it over post-COVID.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, orange carpet, pews, no art.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: But the people, oh my gosh, the just people are beautiful.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean just vital.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's a vitality and aliveness and an engagement with each other and with life and with the most meaningful things.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sitting there in this in this pew in this sort of small congregation, probably 120 people at the time, and you know, they're singing worship songs, none of which I know any of the words to, which I'm not a fan of being completely awkward where everybody else is singing.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and many of the ideas are ideas that I have, you know, I rejected when I was eight in Texas, you know, in in the 70s.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't reject hard, but just rejected soft, like, hmm, this is sort of an old-fashioned wrong uh ethos.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, I'm noticing as the pastor is preaching, I think he's doing Ephesians.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, wow, hold on.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: So this group of people is gathering and spending a lot of their time and attention focusing on what are actually really hard, deep questions.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like they're attending to what is most meaningful every Sunday.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, it turns out every Sunday and every Wednesday, well, that's like it's like the bottom line.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's the core element of any viable culture is are people actually willing to work on the most meaningful things and to cultivate and disseminate wisdom with real commitment?
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like this is again, I'm kind of doing this now from seven years back.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like the theory says that's if you don't have that, everything else doesn't work.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, okay, I better, I'm gonna have to pay attention.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: So within about six weeks, I'm in a conundrum because I really, really want to continue going to church and participating and house church and everything else.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I formally do not believe what it is that they're saying.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: So then I have to go in this this sprint of what I would say is sort of a super intense conviction.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I ultimately run against what I call the four blockers, like the four things that were I couldn't choose to adopt this as a way of life if I wasn't able to resolve these four questions.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: One is the historicity of Christ in the crucifixion, the second is the meaning of the crucifixion, you know, penitentiary atonement, and all that other kind of stuff.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: The third is the Trinity, and the fourth is the paradox of free will and divine foreknowledge, which I laugh about because by the time I got to the third, the fourth is no longer a blocker.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: Not no longer relevant to the question.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um kind of a neat Rubik's Cube to play with.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: So my wife and I both are in this intensity.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: We both, I mean, I'm 16 hours a day.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was intense.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: I read probably three 500-page NT write books, very helpful.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I was started reading scripture continuously using Chat GPT on one side and YouTube videos on the other side, just zipping, like racing through.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm uh reading the the patristic fathers and I'm reading, I'm spending time on the Cappadocian fathers, and jumping, I'm jumping from contemporary theology down to first century.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I'm I'm I'm rehashing the Greek that I had learned when I was in college to be able to pull these words apart and applying literally everything that I had done in my entire life, which was a quite substantial amount of work, to this investigation.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um and, you know, slowly but surely, check.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, historicity, green light.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: That is in fact true.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um the crucifixion, holy smokes.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like, okay, that is the Axis Monday of all reality and how eternity echoes through chronology.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: Check.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, not check, but a like, oh, it's so vastly deeper than I had ever imagined.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the only thing is, it's not it's not a problem to be solved, but but rather a kind of a mystery that actually explains everything else.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's right.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's definitely not the kind of thing that I would receive from a movie of a kind of a narrow, angry Christian yelling.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's that's not what it is.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: Completely not.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, neat.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: I can not only can I, but now it's impossible for me not to delve into this continuously.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then the Trinity.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so the Trinity was a uh, you know, the ultimate answer.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: And remember, I'd gone through this process of relational ontology.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm sitting there, and what happens is I'm contemplating, like, what do they even mean?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: Think about how funny that is, right?
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't, it hadn't even occurred to me.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because by the way, as far as I can tell, Christians have not done a very good job of this is saying, hey, Christianity is founded on relational ontology.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: That actually is what the Trinity is is relationship as the autoethical, epistemological basis of everything.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: The collapsing point where all these things unify and multiplicity emerges.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so in a variety of loops, mostly sitting with the Cappadocian fathers and frankly Pageot, suddenly it just sort of dawned on me.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like it all came together all at once, and I had this really profound experience of clarity.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like, ah, yes, this actually is reality.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is the nature of reality and reality at the same time.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: Does that make sense?
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's like you're I was sitting in the collapse point where ethics, ontology, and epistemology collapse into each other, literally in me, looking around at reality, noticing I was now in relationship with a completely different reality and it was truth.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so that epistemological shift simply occurred.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember actually, this is very clear, I remember going, oh crap, because that's a one-way trip.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like at that point, I was like, Well, I guess I'm I'm a Christian now, and all the implications and consequences of that have now become part of the reality that I am now living.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, like a a lot of theologians you're reading as you as you're reading scripture at this point, um tons of it.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: Tons of it.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And and we had Larry Sanger on the channel uh last week a couple of weeks ago, and uh he was talking about kind of entering into the scriptures on their own terms and having yielded himself to the Bible in that way, jumping in with both feet.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was just so interesting that that the the kind of the analytic philosopher part of his brain wasn't exactly that it was switched off, it it's that it was switched onto scripture in its own terms.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: And and he tell told this really fascinating story about um coming across a miracle in scripture, and instead of the atheist part of his mind saying, Well, miracles don't happen, instead, kind of this narratival storied uh part of his brain kicked in and said, Oh, but that miracle explains what happened three chapters earlier in in the scriptures, and that's why actually the book of Genesis was framed in the way that it was.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so he was he was kind of answering scripture's questions from within the strange new world of the Bible and finding that that kind of integrated whole.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was something that was sort of pulling him further further inwards.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: What was it like for you reading scripture?
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's actually very similar.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the the metaphor that I use, which I don't think anybody else in the world appreciates except for Eric Weinstein, is it's like a klein bottle.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um way of putting it is like you you turn inside out and upside down.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and in that fashion, you're actually reintegrated with reality.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: So instead of standing outside of reality and observing it, you notice the experience of what it takes to be the prodigal son spiritually, like literally being brought back into relationship with the father and on its own terms, right?
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's a powerful place to be.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: I remember very specifically actually talking about this problem of uh uh predestination.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I I hit that rock, I like it's a rock.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: I was chewing on it, like, oh man, this is not yielding to my efforts.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: I pull up all the best thinkers on the question.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, oh man, their frameworks just don't work.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: Their mutual criticisms are correct.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so each one is not on it, it's not working.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I call a friend of mine who I had met way back when I was at Harvard and was like the first Christian I knew that I was like, wow, that's he when he became a Christian during school, he he became better.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, hmm, that I take note of that.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: Twenty-five years later, I call him like, dude, I'm having this problem with this issue.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and he's like, Well, can you live?
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: Can you live knowing that God is omniscient, the God knows all things?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: Can you live knowing that you are completely responsible for your choices?
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of course.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's how you do it.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: So what's the problem?
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: And like, well, I can't make sense of it.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, well, maybe that's because it's just above your pay grade.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's the kind of thing that you can't make sense of.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's that kind of thing in in principle.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, and it's funny, it's like, oh, right, of course.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: Humility, the reality, the infinite is just a lot bigger than me, like we're a whole lot.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I should be uh mindful of that fact.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: So when I enter into now this relationship with scripture, I'm not reading a book, right?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm actually relating with the divine, with God.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it and as soon as I entered in that that posture, what I noticed, I think Lewis talked about it.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like you walk into the room, and that as you spend time in the room, you begin to notice that what looked like a room has portals and doors, and you go through a door and it opens up, and you begin to realize, oh, this is actually an infinite richness.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like as I allow myself to be in relationship with it on its own terms, I guess with him.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: On his own terms, what happens is more and more and more richness begins to emerge.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: And all these things that I had thought were challenges evaporate in an awareness of, oh, is because I was not capable of perceiving what was happening here.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I was trying to make it fit within my frame.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: But as soon as I allow myself to participate in his, let's say, frame, which is actually a paradox, the thing that I have been constrained with actually completely resolves itself.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: The hard part is being able to go back out and explain that to other people.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's tricky.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: Which I'm sure you're very familiar with.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's that's the that's the day job.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: Which is which is tricky because precisely what you're pointing to is the posture issue is everything.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: And this is, and we're going back to the epistemological kind of point, that if if you sort of start with a kind of a skepticism and and an intellectual pride, um it's like how do you get anyone else to take the posture of doing what Larry Sanger did, you know, jumping in with both feet to the Bible, or doing what you did, you know, taking these things on their own terms.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: As you I've got to let you go in a second, but um as you think about this cultural moment that we're in, um, I'm I'm an evangelist, I want more people to know this stuff.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: I want more people to know Jesus and to be to be drawn into this primordial love that that you're talking about, the the God who is love.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um what do you think I should be doing?
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think Christians should be doing um in order to help people on this journey?
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it has come to me as a little bit of a surprise, not really just because I was not familiar with it, that the church has really, and and specifically I'm focusing on the evangelical church, because I happen to be, I think, in a largely evangelical context, um, has really lost its way.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and in particular is self-criticizing a absence of presence, an actual absence of participation in the presence of God.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: A reified in some sense it it has adopted the rationalist frame and then tried to constitute a Christian version of a rationalist frame.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that of course is perfectly wrong.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and so part of it is actually the church just to actually be the church, the church actually to be all the way in, right?
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: Just fully committed.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and trust, like really, really trust that the thing that you're engaging in is so far beyond your limited capacities that your effort to control or strategize is just going to get in the way of God's plan.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really taken by uh first Samuel.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I read about Saul not destroying all the Amalkite's stuff and then being cursed, like zapped and cursed, I was like a little bit pissed.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, Man, what are you doing, dude?
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: That is like a minor mistake.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: He's honestly obviously working in good faith.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: What are you doing?
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: And my friend goes, Yeah, exactly.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like God did not ask you to figure it out on your own.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: He asked you to be obedient.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: And if he tells you something with clarity, do it.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly what he says.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's the that's the gig.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason is because it's just like, you know, yeah, I imagine you're probably a parent.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there are many, many circumstances where your child is about to do something which is harmful, and you tell them, don't do that thing right there.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: Don't put your hand on that glowing red circle on the stove.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason why you're doing that is because your kid doesn't know better.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the point is if they listen, then they will avoid the more harmful direction.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, if they don't listen, then they'll learn something and then you'll put you know ice and cream on the hand because you love them and they are humans just like you are.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that just be the church, like really, really, really, really be the church in a way that maybe most humans in the West haven't perceived.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: And and here's the here's what I want to say on the top all of the cultural political stuff, all the all the struggles that people in ARC kind of get their uh panties in a knot about, that's all burning away.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's all burning away on its own terms.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you cannot resolve those problems from the secular frame at all.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: Zero percent.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you cannot resolve those problems from a simulated Christian frame, pretending to be Christian, trying really, really hard to simulate that, but still not laying yourself, your full self, your highest self, your best self before the cross and completely surrendering to his easy yoke.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: So just actually embody the Christian life.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then when the broken and contrite hearts fall out of the secular world as it burns, heal them and bring them back into you know the home.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's actually it.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not kidding.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: I hate to say it because it hurts my heart to feel the pain and the tragedy of that, but I think that's actually it.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, be the place of refuge for the for these refugees from the from the storm that is hitting.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um they're gonna start flooding because the ster the flood is a coming.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: Fascinating.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: Jordan, you've been so generous with your time.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you um for giving it to us.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, how can people keep up with you online?
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: Is that are they you're on you're on X for instance?
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: I strongly recommend against it.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely don't.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: If if it turns out that the algorithm throws my mug in front of you, pray deeply on whether or not that's a good idea.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: And if it is, you know, feel free.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I would definitely not intentionally try to keep up with me.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you've you've saved us all from from one channel.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when yeah, the the the rest of social media will be flung at us anyway.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: But um That's absolutely fascinating and heartwarming and mind expanding, and um and I I love that ultimate focus on the ontology of love, on the God who is love, and on living in love as church.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, the the great apologetic is the church, as Leslie Nubigan said, and um yeah, I I think you've you've pointed us in the right direction.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: So Jordan Hall, thank you so much.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: Right, brother.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Jordan.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, to those who want to go deeper with Trinity, we've got a great course that introduces you to the Christian faith.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it begins with the threeness of God.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: You can go to three2oncourse.com and check it out, start an account.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's totally free, and uh, we won't spam you, and there are no hidden fees.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: Go to threetwooncourse.com.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to see the full version of this conversation where I'll talk to Jordan uh not only about the things here, but also about that substance ontology versus relational ontology, uh, about some of the deeper issues to do with ARC and some more of Jordan's journey.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, just go to the description box and join our Discord server.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's completely free, and you'll get the full version of my conversation with Jordan Hall.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: See you on the next one.